The Blackmail

Blood Sugar

gabe — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:03:56 +0000

Fresh starts all round today, the clean slate of Spring is upon us. What better way to get into the swing of things than with some fresh ink and a little history lesson from the good folk at Inkship. Some other good folk who don’t seem adverse to the idea of a tattoo or two have just set up a rather fine looking diner in inner-Sydney so we popped on down to check it out.

Illustrator Chris Hopkins takes us though the very best in afternoon TV while Georgie Thomas goes beyond the thunderdome in the name of fashion and artist Rob McLeish discusses his penchant for Julie Andrews. Photographer Jackson Eaton is flying the flag for all the single ladies, and men for that matter in his latest exhibition while fellow camera wielder Josh Robenstone pinpoints the exact moment that photography hooked him.

On a musical note, Naked On The Vague have a film due for release and New Zealand’s Surf City are coming to visit so we catch up with them and Sydney’s Papa Vs Pretty who also happen to be a band.

Beyond Thunderdome

tristan — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:01:10 +0000

Text: Adriana Giuffrida Images: Georgie Thomas

Georgina Thomas is quite an individual. She a has a razor-sharp wit and talent to boot. After a standout debut collection in 2009, and an equally impressive follow-up, Georgina has just released a third collection that proves beyond a doubt she is a talent worth watching. Featuring refined colour palettes, tailored lines and draped, cut out details, Georgina Thomas’ SS10/11 is whimsical, wearable and tough. Adriana Giuffrida speaks to Georgina about her latest collection, the journey to begin her own label, and the one and only Tina Turner.

Adriana Guiffrida: Hi Georgie, One of the last times we saw each other you were dressed as Tina Turner, and I as Winona Ryder at a house party in Melbourne a long time ago. What have you been up to since then?

Georgie Thomas: I did some travelling and then I started my own label a few years ago and have really been focusing on that!

AG: Did travelling inspire you to start your own label, or did you always know this would ultimately be your goal?

GT: I think I always wanted to be able to design without restrictions and I thought probably that starting my own label was the best way to achieve that.

AG: So you interned with Ann Sofie Back in Stockholm, you must have learned a lot from that experience?

GT: I did intern with Ann-Sofie but she was based in London at the time. I did learn a lot – seeing somebody run a label whose work I really admire, first hand, really did give me confidence to do it myself. Before it seemed like it could be so far away.

AG: The splicing, cut out and draping techniques in your current Spring/Summer collection are so bold, and I love how this is paired back with a beautiful soft pastel colour palette. Tell me, what is the inspiration behind this collection?

GT: I wanted to be more sculptural this collection, and kind of attack the silhouette, then soften that with soft, beautiful colours and more luxurious fabrics like silk and tencel.

AG: Cut outs and slashing of garments seem to be a recurring theme in your collections, do you think these ideas are something you will continue to play around with?

GT: It seems like whether I like it or not they always turn up, so probably! But each collection I want to take it somewhere new as well. Hopefully the combination of the two will produce something different each collection.

AG: I’m interested to know how you begin a new range, do you start with colours, concepts, a general mood or all of the above?

GT: It can be any or all. Sometimes I’ll start with a concept and everything else just follows, but with this collection I knew I wanted to have this beige base for the colour palette and highlight it with pastels. Once you have one element it kind of informs all the others.

AG: What are you feeling for your next Autumn 2011 Range?

GT: At the moment because it’s so cold I feel like doing a collection of jackets only, but we”ll wait and see!

AG: So no Tina Turner inspired collections in the near future?

GT: Well I do love Tina, so that could happen… seriously.

Next story: Single’s – Jacskon Eaton

Kudos Indeed

gabe — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:01:07 +0000

Text: Digby Woods Images: Surf City

New Zealand ‘surf-rock’ band Surf City has had quite an interesting time since their debut EP dropped in 2007. They opened for the likes of Interpol (whom they stole pizza from), Dinosaur Jr (who said they were, to quote Lou Barlow, “good guys”) and MGMT (who apparently are a lot more complex than previously thought), and played a slew of gigs including The Big Day Out, The Laneway Festival and SXSW in the States. Now, this Kiwi foursome is set to release their debut LP, Kudos. If that was what happened after their EP dropped, I’d hold onto your hat for what comes next.

Digby Woods: Was it a bummer having to change your name after the conflict with the Scottish band of same name, or were you not really fussed about it?

Davin Stoddard:Yeah, it was a bummer to change the name because we liked it. Probably the worst part about it was going to the whole process of getting signed to a record label and then getting a lawyer and all that sort of crap, going like, “You gotta change your name, you don’t want them coming down and doing this.” So we were just said OK, just did what we were told like good little boys, and it ended up being Surf City.

DW: Do you ever try and emulate the sound of a certain favourite band or song, like, ‘I really like Animal Collective’s Grass, let’s try and use that kind of melody for Dickshakers Union‘?

DS: Yeah probably, I mean, it happens. You’re just jamming around and it’s what comes out of your mouth, and then you’re like, “Oh shit, we’re going to have to go with it now.” It happens a fair bit. Maybe we’re just not terribly original (laughs).

DW: Do you have any non-musical influences that have had a particular impact on your music?

DS: I don’t know necessarily on the music itself. Myself, it would be skateboarding, doing things like that. Reading, stuff like Robert Anton Wilson and other various pretentious writers (laughs). I don’t know, just like television and films, I can’t think of anything in particular.

DW: Though affiliations with the genre of surf-rock can be literally interpreted from your name, do you identify with the genre at all?

DS: I like the idea of surf-rock, but now it’s become a by-word for whatever’s fashionable at the moment, like you’ve got a thousand bands that are named after surf-inspired somethings. I don’t know, it feels like I wish we had a different name because of that, it’s become so chic. Guitars sound pretty surfy though, so there’s no way of really denying it.

DW: When your EP came out in 2007, everyone proclaimed you as having a stripped-back, lo-fi surf-rock sound. Now with Kudos, there is a distinct element of reverb-driven echo-y sonic-rock, like Spacemen 3 crossed with Sonic Youth, in particular with tracks like Icy Lakes, Yakuza Park and Autumn. What prompted the turn toward this more distortion-y sound?

DS: I don’t know, eh? You’re probably just sitting there and you always wanted to make it sound a bit more grunty. I was listening to a lot of The Boredoms at the time, still am. I think they were one of the bands that as a collective we’d like to sound like, that we were influenced by.

DW: OK, this is an obvious question but necessary. Your style of production, your song-writing process, mixing, etc. How does it all start and then come together?

DS: Pretty much we just do it all at home, we’ve got a computer set-up, we bought a bunch of gear, some monitors, borrowed some mics here and there, and we’d just kind of get together and would do it whenever we could. At the time I wasn’t working, so I would spend a lot of time during the day, Jamie wasn’t working either, but the other two were, so we’d record stuff at night, record some drums on the weekend, work on those over the week. We tried mixing with a few other people but that didn’t work out like we thought, so we just ended up mixing it ourselves and then got some guy to master it.

DW: Was it the same kind of production for the EP as for Kudos?

DS: We used less mics on the EP, which was just because that was all that was available to us. This time we had a little more money to buy a few more things. We had these big ideas of recording an album in a week but we ended up not liking any of the songs we had, so that was aborted. So then we started again with what we had and just built on those.

DW: Why didn’t you like the first batch of songs?

DS: They just sounded too clean, almost too normal, like normal rock songs. Not that I have anything against that, like the structures on this record are definitely normal pop structures. It was just the sound that didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to.

DW: With songwriting, is it a collaborative process or does only one of you write the songs?

DS: Sometimes it can be one person, but a lot of it is just me and Jamie doing quite a lot of the songwriting and the structures, but then a lot of the time we can take that and put it on the computer and then work on it as a band.

DW: What about with lyrics?

DS: I’ll usually just sit down with a tune and just mumble stuff into a microphone and then listen back to it and try to make words out of it. Sometimes I write them beforehand, but not too often.

DW: The lyrics seem to be clearer on the EP compared to Kudos. Was this intentional?

DS: I don’t think so, although I did listen to it the other day and thought, “Oh shit, you can’t hear a word I’m saying (laughs).” I don’t know if it was a mistake or not, but there’s the possibility I would’ve turned up the vocals a little more had I listened to it now. But I’m still happy with how it sounds.

DW: Are lyrics then of secondary importance compared to the songs’ melodic and rhythmic structure?

DS: Yeah, it probably would be. Melody and rhythm is where it’s at.

DW: Are there any bands or musicians or even things in general at the moment that you think are particularly damaging to people’s ears and/or minds, maybe like Kesha or something?

DS: (Laughs) I don’t know if I should even say this, I’ll probably get in trouble for it, but things like Vampire Weekend, I just don’t really understand why they’re so popular. The blogosphere can be quite harrowing at times if you look. It’s one of those things where I should really try not to do it, but then sometimes you go have a look at this blog or that blog, and you look at the comments section and you’re like, “Oh my god!” (laughs). I’ve decided with this record I’m going to do my best not to look at any of the reviews whatsoever, because you’re either going to get real pumped up on yourself or real down on yourself and it just seems pointless.

DW: MTV described your sound as “surf, rock and electro with a smidgen of MGMT-style complexity”. Are such descriptions accurate in your eyes, or do you think they’re simply over-analysing?

DS: (Laughs) Yeah, it must be over-analysing. MGMT complexity sounds pretty funny. I heard their last record and it was pretty all over the place. Hopefully we’re not that complex. I always thought we were just ‘verse, chorus, verse, chorus’, you know, not that complex.

DW: Not that New Zealand isn’t an awesome place, but given the state of the indie music scene there at the moment, is it a scramble for bands like yourself to try and escape and make a viable living elsewhere?

DS: Yeah, that’d be right, definitely. It’s just such a glass ceiling there, you get to a certain point and it’s like, “What are you supposed to do now?” For ourselves we’ve never garnered that much of an audience, we’ll get maybe a hundred people in Auckland and that’s the top amount we’ll get there. There aren’t enough people over there, just not that much room for it.

DW: Have you found Melbourne crowds to be much more uninhibited than Sydney crowds, that they get way more into the gig?

DS: We did play a good show in Melbourne, we’ve played some shockers though too. The first we played it was all our own doing, we got way too drunk, acted like wankers pretty much. It was just one of those nights that we’d rather forget and that people who saw it won’t ever forget (laughs). And then the last time we played there, we were playing with Songs from Sydney, and there was a huge storm warning telling people not to come into town, so we had about 30 people at our show, and it was a huge venue too, and then after this guy came up to us and said, “The first time I saw you guys you were really good but this time you sucked?” (laughs) We were just like, “Yep, cool, sweet.” We’ve never really had that much of a crowd in Sydney either, so I couldn’t really offer an opinion either way. Brisbane though, we’ve played some of our best shows there.

DW: You’ve played support slots for Interpol, Dinosaur Jr and MGMT, coincidentally enough. What were they like to play with?

DS: Interpol were really private, they had this huge manager standing outside their door, just glaring at everybody. They had lots of pizza so we took some of their pizza and then got told off straight away. Dinosaur Jr were cool. Lou Barlow came into the studio, said we were good guys. We’d only played fifteen shows by that stage and were still finding our feet, we hadn’t even recorded anything, so that was pretty cool.

Surf City’s debut LP, Kudos releases nationally on September 3 through Popfenzy Records and Inertia Music.

Tour Dates:

Wednesday September 8 at the Beach Road Hotel, Bondi
Friday September 10 at Spectrum, Sydney
Saturday September 11 at the Workers Club, Fitzroy, Melbourne

For more dates, check Myspace.

If you’re in Sydney or Melbourne we’ve got two double passes to give away for each Surf City show. For your chance to win a double pass, email prize@theblackmail.com.au and tell us what Lou Barlow said about Surf City.

Next story: Afternoon TV – Chris Hopkins

Off The Chain

gabe — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:01:06 +0000

Text: Melissa Loughnan Images: Rob McLeish

Rob McLeish’s work can be defined as operating against notions of transcendence, catharsis, teleology and opulence, reducing capitalist motivations and religious beliefs to satire and irony. He cites imagined and inoperable instruments, popular culture and ’90s L.A. slacker art among his many sources of inspiration.

As McLeish’s current exhibition, Tapeworm, comes down at Neon Parc, Melissa Loughnan catches up with him to talk the vuvuzela, bell clapper and Julie Andrews.

ML: Can you describe the inspiration for your most recent bodies of work?

RM: No, but I got really into the vuvuzela. And the oil blow out. When they were disgorging simultaneously it was the same thing.

ML: So is the vuvuzela and the oil blow out reflected in the Remarques For Asses series of works included in Tapeworm at Neon Parc?

RM: Not specifically. I had commenced making that work prior to those things… but as phenomenons they’re excessive, which is something I’m really interested in… they were simultaneously ecstatic and catastrophic. All that oil was like a massive shrimp-cocktail being spilt by the waiter – in an instant it goes from being something valuable, desirable, a privilege, to something foul and humiliating. Consumed and digested in, that’s fine, but spilt on and there’s a transformation; it becomes abhorrent. I’m really into that fluidity. The vuvuzela was the same; it flooded the actual game and morphed a celebratory gesture into something indifferent, uncaring and immoral…and became intoxicating. And formless.

ML: What else is this series of work about?

RM: Well the bell clapper obviously can’t ring because there’s no bell, its utility is gone. Also it’s been constructed and then deconstructed, the clay has been clawed off and the foam armature is exposed, falling out… so there’s a destruction as creation thing and the desecration is very expressive and innate looking but it’s a cast, a replica made out of epoxy resin, so it’s a monument to that… a fetish, it’s not the act. A remarque is some form of distinguishing, authenticating mark that is used on the edge of an engraving plate – at an early stage and removed later once the proofs have been worked out. And then there’s Julie Andrews circa Sound of Music, which is a really clichéd image, both as a positive image to celebrate and as a positive image to transgress. All in all it’s basically anti-transcendent.

ML: Your work relies on an appropriation of sorts. What influences your selection of images? i.e. Julie Andrews vs. topless women.

RM: There’s a million influences, topless Julie would be good.

ML: You seem to have developed a clear stylistic iconography in your work. Could you tell me where the plunger comes from? It often appears to be holding up the work as a set of screws would for a painting. Is it an anti white cube comment?

RM: A plunger purges, cleans out the pipes… slammed into a wall it’s pretty irreverent and tragicomic. Holding up a picture it becomes parasitic… and again they’re all cast so any suction/collapse tension is hollow. I love white cubes, and in relation to the plunger the more vacuous the better.

ML: Would you posit your work with such artists as Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy? There seems to be a strong ’90s L.A. slacker aesthetic in your work. Would that be fair to say?

RM: Their shadow is so large; it’s kind of omni-present in art making… for me at least. I definitely follow and am very into their work. I like L.A. in general and I like alot of art that comes out of there but any ‘slacker’ aesthetic in my work is fairly stylised… formal rigour is a large part of my art… the loose aspects are usually formalised in some way and vice versa.

ML: Penny Modra, in a piece for Three Thousand, suggested that ‘Step Into the Light’, your work exhibited in Life, Death, Thereafter at Silvershot Gallery in 2007, ‘may or may not have pitted art’s fashionable atheism and the irony now embedded somewhere in all post Grunge-era conceptualism against a personal ambition to explore the sincere’. Would you agree with this statement, would you say that your work may (or may not) have inspired recent post-grunge/atheist trends in art, and would you associate yourself with other such Melbourne-based artists as Simon Pericich and Alex Vivian? I suppose this also goes back to references of ’90s L.A. slacker art…

RM: Well the work oscillates between different positions, so it’s open to that reading but if it does emanate ‘any personal ambition to explore the sincere’, it does so as a flat joke – I’ve always viewed that figure as some kind of shitty stand-up act, which is maybe what Penny is getting at… for me atheism is a given and any kind of conceptual or philosophical thought, I mean if you’re going to spend time thinking about thinking… there’s no need to if you have a religious faith. Sincerity in art – I think sincerity can be a component within an artwork, as in one part of something more complex, but if it’s seen as a goal, then it starts pushing towards ideas of honesty, which I would totally reject, because you’re slipping into some search for absolute truths and/or some kind of transcendent reality… I would always work in opposition to that. I don’t think I’ve inspired any post-grunge/atheist trends… maybe me and Alex share a soft spot for excretion…

ML: And, finally, back to Penny, what was your 2009 Ocular Lab exhibition, Pissing In The Infinity Pool about? Did you pee in a collector’s pool?

RM: No, not yet. But pools are an on-going subject for me… the title is… I guess a lot of things: the futility of making art… luxury, desecration, supply/utility/waste, hi/low… infection… laughing.

Rob McLeish recently completed an MFA at Monash University and is a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary. Selected group exhibitions include Flowers In The Attic, TCB Art Inc., 2010; Canadian Pharmacy, Neon Parc, 2010; Gertrude Studios, Gertrude Contemporary, 2009; OMFG!, C3, 2009; Don’t Trust The Artist, curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of NSW, Sydney, 2009; Life, Death, Thereafter, Silvershot, 2008; and Young Old Hot, TCB Art Inc., 2008.
Recent solo exhibitions include Keep Art Evil, Monash University (MFA Examination), 2010; Bung Eye, Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary, 2010; Pissing In The Infinity Pool, Ocular Lab, 2009; Afterparty, Westspace, 2008; and Step Into The Light, TCB Art Inc., 2007. McLeish is represented by Neon Parc in Melbourne and will be exhibiting a solo presentation with them at the NADA Miami Art Fair in December later this year.

Next story: Pappa Dont Preach – Papa Vs Pretty

Twelve Dark Noons

tristan — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:01:05 +0000

Text: Joanna Lowry Images: Naked On The Vague

Purporting to be a “psychedelic movie for the apocalypse in twelve chapters”, Twelve Dark Noons is far from a Twilight Sequel. A collaborative short film, Twelve Dark Noons will feature Sydney’s Naked On The Vague, a band with an established penchant for industrial soundscapes; artwork courtesy of Shawn Reed of label Night People; and music group Wet Hair. It’s being produced by Caleb Braaten of Sacred Bones Records, while Jacqueline Castel of Future Primitive Films (who has made clips for the likes of Zola Jesus, Blank Dogs, Gary War and Moon Duo) will be sitting in the director’s chair. After chatting to Naked On The Vague’s Matthew about ghosts, Ice Age rock formations and meeting future collaborators in Brooklyn bars that give out free pizza, it sounds nothing short of a deliciously spooky, multi-sensory venture. Transferring the jarring energy of a Naked On The Vague warehouse show to Super 8, expect a visual velodrome of audio pandemonium.

Joanna Lowry: How did the Twelve Dark Noons project come about?

Matthew Hopkins: It was initiated by Jacqueline Castel of Future Primitive films. We’d made loose plans in the past to work together on a video or film project. Basically Jacqueline and Caleb said they wanted to come to Australia and make a weird movie in the outback, we said “why not?”. Shawn Reed was brought in to provide artistic and spiritual direction. I guess you could say it is a product of everyone’s mutual interest in each other’s work.

JL: Who is involved and how did they get involved?

MH: Jacqueline Castel of Future Primitive films, Caleb Braaten of Sacred Bones Records, Shawn Reed of Night People records and music group Wet Hair, and us, Naked On the Vague. Jacqueline and Caleb simply proposed that they wanted to come over, bring Shawn with them and wanted us to be in on it, we simply said yes.

JL: Is it the first time you have collaborated with these people or have you worked with them in the past?

MH: We met Jacqueline, Shawn and Caleb on our first tour of the USA in 2007. Shawn had us play in his basement in Iowa City with his group Wet Hair during that tour. We got in touch with Jacqueline through a radio show she hosts on WNYU called Make the Product. We did a live set on her program and a little interview. Jacqueline plays a lot of underground Aussie stuff on her program so there were links through the musical community we both are involved in. As for Caleb, he was lurking in a dark corner of the Charleston, a venue we played in Brooklyn that gives out free pizza with every drink. He was enthused about our show and we had a beer and a laugh and became friends. He runs the label Sacred Bones for which we released a 7″ last year. We are currently recording an EP for Sacred Bones to coincide with the film’s release. The EP features the track Clock of 12′s, which became a kind of starting point for the idea of the film.

JL: What is Naked on the Vague’s involvement with the film?

MH: Both Lucy and I ‘act’ in the film; we are the only characters apart from a giant grandfather clock of 12′s. We will also be scoring the film, which will involve the whole band making spooky sounds. There is not much dialogue so we will be approaching the sound design as a recording or musical project within itself.

JL: The film purports to be “a psychedelic movie for the apocalypse in twelve chapters”. Is it going to have a linear narrative or is it going to be a series of vignettes?

MH: The film is structured in 12 short sections, each corresponding to the 12 hours of time on clocks. There is a narrative that threads each chapter revealing a fragmented account of what happened to the characters. There is a lot of wandering and isolation, which feeds the apocalyptic side of things. I wont say too much about the psychedelics, but I will say that it’s all very mathematical. Of the 12 chapters, sections 3, 6, 9, and 12 are key scenes, not so much linear, but in terms of the narrative they suggest a course of events. Sections 1,2,4,5,7,8,10,11 are more like departing points for these key scenes.

JL: Where is the film being shot?

MH: Originally it was intended to be shot on location in and around Mungo National Park in South Western NSW, but it had rained just before we arrived and the dirt road into the national park was pretty boggy. So we scrambled to find another desert style location. We came across the Perry Sand Hills, which are just near Mildura. They were incredible. Rolling red sand hills and rock formations, apparently formed during the Ice Age.

JL: Lake Mungo is cited as one of the locations – Lake Mungo has a bit of a reputation for being haunted by ghosts. Any paranormal experiences while you were down there?

MH: We didn’t actually make it to Mungo but we did make it to the Homebush Hotel in Balranald, where Phil the publican talked about some ghosts at his pub. I highly recommend visiting the Homebush Hotel.

JL: How is the project being funded?

MH: Through donations on our Kickstarter program. People can find out all about it here – http://www.kickstarter.com/

JL: What are some of the incentives for people to donate on the Kickstarter page?

MH: Some of the goodies one may acquire as a pledger to the project include editions of the DVD with hand made covers, t-shirts, posters, exclusive recordings by artists involved, books…tons of stuff. Basically the way Kickstarter works is that there are set amounts of money you can donate, with each amount providing certain goodies made and donated by the artists involved. This kind of thing works more like a pre-order of limited edition/exclusive goodies rather than simply money donation, or artist payment etc.

JL: Along with shooting the film, you will be shooting a music video for the song Clock of 12′s off an upcoming Naked On The Vague 12-inch EP release on Sacred Bones Records. Can you tell me a little bit about that? When can we expect to see it?

MH: Yes, we shot the video just after the film was finished. We shot it in our kitchen in Sydney using the haunted grandfather clock that features in the film as a prop. The 12″ EP will be out late 2010/early 2011 on Sacred Bones. The video will come out around this time also. We are currently just finishing the recording of the EP which will be a collection of songs and possibly some snippets/collage style bits from the film sound.

JL: What are your all-time favourite films?

MH: The Fly, The Elephant Man, Fargo.

Twelve Dark Noons

Next story: Eat Here – Eathouse Diner

First Shot

gabe — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:01:02 +0000

Text & Images: Josh Robenstone

“The reason I’ve called it what I have is because I got my first camera when I was there in 1990 on a holiday. I got taken there to go to Disneyland and New York. For a kid it was pretty mind blowing. I remember shooting quite a bit when I was there.”

“This one picture I took of the Statue Of Liberty. We went to go there on a boat one day but it was winter and the weather was terrible and the boat couldn’t go because it was too rough. Anyway, I just remember looking out at it though and it being really stormy, rough and dark but the sun was sort of shining through and I took a picture of it and I remember when I got the print I got that feeling I still get today, that stoked-ness when you first see your photo. That’s when I first experienced loving taking pictures.”

“I found the print a few years ago and I’ve got it framed in the gallery as an intro to the show.”

“I’ve never been there intentionally to shoot but I think it’s four times I’ve been there now, it’s sort of a work in progress.”

“In 2001 I did a snow season in Canada and we were going down to Mexico after that but our van broke down in San Diego and we were stuck there for a month.”

“The van was called Marley, after Bob Marley. We were 20, it seemed like a good idea! We were on the highway in San Diego and it just died, the next thing we know there’s this highway patrol car ramming us off the road. They have these special bumper bars.”

“So we took it to a mechanic and he told us it was gone but we could sleep in the back of the van in the car park outside his garage. We had no money and we spent three weeks in the car park trying not to spend any money and going surfing every day. It was actually the highlight of the trip in the end.”

Josh Robenstone

Everfresh Backbook, The Studio & Streets: 2004-2010
Melbourne book launch – Friday September 3 at 1000 Pound Bend, 361 Lt Lonsdale St, 6pm-11pm
Sydney book launch – Friday September 10 at Ambush Gallery, 4A James St Waterloo, 6pm-9pm

NY/LA And Other American Adventures
China Heights, Level 3 16-28 Foster St Surry Hills, Sydney
Friday October 1, 6pm

Next story: Kudos Indeed – Surf City

Ocean Of Ink

tristan — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:01:01 +0000

Text: Oliver Georgiou Images: Inkship Books

In August this year Melbourne based tattoo artists Danny Young (Tattoo Magic) and Jane Laver (Chapel Tattoo) released a biographical book documenting the life and work of John Entwistle, a Melbourne tattooer since the early 1960s. Reading the book feels like opening a pirate’s treasure chest or a message in a bottle type time capsule, filled with amzing visual relics from the past, along with some great stories. Oliver Georgiou sat down with Danny Young in his backyard with a can of Melbourne Bitter to have a chat about how it all happened.

Oliver Georgiou: Is Inkship Books something you thought of to make this book or was it established as part of a bigger motive?

Danny Young: Just out of necessity we had to come up with a name, we didn’t have to but we needed to put a publishing name to it. There were pretty much two options, we were either going to lay it out ourselves and then present it to someone for publishing, but we couldn’t really find anyone suitable. I thought it would be an easy thing, I thought someone would definitely be up for putting it out because the book would be all done for them, not that we looked too hard or knew where to look, but then we thought we would just do it ourselves and then get someone to distribute it and we ended up just doing the whole thing – so then we had to think of a name. We went through a few names and everything was taken. I already had Inkship for my personal website referring to something like an apprenticeship or something-ship. I asked Jane and she didn’t mind so we went with Inkship books and made the logo. We didn’t plan to make a publishing company, it was just for that project. We already have other people asking what else is Inkship going to publish.

OG: I’m personally wondering that.

DY: Maybe, if I’ve got time and a good idea pops up I will do it for sure, yeah.

OG: So if it wasn’t the idea to make this publishing company, or the idea to make books, it was the idea to make this particular book.

DY: I bought my first machine off John, he’s been around selling tattoo supplies and tattooing for a long time, Me and Jane have just been going to him for years to buy stuff and getting tattooed by him, so you know he is one of the last dudes doing that sort of thing. There were other people doing it but he is the last one that you can actually get in contact with or that we know and he is super nice and still sticks to his style and his five colours. So just through getting tattooed and buying stuff off him he always had a few stories and we were always asking him what shops were around or who was tattooing or how did you start and we both sort of ended up a different times thinking it would be good to document it before he is gone, not that we wanted him gone in that way, but nowadays with LA Ink and the Internet and everything it’s all pretty easy and rock starry. Back then there wasn’t all that that sort of stuff so hearing him saying there weren’t appointments and how he was busy all the time or that people came in and picked his flashes it was really interesting and we just thought we better start documenting it before people don’t realise that it existed in Melbourne. There is stuff overseas like Sailor Jerry or people in Europe where it’s all been done but nobody had done it in Australia.

OG: Yeah I thought it was interesting how in an interview in the book he talks a lot about just spontaneously going and getting a tattoo of whatever was on offer and how it doesn’t exist so much these days.

DY: Yeah for sure, not long ago people came in with a heap of notes but now people come in with their laptops show you about thirty ideas and wanna cram it into a tattoo the size of a tennis ball or something. Before it was more like if you were going to get a tattoo you pick something off the wall or the tattooists would say “nah you’ve gotta get this one”. A lot of older people I have spoken to got something that they didn’t ask for, there were no niceties like there is now.

OG: From what you have found out what was the scene like when John started tattooing nearly 50 years ago?

DY: There were about a half a dozen tattooists in Melbourne, a couple in the city, one out in Williamstown and another couple out in the suburbs but only half a dozen shops, there might have been a few back-yarders and stuff but yeah…

OG: Tattoos themselves have been around for a long, long time. I can imagine people in Australia having them prior to that.

DY: Yeah, there is a little bit of history, we have been trying to find out about that too and maybe that is something that we will do because Jane has been looking into it, John knows a lot and we have found a little bit. In Bourke Street what is the Commonwealth Bank now used to be the Southern Cross Building and before that it was the Eastern Markets; there is a little bit of info on a tattooist that was in the markets there in the early 1900s. John was pretty young in the ’60s so we don’t really know too much about before then. Hopefully doing the book it brings other people out with shoeboxes of photos or other info from their granddads.

OG: Does his stance of the whole meaning of tattooing change the way you and Jane approach tattooing yourselves?

DY: There are a lot of reasons why people do or don’t do things but yeah, I think people like Jane and me are sort of more of his view. I am old enough to have grown up when dudes went and got a tattoo on their forearm or whatever, just Bon Scott era and all that sort of stuff. It was just a thing dudes did if you were into rock ‘n’ roll or if you were a bit tough or wanted to be tough or whatever, it wasn’t just a pretty thing at all, or a gallery sort of thing at all. It’s cool that people don’t have to have a big story on Miami Ink about their tattoos “oh, it’s because of this and that”, it’s more like “that looks cool, I wanna get it, I’ll buy that.” Like with a lot of things spontaneity is a big thing so I think what he did was, he was just a worker who did tattoos, when we asked him to do the book he was was just like “ah, OK.” Not that he didn’t want to, he’s just not from that gallery or promotion sort of era. He did tattoos for people who wanted to get tattoos, he got tattooed a lot. Now it’s a bit more an arty thing, people come from art school and want to tattoo and haven’t even got tattoos, John was covered by the time he was 19 and decided that was what he was going to do and just got into it. I suppose we sort of think along the same lines, that’s why we wanted to do the book.

OG: These days there seems to be a lot less stigma surrounding tattoos, what would it have been like getting around with tattoos in past in Melbourne?

DY: I know a lot of people like friend’s dads that don’t want to talk about them or don’t like showing their tattoos because of that stigma. But you can pick whether a person is good or bad regardless of if they have tattoos or not. More often than not though a lot of those older guys you see with tattoos have probably led a different life to what we see, maybe they got in fights lots, maybe they drank a lot or maybe they were in the army.

OG: As a kid I distinctly remember a home made tattoo that my dad had on his hand of an anchor that he had done when he was real young, but he had a diving accident and his thumb got ripped off and the tattoo went with it, I think he was happy to see it go.

DY: A lot of kids now are covered because they are in bands but I reckon a massive percentage of those kids are gonna get to their late twenties and go “fuck what have I done?” Would have been the same for guys from the ’60s or ’70s, they would have got swept up in AC/DC or in their young gangs or whatever was happening and not realising the permanency. You think you know what you were doing when you are 18 but it takes a bit longer to really work it out.

OG I feel that Melbourne being so geographically isolated has given us the opportunity to really cultivate differently over time, whether it is in music or visual arts. Was it the same for tattooing?

DY: I think so, from a tattooists point of view you can sort of pick peoples styles and I think Melbourne had like a real sharp pointy sort of style, as much as they were using the same colours and imagery, John was influenced off local guys and Melbourne sort of had a different look, so yeah I think for sure Australia had its own sort of take on that traditional thing.

OG: You have been travelling a fair bit, being a tattooist full time did you pick up on some differences as you were looking around?

DY: When I was in America the time before our recent trip I booked tattoos ahead and got one in each city I went to, which was five cities. That was a couple of years ago when we went to play I got one in New York, one in Washington, one in Texas, this time around I didn’t book anything. I thought I would get some walk ins and when I got there we went swimming at a few places like rivers and stuff and it was just like, god there are so many shit tattoos and then, I thought, I have friends at home that I would rather tattoo me that I like and wasn’t in a rush to get them done. But there are a lot of good tattooists in America. It’s the same as if you go to the Big Day Out or the beach here you see a lot of bad tattoos.

OG: It’s cool to be able to read a bit of history on peoples skin whether it be an old foot logo or…

DY: …or the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the late ’80s, that era has got a lot to answer for. When we were in the ’80s my friends when they were 15 or 16 got the eagle, got the snake and stuff then when it got to the ’90s people started doing this real tech bio stuff, didn’t like their eagles and got them covered up and now wish they had have kept them.

OG: I recently was speaking to a mutual friend of ours that you tattoo and he mentioned that he wanted to get a tattoo of a dolphin having sex with a unicorn on his arse.

DY: He hasn’t asked me about that one, maybe he knows not to. I might give him a gift certificate for his birthday.

OG: To catalogue and document other peoples work is in a way a very noble thing to do. To find something that you have seen and that you have enjoyed and then to spread that is in a way contributing to history.

DY: It’s definitely not a monetary thing or a claim to fame thing. I’ve gone over it in my head with lots of other things, like why am I doing this or why do we do these kind of things, it’s more because when I was growing up I was stoked on certain bands or stoked on certain people’s artwork or something, so that gets me keen and allowed me to do the things that I have done. I might speak to a kid who is like “oh I saw that and it made me want to do this…” If you can inspire people do things that they want to do, that’s a good thing and the feeling that maybe if I wasn’t going to do it might to get done sort of thing. Marty Bell gave me a book called Top Fellas and I probably wouldn’t have found it, it was a book on the Sharpies around the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s in Melbourne, just a little book by some guy who wrote down all these tales, interviewed some people and put some photos in, and I thought ‘oh sick I sort of grew up with that and it’s awesome that some guy has gone and done this’. It touched on tattooing a little bit and that was one thing that made me think ‘oh you know no one has done this about Melbourne tattooing’. John has got good things to say, I know there are people like me that like John’s stuff or this way of tattooing, not saying it’s the right way or for everyone. And when John goes I didn’t know if there would be anyone else who would follow it up so I thought, ‘oh shit we should show people this because he had so many of his old drawings and info’. So it was just a cool thing to do… I think so, yeah.

John Entwistle – Tattooist – Melbourne, Australia is available online at Inkship Books and from:

Tattoo Magic, 100 Gertrude St, Fitzroy
Chapel Tattoo, 155 Chapel St, Prahran
Johnny Dollar Tattoo Supplies, 207 Punt Rd, Richmond
Artisan Books, 159 Getrude St, Fitzroy

Next story: Off The Chain – Rob McLeish

Papa Don’t Preach

tristan — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:01:01 +0000

Text: Digby Woods Images: Nirrimi

At first glance, the name Papa Vs Pretty may be confusing to you. Most band names fall into one of two categories it seems. The first is fairly conventional, non-threatening and easy to understand (even if you don’t understand it). Think of AIR, The Beatles and Interpol. The second category is almost intentionally confusing and cryptic, like it wants to fuck with your mind, just because it can. Think of Godspeed You Black Emperor, Pink Reason and Times New Viking. This latter category is definitely the domain of Papa Vs Pretty and the fit couldn’t be more perfect.

In the competitive arena of the Sydney music scene, gladiatorial battles are common place for spots at The Metro (of course you haven’t seen any battles, they’re invite only. Duh!). However, Papa Vs Pretty have managed to deliver themselves in such a prodigious manner that they’re already doing support acts for the likes of Phoenix, Temper Trap and British India, and have just released their breakthrough EP, Heavy Harm, with EMI’s shiny new sub-label, Peace and Riot. Speaking with Tom Rawle, frontman for the PvsP, we delved into the chestnut of Melbourne vs Sydney crowds, the ambiguous nature of ‘psychedelic’ music, primal breeding and the state of the world. The future for these boys is hardly looking ugly.

Digby Woods: You were just up in Queensland for the launch tour of your third EP, Heavy Harm. How did you find it?

Tom Rawle: Yeah, it was great. I mean, we weren’t playing to a thousand people, we were playing to a couple hundred. It’s not much, but it’s just a matter of getting enough momentum and doing something that’s honest. If you do something that you truly believe in, it might not be as cool as everything else straight up, but if you just persist in it, people start to realise and pay attention, hopefully. If not then I’m fucked (laughs).

DW: As long as you were pleased with the end result, would you care then if only two hundred people ever turned up to your shows?

TR: If I were truly happy with it, I wouldn’t care. To me, I just want to make records that are good enough to make a statement, rather than listening to what everything else is and making something that fits into that because you want to live a particular lifestyle.

DW: How is the Heavy Harm launch going so far?

TR: Well, it’s kind of weird but really good that the EP is getting such a level of publicity, like MySpace are featuring it a lot, which I am eternally grateful for, because we just sent it over to them and they were like, “It’s good, we’ll put it all over our website,” and we were just like, “Fuck, okay, cool.” I mean we’re on most of the pages, you go to the main page with the feature albums, and there’s Arcade Fire and all these bands underneath it, and we’ve got this big banner. It’s weird, it feels wrong (laughs).

DW: You’re local though, and one always promotes local.

TR: I know, which is incredibly great, because not everyone works like that. I mean we’ve gone from like 120, 000 views to something like 194, 000 in a week. I think we’re on rage as well, and Channel V sometimes, which is really weird, but I don’t have pay TV, so I don’t see Channel V anyway.

DW: Is Channel V the one with that girl, whatshername, Fuzzy?

TR: Oh, we saw her walk past in Melbourne I think. I could be wrong, because when you’re on tour you begin to forget which city is which, just because you’re tired and they all have the same things. There are little differences with each place, but really they’re all the same, except for the audiences. Melbourne audiences are fucking awesome and Brisbane as well.

DW: What about Sydney?

TR: Sydney’s good as well, but Sydney always seems to be a little bit more restrained than Melbourne, they just seem to go nuts a little more. People are a little more self-conscious over here. I know when I’m standing in a crowd and everyone’s really quiet, you don’t want to be like “YEEEAHHH!” and jumping around, whereas in Melbourne people don’t seem to care. I remember when we played with Surfer Blood, there were people crowd-surfing and I’d never seen that here before. Like the keyboard-percussionist, Marcus, he just jumped into the crowd and it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen but also the craziest thing. It’s fantastic to see bands like that because they’re just honest.

DW: Do you guys still work on the side, or are you a full-time band now? Are there any uni constraints for anyone in the band?

TR: Yeah, we still work. Angus (Gardiner – bassist) does some promotions thing with his girlfriend and goes to Sydney Uni. He does philosophy and music, so he’s very, very smart and he does lots of intellectual things. Tom (Myers – drummer), he lives up in the Hunter Valley and comes down here for rehearsals, so he’s so busy. He’s a trooper. I don’t know anyone who spends more time on transport, in transit, than he does. He’s an apprentice winemaker, so whenever we go up to his place we just drink wine, which is pretty good (laughs).

I’m the most boring of the lot, I work at a café on Wednesday and I go to uni at UTS, which is okay, although I’ve been lost in bureaucracy recently, so I attend there, but very confused, I confusingly attend there (laughs).

DW: What are you studying at UTS that has you so tangled in red tape?

TR: I do Communications. I didn’t want to do a music degree just because I suck at theory, and my parents are pretty keen on me getting a degree, so I just try and cram everything in, have that as my last priority.

DW: Yeah, I did Communications and thinking back on it, I can’t remember anything very specific.

TR: It’s helped a little bit, like I understand a bit more about marketing than I used to, and as much as it’s un-indie and un-alternative to care about that, the most well-marketed, image-conscious bands to me are those really alternative, indie bands, where you can see that they’ve really sussed out their stuff on the visual spectrum of things. Even the concept of their music is very straight to the point, and I’d like to get to that point but I’d rather just find it than trying to deliberately structure myself as something obvious.

It feels like it’s getting pretty close, like the [Heavy Harm] EP is more cohesive than the last one and the album is sounding very much like a single voice, it doesn’t sound like all these fucked up things coming from different places. It’s just starting to converge to become one thing, so I can’t wait to do the album, I’ve got it all sussed out in my head, what it’s going to sound like, look like, so I’m really excited for that.

DW: Compared to the three EPs you’ve done, are you preparing for a more intense period of post-production with the album, given expectations?

TR: Well, post-production and doing mixing is not too bad. It’s kind of fun, you get to lounge around and listen to music, just try and get it sounding as immersive as possible, because I just want to make a record that has an ambience in itself. Like Grace, Jeff Buckley’s album, that record as a whole, you just need to put headphones on and it’s like you’re somewhere else. OK Computer or Hail To The Thief, that album in particular, it just has such an atmosphere about and it has its own space. It’s like it somehow managed to jump into your imagination and create this geometric space that wasn’t there before, and this whole entire world just gets laid into your brain.

DW: That’s quite a metaphysical perspective. Looking back, how do you think the band evolved from its early formation with EP1 through to its current stage? What have been some defining points?

TR: The first EP got one review in Drum Media, maybe one in Brag, and I did that all at home and I wasn’t expecting anything really, I just wanted something to give to record labels and booking agencies, and hopefully they’d like us. But the people I was playing with at that point in time left the band because they wanted to share writing credits for the songs. I was pretty young, only 16, and that freaked me out because I’d written those songs before they were in the band, and I’m an extremely anxious and paranoid person, so that freaked the shit out of me and I kind of hit the ceiling for a while.

So we disbanded in that period of time and whatever interest was there was dropped. We didn’t play any gigs and it just got really quiet. Then we did EP 2 when I formed the band again with Gus and Tom, and we get on really well. Heavy Harm was much more of a collaborative effort compared to EP1, which I’d done all by myself.

So yeah, that was a weird point in time, and it’s weird now that Triple J are playing our songs, in a good way though, I’m really thankful that they’re playing [Heavy Harm] because I was really freaking out. Like after we’d finished it I thought, “Fuck, no one’s going to play it, no one’s going to like it.”

DW: Why did you think no one would play it?

TR: I don’t know, like I don’t know how to write songs, it just kind of happens, I can’t really calculate it. I know that at the moment what’s cool is that electro-rock cross-over and really folky stuff, like “Let’s use heaps and heaps of harmony.” I love Grizzly Bear, they do it fantastically, but there are about a million other bands that are trying to sound like Grizzly Bear, and I couldn’t try and sound like anybody. I know I probably do sound like a fuckload of people, but not intentionally. I can’t write songs for a purpose and because of that I know that the songs aren’t exactly what’s trendy at the moment. There’s not that much production to them, they’re just kind of… there. My hope was that the melody would be strong enough, that the actual structure of the songs would be good enough for people to get into them.

DW: Is song writing still solely attributed to you, now that PvsP has become a three-piece?

TR: Yeah, but it’s not a monopoly or anything, that’s just how we work. The process is still very much that I write the songs then take them to Gus and Tom and they flesh them out and make them better. Later down the track once we become a really tight unit, which we’re getting to, then I’d like to start writing some stuff together and see how that goes. But for this EP and for the album the song writing is still very much my domain.

DW: Are there any bands that you strive to emulate in terms of song writing and song structure?

TR: Queens of the Stone Age, they’re a band I really admire, Elliot Smith as well. His songs are incredible, you could play his songs on an acoustic guitar and they’d still retain their awesomeness, whereas like, you couldn’t play Crystal Castles’ new song on an acoustic guitar. Although the singer’s really fucking hot and I love them for that (laughs). I can’t remember, what’s their song at the moment, the new single?

DW: No idea, I haven’t even listened to their new album.

TR: It came out on rage and she looked really hot, so I just kind of bopped along to the song (laughs). If you think of a band like Human League though, who were a completely electronica band in the 80s, songs like ‘Don’t You Want Me?’ and ‘Fascination’, you could play that song on a piano and it would still be a fantastic song, you could play it on anything. The Beatles’ songs are how old? 50 years old or something, and they’ve stood the test of time.

When we played in Melbourne recently, there was this fiddler guy playing on the corner of Flinders St Station, and he was playing the melody from Eleanor Rigby. That melody is so strong that some dude is playing it on a fiddle miles away from where it was originally written, years later, on some random street and people recognise it. That’s a strong song. I’d be so happy if I could write melodies that were that good.

DW: Well, it’s early days for you yet.

TR: (Laughs) I’m not expecting to get to that level at all, but that’s what I admire.

DW: You’ve mentioned Queens of the Stone Age and Jeff Buckley, The Beatles and Elliot Smith. Their musical influence, whether conscious or not, is quite apparent in your songs. However, are there any non-musical influences that have an impact on your music?

TR: Well, a lot of the time I seem to go to parties and I don’t know what to talk about at all, I just kind of sit down and feel awkward. I’ve kind of noticed that at a lot of parties, all these people get together and when they’re not together they watch TV and they come together to talk about what they’ve seen on TV and that’s the talking point, or what they’ve seen on the internet. So they all talk about the same things, drink, get intoxicated, more to the point where it becomes about primal things like fucking and making out and doing that sort of stuff, and it just seems to be this obvious display of primal breeding, but without the actual breeding.

Not that I have a problem with it at all, like I don’t despise it, I don’t disagree with it, I don’t have any negative feelings towards that particular thing, but to me it feels like I know what is going on, and everything that is happening before and during it is just this very shallow masquerade. I usually get really angry or jealous that I’m not taking part in this.

I’m saying I know but I’m probably completely wrong. I just see all this behaviour that looks so devised and I don’t know how to react to it, so I go home and write songs, and then I realise that, oh, that’s a reference to that particular incident and that’s a reference to that particular incident, etc. Like I’m extremely bad at handling situations with the opposite sex, so I’m always writing about failures in that.

DW: That’s the biggest cornerstone of rock music though, or even just art in general, the relationship between love and pain.

TR: It’s interesting because I feel you write the best songs when you’re at your most isolated or lonely. Sometimes I feel it’s almost my job to feel a bit separate and to observe what’s going and take my own thing from it and write about it. I don’t enjoy thinking that way though, that’s why I write to feel better.

It’s not just parties, it’s everything, where everything comes down to fucking and having a family. It seems to me no love is without some kind of game, like this person is with this person because they’re physically attractive and it makes them look more attractive, and this person has money, future prospects, a certain social status, or this person is all I could get. But you can never really know what anybody else is thinking or feeling. Maybe you can but I can’t. I don’t know, everything just seems really obvious but unexplainable, which is very annoying (laughs).

DW: It says on your Wikipedia page that your songs deal with themes of lost love, disenfranchisement, technology, human emotions and the state of the world. Do you agree with this description?

TR: I know that the guy who wrote it, he got all of those points from reviews and interviews that we’ve previously done, so those are all legitimate interpretations of our music, but personally I’ve never thought that much about what I write. Although that’s not to say I don’t identify in some small way. I’ve been in fairly interesting romantic situations as much as anybody, and occasionally I get pissed about how things are like most people, but everybody is affected by similar things.

DW: Being a self-described ‘psychedelic-grunge’ band, do you think the term ‘psychedelic’ has lost some of its meaning in the music world recently due to its constant overuse? What does it mean when applied to Papa Vs Pretty?

TR: I think psychedelic to anyone nowadays is just phaser and reverb and any song that is longer than five minutes, or long hair. But we don’t really have any of those things, Heavy Harm as a record doesn’t even have that much reverb. A lot of my favourite bands don’t use that much reverb, whereas you get bands nowadays like Best Coast where it’s just like reverb everywhere.

I guess when applied to us their was a period where we were doing prog-rock songs that were five to ten minutes in like a billion sections, that could potentially be seen as psychedelic. I wouldn’t say it’s psychedelic though, I don’t even have a phaser pedal. My reverb pedal actually broke the other day, so it’s physically impossible for me to be psychedelic now (laughs).

DW: The cover art of your debut EP is quite surreal, like something out of a Terry Pratchett novel, almost Dali-esque. Who created it and what is the meaning behind it?

TR: This company called We Are Synapse did the artwork and the video clip, which is this animation-type thing. We didn’t know what we wanted for the artwork and our label set us up with them and they’d done some awesome stuff.

Originally I wanted a clay head on the cover that looked kind of real, kind of fucked up, and it would just be sitting there on a bust, but then it seemed a bit too morbid. We got drafts back and it looked more like a Tool album. So I thought, what’s a way we can give it more colour.

Then I looked at this Japanese artist, I can’t remember his name, and he does these heads with all these detailed drawings on them, and I thought it would be cool to have like a 3D-type world in the head with a waterfall coming over the top of it. So I told this to We Are Synapse and they did their own interpretation of it, which took a while to get right, but they have awesome skill with illustration, really detailed. So they did it and we gave it the thumbs up. It was a really smooth process.

DW: It seems about half of all band names are fairly straight-forward and the other half are almost intentionally confusing. Papa Vs Pretty is definitely in the latter category. Are you merely satirising Madonna or is there something deeper at work?

TR: Madonna?

DW: You know, the song, Papa Don’t Preach?

TR: (Laughs) No, no, I didn’t even think about that. When I first started the band there was another guy who sung and wrote lyrics, and I played guitar and wrote the music, so we named the band together. We were in math class and I asked him, “What was your first word?” and he said “Papa”, and then he asked me what mine was, which was “Pretty”, and I can’t remember how it happened but the ‘Vs’ thing got involved because not many bands at the time had ‘Vs.’ in the name. It’s the name that stuck, we didn’t really know what to think about the band name, we were more interested in the music. Now though I think it could be a pretty awful band name, some people think it’s terrible. It’s actually a talking point with some reviews, they’re like, “Terrible band name, good music.” (Laughs)

DW: Have you ever thought about changing the name?

TR: I have but there are bands out there with more ridiculous names that are huge, like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam. It’s a pretty moot point I guess. Some bands have awesome names and all the hipster-type people go, “Fuck yeah, cool band name!” except they have this really ‘abstract’ sound that’s been done by about a billion other people. Whereas if you have this bad band name then you have to really prove yourself with your music.

Papa Vs Pretty

Next story: Twelve Dark Noons – Naked On The Vague

Singles

tristan — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:59 +0000

Text: Danielle Marsland Images: Jackson Eaton

There is a massive immediacy that has come to exist online in recent years – it seems self-restraint is the only thing standing between one’s personal life and one’s personal life, made public. Websites, blogs, photologs, Tumblrs – so many ways to let people in. And so many people who want to! When you can’t see or judge the depth of who or what is following your movements online; it’s easy to feel free to share more and more information, to break down barriers between yourself and your viewer, or to just pretend that barriers don’t exist at all.

The photographs of Jackson Eaton have immersed many over the years, not so much through their being prolific, but because the nature of their subject is directly associated with Eaton’s own personal life, immediately triggering intrigue in strangers near and far for the unfettered intimacy that they offer freely to the viewer. A stint a few years back with a fellow photographer and live-in lover in Korea doubled the exposure (figuratively and literally).

Doing all this from afar, Eaton never had to answer to anyone except his online public; who were intangible at best. However, last year saw Eaton re-insert himself into his small hometown, and thus face the challenge of reconciling that foreign, online, seemingly untouchable photographic world with one capable of being dissected and reacted to by friends, family and viewers now at arms length. And now, the ultimate test of these change in circumstances: Eaton’s fourth solo exhibition, Single, will see him document with Fade-To-Black polaroids a night spent in an art gallery with a stranger, in his hometown. What better time to speak with Jackson Eaton about the reality of the worlds he inhabits: the real, the constructed, and the limbo in between.

Danielle Marsland: Your latest photographic project explores the notion of being ‘single’, an idea which you appear to be putting forth as a contrast to your previous photos, which explored relationships/togetherness. A close inspection of your photos reveals the idea of being ‘single’ or ‘alone’ as having been there the whole time. There are a lot of images of lone figures versus landscapes, individuals framed against the bigness of the world, sometimes even lacking identity in the face of it (ie obscured faces, backs to the camera). Is it possible that, even whilst you were in a relationship, your work still spoke of an overarching solitude?

Jackson Eaton: Yes, certainly. I’ve never felt my work explored togetherness or love as some kind of ideal or harmonious state, despite it sometimes being interpreted that way. Even in relationships I think we often struggle with how pure a union is or ever can be. Environment does play a large role in my photographs, even the portraits, you are right. I think this interests me because it is a way of lending perspective and context to where we find ourselves in life and how we got there. As a chronically bad decision maker, I am interested in the in-between or limbo states that exist in our lives where even if we can see how meaningful or positive something is there is still some element of doubt or dissatisfaction.

DM: Most of the subjects in your work are people you know – it seems there’s almost no one in your work that doesn’t bear some relationship to you. There’s a huge amount of vulnerability involved in being a photographer’s subject – are most people you know comfortable with you taking their picture often?

JE: I suppose there is vulnerability involved but I have never really thought about it like that. How much more comfortable would you feel having your photograph taken by someone you knew? A lot I would think. My style is (or at least was) very immersive. I would take my camera everywhere and take a lot of photos so it was just something people around me got used to. They learned what I liked from a subject and I learned who was capable (and comfortable) of providing something interesting. The barrier breaks down after a while.

DM: Temperature can be an interesting way to read your photos. A lot of the images from Korea are clear and sharp; hued in blues; cold and rainy. Others experiment with some different effects; they are warm, faded, grainy – like photos that might have been ageing in a box for a long time, or left out in the sun. What is your technique for creating, imagistically, a sense of the moods that define the environments in which you take photos?

JE: For the first couple of years in Korea I was fascinated by the incredible array of colours in the urban landscape, even at night. I used a cheap film stock that was saturated in red for the majority of that work. Back in Australia it was the opposite. The UV light just seemed to dominate and wash over everything. I became interested then in how colours had to strain to be felt and began using some expired film stocks. I think as a photographer you have to experiment but also work with what you are given.

DM: One of ee cummings’ most well-known poems, since feeling is first, casts off convention at the bequest of emotion, even going so far as to say that feeling is more important than knowledge (“the best gesture of my brain is less than/ your eyelids’ flutter”). Your widely regarded photo series, were never married, the photos from which comprised your solo show of last year, oh+ve, are heavy with feeling. As a gesture of your skill, do you think these photos are, in the end, the photographic equivalent of cummings’ understanding of ‘syntax’? (or, put more simply, is it the foolish viewer that takes these photos – which at the end of the day, are artistic constructs not unlike poems – for reality?)

JE: That is a difficult question made harder from my closeness to the work. I would say that yes, it is foolish to take these photos for reality. While I think I am a modernist at heart and partly attracted to photography because of its relationship to objectivity, I think photographic images can only ever be constructions. However, I am interested in exploring the closeness that does exist to ‘reality’ (it feels like something that should be put in inverted commas). I abhor very staged and post-produced work and try with what I do to dissolve the barrier that exists between what is out there (in the external reality) and what is in here (in my internal reality), and almost align those two worlds as if they were two images. To me that relationship feels very complicated and muddled and I think my techniques for taking photos exploit that feeling. For example, I shoot both pov and self portrait, I use film to encourage chemical abnormalities, I like dusty and faded and imprecise images, etc.

DM: Your online portfolio is divided into titled albums – how did you initially go about collating these ‘albums’, did you impose any criteria upon your photos to determine their selection?

JE: The albums are roughly chronological, with considerations made for the mood, order and style of the photos. The do reflect certain periods of the relationship that I sometimes wonder if I should explain (perhaps if I could write better). For example, ‘Australian Butterflies’ doesn’t actually contain any images from Australia but explores a time when Hasisi and I had resumed contact and agreed to meet in America for a couple of weeks. After the trip we made a plan to move to Melbourne together, but a week before the date we had booked, she decided not to come.

DM: You went and explored some of America last year with some photographer friends – Benjamin Acree and Robert Johnson – and documented your travels. How did you initially meet these guys and where did the idea for the trip spring from?

JE: I met Robert and Ben in Korea. In Korea we had a little group of photographers that we sometimes called ‘the photocrappy gang’. It wasn’t very technical, as the name suggests, but more of a group of expats intent on exploring and documenting a strange and vital place and time in our lives. After I had returned home to Australia, Robert home to the US and Ben moved on to Japan we decided it might be just a crazy enough idea to get together again for the American summer to do THAT trip everyone wants to do, i.e., drive coast to coast.

DM: What’s it like travelling with other photographers, do you have to take ‘dibs’ on potential good photos?

JE: We always conceived of the project as a group project so there was no real competition for images. If we could all shoot something we would, knowing that there was more chance of getting a great photo, but if not we would trust one of us to get it. Often we would take a walk around a small town and shoot for an hour or so before meeting back at the van. It was a lot of fun. Part of our orientation towards the trip was that we didn’t want to ‘say’ something about America. We had a few major destinations but mostly we chose highways and streets at a whim, avoided big cities and stopped whenever we saw something interesting.

DM: Some of the shots that you produced from the US trip are pleasantly surprising – in that many of the photos are portraits of strangers, or shot in an observational style, or object-focused, which isn’t really something we’ve seen a lot of thus far in your work – are you conscious of that growth in your work, as depicted in the photos?

JE: That’s right it was a big departure for me, and I wasn’t sure how comfortable I would be with it. I wouldn’t say it is a new direction because it was more about taking that specific opportunity to create a body of work with two talented photographers (who are good at that documentary style). It was an enjoyable process however and so hopefully the three of us will do it again in Australia or somewhere else. We are intending to publish a book of the America photos soon called Coney Island Malibu Beach. Maybe the Australian volume will be Rottnest Island Bondi Beach, or something.

DM: The most awful way to end an interview is probably to say ‘what’s next for you?’. So instead – what is the last photo you got developed and were you happy or disappointed with it?

JE: I got a roll developed today. On it are a few photos of a friend couple of mine for a fledgling series exploring other people’s intimacy (see photo to left). A lot of my friends are in pretty long-term relationships and it can be quite lonely when they consistently only do things together or with other couples. I wanted to kind of inject myself into their lives and play with the awkwardness of shared intimacy. It is a relatively new approach for me to think things out this much – but this is what Perth does to a man.

Jackson Eaton

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Afternoon TV

tristan — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:52 +0000

Text: Tristan Ceddia Images: Chris Hopkins

Chris Hopkins is a bit of an enigma. He is originally from Sydney, is now located somewhere in Japan and only recently got a (very minimal) website upon realisation that he was being mistaken for another artist. Nonetheless, he makes wonderful graphic illustrations. Determined to find out more, Tristan Ceddia tracked him down for a little back and forth banter.

Tristan Ceddia: Where did you grow up and how did you begin your career as an illustrator?

Chris Hopkins: I grew up a few hours south of Sydney and for as long as I can remember, I’ve always liked drawing. I’ve never really worked solely as an illustrator but rather got my start at 19 working as an animator which progressed to becoming an art director, the whole time working for ad agencies (which had it’s pros and cons). Whenever possible I would draw as part of my job and for some reason I also started taking on illustration jobs outside of full-time work, for fun and to pass time more than anything. In 2005 I decided to leave my job to just concentrate on freelance work which I’d say is a 50/50 split between illustrative work and art direction. Both of which I enjoy… And God knows what I like to draw isn’t suitable for everything.

TC: So what do you like to draw?

CH: Things I like… Loose shapes, flowers, Steve Martin, that type of thing. I like things that to me are also kind of funny or a bit ridiculous without being ironic or hip or contrived and mostly not boring, at least I hope. The composition side of drawing is also interesting to me and something I really enjoy.

TC: What made you decide to live in Japan?

CH: As a city and a place to live I’ve always loved Sydney. At the time however, for better or worse, I was just not at all into in what was taking place creatively. Japan on the other hand was one of few places I had experience in travelling to and just a place where I felt comfortable, so that was that.

TC: Has this move had a big influence on your subject matter and style?

CH: I wouldn’t say living here has changed the style of my drawing beyond its natural progression, although certainly it has influenced subject matter. It’s hard not to I think. Even just day-to-day stuff becomes referential on some level. I also like a lot of Japanese artists and artwork so there’s that influence too. It’s a fine line though. I mean, I’m very conscious of not taking everything in that direction or over-doing it.

TC: Do you work in the creative industry in Japan?

CH: I don’t really think about things in those terms but I suppose so? I’m not sure. A few years ago it was certainly more the case with the majority of work being for Japanese clients. These days it’s more geographically spread. I don’t actively promote my own work or try to solicit new clients despite working solely as a freelance artist. (I only recently put a small website of work online after learning a different artist of my name was being mistaken for me). It’s always been a matter of seeing what comes my way as opposed to trying to push things in any particular direction, Japanese or otherwise.

TC: I assume working with Japanese clients would involve speaking at least a little bit of Japanese. Do you ever find yourself (pardon the pun) lost in translation?

CH: I understand a little but really I’ve been lucky. Most clients have been able to speak English so in that regard, it’s all somehow worked out.

TC: Your work mixes modern themes with a classic Push Pin era style illustration. What draws you towards this more classical style of drawing?

CH: I don’t know how classic it is but thanks. I’ve always just felt I can only really draw one way and that’s kind of cartoon-like. I’m honestly terrible at doing anything realistic so I just try to focus on what comes most naturally.

Taste wise and amongst many other things, I do particularly like a lot of the art deco revival graphics that were being created from the mid eighties into the early nineties. From Push Pin right through to artists like Thomas McKnight into what could be regarded as hotel lobby art. Along these lines a friend recently told me that my drawings often remind him of Ken Done (I really liked this). I think more than anything a whole lot of stuff (artists, interests and otherwise) just get muddled-up in my head and what remains is probably something that shares the feeling and sensibilities of that period without looking quite like it. To me it comes down to loose pattern or composition driven illustration that has some kind of warmth or energy to it. I also place an importance on seeing drawings through from pencil sketches to finished art, something I feel can be overlooked these days.

TC: Do you find yourself drawing often? Is it something that you are doing every day?

CH: Not every day unfortunately, but most days. It’s the colouring or finishing of illustrations on the computer or the more design orientated jobs that mostly seem to get in the way of actual drawing. It’s okay though.

TC: Can you describe the thought behind the cover image you illustrated for us?

CH: As is sometimes the case, I started out with one idea but mid-way it turned into something else. I was originally thinking about that old Pepsi logo and wanting to pair the red and blue of the logo with the red and blue of a school uniform. Anyways, it slightly changed but that was the original thought.

TC: If you had to look at one image for the rest of your life, what would it be?

CH: In the name of brownie points, my girlfriend’s sweet face.

Afternoon TV

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