While Lee’s departure was not surprising, the loss of Michael Parisi from Warner came as a serious blow. Parisi had relentlessly pushed Regurgitator, sometimes bringing himself into conflict with his employers, still smarting over Yeomans’ refusal to take America. Regurgitator, like so many before them, soon found their creative freedom applied only as long as they were selling records, and . . . Art, by the band’s earlier standards, sold poorly. When Yeomans penned an unofficial anthem for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, Crush The Losers, his lyric may as well have described Warner’s hardening attitude towards the band.
In early 2001 Ely and Yeomans reconvened for the recording of Regurgitator’s fourth album, Eduardo And Rodriguez Wage War On T-Wrecks. Produced by the duo with the assistance of ex-Gang of Four member Andy Gill, the more overtly hip-hop flavoured album opened up plenty of new ground for the band to explore, with new drummer Peter Kostic (of Sydney’s Front End Loader) providing the necessary injection of new blood. But worrying signs abounded.
Ben Ely: All the guys that signed us had left by that stage, and [new A&R head] Dan Hennessy was dropping in on our sessions, trying to get us to add choruses and take out this and that. And we’d never, ever had anyone from a record company interrupt what we were doing before.
Paul Curtis: They just decided the band didn’t want to bend over backwards for them, basically. It was worse for Eduardo And Rodriguez. I got called in for a meeting and rapped over the knuckles – ‘Paul, you’re a bad boy, you’re not making the band do what we want them to do!’
Regurgitator are now an independent act for the first time in their career. To secure their release from Warner, the group really did have to bend over backwards, their liaison with the label ended by a greatest hits compilation of singles. Its title: Jingles.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
new suburban fables
Powderfinger gathered in Sydney’s Q Studios to record their second album in early 1996. The quintet was on the rack. Support for the band within Polydor was less than unanimous. The label had seen little short-term return for its investment, with neither Parables For Wooden Ears nor the following EP, Mr Kneebone, capitalising on the excitement generated by the Transfusion EP. Inside the studio, however, a gradual metamorphosis was taking place. A band once clenched tight as a fist was unfurling within a song that beckoned instead of pummelled the listener.
John Zucco, Polydor’s national promotions manager, was a long-time supporter of Powderfinger. An old friend of founding guitarist Ian Haug, he had moved to Sydney in 1991 after his promotion from the Brisbane office. When Parables For Wooden Ears was released in 1994, Zucco was saddled with the unenviable task of pitching the accompanying single, Tail – the same song critic Jack Marx had memorably described as ‘disappearing up its own arse’ – to Triple J. But when an excited Haug invited him back to the studio to listen to a new song, Pick You Up, he had no doubts.
John Zucco: From listening to it we knew we had something really special, and we went after it quite hard. We wanted to place it with Triple J and the community stations first, because that was particularly the wishes of the band; they wanted to be organic about what was happening. And luckily for us, they went with it, and then the commercial stations went with it.
Bernard Fanning: You always read about artists who say, ‘And I knew at the time I had this enormous hit on my hands.’ And it’s just not like that! But for me, the clue to a good song is when you play it and you get some kind of natural physical response in your body, where it’s stirring around in your stomach. I remember feeling that a little, at the initial stage of that song.
Powderfinger were a couple of years older than most of their contemporaries. The band began as a three-piece in late 1988, with Haug teaming up with bass player John Collins and drummer Steven Bishop shortly after leaving Brisbane Grammar. The members’ tastes leant surprisingly towards the indie scene: Collins admired the malignant throb of Joy Division, while Haug was a psychobilly fan, addicted to the primal voodoo beat of the Cramps and the Gun Club.
Overriding these, however, was a love of classic ’70s rock implied in the band’s name. Alongside Neil Young were all the big names: Stones, Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Kiss. Bernard Fanning – who joined Powderfinger in 1989 after meeting Haug in an economics class at the University of Queensland – added a variety of earnest singer-songwriters to the pot of influences, although it would be several years before these softer touches were allowed to filter through the band’s music.
It was a streetwise combination for a young and hungry band in Brisbane. Although Powderfinger always included original songs in their repertoire, the dominant booking agency in town was more interested in cover and tribute bands, accounting in part for the lean years for original music in Brisbane in the late ’80s. Playing the covers circuit honed Powderfinger’s chops, but admitting the occasional Neil Young number to the set (sometimes Powderfinger itself) also caused some early confusion.
Ian Haug: That probably put us on the outer with Triple Zed, because they thought we were some kind of concept band. We were sort of doing grunge music before we knew what it was called, which a million bands around the world would have been doing at the time.
The band certainly had the look: long hair and ripped jeans all round. But Powderfinger needed to beef up its sound to be convincing. Steve Bishop left, to be replaced with the raw but hard-hitting Jon Coghill, while second guitarist Darren Middleton was recruited to add the requisite metallic flash after the band discovered him strutting his stuff in a glam-metal band called Pirate. Middleton, now probably the least showy member of Powderfinger, has never heard the end of it since.
Ian Haug: He was doing the shred thing, dancing on the tables with a wireless guitar. He was into Dokken and all those terrible bands and we thought he was just the sort of idiot we needed! He was really funny.
In fact, the addition of Middleton allowed the spotlight to settle on Fanning. The fact that Powderfinger could play was one thing; having a singer who could actually sing was something else. A devotee of soul greats Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, Fanning’s warm tone and elastic range was Powderfinger’s most obvious ace, the first thing anyone who saw the band noticed. Freeing Fanning from guitar duties made him more than just another member of the band: it made him the star.
Powderfinger’s line-up was completed by their sixth member, manager Paul Piticco. A former housemate of Haug’s, Piticco was asked to take the reins shortly after Fanning’s induction. Barely 21, Piticco had yet to find his direction, and was biding his time in an office job selling building materials.
Paul Piticco: My direction found me! I didn’t ever really plan. I liked music and I pottered with it, but at the risk of sounding like my parents, you think it’s never going to be a real job; you’re never going to make a living out of it. And even after I was committed to it, for quite a few years that didn’t look likely. It wasn’t until about 1995 that I thought, hang on . . .
John Zucco: A lot of bands have potential, but they fall through the cracks because they don’t have strong management. And that’s what they get from Piticco – he can be a real hard-arse, but bands need that, because when they’re going up against labels who can be incredibly intimidating, you need someone in your corner who can fight for you.
The band found its first regular home at the Orient Hotel, a triangular block at the junction of Ann and Queen Streets, midway between the city and Fortitude Valley. It wasn’t long before patrons began spilling out into the street. Powderfinger simply didn’t sound like a local band – clearly the five-piece was purpose-built for bigger stages than the corner of the Orient could accommodate. The question was how well they would handle the transition.
There was no shortage of sceptics. Initially the band was unfavourably compared to the Black Crowes, an understandable conclusion to draw: Fanning’s wafer-thin visage wasn’t entirely unlike the Crowes’ Chris Robinson, and t
he two groups shared a common set of influences (most glaringly, both covered Otis Redding’s Hard To Handle). By the time Middleton and Coghill joined the band, Powderfinger’s imagination had been captured by the new music emanating from Seattle – especially Soundgarden, whose influence on Powderfinger’s early recordings is undeniable.
But originality, or lack thereof, was hardly the point. Powderfinger were all young men in their early 20s, and their tastes were perfectly in tune with thousands of others like them in the summer of 1991–92. If they were to be the local standard-bearers of grunge, they were doing it more than well enough. Being ahead of the game was something for critics to worry about, not the band.
Bernard Fanning: We were always trying to get bigger, and trying to go on tour wherever and whenever we could, no question about that. We weren’t interested in being the coolest band around, because that was never my motivation for being in a band. I never wanted to be cool. I wanted to make music.
Powderfinger had approached signing to Polydor with a level head, asking the label to invest in the band’s long-term potential. ‘We said to them, buy our third album,’ says Fanning. ‘We wanted two albums to develop before we were pushed by the record company.’ Piticco concurs: ‘There was a definite plan to not be successful immediately but to be successful for a long time.’
Once the deals were done, however, both parties forgot their good intentions. Subconsciously, perhaps, the band had begun to believe that major commercial success would be the inevitable result of major commercial backing. When the band went into the studio to make Parables For Wooden Ears, they were cocky. ‘We believed we were better than we were at what we were doing,’ Fanning says.
Polydor seemed to agree, sinking more money into the album’s recording and promotion than Powderfinger was ready for. Somewhere along the line, as Powderfinger and Polydor set out to prove themselves to each other, the music became lost. The album sold just over 6000 copies in its first year.
Paul Piticco: We realised at that point that we had to take control and really work for something and focus on it, basically. There was a feeling that maybe the record company dropped the ball on the first album, and we’d allowed ourselves to be directed . . . We were very easygoing about it all. We weren’t as analytical as we should have been, and definitely not as controlling as we’ve become.
The instrumental heroics that dominated Parables had been influenced in part by the bands dominating the local funk-fusion scene, particularly Pangaea and Brasilia. By 1995, a new crop of artists helped point Powderfinger in a more natural direction. The Toothfaeries were selling out shows with their light, summery folk-reggae; Isis began as a feminist vocal trio before expanding, morphing from acoustic to electronic pop in the process. When Ben Harper toured for the first time in late 1996, the Zoo was jammed beyond capacity.
The music resonated with Fanning in particular, whose biggest stated influence was the early ’70s folkie Rodriguez. Over the course of two EPs, Powderfinger began to take apart their sound. Technique took a back seat to melody; Fanning’s lyrics found a new directness. When the band began recording demos for their second album, Double Allergic, Pick You Up was the standout result. Anthemic but graceful, the stately ballad became both template and talisman for the band.
Bernard Fanning: It’s in a really unusual tuning, that song, I had never written a song in that tuning before. Of course, I subsequently wrote the next 27 the same way! It was like opening the door to what you thought was just a hallway, and inside there’s this huge mansion full of rooms that you can explore.
This time Polydor handled their charges more carefully. Presenting the song to Triple J ahead of commercial radio preserved Powderfinger’s credibility in the youth market, while giving the broadcaster its biggest Australian success since silverchair. With its soft/loud dynamic and keening vocals, Pick You Up remained identifiably aligned to the post-Nirvana era, but the invitation at the song’s core – and Fanning’s delivery, from warm entreaty to final, desperate wail – was irresistible to anyone who heard it.
Pick You Up was already an alternative hit by the time Triple M adopted the song, and with it the band, as the acceptable new face of Australian rock. If the strategy cost Polydor a bigger hit – the song peaked at number 22 in June 1996, not a true reflection of its overall impact – it also gave Powderfinger tremendous commercial momentum leading up to Double Allergic’s release in September.1
The album debuted in the top 10, but more importantly it stayed there, peaking at number four in February following a dominant run of performances by the group at the Big Day Out. Within a year, Double Allergic had gone double platinum, selling over 140,000 copies. It was an extraordinary result for a band coming off such a low base. The doubters at Polydor were silenced: Powderfinger had saved their career with what may well have been their last throw of the dice.
Paul Piticco: If you sign a record deal with a major label, you’re a commercial rock band, whether you like it or not . . . The guys had set out to challenge themselves musically, not necessarily by writing songs that were populist, but by writing songs that would at least not discount them from having a future in the music business.
Although a major improvement on its predecessor, in truth Double Allergic was carried almost entirely on the strength of its singles. DAF (named after its chord structure) was an excellent follow-up to Pick You Up, while Living Type was only just good enough. From there, the album fell away, and the band knew it.
John Zucco: I remember sitting with Bernard and Ian at the Dolphin Hotel in Surry Hills, and they were being interviewed by a music journalist who said, ‘There’s a lot of fuss about your album, and it’s not bad, but it’s not that great.’ And the guys said, ‘Exactly! That’s what we think, too – we can’t understand what all the fuss is about it.’ It showed they had a good perspective on things.
The honesty that characterised Powderfinger’s approach – to themselves, their audience and their work – was a significant part of their appeal. While Custard never outgrew their reputation as merry pranksters and Regurgitator were too clever by half, Powderfinger didn’t really have an image, beyond the fundamental ordinariness of its members. Neither ugly nor particularly good-looking, the group wore their street clothes on stage and off and hated photo sessions. (The group has never graced the cover of one of their own albums.)
Paul Piticco: They were very normal guys, and normal guys are much harder to sell in the beginning, but once you break through it’s a blessing. No one cares what Bernard wears! If it worked – and it worked in a big way – Powderfinger was always going to be something that stuck in middle Australia.
Not that Powderfinger lacked personality. Fanning, generally quiet and astute, was also highly quotable, once engaging in a memorable slanging match – via the media – with precocious young singer-songwriter Ben Lee.2 Drummer Jon Coghill was the natural extrovert and joker; happy to poke fun at himself, his band and (especially) any journalist assigned to interview him. With Haug, Collins and Middleton content mostly to remain in the background, the overall effect was of a rather laddish bunch of Queenslanders who didn’t take themselves too seriously.
But the music was a different story. Powderfinger (again, unlike Custard and Regurgitator) found no place for irony in their songs. And just as the band had to learn to streamline its musical attack, Fanning gradually gained the confidence to express himself more openly. The more plain-spoken the lyrics became – as with Pick You Up – the better the overall results. The soulfulness of Fanning’s voice left no room for ambivalence: if the words were obscure, the vocals tended to overcompensate, as if the singer was working himself up over nothing.
Powderfinger’s sincerity resembled earlier, salt-of-the-earth Australian bands, accounting for the band’s success on commercial radio: Triple M finally had a contemporary band to complement (if not replace) its Australian quota of Cold Chisel, Hunters & Collectors and Midnig
ht Oil. Comparisons to the latter increased with the release of The Day You Come in August 1998, which appeared to address the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party.
Bernard Fanning: That’s kind of gone into myth, that that song was about Pauline Hanson. It wasn’t. It was more about the mood of the time, and One Nation definitely contributed to that, but to me it was the first witnessing of a really obvious nastiness against minorities, where people were being overtly racist and discriminatory, and to me that was disturbing. And it wasn’t just Pauline Hanson that was doing that.
Hanson was the public reincarnation of everything the Deep North once stood for. Carrying more chips on her padded shoulders than she ever sold in her famous shop, she had won the old Labor stronghold of Oxley as an independent after being disendorsed by the Liberal Party in the weeks leading up to the 1996 federal election.3 When One Nation won 11 seats at the Queensland state election on 13 June 1998, Hanson asked the party’s spiritual godfather, the 89-year-old Joh Bjelke-Petersen, to instruct her new members on parliamentary procedure. (Ironically, the result also split the conservative vote, handing power back to the Labor Party, led by Peter Beattie.)
The choice to release The Day You Come as a single was opposed by Polydor. Although the song was sonically gorgeous – with its lilting verse refrain and explosive, shimmering chorus, the sound was closer to late-period Crowded House than Midnight Oil – the label feared its grim subject matter and bleak atmosphere would cost Powderfinger the support of the commercial networks that had embraced them. But with the label about to be swallowed up by Universal, the final decision was left to the band.
Paul Piticco: Most record companies make the assumption that you don’t really know what’s best for you. So you have these fights, and at the end of the fight somebody gets the ball tossed to them – ‘OK, it’s all yours.’ So we made a lot of big calls, and we were right, things went well for us. And suddenly it was like, ‘Oh, maybe these kids know what they’re doing.’ It took years.
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