Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  Powderfinger’s third album, Internationalist, was released in September 1998. Qualitatively, it was an even greater leap forward from Double Allergic than that album had been from Parables For Wooden Ears. If Internationalist lacked cohesion overall, it showed the band exploring every room in the mansion Pick You Up unlocked. And in Passenger, the band had an even better song, starting slowly and adding piano, horns and backing vocals for a stunning emotional catharsis.

  At first Polydor’s concerns about leading with The Day You Come appeared well founded. After a major publicity push that saw the album enter the ARIA charts at number one, sales of Internationalist quickly dropped off. But the single, while not a major hit, was a sleeper, a consummate sucker-punch. As the band embarked on a relentless touring schedule in November, they followed up the song with a full-throttle rocker, Don’t Wanna Be Left Out.

  Then came the blue-collar anthems: first Already Gone in February 1999, then Passenger in August. It was the knockout blow. Again, Powderfinger had shored up its Triple J base before delivering the goods to commercial radio.

  With sales now closing on 400,000 copies, Internationalist proved Piticco’s point: Powderfinger was the number-one choice of middle Australia. Even Celebrity Head, which rather unfairly aimed a bazooka at the smallest of targets – the song was originally named after a local street-paper journalist – underlined the point: Powderfinger were the people’s band first and critical darlings last.

  By October 1999 Powderfinger was the most successful band in the country. They scooped the ARIA awards, taking out Best Album and Best Group; in May 2000 Passenger was awarded the prestigious Song of the Year award by the Australian Performing Rights Association. Commercially, the band was miles ahead of Regurgitator, Spiderbait and even silverchair – although the latter boasted a stronger overseas profile, something Internationalist’s title had obliquely addressed.

  While The Day You Come had been produced by Lachlan Goold at Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne, the rest of the album was recorded by an American, Nick DiDia, previously the engineer for Pearl Jam producer Brendan O’Brien. DiDia quickly slotted into the Powderfinger network, coaxing powerful performances from the band while adding a smart but not overly glossy finish. Having worked on the band’s last three albums, DiDia is Powderfinger’s unofficial seventh member.

  Paul Piticco: Well, unless something changes, he’s the band’s producer. We’ve always tried to have kind of a family mentality to how we do things, and Nick’s definitely got that . . . I mean, everybody likes everybody, and it feels good, it makes it feel like there’s more to it than making money out of Powderfinger’s art.

  Powderfinger’s stability was their greatest asset. The band ran itself as a democracy, leading to plenty of arguments, but the value placed on each member’s input was genuine: publishing royalties were split evenly between the five performers. Of course, one could also argue that Powderfinger were successful enough to afford such a luxury, but that ignores the eight years the group laboured before Pick You Up transformed them into a platinum commodity.

  Some bands peak early. Almost all the great ones, however, take several years to hit their stride. As Powderfinger approached their fourth album, the old-fashioned virtue of giving artists the necessary time to develop rang louder than ever. The band’s old friend, John Zucco, was given the plum job of overseeing A&R for the project.

  John Zucco: I had the title, but I wouldn’t want to claim any credit there, because those guys know what they’re doing. If nothing else they have remarkably good instincts, they’ve always been able to back their judgment, and I think that’s one of the reasons why they’ve been able to keep moving up a couple of notches with everything they do.

  The band had maintained its momentum with stellar contributions to two film soundtracks, recording These Days for the Australian crime thriller Two Hands and My Kind Of Scene for the much bigger budget Mission: Impossible 2. The latter was a coup for the group, giving Powderfinger their first major American exposure when the soundtrack went platinum (one million sales) Stateside. Both songs would be reprised on Odyssey Number Five, recorded in April 2000 at Sing Sing.

  If Internationalist had been cautiously received two years earlier, despite its initial number one placing, there would be no such reservations this time. In Piticco’s words, Odyssey Number Five ‘just went stupid’ upon its domestic release in September 2000. Within three months, the album had shifted a phenomenal 350,000 copies. (The album is now officially eight times platinum in Australia, with sales over 560,000.)

  And this time even the critics had no doubts. The punters were right – from front to back, Odyssey was an outstanding album. Playing entirely to the band’s strengths – mid-tempo rockers and fire-starter ballads – the songs oozed emotion, with Fanning’s rawest set of lyrics married to superbly realised tension-and-release arrangements. Moreover, for the first time it felt like a proper album, with the band creating an overall mood rather than simply cutting and pasting its best dozen tracks.

  Bernard Fanning: We wanted to do a shorter album, because then we probably had a better chance of marrying the songs together. So that was something that we were conscious of when we started writing for it; it was definitely the most contrived in the sense that we knew what we were aiming for before we started.

  My Happiness was the first single. Built on a chugging acoustic rhythm and oscillating lead, it was not a difficult choice, even given the quality of the surrounding material. Coming after My Kind Of Scene, it was the song that would be used to push the band into the American consciousness. In Australia, however, the band was confident – and powerful – enough to follow My Happiness with the caustic Like A Dog. This time there was no denying which politician was in Fanning’s sights.

  Ian Haug: That didn’t get played on Triple M, because they thought too many voters for John Howard would get offended, both within the station and on the airwaves, probably. It’s good to make people think about things, rather than telling someone the way things should be. And Bernard’s very good at doing that lyrically. He’s become less and less cryptic as our career’s advanced though!

  It hardly mattered. Triple J was welcome to Like A Dog. Commercial radio had the rest of the album to play with.

  With the worldwide release of Odyssey Number Five by Universal, Powderfinger set off on their first major tour of the US in February 2001, performing My Happiness on David Letterman’s The Late Show for their American television debut. And somewhere along the way, things went according to the script of This Is Spinal Tap, where Artie Fufkin – the hapless local record company spruiker – promises the band massive radio exposure, yet is unable to entice buyers to the band’s in-store appearance.

  Paul Piticco: The song just didn’t react with the public. It was the number one most added song on radio, in the Top 10 most played songs for a couple of weeks, and it still didn’t sell. It was sort of inexplicable.

  Piticco, in fact, does a good job of explaining. Despite supporting British band Coldplay on tour – whose mellow Parachutes album had turned them into arena stars – Powderfinger’s sensitive-guy rock had been surpassed in America by jock-metal bands like Limp Bizkit. Possibly Powderfinger’s music fell in between: too heavy for one demographic, too vulnerable for another. When the band mounted their own headlining tour in May, they were confronted with the reality of trying to crack the US market without a hit.

  Bernard Fanning: I know it’s the oldest cliché in the book, but it’s true, and that’s why Jackson Browne wrote that album Running On Empty. We went on tour in America on a bus twice, and I understood where he was coming from, where you drive into places you’ve got no relationship with, and you don’t even like performing there.

  The band maintained its image as the quintessential blokes of Australian rock. Several articles suggested the members were too content admiring the view from the verandas of their new homes in Brisbane to be bother
ed moving within more elevated company. Asked whether they had received any feedback for My Kind Of Scene from Mission: Impossible 2 star, producer and fan Tom Cruise, Darren Middleton joked that Cruise had left a message on his answering machine, ‘but I haven’t got back to him’.4 Perhaps the music wasn’t the only thing the Americans didn’t get.

  But the group were not about to die wondering.

  Bernard Fanning: The key thing for a band like us in America is to go and play live, because we’re not going to really impress people with our personal appearances or our interviews. Everyone was amazed that we would actually go and talk to the punters after the shows.

  Paul Piticco: I don’t think it’s about fluking a radio hit; I think it’s about doing the work. We’re a working rock band – make great album, find person at record company who also thinks it’s a great album, have them put the record out, and go and tour on it.

  Powderfinger, above all else, had the balance right. They were ambitious enough to work for their success without ever letting the prizes – or the pitfalls – get in the way of the process. They also stayed hungry: if anything, the band’s 2003 album Vulture Street was even better than Odyssey Number Five, looser and more upbeat, but also more economical and buoyantly tuneful. With sales at home nearly matching its predecessor, there is little left for the band to do but take it to the world.

  Besides, life in Brisbane is not quite what it once was, especially for Powderfinger’s most recognisable member.

  Bernard Fanning: Because we have a reputation for being friendly, people aren’t reticent about approaching us, and me in particular. You can worry about that too much though. It’s very rare for people to approach you and be aggressive and say ‘You fucking suck’. They usually shout that from cars!

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  today your love, tomorrow the world

  If rock & roll was revitalised by Nirvana in 1991, it had become a sullen and unsmiling beast by 1995. The grunge explosion lingered like a bad hangover; the initial energy dissipated by a succession of frowning, introspective acts led by Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins.

  While the UK looked to its storied pop history for inspiration, Australia produced its own variants on the Seattle sound in silverchair and Powderfinger. The local music industry, from bands to A&R representatives to journalists, had been infiltrated by the values of the indie-rock movement. As Craig Mathieson has documented in The Sell-In, the industry co-opted the scene, marketing the new bands – no matter how generic – as an alternative to the old.

  No one wanted to be a star any more. It had become de rigueur for rock bands to be diffident, even apologetic about commercial success. Somehow the vitality and charisma of punk had become infected with the dreariest aspects of the folk movement, where street credibility ruled and selling out (regardless of how many records one actually sold) was the biggest sin. Pop had become a dirty word.

  John Woodruff had watched many a musical trend come and go during a long and fruitful career managing the names that made Oz Rock: Cold Chisel, the Angels, Icehouse, Diesel and the Baby Animals. But with those bands long since overtaken by a younger, louder and snottier breed, Woodruff had not had a hit for half a decade.

  Now he had someone new: a baby-faced pop duo from Brisbane going by the unlikely name of Savage Garden. Woodruff had a nose for a hit – he had supervised the creation of more than 70 albums, almost all of them platinum – but as he shopped his latest find around, most observers seemed to think he’d finally lost his marbles.

  John Woodruff: I thought I was heading for Scandinavia, because it sounded like Roxette to me. I went to LA, and I guess half of the companies sort of laughed, and the other half . . . Dreamworks had just started at that point, and the A&R guy there turned down I Want You halfway through the track – he didn’t even get through the three minutes 28 seconds of the song – and looked at me and went, ‘Well, with respect, you haven’t done your homework, have you?’

  Darren Stanley Hayes was born in Logan City in 1972. Logan is to Brisbane’s southern outskirts much as Ipswich is to the west; a separate municipality half an hour’s drive from the city. Like Ipswich, the working-class suburbs around Logan suffer from a down-at-heel reputation, none more so than Woodridge, where Hayes grew up. Yet he led a mostly happy childhood, unaffected and unpretentious.

  Darren Hayes: When I think of growing up . . . There was a street called Paradise Road that I thought was the busiest in the world. Every Saturday I would cross Paradise Road to walk down to the local shopping mall. I would go to this record store called Woody’s, and look through all the vinyl I couldn’t afford to buy . . . It was a very sheltered and a very innocent upbringing. It wasn’t until I hit 17, 18 that I realised there was a stigma attached to where I lived, and that I was growing up in a neighbourhood that was kind of rough.

  In the early ’80s Hayes was swept away by the magic of pop music, sitting by a radio cassette deck with a blank tape at the ready, waiting to hit the record button when Michael Jackson’s Thriller began its bass-driven strut through the tiny speakers. Thriller was the modern link to the few hand-me-down Motown records Hayes owned and loved. As the ’80s progressed, his tastes broadened, taking in everything from Duran Duran to the Smiths and U2.

  The difference between Hayes and any other suburban teenager was his seriousness in his quest to emulate the success of his idols. Such ambitions, however, were completely out of sync with his surroundings. A regular lead in school musicals, Hayes was determined to go to the performing arts school at Kelvin Grove, but guidance counsellors urged him to pursue a steadier career. Their belief that Hayes was university material was unusual in itself.

  Darren Hayes: Very rarely did anyone [from my school] even go on to university then, it was kind of a new thing then to go and get a tertiary entrance score or anything like that . . . So being in the debating team, or doing speech and drama, singing or acting – God forbid you wanted to be a pop star, you just never mentioned that.

  Hayes did go to university, but not to Kelvin Grove. Instead, like Bernard Fanning before him, he started studying journalism at the University of Queensland. Later he began an education degree. When his dreams of stage and screen failed to materialise, Hayes grew frustrated, feeling he had sold himself out. But Hayes didn’t play an instrument; didn’t even know anyone in a band. Nor could he relate to the exploding indie scene on his doorstep: his first love was the mainstream ’80s pop of his teenage years, and no one was playing it any more.

  In 1993 Hayes realised he was making excuses for himself. After being challenged by a girl who told him straight – if he wanted to be a pop star, what was he doing boring himself at university? – Hayes picked up a copy of street paper Time Off. Turning to the classifieds section, he called the number on the first ‘singer wanted’ advertisement he saw, placed by a band called Red Edge. The number belonged to Daniel Jones.

  Darren Hayes: I spoke to Daniel on the phone and we just clicked. And I almost talked myself out of the audition – after 20 minutes I said, ‘You know what, maybe this isn’t a good idea, because I don’t know if I’m into the music you’re into.’ He kept listing a lot of Australian artists like Noiseworks, and the only Australian band that really turned me on was INXS. And Club Hoy, which was an acoustic act that I used to love. But I turned up and sang, and I was so nervous I sounded like shit . . . Everybody in the room except Daniel passed on me. I think the two of us just knew there was a connection there.

  Daniel Jones was born in 1973 in Essex, England. After his family’s migration to Australia, Jones grew up in the semi-rural suburb of Shailer Park, also in Logan. Leaving school at 15 to concentrate on music, he formed Red Edge with his older brother Oliver. Although primarily a covers outfit, the brothers were being courted by publishing agency Warner Chappell. The original songs, according to Hayes, strove for an Australian pub rock sound, a direction reflected by the band’s taste in covers: ‘I
was from the school of Duran Duran and Michael Jackson, trying to sing Khe Sanh.’

  Hayes nevertheless stuck with Red Edge for 18 months, finally quitting after one rendition of Khe Sanh too many in Alice Springs. But his rapport with Daniel Jones remained strong: even as he left, Hayes expressed his desire to keep working with the talented multi-instrumentalist. Jones was also keen, and he loaned Hayes a keyboard and sequencing manual. Hayes, uncomfortable with the technology and perhaps still unsure if he had whatever it took in him, never opened it. Eventually Jones took the initiative.

  Darren Hayes: He called me up and said, ‘Do you want to come over and write a song?’ I went over to his house and got on the keyboard and I showed him this house riff. And he said, ‘Are you sure you want to make music like that?’ And I said, ‘Well, what was your idea?’ And he played this beautiful, moody progression that became A Thousand Words, which ended up on the first album.

  A band manager’s life is a never-ending stream of demo tapes and CDs, each one a snapshot of someone else’s dreams. John Woodruff was used to looking after rock bands, so this particular tape – a glitter-covered cassette from a band calling itself Dante – stood out immediately for its sheer incongruousness: ‘I thought, well, I’m going to have to listen to this one.’ The first track on the five-song tape was To The Moon And Back.

  John Woodruff: It was pretty much as it ended up on the album. Obviously a bit rougher, because it came from a home studio, but that same vocal, same arrangement. That was enough for me. Much as we were in the middle of the grunge era and I managed rock bands, it was pretty undeniable. So I got on a plane and I was in Brisbane the next morning.

  Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones had been writing songs for over a year when they met Woodruff in a Brisbane hotel room in early 1996. While Jones was working in a printing factory – accounting for the sparkling cassettes – Hayes had finally dropped out of university, taking a job in a video store. His family was horrified. But so strong was the musical chemistry between the pair, they were convinced nothing was beyond their grasp, even as the rejection letters piled up. Woodruff was sold.