Crucial albums #3: Faith No More’s The Real Thing

Inspired by that facebook game where you list 10 important albums, I realised that many of my favourite albums are not the ones that shaped my music or songwriting directly.

I want to explore the albums that changed how I thought about my practice as a singer and songwriter, and that are direct influences on Mitropa, the Wasp Summer album I’m currently making.

Number 3 must be Faith No More’s eclectic hard rock masterpiece ‘The Real Thing’.

 

1990, Year 10, and the final year of the acceptably ugly school uniform. Fashion inspirations: Stevie Nicks, Chrissy Amphlett, Wendy James, Permanent Vacation-era Steve Tyler checking out new band night at the Whisky a Go Go.

Faith No More’s The Real Thing quite literally changed my life. Before this album came out, my two big musical loves were INXS and Guns ‘n’ Roses, who, around that time, inspired me to fashion a primitive vapouriser from a coke can and fill it with Mum’s best Ceylon in order to experiment with the ‘smoking tea’ they spoke of in their cover of Aerosmith’s mighty Mama Kin. No buzz. But I digress.

I think I may have Shane N. to thank for my first tape of this album. At least, I associate it with going Trick or Treating with him around Highland Park, a newish housing estate, and coming home to my Dad telling me he kept a little black book of all my misdemeanours and had spies all over Nerang who would tell him if I got up to mischief. Mum assures me that was just Dad’s sense of humour.

The second single off this record, Epic, went round our school like a particularly explosive dose of salts. I have a vivid memory of discussing the video in awe with Brett N. one Monday morning outside the science block. We’d obviously all seen it on Rage over the weekend. They’d never play it on our local radio station. Until it spent 18 weeks on the charts, Australia giving them their first international #1.

But it wasn’t Epic that really blew my mind. Like pop kids who discovered The Smiths or The Cure, this took all my love of hard rock and added weirdness, eclecticism and intelligence. I desperately wanted to be in a band, and eventually my mate Craig Rickard invited me to create ‘Decadence’, our glam-rock covers band.

I loved the pop-triple-punch opening of From Out of Nowhere, Epic and Falling To Pieces, but the later three song run of The Real Thing, Underwater Love and The Morning After, and especially the title track itself, changed for me what was possible with music. It gave me the idea that songs could have power, texture, mystery and space.

The music is precise, brutal and, yes, spacious. There are repeating lyrical threads through the album that are philosophical, questioning and complex, not merely hedonistic. There’s also a huge whack of absurdist humour.

I had my first taste of cool as a school authority on this album. Two popular girls came around to ask if i could dub them copies. I had an old pink Sanyo deck that dubbed in real-time, and as we listened to the piano ending to Epic, they were visibly disturbed at the weirdly classical turn the album was taking. “What is this shit?” they asked. “It’s excellent. Do you want it or not?”

Patton’s vocals go from roaring and stentorian to seductive, almost pleading. I have never forgotten his harmony sixths, and the way he sings “you leave me writhing on the floor” definitely “makes me feeeeeeeeel this way”…

And they finished the album with the consumately creepy lounge-pervert swing ballad End of The World. It was my Enlightenment.

Check out my crucial album #1: Cocteau Twins ‘Heaven or Las Vegas’
Check out my crucial album #2: Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock

Crucial albums #2: Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock

Inspired by that facebook game where you list 10 important albums, I realised that many of my favourite albums are not the ones that shaped my music or songwriting directly.

I want to explore the albums that changed how I thought about my practice as a singer and songwriter, and that are direct influences on Mitropa, the Wasp Summer album I’m currently making.

Number 2 must be Talk Talk’s avant-jazz-rock masterpiece ‘Laughing Stock’.

Talk Talk’s final album Laughing Stock is an entirely appropriate album to come after the Cocteau Twins. Another record that nails the balance between melodic beauty and noise, sung in glossolalia and with the most amazing sense of space.

The track Ascension Day is actually super important to the writing that went towards the next Wasp Summer album, and I have Chris Chapple to thank for the introduction. I can still see the scene, bathed in beeswax-yellow light, in his old St. Kilda living room as The Mime Set gathered for a rehearsal/writing session for our second album.

It may have been the same night I cried behind the door as we ran an early version of Honey O, and Andrew gently asked if I wanted my lyrics to be that nakedly honest. Yes, I do. Always.

That’s the thing about this album. It’s achingly truthful. I can make out words here an there, but even through abstractly-sung text, the emotional through-line of this album is pure and true.

Even though the album was painstakingly assembled collage-style from over 7 months of improvised recordings, this album is honest and brutal and true.

Released on the Verve jazz label, it’s more akin to jazz than the glossy, clever pop they made before, but also lays the foundation for post rock, a territory, along with dream pop, that I spent a good part of my 20s travelling.

To make music where “The record was “only complete” when the band’s Mark Hollis felt each guest musician had “expressed their character and refined their contribution to the purest, most truthful essence,” is the dream, isn’t it?

Check out my crucial album #1: Cocteau Twins ‘Heaven or Las Vegas’

Crucial albums #1: Cocteau Twins ‘Heaven or Las Vegas’

Inspired by that facebook game where you list 10 important albums, I realised that many of my favourite albums are not the ones that shaped my music or songwriting directly.

I want to explore the albums that changed how I thought about my practice as a singer and songwriter, and that are direct influences on Mitropa, the Wasp Summer album I’m currently making.

Number 1 must be the Cocteau Twins masterpiece ‘Heaven or Las Vegas’.

Oh, this album, beginning to end, blows my mind. In 1994, I escaped an increasingly dangerous relationship and was relieved to move into a sharehouse in Lismore with 4 other women, located above a veterinary surgery. Collectively and consciously, we explored ritual paganism, argued theology with the Mormons that came each week to save us, and smoked more weed than was strictly necessary. I saw some weird shit.

I started off living behind a makeshift curtain in the kitchen until a room became available. Then I moved into the least psychedelically-wallpapered of the rooms, affectionately known as the Triffid Room.

A lot of music that is important to me (Pink Floyd, PJ Harvey, the Clouds) came out of this room and this year, as did my first attempts at songwriting. Rachel the Cone Queen stole this record from her sister, but it lived for the entire year in my room where I attempted to rationalise its immense harmony while drifting off into its etheric spheres.

This album remains an act of divinity to me. The Cocteaus’ perfect pop moment. The post-punk textures they had been developing all the way along, Liz Fraser’s astonishing vocal style, the pulsing bass and drum machines, liquified into a weird, dreamy and pleasurable set of songs that blew open my expectations of what I could do, what the human voice could do, what guitars could sound like.

It was the precursor chemical to so much of the music that made my music sound the way it does. At least, most of what I did with The Mime Set and Wasp Summer was me aiming for this kind of freedom.

Upon reflection, Annie Lennox and Liz Fraser are largely responsible for the beautiful oddness of my sense of harmony.