Oh Mercy: From Go To Woes

While honing their songwriting smarts, Melbourne’s Oh Mercy accidentally got better at playing their instruments, writes DOUG WALLEN. Photos by SOF MUCENIEKAS.

Named after a Dylan album and taking their cues from The Go-Betweens, Oh Mercy are a relatively young band that stands out from the pack by placing the craft of songwriting above singing, playing and other seemingly trivial concerns. After writing together for nearly six years, however, singer-guitarist Alexander Gow and guitarist-keyboardist Thomas Savage have managed to hone their chops as well. In fact, their new album Privileged Woes is uniformly pristine. A postscript to the In The Nude For Love EP, also released this year, it’s gorgeous and accomplished, despite being recorded 18 months ago when Gow and Savage were barely out of their teens.

Gow took a quick respite from the band’s current national tour to discuss how from little things big things grow.

I was wondering why you included ‘Lay Everything On Me’ and ‘Seemed Like A Good Idea’ from the EP on the album. Is it because they were the singles?
Well, what happened was, we actually finished recorded the album about 18 months ago. So it’s been ready to go for quite a while. When we finished it, we didn’t have all the bits and pieces that you need to put an album out, like distribution or management. And we hadn’t played much around the country, so we wanted to sit on the album while we did some shows and let people know who we were. When we had worked out a release date for it, it was still quite a while away. We wanted to release something in between, as a bit of an introduction to the band. So we decided to put out the EP. Obviously we had those two songs ready to go that had been on the radio already [via triple j Unearthed], so we included those and recorded a few new songs. So the EP is more like an introduction than a starting point.

The band seems to have done quite well on radio.
Yeah, triple j and Triple R have been really good to us, playing lots of our songs but those two specifically.

Oh Mercy has had a really big, yet gradual year, and now you’re headlining the Corner [on October 31]. What’s the year been like from your perspective?
It’s been mental. The first thing we really did was a residency at the Birmingham Hotel in Collingwood. We did four Wednesdays in a row, playing for 10 people and then a few more than that. So we started there. And our booking had us working really hard supporting some great bands, so we’ve had the opportunity to refine our live show and get better at our instruments and get better playing as a group. So we’ve had the year to practice our craft and write more music and see the country. We don’t take that for granted. That’s been incredible. We’ve been really busy. We haven’t had much time off. But we like it that way. We’re a hard-working band. So we’re headlining the Corner at the end of this month, which amazes me, considering where we were 12 months ago.

When exactly did the band come together?
Well, Thomas and I went to high school together in Malvern [in Melbourne’s south-east]. We started writing music together when we were 16. I suppose all our peers that were into music were concentrating on mastering their instruments and learning Metallica guitar solos. We were listening to Dylan and stuff, so we wanted to be songwriters. We started writing songs, and we wrote some pretty bad ones to start off, but by the time we left school, we were half-decent and well-practiced as songwriters.

How many years ago was that?
Well, we graduated in 2005, and I turned 22 a few days ago. For a long time. Right out of school, we weren’t quite sure how to go about things. It’s a strange time. Thomas went and did like a pastry chef apprenticeship for a year, and I went to the VCA doing photography. But by the end of that year, we decided that we really needed to put our heads together and commit to the band thing. So it’s been a lot of hard work from there.

“We’ve been through three or four entire set lists over the past three years, 15 songs each, so we’ve written a lot and thrown out a lot.”

I think you can tell that you guys concentrated so early on the songwriting. The songs are fully formed and sound quite wise beyond your years. Is that what you’ve been working towards all along?
Yeah, definitely. We accidentally got better at guitar in between, but the focus was on songwriting. We got lots of bad songs out of the way. I think the songs that made the album were written when we were 19 or 20, but they were the first bunch of songs where we wholeheartedly agreed that we’d considered all angles. We’ve been through three or four entire set lists over the past three years, 15 songs each, so we’ve written a lot and thrown out a lot. So I like to think that the songs that made the record are, like you mentioned, well thought out.

How collaborative is your songwriting partnership with Thomas?
Well, it’s not really a, “Let’s sit down in a room and lead with a song”, sort of thing. Often one of us will come up with the foundation of a song and knock it off and bring it to the other one to finish up the other 30 percent. It’s a pretty casual kind of process.

Oh Mercy has been compared to the Go-Betweens, who also had two main songwriters, and I saw a video on YouTube of you covering ‘Head Full Of Steam’.
The Go-Betweens are probably my favourite band. They’re an incredible band who we have lots of respect for. To be compared to them in any way is a real compliment.

Is the band a quartet now?
Yeah. We’ve actually had a bass player who’s played with us for quite a while, Eliza Lam. We’ve been through a few drummers, but our current drummer is Rohan Sforcina. We’ve been taking the live show around the country, supporting different people. We just finished a tour with a songwriter from Albury called Lisa Mitchell, who is amazing. We were lucky enough to play at the Sydney Opera House with Ben Folds, and we played with Ben Kweller recently as well.

Has playing so many support gigs helped you observe how other musicians work?

No doubt. That’s the way we learn. We never had lessons or anything like that. Being on tour with such great bands definitely helps us. I’ve learned a lot personally from the singer of Sparkadia, from his guitar playing. It’s a real privilege and something we don’t take for granted.

You have this high, breathy style of singing. Did you have to develop that at all?
No. The only thing I made a conscious effort with was songwriting and lyric writing. I suppose as I grew up, my mom played Dionne Warwick playing the Burt Bacharach catalogue, and I’d always be singing along to that. And Nancy Sinatra and Dusty Springfield and stuff like that.

You have guitar-based songs as well as piano-based ones. Do you like having the option to do one or the other?
Yeah, I mean, Thomas and I both have pianos. Thomas is much better on the piano. We call ourselves guitar players, but when you sit down at the piano to write a song, you end up with a much different kind of song than you usually write on the guitar. We do try to mix it up a bit between what we write on, to produce different outcomes.

A lot of your songs are also quite lush and filled out with extra instrumentation.
Well, when we were making the album, it was a really casual process. It was just our friend Myles [Wooton of The Panics] doing us a favour. We didn’t have any expectations of seeing it released or anything. So we just had the leisure of being able to experiment with different sounds and not even give a second thought to how we were going to do something live. We’re really interested in lots of lounge music, so we wanted to use lots of vibes and conga and bongos. Because of the casual nature of the recording process, we didn’t even hesitate.

The new single ‘Get You Back’ opens with harmonica and is also quite twangy.
Yeah. If all the songs were the same, you’d probably get to the end of the record and not be able to distinguish a song from a song. We like to change up the instrumentation and the overall sound. Once again, it’s not necessarily a conscious decision.

Since the album was recorded so long ago, do you have a lot of new material?
For sure. We write heaps. Perhaps that’s from being kind of young. We could record another album and a second one if we wanted. We’re going to keep on writing and hopefully make another record sometime in the next year. The writing process hasn’t stopped, and I think the songs are getting better and better. At least, you’d hope so.

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Privileged Woes is out now through Casadeldisco/Shock. Launch dates here.