Storytellers: Underground Lovers

In his only interview following last year’s reformation tour, Vincent Giarrusso from The Underground Lovers speaks to CHRIS JOHNSTON about the inspiration behind the band’s 1996 classic ‘Rushall Station’ along the banks of the Merri Creek, where it all began.

‘Rushall Station’

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Beside Rushall Station in Melbourne looking away from the city the train line bends around in an arc so big it’s almost a horse-shoe. It vanishes away and it’s gone and it’s like one of those places that’s so grand you can sense the curvature of the earth. The trains rush in from a void somewhere beyond the Merri Creek.

Vincent Giarrusso from the Underground Lovers would stand still on the grass near the fence. Not in the station waiting for a train but outside waiting for the sensation to hit. Preferably at night but not necessarily. Sometimes with his two baby daughters in a pram. Sometimes with them on a walk but sometimes alone, searching, wandering. This was back in the mid-’90s as the landmark Rushall Station album, the band’s fourth, was gestating. Then it would happen like it always did and it was something Vincent would always feel to the point where his nerves tingled.

The feelings and sensations became a set of collected memories and then became the core of the album’s pensive title track. Rushall Station was the album that set the band free from their bittersweet Polydor years of Leaves Me Blind and Dream It Down, both extraordinary albums but both also tarnished by an era which quickly turned sour for them. Boardroom wranglings, corporate interests and such. Rushall Station was a new start.

Vincent has always lived around within a short walk of Rushall. It’s in North Fitzroy, one stop after Clifton Hill and three after Collingwood. The creek is beautiful. After rains you can hear it flowing beneath the train lines. He loves it here.

“That bend in the line has always been very evocative for me and, at the time leading up to that song, I guess I’d be here at night and it was just that image that played on my mind: the sensation of the train approaching, the huge machinery, the steep turn. Standing here feeling the drag of it.”

“Part of the puzzle of the song’s imagery is the interplay between the area’s natural beauty and its unnatural mechanical forces. Part of it is the sense of being lost within the roar of a train coming from nowhere, the big white light at night a kind of snipers’ sight.”

What it amounted to for him was a whole lot of sensations and hunches and apprehensions joined together with no clear answers or anything like that. Part of the puzzle of the song’s imagery is the interplay between the area’s natural beauty and its unnatural mechanical forces. Part of it is the sense of being lost within the roar of a train coming from nowhere, the big white light at night a kind of snipers’ sight.

“I remember thinking it was a super-feeling, like a hyper sort of feeling, the noise and the light, the screech, the wheels against the track, man against machine and being lost and sort of losing perspective,” he says.

The song is really beautiful and really slow. The guitar sounds are just incredible. Vince’s singing is better and more tender than on pretty much anything the band did and there’s a clever, loaded moment where everything drops out on the chorus – “…rush, rush, rush…” – except for Phillippa Nihill and her farwaway voice dripping with feeling, just her alone in the sound.

The song has a story too, as well as just impressions. Vincent remembers a crime that happened at the station – a girl was raped in front of onlookers, in the underpass that connects Rushall with the creek and the bike path. He read it in the local paper.

He conjoined that with what he already had – the heightened senses and the emotion and beauty that he got from the place – and that’s how the song can read: “…in the cesspool Bobby’s freezing and I’m staring at what he’s feeling/I watched the lines come out of his mouth…” Then it can rise from ideas of violence into ideas of peace and bliss and wonder: “…we ride together and it gets you so high/we ride together and it gets you so low/strung out on the way I’m feeling and I’m spaced out by the way I see it…”

There’s a third element too. The state of the band. Two big important records for the multinational had been and gone. The Cure tour, the hopes and dreams and expectations. The drummer left, fed up with the angst. Nihill was about to leave. The Lovers’ wanted a stripped back sound and they wanted to dictate the terms and they also wanted to get rid of the “system” they had unconsciously started using to write songs. They formed their own label and made Rushall Station. They were scared of what lay ahead but also energised and reflective on notions such as compromise. So all that kind of stuff filtered into the song as well.

“On the album a lot of the songs reflect a bitterness,” Vincent says. “Maybe not bitter but pissed off at things that happened, just trying to define and articulate it but trying to be objective and explain what happened without judging.”

He says he was never the kind of songwriter to be prescriptive or even descriptive. He didn’t want to make definitive statements about this or that: he was about impressions and abstract ideas and imagery. “I didn’t want to encapsulate anything total with that song. It was just a series of ideas.”

In the end what he tried to do more than anything was be very close to Rushall Station and all that it signified for him but also very far away. “Attach,” he says, “but detach.”

+

Rushall Station is now available through Rubber Records via iTunes.