Storytellers: Sleepy Township

Mia Schoen from the ever-elusive Sleepy Township talks to RENÉ SCHAEFER about the origins of ‘Westgate Bridge’, a song about walking around, climbing over mounds and lying in the long grass in Melbourne’s industrial inner-west.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Westgate Bridge’

Formed in Perth in 1994, Sleepy Township were a unique band in that they brought together four songwriters and instrumentalists with distinctive individual styles. Within the framework of indie pop, Sleepy Township forged a strong group identity based on skewed melodies, a robust rhythm section, and above all the sense that they were people who loved creating and playing together.

Having no dominant frontperson was one of their great charms. All four members would take turns at the microphone. Founding members Mia Schoen and Guy Blackman alternated on guitar and electric organ, while Chris Gorman joined the small genepool of singing drummers. Bass player Alison Bolger took a little while longer to bring her songs to the band, but when she did, she quickly embraced this new role.

After a move to Melbourne in 1995, Sleepy Township became a fixture on the city’s live circuit, releasing two full-length albums – Set Sail (1998) and Deep Water (2001) – and a compilation of early recordings, All These Records (2002). Since breaking up in 2002, all members have been active as writers and performers in other groups that either co-existed during Sleepy Township’s lifetime or were formed shortly after their demise. Guy Blackman is a solo artist, a member of Minimum Chips and runs the successful Chapter Music record label. Alison Bolger is active in long-running trio Panel Of Judges and psych-rock quintet Beaches, while Chris Gorman joined Mia Schoen in New Estate.

Choosing to focus on one song by this eclectic group was tricky. As Schoen explains below, the majority of songs originated with one or the other individual writer, who would present it to the band to interpret it and contribute parts. Because of this methodology it would have been impossible to pick one song to accurately represent Sleepy Township’s entire output.

Instead, I chose to talk to Schoen about her tune ‘Westgate Bridge’, because it remains a personal favourite. I had always been intrigued by its subject matter and the way in which its lyric hints at a narrative, yet remains impressionistic and abbreviated in a highly personal shorthand. I was also interested in how the song relates to her practice as a visual artist. Schoen is an acclaimed painter of urban and suburban architectural landscapes and these themes obviously resonate with the subject matter of this song, as they do with the cover of the album Set Sail, on which it appeared:

Plastic bags, barbed-wire fence
Breaking and snapping bones
Sounds like foot-falls in long dry grass
It's the march of the gnomes
You were lying perpendicular to me
And we made a T in the sun
You were slightly stoned
You were getting sunburnt
We walked, we examined the debris as we roamed
And the trains passed all the time and I looked very deep in your eyes
I still can't work out what colour they are
It’s a grey green blue black mystery
It’s a long stretch of cement with no horizon
Forty thousand tonnes of concrete that just hang rhetorically
A secret passageway you shouldn't enter
A secret passageway you shouldn't enter

Mia Schoen on ‘Westgate Bridge’

My partner David Nichols [Huon, The Cannanes] helped me in a big way to write ‘Westgate Bridge’. He came up with the first couple of lines. We had been going out for about a year, but this was the first song we ever collaborated on. We had just been to Yarraville, because David had a post office box there, and we spent a couple of hours walking around underneath the Westgate Bridge. It’s this industrial area, overgrown with weeds, and there is rubbish everywhere. It has a really spooky atmosphere.

We were sitting around at home a little later and David suggested we write a song together. I was fumbling around on the guitar and came up with the tune. We were talking about the Westgate Bridge experience and the desolate feeling places like that have. We thought about all the people who died when part of the bridge collapsed during its construction. The structure is so vast, with huge concrete poles. You look up from below and the cars are really far above. As a place, it’s got a very special quality about it.

Dave came up with the lines, “Plastic bags, barbed-wire fence/Breaking and snapping bones”, and I took it from there. At the time, I had just smoked a joint, and that’s where the line, “You were slightly stoned”, came from. It just seemed to fit with the rest of the song. I don’t remember where, “A secret passageway you shouldn’t enter”, came into it. I didn’t have a specific meaning in mind, but really liked the feeling it evoked. I don’t really think of the bridge as a metaphor for anything. The song is quite literal. It’s about the experience of the day – walking around, thinking about the bridge and kicking around rubbish, climbing over mounds and lying in the long grass. The meaning of any song is subjective. Ultimately, people take from a song what they want. If it makes you feel something, it is because of what is already inside you.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

I was painting a lot of urban scenes back when I wrote ‘Westgate Bridge’. I hadn’t moved on to my suburban “new estates” theme yet. My painting subjects were quiet buildings and deserted industrial lots. I was interested in those kinds of locations because I used to spend a lot of time in industrial areas when I was growing up in Perth. I love those non-people spaces of vast blank walls and concrete.

I saw something similar in the four Victorian terrace houses I painted for the album cover. Something about that scene was very still and quiet. I took a reference photo for the painting when I was walking home from a party at sunrise and there was nobody else around. I liked the way the light was falling on those houses and the way the corner house sits there like a ship adrift in a sea of tarmac, with its own world contained within.

I’m not sure how my paintings and music relate to each other. The songs are just what they are when they come out. Maybe that’s because of a lack of [musical] training I have, compared to painting. Tunes usually just come to me. I literally pull them out of the air. It’s not something I “craft”, in a sense. With paintings, I have a much more definite idea of how I want them to look and how I want them to be perceived. As far as subjects go, I guess they are similar in that I’ll be walking around and observe something that attracts my attention. That might be because of the light, or the way a building and a road relate to each other; a combination of things coming together at the same time.

I still really love ‘Westgate Bridge’. I enjoy singing the chorus. It’s really quite simple, but the chorus has got a lot of power. I almost do a yodel. Simplicity is something I often try to use in songs; it can just be one chord like an A major or E major. Every song I write informs the ones that follow. It’s a way of learning what can be effective. In all my years of writing music and playing in bands, I’ve gotten to know my craft and how to use it to best effect.

A footnote…

Sleepy Township will always have a special place in my heart because of the different personalities involved. I love the raggedy nature of what we did. In our 10 years together we built up a great working relationship. The band never really broke up, but circumstances prevented us from playing together. Alison [Bolger] and Guy [Blackman] were moving overseas, so it just seemed like a natural end to an era.

Life moves on and we’ve all got other projects going on now, so it makes it a lot harder to get together. Guy instigates the occasional reunion show because he has always had more of an organisational role in Sleepy Township, willingly or not. We’ve often talked about writing or recording new songs, but at this stage that’s all it is - talk.

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