Features
Patinka Cha Cha: 'It’s Just A Pop Band For Me'
By David Nichols
Patinka Cha Cha’s Natasha Rose is a VCA jazz student working in a pop means. She talks to DAVID NICHOLS about her seven-piece collective, her vocal insecurities and the drawbacks of being unique.
A creature of my own music writing training, I originally started writing this with some lazy old school comparisons between some other local groups and Patinka Cha Cha until I realised, you don’t need to do that kind of thing anymore: today’s reader is able to investigate the actual material about as quickly as s/he might spend time triangulating some putative soundalike. That said, PCC change their sound and attack frequently and the creation of recordings seem almost to be a part of the process of creating new material – jettisoning old junk they no longer like spurs them on to do more and better – and you need to reconnect frequently to know them. The new Patinka Cha Cha EP Planets comprises four songs, three of which are interconnected in some kind of undefined but essentially schematic and conceptual manner: it’s a suite.
“What we were trying to do,” says Natasha Rose, the group’s songwriter, guitarist and singer, “was show that they were related and that the tracks actually fit together. I guess that EP is an accurate representation of what was happening at that time – but I’m not thrilled with the songs anymore.”
This, one finds, is Natasha’s usual approach to her own work: a matter-of-fact dismissal bordering on distaste which covers a philosophy about the progressive imperative to creation. She knows enough now about her own modus operandi to admit that for her, “That’s always the case. You just document the specific point in the musical adventure.”
“I don’t think it sounds like jazz at all, there’s no swing, there’s no overly complex harmony. There’s very little improvisation.”
Natasha is a Victorian College of the Arts jazz student. Working in pop means (sorry, inadequate comparisons coming up: it’s a hard habit to break) that when she performs with PCC she is not a million miles away from Dean Richards, writer/guitar whiz 30 years ago for the group Equal Local, and it also means – or perhaps this just points to my inadequate understanding of new wave jazz rock a la no wave things like the Contortions – that PCC’s horn arrangements have that edgy cut ‘n’ thrust of Essential Logic. I don’t know if Natasha is aware of these things, and I wouldn’t be surprised either way, though I imagine she probably has an entire set of references I would not even recognise as things.
PCC only gets a part of the music she writes, and “I don’t try to write something jazz just because I’m at VCA. I did a little to start with. Then I realised I had to write something I had a connection with, not that someone else had a connection with. In different circumstances I do write differently – I put a lot more effort into what I write for other things. Patinka, it’s just a pop band for me. I don’t put that all that much energy into the arrangements, they come together in rehearsal.”
Certainly PCC gives you the impression of a bunch of people completely immersed in their possibilities and also pretty up on the idea that less is more (that takes some discipline in a group of six). Natasha is the only constant member of the band in its five-year history and while she has clearly always seen it as a place to collaborate, she has also run it. “I was only 16 at the time the band started and all I knew was that I wanted to be creating music, and I didn’t want to create something that was similar to what I was listening to – I wanted to create music that came from within myself. I didn’t really think about where that would go – whether it be bars or clubs. At that time we just wanted to play more intimate places as there were only two of us, me and my friend Martin [King]. The songs were long, instrumental and very ambient. Whereas now there’s seven of us and they’re pretty much just pop songs, so it’s a lot easier I guess.”
Like many other excellent groups, PCC combine people invited into the band for personality and for compatibility (and also, presumably, both). “Some people – Ruby [Green], she’s been my closest friend for the last 10 years. Then there are other members I’ve met through various friends and thought, “you’re a great person I’d love to play music with you”, and then there are people I’ve met at VCA and I’ve thought, “you’re a beautiful musician.” Some members haven’t really had much musical training and half of them have studied it quite intently. We kind of work off each other, pull each other back, and push each other up in the process of playing together.
“I generally have an idea in my head of what the whole song might sound like. But sometimes the horns will change their harmonies and Andrew Woodgate [the MPC player] usually writes his parts because I find it harder to write for electronic instruments that I don’t understand. He always comes up with these brilliant simple parts that fit with the music – I get excited to see what he might do.
“I have been trying to get people to have more input and getting people’s opinions but the bigger the band gets the harder it is to do that. I think we all see it as not quite a collaborative project, but definitely not a solo artist with a backing band. I guess it’s something in between. Like a lot of bands are.”
The first time I saw PCC play – at the Edinburgh Castle supporting royalchord – Natasha was simultaneously spruiking and denigrating the band’s first release. It seems to be something she can’t help doing. “There’s definitely lots of recordings of different stages of the band but I kind of hate some of them … and there’s lots of recordings of solo things I’ve done. But I don’t like any of them…
“Even now, looking back at the EP me and Martin did together when I was 16, two years ago I thought it was terrible – now I look back at it I feel happy I was able to do that at that age. The music I’m playing now is probably more accessible than the music I was playing when I was 16, and it’s usually the other way around – you start off trying to replicate things and then find your own sound. I was trying hard to not be anything. I didn’t want to have anything lacking sincerity and I didn’t want the sound to be preconceived, I just wanted to write songs.”
She wasn’t aware of writing songs with an audience in mind, she says, but, “I remember thinking, ‘No one’s going to like this.’ I can’t liken us to any bands in Melbourne we know. It makes me feel quite insecure about it. I have no idea how other people are perceiving the music. People will say it sounds like jazz – I don’t think it sounds like jazz at all, there’s no swing, there’s no overly complex harmony. There’s very little improvisation. I think I like it. I always like the stuff that’s most recent.
“Embarrassingly, most of the Patinka Cha Cha songs are love songs at the moment. It’s just something that I’ve found easy to communicate. I think it’s embarrassing because they’re all about the one person, it seems pretty narrow. How much can you get out of one person? I guess it depends on the person!
“Every song was written about the same person ... it seems obsessive. A friend of mine gave me a book of Ted Hughes’ poetry all about Sylvia Plath to make me feel better about it.”
“I can’t liken us to any bands in Melbourne we know. It makes me feel quite insecure about it.”
Comparisons with Hughes and Plath are surely a backhanded consolation, all things considered, but in any case Natasha is committed to finding new subjects: “I’ve got to think of a new theme! I think I’m entering a new stage of writing about non-love related things … I don’t know why I find it so hard to express that in songs. I guess loving a particular person is so personal and therefore you understand that so it’s easy to articulate that. I’m 21 and I have these thoughts and ideas but I don’t really have a clue about anything – it’s just me trying to understand the way people work and the world works.
“I sometimes write about other things, just little stories – especially when I’m writing for other singers [at VCA], I can’t give them a love song to sing, I feel uncomfortable about it, I’m sure it wouldn’t come across the same way if they didn’t believe what they were singing.”
By the same token she’s happy to write for others, she says, “because I’m not a singer, I’m a terrible singer. When I get to work with singers who know what they’re doing, the melodies change completely, I can write things I want to be heard on voice, because voice is one of my favourite instruments. I generally feel pretty embarrassed singing in front of trained singers.
“It’s weird because I can get up and play drums out of time, but if I sing out of tune I feel it’s a such personal imperfection I’m letting people hear – a flaw that’s so related to myself. I feel incredibly vulnerable. I think a lot of people do when they sing.
“I was too scared to sing until a few years ago, I wouldn’t even sing to myself, I wouldn’t let myself hear my voice. I was in a school choir when I was eight or nine and we had this thing where we went around and everyone had to sing one note. I was too scared to sing the one note – I just walked out of the room. I’m still like that. My first singing lesson the other week, I tried to sing and nothing came out.
“Again it comes down to me writing songs that are really personal to myself and I wanted to express that. That’s why I’ve been taking lessons, I want it to be less of a challenge, and it’ll help me to become comfortable with myself – as cheesy as that sounds. I’m not really one for turning away from things because they’re too hard.”
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