Features
Jumpin’ In The Night #5: Some Sobering Thoughts
By Andrew Stafford
Do Australian artists have a use-by date, asks ANDREW STAFFORD while listening to the latest unheralded classic by Spencer P Jones. Photo by ROBERT CARBONE.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] One of my favourite Australian records of the past two decades is Rumour of Death, Spencer P Jones’ solo debut from 1994. It’s long out of print, which is a travesty, and even worse than that, it’s not likely to be reissued any time soon either; the best efforts of Spanish label Bang! notwithstanding – the rights being owned by Polydor, in those terrible words, “in perpetuity”.
Spencer took a while to follow the album up, filling the time in between with a brief return to the Beasts of Bourbon (for the much maligned album Gone, which Jones still defends) and several years playing guitar for Paul Kelly. Jones, as Clinton Walker once noted, had never been a particularly prolific songwriter – even his albums with The Johnnys are studded with covers, and featured many more tunes by the inimitable Rod Radalj – but still, there were gems strewn across a growing back catalogue.
Listening to Jones’ latest album, the wonderfully titled Sobering Thoughts, I’m starting to wonder if Jones is even capable of writing a bad song. Indeed, if you counted 2010 as the last year of the noughties (Sobering Thoughts crept out without any fanfare towards the end of last year) then you could make a strong case that, for sheer quality of output, Spencer P Jones was the Australian artist of that decade.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Jones blossomed, releasing a string of simply outstanding albums: The Last Gasp, The Lost Anxiety Tapes, Fait Accompli, Fugitive Songs and the odds ‘n’ sods collection, Immolations and Ameliorations, which might arguably be the best of the lot. There was also, of course, yet another return to the Beasts, and Jones’ songs (in the absence of Kim Salmon) formed the backbone of their comeback record Little Animals.
“I did the work,” Spencer told me once, in an interview I conducted with him upon the release of Fugitive Songs. It was something he learned from Paul Kelly; that songs don’t just land in your lap, or at least not as often as you wish they would. Songwriting is a craft. Spencer Jones is a craftsman from the old school.
Like Kelly, Don Walker (who has become an ardent supporter), Ian Rilen and Bon Scott, Jones’ songs are always stories full of wit, pathos, nerve and marvellous rough-and-tumble poetry. You get it in the first lines of Sobering Thoughts: “Poor me, I’ve got troubles/Bigger troubles by the hour/In my bouquet of troubles/You are just another flower.”
Jones has indeed had no shortage of troubles to call on in the last few years. There has been a long struggle with heroin, a subject he has been candid about – on a New Year’s Eve gig here in Brisbane, he addressed the subject at length before introducing a new, unrecorded song, ‘Monkey Has Gone’ – and a marriage breakup. Sobering Thoughts addresses both with unflinching honesty, summed up in a couple of lines from ‘Trust’: “The life I pursued impacted on you/I was like garbage back then.” The melody – set to one of those guitar riffs that seems to have been around forever – spirals appropriately downwards.
“Jones’ songs are always stories full of wit, pathos, nerve and marvellous rough-and-tumble poetry.”
In a just world, a song like ‘Trust’, or the instantly memorable ‘Have Some Faith’, would be hit singles. These are classic three to four-minute pop songs: they deploy all the old virtues of economy, style and choruses that don’t quit. Most of all, it’s 100 percent real. And maybe that’s the problem; but that’s an old complaint in the music business, which has faced accusations of shallowness and vapidity as long as it’s existed.
I’m happy to give Sobering Thoughts some sort of plug though, even if it means preaching to the converted on this website, because it’s so ridiculously under the radar that I didn’t realise it was out myself until 2010 was almost over. You can file Spencer P Jones under the many Australian artists who had their best days in the 1980s (The Johnnys were, at the time, close to the hardest working bands in the business) who now struggle for airplay and recognition.
What’s particularly sad about it is that Jones is struggling for that recognition when he’s producing the best work of his career. Overseas, age hasn’t hurt the profiles or sales of Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young, all of whom have enjoyed mid- to late-career revivals at various times. What makes Australia different in this regard? Paul Kelly is the exception; almost everyone else of a certain age is dead in the water.
I can still listen to Rumour of Death as if it was recorded yesterday, over 15 years after it was recorded. If there were ever any such rumours, they appear to have been greatly exaggerated. I’m sure I’ll still be listening to Sobering Thoughts in another 20.
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