Ben Salter: ‘I’ve Gotten Better At Being Myself’

Ahead of his Lunchbox performance in Melbourne this Friday (July 29), Ben Salter talks to MATT SHEA about the protracted release of his debut solo LP ‘The Cat’, embracing change and discovering a likeminded Radiohead fan in the album’s producer, Drones frontman Gareth Liddiard. Photo by DANE BEESLEY.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] There are many different musical sides to Ben Salter. You have the nerd rock of Giants of Science laid next to the multi-layered serendipity of the Gin Club; the ramshackle charm of the Wilson Pickers juxtaposed with the organised chaos of the Young Liberals. It’s a small wonder, then, that there’s anything left of the Brisbane songsmith to apply to a solo project.

But The Cat has been a long time coming. Some elements of this debut date back to the late ’90s, Salter sitting patiently on his songs and waiting for the right opportunity to apply them to record. That opportunity turned out to be a gap in Gareth Liddiard’s schedule, the Drones frontman offering to produce The Cat at Havilah, his recording space deep within the Victorian Alps.

The two men decamped to Havilah, along with co-producer Robert F. Cranny, and invited a rotating roster of friends to stop by and act as session players. Salter wanted to reinvent these songs that he’d lived with for so long, and wouldn’t offer any guidelines or allow his musicians to hear any playbacks before laying down their takes. It was an approach he’d mastered over six quick fire albums with the Young Liberals.

Salter has a reputation for being one of the more decent gents on the Australian music scene, and so it proved when I got him on the phone. He’s easy to warm to, and isn’t afraid to reach a little deeper into his personality if it’s going to help explain the way he approaches his craft.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

Whereabouts are you, Ben?
I’m calling from my bedroom!

You’re in Brisbane, though?
Yeah I’m in Brisbane.

And you’re still based here, right?
Yep, yep.

It says in your bio that you get bored a lot. Is that the reason for having so many musical projects?
Yeah, I’ve got a really short attention span and I get really impatient really quickly. I love making music, so it’s a pretty easy equation for me.

This solo project. How long has it been in the pipeline for? How long have you been waiting to do this?
Well, I’ve been playing solo since before anything. Since before Giants Of Science and I’ve continued to do solo stuff. I recorded five or six songs in about ’98 or ’99 – that got put on the backburner when I was in Giants – and then the Gin Club kind of absorbed a lot of the songs that were solo-y songs. I was quite happy to do those projects but it got to the point where I thought, “No, I’m sick of pushing band members into places they don’t necessarily want to go and trying to push my ambitions on to them.”

But why right now?
The opportunity came up to do it with Gaz [Liddiard, of The Drones] and I was like, “That’s a really good opportunity and that’s someone I could trust.” Because I’m so bad: one minute I’ll love stuff and the next I’ll get really bored with it and not want to do it and put it on the backburner, which is why some of these songs are ten years old. I just thought it was too good an opportunity to pass up, working with Gareth.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Is there something that you can define as being particular about this group of songs that makes them right for this project? Why not take them to your other bands?
Not really. Some of them just wouldn’t fit with Giants or Gin Club. With Gin Club we’ve got a pretty broad definition of what fits and there’s a pretty wide range of stuff going on there; I’m sure any of these songs could have gone onto a Gin Club album. It was more about the treatment – I just wanted to have the final say about everything … It’s funny: songs like ‘The Coward’ and ‘The Mailbox Song’ are really old, and I’d never considered putting them on Gin Club albums, so there was obviously some part of me that went, “No, these are songs that I’ve got to save for my own thing. They’re not going to work anywhere else.” ‘I Am Not Ashamed’ was going to be a Gin Club song for a while but we couldn’t get it to work, so we re-jigged that. All of the others I wrote for myself, I guess.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Ben Salter - The Coward by Mess+Noise

I guess if these songs come from such a large span of years they must also come from a large span of influences.
Yeah, absolutely. The song structures and melodies aren’t particularly radical. I’ve just gotten better at being myself, which kind of sounds a bit silly [laughs], but better at using my own voice and better and getting more confident with my own speaking voice. The real changes and influences have come in the way I’ve treated the songs, and the way that we’ve approached the songs. But the melody and structure: it’s not like rocket science or anything – they’re still well within the bounds of pop-rock stuff. I wouldn’t have treated them the same way if I’d recorded them ten years ago. It would have been straight, and now I’m just interested in fucking things up a bit more.

With the Gin Club and the Giants at least – and probably the Young Liberals as well – there was always this feeling of bravado and camaraderie about those bands. How are you coping being on your own – are you comfortable with that?
I love performing just by myself. I mean, there’s going to be a band for this tour that I’m doing [see dates below], but I do a lot of shows by myself. I’m getting a lot more comfortable with it because you get bored and you have to really work to get people’s attention. With Gin Club and Giants you’re sort of playing for each other to an extent – you’re trying to impress one another – and if other people like it it’s a bonus. That’s true to an extent with the solo stuff, but I’m having to figure out ways to keep people’s attention and I’m getting better, as I said, at using my own voice. I do really enjoy it. The camaraderie thing is still there with the band that I’ve got at the moment. It’s not quite the same thing but I’ve got that with Gin Club and I don’t need to do that with the solo stuff.

The bio talks about the album covering a lot of musical terrain, but most people would tend to think of solo records covering a narrower field of musical terrain.
Yeah. Within Gin Club – even though we like to think that it’s totally open – there’s stuff that I wouldn’t expect them to do, and ideas that I don’t want to force on them, because it’s not my band. I’m kind of a ringleader, I guess, but at the end of the day it’s not just me that writes the songs. It’s everybody. So this was a chance to address my more out-there leanings, and I’ve got fairly eclectic music taste, I’d like to think.

When you guys were recording in the northeast of Victoria, were there records in particular you were listening to while making the album that fed into it a bit?
There was lots of stuff that fed into it before we went to record. Because we did pre-production up at Prior Park [in central Queensland] where the Gin Club record … We went up and threw around all of these ideas, sat around the fire and talked about records and played records. The main stuff for me that I was really getting into was Talk Talk, and then I really love Radiohead as well. When we were mixing the album I found out that Gareth was a closet Radiohead fan. We got King Of Limbs while we were doing the mixing and we were just listening to that heaps and just going, “Wow!”

I’m not sure I knew there was such a thing as a closet Radiohead fan.
Well, I just assumed. Gareth is very opinionated with his taste and he’s got very eclectic taste … I was like, “Do you like Radiohead?!” and he was like, “Yeah!” I said, “I thought you hated them,” and he was saying, “I thought you hated them!” [Laughs] Scott Walker as well – I was listening to him a lot. I was just getting into weird stuff and a lot of classical stuff, not that there’s much sign of that on the album. Lot’s of jazz, and just wanting the treatment to be different was the main key. There’s almost no hi-hat on the whole album; that was one of the first things Gareth suggested: “Fuck off the hi-hat because no one wants to hear that. It just takes away the whole rock feel.” But yeah, the weirdness is really in the treatment and not so much the arrangements.

You mention jazz. You’ve got a whole bunch of guests on the record, but perhaps the most interesting is [jazz saxophonist] Julien Wilson. How did you come to work with him?
Well, in the six months leading up to recording I was thinking a lot about the album, once I knew that Gareth was onboard. I was like, “Right. What am I gonna do? It’s got to be better than everyone else.” I just fret about this shit so much. It’s got to be amazing!

Like, “Gareth made a solo record last year. I’ve gotta better that!”
Yeah, yeah. It’s ridiculous. I get very competitive. I guess that’s a good thing. You want it to be good and you want to impress people. Most of all, I want to impress myself. I want it to be something that I’ll be happy with. So I was playing guitar in Andrew Morris’ band for one tour, and we went next door after we played at the Northcote Social Club [in Melbourne] to that 303 place – the jazz club – and there was this trio playing this amazing stuff. I was really impressed and I was pretty pissed at the time as well. Talk Talk have lots of sax and horns and all sorts of amazing stuff, and I’d watched that Scott Walker documentary [Scott Walker: 30 Century Man] that has all of that avant-garde sax and realised that it doesn’t have to be this kind of cliched thing – the saxophone is a pretty amazing instrument. I didn’t really know who he was and he gave me an email address and a number and three or four months later I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll ring him and see,” and he said, “Sure.”

He came up to the studio and I didn’t really know what to expect. I did the whole thing where I said, “Right. You don’t get to hear the songs. I’ll just tell you the chords, and don’t ask me whether you’re doing the right thing because I’m not gonna tell you. I just want your first reactions to the music.” And he was just amazing.

“When we were mixing the album I found out that Gareth was a closet Radiohead fan. We got ‘King Of Limbs’ while we were doing the mixing and we were just listening to that heaps and just going, ‘Wow!’”

You made an interesting comment last year in an interview with M+N about not being able to listen back to your music out of embarrassment, except for the Young Liberals stuff. What about with this solo material?
Well, what I was trying to get was some of that spontaneity that makes it a joy to listen to every time, and that’s what happens with the Young Liberals. Mostly when you record stuff you have to be either really pissed or take five or six years to get some distance and some perspective. With the Young Liberals, because we would write and record the songs within 24 hours you don’t get a chance to get sick of the songs. Sometimes when I listen to the Young Liberals I think, “This is awesome! I love it.” I never get sick of it.

I wanted to try and get that happening with the solo album, but all of the songs were set in stone and some of them were 10 years old. I was trying to find ways of making myself love the songs again, so getting Tom [Lyncolgn, The Nation Blue/Harmony] and Joel [Silbersher, Hoss/GOD] and getting Julien and Peter [Novotnik] was the way of doing that. I still reached a point with the mixing where I was just like, “I’ve just got no idea, Gaz. I don’t know anymore. I think it’s good. I’m pretty sure it’s good. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made all these decisions up until now.” … But I am enjoying listening to this now. It’s still difficult, it’s not ideal. I mean, I really would like to record a solo album in the same fashion as the Young Liberals. It’s a pretty difficult thing to do in terms of backing yourself, but I think it gives you a lot more pleasure in the long run. But I’m really proud of the album – I’m really, really proud of the way it’s turned out.

Rob Cranny and Gareth Liddiard helped with production. Were they working on it at the same time as each other?
When we were recording they were. Robert had a very clear idea. He was a big fan of the songs. Bob and I love very similar things, like song suites and [recording company] Elephant 6 bands, where you just have all of these songs that segue into each other. He and Gaz were both of the attitude that we needed to fuck with the process. But really, they were both there to say, “Shut up and do it.” Or I’d say, “Just say yes or no when I play you this.” They’d both have an opinion, and any more than two opinions and you’re starting to get into shaky territory. They might agree, they might disagree, but at least I had a compass.

What do you think, Ben? Can we expect more solo albums from you in the future?
Absolutely. As I said, we got to a point with the Gin Club where I was imposing my ideas about what I wanted the band to be on them – not musically, but in terms of career side of things. I’m the Gin Club’s biggest fan; I absolutely love the band. I they’re one of the most underrated bands in Australia and I think the album Junk is just stunning. ... [But] definitely more solo stuff; that’s how I see myself. I want to travel more and be self-sufficient so being a solo artist just makes so much more sense. I can go overseas and I can play, and I’m figuring out ways of keeping the solo thing going.

Now, you’ve got some live dates lined up, is that right?
I’ve got a whole bunch of dates with [The Cat Empire’s] Felix Riebl – they’re all the way through August – and then my own solo dates are just getting finalised at the moment, which will be throughout September.

Looking beyond the middle of the year, what are the plans?
I’ll do this tour and then another Gin Club tour for Christmas, because we had such a good time on the last one and didn’t lose too much money. And then next year I have to get out of Brisbane. I’m taking Brisbane for granted and I think maybe Brisbane’s taking me for granted. I mean, I love it here, I absolutely love it, but I’ve got to move to Melbourne for six months or I’ve got to go overseas for six months. I’ve got to do something because I need a change.

You’ve got to challenge yourself.
Absolutely. It’s like that bit in Dune where Paul Atreides and his dad are about to set off to the planet and his dad says, “Without change something sleeps inside of us, and seldom awakens.” It’s true.

That was a particularly big change they were making, though!
Going to Dune? [Laughs] Yeah. Moving to Melbourne’s perhaps not quite the same. It’s true, though, and it’s a great attitude to have. Change for the sake of it is a good thing. I’m still pretty conservative in a lot of ways but I think especially if you’re an artist it’s a good thing to do. You need to have change – you’ve just got to get that different perspective. So hopefully I’ll go overseas for a solo tour next year and then Melbourne for a while, and we’ll see how we go.

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‘The Cat’ is out August 5. Ben Salter plays the M+N Lunchbox this Friday (July 29), 1pm. Entry is free. More details here.

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BEN SALTER AUGUST TOUR:

Fri, August 5 – Oxford Arts Factory, Sydney, NSW
Sat, August 6 – The Toff In Town, Melbourne, VIC
Sun, August 7 – The Toff in Town, Melbourne, VIC
Wed, August 24 – Byron Bay Theatre, Byron Bay, NSW
Thurs, August 25 – The Old Museum, Brisbane, QLD
Fri, August 26 – The Promethean, Adelaide, SA
Sat, August 27 – Fly By Night, Fremantle, WA