HTRK: Slow Tempos, Frustrated Desires

HTRK are one of the most brilliantly frustrating, exceptionally defective noise acts you’re likely to meet, writes STEPH KRETOWICZ.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] It’s the Monday of a bank holiday in East London and HTRK’s Jonnine Standish is locked in her flat. Drolly explaining the situation through the intercom over the noise of a busy main road, she explains that if husband Conrad (from The Devastations) can’t make it home, she’ll need to talk me through opening the front door from outside. After some issues with another door, three flights of carpeted stairs and an ingenious residential postal system where everyone’s private mail is laid out on their allocated step, I take the key from under the door and play around with the lock until it opens. I’m greeted by Standish, wine glass in hand and crooked grin applied: “That’s never happened before.”

The flat is an artists hideaway with old furniture, a balcony looking out over surrounding rooftops, an ash tray and a book on Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on top of an old copy of The Wire. Standish is evidently enjoying her day off with red wine, while bandmate Nigel Yang is on his way with some nibbles.

Just the week before, I’d seen HTRK play one of a few London shows ahead of the release of their second album Work (work, work) in a basement bar literally steps away from Standish’s front door. Agreeing that it was all rather convenient, she shows me a tower of sound equipment still stacked against the wall in the bathroom.

It’s been about three years since HTRK moved from their base in Berlin, four since leaving Melbourne and one-and-a-half since core member Sean Stewart tragically took his own life. They count the late Rowland S Howard, not only as the producer of their first album Marry Me Tonight (2009), but a close personal friend, and admit that London – in all its chaotic, grimy glory – is still a place they’re happy to call home.

Marry Me Tonight was quite a protracted release. What keeps happening?
Nigel: It’s the HTRK curse.

Jonnine: Yeah, it’s a good one.

Nigel: Just a rights dispute. We only finished production in 2010 for Work (work, work), so that’s actually quite quick.

Jonnine: It’s amazing because the last one took three years to come out. We used to describe it as being three years pregnant. It was the most awful feeling and quite an anti-climax because it had been leaked for three years when it came out. You feel like there’ll be some “high-five” but it was just kind of a fizzle.

That’s almost like HTRK musically, isn’t it?
Jonnine: Pretty much. Yeah there’s no “high five” moment in the music. It is what we’re asking for, so perhaps we deserve it.

How did you get to work with Rowland S Howard? Did you solicit him?
Jonnine: He just saw us play with Magic Dirt one night. Saw a couple of songs. He said to me that he’d given up on Australian music and then he saw us and thought we were hilarious and great. He was telling me not to give up on Australian music because at any time you just don’t know when it’s going to happen, that you’ll see something you really like.

Nigel: Yeah that was pretty exciting when he approached us. People generally approach us first.

Jonnine: We’re not very good at networking. In fact it’s probably where we need to improve.

Nigel: Or as Americans would say “reaching out”. After we go to America I think we’re going to have some pretty good reaching out skills.

Jonnine: Yeah, we’re calling it the “American Media Tour”. We’ve always shied away from that sort of stuff and now we’ve thought, ‘what if we just embrace it for four months?’ See what happens. We might get a couple of yachts out of it.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] HTRK - Eat Yr Hrt by Mistletone

The older I get the more I find it hard to relate to teenage angst. What compelled you to recreate that emotional turmoil of adolescence in Marry Me Tonight? Looking from outside of those formative years, it seems so immaterial to me now.
Jonnine: I think that once you forget those feelings entirely, it’s over for you. I don’t think that you need to relive those experiences, in any way. But it’s very important to try to tap into that passion for anything you do in your life, on a sexual level as well. It’s too easy to forget and then you’re dead.

Nigel: When I was 15, music had never been so important to me. It just gets you through life so if we can make tunes that can help…

Jonnine: Maybe we just appreciated those artists. I‘ve heard this quote before that music doesn’t change your life but helps you through it. At the age group when your parents are shitting you and you really turn to music to help you through, if that’s all we can achieve then that’s just the best thing in the world.

I guess I’ve always been torn between wondering whether it helps or exacerbates the problem.
Nigel: Yeah, I don’t know whether we’re helping these people.

Jonnine: [Laughs] Yeah, I don’t know whether we’re helping them at all. God, what a contradiction, I like contradictions. But we’re not putting that much thought into it. We’re not trying to target teenagers in any way and we never have. That might be why we appeal to them because they can smell you out. If you try to advertise to them, they won’t feel it. It’s just something within us – myself, Nigel and Sean. Rowland had it too. That feeling, that essence is very important but we haven’t tried to analyse it too much.

Nigel: As an adult, I feel the music that you listen to gets more and more intellectual. It just gets too clever and it doesn’t bring you the same pleasures as when you weren’t so critical. I don’t listen to any bands because none of them make music that makes me just feel, as opposed to having to analyse what they’re doing. So I guess, in a way, we’re trying to provide no-brainer tunes.

That reminds me of something that's been written about you a lot. That you ran away from Australia because of the garage revival of the time.
Nigel: That’s Chinese whispers.

Jonnine: We needed more of a story. Why does any Australian leave? It’s about what’s over the fence. It’s not like we were the first people to not like that music. No one likes it, surely. It’s the worst music in the world. I think what was really happening was we played a lot of shows in Melbourne at the time. We’d play a show, our 10 mates would come along, maybe 10 fans, and then everyone else would say that we’re too loud. You do that 60 times and eventually you say, “OK, well let’s go to Berlin.”

Nigel: We were getting called pretentious a lot.

Jonnine: Wankers. [Laughs] We weren’t called wankers, really. We were called pretentious, which we feel was a good thing because we weren’t actually rebelling against Jet or The Vines and all that sort of shit. We were rebelling against the everyday friendliness and banter of the Australian music scene. It was a couple of jokes between songs, t-shirts, boys and beer. There was no concept that you could take this into escapism. By being pretentious you could be otherworldly. No one was picking up on that and we thought we’d go to Europe where you’d see it more in film and things like that.

It could be difficult when you’re in a scene that’s really friendly. You can’t really be discerning because people are more concerned with having their mates on their line up, rather than focussing on the art in a way.
Jonnine: There’s nothing more fun than playing with your friends and having a good night and we used to do that. But that was another draw card of going overseas because we didn’t really know anyone and we could start again.

Have you developed a decent following in London?
Jonnine: Yeah. It’s also been kind of tough sometimes, not being English. They’re really into hyping their own here, so we’ve found it hard as Australians to fit into the scene.

Nigel: We’ve got a really mixed crowd that we really like. A lot of punks, more anarchist punks…

Jonnine: We’ve got a lot of anarchists. They don’t have to be that hardcore, it’s just more of a subtle anarchism. [Laughs]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

Was Sean keen on London as well?
Jonnine: He didn’t like London at all. I don’t blame him. I was really hoping that he would fall in love with it because it takes a long time for some people. I had really high hopes for him, but Sean is such a romantic and there’s not so much romance in London at all. There’s the glamour and the grime but not much romance. Even the way it looks, the food. Everything is built because it works, not because there’s beauty in it. I think it was going to take Sean a lot longer.

You say that Sean was a romantic and your lyrics are quite without romance, or “without love”.
JS: I think they’re romantic.

How can you be romantic without love?
JS: Oh god, this is a really long conversation. I think unrequited love is without love. Fascination interests me more than actually having the prize, so that’s where desire comes in. When I say these songs are not about love, they’re about trying to get love but you’re never quite there, which I find interesting.

Like foreplay.
Jonnine: Yeah, all of our recordings are like that. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to get it but you kind of leave it up to the mind to decide.

That makes for a good angle on HTRK as a whole: protracted releases, slow tempos, frustrated desires...
Jonnine: Yeah, there’s a lot of patience involved, for sure [laughs].

Do you get bored?
Nigel: We never get bored.

Jonnine: Not playing the songs because they’re slow. Not as a singer anyway. I don’t know about you guys.

Nigel: The songs are written in such a way that you would never get bored of them. The only thing that could make you bored of playing a song is when you have too many changes and you have to know when the rest of the band is changing to the chorus, stuff like that. That’s when songs get really tiresome to play. Our songs are different every time; we just draw them out and mess with them so it’s never boring.

Jonnine: We were really surprised at how we could probably play ‘HA’ [from Marry Me Tonight] for 30 years. Well, maybe a couple of years ago we were like, “Oh my God, if we have to play ‘HA’ one more time”, but still, we played it for six years.

Have you started working on new material?
Nigel: Not really, we’ve been too busy.

Jonnine: I’ve started writing lyrics actually.

Nigel: We’ve got ideas.

Jonnine: I don’t have any melodies, just lots and lots and lots of words.

Nigel: When we’re writing or recording it’s a total bubble and we don’t take in any external influence whatsoever. So when the album’s finished this is a time to ingest ideas, process them and come up with something.

Jonnine: It’s also really important – this is another idea of Sean’s that is important to me – when we finished Marry Me Tonight and we moved to Berlin, me and Nigel wanted to start writing straight away and Sean was like, “What are we going to write about? We have to live.” That’s always stuck with me. I think with this routine that band’s get into, which is, “Write, release album, write, release album”, each album gets worse because there’s no living in between. If I’m writing lyrics I don’t want to go back and cover old ground.

Nigel: You want new feelings, thoughts and sensations to come through.

Jonnine: I’m going to try to put myself into situations good and bad for the next six months and not think about anything but life. Then we’ll get back together, after this album is a memory.

Do you ever feel uncomfortable drawing from your own life?
Jonnine: No. I try no to be too earnest and be a little detached from it. I never feel uncomfortable but I’m aware that I have to keep myself interested. I also know what it’s like to keep a diary, then look back on it, really cringe and want to burn it. So I’m really aware of not making these songs too much like a diary entry that I’ll want to burn in a year’s time.

“We needed more of a story. Why does any Australian leave? It’s about what’s over the fence.”

You’ve said that life gets in the way of your output, what do you do aside from music?
Nigel [looking at Jonnine]: I don’t know whether we should go there.

Jonnine: I know you find it really interesting what musicians do in the day and that’s all you want to read, you really do. You don’t actually care about the music. It’s more like, “How do you do this?” but Nigel has it pretty easy where he does a bit of music teaching here and there but me and Sean have embarrassingly corporate jobs. That’s certainly leaked into the concept of the album; how much work it is to be in a band. That’s the literal meaning but it’s actually not about that so much. It’s more about the body and the damage you do to your body working so hard, not just the mind. Working a day job, nine to five, is just really damaging and if I ruled the world no one would have to do anything so ridiculous. That’s the statement of the album. It’s just wrong, it’s really wrong. [Laughs]

So the title is ‘Work’ in your corporate job and then ‘work, work’ on your album, in brackets.
Jonnine: Yeah, or the other way around, really. Everything really ties into three. There’s Work (work, work). Then there’s “relationships”, “band” and “day job” and everything is starting to really leak in this album. You can hear it in the sounds and you can hear it in the layers of the vocals. The three separate lives are really becoming one. You try as a human to keep things on separate shelves so you can organise yourself but that’s the thing about being in a band. Your relationship is number one but it ends up being number three and it gets out of order, it’s really hard.

Do you ever feel like working?
Jonnine: I know where you’re going with this, “How would things get done?”

There’s that but you might hate people that do it…
Jonnine: I don’t hate them at all. I’m one of them.

Nigel: Most people need to work and like it.

Jonnine: Yeah, I need to work. There’s more to this. Not working in Berlin nine to five, I became a mess. So I have to do this thing that I hate to stay alive. It’s a very complex thing, routine. Without routine I probably wouldn’t get out of bed but I hate routine so … I don’t know. I didn’t invent humans. I don’t get it.

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‘Work (work, work)’ is out now through Mistletone.

HTRK AUSTRALIAN TOUR:

Saturday, November 19
RAOBGAB, Melbourne, VIC
w/Lost Animal + New War + Free Choice Duo

Wednesday, November 23
Venue TBA, Newcastle, NSW

Thursday, November 24
Goodgod Small Club, Sydney, NSW
w/Lost Animal

Friday, November 25
St Michael’s Uniting Church, Melbourne, VIC
w/Beaches + The Orbweavers + Montero + Wintercoats

Saturday, November 26
The Bridge Club, Brisbane, QLD
w/Lakes + Secret Birds + Nite Fields