Don Walker: Painting The Picture

“This is the longest conversation about dancing I’ve ever had,” Don Walker tells DOUG WALLEN. After he gets that out of the way, the legendary songwriter opens up about his first solo album in seven years.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Get ready to not be surprised whatsoever: Don Walker chooses his words carefully.

We’d expect no less of one of this country’s most valued songwriters, a man who only feels that he’s accumulated enough songs worthy of a solo album about once a decade. Throughout our interview for the third and latest of those, Hully Gully, Walker hesitates thoughtfully before nearly every answer. He rephrases his meaning in one instance and corrects his word choice in another; seldom does he dash off a response without first applying that internal level of quality control.

And so it goes with Hully Gully, a booze-soaked clutch of character studies that are painstakingly rendered. Recorded straight to 24-track tape with minimal overdubs, his backing band The Suave Fucks behind him, Walker brings his career-defining observational wisdom to songs recalling both the glory days of Sun Records and a waning afternoon spent gazing into a barroom mirror.

With that pinched, lived-in drawl and an unmistakeable wit that can only be described as – to borrow a phrase he uses below in another context – ‘bone dry’, Walker is the rare interview subject for which you want to shrug off the confines of your allotted phone time and hang around his regular haunt until he wanders in, then pull up the next chair, buy him a drink and keep him talking into the wee hours.

First, I was curious about the album title and the song of the same name. Was that derived from the dance, which seems to be alluded to in the song?
Yes it is. I’m surprised that you would know about that.

[Laughs] I didn’t, but we posted something about the album and one of the commenters said it was the name of a dance.
Yes, there was a certain period of a year or two – in rural areas, where I was – as it became the fashion throughout the world … not to dance holding the other person but to do what they called a “modern” [Laughs] in the dancehalls where I was, where somebody would play a sort of a rural version of rock ‘n’ roll and you would stand back and just do some kind of freeform thing. This was pretty challenging in cultures that are, y’know, not physically expressive.

So this dance came along that allowed people to do something without holding onto somebody else. Which was called The Hully Gully. It’s basically one foot forward, one hand on the other bicep and doing this simple thing. Then you switch feet after a couple of minutes, after it gets boring. It actually survived right up into the ’70s, when the skinheads used to do it.

It almost sounds like a precursor to The Nutbush.
Nutbush was a whole lot more complicated. But yeah, Nutbush really served the same cultural function. A set of steps that people could line up and do, and you didn’t even need a partner. And most of the places I played in the ’70s, it would be a line of girls doing The Nutbush. And then a little while later came line-dancing. This is the longest conversation about dancing I’ve ever had.

[Laughs] That’s good! So what got you thinking about The Hully Gully again?
I don’t know … [Hesitates and thinks it over] I’d be lying if I say I thought about it. [Laughs] I’d be tryin’ to make up something now. And of course, in this particular song, it’s euphemistic as well.

So it just came out of the process, without labouring or being premeditated?
Yes. I just wanted to write a particularly kind of bone-dry, minimal … I wanted to write a bonehead song. And I think it’s a particularly fine piece of craftsmanship to those terms of reference.

“Last year I recorded for one day. I recorded one day in 2010. I didn’t record between 2006 and 2010.”

Like your previous solo album, this came together over about a decade. What is the benefit of doing it that way? Or is that just the only way it can happen?
The only benefit is, I think, I make better albums than if I went into a studio for six weeks with a few scraps of ideas and tried to make one quickly. I think the albums that I make are very few and far between – this is only the third solo album – so it’s drawn from a day here and day there’s recording over 10 years.

And it’s not only the pick of 10 years of recording but, of those picks, it’s a bunch of songs that hang together. So the only advantage is, for me, the result is better.

So are there a lot of songs that are left behind along the way?
Most definitely. Not only songs but recordings. I don’t record that often. Last year I recorded for one day, and four songs came out of that. The time before that I recorded was one day in 2010. I didn’t record between 2006 and 2010. And I spent two days recording in 2006. That’s the way it works.

But in the time in between those recordings, a lot of work and evolution goes on, both in me coming up with new songs and myself and the band getting to the essence of those songs.

What happens to those songs that don’t make it? And the recordings?
Well, nothing. Unless at some stage down the line, maybe if I’m doing another album in six or eight years, I find that one of those recordings fits into what I’m doing then. For example, there’s a song on this album called ‘Angry Women’ that was recorded in 2001. Twelve years ago. I’ve put out recordings in that time [including 2006’s Cutting Back] that it just didn’t fit with.

How long have you been playing with this backing band?
The Suave Fucks date back to the late ’90s, but this present line-up is about five years old, as people dropped out and new people came in every few years along the way. This present line-up has been the same five guys [Glen Hannah, Roy Payne, Garrett Costigan, Michael Vidale and Hamish Stuart] for about five years.

“I don’t think what I do is country. It sounds a bit like that because country artists prize minimal arrangements, and I do too.”

Certain songs on the record have more of a country feel than the others, like ‘Lucky’ and ‘Fishing’ and even the title track a bit. Are you ever tempted to go completely in that direction, and make a quote-unquote ‘country record’?
I think ‘Lucky’ is a … I don’t think it’s a country song. I think it’s a Frank Sinatra-type song. ‘Fishing’ … yeah, that’s a country song. But there’s not many of them, on the album. And I don’t think what I do is country. It sounds a little bit like that because country artists and musicians prize minimalism and minimal arrangements, and I do too. So there’s the connection.

And the focus on lyrics and a story is big in country, compared to rock ‘n’ roll.
The country guys are certainly better at it.

‘Pool’ shows up again at the end as more of a stark piano thing. Is there a story behind revisiting that song?
Well, ‘Pool’ was a set of lyrics. One of those occasional situations where you have a set of lyrics before you have a musical idea, and when you know from the structure of the lyrics that it’s a viable song. OK, what’s the music gonna be like? And there’s six different ways that I could take that, and two of them I couldn’t choose between. I had a version that was a minor-key, bluesy approach and another version that was a more contemplative, major-seventh approach.

Completely different music, and melody. I went for the minor-key approach because it suited the band, but at the same time I had this major-key approach I’d demoed on the piano that I really liked the feel of. That late-morning-on-a-rainy-day recording.

When you write a song, is it usually on piano?
It’s pen and paper, if anything. Pen and paper or in my head. I’ll go to the piano after I’ve got a song finished, and pick at whatever it is that I can hear in my head. But I’m not actually writing on piano. Or very rarely do I do that.

“We approach things very much from a lyric-down viewpoint.”

And then you bring the song to the band and it builds in rehearsal or soundcheck?
Yes, either rehearsal or soundcheck. If I’m prepared and I’ve done a demo of it playing the piano, I can send a demo of that round to the band. If not, I’ll just walk in with a set of chords on a sheet of paper for each guy and talk them through it. And of course, initially that means they’re just tentatively playing through a series of chords.

But then, pretty quickly, we all get to hear it and then you start the process of suggesting that we try, y’know, just the nuts and bolts of taking a raw song and really powering the performance of it. ‘Powering’s the wrong word. Really bringing it out, bringing out the story.

We approach things very much from a lyric-down viewpoint. Like country music, where the most important thing that’s going on is the story in the lyrics. What everybody’s doing is painting the picture behind that. Putting people in that landscape.

You mentioned earlier the different directions a song can take. Was that what happened with ‘Everybody’, wanting to do it on this record after having it on [Cold Chisel’s 2012 comeback album] No Plans?
Well, the recording of ‘Everybody’ on this record was done in 2010. So it predates that version. I’ve been doing this song live since about the turn of the century. In fact, it has quite a long history because somebody [Abi Tucker] recorded sort of a hip-hop version of this song in about 2001 for a TV show [The Secret Life of Us]. And somebody else had a minor hit with it in South Africa a few years later. So it does have a bit of a history.

I recorded my version in 2010 and thought, “Right, that’s pretty good. That’s ready for the album, whenever the album happens.” And then the Cold Chisel guys heard it in 2011 and said, “We’d like to try a version of this. We like the song.”

Does it ever come up, when Cold Chisel asks for a song like that, that you say no? That you’d just rather have it as your own thing?
I wouldn’t rule it out, but it hasn’t happened. It definitely crossed my mind, because there’s a couple of songs I had recorded already for this album and the Cold Chisel guys liked them. Being ‘Everybody’ [and] ‘HQ454 Monroe’ [included on both No Plans and 2011’s The Best of Cold Chisel – All For You]. I thought about it for a day or two and I thought, ‘What the hell? Let Cold Chisel do it. If they do a better version, make your own decisions about your own recordings.’

Which is what I’ve done. I haven’t included my version of ‘HQ454 Monroe’. I let that be a Cold Chisel song. My version of ‘Everybody’, I thought it’s quite different from Cold Chisel’s version and I rather like it, so I put it on.

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‘Hully Gully’ is out now independently through MGM. Read David Nichols’ On Rotation review. Walker and band are touring in November; dates below.

Fri, Nov 1 – Shoalhaven Entertainment Centre, Shoalhaven, NSW
Sat, Nov 2 – Camelot Lounge, Sydney, NSW
Fri, Nov 8 – Sawtell RSL, Sawtell, NSW
Sat, Nov 9 – Old Museum, Brisbane, QLD
Fri, Nov 29 – Caravan Music Club, Oakleigh, VIC
Sat, Nov 30 – Flying Saucer Club, Elsternwick, VIC