TV Colours: Leaving The Neighbourhood

Six years in the making, TV Colours’ debut album was Australian music’s defining word-of-mouth success last year. ANNIE TOLLER talks at length to leader Robin Mukerjee (a.k.a. Bobby Kill) about the album’s rocky path to completion as well as life in Canberra.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The fact that TV Colours’ debut Purple Skies, Toxic River took six years to write, with two versions of the album ditched along the way, has been memorialised almost too many times to count. But speaking to its amiable, self-deprecating creator, Bobby Kill (Canberra’s Robin Mukerjee), about the record's development, it struck me as only reasonable that he took six years from writing his first material to releasing such an accomplished work.

Purple Skies was #3 on last year's M+N Critics Poll and #6 on our Readers Poll, with single ‘Beverly’ dubbed the best track. A meticulously realised concept album that takes cues from Husker Dü’s Zen Arcade, the story follows a kid who splits the suburbs for the wastelands of the city. Driven by power chords, cold synths, wailing guitar solos and the insistent pulse of drum machines, the record evokes some sort of retro-futurist dystopia, like the dark imaginings of 1980s action films.

In a conversation littered with Mukerjee’s affable ’90s bro-speak (‘gnarly’, ‘sick’, ‘brutal’), we talked about TV Colours’ recent European tour, some of the influences behind Purple Skies and the hometown that shaped the record’s narrative and sound.

So do you mind if I use your real name in the article, or do you prefer Bobby Kill?
No, you can use my real name. That was like a weird, crazy album-neurosis thing I was having when it was coming out.

It wasn’t just kidding around?
Oh, I don’t know what it was. I just didn’t want people to know that it was by me. I can’t explain it; it’s just really nuts. It definitely was a big joke but I also was like really, really self-conscious about my name being on it for some reason. My parents didn’t even know I did it until the album came out. I was just – I can’t think of any other word but ‘shy’ about it, to the extent where I was like, ‘It’s not by me, it’s by someone else’.

It’s a good pseudonym.
Yeah, it's really old. It’s sort of like a massive joke that just stuck when I told people. When I lived in Sydney everyone I knew just called me Bobby. One of them, the first guy that I met, he just told everyone. So no one even knew my real name; it was kind of weird.

“My dad called me Bobby Kill the other day. I was like, ‘Don’t do that ever again!’”

I like the mystery that’s sprung up around it on the internet. I so rarely see anyone refer to you as Robin in reviews and stuff.
Yeah, I kind of liked the confusion of it all. But I’m over it now – like meeting people and being like, ‘Hey, I’m Robin,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh!’ It’s just gotten really confusing. My dad called me Bobby Kill the other day, which was really weird. [Laughs] I was like, ‘Dad, don’t do that ever again!’

How was the European tour?
It was amazing, really. I don’t know what I expected, but we played some really, really good shows and met some really awesome people who showed us around everywhere. It was really gruelling though; it was kind of like a clichéd tour, which I was trying to avoid. It was just like drinking every night and partying and then getting in the van, driving to the next show and waiting round at the venue and then doing it again. We all got so sick by the end. It was just like our bodies couldn’t take it anymore; it was kind of brutal.

But, yeah, it was crazy. It was awesome going over there and heaps of people coming to your shows. I didn’t really expect that.

So you guys did have a lot of people turn up?
Yeah! Yeah, we did. It sort of varied. In the bigger cities some of them were packed out and then it went down to maybe 10 people. And then we played some other ones which weren’t really organised around us; they were sort of weird uni nights. So we’d turn up to the venue and it would be packed out, and we’d be like, “Whoa, holy shit!” But then everyone was there to just party and see a band, and take heaps of drugs after we played – just get really fucked up and listen to trance. It was kinda weird.

“All I wanted to do was start a band. I was putting ads out and going on weird music dates with people.”

So do you want to tell me about how the whole TV Colours project got started?
Yeah. It started when I lived in Sydney, in 2007. Basically I moved up there and all I wanted to do was start a band, and it just never happened. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t going about it in the right way. I was putting ads out in Drum Media and stuff like that, and going on weird music dates with people. It was really bizarre. I was like, ‘Oh, fuck it’. It was out of frustration. I was like, ‘I’m just going to buy a drum machine and play with the drum machine by myself’. It was pretty naive, I think. At the time I was like, ‘Yeah! I’m going to get this drum machine and play these shows and record everything’. I thought it was going to be easy. But it turned out doing stuff by yourself is pretty hard, especially when you haven’t been in a band before.

So a bunch of the songs predate the album as it stands now?
From back then, when I first started, only one song is on the album, which is ‘I Soon Found Out My Lonely Life Wasn’t So Pretty’.

I like that song.
It’s really, really, really old. It’s the first song I ever played live. It was pretty cool to finally get that onto an album, because I always saw it as like a cursed song. I probably tried to record it like eight times, and every time I tried to it never worked out. It just sounded really shit. It finally made it onto the album at the very last second. The end of that song was from a completely different song. The first half of it didn’t really sound very good, and on the second last day of recording I was just like, ‘May as well chuck that cursed song on the start of this and see how it goes’. And it worked out, which is kind of crazy.

It’s an intentional Beach Boys reference, I suppose?
Yeah, definitely.

Some of the reviews I’ve read seem to take the angle that the whole album’s this teenage angst thing – that it’s like ‘Fuck school’ and all that sort of stuff. I always interpreted it more as being about you moving to the city.
Yeah, that’s it. The teenage angst thing is like – I'm like, ‘Oh shit, have I not emotionally developed since I was a teenager?’ I guess it works though. It’s supposed to start off as a teenager and then ... it’s supposed to span a long period of time. But yeah, basically that’s it. The second half of that Beach Boys lyric is basically what the concept of the album was.

As a Canberra album, too, that seems kind of appropriate, because it’s just what it’s like being in your early 20s and always being between Sydney and Canberra or Melbourne and Canberra.
Yeah, it’s really brutal. It’s the Canberra life. I’m living here now and it’s so hard because everyone leaves or is talking about leaving, including myself. It’s really unstable and annoying.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Is that a Canberra scene on the album cover?
Yeah. That’s the stormwater drains near my parents’ house in Curtin. That’s the bridge that leads out of the suburb, so it’s supposed to be like leaving the neighbourhood.

You’ve got it dressed up like an American teen movie or something like that, but that shot definitely reminded me of my childhood, riding bikes around the suburbs.
Yeah, I’m so happy with the way the artwork turned out.

I was wondering why you ditched the first two versions of the album.
The first one was a non-event. I was housesitting my parents’ house in Canberra when I still lived in Sydney, for two weeks, and I just decided, really naively, ‘I’m just going to go and record this album in two weeks – write and record it, all on a four-track’. I got there and I did it, I guess – it was just rubbish though. I didn’t really know how – like, I hadn’t written many songs then and I was just really young. I thought you could just do that – write an album and you’ll be happy, in like two weeks.

And then – it just wasn’t very good. I remember showing it to friends and they were like, “Yeah … cool …’ And I was just like, ‘Ah, fuck it’. I didn’t even really care about it.

“I ended up ditching everything except three songs. I thought I could do better.”

But with the second one, I put heaps of effort into that one. When I was living in Sydney I had 24-hour access to this weird studio at Sydney Uni. It wasn’t really a recording studio, but it had heaps of recording gear in it. I basically lived there. In my last semester of uni I only had one unit, so I was like, ‘Alright, that’s it. In this three or four months I’m going to record a whole album, and then that’ll be it – I’ll finally have it out’. I recorded it all and it wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that good either. The thing was it was going to come out. We were at the final stages with Tim [Guthrie] at Dream Damage; he was asking me for the definitive track names. There was lots of weird noise stuff and then like five or six songs in between. And I was like, “Hang on, I just want to record a few more actual song songs and then we’ll release it.”

So I didn’t actually ditch that initially – I just kept on going with it, and then eventually I sort of got on a roll with these new songs and ended up just ditching everything off the other one except three songs, which Tim and [other people] were pretty angry about. Well, they weren’t angry, they were just like, “What the fuck are you doing?” And I was like, “Trust me.” I just thought it sucked by then. I thought I could do better. It’s floating around somewhere; I’m not sure if I’ve got a copy of it anywhere…

Maybe it’ll become a cult object in, like, 10 years.
[Laughs] Yeah. I’m sure I do have a copy somewhere, I just don’t know where.

Which are the three songs that survived from the second version?
‘Lost Highway’, ‘The Kids are All Grown Up’ and ‘Running With the Creeps’.

So that’s the version of ‘The Kids are All Grown Up’ that’s on the 7”?
It is, but it’s been remixed.

Yeah. I was listening to it today to try and pick the difference. It was actually fairly easy to – it was way more lo-fi on the 7”.
Yeah. I still think I prefer the more lo-fi one a bit. I went on this crazy attempt to un-lo-fi the whole thing at the end of it. I got it mixed by someone else, and it just didn’t work; I’d gone too far [Laughs]. All that distortion and stuff, if you took it away it just kind of sucked the energy out of everything. With ‘Kids’ it still works, but I still think the other one’s a bit better.

It’s got a lot of energy. I remember when I first heard that I was pretty pumped.
It’s heaps more blown-out than the later one. I probably should have ditched that song on the album; it’s kind of a weird one on there. But I don’t know – I was just like, ‘Oh fuck it, I’ll just put it on’.

“I always hate seeing songs wasted on EPs.”

I guess thematically it stands out a little bit.
Yeah, that’s the thing. The only reason I left it on is that when I recorded that song I was like, ‘Okay, I have to record an album so this song goes on an album, not just an EP’. I always hate seeing songs wasted on EPs. And by the end it had taken so long that I just felt like I had to put it on there.

When did you come up with ‘Livin’ After Midnight’? … It’s such a mood piece, and with that sax solo it seems like kind of an anomaly on the album.
Actually, I got the idea when I was watching this Simpsons episode. It’s a later one – far beyond when they should have stopped. I can’t remember what it’s called [‘HOMR’]. It’s the one where they realise that his whole life Homer’s had a crayon shoved up his nose, then they remove it and he becomes really smart. Then something goes wrong and he’s contemplating putting the crayon back up his nose, and he’s walking through the city and there’s all those neon lights coming behind him, and like him just walking. You know the neon lights coming behind someone?

Yeah, they’re, like, spinning.
Yeah, and there was a saxophone playing. It’s from there. That’s my favourite track on the album. It worked out so perfectly. And it was kinda hard, which made it better when I finished it.

Did I read that you worked with Casey Rice on this album?
Yeah, I did. That was who I got to un-lo-fi it.

Was he good to work with?
Yeah! Yeah, he was fine. I think at the end of the day he only mixed half of it, and I mixed the other half because I don’t think we had enough time. I got down there [to Melbourne] with like 18 tracks; three got culled in the end. I don’t think we had enough time – it was done really quickly. At the end he also made me realise a lot of things I needed to add. He was really into it, which was really cool. He would open a Pro Tools file, and they were so crazy towards the end, like, I’d use every single track. I’d run out and put stuff on other tracks, and they were just a real mess.

I kind of felt sorry for him that he had to figure it all out. He was like [feigns an American accent], “Dude, you’re a fucking psycho!” [Sheepish] “I’m sorry.” “What do you do, just sit in your room and smoke bongs?” “No…” He was pretty funny. He was a cool dude.

He’s got a great back catalogue. I just got into that Liz Phair album [1993’s Exile in Guyville] that he worked on.
Yeah, he talked about Liz Phair heaps, and I asked him heaps of questions about Billy Corgan. I don’t think either of us like him very much.

Yeah, that guy’s a cock.
He is.

“I’d make him turn things that no one else could hear up by tiny amounts and all these intricate things.”

So you weren’t too alarmed handing your album over to other people?
Nah, not really. I hated it by then, so much that I was just like, ‘Oh, fuck it’. I was pretty crazy with him. Like, I’d go in there and make him turn things that no one else could hear up by like tiny amounts and make him do all these intricate things, and he was like, “You’re fucking crazy, dude. We’ve been over this too many times.” And I was like, “Please just do it!” I was pretty hard to work with, I think, in that situation. But we got most of it done. And when I got back, the only tracks I mixed myself are the ones where he was like, “The reason this song’s so weird is cos it has no hi-hats in it.” So I had to put them in myself, and by then I was like, “I'm not going back to Melbourne; I’ll just do it myself.”

What does it feel like to be playing the songs live, now that the album’s out and it’s taken a whole six years?
Like with the band? It feels pretty good.

You’re not sick of them?
No, no, I’m pretty sick of them. No, the band gave them a whole new life, which is what I needed. We worked them out, and we’re sort of covering them in a weird way, which is cool. It gives them a lot more dynamic and energy in a live setting. When I used to play them solo that was always a problem – by, like, the second verse it just got a bit boring. The band gave them a new life. I’m sick of them now we’ve played so many shows – like, it’s probably time to write new ones. It was a long process, working them all out with everyone else, too.

Did you play all the parts on the album yourself?
Yeah, except for one song, which is ‘Run with the Creeps’. Kieran [Davis] from Cat Cat played drums on that. But the thing is, that song wasn’t even a TV Colours song to begin with. It was this other band I had with him called Sluggers. I was doing TV Colours and that at the same time. I was doing the writing for both of them – well, sort of. It was when I was absolutely insane, and I feel really bad for Kieran because it was an awesome band and it basically became a sacrificial lamb so this album could get done, because I couldn’t do two things at once. I don’t think I ever could, to tell the truth. So we recorded that song and I was like, “Oh, can I use it on the album?” And he was like, “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

When you record again are you going to do it with the band from the start, do you think? Is it a permanent setup?
I don’t know if it’s permanent forever, but I have a plan to do this next album and I want to do it with the other guys, definitely. I’ve talked to them about it, and they’re down to do it. When we’ve been rehearsing and working out the songs for the show now, it’s just so refreshing to have other people helping you out, and the dynamics you can get with a real band is something I always wanted to do.

So yeah, that’s sort of the plan. I think I’m still going to demo them and write them the same way I used to, which is with a drum machine, and then take them to [the others] and then we’ll work it out as a band. It might be a long process.

I guess you won’t be able to be as meticulous as you have been.
Well, I think when we’re recording I still want to produce it, so… [Laughs] I actually told them, “If we do this, you have to be prepared for me to be totally crazy about everything,” and they were like, “Okay. That’s cool, we understand.” And I was like, “I don’t think you do…” and they were like, “No, we do.” [Laughs]

Nah, it’ll be fine. I still want to record it myself and do it that way so I can still get in there by myself and cut and paste and chop stuff up.

Since Purple Skies was such a tight concept album, do you think when you record again the aesthetic might be quite different because you’ll sort of be in a different world?
No, I have plans for it to sort of continue on in this weird way. The thing is I can worry and I’ll just overkill it, but it’s all I know to do now, so I’m just going to continue doing it.

“I’m just obsessed with American bands, and it came through.”

I was actually thinking it’s kind of cool that you’ve got this, like, Minneapolis punk sound going on when a lot of Australian bands have these very Australian sounds of either sludgy pub-rock and post-punk like The Birthday Party or else Go-Betweens-y, jangly indie pop. It’s kind of cool that you guys in Canberra are coming out with this punk that’s nowhere near any of that.
Yeah, it is kind of different I guess. I’m just obsessed with American bands, pretty much, and I think it came through. It’s weird that all those things came through, especially the hair metal, because I didn’t intend that at all. But obviously it somehow got deep inside my brain when I was a bonehead teenager, and it just came out.

What other albums have been important for you? Apart from Zen Arcade.
That was the main one. The thing is, it was a huge, huge influence, but from when I really went forward with the idea, the sort of Zen Arcade-y idea, I stopped listening to it because I didn’t want it to sound too much like it. I started listening to it in this really naive stage and then just left it. Towards the end of the album and when I was recording I started listening to it again, and it sort of freaked me out. I was like, “Oh, fucking hell.” That was when I was sort of crazy about everything. I’m like that with stuff – if I think it’s going to influence me too heavily, I’ll just cut it off. But besides that I really don’t know.

Films seem to have been sort of important as well.
Yeah, definitely. That was a big, big influence from being in Assassins [88] with Tim [Guthrie] and Lach [Lachlan Thomas], because that’s what they were all about.

They’re film buffs?
Yeah. When I was in the band and saw how they worked, with writing songs it was more about the movies that they got into. For me it’s just that one Penelope Spheeris movie, Suburbia.

I haven’t seen that.
She did Wayne’s World and The Decline of Western Civilisation movies, Part I and Part II. In ’83 or ’84 she did this film called Suburbia, which I sort of knew I could match up with punkier songs because that soundtrack, it’s all T.S.O.L., and this guy, I think his name’s Alex Gibson, did this amazing score for it. It’s all synths and drum machines and stuff.

So it’s all from there. It’s weird, those guys know everything about every movie, and I just found this one movie, and it’s like, ‘Right, that’s it, that’s the one’. I’m probably going to continue mining it for all it’s worth, to tell the truth. It’s an awesome movie … It’s about these punks hanging around in a Californian suburb somewhere, like, an LA suburb. It’s just about them hanging out for a day, really, and going to punk shows. It’s one of those ’80s movies where not that much happens, but it’s fuckin’ cool … The soundtrack is just so amazing. And it’s cool how it matches up further on with Wayne’s World and stuff.

So when did you meet the guys from Assassins and Dream Damage?
When they were in Assassins they came up to Sydney to play a show and they stayed at my house. I met them maybe Canberra-wise – you know, you’ve sort of met everyone vaguely. I’d maybe been introduced to them, but they came up and crashed at my house because they had nowhere to stay, and that’s sort of when I met them. It was kind of random, actually, looking back on it.

When did you start playing with them?
Not 2009; the next year, when I released ‘Kids’, they sent me a MySpace message asking if I wanted a backing band. They were my favourite band, so I was so overzealous about the whole thing, like “I’ll come down to Canberra and we’ll jam!” And I did – the next weekend I went down. We had a jam and, yeah, it was awesome. And then it sort of died, and they came up to Sydney and Newcastle to play some shows and I just went along for the ride. And they were like, “Do you want to play those songs at the end of the set?” And I was like, “Yeah, for sure.”

From there – I can’t even remember, I just started playing with them. I’d never been in a band and they were my favourite band, and then suddenly I was going to Melbourne to play shows with them. I was like a little kid or something.

“The glory days [of Canberra’s music scene] were in 2009, before I even lived here.”

There’s a really good scene in Canberra at the moment – well, there has been for a while. I remember there was an NME article about Dream Damage a couple of years ago.
Yeah. Well, there is, but at the same time there isn’t. It goes through so many phases constantly because people are leaving and bands are breaking up. At the moment there’s, like, three or four good bands playing around, which is sick. But there’s stages. I don’t think anyone realises, even if they’re taking any notice at all of Canberra, looking in. It seems like it’s been this continuous thing, but there’s really been dips and rises the whole time. The glory days were in 2009, before I even lived here. It seemed like there were, like, 15 bands all playing at house parties and being really productive, and then everyone left, and it was just like, ‘Ugh’. That’s when I got back – like, I got back and it was over. It was so brutal.

Who are the three or four good bands now, in your opinion?
There’s Sex Noises, Sweet Shoppe and Mornings. They’ve got pretty similar members. And, well, I was sort of including us in that, I guess. [Laughs]

Then there’s Danger Beach. But Danger Beach and The Fighting League aren’t really playing at the moment; they haven’t for a while now. There are some younger bands which are awesome, like Beach Slut and there’s this other band called Oxen, which is pretty cool.

Those are all on Cinnamon Records, right?
Yeah, that’s the new one. They’re all on that label. There’s no rivalry or anything ... Jordan [Rodger] who runs Cinnamon Records is really productive. He’s putting on all these shows and consecutively putting out really good stuff every couple of months. It’s cool.

Does he have Bare Grillz?
No, Bare Grillz is sort of on Dream Damage, but like half. That album [Friends]’s like a weird half-release, because it’s on Bare Grillz’s label [Y202] too.

I just heard it for the first time yesterday. There are some cool-sounding things on that.
Yeah, me and Lach actually recorded that. It was so brutal. We went and played Camp A Low Hum with them, and we talked about it then. They were super keen and we were like, “Come down and we’ll do it! We’ll have a house party when you guys arrive and we’ll do it after that.” I remember we had this huge, huge party and then the next day it was like, “Get up everyone! We’re recording!” Recording’s so gruelling, and we were just hungover and boozing the whole time. By the end of it we were so tired, but it worked out really well.

You’ve got a few production credits in Canberra now, right?
Yeah, I’ve done a few things. I’ve done this album that hasn’t come out by this band that existed for, like, six months called Bad Lifers, which is really awesome. I just have to put it out, it’s just sitting there.

It strikes me as interesting that a lot of the music coming out of Canberra is so punk, given it’s such a tidy little bougie place.
I’ve thought about that too. It’s pretty clichéd, but I think it’s because it’s a kind of boring place. And there’s always been a pretty good punk/hardcore scene here. I think it’s maybe a little bit of a reflection of that, too.

Maybe like how Canberra’s also the porn and fireworks capital, and hard drugs.
[Laughs] Yeah, pretty much. I honestly think it’s just boredom, and it just goes hand in hand with having to make your own fun.

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‘Purple Skies, Toxic River’ is out now through Dream Damage. Read Mitchell Judge’s review. TV Colours are playing two gigs in Victoria this weekend; info below.

Sat, Jan 25 – The Bridge Hotel, Castlemaine, VIC [w/The Stevens + Beat Disease]
Sun, Jan 26 (Australia Day) – Boney, Melbourne, VIC [w/Unity Floors, Beat Disease + Chook Race]