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It’s great that you included the lyrics in the CD — is there a particular reason for doing that?

Pure, naked vanity.

Which ROOT! song is your favourite? For what it’s worth, mine is “Caroline Springs”. [Caroline Springs is a planned and developed community outside of Melbourne, Australia -- Ed] I like how you’ve turned a critique of the suburb into a love story of sorts. My favourite line is the one about supposedly being twenty minutes from the CBD. ["Caroline Springs" lyrics]

I’m really glad and encouraged that you got that Greg. It was always meant to be equal parts melancholy/satirical. All that stuff about seeing her at the photocopy machine, and so on, it’s not necessarily meant to be seen as a putdown of him, or where he lives. It equally puts her down, with her “Golden Mile” background and the fact that she’s slumming it in Fitzroy. If people say you have to know Caroline Springs to understand the song — they ain’t getting’ it.

Lyrically, I like certain moments, more than whole songs. “I never was much good at mixing/here they all drink bourbon and cola” — I’m always trying to put things within things, like that double meaning of “mixing”, or the extended allegory — is that what you’d call it? — of “Shazza and Michelle” [lyrics], or using paradoxes within lines. It’s not much chop, mind you, in the end I’m just another crummy rock lyricist — but those moments give me a little pleasure.

Musically, I get a great deal of pleasure from certain guitar licks of Henri’s. I’m a sucker for good old fashioned rock guitar. Not turgidly rococo Joe Satriani style playing — I mean bending, twanging, more-attitude-than-technique rock guitar.

But I’m bored with our album. I never play it. There is a whole new album, like a new girlfriend, in my heart. I’m a fickle cheating typical male, when it comes to songs.

What is it like for you to play live? Do you get nervous? What have audiences been like?

Live I’m in a completely shut-off world, so I end up ringing the guys the next day to ask them how we sounded — because I’ve got no idea. I get nervous, but it manifests itself in weird ways: usually I get tired, like I just want to crawl into bed. Someone once suggested this was my brain compensating (in advance!!!) for the huge ordeal I was going to put it through later. Pretty tricky, that brain. The whole day of the gig it builds and builds. You always end up socialising beforehand, but I’m not sure I’m the best company, unfortunately. I just feel uncomfortable, no matter what I do.

Our audiences have been very enthusiastic. It still surprises me. But then, I’m not just getting up there and “playing my music and if you like it, I don’t care” like you hear other people say. I think about every gig with this mindset: the audience doesn’t give a shit. That’s how I approach things — how do I win them over? So I try to mix subtle bits with obvious, funny bits. I regard every person in the audience as someone who is doing me a favour. Not like so many bands I’ve seen, who seem to think it’s the other way around.

Out of curiosity, your song about Tex (“I Wish I Was Tex Perkins” [lyrics]) — where does your interest in him stem from — do you know him for example, or have you played on the same bill? He and I played in a band together as teenagers by the way. How literally should we understand these lyrics — I mean, do you really want to be like this or are you being sarcastic? (Sorry if that should be obvious, but I discussed it with someone else who disagreed with me.) Or is it a bit of both? I once did a sticker “I’d rather be — Nick Cave” which was about both soundalike bands and my office job.

I’ve never met Tex. I’m sure he’s nothing like I make out in the song. But I wrote it because there were women I knew, intelligent, literate women who don’t take shit from fuckwit males, and more than one of them admitted to quite fancying Tex. And it made me think, for all my crappy poetry and my crappy intellect and my crappy witty, metaphysical carrying on, sometimes I think I’d give it all up if I could just have that base, animal power to simply walk in a room and make women swoon. Wouldn’t it be ace? For starters, how much less tired would you be? No Wildeian conversational gems. And time. You could cut to the chase and still have enough time to watch the footy! Ah well.

So, Tex is just a symbol, really, of the guy I could never be. And anyway, the song starts going off the topic pretty quickly, quite deliberately. It’s more about me than Tex. So, when people go “ooh, you should get together with Tex” I think, well, not really. I’m always keen to deflate the balloon of reverence around rock stars. But I’m not really having a “go” at Tex.

I liked your Nick Cave thing, because the whole problem with Nick Cave isn’t Nick — who is obviously a smart, talented, original guy. It’s with the horrible, fawning, reverent, Nick-Cave-worshipping orthodoxy that exists whenever anything is written about him. It begs to have someone come along and poke fun at Nick, just to see the outrage on their faces.

But I don’t think that about Tex. When women say they want to root Tex, I think, well, fair enough, really, good on them.

Audiences often perceive lyrics as autobiography. This was a problem in my old band. People assume that singers are singing about themself or someone they know. Even when they’re right it’s annoying. Does this happen to you, and if so, how do you deal with it?

Aha! Yes, well Greg, I can see that being a problem with New Waver. Anyone who can stand there in a coldly-lit room full of people, completely naked with an “L” painted on your non-footy-player chest, singing about masturbation… I’m not surprised that some people assumed you were playing “yourself.”

I guess we might have that perceived autobiography problem. It’s an interesting question. I think our audience is pretty smart, by and large, so they have the ability to distinguish between bits of the real me and bits of persona. I try not to harangue my audience too much…OK, I harangue them in “Back to Mine” about my abhorrence of the term “comfort zone” — but I am being very exaggerated there. If anything, you know, I think I may personally suffer from the opposite problem, I assume everybody in showbiz is, in the end, as the German man once said to the English barman, “stealing ze urine” — I assume they all are just personas. (Well… I like to assume it, anyway. I like to sit back and imagine Jon Butler eating pies and hanging out with property developers, chuckling about how he pulled another one over those fucking hippies at Byron.)

And while we’re on personas, let’s go back to our friend Nick. When I was a pine-headed teen I used to go see the Birthday Party. I thought they were great, and — quite honestly — I thought they were meant to be seen as a figure of fun. The audience was full of people who went to expensive private schools so they could live on heroin and bin juice in their Brunswick Street squat, and there was Tracey Pew with a gay bar moustache, cowboy hat and string vest, grinding his hips behind the bass, and Rowland Howard standing with one leg ridiculously bent behind him like a Monty Python Silly Walk, and Nick Cave yelling “Pow! Pow! Pow!” in a song called “Hamlet” — I thought it was all deliberate nonsense, designed to make fun of the whole “arty” scene. I was cacking myself! And when Nick sang “In the Ghetto” for an encore, again, I thought he was being silly, singing a schmaltzy Vegas song to a crowd full of Velvet Underground-dupes. But, you know, I started to realise that maybe I was wrong, as Nick’s entire career turned into retreads of “In the Ghetto”, and the same people who would have sneered at their parents’ Marty Robbins record collection back then, were growing up to write pant-wetting reviews in the Age Good Weekend about Nick’s latest tale of a bible-toting killer. I still say a little prayer at night, though, that maybe, just maybe Nick’s sitting at home having a quiet chortle…

Conversely, if you sing about someone else’s misfortune, some people will assume that you are making fun of the victim. Take the “Caroline Springs” example — it’s good to puncture the ads and say what it’s really like to live there. But is it cruel? How do you deal with this fine line, if at all? Also, comment on this song in the light of this year’s rise in interest rates. Would you now add an extra verse? Your prediction that values will plummet seems to be coming true. Have you tried selling this song to Delfin’s ad company?

Yeah, see, I could be accused of being some horrible middle-class snob putting down the battlers. It’s Delfin I’m after, not the people who live there — but maybe I’m just not good enough a lyricist to get this across. I was hoping that the listener sides with the main character, I guess. Just like the guy in “Root 66″ whose entire life is spent working towards his retirement. There are, believe it or not, autobiographical elements in both those songs. I’d much rather side with the compliant society-obeying guy than the fuckwit “I’ll never be a suburbanite” who lives in St Kilda and hasn’t been past where the tram stops. But maybe I failed.

What about today’s music scene — do you like any of it? What do you listen to? Do you mostly listen to music in the same genre as ROOT!’s? Do you listen to experimental music? Is there any particularly good or bad music you’d like to comment on?

I’ve got to the point where I just can’t be into everyone new who I should be into. There’s too much stuff, and not enough time. The last time I really really immersed myself in a new musical culture was in the early 90s when I listened to only techno. These days I occasionally stumble across a band that I like, like, say Art Brut, because they sound like they are doing something original. I was a huge fan of the Beta Band. They were the most original band I’d heard in years, they were trying something genuinely hard to categorise — and even a little bit shoddy as well… were they meaning to sing shit like that? I loved it. Of course, if I’d lived in England, I would have hated them, because I gather the NME types were wanking on terribly about them — but I only found that out later, after I’d come to love their shambolic shitness.

This is my terrible problem: if I sense everyone raving about a band, I’m out of there before you can say Thom Yorke. And I’ll wait till about 5 years after they’ve had their day and disappeared off the face of the planet…and secretly love them! I must have rock-historian disease, or something. I have to enjoy everything retrospectively.

I like Aussie hip hop — only when they sing about going to the milk bar, and Aussie stuff. If it’s music of the streets, then sing about your fucking streets, not stupid gangstaland. I recently saw Corrine Grant do a comedy routine where she did the “come on! Who likes Aussie hip-hop? Nobody, right?” sort of attitude. I was sitting there in the audience thinking — well, love, I’m exactly the person who you feel confident isn’t in this room.

I’m also still trying to catch up on artists I never knew during their day — so last week I was listening to Dusty Springfield, Hunky Dory by Bowie, the Temptations.

I had my experimental music phase a long time ago when I was hanging around black clad bookish girls in the vain hope that after a night of Jarry’s Ubu trilogy performed by some avante garde troupe in a hell hole somewhere in Fitzroy we could cruise over to the Black Cat for a chinotto and light discussion about how becoming precedes being, and then maybe later she’d let me pop my Converses under her bed. These days I prefer air guitaring at home to Thin Lizzy. I get about as much sex.

I listen to roots music a little bit. But like reggae and hip-hop, I find the sameness gets to me after a while. I hate posturing. Gangsta posturing, heroin-chic posturing, whatever.

And I hate vocal affectation, which is absolutely rife these days. I listened to the Kooks, thinking they’d be like the Kinks (their new album is called Konk — that’s a bit of a giveaway) — but their lead singer completely wrecks it by singing in this vomitous-cute put-on voice.

I get angered by bands that, to me, are just up there because they want to be famous, without having anything new to say or contribute any new sound to rock’s long, exhausting history. I also get angered by bands with shit lyricists.

What is the point of music in 2008? Is it just a waste of time, money and carbon? Rather than play shows and press CDs, should we all minimise consumption to ward off climatic disaster? Should musicians lead the way on this?

The point of music is, as always, to not have one, single, cogent point.

You have been critical of the last government. Do you support any particular party or policy? Do you subscribe to any particular ethic?

I was also critical of the current government. But neither were reasoned criticisms, more just irreverence. Because I’m simply not well-read enough to have an opinion worth sharing, and I’m very wary of becoming what I hate most. What I hate, far more than politicians, are pontificators — about politics, about footy, about music — anyone who feels the need to shove their opinion down your throat as if it is some immutable truth. Kind of like the way I’ve been pontificating for these last thousand words…

Melbourne, April 2008

Thanks to Nick Potter for photos of ROOT! at the Sydney Road Festival, and to Olivia Mayer for editing the interviewer text. DC’s text is unchanged.

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