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QW - Courier Mail
By The Books
By Noel Mengel
October 11 2008
Forget rock cliches and guitar solos - the music of Augie March is powered by poetry and literary illusions. How has such an atypical Australian band garnered so loyal a following?
It's three o'clock on a sunny, crisp Melbourne afternoon, one of those days when the clear spring light makes even Swanston Street washed clean. The first warmth of the season is in the air; buds are threatening to stir.
Inside the State Library of Victoria, the five members of Augie March are gathered in an upstairs alcove that looks down on a packed floor of silent university students. The location is appropriate. Through a long, 12-year climb to become one of Australia's most critically acclaimed bands, they are still almost anonymous, but if they have an image at all it's one that suggests they'd be just as happy curled up with a good book as in the spotlight.
Their name is taken from Saul Bellow's 1953 novel "The Adventures of Augie March", a coming-of-age story through which Bellow questions the value of modernism. Literary devices abound around Augie March, whose attention to the power of poetic expression as much as the music sets them apart.
Words seem to be less and less important in the high-turnover, celebrity-driven world of popular music, in an age when people download music from the internet and bypass the lyric sheets. But language, in all its richness and nuance, is at the core of Augie March and the songs of the band's singer and songwriter, Glenn Richards. Cliches, a driving force of popular song, are out.
The band's albums always carry the lyrics in the accompanying booklet and for the fans, that's an essential part of the attraction. Their second album, Strange Bird (2002), featured an index of first lines, in the style of a poetry anthology. It was written under the influence of English poet Ted Hughes's "Crow". Their third - and seldom has a mainstream breakthrough album carried a title as multi-layered as 2006's Moo, You Bloody Choir - came with little notes on the lyrics of each song. ("Mt Wellington Reverie": "Three convicts. Hobart Guest House. Marcus Clarke. Hails His Last Taxi.") Richards says these are "a means of simultaneously elucidating and confusing anyone trying to figure out the songs".
Another, "Mother Greer", was addressed - sort of - to Germaine. And "One Crowded Hour" took its title from Tim Bowden's biography of the late war photographer Neil Davis (which had borrowed the phrase from Sir Walter Scott).
There had been a place for this kind of bookish songwriting in the world of Australian music, among the listeners who preferred the sturdy craft of bands such as The Church, The Triffids and The Go-Betweens. That place had usually been on the fringes, not near the top of the charts.
Then something happened. Released in 2006, "One Crowded Hour" - a song not as much about Davis as about Richards's experiences as a performer - hit the spot. It struck a chord with commercial radio, previously a foreign planet for Augie March. In January 2007, Triple J listeners voted the song No.1 on the youth station's annual Hottest 100 list, a reliable barometer of popular taste. It was also named the Australian Performing Rights Association's song of the year; the song and album won the band ARIA Award nominations and Moo, You Bloody Choir received a release in the US. Last year it also took out the prestigious Australian Music Prize, awarded for "artistic excellence" and voted by a small assembly of music lovers from the press, record stores and music business. It got my vote. The album has sold more than 70,000 copies; not in the Silverchair league but certainly more than might be expected from an album with song titles such as "Bolte and Dunstan Talk Youth".
At the end of "The Honey Month", cows can be heard lowing on the way to the abattoir. They were recorded by Richards, a vegetarian, holding a microphone out of the window during a trip to Shepparton, two hours' north of Melbourne, from where Richards, drummer David Williams and guitarist Adam Donovan hail. "The Mitchell St Stockyards Choir, R.I.P." gets a credit. There is a cryptic element to Richards's songs but there can be a playful, devilish humour at work too. Was the choir in the Moo, You Bloody Choir just the cattle, the band, or the audience?
Despite the mostly serious subject mater, it would be wrong to mistake Richards's songs for the man. He enjoys a joke - the sly kind. A Latin dedication on the sleeve of Choir, "Cogito sumere potum alterum", translates as "I think I'll have another drink". Nothing about the band, including the op-shop suits and facial growth, sets them out from the crowd. It's their music that does that.
Williams, an apparently cheery soul who flits between the drum kit for Augie March and paying bills in "the hospitality industry", opens the batting. "I'll never pretend to know what a hit song is," he says. "There are times when I've loved a song and no-one else likes it at all. But a thing often said to me after "One Crowded Hour" won the Hottest 100 was that this was a band that barely even does any promo, so it was an example of the song speaking to a lot of people. It got out there, people heard it, but it's not like people know what we look like on the street."
At the table with Williams, Richards and Donovan are bassist Edmondo Ammendola and keyboard player Kiernan Box, who carries a copy of Geoffrey Blainey's "Our Side of the Country", a history of Victoria.
Mid-2008, the band adjourned to New Zealand to record their fourth album, Watch Me Disappear, at Neil Finn's Auckland studio. The plan was to escape the myriad distractions of recording in a home city and focus on the job at hand. In what seems to be the usual Augie style, things did not run particularly smoothly, with technical problems, slowing things down in New Zealand and more work to be done when they got back to Melbourne.
"It was nice hearing from Neil Finn," Richards says. "He said, 'There's a reason why things go wrong. These albums shouldn't be easy, they should be hard to do.' I heard that from five or six people who had something to do with the record: 'It's not going to be any good if it's not difficult.'"
As the afternoon progresses, a picture emerges of the reality of creative life in Australia - particularly if you value art before commerce. Augie March aren't unhappy with their lot, but for a band still trying to consolidate a commercial foothold there's more hard grind than romance. "There's a lot of talk about how liberating the internet is for bands," says Richards, "and it's true to an extent. It's fantastic for a band starting out to be able to network under its own steam, to travel to other countries and have an audience. But ultimately, it hasn't changed a thing. You are very much at the mercy of radio stations as to whether you advance. With years of hard work we've made a small mark. Is it another 12 years before we get twice as much?"
When appealing to the lowest common denominator gives you a better shot at success than producing quality songs with something to say, it's heartening that Augie March has prospered at all.
Like many of the great lyricists in rock music, Glenn Richards was born not to a world of books and poetry but to a solid working class family. His parents ran a Shepparton small business. Country Scale and Equipment, selling everything from cash registers to weighbridges.
"We weren't discouraged from reading," Richards says, but his parents "didn't have the time for those kinds of indulgences, I guess. My brother and I listened to heavy metal when we were growing up; that was as far from the mainstream as you could get. I was attracted to good writers in the young adult area like Robert Westall: "The Machine Gunners" and "The Devil On The Road" had a huge impact. I was raised on Dr Who and The Goodies, anything English from another era. Then I got heavily into Stephen King, like a lot of teenage males do; good storytelling."
His path was set when he enrolled in English Lit at Melbourne University. "When you are doing that you don't get a lot of time for anything else [but reading]. There is every chance you will be doing a couple of subjects that require you to read a novel a week."
Despite the rigours of the course, he did find time to pick up a guitar. By third year he was writing songs.
The core of the members who would make up Augie March met at music courses around Melbourne. One day Donovan said: "I know this guy who writes some songs." When they went around to a house in Abbotsford in Melbourne's east to hear Richards, "write some songs" turned out to be something of an understatement. Richards knew what he wanted to call the band. He'd read everything he could get his hands on by Bellow but couldn't find a copy of "The Adventures of Augie March". "Bellow made the point of coming up with names that absolutely sounded like the characters," Richards says now. "I ordered 'Augie March' in from America and it turned out to be one of my favourites, but the band name had plenty to do with liking the sound of the name."
In 1996, Matt High was working as an A&R man - the one who spots the talent - with BMG and driving around in Sydney listening to a cassette of new bands. "Slowly these amazing songs got stuck in my head," High recalls. "There were other bands with more immediate songs and sounds, but nothing was as good as these. I flew to Melbourne and saw the band playing to 50 people. Glenn had a ponytail and an acoustic guitar, playing these beautiful trippy folk songs with obtuse rock parts." BMG signed the band, and soon after High left the company to become their manager.
Sparks can fly when Augie March are on stage. Richards can be a feisty character, bringing songs to a halt if they aren't going well, or blasting off at malfunctioning equipment. "There's no pretence," High says. "I've seen them walk off if it's not happening. They refuse to go through the motions, which is why they don't tour that often. They have to feel like playing the songs, otherwise there is no point." That doesn't make it easy to pay the rent, but easy isn't what the band is about.
The poets Richards read in high school also shaped his songwriting style. "Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, the quite bleak poetry that was prescribed for teenagers at school then. That sticks with you, then you start looking at [T.S.] Elliot. It's probably where the dark side comes from in the songs," he says, laughing.
Ah yes, the dark side. Richards has always balanced that with his gift for a memorable tune and the band's touch for melodic folk-rock. The album Strange Bird is a meditation written in response to the death of the band's first keyboard player, Rob Dawson, in a car accident in January 2001. It contains one of the band's greatest songs, "The Night is a Blackbird", in which Richards sings in his heartbreak tenor: "His father kisses him, his mother misses him, his lady dreams of kissing him, bring back the sun, bring the sun back..." The album sold less than any of their other releases, but Richards remains immensely proud of it.
The subversive element of Choir continues on Watch Me Disappear. The album's title and opening lines can only be a reaction to the band's higher profile ("This light doesn't hide under a bushel anymore / But I don't know what you could use it for...Watch me disappear."). "Mugged by the Mob" is a searing attack on dumbing-down, and most striking of all is the jauntiest song they've ever recorded, "Pennywhistle". "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," Richards says of a song that's clearly about depression. You get the feeling Augie March get a tickle out of inducing a crowd to sing along with lines like "Out of the mouth of a black dog / Out of the terrors of 3am / Out of the dark and whispering fen / I was blind then I could see / Now I'm blind again."
Richards' lyrics read as poetry better than almost anything in rock, and they feature numerous allusions and puns that only work on the printed page. "That's entirely for my own benefit," he says. "It's very much about if you keep yourself interested you'll probably keep other people interested too."
As in any band, there are tensions. "We do have good run-ins," Williams says. "Most of them unremarkable; some you could turn into short stories. You spend 12 years with five guys trying to do the same thing, that's always going to happen.
"The way I see it," he says, "it's like a kaleidoscope. You can't really change who you are but you can turn the kaleidoscope to give different shapes and colours." Richards is not so sure. "Adam was telling me he thinks it's more like seeing someone with a kaleidoscope and hitting the kaleidoscope with a sledgehammer."
So, the sparks still fly in Augie March. On the evidence of Watch Me Disappear, that's a good thing.
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