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Friday November 21st
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· Empire Hotel: Hal's Teef
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· Murphy's Irish Bar: Amanda Goodwin and Joe Setefano
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06 April, 2008
The Verlaines talk to Jeff Harford on the release of 'Potboiler'
Page 4
The Verlaines talk to Jeff Harford on the release of 'Potboiler'
Page 4
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GD: Well, the songs were there. I kind of felt that I should get something out, particularly because you stand up there in front of a class and pretend you know something about the art of song-writing, so it’s a good idea to have something out there . . .
DS: Because you know what they say: If you can’t do, teach. So you have to keep out there, really.
GD: As part of my job, I have to publish anyway. That’s the nature of the beast. So it’s one of the things I’m publishing at the moment. I’m going to try and publish more because I want to be active, so that I can be a decent teacher, so that I can say ‘I’m doing it too.’
As a teacher, surrounded by young musicians, presumably you could cherry-pick from any number of people to work with. But this is a Verlaines album and it’s with your old cronies. Because?
GD: Because they wanted to do it. As I said, Russ was the prime motivator . . .
Did you have to be talked into it?
GD: I can’t even remember the chronology of events, but it just sort of coincided with a time when I was doing a pre-production lecture with the second-year students. I played them the songs of the Sibelius files that we did with the horn section etc for National Anthem. I hadn’t looked at them for a couple of years – this was 2006 – and I thought the cohesion of it as an arrangement meant you could probably go into the studio, even though we only spent two hours together as a whole unit, and record it. Then it was a case or Russ being keen, the songs were lying around, and I just started doing the same process with all of them – throwing them up on Sibelius and getting the arrangement to work, then throwing the karaoke things to Darren and Russ.
DS: We also had access to a studio – a fantastic-sounding room, a good environment. And it wasn’t $1200 a day! We were literally rehearsing between Christmas and New Year, stealing time between family do’s. It was kind of surreal, thinking ‘What am I doing here, making an album? I don’t even know these songs.’ You had to trust in it.
GD: The motto was ‘If you trust the score, it will be all right!” Well, we trusted the score.
DS: And if it had been shit, we wouldn’t have put it out. None of us are relying on it for income or anything.
GD: Even if some of the tracks are failures . . . This is another thing that I do with my students. I have a lecture for that whole pre-production thing on songs I have murdered. Songs I should never have allowed to be born. You start to understand this when you put out a Verlaines Best-Of. You have 100 songs registered with Apra and you go ‘What were you thinking?’ for most of them. Over the years, you learn to hear the square-peg, round-hole things where you couldn’t hear them before. But the hits were hits for that reason. They don’t have a lot of those problems and generally they work quite well. It’s something that seems to happen in the whole sifting process of popular culture. Things that sell a record for a period of time will disappear without trace. You’re left with a bunch of stuff that’s the cream of the crop, because art is large and life is short.
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Related artists: Graeme Downes, The Verlaines
