YOU AM I - The Lives Of Others

By Ian McFarlane

Thanks to Tim Rogers, Russell Hopkinson, Kaza Black

This article was originally printed in RHYTHMS magazine Issue #306 (July August 2021)

**One of Australia’s longest running bands, ’90s Alternative heroes YOU AM I, have stamped their mark with a contender for Album Of The Year, The Lives Of Others.**

“I scored a goal but I missed the point” and more wordplay from Tim Rogers

You Am I’s current album, The Lives Of Others, made its debut on the ARIA Chart at #2, kept off the top spot by Delta Goodrem. This is the band’s highest album chart placement since the glory days when they made Australian music history by scoring three consecutive albums debuting at #1 on the national chart – Hi Fi Way (1995), Hourly, Daily (1996) and You Am I’s #4 Record (1998).

That bastion of commercial radio programming Triple M has been playing the single ‘The Waterboy’, which is actually a first. I was thinking, surely they had been played on Triple M back in the day. Certainly on Triple J, 3RRR and 3PBS, but I could have sworn You Am I had some commercial airplay in the past?

Singer-songwriter-guitarist-vocalist Tim Rogers sets me straight, “No, we just got told the other day that Triple M have been playing the band for the first time ever. I love the irony of that. Maybe they might have played ‘Heavy Heart’ once late at night. I say that with no malice at all, it’s absolutely fine. We’re not particularly well known in the way that some of our contemporaries are, or other bands before us who did get a lot of commercial airplay. The little bit has definitely helped and we’re grateful for it but we’re not at a level... we really have to work hard to get heads through the door you know, or to sell records. It’s just a little stroke of luck that it’s worked this time, for no other reason than everyone’s looking for a reason to be happy these days.”

I remember an interview Rogers did with Andrew Denton (Enough Rope) where he was asked “how come you’ve never had a hit single?”, to which he replied, “have you heard my voice?”.

“Yeah well, it’s true. I don’t have a great voice after all. I get bagged all the time; every single show we do someone will barge backstage and say ‘you’re an alcoholic, you’re a drunk, you can’t sing’. It hurts because I try. You Am I are a very powerful band and they’re very difficult to sing with and I haven’t got a strong voice but I’m 25% of the band. I do what I can. If that means we don’t get a big stinking hit then it also means that we don’t have to play the same set every night.”

We’ll get to the live component of the band experience below, but for now let’s examine the new album. As much as I enjoyed those early albums – with the guys in all their alternative rock / mod rock glory – for me The Lives Of Others as well as 2015’s Porridge & Hot Sauce rate as the band’s most consistent and best releases. On The Lives Of Others, tracks such as ‘The Waterboy’, ‘The Third Level’ and the title cut are archetypal You Am I rockers: bold, tough, tuneful and accessible. The acoustic ‘Manliness’ examines the age old conundrum of macho cool. On ‘Rosedale Redux’, ‘DRB Hudson’ and, in particular, ‘Rubbish Day’ they’ve gone all psychedelic. ‘Lookalikes’, as drummer Russell ‘Rusty’ Hopkinson puts it, is “the quiet hero of the record”. (“He’s a very smart man,” Rogers chuckles.)

Those are all Tim Rogers penned tunes. Guitarist/vocalist Davey Lane – no slouch in the song writing stakes – contributes two sterling numbers in ‘We All Went Deaf Overnight’ and ‘I’m My Whole World Tonight’ in which he delivers on his Todd Rundgren / Roy Wood / Raspberries / Cheap Trick mode to perfection. His guitar playing is also pivotal to the overall sound. One only has to listen to his astonishing lead break in ‘Rubbish Day’ – like he’s channelling Jeff Beck circa 1969 – to confirm that he is one of the country’s foremost players.

GETTING THE ALBUM COMPLETED

Because the year 2020 was predominantly taken up with Covid-19 lockdowns, it’s commendable that they got to complete the record. How did they get the album done?

“What a trip it’s been,” says Rogers. “Davey and I managed to get together in Melbourne for a couple of afternoons and Rusty and Andy (Kent, bassist) got together in a room for about two days in Sydney. It seems we talked a lot more than actual performance time. Davey reminded me that all my vocal takes and guitar takes were first or second takes. I was in and out of there pretty quick. Rusty and I like to work fast but Davey and Andy like to take a bit of time.

“Andy’s playing incredibly well. His countenance is very assured, he’s methodical in the way that I’m impulsive. I never tell that guy what to play, haven’t since 1996. Russ creatively is a massive part of what we do and his record collection is our education and his intelligence is our education and his drumming, there’s no one who plays like Russ. And, well, everyone’s in love with Davey, as they should be.”

The first thing you notice is the sonic qualities, as if the musicians have unleashed their inner arena rock predilections. There have been hints of it in the past but this one in particular has a huge drum sound.

“I think a large part of that was Russ being in command of the his own domain really. When we were making records in the States we were instructed by record companies to straighten up. I think Russ felt he was being brow-beaten because he can be a marvellously contained, straight drummer who is right on top of everything but when we’re in a band we get excited and egg each other on. Russ had his own time and own agenda and could play the uber-Hopkinson. Then when we gave the tapes to Paul McKercher, he’s such an old friend of ours, he just knows us inside and out, he worked his magic. I don’t think it’s an accident that it sounds so great and alive, because that spirit is inside us.

“For ‘Rubbish Day’ I had an idea of how I wanted it to be and I told Russ the way I thought the beat should be. He didn’t tell me but he disagreed and did the inverse of what I suggested. So him doing that it’s a far better idea by a million percent. And that inspired Davey to play the way he did. Davey’s and my original demo for that was nothing like the song came out; maybe there was a hint of it. So Russ’ musical knowledge is so far beyond mine. We do have an intuition with each other; I guess that’s 3000 shows playing together. After 30 years we’ve worked out what our relationship is in a lot of ways. When we’re playing in the same room, we have conversations but ironically we figured each other out by not seeing each other.”

Hopkinson’s presence is definitely a major force behind the album. When I spoke to him in Sydney, he explained: “Tim and Davey had sent us a bunch of guitar and vocal things, the bare bones of songs. Andy and I went into Forbes Street studios and we played through those for a couple of days. We ended up doing nine rhythms tracks there. I took the drum tracks home and did some editing or whatever, chose the best takes, all that pre-production stuff. Knocked them into shape, sent them down to Davey. Andy did the same with his bass parts. Davey and Tim just jumped on top of them and fleshed them out. Quite a few songs weren’t at all what Tim was expecting, so it ended up being quite a lot of fun.

“Then I had to move to Perth for the summer, for family reasons, so I found Tone City Studios there with Sam Ford, a good engineer. We just sat there for a few days and I did some drums and percussion and finished everything off and Paul McKercher mixed it in Sydney. He had this system set up where he could stream what he was mixing in real time. I was in Perth walking around the streets with headphones on, listening to tracks. I’d pull out my phone and text Paul, ‘can you EQ the kick drum like this’. It was a weird collaborative but not collaborative approach. Not by our design, there was no way to get together. In the middle of the year we realised that couldn’t happen, so it came together by just passing it around. It’s been really good, a testament to the understanding of how we play that we could do that. I think it does sound like a band.

“When we recorded Porridge & Hot Sauce it was at a place called the House Of Soul in New York, owned by Daptone Records, with this little 8-track machine set up in a house. Just like, I imagine, how people would have recorded at Chess in 1957 and we were all elbow to elbow in a room playing. That was a different way of recording. In some ways that was more difficult because you can’t be loud, you have to respect the process and the playing. There were other times where we’ve recorded in a piecemeal fashion.”

Another part of the process that informed the album’s sound was Hopkinson’s listening habits. “Yeah, I don’t listen to much music that was recorded after about 1972,” he reveals. “I said to Paul I want it to sound like ‘Send Me A Postcard’ by Shocking Blue which is arena rock before there was such a thing, 1969. I just wanted to make it like a big rock thing, it’s what some of the songs deserved. I collect a lot of psychedelic records, and when I heard ‘DRB Hudson’ I’d been listening to things like The Moving Sidewalks’ version of The Beatles’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ a heavy rock version, so that inspired me.

“I was also inspired by a lot of different drum fills. John’s Children’s ‘Remember Thomas A Beckett’ has those big rolling drum fills, so I wanted to keep things lively and exciting. Other tracks then had a different feel to them, taking on other influences. With ‘Rubbish Day’, I’d been listening to a Mexican band called La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata. They’re like Santana on bad drugs. They have one song called ‘Shit City’ and another called ‘Nasty Sex’ and they’re super wild. I just wanted that wigged-out sense, like why is it all of a sudden going Latin. I was saying we’ll do that and everyone’s hitting stuff, it was fun. There’s that searing guitar line that Davey does in the percussion breakdown part. He was saying that’s the closest we’re ever gonna come to sounding like Parachute era Pretty Things.”

GOOD ADVICE

Obviously Rogers’ song writing is a big part of the band’s make-up. You just have to think back on the likes of ‘Berlin Chair’, ‘Purple Sneakers’, ‘Mr. Milk’, ‘Good Mornin’’, ‘What I Don’t Know ’Bout You’, ‘Heavy Heart’, ‘Kick A Hole In The Sky’, ‘Good Advice’ etc, to know that his songs are instantly catchy and indelible. Rogers learned his craft via his love of the likes of The Kinks, The Who, The Move, The Pretty Things, Rush, The Replacements etc., and he’s never shied away from acknowledging that. The irony is that on this album you get all that but there’s little in the way of traditional song structures. He keeps the listener guessing.

“I think it’s because my songs all started out as folk songs,” he explains. “I had the lyrics done and they dictated a lot of the way the structure of the songs came out. I had to do a little bit of shoe-horning but for once I wanted the lyrics to dictate where the songs went. No one’s asked me about that before; we talked about it with the band obviously but I guess a lot of people don’t notice those things like you have. I kind of enjoy that, it can be a little irritating for the listener. I think again after those years when we were with the American companies, they hammered home the structure to me so much. If it was a dozen times it was 12 hundred times.

“It was just maddening because we’d record songs how we heard them and then we’d go back in next day to the studio and it had been chopped up and rearranged by an engineer because whatever record company of the 600 we’ve been on said, ‘no, this is the way a song should be structured’. That destroyed my confidence for about a decade but now it makes me not want to let traditional songs structures be the predictor. If you just feel that this is where the bridge should come in, just do it because no one’s gonna tell us otherwise. There’s no reason to change arrangements just to make it a radio song.”

The Tim Rogers wordplay is alive and well too. He gets to throw out such intriguing lines as: “I scored a goal but I missed the point / Statement made I left the joint” (‘Manliness’); “Geddy Lee on a crutch in a hell of a Rush / I’m goin’ nowhere and he’s got somewhere to be” (‘Lookalikes’); and “Edinburgh, Galway, Nashville, Ulladulla breakin’ my heart in four places” (‘The Waterboy’).

“Yeah, word play amuses me. It keeps me happy and the black dog away and if I can just scribble down some ideas I’m really happy and ready for a drink. So, again that’s my thing and it just gives an extra edge to the songs. Davey brought a lot of other songs. I brought 10 and Davey brought five. He, as much of a musical wunderkind / maestro he is, knows what’s good for the band and he listens as well, he excoriates.”

So then who is the “... Scottish man fronting an American band / Now he lives in Dublin tho’ and I’m in Rosedale lookin’ for ghosts” (‘The Waterboy’)?

“It’s Mike Scott from The Waterboys. Yeah, I’d been listening to a record of theirs called Modern Blues. I was down fishing and drinking beer with my mate Nick (Tischler) who my brother and I started the band with. There were a lot of metaphors clashing. I was in a tinny, out in the ocean fishing with my mate and then we’d get back on land and in my hotel room I’d be sitting and listening to this record over and over again. I’m a big fan of Mike Scott’s. From very early on it seemed he was just someone who’s heart’s so big and he just tried big ideas. Sometimes they don’t work but when they do they’re just beautiful. That song’s about, not seeking inspiration but getting it at exactly the right time.

“And using Australian place names, I think often Australians got told early on, or warned off in rock and roll anyway, to stay away from place names. The likes of Mississippi, Tennessee and Kansas City, they’re all over the American song book. There are examples, someone like Paul or Don and Mickey Thomas would use Australian geography and I thought I want to own this. It’s taken a long while to get it. Coincidently, something like Ulladulla is onomatopoeically so beautiful, it’s brilliant. Those kinds of indigenous names have such a swing to them, they’re just gorgeous, using their vernacular and trying to use it in a respectful way. I was just luxuriating in those beautiful words.”

TAKIN’ IT TO THE STAGE

As I queued up outside The Night Cat, in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, for the band’s first of two sets that night, the air was palpable with excitement. Not only was it the chance to get out and see a band – before the May lockdown hit – but also it was the mighty You Am I. They’d been interstate, playing two shows in Brisbane, then a sold out, 1,500 capacity show at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre.

The Night Cat is a club about a fifth the size of the Enmore but the band played like they were fronting a whole arena. The stage is in the round, so the audience surrounded the band on all sides. They put in a remarkably assured and commanding performance, one great song after another. For all their wild ’n’ woolly urban bluster, they’re a top notch rock ’n’ roll band with the interaction between band members a joy to behold. Russell Hopkinson, in particular, was an unstoppable force on drums. The audience loved them, spontaneously singing along to the likes of ‘The Waterboy’, ‘Good Mornin’’ and ‘Berlin Chair’. For one band member touring again has been a bittersweet experience.

“Um, it’s been quite confronting actually, yeah,” Rogers reveals. “The plague last year affected my family quite disastrously, overseas and here. My sister’s husband dying from it, my daughter in New York right in the middle of it and my family in Spain being decimated by it. So touring, ah, I’m a little flipped out about being around humans, again. When we toured last time before the plague I was ready to go, I didn’t want to tour anymore, I didn’t want to get on a plane anymore. I just wasn’t interested in being a musician really. I thought it was time to get a job and drink beer, get a bit of sleep every now and then.

“But I love playing with my friends and I love going through this experience with them. So going out and touring, I love not sleeping and not eating, I love all that shit. It does take a bit of a toll but then about the third day in I start getting very jittery again. I want the whole thing, I want the crap food and the mucking around and the no sleep. I love all that but maybe I’m just not match fit. Yeah, I can’t pretend that I’m anyone other than who I am but being on stage, people looking at you, all that noise, it’s actually an uncomfortable experience. Oddly it’s also the only time in the day when I am comfortable, so I make it my mission to do the best I can. If no one was there it would almost make it easier; I’ve done plenty of those shows believe me.”

For Hopkinson, it was an almost cathartic experience to be on the road again. As Willie Nelson sang, “On the road again / Just can’t wait to get on the road again... with my friends”.

“It’s great! It’d been the longest I’ve gone without playing gigs since I was about 16, and that was 40 years ago. Literally over a year without being in a venue and stepping on a stage. It’s work, it’s a fair bit of effort, especially when you’re getting older. We’re loving it though, finishing the night feeling satisfied that we made a bunch of people happy. The feeling from the crowds has been overwhelming in a way. I’m going ‘holy shit, this is fun!’.

“You can rehearse as much as you like, but playing a gig is a different beast. It’s driven by a lot of emotion, a lot less calculated thinking. It’s not off the cuff necessarily but we don’t really rehearse. We don’t stick to a template with every song. We’re just building up to that thing where we’re comfortable again and feel like we’re on top of it all. It takes a while, I think I’m playing pretty well but there’s always room to improve. People seem to be digging it.

Because the stage was in the round, the guys had to walk out and back again to the band room through the audience. In their excitement, punters were trying to hi-five the guys and engage them in conversation. Was that confronting because they were intent on just getting to the stage and then backstage again?

“Well, I don’t know what people want. Do they want to be my best friend? No, we’re a fucken rock band and we cling to each other, we’re best friends, we just want to get backstage and have a drink together. We don’t necessarily play nice on stage, we don’t feel nice on stage, and when we finish we do get a lot of gyp for being impolite and not going out and signing records. I’m so grateful that people are there and I appreciate that they’ve chosen to see us, and three hours after at a pub I’d buy anyone a round of drinks. I’d buy you dinner, talk to you till the sun comes up. We’re there to do a job and despite all appearances we’re actually pretty serious about doing the best show we can.”

They finished the set with a rousing version of ‘Berlin Chair’. Then to a wail of feedback, they did the arena styled salutation to the audience, a series of four-man bows with Rogers kicking out his right leg, just as Lemmy would do at the end of a Motörhead concert. It was a final way of saying, “We are You Am I. We play rock ’n’ roll!”.

You Am I - The Lives Of Others