The Thin Black Line

28 August 2012 | 6:45 am | Chris Hayden

"So when it was done I got out of Australia because I needed a fresh perspective on things. I went across there (to Paris) and played some gigs and just lived life. I really feed off the energy of Europe. It’s just an amazing place and I loved being there."

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The phrase 'Ten Pound Pom' was used back in the day to describe British subjects who migrated to Australia after World War Two. The idea was that Australia's population could be increased with white Anglo-Saxons to supply workers for our then booming industries if we offered safe passage for the cheap-as-chips price of ten pounds. Kids travelled free. Funnily enough, both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbot are products of this scheme which, when you consider their respective stances on immigration today, is massively ironic. Another beneficiary of this wave of immigrants is Blackchords lead singer Nick Millwright. As the son of an Englishman, he is the proud holder of a British passport that gives him free rein throughout the UK and Europe – a document which by now would be fairly well stamped. Millwright has spent the better part of the last five years yo-yoing between Europe and Australia in the pursuit of musical and personal satisfaction.

Writing and recording Blackchords' first album in Melbourne, Millwright didn't exactly have lofty expectations for his work. In fact, immediately after finishing the self-titled effort, he decamped straight to Paris – where he remained for a year. “The first record in some respects was something that I needed to do,” he explains through what sounds like a pretty gnarly head cold. “Getting out of Australia also, was something that I needed. The band was in a strange place; we were going through lineup changes and at the time I just felt like the album could not happen. I just made the decision that I had to make that first record because if I didn't I might not ever actually make a record at all.

“So when it was done I got out of Australia because I needed a fresh perspective on things. I went across there (to Paris) and played some gigs and just lived life. I really feed off the energy of Europe. It's just an amazing place and I loved being there. After a while our manager had started pushing the record over here [Australia], which started to give it a bit of a life. So that's when I came back and put a band back together and started trying to make it happen. It was kind of clear for Damien [Cazaly, guitar] and I especially, that being in Australia was what we had to do to make it work.”

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After releasing their debut to much acclaim and touring through Australia several times, the Euro-bug bit again for Millwright and co, as Blackchords set out again for what would become almost six months of travelling and gigging. Living on couches and sleeping rough may seem like a tough slog for that amount of time, but evidently the lads had a ball.

“We spent six or seven weeks the first time round and the second time it was for three or four months. We'd spent a lot of the year on the road in Australia and Europe so I look back now and think, yeah it was probably the best year of my life. Just generally being on the road and getting that energy and that match fitness, really knowing what each member is going to do and being able to feed off the energy of that. We were spending months at a time doing exactly what we wished we could do in our lives and living what we dreamed of doing.”

A lot of bands spend fruitless time on the road in Europe, moving from Autobahn to café floor and not really having a lot of impact. However, for Blackchords, the combination of persistence and quality work started paying off when they began to get the attention of several far-flung college stations. Millwright knew it would be a long road, but he sounds genuinely grateful when describing the effect this airplay had. “It's funny watching the crowd's reaction from place to place,” he says. “When we were touring in France we had a really receptive audience. We'd been getting some airplay on this college radio station over there so we'd get to the chorus of the song and everyone would just start singing along, which we've never had before – even in Australia. So that was amazing.”

After such an unexpected reaction overseas, combined with a growing amount of success back home in Australia (Blackchords were personally asked by Ian Haug to open Powderfinger's final ever Melbourne show at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl), the expectations for album number two were high, not least from the band themselves. In talking about the writing process for the potentially “difficult second album” Millwright reveals that things didn't always go according to plan. “We attempted to start writing it while we were on the road,” he begins.

“For me it was a very strange and tough experience. The first record was something I very much did on my own – I kind of wrote it all in my bedroom, they were my songs and I didn't have to worry about what anyone else thought. When we started trying to write on the road, we were playing for an audience every night so I started writing for that audience and I just kept thinking 'It has to sound like this or has to sound like that.' That was really difficult and counter-productive in creating something that I actually believed in. A lot of that material just got lost along the way; we never really connected with it.”

So, writing on the road: no good. Surely the band could return to their native Melbourne and sort things out though? The comfort of home is almost always a more conducive writing environment when compared to the perils of trying to piece together your masterpiece in the midst of a crazy European tour. Right? Wrong. “When we came back to Melbourne we started putting pressure of ourselves, feeling like we should've written a lot more songs on the road,” Millwright laughs, although you'd imagine it wasn't particularly funny at the time. “We went through this 'we have to write' phase because we knew people were going to hear it, and again we just put a lot of pressure on ourselves and I just got into that writer's block mode – thinking that everything I did was a piece of crap. That was really frustrating and kind of scary wondering whether or not I could write anything at all.”

In the end, it was all about getting back to nature. Blackchords found that when the time came to put together their second record, the swirling, infectious British-influenced pop of A Thin Line, it was best to just remove the pressure, make themselves completely comfortable and get back to what they do best. “Finally, about the middle of last year we hired a house out in the country and just set up in the lounge room with all our equipment. We'd wake up in the morning, drink coffee and eat food and kind of hang out in the bush and casually start playing music. A lot of the material came out of those sessions. That was really where it all happened.”

Blackchords will be playing the following shows:

Saturday 1 September - FBi Social, Sydney NSW
Saturday 8 September - Jive Bar, Adelaide SA
Friday 14 September - The Evelyn Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 15 September - The Bridge Hotel, Castlemaine VIC
Thursday 20 September - Karova Lounge, Ballarat VIC
Saturday 22 September - Westernport Hotel, San Remo VIC
Saturday 29 September - Ric's Bar, Brisbane QLD