One Man Band

Wolfmother is not dead. They have, however, been sent to the 'resting bands' graveyard and, if the former frontman Andrew Stockdale has his way, the band won't be resurrected. Ever.

“Well, that's the idea”, Stockdale laughs.

At the time of this interview, the fuzzy-haired frontman was living every musician's nightmare – he had become the fodder of journalists everywhere, fielding interview after interview after tweeting, “I'm putting this record out as Andrew Stockdale… It's a different trip now and I need to be true to myself.”

Not only did it come as a surprise to fans, the label also had no idea the now notorious tweet was coming. “Originally no one would listen to me,” muses Stockdale. “I was like, 'I'm gonna go forward as Andrew Stockdale' and they [the label] were like, 'Yeah, yeah sure – sounds good, but you sure you wanna do that?' and then I was like, 'Listen, this is going forward as Andrew Stockdale' and they just kept saying, 'Yeah, yeah sure, one hundred per cent!' Then I thought, I'm gonna tweet this, because if I tweet it then it becomes reality and I'll cop whatever comes out of it. Sometimes you just have to go crazy.”

The band exploded onto the Australian music scene in a fit of glorious fury in 2005, which saw the release of their debut, self-titled album which proved a critical and commercial success. They even managed to snare a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2007 for their single, Woman, which was taken from their debut. Then, in 2008, shit got real. Co-founding members Chris Ross and Myles Heskett left the band citing 'irreconcilable personal and musical differences'.

“I kind of feel as though I had the rug taken out from under my feet by the band,” says Stockdale. “All of the success I had – or we had – it was like, should I turn away from it and go and do something fresh? Or should I try to, like, honour what we'd done and try to make it grow,” Stockdale stops before sighing and continuing. “I sorta did that and it just ended up being a lot more complicated than I thought and it just wasn't inspiring [me] creatively.”

The fuzzy-haired songman adds that staying with the band would have simply been dishonest to Wolfmother's legion of fans. “You're trying to recreate something that doesn't really exist anymore. I felt like I was writing with one foot in the past. It wasn't a block I felt either. I mean, I could write, but I wasn't that connected to it.”

He adds that the decision to euthanase the name wasn't only a relief to him. “When I told the guys that I wasn't going ahead as Wolfmother, I said to them, 'now is the chance to be yourself – you're not replacing someone who's no longer there. We're giving ourselves freedom.'”

The creative pinch Stockdale describes tightened its grip after 2009's Cosmic Egg, the follow-up to the phenomenally successful eponymous debut, was met with a mediocre response. “When we first started there was no benchmark – it was a blank canvas – then when you do something good, it then becomes something you are compared to,” Stockdale admits.

An extraordinarily hard thing to be compared to, really, if you take into consideration the comparisons thrown around when Wolfmother first emerged, mainly of course, to the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and the speed and power of rock'n'roll born in the '70s. “Everyone kept wondering if Cosmic Egg was going to sound as good as Woman or if it would be as good as Joker And The Thief, all that kind of stuff, you know?” sighs Stockdale.

Stockdale insists he was remiss about living up to that something, anything, even if it was their own reputation, adding that if he's not “vibing” a song, it ain't gonna happen. “See,” begins Stockdale, “Woman was just something that I was vibing off at the time. I was like, you know, just having a good time and went into the studio and said, 'I'm gonna write a song today,' and it pretty much took me half an hour and that's where it came from.”

Ultimately, it was the songwriting that gave Stockdale the out from the band moniker. “I remember I had these chords...” he begins before drifting off. “Yeah, these chords for Moving, I had these chords on the banjo and I thought there is no way this is gonna fit with the Wolfmother vibe, but I played it for the band and we just got this groove going straight off the bat!” Stockdale recalls in an excited, halting way – like a child explaining his first visit to the zoo.

“I had been working on the song for six months without even knowing it. I was writing all these different lyrics – stuff like about being on the road or about how people feel better when they're moving, you know? It's about how people shake off their bad vibes by travelling or going somewhere.”

After the rest of the band gave Stockdale their blessing to pursue his creative ambition, it was, he says, all systems go. “Then, I started writing all these songs [on the album]. Like, I've gotten in a van and just recorded these songs on a voice memo on my iPhone. Some of the other songs I've recorded on GarageBand – I actually quite like the sound of GarageBand,” giggles Stockdale. “You know? It's got this certain 'old tape' quality that I like… I was actually gonna put a couple of songs from GarageBand onto the album. There was this song I had at one point – Suitcase – but I decided to step it up and do a proper recording through the desk.”

The resulting album, Keep Moving, has a sound akin to Wolfmother's, but at the same time different – with a noticeable country drifter twang (remember that banjo?) that shifts Stockdale's signature '70s-inspired rock off its axis. “Hopefully,” he sighs, “we won't need to resurrect the name and my music will work.” It's odd to hear an already accomplished muso display such vulnerability about a new release, but Stockdale is unashamedly honest about his nerves and even openly slightly insecure about the new release.

“It will be more than that. I've just come clean,” he suggests with resignation. “I've been getting some amazing feedback from the musical community and now I keep thinking to myself, why didn't I do this sooner?”