Calm And Collected

“We beat John Butler, Xavier Rudd, Angus and Julia Stone, and Bernard Fanning – sorry Bernard. Three [awards] seems nice, and in homewares and other design places they always talk about collections of threes, so I'm okay with that,” The Audreys' Taasha Coates says sweetly of her achievements to date with bandmate Tristan Goodall. Since 2006 they've owned their category, the strange beast that is Blues And Roots. But what if The Audreys kept getting nominated for ARIAs, but in different categories? Pop? Children's, or Adult Contemporary (whatever that is)?

“Isn't it just modern music for grown-ups?” Coates offers by way of explanation of the strange thing that is AC. “[But] that's actually what I think I already write, I don't write music for teenagers. But it's not a nice label is it? It sounds a bit MOR, a bit middle of the road.”

Is there something slightly sinister about Adult Contemporary, though, the adult part?

“It makes you think… porn? Look, I could branch out…”

Now, dear reader, we're off. Coates is charming and wicked – don't let looks or sounds deceive. Currently on the road but putting in some pre-tour industry advising at the recent the Sydney Song Summit, Coates has had a chance to slow down, smell the roses and grow. Literally, as she made a human (a gorgeous little boy who she shows pictures of after only the tiniest prompt).

“One afternoon a week I take a class of kids who are doing Certificate IV in Music Business… [After having my son] I'm a lot more in one place than I've ever been before. And so I thought I might just do something a bit more grown-up. It's all the admin/business side of the industry, which bores some people but I find it quite interesting. And they're not all musicians; some of them work as bookers or promoters or venue managers or managers so it's not just musicians, and they're the ones who aren't so keen on it, who sit back and go 'Í don't need to listen, I don't need this stuff.'”

While it's easy to not think about The Audreys as “needing that stuff” either, this last little while has been about exploring what the duo have done over their career to date. Their new release, Collected, a three-album best-of pack, also contains rarities, live takes and other bits we don't usually get to hear. While such bonus material is relatively standard fare these days, the process of gathering it was a new experience for the band. Take, for example, the live stuff (such as new single and video, Train Wreck Blues), which was the type of thing Coates was, strangely, initially against.

“It's something I resisted early on because I didn't want to be self-conscious during the performance, having to listen back to it later, because singing live is a thing that happens in a moment and then it's gone, and so I was nervous about listening back to it and having it change my memory of the night. So I was just being a bit of a prima donna, really, but I think that even maybe, sneakily, our sound engineer had started recording performances, and he justified it by arguing it was for his own purposes, saying he wanted to try out a new desk, or something. Boys and their stuff, you know. But then he dug out some stuff and played it back to me and I thought, 'That's alright, I can live with that.'”  

The idea of a singer being opposed to being recorded might seem strange to we lay people, but it also gives an insight into how the process works for those on the other side, and helps us understand what gets chosen for such a collection as Collected – why it's special stuff. “When you're in the studio you're hearing yourself back in a perfect environment. You've got these really expensive headphones on and an amazing microphone and everyone's really quiet and all you're focusing on is giving a really great performance. But live, there's so many other factors and I wasn't sure I was hitting my marks,” she explains, matter of factly. “But it turns out I'm awesome…” she trails off, then smiles. That wicked smile. And that is awesome.

Coates says the process of coming back from learning to be a grown-up was something she hadn't expected. “I sort of messed the guys around a bit by getting pregnant before the last record came out; we only toured it for three months or so before I took a year off… So we came sort of a long time out of a release and didn't really have anything new to promote. [But after the last ARIA win we thought] 'Let's just gratuitously celebrate that with some kind of compilation thing that we can then use as an excuse to go out touring again.' I'd really missed playing, and I hadn't had a break like that since the band started. I never got out of my trakkie pants – went down the shop once every couple of days to get coffee, and that was my excursion for the week. It was a real shock, I really loved it, but my life went from this big thing which was going out and being in public and meeting people a lot, to this very small thing which was just me and my gorgeous little boy. So it was such a big change, and I loved it, but then we had booked something, I think maybe before he was born, and I said, 'Oh yeah, that'll be fine, he'll be four or five months by then, that'll be fine.' But then as the date got closer, the thought of going on stage was really confronting, but I just got up there and went, 'Now I remember why I loved this so much!'”

One thing Coates can promise is the band won't use the time to write songs about being on the road, and she will do her best not to get too sooky over this new role as a mum. “I'm also really worried that I'm going to start writing really sappy music about my son – somebody stop me!” she jokes. What about making that a new branch – a genre of mummy music? “I don't know, we should make it up. We know what dad rock is, don't we? Maybe it's greying mullets and too-tight jeans, yeah… but I really don't think I'd be a good kids performer because I swear too much. I really don't think that would go down too well with the mums and dads.”