Big Bad Bird

29 August 2012 | 10:12 am | Steve Bell

"I love Pavement, The Velvet Underground and The Go-Betweens – they’re my Holy Trinity."

The mixing notes that The Stress Of Leisure's frontman and songwriter Ian Powne gave to esteemed engineer/producer Magoo when he was gearing up to mix their fourth album Cassowary tellingly contain a pie chart outlining the proportions of the album's various themes: the 'Death/Survival' slice is the biggest, followed closely by 'Queensland Tropics' and 'Love/Lust' with 'Ennui' and 'Nightclubs' bringing up the field. A somewhat strange thematic mix one would imagine, but one that seems totally natural for Powne and his crew.

“I'm a bit embarrassed about the ennui,” the singer laughs. “That's ennui in there, and that's a bit too serious, earnest singer-songwriter crap – so I think I'd swap that with nightclubs and make nightclubs have a bigger portion than ennui, but that's just probably me being defensive.”

Powne certainly has an idiosyncratic approach to his craft, an inkling confirmed when divulging how the whole Cassowary project came into being.

“I put titles on a page – album titles or something – and if I like an album title I'll usually stick with it,” Powne concedes of his songwriting process. “Cassowary was just a name that I kept coming back to and I got fascinated with it. Everyone I speak to about it ends up going, 'This bird is awesome!', so it just kind of had its own energy. I thought I'd use that energy for the overall working title of the project, and I'd just think, 'What does it mean having Cassowary as the title?' and after that I'd just fill it in from there.

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“So the thought process was basically; 'Obviously it's a tropical setting, so I've got to put more tropical imagery in there' – not force it, but let it come naturally – which is why you've got song titles like Sex On The Beach, even though it's not directly set on the beach the title alone makes you think of that tropical imagery. And songs like Shark Killer and Scuba Dive Honeymoon Hell, they're all playing on that imagery of the tropics. I guess the more you delve into something the more it makes sense at the time – I guarantee in two years time I won't be able to explain any of this, I won't know what I was thinking.”

This instinctual approach has paid handsome dividends – Cassowary a great follow-up 2010's underrated Soft Approach album – but Powne stresses that it wasn't always about following gut feel.

“There are things that were a bit more forced that still worked though,” he continues. “A song title like Endangered Species is obviously a direct link to the cassowary being an endangered animal, but that was more thinking about how The Flaming Lips' [1999 album] The Soft Bulletin was all about keeping death away and the race for the prize – doctors and scientists trying to create a cure for cancer – and I think our last two albums have all been swept up in that death and survival play-off, it's an ongoing theme in what I do, which is another reason why it fits so instinctively.”

Previous The Stress Of Leisure albums all seemed to be set firmly in the urban realm – songs such as House And Garden, Death On The Magic Mile and Apartment To Apartment all dealing with inner-city issues – whereas Cassowary is definitely and fittingly located in the tropics.

“It's a deliberate kind of push up north, because when you think of your own backyard and what's happening there's so many interesting stories that are set in Queensland that I think the rest of the world finds interesting as well,” Powne offers. “If you look at the setting for Scuba Dive Honeymoon Hell, it's obviously starting from Tina and Gabe Watson and their case – not necessarily about it, it's more about how the public get swept up in these stories, like the recent Baden-Clay murder case. It's the stuff that's happening in our own backyard which I find fascinating. So I guess it was a deliberate push away from the city, and looking more across Queensland – it is quite a distinctive state within Australia, there's people with very set ways which makes for interesting stories I think.”

Musically Cassowary is a strong offering, the first to sound completely like a cohesive band effort and not betray The Stress Of Leisure's origins as a solo project for Powne and his writing.

“I guess it takes a while – when new people come into a band I think you immediately feel the strength of the way they play and the feel of it, but you don't necessarily get the character of it straight away,” he reflects. “I think the last 18 months has been a way of saying, 'Hang on, how do I get everybody interacting? How do we get that collaborative feel of a band moving together instead of just that singer-songwriter perspective?', which I think the other albums have been more grounded in. This one has been a more concerted effort to get Pas [Burton – keys/vocals] working more in terms of the keyboards and the synth lines, and Ben [Moore – bass] and Jess [Moore – drums] mould into their own feel now as well.

“The more you play with people the more you understand how they work best, so with that in mind the aim was to get everyone feeling good about the songs – when you get a good feeling from the songs they end up with their own energy and end up easier to play and record. So it's more collaborative – at the end I guess once I'd worked out the direction of the album I sought more collaboration to bring that vibe out more, and everyone ended up contributing specific parts to the process.”

Powne's sonic inspiration for this batch of songs goes beyond the key players that have informed his past work, delving further back in time to find a template for his musings.

“I think it evolves all the time but I love Pavement, The Velvet Underground and The Go-Betweens – they're my Holy Trinity,” he offers of his musical heroes. “But I love so many other things; at the moment I'm really into The Fall, Talking Heads and Wire. I think this album's sound – and the sound that I think I'm getting most comfortable playing with the four of us – is that late-'70s post-punk and early-'80s new wave feels. I think it's that aesthetic in the last couple of years which has really influenced this writing – things like Talking Heads' Fear Of Music (1979), The Fall's Hex Enduction Hour (1982), X-Ray Spex' Germ Free Adolescence (1978), Wire's Chairs Missing (1978), Devo's Freedom Of Choice (1980) – those sort of things I think, tying in with the Holy Trinity, that's where you get Cassowary. I really love that late-'70s sound, I must have grown up with that ingrained in me, so that drier sound from the '70s to the '90s to now must really work for me.”