Silly Duffer

"I first discovered it when I was in high school and we were studying Shakespeare,” says Sam Cromack, one-fifth of Brisbane's Ball Park Music. “It was in one of the plays, I can't remember which one, and it's an insult, a Shakespearean insult to call someone a 'puddinghead'. I had a song called Puddinghead which didn't actually make the album, so that's where we first came across the name and the band really liked it. And Daniel [Hanson], our drummer, he looked it up on Urban Dictionary and it says that a puddinghead is a person that is capable of fucking up even the most basics of tasks. It just stuck.

“It's kind of like an insult but it's friendly at the same time, kind of like calling someone a 'duffer'. I think we all identified with it, and we started calling one another puddingheads.”

The album isn't really much of a change in direction from their second, Museum. It's poppy and cohesive musically with single She Only Loves Me When I'm There a clear catchy stand-out. Some of the songs on Puddinghead were written recently, while others are much older, and some were even stolen from an album from Cromack's side project My Own Pet Radio that was recorded but never released.

“They were kind of sitting there doing nothing and my bandmates quite liked them and I quite liked them so we sort of redid them for this record. I think on this record, and producing it ourselves, in many ways was an effort from me to be able to have some of the qualities of My Own Pet Radio in this, which probably sounds weird. But it's more just giving myself the opportunity to explore more of my own ideas that I would otherwise have explored on my own.

“There's songs on [Puddinghead] that are about feeling great and feeling really satisfied and ecstatic, and then there are songs that are really miserable. Again there are songs that sound like break-up songs and there are songs that sound like, that are just love songs as well.”

Ball Park Music and their candid lyrics about love, lust and self-hatred tap into a certain Australian suburban mood, something many people can relate to. “I'm just a normal person like everybody else. I think it's easy to process a lot of that kind of imagery and those ideas and put it back into lyrics in a poetic way using things that are familiar. It's easy for me because that's kind of my life and a lot of other people's lives as well. It's always just been something that's felt really natural.”

But Cromack doesn't think that means that their sound is particularly 'Australian' per se.

“I would say even though, I know personally, I write and draw on a lot of my experience here in Australia, my understanding is that I don't think our band has an especially Australian sound necessarily, maybe it does, I don't know, maybe I'm the wrong person to ask... Like The Drones, The Drones are like very Australian-sounding in a good way, whereas when I listen to us I think we have spent a lot more time imitating the stylings of a lot of indie and alternative bands from the UK and the US. I don't think we seek to necessarily be like flying the flag for Australia in our music.”

He reckons there's no particular mood or political agenda in the Brisbane music scene currently, or at least, nothing akin to that predominant for The Saints and more during the Bjelke-Petersen years (1968 - 1987). 

“I don't know if you've ever heard of the book called Pig City, it's about the Brisbane music scene during the Joh Bjelke-Petersen years, he was an old – I think he was a National – Premier in Queensland for a long time. He was pretty notorious. And there were heaps of bands at that time acting out against the mood in the state, whereas I don't think we really have anything like that. I don't think we have a really angry or political agenda, most people are writing songs from a personal point of view.

“[Now] the government in Queensland changed hands only a year or so ago and now the LNP has a massive majority there and there have been a lot of changes in Queensland. The mood is probably changing a little bit. I do sometimes wonder if any of the music or just arts scene in general will start to mirror what people feel. But realistically I don't think the changes are constricting people that badly. What's worse than having musicians fucking bitch and moan about politics? It's such a hypocritical thing, I think. I've always been of the belief that singing your song, playing your guitar, isn't going to change a whole lot.”