Total Control

The free Music, Melbourne + Me: 40 Years Of Mushroom exhibition at RMIT Gallery closed at the conclusion of White Night in February, but Dan Sultan helped out on opening night by performing a couple of numbers. “It was quite an honour I think,” the singer/guitarist, seated opposite in the booth of a brand spanking new café in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg, acknowledges. “To be part of Melbourne history and to be on the [Mushroom] roster is one thing, but then to be able to play a few songs and a little bit of a showcase. And I think [Michael] Gudinski wanted to show everyone what he was on about [laughs], 'cause I think he's been revving it up for a while since we signed.” Sultan agrees Gudinski's a great one to be championing him, adding, “I feel very well looked after at this stage. Yeah, it's good.” 

The café's paint job matches Sultan's eyes. The hesitant star looks reasonably content sipping on his sparkling mineral water, after admitting he still hates being interviewed at the beginning of our chat. Sultan is also in extra-fine voice at the moment, which probably comes down to cleaner living. “A little bit cleaner living,” he allows. “I still have my moments. Cleaner. Mostly. Yeah.”

The first taste of new Sultan dropped at the end of last year via Under Your Skin, the first single from latest album Blackbird (his third). If you've watched the video, you'll understand what we mean when we say that a blooper reel would make for quality viewing. There's a lot of dancers getting all up in Sultan's grill and he even gets licked and bitten. “We were all pretty close,” Sultan stresses, “one of them is my cousin [Kaine Sultan-Babij] and the other one I've known from, you know, 13 or 14 years old. And the others – everyone else I've known for quite a while anyway, 'cause they were all the Bangarra dancers and we worked together for Bran Nue Dae and a couple of things. It was good fun.”

Other than Under My Skin, are there any other tracks that Sultan has already performed live? “No.” There's another cut on the album, Kimberley Calling, which sounds familiar. “Oh actually, yes! Maybe once or twice I've played that, but not a long time ago.”

As soon as Jacquire King's name was thrown into the ring to produce Blackbird, it was important “to see if [they] would click”, Sultan says. So the pair had a phone conversation a month or two before Sultan went over to start work on the album. “We spoke for about half an hour, 40 minutes,” he recalls. “For the first five minutes we spoke about the record and then for the rest of the time we just talked shit, you know. We just became friends, really. It was pretty instant. We knew pretty much straight away we'd be okay.”

Cutting an album in Nashville has gotta be an appealing prospect and the studio's name also became the long-player's title. “He works out of a studio, Blackbird Studios, which is what the album's named after,” Sultan clarifies. “It's just an amazing place to work – incredible – a lot of great musicians have made records there… There's a guitar there that a lot of them engraved their name into and I had a look at that – you know, Neil Young, Buddy Guy… just to name a couple – and they asked me to put my name on it, so that was pretty cool.”

Recording kept them pretty busy (“We'd have breakfast together, we'd go to the studio in the morning and stay there for about 12 hours, 13 hours and then go home and go to bed”), but Sultan did manage to explore a little. “We went down to Memphis, we went to Graceland and it was closed at the time – well, the mansion was closed, so we didn't get to see it – but we went into the museum and that was cool. So what we also did was go to the Stax Museum and that's the old studio, you know, and we stood in that room where all those songs were recorded and all those people worked and that was pretty special. And especially because we were in the middle of making a record ourselves. So that was something that sticks out in the memory.”

When you listen to Blackbird through headphones, the varied instrumentation that's utilised from track to track rises from the mix. Are those castanets we hear on Waiting On The End Of The Phone? “I think there's a bit in there, yeah,” Sultan allows. “We had a great percussionist and I actually wasn't in there while he was doing the percussion because we had to come back for a show, and then I had to go back [to the States]. So I was back [in Australia] for three days and in those three days he'd done the percussion, but I was getting sent photos and he had a pretty amazing set-up. He had a lot of objects that he was gettin' some cool sounds out of. I really like those castanets.”

There are also some bells that call to mind Red Right Hand by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in Sultan's latest single, The Same Man. “Yeah, the death bells, we utilised those in a coupla tracks actually,” he recalls. “The percussionist had a lot of that shit, like, sheets of iron – you know the [demonstrates a howling wind kind of sound] when he'd just shake it.” A bit Rolf Harris-like, the wobble board? Sultan laughs, “Well, maybe not, but, um, it sort of sounded a bit like thundering, you know? At the start of Nobody Knows there's just a big kind of swooping into the song, so there's a whole bunch of stuff in there that I'm still figuring [out] today.”

It's clear that Sultan appreciated King's approach and the way the producer suggested improvements: “He'd do it in a way [where] it was up to us to figure it out. He'd tell us what he was thinking as an idea and the things that he would need, or that he felt that he needed, out of a particular session if we weren't quite getting it, or if we needed to do a bit more with it, you know. But then he'd leave it up to us to figure out what that is, and then he'd let us know if we had it or not. And if we didn't, we'd just keep working. And if we did, then we'd run it… It was a great experience and Jacquire; he's really good to work with. We all learnt a lot working with him.”

The first time this scribe interviewed Sultan was after one of his gigs back in January 2010, on the steps outside Corner Hotel's stage door. The film version of Bran Nue Dae, in which Sultan plays a character called Lester, had just hit cinemas and our scheduled interview was something Sultan wasn't aware of. “I'm a lot more, well, in control and I'm also taking a lot more responsibility for it,” Sultan reflects on the changes that have occurred over the past four years or so. “My work ethic's up because I'm motivated and I'm not having to deal with something like that. And, you know, there's a lot that I can't really say – that I don't really wanna say – about Buzz [Thompson, former manager] and Scott [Wilson, former songwriting partner], from the past, because it was really just horrible for me for a long time and I don't wanna have an article with any bad blood or anything like that. Because of that, and because of the way things used to be run, I wasn't that motivated and I didn't care, you know, and I wasn't happy and I was very disappointed a lot of the time. And now I feel like I'm – again, more in control, a lot happier and I feel like things are going in the direction that they should be rather than, I dunno, rather than feeling like I was helpless and I'm just kinda being taken along for a ride that I don't particularly wanna be on, you know? It's good to have the freedom to write with whoever I want, or not write with whoever I want.”

When asked whether he has any fantasy songwriting partners, Sultan doesn't hesitate: “Oh, yeah, there's a few. Josh Homme's awesome. He writes some amazing stuff. One day in a perfect world I'd love to write a song or two with him… But I'd like to just meet him let alone anything else. I'm a big fan of his. Yeah, but other than that: Nick Cave.”