Some Like It Hot

Like his music, you don’t get the full sense of what Robbie Jalapeno is all about from first opinion. Unassuming and friendly, Robbie’s demeanour is completely at odds with the sullen, brooding nuance of his music. Kitted up in his day-job suit, Jalapeno sips a beer while we discuss the making of Robbie Jalapeno and his affectively named Band Of Faceless Bureaucrats’ new long-player, Carmina de Nihil.

I guess my story is, I began as a musician a long time ago,” Jalapeno announces ominously before laughing. “Really, I started playing and writing my own songs when I was in uni and then after that, when I was living over east. I did it because I wanted to make music, and I gave it away for free because I wanted to share that music without anything else getting in the way.” His admitted dreams of rock stardom were cut short by the rat race, though. “I did what happens to most people, I think, which is I got caught up with regular life,” he explains. “You just get distracted by those things in life we see as normal. Y’know, it’s very rare for someone to hold on to that dream of making music, because it’s very hard to live off it.

"Y’know, it’s very rare for someone to hold on to that dream of making music, because it’s very hard to live off it"

“I came back to it in 2008, I think it was. I just started writing songs again, started playing pubs again and eventually found a few people who wanted to play those songs with me. So I had a different experience, where I went to work for a while and then picked it up again years later, when I moved out here. So it’s been a long road to get here.”

Pegged down somewhere between Tom Waits and an AOR-tinged Nick Cave, the sound of Robbie Jalapeno & The Bureaucrats is the sound of a dingy cellar café at midnight, glass of rouge in hand, smoke trailing around the stage. It’s rough, angular and dirty, and it rides on the timeless cool of countless lounge acts of the past.

Carmina de Nihil is also a product of Jalapeno’s unique worldview. He has kept that passion for direct conversation with the listener, though he is cautious about crowdsourcing (“There’s something a bit dangerous about paying someone to create something; it seems almost undemocratic, almost like the old days of patronage”), and believes that music should always be a balancing act between creator and consumer.

“Y’know, no one writes in a vacuum,” Jalapeno says. “The whole point of music for me is communication. Whether its ideas or concepts or feelings, a lot of it’s about conveying things that there aren’t words for. I think that’s why we have art and why we have music, because there’s so many things that human beings need to communicate with each other where there’s no words; you can’t just write something down and expect to have it mean the same. So I’m always trying to express things with more than words.”