Why It Took Geoff Corbett 20 Years To Come Of Age

26 February 2015 | 5:58 pm | Steve Bell

"It’s almost like you’ve reached this point where you’ve unlocked the secrets of the world, but you just can’t be fucked doing anything with them."

It’s always fascinating to see different sides of people you thought you’d come to know a while ago. For the best part of two decades now, the Corbett brothers – Geoff and Ben – have been terrorising the discerning music fans of Brisbane (and beyond) with their chaotic rock beast SixFtHick, but in recent times they’ve both taken to exploring the quieter realms of the music game as well. First, Ben branched out with his project Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side – who’ve been around for over a decade now and released three fine albums – and Geoff has been following suit with his new outfit, Shifting Sands.

For the last couple of years, Shifting Sands – the core of which is Corbett and his long-term confidante Dylan McCormack (also a member of Gentle Ben, as well as being a veteran of numerous fine bands over the journey), joined by recent additions Dan Baebler (SixFtHick), Alex Dunlop (Keep On Dancin’s) and Anna Clifford (Family Jordan) – have been institutions on the Brisbane live scene, but now they’ve parlayed that into the recorded realm with their debut long-player, Beach Coma. It’s an incredibly assured collection of dark noir anthems, bleak and melancholy in places but drenched with enough character and grit to make it a compelling listen. For a band probably often assigned ‘side project’ status purely by dint of its accomplished membership, it’s a resolutely strong opening gambit.

“I’m really happy with it,” Corbett admits of the album. “We knew that there were good songs and we were kinda into the songs, but as an album we were a bit wary, because there’s not really much around that’s been released recently to use as a benchmark. You can’t go, ‘That sounds like so-and-so’s record’, so we felt a bit out in the middle of the ocean. But over time we realised that it holds its own – we don’t know what type of music it is, but it’s good.”

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The crux of Beach Coma was recorded in isolation by Corbett and McCormack – the latter of whom was responsible for much of the musical direction – and this partnership has produced handsome dividends.

“We first went into the studio with a bunch of songs that we thought were finished, and then we got them in the studio and recorded a heap of stuff that we ended up re-recording, because we realised that we were probably too pissed and had to do it in time, and it was going to sound better with other people throwing their stuff around in there as well,” Corbett remembers of the process.

We recorded 18 tracks and eight will never see the light of day. Not because they were inherently bad; just because we lost interest. And they were inherently bad.

“We sort of had the guts of the songs built, and then over time we would go back and re-work stuff, and then it was a process of re-editing everything. There’s songs on there that have obviously got lots of production and are very lush, produced with lots of sounds, and then there are some that are stripped-back to absolutely nothing – that’s kinda the way that we wanted to play it. And also it’s an economical way to do it, because if we’d done every song as a huge production it would have cost us three times as much.

“The luxury we had was that we did go in with a lot of songs, and songs happened along the way – recording that record, we’d go in and do two songs then hang back and mix them; I think there’s 10 songs on the album, but we recorded 18 tracks and eight will never see the light of day. Not because they were inherently bad; just because we lost interest. And they were inherently bad.”

Did they have a clear idea for how they wanted Beach Coma to sound at the outset?

“I had a clear idea on both the way I wanted it to sound and the way that I wanted to deliver the songs, but we had a shared idea on the mood,” Corbett reflects. “Dylan’s really good at going, ‘This is the mood, let’s take the music in this sort of direction’. He’s got a good idea about having that not just in the context of one song, but he’s also good at going, ‘Across the record this is sonically how it’s going to go given that we’ve got all of these different moods and feels coming out in the vocals’. He’s been really good at doing that with the Gentle Ben stuff too, so that’s a win/win situation.”

The lyrics in Shifting Sands songs are Corbett’s domain, and he’s produced a doggedly strong batch for Beach Coma – does he see there being a lyrical theme across the album?

“I just think that it’s a ‘coming of age’ album, in that it’s almost like you’ve reached this point where you’ve unlocked the secrets of the world, but you just can’t be fucked doing anything with them,” he smiles. “It’s looking back, and taking an observer’s role, whereas for a long time I was a willing participant in all sorts of untoward activity.”

Indeed, the lyrics are pretty grim in places – for example, the central “if you leave me… I will overdose and die” conceit of Didn’t I? – and Corbett explains that this is partially due to his vocation as an AOD clinician and the rest derived from hard-fought life lessons.

“Yeah, some of that stuff is drawn obviously from experiences at work, and looking at relationships play out through my work stuff, but also in my private life there’s that sort of feeling,” he laughs. “You come across that. I think sometimes it is a little therapeutic, you could say. Therapeutic with tongue planted firmly in cheek.”

Another of the tracks, Onions And Violins, was first conceived in the nascent days of SixFtHick and has been around for 20 years; how does Corbett feel finally having that committed to tape after all that time?

“Good, yeah,” he concedes. “That’s a pretty different version to how it was originally put out there, but to have a song that’s that old to still lyrically resonate is a good thing. It makes you think, ‘Well, maybe that stuff that we were writing 20 years ago wasn’t all shit’. I mean most of it was shit, but it wasn’t all shit. It’s nice to have a legacy, I suppose.”

Corbett’s actual vocals are a large part of what makes Beach Coma work so well, his style a lot different here than the relatively raucous nature of his work with the ‘Hick that we’re accustomed to.

A lot of people say that it reminds them a lot of early Dave Graney too, and I’m a big fan of that stuff but I didn’t go out of my way to go and make a Dave Graney record.

“It’s different, all ‘up close on the mic’ sort of stuff, and because all of the songs were written with just vocal and acoustic there is that capacity to allow for a little bit of space; space around the lyrics and the melody, but also to allow some vocal timbre to get into the mix too,” he offers. “Which makes it even more sad, because you listen and go, ‘Listen to this old man, he sounds like he can’t be too long for this world – I’d better seize this opportunity while I can. If I listen to these stories of unrequited love I might fucking learn something’.

“Probably the biggest [vocal influences] were Leonard Cohen and Lee Heazlewood. A lot of people say that it reminds them a lot of early Dave Graney too, and I’m a big fan of that stuff but I didn’t go out of my way to go and make a Dave Graney record. And there’s definitely a bit of that late-‘60s/early-‘70s balladeer sorta stuff, and a little bit of Neil Diamond. It’s quite like Neil Diamond, if you imagine Neil Diamond with terminal cancer on a respirator – that’s the vibe we’re going for, palliative care Neil Diamond. That’s actually a great name for an album.”

And now it’s time to set Beach Coma free into the world, Corbett explaining that they’ve been building towards the album launch for a while now.

“We haven’t been playing much of late, just so we can have a good one at the launch,” he reveals. “We’ve got a few new-ish songs that we want to bust out, but we’re a weird band in that we don’t rehearse much – if we’re lucky we’ll get together before a gig – and I think it’s one of those things where you either have the magic on the night or you don’t. And I really like that – having the potential to be horrible or where we’ll all be too pissed, but also having the potential to have those gigs where it all clicks as well. I don’t think that that sort of chemistry comes about through over-rehearsing. I could be wrong though.

"But the best songs on the record just kind of happened – they were written in five minutes – so a lot can be said when it comes to playing live that if you’ve got a bunch of good songs and everyone’s in a good headspace, then you should be able to just play them and mean it without having to rely on muscle memory and stuff like that. You rely more on emotion and the expressionistic quality of the music rather that some sort of rehearsed shit.”