Jebediah Reflect On 'Slightly Odway': We Have A Few Regrets

24 March 2015 | 2:38 pm | Mark Neilsen

The band take us back to the beginning ahead of their upcoming 20th anniversary tour.

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Kevin Mitchell: By the time we went to do Slightly Odway, the band had only been together for two years and I think we were in that beginning period where literally every time we were in a room together it was very rare that we would walk out without something new. The songwriting happened really fast and I think that was just because we were…
 
Vanessa Thornton: …excited…
 
KM: …learning at a really fast rate.
 
Brett Mitchell: When you only know three chords, every new chord is a massive increase.
 
Chris Daymond: Learnt a new chord, let’s write a new song.
 
KM: We were very prolific.
 
Guitarist Chris during the making of Slightly Odway
 
CD: And we were playing as many gigs as we could get our hands on as well. And I’ve got setlists of earlier shows where we’ve played every song basically we had. And it may be half an hour long setlist or something like that, but it’s got everything. But Slightly Odway was at least a year or so after [1996 debut EP] Twitch, so we did write pretty quickly. 
 
VT: That time we did the Falls Festival, which would have been the end of ’96. We played three new songs that day. So from the shows we would have done like a few weeks earlier, between then and Falls, we’ve played three new songs.
 
 
KM: I do also remember in those first years of writing songs leading up to Slightly Odway that I never really felt like lyrics were all that important. I always thought that the melodies and all the other things that were going on in a song, that was the immediate bit.
 
BM: That’s where the energy comes from, isn’t it?
 
KM: And I thought that’s mostly what people were responding to. We hadn’t made any records, all we were doing was playing live and most people don’t understand what I’m singing. We would often play new songs that I hadn’t even written lyrics for and I’d just sing nonsense into the microphone. So I think when we went in to make that record, I was coming from a background of just live shows where no one was really listening to the words. Of course when you start making records and the vocals are right up the front, the words suddenly become important. I think it’s one thing – and maybe it’s something I was relatively good at – to write little bite-sized lyrical hooks, but to actually write an entire song that has some decent lyrics is another thing entirely. So I think I was good at throwing out bite-sized words that were memorable, but everything that surrounded those in some songs was gobbledegook.
 
BM: I just think it’s part of being young. When you’re young, you’re informed by your experience as a listener. When you start trying to write stuff and your experience as a listener when you’re young for the most part is it’s all about the feel of it, the energy, it’s not an intellectual, analytical process. So that was how, I think, the writing was approached as well.
 
KM: Our main focus when we were writing songs for Slightly Odway was the live environment. That’s where I think our heads were at the whole time.

 
KM: The aim of the recording was to lay down all our parts. I think Neill [King], who was the producer for the record, his approach as a producer was probably to just capture exactly the personality of the band at that time. I don’t think that there were any big attempts to make us sound like something that we weren’t. In fact some of the songs after we recorded, some of the songs that could be singles, were remixed and beefed up a little bit for radio and even that in itself was a little bit, oh wow, we sounded quite a bit different. Neill didn’t make any of those decisions in the recording process or try to make us sound like a more typical, perhaps American-style radio band or whatever. And we didn’t know any better; we just went in there and recorded our parts. We wanted it to sound good.
 
BM: Whatever that means.
 
KM: Yeah, whatever that means.
 
BM: And I think the climate at the time was such that the record companies, even the majors, they were willing to take these sorts of risks. Maybe it was going to work, maybe it wasn’t, but they had enough faith in the climate at the time, what was going on, that they knew some of these risks would pay off. And I guess this was one that did.
 
KM: It’s amazing to think now, because I certainly didn’t have that perspective at the time, but to think now, about how being signed to Sony – even though we were signed to Murmur, a subsidiary, there was some separation there – but anyway we were pretty much able to do what we wanted.
 
BM: It’s an adolescent dream world really, isn’t it?
 
KM: Yeah. And they really didn’t interfere much at all. Sometimes against their better judgement.
 
 
VT: I think the only record that Neill had done at that stage as a producer was the Menswear record. So all those bands that people reel off after his name he engineered them, but in terms of actually being a producer, at the time he worked with us, he’d done one album.
 
CD: He was awesome.
 
BM: So easygoing. 
 
CD: Even though we were very inexperienced, he didn’t make us feel uncomfortably inexperienced. And I think that was probably really an important part of capturing what it was that we were doing. Because it would be quite easy for a producer to have an agenda and to be pushed by a label to do so, so that it sounds a certain way. And I don’t think it was in any way done like that. I think Neill approached it more as an engineer, just setting us up and making sure we were comfortable; getting good takes. Making sure all the ingredients were in the mix and then moving from that point. So in that way I guess it was strange to work with an inexperienced band and not whipping them into shape. But it was really gentle and I think we enjoyed every single minute of it.
 
"I think the fact that we’re here now 18 years later talking about it, it makes me feel extremely grateful to have had it as part of my life."
 
BM: It was quite a new experience I guess for him as well.
 
KM: When things are successful as that album, because it was successful in most respects, it kind of vindicates everything that precedes it.
 
BM: It’s very easy to look back and say everything was done perfectly and for all the right reasons.
 
KM: If the record hadn’t of achieved anything and we were set on a different course, then we might have said [incredulously], “Oh, how did we end up with Neill? Why didn’t our label get us in the studio with Nick Launay? That would have been the obvious thing to do.” I think it was funny we didn’t go into the studio with a really obvious kind of person to work with us.
 
VT: I think because probably none of them wanted to work with us. They heard the demos and went, “Pfft.”
 
BM: So in the sense there was an air of experiment about it. It could probably have just as easily not worked, but for whatever reason it seemed to.
 
 
CD: Those touches, like sound-wise, especially guitar ones, except for the intro for Invaders, they’re just the pedals we had. I had two pedals and one’s a Jet Phaser and it’s got two settings and I used them all the time.
 
BM: And wasn’t there some kind of novelty, shaky thing…
 
VT: Do you know what, there was a Jew’s harp in Teflon.
 
BM: Yes there was.
 
VT: And a bell tree. Which we did try and take out.
 
CD: Which I guess the exciting part of being in a recording studio and having access to things that you didn’t own. And thinking what would be really nice… Play with it. Just have this idea. “Oh, what’s one of those things called… that’s a bell tree.”
 
Lead vocalist/guitarist Kevin Mitchell
 
KM: Often guided by a sense of humour. Most of those ideas, apart from the cello [on La Di Da Da] – there’s also a car sound effect at the start of Puckdefender, which is taken from a sample library CD – probably all decisions that were guided by mucking around. If it made us have a giggle, then we’d do it. There was definitely a sense of fun in making that record that I don’t think we experienced again until we made the last one.
 
CD: It’s part of the creative process where you’re so enjoying getting your songs recorded that you keep coming up with little ideas, whether they’re good or not. Sometimes they stick and that was the way it went.
 
VT: I mean a lot of that you could probably take off the record and it probably wouldn’t make much difference whether it was there or not.
 
CD: We weren’t purists in terms of rock’n’roll should be rock’n’roll unaffected. We were certainly into affected things. Probably influenced by the state of mind of certain sessions. It’s just having the ability to do it.
 
KM: It’s funny that you say not being purists. It’s true. I can imagine that when a lot of bands or musicians get the opportunity to go in and make their debut record, it’s quite possible that they may have spent many years imagining that when they got into that studio, the kind of record they were going to make and having quite a fierce or determined idea about how they were going to sound when they made their record based on…
 
BM: …other references…
 
KM: …yeah, other references and stuff. And I don’t recall going into making our first record with any strong vision. We wanted it to sound good and we had the bands that we liked and if it sounded a little bit like that, well then that would be good, but I think we were pretty kind of open to whatever happened.
 
VT: We would have just been excited that we were actually going to get to live in Melbourne for a month and actually spend our days in the studio making music and the anticipation and the whole approach to the record would have been more about the experience of it.
 
BM: The studio experience for the first album, I distinctly remember how exciting it was to be in that environment. Even if you weren’t actively recording something – you know, other people were doing their parts – you’d be just investigating and picking things up and shaking them.
 
KM: Maybe some more than others.
 
BM: Or I’d be playing guitar or something, which these days I wouldn’t bother doing because I’m shit, but then it didn’t matter. You’d be investigating things and maybe you’d find something in a box and go, “Oh can we please put this on a song?”
 
KM: You know what else is a cool memory from that session was about halfway through, Midnight Oil moved into the big studio room that we’d just vacated with [producer] Magoo to start making the Redneck Wonderland album. So all of sudden there was genuine Australian music…
 
"I think for a while after Slightly Odway, despite the fact it was successful and stuff, I couldn’t listen to it."
 
CD & BM: …royalty…
 
KM: …and we were just a bunch of kids…
 
BM: …playing pool and ping pong with them…
 
KM: …and then at the end of the session had a big barbeque with them. I remember too, you [turns to Thornton], me and Kim from Fur were sitting outside, probably smoking joints or doing something, and Midnight Oil were recording in the big room and the vocal booth doors – there was a loading area so they opened up into the courtyard – and Peter Garrett was recording vocals and we were sitting right out there while he was recording it. And then all of a sudden the doors flung open and he came racing out there to run to use the toilet I think and come back. Just this massive man comes down and yeah, he just passes by and I think I said hi. It was…
 
CD: …surreal…
 
KM: …yeah surreal and it was exciting and fun. Those are just some little snippets of memories I have stuck in my mind from that time. Because a lot of the details of physically playing the guitar or singing the songs and stuff, I don’t know, they’ve kind of gone a bit hazy.
 
 
Producer Neill King with Vanessa Thornton
 
 
Thornton and King again
 
VT:
Yeah.

 
KM: It’s just these little snippets that stay with you.
 
BM: It was a little bit of that feeling of like when you sneak into something you know you’re not quite supposed to be at and it’s a complete success. You’re like, “This is awesome, I’ve done it.”
 
 
KM: We made at least one choice that we regret.
 
VT: But we did all make that choice together. But we’d written Please Leave at that stage and that didn’t go on the record.
 
KM: I don’t think that song had been finished properly, that’s why. But yeah, the reason I mention Twilight = Dusk, there’s a song on the album called Twilight = Dusk, it’s the second last song. It was written really late in the piece, I don’t think it was ever really demoed, was it?
 
CD: It was, yeah.
 
KM: But I know we made a conscious decision to put that on the record in an attempt to create some…
 
CD: …light and shade…
 
"We made at least one choice that we regret."
 
KM: …light and shade as they say in the showbiz. Some differences in mood.
 
BM: I think we did succeed in doing that. But perhaps it was a little ill-considered.
 
VT: You live and learn.
 
KM: I think our intentions were on the right track. Trying to think of the bigger picture.
 
CD: It was to make a record that had a journey.
 
BM: We knew we were meant to do something like that.
 
KM: When we made Slightly Odway we really had no idea what we were doing. We didn’t come from a background of home recording, none of us had any real experience or particular skills in the studio.
 
VT: Well Pro Tools wasn’t around. It was all four-track. What was that little four-track machine that you had?
 
CD: A little TASCAM we tried to use a couple of times.
 
BM: Too complicated!
 
KM: Yeah, four-tracks did my head in.
 
KM: I think La Di Da Da would have been earmarked as a final song for the record.
 
CD: Always.
 
KM: Just because we had the idea of the singalong thing at the end, and we probably would have earmarked that as a closing song early-ish on. Twilight = Dusk was probably stuck in there.
 
BM: Had to go somewhere, didn’t it?
 
KM: Certainly the intention of that whole light and shade thing – I have to stop saying that though – the intention was there for that. That was supposed to be the effect, but now I think I look back and think we probably had songs that were better and could have been guided by that, but whatever, doesn’t matter.
 
VT: I mean Monument would have fit very easily on that album.
 
BM: I guess this was the time when an album was a work in its own right. Which these days it doesn’t really apply so much, does it?
 
KM: It does if you want it to.
 
BM: Yeah, but you don’t take it as a given that songs aren’t going to basically be just listened to individually. You assume that will happen.
 
KM: Expectations of how people listen to stuff has changed.
 
BM: So it was all part of that understanding, at least in principle, that this was a body of work and it was our first body of work and somewhat naively trying to create something in that image. 
"There was definitely a sense of fun in making that record that I don’t think we experienced again until we made the last one."

 
KM: I was so focused on the Twilight = Dusk regret that I forgot about the Jerks Of Attention regret.
 
BM: This one’s easy enough to explain.
 
VT: That was the third time we’d recorded that song. So we actually recorded it with Chris Dickie after the EP and then we weren’t really vibing on that…
 
KM: …It never got used…
 
VT: …so then we recorded it again with Lindsay Gravina.
 
KM: And that was good.
 
VT: Yeah, But by the time we got to do the record, well we probably thought we were a bit more mature and accomplished…
 
CD: Well our vibe was we wanted it to be part of the recording session of the album. Because we wanted it to be on the album, 100 percent.
 
KM: We could have saved ourselves all the trouble of recording a song that was already recorded well and been played on the radio.
 
CD: But not having any recording experience you think it would be vastly different and maybe do a better job.
 
VT: Maybe we thought it wouldn’t quite fit in with the record that we recorded.
 
CD: We had some ideals for some reason.
 
BM: I think at some point it was suggest by someone that we revisit the song and try to capture a slightly different feel. It’s the basically about the same, but with pot. You don’t do anything faster when you’re stoned, so…
 
CD: No point in doing the same recording twice.
 
KM: My memory of it was we decided that we were going to try and record it closer to the way in which when we first wrote it. Which was slower…
 
VT: Very slow.
 
CD: Very stoned.
 
VT: It’s like we were still learning to play, where are my fingers?
 
BM: Yeah, shouldn’t have done that. But that’s alright.
 
VT: I totally forgot about that. I never think of that, that the record has that version.
 
 
KM: I’m more at ease now with [the album] than I was say ten years ago or maybe even five years ago. I think I’m much more comfortable of just the whole concept of something being what it is. I think for a while after Slightly Odway, despite the fact it was successful and stuff, I couldn’t listen to it. It was like, “It sounds terrible, oh the words are awful, I can’t sing.” Everything about it was just like I couldn’t listen to it.
 
BM: It wasn’t just you, I can assure you that.
 
KM: And now all that has kind of gone away. I actually listened to it for the first time in a long time in my car, because we’ve been talking about doing this whole Twenty thing for 12 months or more. I remember chucking it in my car – because I’ve moved out of Melbourne so I have lots of long drives now – and I listened to it from start to finish and I was like, “You know what? I really enjoy this.” Even though what I used to kind of define as sounding shit, now I don’t define a lot of that anymore. In a way I could hear for the first time perhaps what some other people were hearing. Which was…
 
BM: …somewhat of a revelation after all this time…
 
KM: …something that was sounding different. It did sound different to other stuff.
 
BM: I actually think it’s part of the whole process of learning to love yourself. I’m not talking in a sexual way of course, we can all do that. Accept yourself.
 
"I think I was good at throwing out bite-sized words that were memorable, but everything that surrounded those in some songs was gobbledegook."
 
KM: To become conformable with yourself.
 
BM: It’s a symptom of that.
 
KM: Maybe perhaps being flawed but having good intentions. I think there’s certainly something endearing when I listen to it anyway. It was a pretty honest sounding recording.
 
VT: Full of youthful enthusiasm.
 
BM: The value of honesty is never underestimated either as you get older.
 
CD: I think of it fondly and half of it’s probably got to do with what it allowed me to do in life and the experiences that it generated and the wave that we created with it that we rode and are still riding now in some ways. All of my memories of that time I was lucky to have had the circumstance to be happy – and I’m still happy now – but that part of my life I don’t have any regrets from making the decisions that we did and all that sort of stuff. And I think the fact that we’re here now 18 years later talking about it, it makes me feel extremely grateful to have had it as part of my life.
 
All images by Chris Daymond