From Ice-Cream Making To The Name On Everyone's Lips

Marlon Williams is sitting in the backyard of his current Melbourne digs (aka Yarra Hotel, which means the backyard is actually a beer garden), so it seems compulsory to order a jug of beer. He’s casually dressed in ripped black jeans and button-up polka dot shirt under khaki military jumper, which is all capped off by a souvenir trucker hat from Meredith Music Festival. 

Williams was the name on everyone’s lips at another highlight on our annual festival calendar, Queenscliff Music Festival, last year. So much so that it was impossible for latecomers to even dream of squeezing into his last scheduled performance for the weekend at Salt Contemporary Art Gallery. One of the album tracks Williams performed that day was When I Was A Young Girl and (of course) the audience always chuckle when he introduces this song. Does that shit him? “Nah, I’m sort of baiting it,” he admits. Smiles rapidly disappear from dials, however, as the devastating ditty unfurls. “I heard it first on a recording by this woman called Barbara Dane and that’s the version I most closely took it off,” Williams shares. “And then I didn’t hear any other version until I’d been playing it for quite a while and then I heard Feist’s version.” Feist’s version is certainly unusual and could accompany a conga line. “I know. It’s like a fuckin’ elevator song,” Williams laughs. “Yeah, I only heard that pretty recently and, Jesus! It’s pretty strange. I’m just gonna grab an ashtray.”

In Williams’ absence, this scribe recalls the singer-songwriter mentioning he was in need of a ride back to Melbourne at the conclusion of this aforementioned Sunday arvo gig at Queenscliff Music Festival. Williams returns. He rolls his own durries and smokes a fair few throughout our chat. So how did he go with that lift mission? “Got it. Yeah,” he confirms. “This lovely woman Jo gave us a ride back. It was me and it was Archer, who was singing at the festival too, and my friend Flora – so, three of us and equipment, yeah. Jo was on her own so we gave her some company. And the weird thing is that last weekend I was in Nannup, which is a little town in WA, at a festival and she came up. Like, I randomly saw her at this bar – it was a wave from a distance. She was from Perth originally, but she’s been living in Victoria for quite a long time so it took me ages to work out who she was and, you know, it finally clicked.”

Did Williams fork out for petrol money? He nods while lighting a cigarette. “You gotta keep the yin and the yang balanced, especially as a touring musician. You can come to the end of a tour and find yourself feeling like you’re indebted to people, ‘cause there’s so many beds you’re staying in, and you rely so much on other people that it’s hard to get out of that mind frame when you come home. And I think it’s a real, like, psychological syndrome when you’re a touring artist: you can’t get out of that frame of mind that people are there to be used.”

Williams hails from Lyttelton in New Zealand, which was at “the epicentre” of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. “It happened sort of under the tunnel that goes from Lyttelton to Christchurch,” Williams explains. ”I was down at the café in the township planning an album with Delaney Davidson that we eventually put out. We finished recording it a year to the day after the earthquake, but all we’d written was ‘Ghost Songs’ on a piece of paper, and we were just chatting about that, and then the earthquake happened and we ran out in the street.

“There were certainly songs on what turned out to be that album [Sad But True – The Secret History Of Country Music Songwriting Volume 1] that were written about the earthquake so, you know, it’s funny how you set out to write an album and then from the get-go you’re influenced by what happens around you.”

If you’ve watched/read up on any sort of survival techniques, the earthquake image that springs to mind is panicked people bolting toward door frames. “I mean, you’re meant to find a solid frame or something but the problem was that there’s not enough frames for, like, a café full of people; there was about 50 people in this café. [It’s] just a kneejerk reaction to be out of wherever and then you realise that you have to run for kilometres and kilometres to get out of the way of it, you know. It’s not an option to run, really. You feel the ground drop and you feel, like, your insides drop with it. Then windows start going out and it’s – yeah, it’s pretty hideous. And then, from then on, afterwards, you never trust the earth anymore. It’s a really strange feeling. Even when you’re at your most calm and just out in the middle of nowhere in nature, you just remember that it’s not a guarantee because you’re away from the cities a little bit. It’s like – not trusting nature is an interesting lesson to learn.”

But then Williams considers: “Certainly it could be argued that it did a lot for the Christchurch music scene, in a way… It did feel a little bit like the music scene, and the town, was really buzzing and it’s easy to say this in retrospect, but it sort of felt like it was at the cusp of something and it was bound for a fall in a way. And, you know, it’s a very histrionic thing to say but, yeah! In retrospect it feels like that a bit.” 

Although Williams admits Lyttelton has been “gentrified” (“the same thing that happens everywhere”), he clarifies, “But there’s still that rawness of the port workers and the artists that makes it really special… There’s a lot of crossover there and it’s a really healthy thing for art, I think, to have as a grounding mechanism.

“There’s a lot of Russian and Filipino sailors that come in and, like, the Russians generally just drink too much… There’s been cases of them finding Russian sailors dead under the docks having drunk antifreeze and stuff like that.” When it’s suggested there’s a song in that, Williams laughs, “Yeah, the fabric of life.” Williams lights another cigarette.

For eight years Williams worked in a Lyttelton “corner shop, just making ice creams”. “That’s sorta what inspired me to learn Russian,” he reveals, “is that I was constantly talking to Russians and trying to work out what they wanted.” He says hello in Russian as requested and confirms the Russian sailors loved it: “I’ve always been a people pleaser so that was a nice fix for me.” He wasn’t tempted to also tackle Filipino? “Nah, nuh. I mean, I’d be a little bit overqualified if I was fluent in Russian and Filipino. The Lyttelton branch of the UN [laughs].” 

On whether he’s always wanted to pursue a career in music, Williams claims, “I’ve never been any good at anything else, so…” Surely he makes a killer ice cream. “Oh, yeah, I made a pretty good ice cream,” he allows, adding, “Made a good thick shake.” How many scoops of ice cream? “I filled it up to the top [with ice cream] and then just put a little bit of milk at the bottom. I get very upset when I order a thickshake and it’s not a thickshake.” We agree that the straw needs to be able to stand up on its own in the middle of the container or else it’s actually a milkshake. “I feel very strongly about those sorts of things,” he guffaws.

Reflecting back on when he first realised he could sing, Williams ponders, “I think I was in my last coupla years at primary school when I joined the choir and realised that I could sort of pick out harmonies better than anyone else – well, most of the other kids. For the first time in my life I could instinctively see the logic of how something worked, whereas I’d always struggled with everything else; the way harmonies worked was just like natural body movement for me, you know.” 

Williams had some validation when he won his school talent quest “when [he] was about 11 or so”, singing “a weird, weird Christian pop song but with a lovely melody” (of his own choosing) called River In Judea. “I sang in the cathedral choir up until the age of 17 or 18 so, you know,” he adds. “Every Sunday morning we’d be doing a new piece and I used to love it so much, so it certainly would’ve filtered through [into my own material], just in the way chords change and stuff like that.” Did he have to wear robes? “No, luckily the choir was out of view. I mean, for concerts we’d all wear tuxedos.” Complete with bow tie? “Yep, the red bow tie.” When bow ties are deemed no good, there’s silence. Oops, does Williams still wear one? “Yep,” he cracks up. “Sometimes. Sometimes.” Turns out they make Williams feel more dressed up than regular ties. “I’ve never had a job that’s required me to wear a tie or anything, but I like the feeling; like, I feel like I should probably do something. It spurs me into action when I’m dressed well.”