Fanning Claims That Compromise Killed Powderfinger

In the wake of the release of his sophomore solo record Departures, Bernard Fanning has made some honest revelations about the breakup of Aussie legends Powderfinger. He has attributed their demise to having to make compromises to appease all members' alternate musical ideas.

When asked in a recent interview about alienating his fanbase with glimpses of the soul-come-electronic direction his new record has taken, Fanning replied, “Even that consideration is a complete road to ruin. Thinking about what people think of your songs before you've written them... there's so many things to be paranoid about already, especially on that level of being popular - having been in a band as popular as Powderfinger, there's already a certain amount of negativity that gets directed toward you from within the music community, not from the wider community but from the general hater crew,” he smiles. ”But if you were going to worry about that, and then you were going to worry about the people who do like you or worry about people who might like you, and what will radio think, and how short should this song be - if you did that at the beginning of the process, you'd go insane.

“Nobody can afford to do it or else the situation becomes counter to why everybody begins to do it in the first place - because you want to make some shit up, because you want to sit there and invent something that hasn't been there before - and if you start having all these fences around it, it just sucks. And that's one of the things with Powderfinger that I found frustrating at the end, because everybody was starting to have different ideas about how things should happen musically, then you were starting to make considerations and compromises at that very early stage, and that to me is death. Design by consensus.”

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