HOMEBAKE CLASSIC: SIMON DAY (RATCAT), NICK LITTLEMORE (PNAU) & IVA DAVIES (ICEHOUSE)

WITH THE VENERABLE HOMEBAKE FESTIVAL MAKING A WELCOME RETURN IN 2011 WITH “THE CLASSIC EDITION”, LIZ GALINOVIC GOT SOME FACE TIME WITH SIMON DAY (RATCAT), NICK LITTLEMORE (PNAU) AND IVA DAVIES (ICEHOUSE) ON THE FESTIVAL GROUNDS AT THE DOMAIN TO PICK THEIR BRAINS ON THEIR OWN CLASSIC PASTS.

Do you think that in the United States, where the lion’s share of the music mainstream seems to originate, they have festivals that take pride in being all-American? For them, it’s probably a redundant concept, while in Australia, where festivals and promoters compete and take pride in getting the greatest international names on their bill, just convincing hype and/or heritage acts to sit through a horrendously long flight is a feat in itself: “Don’t worry about the 30 hour flight, it’s sunny over here and nobody cares about anything. Please, please come and perform in our country.”

The flip side of this is a pride in what is ours, a celebration of Australian artists. Since January 1996, the Homebake festival has been delivering home-baked goods to Australian festivalgoers – from our best-loved musicians to the just emerging – and it’s not just music on offer but film, comedy and more. It’s like Glastonbury, except the only Brits allowed are punters. This year’s Homebake has been labelled “The Classic Edition”, perhaps because it features a line-up chock-a-block with classic Australian artists, perhaps because the festival itself has earned the “classic” descriptor.

“I love Homebake,” says Ratcat frontman Simon Day. “It’s the festival with the most integrity in this country simply because it’s choosing local bands. I think that in itself is far more reflective of the art of the country than bringing bands from all over the place and that is great for people who are interested in music, because they get a chance to see how good local music can be instead of just hearing all the other crap on the radio that is from other places and has a cultural cringe factor.”

Ratcat entered the Australian music scene in the second half of the 1980s when the classic Australian sound was “pub rock”. So called because back then, bands actually played live in pubs. You can still find evidence of this today if you look closely for their fossilised sweat-beads beneath your local’s DJ booth. But Day and fellow bandmates brought something new to this scene – “they called it alternative music at the time,” he says – and with its decidedly punk influence, it was.

“We really loved our melodies and the marrying of noisy aggressive guitars with a nice melody. I think it was that sort of opposing beauty of each that made it interesting.” And very successful. Ratcat went on to shift a serious number of units and secure coveted number one chart spots, beginning with their 1990 Tingles EP and following up with their 1991 longplayer Blind Love. The album and accompanying single Don’t Go Now simultaneously sat at number one spot – a huge feat for a local band back then (at the time only INXS had achieved this) and still considered a huge feat now.

“[We were] Incredibly surprised,” Day recalls. “I think at the time the album Blind Love went to number one we were hoping to double our fanbase, which was about 3000 sales of the previous album so we were hoping to sell 6000 units and we sold a lot more than that.”

If Ratcat are representative of ‘80s/’90s pop/punk, timeless in its sense of cool, then Pnau are representative of another time and genre all together – dance music. Their 1999 debut album Sambanova won the ARIA for best dance music release, just a week after the album had been recalled from stores for use of uncleared samples.

“Classic problem,” says Nick Littlemore, one half of Pnau. “Although not anymore it seems. Have you listened to the radio lately? It’s all slightly ripped off music but it’s just five cents away from being the song so you don’t get screwed. But yeah, we had the classic problem of ripping off Miles Davis and thinking, ‘Oh it’s just some little jazz artist.’ “We didn’t fucking know,” he shrugs. “We were young”.

It may have been a setback, but it certainly wasn’t the end. This year their fourth full-length Soft Universe has scored a nomination in that same ARIA category, for an album inspired by a classic life experience – “Yeah,” Littlemore admits, “the break up.” In Soft Universe, Littlemore and creative partner Peter Mayes have written an album more pop and ballad than big room banger, which is not surprising given the amount of time they’ve spent over the past four years with a man who gets about with a litany of classic tunes trailing behind him – Elton John.

“I gave him lyrics and he just puts them down,” he mimes laying out sheets of paper, “so there’s three or four songs ideas, or lyrical poems if you want to call them and he would find one – ‘Oh, okay, this one could work’ – and he just reads it, with his glasses, reads it, plays a chord, maybe a second chord and then goes ‘okay’ and plays and sings the whole song from beginning to end. Just like that. That’s just how he does it.”

While Pnau have played Homebake umpteen times – Littlemore actually finds it hard to remember it’s a large festival filled with fans and not his own backyard filled with friends – one man who has never graced the festival’s stages will be delighting a broad generational spectrum playing tunes that have become classics not only here, but overseas as well. Icehouse’s Iva Davies, blue eyes peeking out the bottom of his sunglasses, smiles as he recalls the mullet he sported in the late ‘80s. “I had a number of classic hairstyles over the years,” he says. “Eventually I had it all the way down back looking more like Robert Plant, which was ultimately what I was happy with.”

It’s been 30 years since Icehouse released their debut album Flowers. At the time the band was called Flowers and the album Icehouse, but the existence of another Flowers band required a name change so they simply swapped the titles. For 15 years it was Australia’s highest selling debut album until Savage Garden came along (the latter also eclipsed Ratcat’s simultaneous number ones) and spawned several hit tracks like Walls, We Can Get Together and Icehouse.

Icehouse are known for their boundary pushing experimentation and use of technology (synths abound) and Davies claims to be the first in Australia to buy a sampler.
“I firmly believe that all of the energy that created all that ‘80s music was this incredibly vital period of technological invention. A whole bunch of stuff that’s gone on to be classic, like the invention of MIDI… as well as all the synthesisers and drum machines and the sampler was invented which I think, apart from the recording technology itself, the sampler was the most influential piece of equipment to hit music, ever. Hip hop has entirely resulted from this invention – which, by the way, is an Australian invention, which very few people know. And I had one of the first in the world and I invested in that in 1982 and it was 32,000 dollars then. It was a big leap of faith.”

Icehouse continued to write tracks of local and international acclaim – Electric Blue, Crazy and, of course, the song that went on to become a classic Australian anthem, Great Southern Land. “I’m a very conservative songwriter,” Davies admits. “I don’t get into heavy politics and all that sort of stuff. So I remember thinking very clearly, if I’m going to write a song about Australia, it’s such an important subject that I better not get it wrong. [And] I remember being semi-terrified by this task that I’d set myself.

“I decided to just make the lyrics [using] the cut-up method, a method devised by William Burroughs, an American writer who had a method of cutting up newspapers and then putting all the bits together on the floor and then mixing them all up and putting stuff together that didn’t belong together. Various lyricists including David Bowie and Iggy Pop tried [this method] as an experiment.

“But the result of that way of doing things is that you never actually get a finished sentence, you only get three words that might actually mean something. So I decided that that was what I would do so that you could have all these phrases that people could read not only one meaning, but maybe three or four or five meanings into. And people always ask me – and I never tell them what I was thinking because it kind of cuts down the possibilities – people always ask me, ‘What did you mean when you kept using that phrase ‘burn you black’?’ and I say, ‘Well you just go away and think about it’.”

It’s just as well that Grinderman will be headlining this year’s Homebake as Littlemore and Day list Nick Cave as an icon and a man to be admired as a classic Australian musician. But there was something all three of these artists acknowledged as a classic problem for Australian musicians – breaking into the overseas market. As Littlemore says, “There’s a lot of great Australian music. I don’t think it’s gotten any easier to get it out overseas; there’s always a blip in how it works and nobody really understands how that works.”

Perhaps it is for this reason that as Day pointed out, a festival like Homebake is an important one to have – an opportunity for our artists to show what they’re made of.

L to R: Iva, Nick, Simon. Pic by Cybele Malinowski

Playing at Homebake

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