Quiet Desperation

We knew it was possible that at least one of the crazed Corbett Brothers who front SixFtHick could successfully translate his skills to the quieter end of the musical spectrum – after all Ben has been refining his excellent Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side project for years now – but it seemed a stretch that both of them would traverse this road of less volume. Yet in the last few months Geoff Corbett has also been gradually unveiling his new outfit Shifting Sands – featuring himself on vocals, Dylan McCormack (Gentle Ben, The Polaroids) on guitar and Danielle Golding (Inland Sea) on vocals, organ, cello and piano – on an unsuspecting Brisbane public.

“It was an accident, definitely,” Corbett recalls of the outfit's ad hoc beginnings. “I work with Dylan, and at work there was this really shitty acoustic nylon-string guitar with a fucking corkscrew neck – just horrible, missing a string – and he just started playing some songs, and I just started singing some songs. It helped me get over my fear of acoustic instruments, because I had an innate fear – I thought they were only good for firewood. This was only four months or so ago, and I'd been going through a real rough patch with writing – I found it really hard to get any songs out for a couple of years – and then 'Bang!', we had twenty new songs straight up.

“We didn't really know what it was going to sound like, but we had a criteria that we set ourselves – 'let's really try to keep it pulled back' – and in the recording that we've just done, we did just that.”

Even though they've already recorded enough tracks for an album, Shifting Sands are still honing their live show, and so far Corbett is enjoying the far less exhausting experience compared to the tumult of SixFtHick onstage.

“I love it because I don't have to change afterwards – I don't crack a sweat, which is interesting,” he laughs. “It's a very naked way of performing, really different. But I really like it – it's the yin to the 'Hick yang. I really like that super-nude kind of performance – I'm using that as a metaphor, although it's a good idea, it's been getting pretty hot lately!”

Even though Shifting Sands may be quieter than its predecessor, it's no less intense in the subject matters that it tackles.

“It's that gold mine of unrequited love, clinical depression, drugs and booze – the trifecta. You don't need much else,” Corbett smiles when asked about the subject matter of the new songs. “The weird thing is that there's a song we've recorded which is one of the first ever songs that I wrote for SixFtHick, but we never really ended up playing it – we played it in that stage production that we did about eighteen years ago, and that was it. It's this song Onions And Violins, and I kind of rewrote it with Dylan – the idea for it was eighteen years ago, but as it turns out it took me that long to get my shit together.”

And obviously Corbett is tapping into a whole different array of influences for Shifting Sands compared to the 'Hick – although not that different.

“If you were going to drop names you'd be looking at Lee Hazlewood, Mark Lanegan, Serge Gainsbourg, maybe a bit of Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen – that sort of thing,” he muses. “Dirty old man baritone stuff. We're going to be playing quite regularly – that's our thing. We're limited in the kind of venues we can play in and the kind of crowd that will 'get it', but if you're after sleazy, alcoholic music then we'll play your kid's party.”