Finding The Formula

One spin through their debut album, Ballet In The Badlands, and it's obvious Perth's The Chemist are mining the entire 50-odd years of rock and pop music history. It runs from late '50s Hit The Road Jack-era Ray Charles – they reference Billie Holiday themselves too – to Jonathan Whitehead's Quixotic theme from Black Books. The latter, as it happens, references American guitarist Marc Ribot, who has played with Tom Waits, and, in a coincidence, the core member of The Chemist, guitarist Ben Witt, is a self-confessed “enthusiastic Marc Ribot fan”.

“Alternative rock doesn't really…” Witt trails off as he ponders the label usually imposed on The Chemist. “I mean it's just rock'n'roll at the end of the day I guess, but…” Nonetheless, there's obviously a very strong pop sensibility at work. “I guess in the embryonic stage, I was trying to write songs the way I imagined Tom Waits or Bob Dylan would, and I know that's shooting pretty high but those kinds of forms and some of the structural elements of the verses, things like that, and then, when it would come to arrange them band-wise, it was thinking of the most interesting way we could play, and that would probably be referencing more current bands I guess.”

Not that there was a band when Witt began writing songs back in 2007 and decided to look around at university friends who might want to get together to make a noise. “I didn't really know what I was doing when the band started,” Witt admits. “If I was listening to The Beatles, we'd try and write a Beatles song. If I was listening to Hendrix, we'd try and write a Hendrix song. So it wasn't like I had a vision and then went out and acquired the appropriate musicians. It just sort of happened.”

Joining Witt, who these days also plays in the Bob Evans band, in what happened were keyboards player James Ireland, bass player Hamish Rahn and drummer Elliot Smith. “There was a conscious effort in making this album to work out what do I hold closest to my… I don't want to use the word heart, but what music resonates with me most? Where do I feel most comfortable expressing what I want to do artistically? That's kind of what I envisioned, what I've always been trying to get at.” And the diversity across the album, “is part of the reason why it's called Ballet In The Badlands, because there are these elements that are pulling at each other.

“There was no over-riding theme across the record – each song is different – but again, I'm not an expert by any means but I do get into Beat literature and stuff like that, through Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. I like Beck too – his lyrics – and Captain Beefheart and these kinds of dudes, so I'm trying to just learn about the elasticity of language, and as much about the crafting of the words as the words themselves, what they necessarily represent. I guess there are themes of autonomy on the album… Heaven's Got A Dress Code is, I guess, about judgment…

“We've already got a bunch of new songs, and in particular this one song that we're referring to as Frenetics – it's kind of like taking the elements of what's on this album and then making it like a violent abstract painting, so the colours might be like your blues melody or your jazzy groove, whatever, but then there are these time shifts and it's pretty violent and frenetic. I want to kind of make something that's pretty potent.”