Setting Sail

For alternative rock fans from the '90s, this is a collaboration that might come as a surprise, at least until you hear the voices of Jeff Martin (The Tea Party) and Sarah McLeod (The Superjesus) come together. The ball got rolling when Martin – who now resides and works out of Byron Bay – was requested to bring his talents to a residency that McLeod was hosting on the New South Wales central coast.

“I had heard of Sarah's reputation as a pretty hardcore rock'n'roll chick, and the fact that a lot of people absolutely adored her voice and what she did with The Superjesus and all that,” he recalls. And so he did some research, loved what he discovered, played the show and on reflection afterwards decided it was something to pursue further. Enter Man The Life Boats, a track that was too dark for The Superjesus, but according to Martin, not dark enough.

“Sarah sent me a demo, just her voice and an acoustic guitar, and I said, 'Let's make it darker'. And that was it, that was the song we worked on first, and as they say – well, hopefully what they'll say – the rest is history, because I think we hit a home run with that song and now it's something that… even though my dance card and hers is quite [full], we're going to keep on getting back together at my studio and hopefully in a year's time we'll have enough material to release a full-length album and do a proper tour.”

Martin admits that right now it's hard to tell what direction the album will take. “I know the next [track] sounds like a 1920s speakeasy cabaret song,” he says, “so I think Sarah is planning for it to be all over the shop. But what I'll hopefully achieve through the production is that thread, so if they do have all these variant styles it will be our voices binding them. And there's nothing wrong with that – for example, one of my favourite Led Zeppelin records is Houses Of The Holy, and that's just one different style after the other, but it's the same band, you can tell.”

For now, however, the pair can't wait to show off Man The Life Boats, a track which the 44-year-old Canadian describes as a “rolling, satanic pirate ship song”. Excitedly, they'll also be tossing a few curveballs at the audience via some cover mash-ups that go great lengths to highlight the disparate inspirations the two musicians draw from, such as their track C'est la Fix.

“I brought to the table that Civil Wars song, C'est la Mort, because I would put that into things like The Messenger on my various solo tours,” Martin explains. “But then Sarah came up with the idea of putting Fix You by Coldplay at the end of it, and I was like, 'I don't know Sarah... Coldplay? That's not on the cool factor for me', but she convinced me and it works. She's quirky like that, and that's what I love about this artistic relationship between us – she's taking me out of my comfort zone, a lot. But I find that once we achieve [something] I'm quite comfortable with it.”

Add this new and reinterpreted music to the two stripped-back solo sets that both Martin and McLeod will perform on the night and it's clearly going to be one hell of an undertaking. How it's all going to come together, Martin doesn't know.

“That's the beauty of it all,” he smiles. “There's threats of many different musicians just showing up, and we'll just take it as it comes. With this first tour we should just be open to everything and just allow it to be what it will be, because the next one we do, like I said, which will probably be when we have an album to present, that will be a bit more structured because there'll be a band in place to really reproduce and replicate what's on the record. This time around we'll just throw caution to the wind and see what happens.”

And for those wondering – yes, the rumours are true, amongst all this there'll be a new Tea Party record in May. Martin reveals just enough the whet appetites. “It's big with a capital F. It's massive and I do believe, and Stuart [Chatwood] and Jeff [Burrows] would concur with me, that for the people that have been waiting it will be everything [they] want and more.”