Album Focus: The Beautiful Losers

It’s been great fun.  There’s a really good feeling within the band.  We also managed a successful tour of Melbourne and managed to enjoy each other’s company rather than explode apart like some bands do when they tour.

What feels different playing in Perth in 2015 as to those mid-late ‘80s heydays?

So much about the local scene is just like it always was, but our approach to it is very different at this stage of life.  We are not stressing about trying to ‘make it big’, we’re just enjoying playing. One thing I have noticed is that there is a much larger spread of ages  among the punters these days, or perhaps I just didn’t notice all the ‘old people’ when I was 20 and now I am one of the ‘old people’ the other oldies are not so invisible to me.  Seriously though, I think there are more people in their 40s and 50s going to local gigs and playing gigs that I recall being the case in the ‘80s.

You released some compilations late last year, was a new album always part of the plan?

Recording is always in the back of my mind.  I write songs with the studio in mind more than the stage in mind.  Shawn (Hoffman, drums) has some basic recording set-up in his studio where we rehearse, so that made it affordable.  We recorded pretty much everything except the vocals and bass in the rehearsal studio, and took those tracks into Poons Head studio to finish it and mix it.  We rushed it a bit cause we wanted it out before we toured Melbourne, but that was probably a good thing because it stopped us from obsessing about every aspect of it.

Were the songs written for the purpose of a Beautiful Losers album or are you writing all the time anyway?

These days I write from time to time rather than all the time.  Six of the songs are new - meaning I wrote them sometime in the last five years - but I tweaked them a bit for the recording and for the way that this band works, plus the rest of the band contributed quite a bit to the arrangements.  The other two songs are from the Beautiful Losers’ repertoire from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s -songs that came after the recording of the Lover/Saint album but that were never properly recorded.

One of those songs, Gold, has a bit of history to it.  In 1990 when JJJ started broadcasting in and from Perth, they did a series of Live At The Wireless that were broadcast live from Perth. 

The Beautiful Losers played the first of those broadcasts and Gold was our opening song.  So, Gold was the first song to be broadcast live from Perth on JJJ.  Other than a cassette recording of the radio broadcast, there is no recording of Gold, so I decided that we needed to record it as part of this album.  Thank god for the dodgy cassette recording otherwise I don’t think Cliff (Kent, bass) and I would have been able to figure out how the song goes.

What do these songs on Fade Out possess that songs from days gone by mightn’t have?

The emphasis of my songwriting has always been on the lyrics, and that remains the case with these songs.  Having said that, the lyrics don’t work without either a good riff or a good vibe.  Some of the songs have extremely simple chord structures, so it is critical that the band gets a good groove to it to provide some legitimacy to the lyrics.  The Lover/Saint album released in 1988 had quite a bit going on in the arrangements - layers of Errol Tout’s guitar parts, for example.  The new album is quite raw.  The first four songs on the CD are pretty much as we play them live - one guitar, one piano or organ part, bass and drums.  The only embellishments are some angelic female harmony vocals and the second song, Home, has a slide guitar part that Luke Dux did for us and a saxophone part on the outro that Alan Holdbrook did.

Do any of the songs on Fade Out really nail where you’re at right now?

Yes.  I think most of them do, but a couple really represent our current vibe: the opening track Clown and the fourth track, Don’t Try This At Home, epitomise the current line-up of the band and are quite different from previous incarnations of the Beautiful Losers.

What are your plans with 2016 coming around the corner?

There are four more recently written songs that need to be recorded, so another record is certain - just not sure when we will have the funds to do it.  We enjoyed playing in Melbourne so much, and got such a good response from audiences there, that we are keen to play more gigs there and will probably extend that to other parts of the East. We are on the bill at the Nannup Festival. 

We are also performing a new work, and a very different kind of musical work, at the Fringe  Festival but people will need to wait a while before the details of that are announced.  We are working on some video clips for a few songs from Fade Out. And we will continue to gig around Perth - not too often though.

Originally published in X-Press Magazine