Throwing A Hissyfit

"I never really get off,” the now Melbourne-based Ben Salter chuckles as he ponders the collective that came together ten years ago last year at O’Malley’s Irish Pub in Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall.

It was an open mic night and the nine singer-songwriters there to strut their stuff that night enjoyed each other’s music and company so much they decided to work together. The result was The Gin Club, the “horse” Salter never really gets off despite his solo career and the odd Giants Of Science gigs.

Now 11 years into it, The Gin Club have released their fifth album, Southern Lights, which they recorded two years ago, in the winter of 2013 – taking advantage of the fact that band member Ola Karlsson, who lives in Stockholm these days, was back in Australia and could join the other eight in the rural studio at Salter’s sister’s cattle property in central Queensland.

“It’s a really special place,” Salter says of the property. “It’s a really relaxed atmosphere and we always do it in winter ‘cause it can really hot in summer. But we just set up the studio in this old worker’s cottage from the turn of the last century, which is all wood, so there’s not a lot of soundproofing, so you can hear birds and whatnot on the recordings a lot of the time, but we can make as much noise as we want.

“We had maybe 20 songs, maybe less, but the general thing we go for length-wise these days is a vinyl length, which is sort of 40 minutes, which I think is a really good length for an album, and we just all voted on the songs, which is a really good way to do it. I’ve only got one song on this album and that’s been really good. There’s always been an emphasis on my stuff but this time the attention has gone more to the other songwriters. Not that it ever didn’t but it’s just been really good to see that people are acknowledging the others.

“We also release this thing called Hissyfit, every time we release an album or every now and then, which is a collection of all the songs that didn’t make it on the album, and we’re going to put that up on Bandcamp and give to the people that pre-ordered the album this time round. So all the mega-fans end up getting all the other songs anyway.”

The gigs haven’t been quite as regular as they were ten years ago – as Salter points out, the line-up includes “lawyers, engineers, academics and people that run small businesses and stuff, so everyone’s sort of really busy all the time” – but they’re still relishing it all. After all, they get to hang with their best friends – each other.