Troubleshooting

It feels strange to be writing about Crime & The City Solution, a near mythological band that grew out of Sydney and Melbourne's post-punk scenes in the late-'70s. They rubbed shoulders with Boys Next Door and The Young Charlatans at the Seaview Ballroom and belonged to a pack of musicians that brought a new perspective to Australian rock. “It was exciting coming to Melbourne from Sydney,” says the band's frontman Simon Bonney, reminiscing on the phone. “Meeting Rowland S Howard and Ollie Olsen when they came up with the Young Charlatans was interesting. They always had amusing stories to tell and were interesting people. Melbourne was definitely more receptive to the kind music I wanted to play. I remember the Seaview Ballroom as being kind of small and empty most of the time. I think the crowds came later.”

As the itinerant Bonney moved from Sydney to Melbourne to London to Berlin he established a different incarnation of the band in each city. Still grateful to Mick Harvey for buying him a ticket to London, Bonney admits that it changed his life but he never liked London or the band's first album, Room Of Lights, which was produced there. “London Crime was not a happy beast,” he says. “It was never more than the sum total of the people in that band and there were a lot of very talented and creative people in that band. It never really quite gelled for me but for some people it did. I just don't think that as a lyricist I really knew what I was doing until I went to Berlin and started playing with Alex Hacke. I didn't have such a strong sense of what and how I wanted to say until then.”

After releasing just a handful of influential albums, Crime & The City Solution seemingly disappeared at the end of the '80s. Bonney gave us a couple of solo albums that were recorded in the States in the early-'90s before also bowing out of the spotlight. Just over 20 years later, Bonney and a new incarnation of Crime & The City Solution have recorded an album called American Twilight in Detroit and are supporting it by hitting the road for an Australian tour this month.

It turns out that Bonney made a conscious decision to live and work in America after releasing his last solo album. As a father of two young children he simply wanted to be there for them when they were growing up. “Music has never been the only thing which interests me,” he continues. “I know a lot of people that simply have to make music. They realise at an early age that the world outside music is not for them and they will pursue music 'til the day they die. I have other interests and responsibilities.”

The forthcoming Crime album, American Twilight, is a distillation of Bonney's reflections on his time in the States. “I didn't have that burning desire to express a point of view for a long time,” he says. “I didn't feel as though I had anything relevant to say, which is another reason why I had not written any songs for a long time.”

In talking about reconvening the band it seems that Bonney could not have done it without Hacke. “When you think the golden period of a lot of bands, I think the relationship between the guitarist and the singer is quite critical to the creation of a particular sound. That definitely applied to Alex and myself. Without wanting to detract from Mick Harvey's important contribution to the sound of Crime, Alex's approach to music was one that brought out of me the lyrics of which I remain the proudest, that I enjoy the most and most represent the kind of things that I am interested in.”

Crime & The City Solution will be playing the following dates:

Monday 18 February - The Hi-Fi, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 21 February - The Hi-Fi, Sydney NSW
Sunday 24 February - The Hi-Fi, Brisbane QLD