Even: Just The Three Of Us

En route from Melbourne airport to soundcheck for Ones We Love: Celebrating REM (1982 – 1992) at Palais Theatre, Ash Naylor stops in at a Fitzroy pub for a beer. He's instantly recognisable when he steps inside, with a full head of rock-mop hair and sporting a dark-hued velvet blazer. Naylor flew back from Brisbane this morning, where he played the first REM tribute as well as Paul Kelly's surprise BIGSOUND show. 


We take a seat at a corner table and Naylor admits that playing Spencer P Jones' slide guitar part in Kelly's How To Make Gravy (which he's done for 11 years) for the first time since the late, great legend's passing had "new resonance" for him at The Zoo last night. Naylor explains he loved The Johnnys as a teenager and, although he never socialised with Jones, they played some shows together over the course of his career. He then shares a fond memory from when Even played a Mirabel Foundation event. "I broke a guitar string so Spencer lent me his white Strat - that classic white Strat that he used to play in The Johnnys and the Beasts [Of Bourbon] - so I got to play that one night and that was a buzz... People reach the end of their life and then the people who are left get to reassess their catalogue and say, 'Wow!'" 

On the making of Even's seven-years-in-the-making seventh studio album Satin Returns, Naylor recalls, "I wanted to shrink it down to just three of us and thankfully I've given myself enough rope to play as much or as little on the guitar as I want. That's my mission now is to make every record a guitar festival [laughs], you know what I mean? Celebrating the instrument. On this occasion that was one of the parameters I set was to not bring outside instruments in, to make all the sounds that we needed to just with the voices that Wally [Kempton, bass/BVs] and I have, and the instruments that we play. So it's a limiting thing in some regards, but it's also liberating because you maximise what you have at your disposal.

"That's what the band is: it's a guitar, bass, drums band and there's no keyboards, there's no horns, there's no BVs from other people." 

Even's harmonies have always been top-notch and Naylor praises Kempton as the better singer, "technically". "When it came to doing harmonies in the early days, I used to be a bit protective about them and I'd just do a few myself. But then when I heard Wally sing it was like, 'Well, we've gotta unleash Wally onto these recordings'... I like harmony, but I don't like it to be too overpowering, but I'm softening in my old age," he chuckles. 

He's a self-taught guitarist and Naylor admits to gravitating towards this instrument early on, his "tuition" being a close study of the work of his heroes: Ace Frehley, Peter Buck, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix. "It's just a beautiful thing to do, to play music," he enthuses, "and, for me, playing a guitar - it's meditative.

"The nitty-gritty for me is having a guitar. They're in my car right now and I've got sort of one eye on the road, you know what I mean?" 

Naylor remembers Even's beginnings as "very immediate". "Matt [Cotter, drums] and I had been in a band called The Swarm - which was a kind of serious, post-punk indie band from '85 to '91 - and that band dissolved," he recounts, "so by the time Even started it was Matt and I doing demos together, and then Wally heard a demo and was keen to join the band. So by the time Wally joined, he was on the crest of a wave with The Meanies so we were suddenly playing gigs everywhere, 'cause Wally knew everyone - and every pub in town and every agent - and it was great! And from that point I kind of tried to train myself not to worry about the industry or where I sat within it, 'cause I felt very fortunate that all of a sudden I'm in a band and we were playing in front of people. And then over, you know, six to 12 months people started coming to see us.

"And I'd probably say that from '94 to 2000 it was just a whirlwind, in a great way. And the connections [we made], for me, are on a personal level, like, I'm still friends with people that we met on our first Sydney tours and people like Wayne Connolly and Tracy Ellis - people that we were mates with, we're still mates with 20 years on. And record deals come and go, booking agents come and go, and airplay comes and goes, but we've still got these connections."

After contemplating, "It's a different kind of notoriety when you're not a household name," Naylor shares. "Sometimes you have an inferiority complex because you're, like, a fringe-dwelling musician, but the passage of time means that I have been visible and that's a lot to do with the PK [Paul Kelly] stuff and the RocKwiz stuff. But, alternately, some people know me from Even, which is great!"