Propelling Forward & Not Letting The Past Own You

"Primavera, we're fucking excited," Gold Class lead singer Adam Curley announces from the Primavera Pro outdoor stage at Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB). Curley sports a white, long-sleeved T-shirt with "Endless Prowl" emblazoned across the front in black, double-vision font. It's 3.10pm and the band's showcase is part of this year's Aussie BBQ. Even though the energy of Gold Class is better suited to nocturnal time slots in dingy, basement clubs, they well and truly find their groove and this set proves a fantastic advertisement for the band's Primavera Sound show scheduled for midnight this evening (which clashes with Slayer and Death Grips). 

Fast forward a month or so and Curley sits on an outside table at The Cherry Tree Hotel in Cremorne together with the band's guitarist Evan James Purdey. The pair sip on water and beer respectively ahead of a busy day posing at multiple photo shoots around Melbourne (first on the agenda: The Music's cover shoot).

After much discussion about whether it's important for listeners to know a song's lyrical meaning, Curley posits, "No one wants an explanation, line by line, about what every song is about. I guess part of the magic of songs is the mystery of them, too... Lyrics are important to the song, but the music of a song can make you think of different things — and it makes you feel certain ways — and it makes you remember your own experiences and, yeah! That's part of it.

"I think it's kind of cool to realise that you write something and you put it out, and then it becomes something — whatever it is — to someone else."

One of this scribe's favourite tracks on the new Gold Class album is We Were Never Too Much, which conjures up regrets over things left unspoken to departed loved ones. "That's fair," Curley ponders, before enlightening, "That's kind of about the end of the relationship that happened right at the beginning of writing the album and it was, you know, not the easiest end to a relationship, I guess. And I think it's very easy — particularly if you're someone who is self-conscious of how you respond to things, because you're made to feel growing up as though you're being too much, which I think relates to a lot of people, like, not just queer people; that your response to something is too much, too dramatic or too emotional or too — you know, too much of something. And I think it was just kind of going back and wanting to say to someone like, 'We weren't too much, even though things were hard and really intense, like, it was ok for that to be the case,' and say like, you know, 'It was really important,' and, yeah! That thing of wanting to tell someone something and having felt like you didn't get the chance, which I'm still kind of finding the line about how much I say about some things because they're personal and I don't want...

"I think that it's ok to figure that stuff out for yourself as you're going and, you know, you can change the line for yourself whenever you want to... It's important almost to work that stuff out for yourself as you go, because one day you might feel like talking about something personal to someone and then the next day you might not be up for it. And that's ok, you know? You don't have to draw boundaries around things.

"But I do think with writing — yeah! Sometimes with lyrics and things like that it's ok to say to people — and to yourself — like, 'That's the song. That's how much I wanted to say. You can interpret it however you like. That's it, and I don't need to explain it and break it down, because I just don't have to, you know? It's just like: my work is done. And sometimes even for yourself it's, like, what the words add up to is about conveying a feeling more than it is conveying an idea; it's, like, you can put words together and it feels powerful and you're like, 'Yeah, that's the feeling that I wanted that song to have,' and it doesn't have to be a very specific story."

Artistic license, perhaps? "Yeah, in a way, but I think that it still feels honest, because it IS honest. And it's that kind of thing of — not to be all, 'Hey, I've read Susan Sontag about it [laughs] — against interpretation, where not every piece of art needs to be interpreted, sometimes it's just about the feeling of it; the feeling you get when you see it or listen to it, like, that's the point, you know? And I think breaking things down all the time takes away from that experience sometimes. But, I dunno, other times you do wanna talk about what a song means to you."

When asked whether he finds songwriting therapeutic, Curley allows, "It definitely helps me get my head around stuff, but I've always tried not to write as therapy. Only because, hmmm, yeah — I don't really like that idea that you're sort of enacting your therapy in a song, I kind of think that's what your life is for and then the song is more about conveying that, then, in a way that's interesting but, yeah! I sort of hate the idea that you get up on stage and that's like your therapy session for the day, you know? [laughs]. But I don't think it even works like that, I dunno; if someone is feeling like they're getting therapy out of playing a show then I'd like to know how that works, 'cause I'm not even sure how that possibly works."

"l think of it in terms of, like, energy release and not necessarily a mental health session," Purdey contributes, "but certainly it's something about an energy catharsis. And you kind of get up and anything kind of pent-up — that's the point where it all can come out in an expressive sense."

"Yeah, man, you play guitar that's more your thing," Curley jokes, stressing, "No, I'm just kidding."

Curley, Purdey and Gold Class' bassist Jon Shub all worked together at The Old Bar, a live music venue in Fitzroy, and the singer explains his band's genesis. "I think maybe at the start of summer [2014] Evan gave me a tape with some guitar ideas that he had up his sleeve, just to see if I liked them... We were working together and talking about music, and writing, and, yeah! I kind of had the idea that maybe we could write some songs together and we kind of took the summer to get to the rehearsal room sorta stage of things. And Evan asked Jon if he wanted to play bass, I think, and Mark [Hewitt, former drummer] if he wanted to play drums." Purdey remembers the other two original band members were recruited via "separate drunken chats": "It was like, 'I know some people who wanna start a band. Do you wanna be in the band?' kinda thing."

"I didn't know Mark," Curley admits of the original Gold Class drummer who wrote and played drums on the band's second album, Drum, before new drummer Logan Gibson was trained up for their recent European dates. "And I sort of knew Jon as well from working in the bar, and it wasn't a given that we would, I dunno, do anything more than one day." Purdey contributes. "Even just getting together in the first place, like, there wasn't even a sense that we could write a song until, you know, kind of two hours later where it was like, 'Oh, ok, we do click musically,' and I think it's just been... on a rehearsal-to-rehearsal basis ever since. It's just, like, you finish a song and then you're like, 'Cool!' that's great! Now we have to do another one!' kinda thing, well not have to, but... And then it was like, 'Well, ok, cool. We have five songs, we'll play a show.' And we played a show and there were people there and it was like, 'Ok, cool, let's keep doin' that'." So where was Gold Class' first gig? "The Public Bar. It was part of the Sunday School shows that were happening there, which was pretty cool. So, you know, I think we played with, like, Ciggie Witch maybe?"

"I think I went to work straight after the show," Curley tells. With a little bit of a spring in his step, no doubt? "With having had a panic attack," he counters, laughing. "A massive, long panic attack onstage. It was like, 'Cool! Now I feel exhausted and I've gotta go to work'."

When asked what it was that compelled him to keep performing with band, Curley laughs again, "Yeah, I don't know what".

Curley downplays it a little here, but we revisit the anxiety he felt during that first Gold Class gig later in our chat and the singer confesses he had "a full-blown panic attack and went to the doctor the next day, and had shingles". But Curley admits "it feels completely different" fronting Gold Class nowadays. "I do feel now like I can imagine what I want a show to be like and work towards making it like that, you know, almost in a way that there's a sense of control there, I s'pose. Whereas, before, I felt completely at the mercy of people watching and being in the mess of the noise and, you know, also just being at the mercy of my own kind of feelings around being in front of people... If you have to get up in front of people, it actually intensifies however you're feeling, tenfold."

On the band's decision to play more than just the one gig, Purdey offers, "For me it was just a nice reaction from everyone that was, 'Yeah, you can probably convince people to come out and watch that again'. And I enjoyed writing with these guys, so that was the big part as well, you know. As difficult as it can be kinda feeling reserved about communicating an idea to other people; just because you feel awkward, or not sure how it would be received... ultimately it's rewarding each time."

"Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing — that's what kept propelling it forward was just our own excitement at, like, what we were doing together, you know?" Curley allows. "It was just completely new — at least for the two of us, like, we'd been in bands before, but not for a long time and not that experience of it; not that thing that you feel, like, it's exciting and something's working and it's clicking. There's kind of like a real energy to it."

On the subject of previous bands, Purdey enlightens, "I played as a duo with Mark, our first drummer... I played as a backing guitarist and stuff for some friends' folk bands along the way. There was a band called Agnes Kain who are from Sydney — I played with them for a while but, yeah, never anything that really went anywhere other than playing at Old Bar a bunch of times by myself, you know, being earnest in my early 20s [laughs]."

After a brief pause, Purdey pipes up, "That's right! I was briefly in The Dacios for, like, three months; we never played a show with that line-up, but that's what got me started writing guitar lines again... I loved those guys, but I probably wasn't the right guitarist for that band." Purdey then brought "bits and pieces of ideas" he was working on during his brief stint in The Dacios across to Gold Class and enthuses, "So, yeah! I owe The Dacios for getting me excited about playing music again."

It's now Curley's turn. "Old bands? Yeah, in Brisbane I was in a band for a couple of years called — it's a terrible name," he cringes, "we were called Go Stop Stop. Actually Cameron Hawes who's in I Heart Hiroshima and Martyr Privates was in that band for a while, but, yeah, that kind of ended. We were talking about moving to Melbourne together as a band, and then the band ended and I decided to move anyway."

Once Curley hit Melbourne, he remembers, "I was mucking around with stuff with Jonathan Wilson who is in Castratii now — I think they're still going — but he lives in Sydney. So we kind of went back and forth for a little bit, but then it never turned into anything and then [I] just kinda got more into writing."

Although Curley admits he used to feel "self-conscious" seeing familiar faces in the crowd during early Gold Class gigs, he now welcomes this experience. "I think it's almost that thing about it being, 'Well, this is who I am in this really emphasised kind of weird way,' you know. But it's not a character and it's not a persona, and so I think to see someone who is close to you is actually really comforting to be like, 'You're there and actually that makes me feel even more gutsy, in a way, and ok about doing it'.

"But also being a perfectionist and wanting to do things right, not just for other people, like, for yourself — having an idea and wanting to make it work properly — I think there's a lot of pressure that you can put on yourself when you then decide to get up on stage... I still get really nervous before shows I think everyone does."

"Yeah, much less, though," Purdey contributes, "but it is that same sense of anticipation and that same sense of not knowing how it's gonna go on a given night, you know, you can be absolutely amped to play and then play horribly or the complete opposite — just be unenthused and then have the best show, or anything in between those two poles."

"You might not realise yourself that sometimes your flaws, or what made you feel exposed onstage, made it good," Curley muses. "I think that was, like — with the recording and recording with Gaz — almost part of it," Curley reflects on the band's choice of Gareth Liddiard to produce album number two. "Wanting someone who was a strong enough voice who we really respected to be able to say, 'That take was good, leave it alone,' you know? Or if you wanna go back and play it perfectly note for note, when actually what you did when it wasn't perfect was better." Purdey agrees, "That's really true."

On their debut It's You set, Gold Class worked with Simon Grounds "more in an engineering sense", Curley tells. "The whole idea was to just go into the studio and bash it out in four days and get it down. And so there wasn't much production work that needed to be done on it, but he was good as an outside voice in telling us, you know, when we could do things again or what we could do better."

Recruiting Liddiard for this album's follow-up, Drum, Curley enlightens, was "a bit more about working with someone who could bring in ideas and push [the band] to do things in a way that we might not think of ourselves". "I think we did talk about working with someone who might work on the songwriting with us, but then it didn't really make sense because we already do so much of the songwriting together and there's already four voices involved in that."

"He didn't have a huge amount of input in terms of the songwriting," Purdey asserts. "His role was more just pure production after the fact so, yeah! He came in and did some demoing of the songs in their pretty-much-completed state before we went into the studio, so that was cool."

Of Gold Class' songwriting approach, the guitarist admits, "It's a process; every song's its own little encapsulated challenge. So you'll get to a point where everybody's just staring at each other, or staring at the floor, or just, like, looking pretty despondent. But then, you know, you get that kind of breakthrough."

"It's more a process of just not allowing yourself to get completely down and frustrated when you hit a wall together, you know," Curley opines, "'cause if you're all sort of sitting in the rehearsal room and you just think, 'I really wanted to finish the song today,' you've gotta be able to pick yourself up and just be like, 'It's alright! It's not happening today... That doesn't mean it's a total piece of shit, like, we'll pick it up some other time'."

"In that regard it was tough," Purdey acknowledges, "but it's never not been that so, you know, I think we're probably more open with each other now than I think we were on the first record — we were still sort of feeling each other out."

When asked whether there was a song on Drum that was particularly hard to pin down, the first single to be lifted from this album, Twist In The Dark, springs to mind. "I know in that song I sorta had a sense of the chorus and what it could possibly be," Curley recounts. "And I'm not playing guitar and I'm not playing drums so trying to describe that to everyone else [laughs] — you're like, 'I'm imagining this kind of crescendo at the end of the chorus.' But it's amazing how you can completely understand what you are saying and not see how other people can't... You can't read someone's mind."

"None of us have any kind of formal musical training and so, having that really abstract dialogue, it's like, haha —  it's frustrating," Purdey concurs, "but, you know, it is really kind of fascinating at the same time how everyone can communicate without having any, like, actual set of words."

Curley reveals: "And we can finish a song and have been playing it for ages, and then when we're jamming be like, 'Oh, and you know in the chorus part of that song...' And you'll be like, 'What, what's the chorus?'" Purdey chuckles: "'What's the chorus? Which part's the chorus?'"

"'What do you think is the chorus?'" Curley laughs. "You know?" Purdey confirms, "Yeah, no one knows... It's the same with Thinking Of Strangers, for so long I thought the verse was the chorus."

"Yeah, and Evan will write the chorus guitar line and then everyone else will be like, 'No, that's a verse!' Now we need a chorus... We stopped trying to pin things down after a while."

"It's true!" the guitarist enthuses. "And it becomes more about just, like, having a sense of when something needs to pick up or when something needs to change."

"I think the only song that we wanted to have a big chorus was Rose Blind, which started out more poppy than it is now," Curley discloses of the second single to be lifted from Drum, "because I think realising that having a pop-song structure meant that it needed a more aggressive kind of approach to it, for it to work for us. But I really like it; it works in the context of everything else."

"It still feels like it has that level of aggression without being aggressive, which makes no sense, but..." Purdey trails off.

"And it's got a chorus!" Curley laughs. "I like having a big chorus. I think it's one of the most fun things to play because of the fact that it has a big chorus! It's just like allowing yourself to do something that you might not allow yourself to do otherwise, because the idea of a big chorus if you overdo it is naff, you know?"

"It is funny," Purdey allows, "'cause I think we all really like pop music, in whatever guise that can take — whether it's R&B or whether it's guitar-pop or whatever — but we're all also really sceptical of trying to write something that feels too sugary or feels too worn in terms of the way that you can just like write a verse, write a chorus, you know, write some chords that sound big and write a melody — I think we're all really wary of going down that path just kind of blindly so, yeah! There'll often be a point where we could've done that and haven't, and I think it made for a much more interesting song. So it's cool that we allowed ourselves to do it, but did it in our own way, of course."

"And, you know, of course we think it's poppy and has a huge chorus, and everyone else thinks it's like a really dark, heavy song," Curley chuckles. "I'm like, 'It's the most pop thing I've ever heard!'" Purdey joins in the laughter.

There's a line in Drum's closer, Lux, which suggests coming to terms with the person you once were: "I no longer answer to the past." Curley confirms, "Completely. And I sort of wanted the album, lyrically, to have a flow to it — to start from somewhere and end somewhere else, and not necessarily end with any definite answers to some of the questions that I was asking myself lyrically, but, yeah! To kind of get to a place. And I think that a lot of the album is about coming to terms with the past and trying to do something with that so that you can become the thing that you wanna become, stand up for the thing that you wanna stand up for, and also just live your life in the way that you wanna live it, you know. And I think that line, 'I no longer answer to the past,' is about that: it's about not letting the past kind of own you. And it's also kind of a defiant statement of having agency, feeling powerful when you don't so much at the time. And I s'pose — that being the last thing on the record — being a bit of a question of, 'What now?' Which I think is a question that a lot of people have to ask themselves, you know? Or are asking themselves currently as well, like, 'Well, what do we do with all the shit that's happened? Or is happening?' you know, 'Where do you go once you've kind of taken stock of it and realise that you do have the ability to change things?' So it's like, 'Well, what now?' I don't have the answer to that, because I was kind of getting to that point, I s'pose, or thinking about it."

Curley shares a feeling he was "drawing on" while working on lyrical content for a few of Drum's songs: "Being ok enough with who you are to be able to stand up for yourself or to feel in control of what's going on." He then points out: "Writing is definitely personal and [about] exploring personal ideas, and feelings, but [it's] more about then constructing it in a way that is interesting and tells a story, and conveys something else — not just my stuff. It isn't self-indulgent and I think you can tell when people are being self-indulgent, because usually they don't have anything to say that's interesting. And then you have to listen to them sing about, I dunno, their relationships." Curley suddenly remembers our earlier discussion about the Gold Class song We Were Never Too Much and laughs hysterically, "I shouldn't say that, because it's exactly what I'm doing! I'm gonna stop talking now."