Blab number 11 - Girl Genius. We started somewhat of a tradition with the Girl Genius EP, that of releasing an EP or mini-album after a ‘proper’ album with out-takes, demos or whatever else was hanging around. I used to argue a bit with Richo about this, an album to me isn’t just about the best songs you have on your set list. It has to be its own world, they need to be siblings to each other. If you’ve written some spare downbeat record and then all of a sudden you come up with the greatest hard rocking song you’ve ever written, that’s no reason to put it on the record. And so many of the songs on our EPs and even singles could be construed as sometimes ‘better’ than the songs on some of our albums. For whatever reason we just didn’t think they fit. Girl Genius is a fitting companion to Patient in the same way Slight Return + Out Seeds is a fitting companion for Doubt Seeds. The songs have the same bare boned production style, recorded with a minimum of cash, lacking in any excess, the prime motivation being to capture what the three of us did together in a room. There’s some great performances on here I reckon. Boredom You are Breaking my Heart became a bit of a beast live. It was fairly new when we recorded it on the Somnambulist Homesick Blues EP, but by the time we got asked to do a JJJ Live at the Wireless set in ’99 it had morphed into something else. Perhaps it was Fletcher getting a chance to play on the instrument he really wanted to play; the guitar. I don’t know, but it was totally immersive and by the time we got to that droning modal end bit it started to write itself every night. It became a really cathartic, explosive piece of music. Sometimes I would feel so separate from Richo and Ben and in a way it made songs like this so powerful. We had such separate lives so that, in a way, you could melt without a fear of shame. It was just something that would happen and you wouldn’t talk about it afterwards. I know - dramatic, bombastic, we were all of those things. It was fun. Revelation on Francis St is a really pretty, barren song. We just felt there were enough songs like that on Patient. It was a choice between Revelation or Matrimony and we chose Matrimony. Jealous of the Sea we chose because we felt Patient could use another rock song but it seemed superfluous in the end. Stained Mouth was something that came about (I think) from a jam we had when Paul Dempsey sat in on drums whilst we were drummerless in Melbourne. It turned from a four track acoustic sketch into the man-pain beast that climaxes this EP. All Over the World was one of two songs we recorded for an American Pixies tribute album. They chose Silver, so this was the other one. We’d hit the glass ceiling around this time. The fuss over Patient had died down and we were desperate to go somewhere else. We talked to John Needham from Citadel about going to Europe but his days of touring Died Pretty and The New Christs etc over there were already in the distant past. We did a double header with Augie March at The Hopetoun and it was clear who the audience was there to see. We were never testosterone fueled enough to win over the noise/rock crowd and too chaotic and feedback friendly to win over the more fragile/pretty folk-rock crowd. We were rangas! It was just the way it was, as things turned out we soon got an opportunity to tour America. This tour ended up pretty much defining the word ‘misadventure’ but I’ll bore you all with that on the next blab. Here’s the clip for Girl Genius https://youtube/watch?v=2mPR662w1TA its one of my favourites. It was shot on super eight by Glen Maynard who was the drummer in Pollyanna at the time. We did it at the Gershwin Room in St Kilda. He was getting wheeled around by someone in a shopping trolley whilst holding the camera as I remember. Its really ghostly, Fletcher dancing with Skye, Richo stoically playing drums in a tin man suit (we miraculously found this at a fancy dress shop, I am a huge Wizard of Oz fan)the whole look of it I like a lot. The CD of this is long out of print but you can download it from our Bandcamp site here https://bluebottlekiss.bandcamp/album/girl-genius-ep .Nighty night x
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 11:06:44 +0000
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