Gotye Live

Live Photos: Brenner Liana

FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY…

I spoke to Wally just prior to the fourth show on his nationwide tour at Melbourne’s mock-classical gem, the Forum theatre. The Gotye stage is quite crowded with all that aforementioned drums and percussion, along with a horn section, synths, guitar and bass – 10 musicians in all. Avant garde animation accompanies a number of the songs. There’s a certain theatricality about the show.

I kicked off the interview asking him about the level of ambition he had for the production.

Wally de Backer: I went through a few stages of ‘ambition’ in preparing for this tour. My first thought, about 18 months ago was: why not have a one-man show that was based more on a theatrical lighting/production vision. I was thinking that I’d probably have a very bare stage – relying heavily on projection and lighting – and I’d be singing off stage at times or singing on screen, coming on stage doing a song with one instrument and switching to another for the next track… as opposed to hiring a group of musicians and having a stage full of mic leads.

But after exploring this idea with four different production companies around Melbourne, the budget proved not to be there. I thought I had a decent amount of money to throw at something like that but the more I looked into it… nup. Turned out that 50 grand was not going to cut it for three months of production for that type of show.

So I was running out of time, and rang Tim Shiel – who’s a mate and plays laptop and samples in the band – asking him to join me. So he’s been with me for the last nine months and has taken a huge load off me in terms of data management – he’s the custodian of the projects, keeping things organised. Hiring Tim also means that on stage I can always be addressing the audience and not turning to the side and changing something on the laptop between every song – which is what I was doing in the previous version of the band, and really inhibited me.

CH: So we’re now talking about late 2010 here?

WdB: Yes. The early Gotye incarnation was a trio at first: me on drums and singing, Tim on samples and some guitar, and Lucas on bass (I’ve known Lucas [Taranto] for years – we were in the high-school band together). We did some shows in January this year – the Sydney theatre, the Sydney Festival and some performances at the Laneway Festival. After those shows I soon realised that I couldn’t play drums and sing the songs off the new album well enough. I set myself such a challenge with this album, stretching my vocal range and ability that to do that and play fairly energetic drum parts… it just wasn’t cutting it.

CH: And the 10-piece grew out of that realisation?

WdB: Sure. I’ve been working up to the big band since then. Michael Iveson started on drums and we did some festivals as a four-piece. The next addition was my friend Gideon [Brazil] who plays sax in the band. I asked him to pull together a horn section. Slowly the lineup took shape.
CH: What would be the grand plan?

WdB: I’m aiming for something that’s on par with the type of shows Massive Attack and Portishead put together in their pomp. They came out with amazingly developed ‘theatre shows’, I guess you’d call them. Unfortunately, my ambitions have been curtailed by simple economics. I spent three quarters of my album advance on making the current release. That was more than I’d hoped, which ate into the amount I’d set aside for the live show. So it wasn’t a case of ‘here’s 200 grand to develop a show’.

The band I have is great, so the live aspect feels really good but the overall show concept – the world you enter for the music to exist in – that’s not really there yet. I need to find a key creative collaborator I can work with to develop a top-down concept.

CH: Right. But for now you’ve gone from the concept of a one-man smoke ’n’ mirror theatre run, to a 10-piece Gotye Orchestra! It must alter your approach as the composer/vocalist/frontman?

WdB: It does. And as much as I might be inspired at times to have a ‘get the band together, jam and see what happens’ approach, that just wastes 10 people’s time. You have to be a music director as a starting point.

We had three months – rehearsing twice a week – to pull together as many songs as we could (13 in total). The backing vocals probably took the most work. Now, just four shows in, we’re realising that there are a couple of moments where we might be able to open things up a bit more, come up with alternative introductions to songs or segues. But otherwise it’s been quite composed.

AT PIN-UP BOY

CH: You’re an AT pin-up boy Wally: you’ve had to learn the art of recording through hard-won experience – no-one’s whisking you off to L.A. for a Lord-Alge mix session and lunch with Beyonce. You’ve had to figure out what you can achieve by yourself and what’s best to leave to the experts.

WdB: It’s been a real ‘seat of the pants’ journey.

CH: What can AT readers learn from that journey?

WdB: Persistence is the key thing. In retrospect, there have been plenty of ‘if I’d only known’ moments – especially with my knowledge of gear or my lack of ability as an engineer. I recall making my first record and doing things like recording a sample off a CD, from a Discman, running it through a secondhand ’80s amplifier and using the headphone jack, without a preamp, straight into my computer. Now there’s a pretty messed up signal chain but I was happy to capture what I wanted and make the best of things. I’ve been making mistakes like that all along and you learn as you go.

From an audio perspective, I’m still not confident in how to best record the ideas I have. I’ve got better. I can hear that I’m making cleaner, better signal-path decisions. I have a more intuitive sense of how I want my vocal or an instrument to sound, and to better select the mic or preamp to get that result. But I’m still not a really well-versed engineer.

Take the latest record as an example: I’ve found this really good vocal chain with a Neumann M147 microphone that goes into an SSL Alpha Channel preamp. It seemed to work really well for most things, but almost after I finished the record I realised, ‘nah, it didn’t work so well for some songs’ and that’s why they were hard to mix – it was way too ‘polite’ and clean a signal for that particular song.

On some level I was thinking – great, I can finally afford a high quality signal chain for my vocal – but it’s not always the answer. Some songs were recorded very intentionally with crap gear. Some songs I sang into the internal mic of the MacBook Pro – for whatever reason it sounded really good in that room and I left it in the final mix.

CH: I guess it comes back to the ‘make the most of your gear’ truism?

WdB: Sure, make the absolute best of what you have but at the same time attune your ears to realise when your gear is being pushed past its limits. If your vocal chain, for example, sounds too garage-y for the type of song you’re trying to record, then it might be time to hire some good mics.

I now regret not doing that in the past. I should have scraped a hundred bucks together and pulled in some favours to get a couple of really good vocal mics to hear what they sounded like on my voice. Rather than, ‘oh well, this is what I’ve got, they don’t sound right on this record but that’s the best I can do’.

CH: You talk about ‘persistence’. There must have been times when you thought ‘yes, I’m well on my way here’?

WdB: Well, there have been plenty of times when I’ve felt inadequate. But you’ve got to keep going despite the setbacks and take stock after the successes. If you’re lucky enough, those scattered successes will give you a leg up to help you keep going.

I feel like my experience with The Basics has shown me the other side of the coin. There have been junctures when the band has had a chance to capitalise on a lot of hard work – self management, booking our own tours, touring a lot, writing a lot of songs, recording them ourselves – but from there the chink in the door hasn’t resulted in real opportunities and it’s been a real knock. So to not get down because of those knocks has been the challenge – persistence again.

CH: And I guess some perspective that comes with experience.

WdB: That’s right, those successes or barriers, what they mean to you, will change over time. 10 years ago, if you asked me what it meant to get a little airplay on SBS radio or to have someone review my album in the street press – I’d be thinking ‘does that mean I’m going to sell more albums?’ ‘Does that mean I’ll have more people turn up to my show I’m advertising at the Corner Hotel?’ Over time you can build a map in your brain about what it all means and how you use that information to plan for the future.
CH: So what do you think your current success all means?

WdB: It’s still a bit outlandish how well this single [Someone That I Used to Know] is going – I’m not sure I’ve processed it yet. The level of sales, the No. 1 single, and being played on commercial radio and how that feeds itself and becomes a phenomenon… that’s all, like, ‘wow!’. I couldn’t have expected it and I don’t know exactly what it’ll mean. I know that it means people recognise you on the street, you get more weird emails and people start parodying you!

BARN: STABLE ENVIRONMENT

CH: Of course, a big part of being in control of your own destiny is having your own studio. Last time we spoke you were camping in your folks’ loft. What stage are you at with your own space?

WdB: Right, last time we spoke I was still doing casual shifts at my library job and about to give the full-time musician gig a go.

Now my Dad and I have completed more of the barn that’s at the bottom of my folks’ block. 

It’s developed a lot inside and has been a permanent place for me to set up my gear and store my stuff.

The barn has been great on one hand – I can hang out there for however long I need to, making music there day or night – but it’s not soundproofed, which can hamper things. There were times when I went to record a soft vocal and the guy next door would decide he was going to get on the tractor and mow the adjacent paddock. At one point I walked out and waved him down. He stopped, got out and I explained to him that I had four hours to finish a vocal and would he mind slashing the paddock some other time?  “Right, sure, okay, I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll go do the other field.”

Or there would be birds landing on the roof or you’d have 100kmh traffic on the main road outside. So no matter how hard I tried there would still be takes where Franc [Tetaz, the album’s mix engineer] would pull up a vocal and say, ‘if I apply this compressor I really want to use I’m getting a lot of road noise’.

So, the barn hasn’t been an ideal setup, but I was into it because I could put all my gear in there and work largely uninterrupted. Unlike in years gone by when if I decided I was recording vocals that day I’d have to move the bookcase out of the room, get some mattresses in and spend two hours preparing, then put everything back in time for my housemate’s return so there wasn’t crap all over the house. So the barn was nice in that regard.

CH: And how has your setup altered in the last few years?

WdB: Between Like Drawing Blood and Making Mirrors there were a few significant changes in my setup. Right at the end of Drawing Blood I made the switch from Acid to Ableton Live. I began using Live for my shows. I used it in Session Mode for a lot of click track triggering and chopping things up. So by the time I got to sampling more records and taking field recordings [for Making Mirrors] I was fully switched to Live on a MacBookPro. Switching from Acid on a crusty old desktop PC – which was all I could afford at the time – to a laptop running Live felt really liberating. Even with Drawing Blood it was very much a case of: hand-on-mouse, shifting boxes of colour around the screen, working around the limitations of the program. Acid was amazing at the time but if I jumped on it now, I’d be thinking, ‘woah, you mean I can’t stretch this sample out?’. You get very used to the amazing things a program like Ableton Live can do for you quickly and intuitively. Being able to quickly throw lots of sounds around and triggering samples on pads in an effort to come up with hooks and lines is very powerful; much better than spending 20 minutes snipping away at a loop…  If anything, Ableton makes me a little too impatient. Maybe you hear something; you try it and it’s a bit rough and you dismiss it because you don’t spend the time trying to sculpt it.

CH: And plug-ins?

WdB: I’ve become a lot more interested in plug-ins and virtual synths. Previously I had a few on the PC which I loved, including a TC reverb and a distortion plug called Quadrafuzz that I really miss. In fact, lots of people online lament the passing of Quadrafuzz. It had specific bands of distortion… but it’s died a DirectX death.

I use the Speakerphone effect quite a bit – it instantly re-shifts the whole space and sound. Altiverb has been really cool. And some of the NI Kontakt plug-ins. I was lucky enough to be given Komplete by Native Instruments.

CH: From memory Komplete also has about a squillion gigabytes of samples.

WdB: It’s pretty massive. It made me realise that I’m not the type of guy who gets off on having 100GB of orchestral sounds at my fingertips. That’s pretty overwhelming and you’ve not put any of your own energy into it. But it’s nice to have if you really need an authentic French horn…

I still get into creating my own gigabytes of samples from all over the place: records, CDs… I’m right into VHS at the moment.

CH: Wow, VHS: the unexplored frontier of car boot sales!

WdB: They’re great… but hard to work with sometimes. I have a collection of old VHS, and I’ve been trying to create a collection of visual elements as well as audio samples. I’m hoping to make my first film clip that’ll be entirely based on obscure cartoon samples. So I’m learning about VJ software, and Adobe Premier.

LIVE PARTS UNPROVEN

CH: Did you use the barn studio to do any drum recording?

WdB: No. Although I recorded some drums with Franc for Eyes Wide Open. He did a few interesting things. He put up a couple of mics in an open cabinet of an upright piano. He was using the resonance of this piano cabinet to apply ‘reverb’ to the toms that were half a room away.

CH: I remembering speaking to Franc about his sound design work on Wolf Creek and, from memory, he loves nothing more than to torture a piano.

WdB: Yes, anytime he can get a piano involved his eyes light up. Eyes Wide Open also has this explosion sound leading into the second verse that we created with a rush of hands over the bass strings of the piano. Franc’s got a lot of creative ideas from a sound design perspective.

CH: But that experience didn’t enthuse you to record more of the songs from scratch, rather using samples as the basis?

WdB: I did embark on some live recording but went back to sampling and felt energised by that. I think that’s partly because I didn’t feel the approach of recording live parts had proven itself. So it was back to taking op shop records and snipping things up again – writing songs with home synths and samples and putting it together again.

FROM IDEA TO FOH

CH: Can you pick a song from Making Mirrors and take us on a journey from idea, to recording, to it translating to a live performance?

WdB: Bronte is an interesting example. It’s one of my favourite songs on the album. It’s the last song and it’s pretty simple – not a huge number of sounds – but it’s interesting as a process.

It started with a percussion loop off a Les Baxter exotica record from the mid ’60s that I really liked. It’s a very incidental snippet of percussion in the middle of one of his arrangements. You can hear a tape splice and this little African percussion bit kicks in, then another splice and it returns to the original performance. I used that incidental percussion loop as a starting point and edited out a way-too-loud wood block, which I’ve replaced with other bits in the bar. I married that to a sample from a record called Calypso from an orchestrator called Leo Addeo who was not super notable like Mancini but recorded a number of Western takes on exotic musical cultures. Leo Addio did a steel drum version of the Banana Boat Song which had these out-of-tune, harmonically-weird overtoned parts. I particularly liked it because of the back cover of this album explaining how ‘we struggled with the tuning of these drums’, so much so he hardly used them, even though they were the whole concept behind the album. So I had this steel drum loop, which married nicely to the Baxter afro loop. And it immediately prompted me to sing this two-part vocal harmony. And that was as far as I got in that session. Which happens – you follow your intuition and see where it takes you but it may not result in a full-blown song.

That idea sat on my hard drive for five or six months until one day when I was hanging out with my friend Marty… He was called back home because his wife was convinced it was time for their old and frail dog, Bronte, to be put down.

I knew that Marty was going home to get his three girls together from primary school and go to the vet with Bronte, and I was touched by that.

I was sitting there at home and decided that I would cycle through various instrument snippets and I chanced on this one, and the thought of Marty and his family laying Bronte to rest in their front yard was really in my head.

When I heard those four chords on the percussion and steel drum loop, the song just started from there – writing lyrics and finding chords by hitting single bass notes on the piano. I mostly finished the arrangement that day, including singing the backing vocals – all directly into the MacBookPro mic.

It’s a very heavily double-tracked lead vocal. One I sang in an upper register into the MacBook along with my demo vocal as I was writing it. I went back a couple of weeks later after borrowing a cheapy Axis ribbon mic from Andy Stewart and testing it out [so that’s where it went! – Ed]. I did some takes of Bronte with that and found that if I dulled down the already dull tone that it had, it created a beautiful double track tone when mixed with the MP3-ish tone of the MacBookPro mic.

CH: So the primo Neumann M149 had to wait its turn again!

WdB: It did. Some of that is trying to stay true to the vibe of the demo vocal regardless of how rough it might be. I’ll try and keep the demo vocal and double track a slightly better signal path that could imbue it with enough clarity for it to be up-front. But it was important to use the vibe and space of the original demo vocal sound.

CH: Is it a problem preserving that vibe in the final mix?

WdB: It was hard. Franc was always trying to make the mix a little more hi-fi, because the original recordings wouldn’t have a lot of high-end or bottom-end extension. But often the more we tried to do those things the more it would reconfigure the perception of the samples working in the midrange of the song, to the point that I felt it was losing the vibe. So it was hard to strike a balance there.
CH: And how hi-fi was Bronte?

WdB: It was a fairly dull track without much low-end extension. I did record some fretless bass with Lucas – our bass player in the band. I ended up deciding to press the Mute button before the final mix because I wasn’t liking the subby bottom-end extension – it wasn’t making sense to me. For the album I ended up using a very bare bass synth sound. In the first verse of the song it maybe sounds a little bit exposed and lacks some personality… but I still felt it worked, as it helped place the focus on the story and the vocal.

LIVE TRANSLATION

CH: Okay, that’s the recording phase done. What about Bronte live?

WdB: Translating it into a live context was hard. Like many of my sample-based Gotye songs it was well off concert pitch – it was 30 cents flat. So for one show prior to this tour earlier in the year, Lucas took a second bass (tuned 30 cents down) just for that song, because we couldn’t find a way of shifting it in Ableton that made sense. When we got the 10-piece band together we tried a version with Tim on my MalletKAT playing the steel drum as a sample. Even though we pitched it up, I found it was really messing with my head – I felt like I was in this tonally-fruity world of not knowing what’s going on, which was deadly for such a delicate song.

So it was a big step forward when I decided not so use any of the samples – we’d play it live. Jim found a really nice electric piano sound which gave us a more sonorous midrange tone. That was a good reference point. Then I have Lucas on the bass providing more bottom-end extension because it wasn’t making sense live without that. Josh on percussion and Michael found a really nice way to marry with the horns who are playing shakers, producing this loping gentle afro beat peppered by Josh doing a finger-lick tuning roll on the conga.

CH: So you’re happy with Bronte’s live incarnation?

WdB: It’s hard to play live. The vocals drive the song so strongly in the recorded version. You’ve got double-tracked lower and upper octave vocals answered by a double-tracked vocal in the middle – that pretty much takes up most of the song, to the point that you almost can’t hear the transients of the steel drum… they just melt away. That’s hard to achieve live. We might see if we can get there in the mixing.

EYES WIDE OPEN

CH: Finally Wally, is being a full-time muso the job you were hoping it would be?

WdB: There is an aspect of it being a job and that’s something my manager has suggested I downplay – it’s better you don’t speak about that because you ruin the mystique; people imagine an artist as immune to all that, just making music for music’s sake. That hasn’t been my experience; it’s been a lot of hard work. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, feeling like you’re pretty crap a lot of the time, wanting to be a lot better. I think that’s what keeps me going a lot of the time: let’s see if I can aspire to bigger/better things and achieve those things.