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Keeping His Head Above Water

September 2013

  • Phil Kakulas

David Bridie discusses a misspent youth, finding wonder and his new album, Wake.

David Bridie thinks we need a slap to stir us from our national stupor. His new CD, Wake, is intended as a wake-up call, both for himself and his country.

“It’s partly about me, but also about the times we live in and where music fits into things,” he says, “there’s a bit of yearning and searching in that… yearning for a better country. We send off troops to fight in wars but when refugees from those wars want to settle here we vilify them in the most disgusting way.”

Bridie may lament the ‘miserable heart’ he feels is at the core of Australia’s refugee policy but his own heart has taken a battering too.

The struggle to keep head above water, as the wake of the world washes over him, permeates the album and our conversation. “I feel, like many people do, that we’re like ducks,” he explains, “underneath we’re paddling in a very ugly and frantic manner and on top we’re just gliding along smiling politely.”

One of the album’s most affecting tracks, Old Lovers, points to the barely concealed anguish that must have followed the recent break-up of his marriage.

Your old lovers never leave the room
Long after you’re gone they’ll trouble you

It is the music that keeps Bridie afloat. “You can lose yourself in music,” he says, “a melody or sound, a turn of phrase or the catch in the singer’s voice… it has that kind of wondering. It makes everything slightly askew and allows you to look at something differently… or just takes you to another place.”

Bridie’s songs are peppered with references to places near and far, but it is Melanesia, where he has established musical partnerships with PNG musicians like George Telek, that the conversation returns to most often. A student of the culture, he delights in explaining the history behind the term bootmen, as it is used on the album. “It’s what the Papua New Guineans called the missionaries as they ate them,” he tells me, “as it didn’t matter how many times they cooked the fuckers – they were still as tough as leather.”

This appetite for travel was whet as a young man, when as keyboard player for the group Misspent Youth, Bridie took the biggest misstep of his musical life. “I was two days into an arts/law degree,” he laughs, “when our lead singer told us that bands got paid more in Perth.” The group promptly set off across the Nullarbor in search of that elusive pot of gold. Unfortunately, what they didn’t know was that only cover bands got paid more in Perth. In fact, only cover bands really got paid at all, such was the city’s penchant for Top 40 and retro hits at the time. After two months and one live show the group returned to Melbourne with Bridie leaving soon after.

The experience of crossing the continent did however make a strong impression on the young musician. His next project, the acclaimed Not Drowning, Waving, saw Bridie and guitarist John Phillips creating atmospheric grooves and expansive soundscapes that evoked the vastness of the Australian topography. For Bridie, exploring ‘region and landscape’ had become fundamental to his work as an Australian artist.

Wake’s melodic post-punk sensibility combines the rich textures and found sounds of Not Drowning, Waving with the acoustic stringed chamber pop of his current group My Friend The Chocolate Cake. Both Phillips and Cake Cellist Helen Mountfort appear on the CD, with Phillips also performing as part of the touring band – something that Bridie says he is enjoying both on and off stage. “It’s great having John on stage,” he says, “and great drinking in bars with him until 3am.”

Despite the backwash of his recent past, Wake suggests David Bridie can feel optimistic about his future. “Maybe I needed to go through that personal stuff,” he says, “bleak, dark, yucky stuff… to find wonder again.”

Thirty years on from making his first musical splash Bridie has left much in his wake. He may still be paddling frantically but he hasn’t drowned yet.

David Bridie’s Wake is available now.

davidbridie.com/wordpress/

Images:
All photography by Luzio Grossi
 

 

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