By Bec Harbour – 8 December 2020
It’s not easy to reinvent yourself in the music world, especially when your identity is part of one of the most iconic Australian bands from the 90’s. But Kevin Mitchell has done just that with Bob Evans.
Bob Evans is the alter-ego of Kevin Mitchell, created as an outlet for music that Kevin was writing that didn’t fit into the Jebediah world. When I had a chat with Kevin about his new music, the shimmering, summery and nostalgic song Born Yesterday, his writing process, performing live again as well as a bit of a trip through 90’s nostalgia, lockdown had just relaxed in Melbourne, where Kevin bases himself and his family and Bob Evans had just released a run of 3 shows on 12 December at the Pelican Bar in Queenscliff just outside of Melbourne.
Congratulations on Born Yesterday, it’s a really beautiful song, it brought up a lot of nostalgia, especially the video that looks like its shot on Super 8 video.
Hey thanks, we filmed that during lockdown in Melbourne, me and Arlo Cook, he was in Melbourne and I’m just outside and we couldn’t visit each other. We had to put together the footage that we had, of some live gigs, in the studio and we both took footage on our mobile phones near where we lived. Then there was some footage that I had on my phone of a few random things, about 2 seconds of my kids at the beach, so it ended up being, you know… I really like the clip, without it intending to be, it ended up being a postcard for 2020 for me… It ended up suiting the sentiment of the song and the sentiment of the year.
I found the video particularly nostalgic as an 80’s kid, having those shaky, slightly skewed angles and colours in a Super 8 video.
With the saxophone, it definitely gives off that 80’s vibe. The initial response and reaction [to Born Yesterday] has been positive. It’s been the best first response to something that I’ve put out in ages.
I think it’s because all the messages lead into the sentiment of the song, its kinda carried through to everything.
The phrase ‘I wasn’t born yesterday’ does the song have an underlying message of frustration, even though the song is quite whimsical and free-flowing?
No, to be honest what I like about the title was that, as you have pointed out, it’s used in a negative context, people use it to say ‘I’m not stupid – I wasn’t born yesterday’. I like the idea of using the same phrase but turning it into a positive.
The idea that naivety and innocence is, can actually be great. It’s something I look back on, in my late teens, early 20’s, that period of time that I was drawing my inspiration for this song, I was pretty innocent and pretty naïve and I’m glad for a lot of that.
There’s something really beautiful about innocence and naivety. I was kind of thinking what is wrong with being born yesterday, I’d love to be born yesterday haha.
So, let’s talk about how you know a song is a Bob Evans song versus a Jebediah song?
Yeah it’s a difficult thing to articulate, but I always know. It’s only the rare occasion that a song doesn’t tell me straight away, where it wants to go. On this record actually, there’s one song that could have gone either way, but it’s mostly obvious from circumstances. Most of the time if I’m at home writing, I’m writing for me, for Bob. Every now and then though something for Jebs will come out.
With Jebediah songs, a lot of those come from jams, being together. It’s very rare that I’ll take a complete song into a Jebs rehearsal room. I guess the answer to the question is the songs kinda tell me.
Your 2 different performing personas, do they give you different outlets/releases?
They are both me, but they do give me different expressions of my personality. Jebediah will always be entwined with my teenage years, I was 17 when the band started, everything about Jebediah is wrapped up in youth.
Bob Evans is a vehicle that can travel with me as I get older, be representative of every stage of my life. Jebediah is always going to be a time capsule, every time I play a gig, it’s almost exactly the same as 25 years ago. That’s what we’re tapping into and you can go back to being a teenager for the time that you’re on the stage.
With Bob, I feel we are moving through time, and I feel like this record, I was really leaning into that, I didn’t want to make kids music. I’m 43 years old and I wanted to make a record that wasn’t cute, that was representative of where I am now.
I don’t feel like I’m 43, I still feel like I was back at 23, but at the same time I’m happy to embrace maturity. And I think for such a long period in my career – from when I was 17 to 2013, 2014, I was Jebediah and Bob Evans which were synonymous with Triple J, which is synonymous with youth.
When that’s what embraces you and that’s the place, you stay with your audience and they expect that type of music. But I have moved beyond that now, and I don’t feel any more to produce music for a teenage or you know…
a particular demographic?
Yes that’s right.
It’s interesting that you say that, I spoke with someone this morning and said that I was interviewing you [Kevin Mitchell] and they are a bit younger and they said who? As soon as I said you know Bob Evans, lead singer of Jebediah, they were ‘ok had no idea that they were the same person’. There’s a whole demographic that really only know you as Bob Evans.
There will always be people that don’t put the two together. You know even as Bob Evans has become more well known, there will always be people that it passes by. They are different things, I gave myself a pseudonym for a reason haha.
I think that you have separated the two entities very well, you don’t go into a Bob song and expect traces of Jebediah in there.
It was a decision I made before I even played my first show. It’s a decision I stuck to hard for many years. In a way, if I hadn’t made that decision I would have gained more attention and perhaps had the opportunity to become successful [with Bob Evans] much quicker. Doing it this way, I was playing gigs for nearly 10 years before people started giving a shit and so many people thought Bob Evans was my first release, it wasn’t. I put out a small independent release, it didn’t get played by Triple J, when I toured it I was playing to 30 people. There was a lot of years of gigging and writing, gigging and writing before it really crossed over and connected.
When it did it was really organic, I didn’t have a fast-tracked experience because of the fact that I was in Jebediah.
It’s hard to start again but you can say to yourself I made it because this is good, not off the back of something else.
That was always my intention, it wasn’t so much that I had to prove it to myself, although that’s nice. The Jebs guys are my older brother and my two best mates, I wanted to be really respectful of what we’d created and built and not do anything that could be interpreted as getting personal gain from something that the group had done together.
Take your mind back to the 90’s, my very first photo gig as a teenager was Jebediah playing a free gig in Darwin. We didn’t get many bands through (especially 90’s Australian indie bands). Was it important, being from Perth and experiencing some of that omission of tours, to play regional areas?
I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t doing it to be honest. I mean especially if you were getting played on Triple J. Triple J had become this national thing by then and was getting broadcast to every nook and cranny of Australia. And so once you started getting a lot of airplay on Triple J you could turn up to any corner of the country and play a show and a couple of hundred people are going to show up. I don’t know why anyone wasn’t doing the same thing. I suppose in terms of playing live, Jebs always knew that was where the band was at its best.
As much as radio helps, making records, we always felt like a first and foremost, that’s how we figured we would gain an audience, touring and people seeing us. So I guess we always had that live ethos, touring ethos, just about playing as much as we could, in as many places as we could and working up an audience that way.
When you go to places like Darwin, the top of WA like Broome, you always feel like you’re on holidays. You’re far enough away from all the cities, it looks different, you are almost in Asia… it’s almost memorable when you go to those places, its hot and humid. It’s like I know I have a gig to do, but I feel like having a cocktail by the pool haha.
Let’s talk about your influences on the latest record, there are definitely some new sounds on the new record
I was getting into more classic rock, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty and for some reason I missed Tom Petty [earlier in my career]. The strangest thing with Tom Petty and it’s happened with Neil Young songs too, when I go to play a Tom Petty song or a Neil Young song, you learn the chords, its so comforting. It’s strange, I learnt to write songs listening to bands like Nirvana and Green Day and stuff like that. It’s so interesting to me to find, when I inhabit those songs by those artists, it feels really natural, really comfortable.
But for some reason in my youth, there wasn’t Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen around for me. And maybe a lot of the 80’s era, because that’s what I’m referring to. I guess in the 90’s all I listened to was current music… so there’s this vast vault of music that I haven’t put a lot of time into listening to and so I was spending a lot of time listening to Full Moon Fever, Tom Petty, just getting into Bruce Springsteen.
I also started getting back into The Smiths, that late 80’s guitar sound. It was a big inspiration for this record. It’s full of that clean chorusy electric guitar sound, what else, a lot of that Australian stuff from the late 80’s, early 90’s jangly pop stuff, like The Triffids and The Church. There’s something about that late 80’s early 90’s period of jangly guitar pop, I just love.
That was the melting pot that I was working with. I had a clear vision from back as far as 2017 that I wanted to make this kind of record with these kinds of influences. I stuck with it and I think it has explored a sound that no other Bob Evans record has done.
Was it difficult not playing during lockdown, or was it an opportunity to focus on the new record?
It gave me a lot of time to get this record ready. I got to make it really right and fuss over the details in a normal year I might not have been able to do that. It was hard not making money, but also, touring and playing is my life.
When I’m at home, I’m with my family, I live a very quiet life, so touring and being a musician, it’s how I generate income, it’s also my social life. Because I have been doing it for so long, I don’t know anything else – it plays a really important part in my mental wellbeing, my sense of purpose, it has been very challenging, like it has been for everyone I think.
At the same time, it’s the most positive and optimistic I have felt since this whole thing started. There’s a sense of, here in Victoria that we’re stepping back into the light again. Theres a sense of hope and positivity that’s been missing for 6 months.
Born Yesterday is available now through Dew Process
Listen to Born Yesterday
Limited tickets to Bob Evans at The Pelican Bar still available
(Queenscliff, Victoria)
