5 August 2021 – interview by Bec Harbour
Last week when I had a chat with Ben Ely about his third solo album, The Golden Path, we were living in a different world, it seemed that we had a semblance of normalcy, well the new normal anyway. Then the Delta strain of Covid spread through the community and everything got shut down and we were once again confined to our houses.
Written last year during lockdown and the following months, The Golden Path has some bright positive messages as well as some darker moments, there is an eclectic mix of sounds and styles on this new record.
Ben gave us insight into the writing of his new album, being a multifaceted artist and staying positive during these uncertain times.
Bec – Congrats on The Golden Path, I really enjoyed listening to it. One of the stand outs is, it’s a really eclectic mix of sounds and styles, first you have some alt-pop-folky sounds on the title track, then the next song, Tale of the Cyclops is a psych-dirty-blues.
Ben – Aha yes, it’s pretty trippy! I put some backwards masking messages on that just like the Satanic Panic from the 80’s, ha ha!
You’ll have the parental advisory label people after you on that one.
Ha ha yes!
Then there is the quirky electronica of My Dog is a Table; do you use your dog as a table?
Ha ha! I did for that one. A lot of those songs like My Dog is a Table came about because I went to this song writing camping retreat called Wild Mountain Songs.
After we did that, we all got together online, we spent an hour each week with a little task, we’d get sent a prompt, then we’d spend an hour recording a song quickly and writing. It was a cool process to write. Those two songs in particular came out of those sessions, where you’d chuck it down quickly, and later I was like, I really like those songs, I wanna put them out.
I was expecting the album to be along the same vibe as the lead single – the guitar singer-songwriter vibe, then I listened to the second song and I was OK we have gone somewhere else now, then the third song, somewhere else again. I needed to listen to it a couple of times to see if there were any underlying themes. The songs have not come from a big dedicated writing block, but from different experiences that you had last year?
Well, they came out of the same process, with the pandemic and gigs started falling over toward the end of the year…
I don’t know if you know the whole story, I had a little tool shed in my backyard that I used to make art in. Then over the summer this bamboo grew over part of the shed, I didn’t see it until I went to trim it back after summer, white ants had eaten out the whole shed.
A friend of mine, who is a set builder at La Boite Theatre, I said to him, mate I know it’s the middle of lockdown but do you think you and your mate Jamie could help me rebuild the shed into an arts studio?
He said sure, no worries and started rebuilding it, then he said, I think you should make this a music studio. I thought, yeah that’s actually a pretty cool idea. So, we get some heavy-duty materials to soundproof it a bit. Then it turned out that he (Jamie) was a drummer as well. I had a jam with him and he turned out to be this incredible drummer. I started jamming a bit with him.
But through the pandemic, I got my tool shed turned into a little music cavern in my back garden. I thought there’s no gigs happening, I’ll just make a record, but a record never to play live and just with the idea that it’s a pandemic record, a lockdown record where you can be free and just create anything and not be limited to the idea of playing it live, just be free and go wild.
Initially I had the concept of doing a really dark album, a gothic kind of vibe, then I started doing it and was bumming me out. I was already bummed out because we had lost all our gigs.
And then I thought, I think I want to cheer myself up, I wanted to make it a bit brighter. From then, I consciously tried to write more positively.
The song The Golden Path came out pretty early in the middle of me making all these depressing morbid songs, I thought it was a really cool concept, the idea of the golden path, when you are younger you choose to do music or art. My dad didn’t speak to me for five years, ‘you’re throwing your life away, you’ve wrecked your life by being a musician’.
I thought the complete opposite, I never placed a huge importance on money. I find working in the arts, even if you make enough money to survive, it’s a really lucky, blessed situation, to do art and have the opportunity to make visual art or play music in bands.
I feel like it’s a really rich direction to take, maybe not financially and that’s what started the idea for The Golden Path. So yeah, I was trying to cheer myself up and it was a pandemic record, it may sound like it’s all over the place, but there is a common thread through it.
That rolls nicely into my next question – I thought listening to it, it does almost feel like a concept album…
Yeah, well it kinda is in a way, just that idea of trying to bring light into a heavy situation, which is the pandemic.
That and you lost most of your revenue streams during that time… and we can’t really call streaming services a revenue stream for artists…
Ha ha, no they can be terrible.
I was listening to another band’s album recently for review and to get the feel for it I decided to chuck their back catalogue on a streaming service, it sounded like half the music was missing…
Yeah right, it just doesn’t sound as good as a CD or something like that?
I love vinyl, I have a lot from my parent’s collection. I find I like to listen to things I love on vinyl…
Yeah great, I have a pretty big record collection too. I love records, to me they are like an artist making limited edition prints. I like records because they are like art with sound.
One of the big things I love about records are record covers, they are big so you get to look at the cover and inserts that the artist intended you to look at, I pull it apart and look at every inch of it.
Yeah, read the liner notes, I like it when people put information on there…
I was really lucky with the album cover for [The Golden Path], I just gave it to Johnny Russell, a mate of mine who does that really beautiful collage stuff, I sent him a few four-tracks and asked what he could do with it. He made the cover, I was like wow, that’s really incredible.
It’s gorgeous and could be framed on a wall…
That’s a good idea, we should do prints of that…
So, what was the last record you bought?
Ahhhh, it would have been Amyl and the Sniffers last one I think…
Oh, yeah! I have their records!
I love her energy.
Yeah, she’s unreal. I think she might be the reincarnation of Bon Scott.
When we were listening to The Golden Path, we were trying to work out what you might have been listening to while making the record. To me there seemed to be a Lou Reed influence?
Yeah! I love Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. We were talking record collections, I feel as you get older you refine your taste. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of stuff I used to listen to and refined my collection. I do visual art and I like psych, psychedelic stuff from the 60’s, even some modern stuff. The last records I got were The Oh See’s. I love that psych type of thing, that influence.
I love that kind of experimentation that happened with that stuff in the 60’s, people were like OK we know what a rock band ensemble is let’s push it and make it a bit crazy through the influence of LSD or whatever was going on. I really love that kind of stuff. But if I’m cooking dinner, I like that quirky outsider folk stuff as well, so that’s probably where all the acoustic guitar is from.
Our other guess was Dylan?
Yeah, yeah, I love Dylan, I love folky stuff, really outsider-y stuff. I picked up this really cheap crap guitar at a pawn shop for $50, I have nice acoustics, but this one just has a vibe about it, sounds a bit beat up.
Tinny?
No, really warm. It’s a Taiwanese made Yamaha. I used that a lot because I really liked that sound. It’s a blending of all that stuff and you know I’ve always loved electronic music. I dunno, I’m a fan of all different stuff.
With Regurgitator, we’re inspired by all different stuff, we always mimicked what we were inspired by at the time. So, I guess there is a bit of that happening as well.
Regurgitator is a bit more playful and sarcastic, whereas my solo stuff is a bit more personal.
The reason for this project is its more of a personal thing for me. I couldn’t do these songs with Regurgitator… it’s not that kind of band.
The only one I could imagine being a Regurgitator song is My Dog is a Table…
Yeah! But even that’s a very personal song, it’s about me and my wife sitting down when my daughter goes to sleep and it’s raining. I just wrote that weird poem, my book was balanced on my dog and I was flicking through for that song-writing workshop, I came across it and thought, I think that’s alright.
It’s actually a very personal song, it’s about my wife and child – there’s no way I could broach those subjects with Regurgitator, it’s such a different project.
There seems to be a running theme with The Golden Path, doing what you need/want, a bit of self-care…
With your art, you do it, you make a decision to do it because it feels good, it gives you satisfaction. With it comes not a great wage, but someone told me a crazy statistic a while ago, only 14% of Australians have job satisfaction and enjoy their work, I think that’s crazy.
How many people are out there doing things because they have to, not because they want to?
Exactly! You get raised in this modern world, go through the school system, get a lot of that childish joy punched out of you, and I dunno, like you leaving studying law and doing what you want so you’re feeling happy every day or at least satisfied – you’ll come across challenges but at least be generally much happier right?
At least having that outlet…
And that job satisfaction.
So, to divert the conversation to pandemic topics, there was a demonstration in Brisbane city on the weekend to highlight the discrepancies between how the music and hospitality industry is getting treated versus sporting events – what are your thoughts?
Australia has always had a history of not really supporting the arts. You tour a place like Europe and you realise you get treated with much more respect when you go to venues. Arts in general in Europe has a lot more respect from the wider community.
In Australia, I feel like it’s a very outsider position to be in.
I guess through the pandemic, it hasn’t really shocked or surprised me that sporting events can still continue but tiny little venues, their capacities are squashed down to the point where they are really struggling to stay above ground.
I do see a major disparity, the arts as a collective probably brings in more revenue for governments than sport in general, its what $17 billion a year?
I had a friend who said he went to meet Anastacia Palazchuk (Qld Premier) about a big venue in the Valley and said can we get help, us and the smaller venues. And they basically said to his face, they are not our voters.
That’s really short-sighted, their voters ARE in those venues, pubs, clubs…
I know, it’s really weird right? Like I said it’s not surprising because Australia has never been very supportive of the arts in general. It’s pretty disheartening without creating a pity-party.
It’s disheartening, we [arts community] are seeing the rest of the world continue through the pandemic business as usual. I turn on the radio and hear that the builder’s union is getting supremely upset because they lose two weeks of work and here’s the arts industry clocking over a year and a half and it’s still crickets.
It’s hard to remain positive but we just have to hope you know…
On a more positive note – Tu Plang! has reached it’s 25th anniversary. I remember that tour coming to Darwin and you were wandering through the crowd, chatting to people, I remember thinking OK they are just like us – we didn’t get a lot of bands through Darwin and those that did come didn’t hang out with the punters.
This is why I loved the 90’s, there were a lot of bands, it was an interesting time, a lot of that music isn’t considered classic rock and getting played on 105 [B105 local Brisbane classic rock station] or rock radio stations.
It was a pretty lucky time to be young. It was a time when punk and rock were in the mainstream pushed by bands like Nirvana or whatever. It was a really good time to play music – a lot of the ethics of the bands at the time there was no line between the person on the stage and the person in the audience.
When I was a teenager, I was a huge fan of the Hard Ons, I used to go see them play, I loved Ray’s artwork on the t-shirts. I remember going to see them and they were just hanging around in the crowd and you could just go and talk to them.
Hard Ons were one of my first photo gigs when I started, I just contacted Blackie and he put me on the door.
Exactly! We would do that all the time. I’d meet people who’d say ‘I like your band’ and I’d put them on the door.
I think it’s a healthy way to be, you know anyone who thinks they’re better than anyone else, they’re a bit deluded. We’re all just human right?
And we all end up in the same place at the end of it all right? You guys are playing Tu Plang! in full to celebrate the 25?
I don’t know if any gig is going to happen. [Note: all 3 members of Regurgitator reside in 3 separate states] I was really looking forward to Spring Loaded with You Am I and Magic Dirt and hanging out with some old friends. When that didn’t happen, I was a bit sad for a few days, then I went hang on, just don’t have any expectations.
Now when a show is booked, I just don’t have any hope [that it will go ahead] which is a self-care thing.
The Golden Path is available on all streaming services – listen now
