FUN! FRITTES EN RIOT, CRICKET INDOORS AND YOU AM I STRUNG UP ON THE HOURLY. DAILY
- 5 hours ago
- 7 min read
IT HAS TO BE SAID, the timing was hardly ideal Mr Russell Hopkinson, on the other end of the phone this cloudy Tuesday morning.
Not the upcoming You Am I shows marking the 30th anniversary of their career reframing third album of superior guitar pop and melodic rock, Hourly Daily; nah, they’re good, in October, plenty of warning for those upmarket venues (like the Sydney Opera House). And did I mention they’re stringing up? As in adding orchestrations for a string section? And a reissue of the album with disc of bonus tracks? Well that too.
My timidly advanced little whine is down to the fact this call with yon Hopkinson, drummer of said You Am I, was scheduled about 45 minutes into the Belgium v USA World Cup match. Mate! Come on.
Hopkinson, not just polite but empathetic, gets it.
“I, myself have been pulled away from the football as well,” he says. “I believe Belgium are leading 2-1 so I think we can be happy about that.”
Given I’m not much of a fan of the old hacking the hands off the Congolese/raping the continent/thank you King Leopold Belgians – though Bruge and Ghent are dead gorgeous – it is a bit weird. But given the alternative is a rampant Trump The Corrupt, needs must.
“Yes, as my French friend once said, as we were driving into [Belgium] ‘it is a sad place’,” Hopkinson chuckles, before explaining that the band does have some – mostly positive, if also a bit weird – history there after quite a lot of gigs over the years, from the Hourly, Daily lineup of singer/songwriter Tim Rogers, bassplayer/now manager too Andy Kent, and Hopkinson, to the long-lasting final lineup of those three and Davey Lane.
“The gig in Brussels is really weird because it was this Turkish sort of community centre and the local Turkish kids didn’t like the fact they had rock bands in there. So [promoters] would bus the audience and the band in, lock you in the venue basically, and then when you leave you have to run the gauntlet of riot police fighting Turkish kids throwing bottles at the buses leaving. It seems like the stupidest place to have a venue but that’s where every band played.”
With this (head)cracking start to an interview whose time is so short it might be a speed-dating exercise, it makes sense to dig into the past some more and ask ol’ Rusty H for five – though hey, if we work super efficiently and get to 10 I won’t complain – people, places, events, things that fed into the creation of Hourly, Daily and the people they were 30 years ago. Sir, your time starts … now.
“The Pretty Things,” he says immediately, throwing in the UK’s alternative Stones/R&B guttersnipes/concept album-conceiving band of the ‘60s, under-appreciated by many but not by this record collecting aficionado of tough but melodic ‘60s and ‘70s music.
“[The Pretty’s 1968 album] SF Sorrow definitely. That was a big record for us because it showed you could expand beyond being a little four-piece rock band and still retain a certain level of rock and roll integrity, as it were. I think [Hourly, Daily producer/engineers] Wayne Connolly and Paul McKercher were very important just in letting us be us and capturing that. It was good to have people who were not necessarily going in as producers but as collaborators.”
Having had their debut, Sound As Ever, produced in Cannon Falls, Minnesota by Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo, and the second record, Hi Fi Way (the first to feature Hopkinson), made in Renaldo’s hometown of New York with American money behind them, being at home in Sydney was pivotal to an album that expanded the musical and sonic territory they inhabited.
“I think the main difference is that people [before] were more concerned with song structures and ‘hey, it doesn’t get to the chorus quick enough’ stuff that people tend to throw at you when they’re ‘producers’,” Hopkinson says. “Someone like George Drakoulias [who would produce #4 Album a couple of years later] would critique everything about the song structure and we’d have to either counter it with our argument or try something different. Which is fine, which is actually good if you want to make records for the radio, [but] which is not something we ever did.
“So Hourly, Daily was a bit of a free hand for us to make the record we wanted to make. At least two songs were like first take: we’d rehearse them and then record them and that was the base track. If We Can’t Get It Together, for example, probably came together as a band in like 15 minutes. And that’s what you hear on the tape.”
One thing about SF Sorrow , beyond the imaginative musical expansion, was the ambition in trying to tell stories beyond what and where the songs and the band might be; one thing about You Am I is that they’ve always told stories from right where the songs, the band, the audience were, but they were filled with ambition to tell us something more than we could see. And on this third album they began to nail exactly that in songs like the title track, Heavy Comfort, Soldiers.
“I think Hourly, Daily is probably Tim’s most complete set of songs that are ‘Tim Rogers songs’. Without anybody second-guessing him or trying to push him in any direction, that record is where he was left on his own, and as someone working with him it was kinda astounding all these songs that came out and how they all fitted together,” says Rogers’ biggest fan. “Lyrically, even though he hadn’t finished writing the lyrics – he was still writing lyrics as we were doing vocals – that was Tim’s vision almost completely emerging unscathed, as it were. Which I think is very unusual in modern rock history, especially if you’re on a major label.
“I think that’s one of the assets of that album, that it’s very purely a band and songwriter’s vision, as opposed to a band, a songwriter, a producer and a record company’s vision.”
Place has always mattered in Rogers’ lyrics, locating the listener often in the familiar, always in the recognisable, even if you’d never been there. For You Am I as Hourly, Daily formed, that place was clear, micro and macro.
“The former Rhinoceros Studios, which had become part of the Australian Institute of Music, where we made the record, was the place. Because it was empty, we bought in our own gear, rented it for a month or so, set up a cricket pitch in the common room to play indoor cricket, and just basically hung out there like a clubhouse,” explains Hopkinson. “It was definitely a Sydney album and it was the first You Am I album made wholly in Australia, our own situation completely, and that comes through. Tim would be writing songs and catch the bus in to the studio writing in his head. You can definitely hear Sydney on that album a lot.”
And for the drummer, was there an impact?
“When you are in a studio with heavy hitter kinda people, you’re not Jim Keltner so you’ve got to try and be Jim Keltner as best you can, which is not very easy,” Hopkinson says with a laugh. “So in this situation it really showed why I joined You Am I because when I joined and learnt those songs off Sound As Ever, I could play them exactly like Mark [Tunaley, original drummer] and they said, no that sounds too much like Mark, just play like your play.
"I think [Hourly, Daily] especially was where I could just go in and say ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that’ and there was a lot of freedom and I really felt part of the process as we were letting our little freak flag fly.”
Even as there was a run of number one albums, and a swag of ARIAs at one point too, this isn’t a band whose sales ever really rattled bean counters or Tina Arena, John Farnham, Silverchair or Powderfinger. However, those first three You Am I albums do have some of that Big Star #1 Album or Radio City feel in terms of how important they were to a generation of musicians (like Silverchair and Powderfinger) and music fans of a certain age and a certain disposition. Is that something Hopkinson and the others recognise?
“I think, yeah. Any time we do anything with You Am I now I really just try and take the viewpoint that this is not necessarily for me. I think you have to recognise that there is a greater purpose than just trying to please yourself,” he says. “Initially that’s what we tried to do, but now I understand that these records are really important to people and you’ve got to respect that, and treasure that because not many people get to ever experience that feeling of having people that really love your work. Respect the legacy, that’s the most important thing.”
And as a fan as well as a band member, a man who respects the legacy and the work, if he had to pick a song on Hourly, Daily to listen to for the rest of his life, what would it be?
“It changes every day,” he says, buying time. “Tuesday I really like as an ensemble performance; lyrically, Hourly, Daily is probably one of Tim’s best written songs – I think it takes a really sensitive subject and turns it on its head in a sensitive way. I think of all the records I’ve ever made in my life, that’s one where probably there is a couple of tracks I could happily listen to for the rest of my life.
"But if I had to, I’d say Tuesday: it’s such a fun song to play, I’d play that every gig if we could. But it is one for the special occasions.”
Hmm. There may be a few of those coming up soon-ish. After the World Cup.
Allez les Bleus!
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You Am I play:
Sydney Opera House, October 18
The Tivoli, Brisbane, October 22-23
Melbourne Recital Centre, November 5-6
HEAR MORE
Hourly, Daily vinyl reissue, and bonus set, Dailies, Seconds, will be released on October 9
