HORNY AND SAD AND SOME LESS GOOD PARTS OF BEING THE AUDREYS
- Bernard Zuel
- Apr 30
- 6 min read
Updated: May 1
SITTING IN A MELBOURNE BAR while the rest of the band loads in – one of the perks of being the vocalist, or at least the designated public speaker – Taasha Coates looks a bit strained after today’s drive but professes not to be stressed. So no need to avoid a first foray into difficult territory, really contentious territory, as canvassed in The Audreys’ new album.
In the slow country shuffle Beatles V Stones, about a failed relationship which for a while “beat the hell out of living alone”, but eventually succumbed to its crumbly foundations, Coates says she really should have known things were destined to end badly given “he liked the Beatles and I liked The Stones”.
Ouch. For him, yes, but maybe more so for some of us on the outside with particular tastes.
Ok, Taasha, I’m a Beatles-first man, but I love Lucinda Williams’ Essence (Coates’ favourite Williams record) more than any other of her great albums – does this mean we might have a chance of being friends?
“I think we could definitely be friends,” she says reassuringly. “For some people Essence is their least favourite Lucinda Williams album but that is the most incredible record: Charlie Sexton on the guitar … oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful, it’s so atmospheric, it’s so cinematic, oh [she gasps] I just love it.”
We agree that sad Lucinda is the best Lucinda, though Coates draws the line at horny Lucinda. Maybe halfway? Now we’re talking.
“Horny and sad!,” she says. “Horny and sad is kind of my whole oeuvre. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.”
Hmm. Let’s keep this in mind as it will become relevant soon.
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Ruin & Repair, the first Audreys album in a decade, finds Taasha Coates leading a newly shaped version of the band she formed in Adelaide with Tristan Goodall some 20 years ago. While Goodall died during Covid, the defining features of The Audreys remain: a rhythmic take on folk and country that has echoes of pre-rock’n’roll music; a seam of melancholia; a lead voice that smooths creases; an overlay of classiness and an undercurrent of emotional frankness. The album title is not underselling the reality of Coates’ life since the band last appeared.
Many careers are done and dusted well inside 10 years, so the idea of a decade between new music is in some ways already beyond the norm. Why persist? At least why persist with the name The Audreys instead of say, Taasha And The Overcoats, with Tom Kneebone on guitar, Felicity Freeman on bass and Beej Barker on drums still?
“First of all, Tristan really wanted me to do that and I wanted to keep playing the Audreys songs. In fact we were going to record an album in 2020 but then Covid hit and not long after that Tristan got sick, sick enough that he had to stop touring,” says Coates. “And I was in a horrible, horrible abusive relationship with someone who called me fat and stupid and lazy. So I became quite non-functioning. Then before Tristan passed he said I think you should keep playing, you should put together a new band.”
She’s also been raising two children, a 10-year-old and a 13 year old, with Coates pointing out the last time she released an Audrey’s record she was touring pregnant and she has mostly been a single mother since.
“I earned this: these are my fucking songs man,” she says firmly. “The people still love them and want to hear them. And want to hear the record. It’s so nice.”
Nice is a word that needs to work harder with the band and this new album right now. In the song Sober, simultaneously the loveliest and the cruellest-to-bear song you might hear right now, Coates says to a friend, “I like you better when you’re sober”, going harder still with an air of resignation and personal recrimination that cuts deep.
And though the person is not named, indeed the sex of the person is not identified, Coates confirms that it was written about Goodall, whose alcohol-damaged life derailed a lot of things. If that was ruin, the writing of that song became a crucial part of the repair.
“I tried to say it before,” Coates says of the gut-punch of Sober. “The sum of the lyric is ‘should I have been the one to warn you? Should I have just stood in your way?’ I’m saying, could I have done more to prevent it?
“Since writing that song I have had soul-searching sessions with myself and also with Tristan’s brother, and we both have gone through that feeling that we should have done more. But really there’s not a lot you can do once someone gets to that point. I don’t think I could have prevented it.”
And almost always we can’t, but it doesn’t stop us wishing we could. It’s human nature. It’s songwriting too. Given her lived experience in its many manifestations, here’s a question for Coates: sometimes partnerships work and a band thrives, sometimes partnerships fail and a marriage falls apart. What’s her advice for people on working out what is and isn’t a good partnership?
“I am the worst person to answer that question,” she says wearily. “I’m spectacularly shit at romance. Honestly my relationship with Tristan was the best relationship I’ve had in my life because we loved each other deeply – we were a couple early on but it didn’t last – and our friendship was so strong, and our connection with music was so strong that really he was my soulmate in a lot of ways. That’s why losing him was so hard.
“But I’ve never had a successful romantic partnership. I’m notoriously shit at picking guys: they just treat me like shit. Sometimes real shit. Like restraining order shit.”
Is she any closer to figuring out how she might identify the red-flagged shit before it becomes real shit?
“So, my current M.O. is absolutely zero emotional attachment. I just broke up with someone three days ago and I didn’t even give a shit,” she says. “That’s terrible isn’t it?”
Well, no, not really. Self-preservation is not wrong.
“I’ll just date people I could never fall in love with, otherwise I’m fucked.”
(It’s worth noting that this most recently ejected boyfriend got the boot because when she came home from a month-long tour, he chose to watch the car races rather than come over and see her. My dude, what were you thinking?)
Quietly, Coates will admit there are some unresolved issues in her past that resonate through her adult relationships, something which becomes clearer in the new song Secondhand Boots (“you made such a wreck of me that I didn’t recognise myself”) and were alluded to in 2010’s Little Molly (“Some places a child shouldn’t go/Some things a child shouldn’t know/Like the wiles of some handsome young stranger/Or the ways of those closest to home … some things are better unsaid/Some stories just shouldn’t be read.”), a song that becomes darker and darker as your absorb the subtext.
That’s some grounding for a songwriter, but not necessarily the best for a human trying to do things like relationships with other humans. A new record has restarted the band, can new thinking restart a personal life?
“I don’t know. Maybe because as soon as my heart gets involved I am really anxiously attached and I can’t think rationally,” Coates says. “I got my heart broken last year and I ended up in a psych ward. That’s how badly it hits me. So now I just can’t do it, I just can’t. I can’t be trusted.”
For someone who says “touring is my sweet spot – I make records so I can tour”, and a long national tour restarting in a few weeks, it may be that the songs will have to do for now. And for a while.
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The Audreys play:
May 16, Quirkz, Hunter Valley
May 17, Brass Monkey, Cronulla
May 18, Heritage Hotel, Bulli
May 22, Royal Oak, Launceston
May 23, Mount Gnomon Farm, Penguin
May 24, Craigie Know Vineyard, Cranbrook
May 25, Longley Hotel, Hobart
June 7, The Gov, Adelaide
August 29, Gympie Muster
October 26, Nimbin Roots Festival
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