THERE’S A FINE LINE BETWEEN THE PLEASURES AND PAIN

Bernard Zuel
Aug 21
7 min read

They've done it once, they can do it again - Lachlan Bryan and Catherine Britt of The Pleasures

MAYBE THE PLEASURES have taken this warring couples-in-song business a little far.

Today, talking about their second album as a duo working the old school country and blues angle of he said/she said/he hurts/she suffers songs, Catherine Britt and Lachlan Bryan seemingly can’t even be in the same country, let alone in the same room. She is speaking from home in regional New South Wales (from her bed, actually) and he is in a carpark in Belfast, Northern Ireland (in the front seat, if you’re wondering). To paraphrase a new Pleasures song, was it something he/she said?

Actually, three years, two albums and quite a few shows here and overseas into this musical partnership, while they are not quite at the stage of finishing each other’s sentences, the woman who began as a teenage country star and says she brings the Merle Haggard to the party, and the man who likes to trace everything back to the blues, have a casual bantering air that is as likely to take shots at themselves as each other.

Take for example when after she says “it’s so rare that you come across things that always feel exciting and always feel fresh and new. Lachlan and I have been doing this for so long and you get up and do the same songs the same way every night that you have been doing for 25 years, but The Pleasures have never felt like that”, and he responds with “You can speak for yourself Catherine because I didn’t write any songs 25 years ago that anyone still wants to hear. Least of all myself.”

That Britt and Bryan actually get along rather well is hardly a surprise: for a start, given their respective chequered relationship pasts they happily draw on for these songs, they wisely are not now, nor have they ever been, involved romantically. Secondly, they can and do say no to each other, as we’ll see later. Thirdly, there’s the fact this new album, Enemy Of My Enemy, isn’t just songs where they tear strips off each other.

“I think actually this record there are a few songs where we are actually singing from the same perspective, we are agreeing on things a bit more on this record. I don’t feel like this album is as much a conflict between the couple is the first one; I think that would be very limiting," Bryan says. "That was just the way things came out the first time around because of the situations we were in, I guess, but I think our only rule probably is that even if we have a pretty strong idea for a song separately, but we think it might be a Pleasures song, we try not to finish the song without getting together pretty quickly.

"I definitely noticed for both of us there were songs that we had pretty strong ideas about and it was hard to resist the temptation to finish without the other one, but I’m really glad that we waited."

There were other advantages to ceding ground he reckons. "I have a way of making something more complicated than it needs to be and Catherine really cuts through in a way that makes me feel like ‘fucking get over yourself Lachlan, just say it straight’. She does that really well and in a way that if I sang it straight it would sound awful but Catherine can say something really straight but sing in a way that makes it sound beautiful.”

Maybe the third album will have a song called Fucking Get Over Yourself Lachlan.

“I’m already writing it,” she says while he mutters in the background that “if I ever do a solo record there would be a lot of people who'd contribute to [Fucking Get Over Yourself Lachlan]”.

Self-owns aside, it is true that this record has some forgiveness and understanding, not just bile and bite: the song It’s Ok for example says some hurtful things but there’s a bit of care in its tone.

“That’s deliberate, for sure,” says Britt. “The only thing we went into with this new record was to try and not to the same thing again. We didn’t want to make, and I hesitate to say, another divorce album; we wanted to progress to another space. And we have, as a band, as people who write specifically from life.

“When we started we had no idea who we were or what we sounded like or what we were doing, but now I think we do know that. We knew exactly who we were and what we were trying to achieve, and that’s a very different frame of mind to start a record with.”

From Belfast comes another thought. “When you mentioned forgiveness there, I feel like I live in a pretty constant state of doubt,” says Bryan. “And it’s a bit more honest for me to not take a really aggressively one-sided perspective on a song or story. I think Catherine knows this from being on the road with me so much, I’m kind of the devil’s advocate about everything. In fact I almost don’t trust things that don’t have a lot of doubt in them.

"I exist a lot in the grey areas and see the world through a very grey, not clear-cut, perspective. It’s not that I don’t have convictions, but one of my strongest convictions is that I don’t believe anyone that really thinks they are right all the time. So that has to include me as well.”

How do they describe the musical foundations of a Pleasures song? Is it a tone, a sound, instrumentation, personnel?

“I see myself as a pretty simplistic musician: I just like stuff that feels good and isn’t technically very perfect or anything like that,” Bryan says. “We are really lucky, we have two guys in this band in Brad [Bergen] and Damien [Cafarella] who are not just naturally talented but educated musicians, whereas I think Catherine and I probably bring a lot of instinct to it.”

He notes that unlike their usual form, when he and Britt write Pleasures songs they do it on electric guitar. “Even the things that ended up with acoustic guitars on the record were probably written with an electric guitar. When you hit an electric guitar into an amp you have a lot more sustain, you don’t have to hit it as many times – that’s kind of how simple I think of music – and as a result the songs have a fair bit of space.”

The simpatico rhythm section, to whom the two leaders can speak frankly, is not accidental: drummer Bergen is Britt’s husband as well as her producer, and bass player Cafarella is in Bryan’s regular band, The Wildes. “He’s your husband,” says Britt. “Yeah he kinda is,” Bryan responds.

This is sounding all very loved up. What is one thing where each has said no, and quite firmly no, to the other? Hell no, even. And, to balance things up, what’s a hell yeah they have given?

“I can think of one specific one Catherine, do you know what it is, and is it worth actually saying it out loud?” Bryan ponders, though Britt sounds unsure. “I’m just gonna say it anyway. There are was a line in a song on this record that she sang that I had to think about for a bit, and it was like, Jesus Christ I actually have to call Catherine. I said, I don’t know if I actually want to hear that word in a song.”

The penny has dropped for Britt now, and she starts to laugh: “Whereas I love it,” she says.

“The irony is it’s not a word that would get an E rating,” he goes on. “But we had to have a bit of a band conversation about it and it ended up, I guess I got my way. It was a really firm no from me, but I did have to wrestle with myself for days.”

Britt takes up the tale. “I wrote the verse and kind of put it in there with a bit of tongue firmly in the cheek, but ended up loving it. Because it is a bit … shocking, but I’ve always loved those moments when I listen to artists. I kind of hoped I’d get away with it but when Lachlan called I wasn’t at all surprised. I kinda giggled and thought I’m sure we’ll think of something else”

He says, “you kinda giggled and thought Lachlan is such a prude,”

Come on, they can’t just drop that tease and not tell us the word.

“It was a word that described a type of ejaculation,” Bryan says. “Vetoed by Lachlan the prude,” Britt says.

The song in question was Love Relapse, and that’s all we’re getting. Guess we are all going to listen to the album now and try and work out what this ejaculatory metaphor was and where it might have fit.

“I don’t want to see your search history after that,” says Bryan, with an evil laugh. Naturally, finishing his thought if not his sentence, Britt joins in. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my victim.

The Pleasures – The Beginning Of The End: album review

Welcome To The House Of Fun. Pain. Regret – Where The Pleasures Begin: interview

The Pleasures play:

Deni Ute Muster, Deniliquin, October 4

Groundwater Music Festival, Gold Coast, October 17-18

Brass Monkey, Cronulla, October 23

Oaks Hotel, Albion Park, October 24

Smith’s Alternative, Canberra, October 25

Camden Hotel, October 26

Full Throttle Ranch, Buttai, October 31

The Cordial Factory, Frenfell, November 1