THERE’S MORE THAN ONE WILLIAM CRIGHTON; THERE’S ONLY ONE WILLIAM CRIGHTON
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HYPOCRISY IS A CURRENCY and some people spend freely. Consider the faecal righteousness of each party in the fight between the obnoxious radio bully who cried foul when sacked this week and the equally odious network that protected and paid him obscenely while making millions from him, and only found disgust when profits squealed.
Not everyone has, or wants, the readies to play this game though, so when the message in your songs is about finding the shared ground rather than division, forging a collective response to existential threats rather than individual indifference, and basically not being a dickhead just because you can, it helps when your life reflects this.
Consider William and Julieanne Crighton. Importantly, consider them together, for that is how the husband and wife (and parents of three) operate at home, in the writing and recording rooms, and now unequivocally in the public space as the two-in-one basis of the recording artist “William Crighton”, a purveyor of rock songs over five albums now which have their feet in folk and country and their heads and hearts in the physical and spiritual essence of this country.
“We probably collaborated more from the start on this one, than we ever have before,” says Julieanne of the new William Crighton album, Colonial Drift, on which she is a co-writer, occasional vocalist and co-creator of songs that unsparingly look at Australia as a country in flux and in need. “I guess that’s intentional, it evolved naturally. We live together, we share a life together, we’ve always written together. Our creative lives have become more enmeshed over time.”
Seated beside her today, talking from their home north of Sydney, William avers that “the work I think is just better when we do [it together]”, and he has the receipts.
“We are both lovingly critical – mostly lovingly critical – of each other’s work, so when you put that together we are pretty objective can work our way through a project like this,” he says. “I was leaning a lot into the production side of things and Jules stepped it up by writing a bunch of lyrics, but we’d conceptualised the production and conceptualised the lyrics and let it find its flow. It’s all very natural, not forced.”
Mind you, asking them to explain the respective strengths each brings to this project leaves them floundering for a bit. Not you suspect because of a shortage of things to say, but a surfeit.
“We’re both good at conceptualising things,” says William. “Jules is definitely great at being critical and making sure the story is not lost. I love .. I don’t really know … I don’t know. Sometimes I think we do something and I understand that then we’ll do something that flips it.”
He turns to his wife, “what you think?”, and she responds, to mutual laughter, “I think we’ve often joked that we share one brain between us, so we are one fully functional frontal lobe”.
“There are lots of ways we fill the gap for one another,” she continues. “Definitely William has more of an inclination to live performance. I love writing, I love the creative process, I actually love playing shows as well, but I’m really enjoy being a part of it in the ways that I’m comfortable and contribute something worthwhile. I don’t have the same inclination and drive that he has. But as far as what happens behind all of that and the work that we do to get us to that point with records, I’m really not sure.”
When pressed she says that he “writes a great narrative, a great yarn and I live for working through that, crafting something entirely new, finding different ways to express concepts and emotions, experiences, that have all been written countless times”. For him, “a good example might be to talk about a song, War Zone for instance, one we wrote with Rob Hirst”.
(Yes, that’s him out of Midnight Oil, Ghostwriters and Backsliders. His writing with the Crightons goes back some years and he said of this partnership that “In the manner of Midnight Oil, William's context and subject matter have always been uniquely Australian.”)
“Rob and I worked on the chorus together and then I had some melody ideas for the verses, and Rob and I had a sense of the arrangement and conceptualised what it should be about, but then Jules really wrote those first two verses in their entirety and they were just perfect worlds in those verses. She is an incredible writer in that way, getting a story across.”
Warzone has a line which captures real sense of the album and its portrayal of an environment and a culture being buffeted by forces of money and power, of division created by those with power and money, while the rest of us think we have no influence: “it’s a fucking war”. You know that line wasn’t tested in a focus group, and you know that it doesn’t just refer to the Australian soldier being sung about.
“There is a lot of conflict in a relationship with the land,” says Julieanne. “With our history, with our families, within politics, within our relationships, with our identity. The context provides so much of what you need to understand better why we are here, why we behave the way we do. That line specifically sums that up and in that example, an otherwise ordinary Australian young man could find himself in a really terrible and extraordinary situation. These are moments in our lives that change us entirely, and they sneak up on us.”
So many of the songs, in different contexts, in different language, have the quite straightforward message of we must change or we will pay existentially. But interestingly what the Crightons do is around that conflict and around that anger they refuse to succumb to lyrical, musical or personal violence.
“I think that’s right,” says William. “In the songs we are appealing to that humanity. It’s just as much human nature for us to look after the place and get along as it is to rip each other apart, but both exist so we are walking this fine line. Previously we’ve called out different things in a more aggressive way, but there is a realisation that we are a part of it. We might be a softer part of it, but I still come home, turn on the lights; I still take advantage of the things that soldiers have fought and died for. So we are all in the war, like the Leonard Cohen song says.”
He explains that when Hirst called him with the concept for the song he drove down to the Midnight Oil drummer’s home and realised that was the essence: shared responsibility and shared outcomes.
“At the time everything was happening in Gaza but you don’t have to look far to see the tension,” says William. “When Jules wrote that verse, the idea of this soldier caught up in this conflict he doesn’t understand, he’s just doing a job – he’s killed somebody, he feels bad about it, he wants to pay some compensation, and all he can do is put down the money on the bed on which the kid lays. It’s a story that is real and true but an example of that greater conflict. It’s just degrees that separates us.”
Julieanne adds that “we want to tell the stories that captures the humanity, even in the most dark of places, in the darkest corners of the world. And there is always that, you can find it: the story of the grief, the story of the loss, that’s the humanity. The horrors of the violence, we don’t need to tell those stories; people see them every day and the fear is we become desensitised to that. So, it’s finding the humanity, pulling that out of the horror, and finding something worth fighting for.”
Rather than pounding a lectern, rather than paint the big depressing picture, the Crightons prefer to pull the focus closer, locally, with the possibility of change. And it hits harder for that.
“That’s what we’ve tried to do with Beautiful Country and Peaceful Land, and the tone of the album essentially is that,” says William. “It’s not about ownership, it’s about feeling connected to the place when we’re talking environmentally. If you love a place then you are going to look after it by your nature, falling in love with it and realising that you are a part of it. So much of the struggle I see today online and within social groups is outgroup behaviour – this group, that group – but you are a part of it, you cannot escape it.
“How are you going to deal with that information? Are you going to be like an adolescent tearing everything up to find your own sense of who you are and truth at any cost? Or are you going to, as a society, listen to the warning signs? You can learn some beautiful lessons from Mother Nature, but rest assured, she will humble you."
That’s not really a cliché for him.
“I’ve felt that on a personal level. Every time that I’ve tried to connect with Mother and I’ve been egotistical about it, she has humbled me, by way of an animal stinging me or a broken limb. It’s immediate. I think it’s important for us as Australians to remember that it doesn’t matter where we are from, as long as we are listening and showing respect to this place. And being a real part of it.”
You can probably tell there is a direct connection, culturally, musically and indeed personally between the Crightons and Hirst who had been a collaborator and supporter for some time, but also someone like John Schumann who with Redgum and on his own has been pounding the same metaphorical streets for decades.
“John has always been a big influence of mine, and he’s an interesting guy. Julieanne run a music program in a prison up here and I invited John to be a part of that for a few days, a couple of years ago. We became friends over that and had a good yarn and we found out he was a really good mate of Rob’s as well, so there is a full circle kind of thing there,” William says.
“Both of them had a mission. When you see Schuey sing any song, he is on a mission. When you see Hirsty sing, he is on a mission. You watch Kosciuszko on the Goat Island Midnight Oil concert, when he is up there playing drums and singing those notes, he is a man on a mission, and he knows what that mission is, and that’s the sort of thing that inspires me and I think inspires Jules too, that dedication to that cause.”
There’s an undercurrent to this turn in the discussion as it wasn’t too long after Hirst’s death that we spoke. The Crightons need no prompting to go there.
“I first met Rob when he was at Woodford [Folk Festival] about eight years ago. He came up and introduced himself, in the most humble way, as he always does, and from that point we were mates, and he is a mentor of mine,” says William. “He had this enduring positivity that would inspire you to go beyond what you thought you were capable of, and just inspiring to be around.
"On this album in particular, because he was sick, he was dealing with that, but he did not let that stop. He’d still come into the room and for everyone in the room it would become the Rob Hirst Experience, because you wanted it to be, and he demanded it to be – not through anything else but his positivity and skill and humility. His spirit, and the things that I’ve learned from him, will stay with me all my life. And as a bloke he was such a good fella, a beautiful man.”
Julieanne chimes in. “He was definitely very special to us and I felt that the moment I met him. He had this wonderful way of comforting people, the way he met them. He had a certain kind of magic and people could underestimate him because he was a very, very nice man, very polite, but he was very astute, wicked smart.”
And here’s the rub, Hirst understood and shared the central philosophy of the Crightons, of the artist formally known as William Crighton.
“He would always be thinking of the collective. He always had this meta view, he always understood that what you could create was always bigger than the sum of its parts,” says Julieanne. “He had this way of dissecting these relationships, these interplays, and really dragging the best out of everybody. And everybody would leave feeling really great, validated about their contribution, and the magic would really happen because a guy like Rob really have that skill. And it was wonderful.”
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William Crighton – Colonial Drift is out March 20.
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