WELL, MAYBE I CAN: SIMON ROBERT GIBSON’S LATE LIFE CONVERSION
NO ONE WOULD SUGGEST Simon Robert Gibson has any links to, or indeed interest in, the bayou. Not even the version of the bayou imagined from the west coast’s bay area. Hell no, this boy may be in Bali these days but his roots and his mind is Bondi through-and-through.
But four albums in as many years, a string of singles in between, and this from almost a standing start as a songwriter and singer after decades as the loyal drumming sideman in a slew of Sydney’s finer if lesser-known indie bands? Writing songs that don’t just reference but wouldn’t be embarrassed to be in the same company as the chaps from The Go-Betweens, The Chills, his Holiness Paul Kelly? Wordy but specific and personal, melodically rich and believably catchy? And they just keep coming, with last month seeing the release of the ten-track album, Nights Go Original?
Bloody hell, that’s almost at Credence Clearwater Revival circa 1968-70 level of musical fecundity.
Where did this come from? To borrow from his song, After Dark, the past provides the context. It turns out part of the answer is nothing. As in doing nothing. Or at least nothing musically.
“I think possibly I took a little break when I moved to Vietnam. I didn’t actually play anything, any drums. I’d been playing so much for about 20 years and it’s tiring, it’s tiring playing in four or five bands, rehearsing, playing gigs. Sometimes you feel like you’re hitting your head against a brick wall,” Gibson says with a chuckle. “So when I moved to Vietnam originally, around 2008, I didn’t play anything for two years.”
He is a high school mathematics teacher and in Vietnam was working at an international school, but his live performance background meant he “kinda by default” started running the after school music program, its own School Of Rock. It was a big crack in the I-am-not-doing-music defensive wall.
“You think, what could be further from music than teaching maths [in Vietnam] and you end up getting dragged back into music. But then I got excited again about it. Things started happening,” he remembers. “I guess there was a critical point there in Vietnam where I was playing in a covers band – Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, stuff I never really had played but was aware of – and started playing drums on a Friday night because you got free beer. In a bar you were going to be in anyway.”
Some local friends became promoters and by 2014/15 were bringing some biggish names into the country, like The Lemonhead, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Vaccines, and they offered Gibson’s band a regular slot as the support act. The only stipulation was they had to play original songs, and who was there to write? Mr Simon Robert Gibson stepped up, wrote a set’s worth of original material in a month. As you do.
Maybe not all of them were great but a good number ended up sticking around as more than the fruits of his songwriting apprenticeship. Mind you, he wasn’t even singing them at this stage.
“I had no confidence in my abilities in that regard,” Gibson confesses. “I knew I could write the songs but I didn’t want to go into a studio and waste everyone’s time waiting for me to be able to sing them.”
The shortage of confidence was almost endemic, though he does have an excuse, touching on his fanboy feelings about some of the writers he has played with (such as his view that Paul Andrews of Lazy Susan is “one of the great pre-chorus writers. He gets melodies into songs that other people would make into a whole song. He’s a bit like Neil Finn, the master of the pre-chorus”) and one writer Gibson has known literally all his life.
“To paraphrase Lennon or McCartney, when you think I’m not the best lyricist in the city and then realise I’m not even the best lyricist in my family!,” he smiles. His brother, Adam Gibson of (these days) Aerial Maps, is a superb storyteller and lyricist, and in fact contributed the poem on which Simon based We Are The Beach Children on Nights Go Original.
But even with these confidence handicaps, the writing became more than a quick fix for the support slots, the labouring with pen and instruments now taking up more and more of his spare time and his spare brain space. This life-long musician was now a late-blooming songwriter who realised that even if nothing else came of this work, it was giving him new pleasures and deeper satisfaction.
“It was awesome. It is. It’s been very fulfilling.” And eventually no longer self-limiting.
“Me and my brother, I stayed in the music lane. I wrote a lot of his Aerial Maps music because I was a bit better at that than him, and he did the lyrics. But that limitation was put on me by myself, not by anybody else,” Gibson says. “And I think when you get a bit older you’re a little less inclined to limit yourself.”
(With maybe some surprises ahead given his favourite song of all time is Stephen Sondheim’s Send In The Clowns. Whose version? If you guessed Judy Collins you would be half-ish right. If pressed Gibson will nominate Judi Dench’s take from nearly 30 years ago.)
If the songwriter is no longer dampening his own confidence, he is also not attempting to dampen the mood. On Nights Go Original in particular there is a palpable zest for and celebration of the good that life can offer no matter the circumstances. While he’s hardly some surfing Pollyanna – death, the haunting of memories, and failures of love and life crop up in his songs – cynicism is not welcome.
There are a couple of explanations I have for why Gibson’s songs have a sense of optimism and openness, a welcome even. Though I will caution that these theories came from complete ignorance of him personally until this interview, just listening to his songs in the context of his story. So take that as you will, but one is if you grow up close to the water, immersed in it, the pleasures of it colour your thinking and the Gibson brothers practically exude old school Bondi. Another is when you discover this thing in you that can make a different you, a songwriting and then singing ability which begins to pour out, you can’t help but have a sense of joy about the world, and that joy will come out of you.
I run these by the man himself, tentatively.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s pretty much it,” he says. “I’ve lived a fairly interesting life. I have been lucky but some of those I made choices that at the time people thought were a bit insane. Like when I moved to Vietnam, on a whim.”
Or when he moved to Bali, which came after a year or so back in Australia from Vietnam, to share the care of his mother with Adam, just prior to Covid. Neither of them could work fulltime in that period because of the demands of their mother’s care, so Simon took a job at his old high school in Sydney on the basis he could and would drop everything if his mother needed him.
Mentally, emotionally and financially it was a hard time for the brothers, especially for Simon who has a now-12-year-old son in Vietnam from an earlier marriage.
“We got to a point where Ad said you can’t keep working [in this much lower position than his Vietnam role] in a school that is a bit of a madhouse. You need to surf more, you can’t keep …,” Gibson says, his voice briefly drifting away. “He could see I wasn’t going that well. I was flailing a bit.”
A job came up in Bali which put him much closer to his son, offered him a solid teaching position and it fed into this new way of being.
“Having a son is a part of that optimism,” he says. “Living an interesting life you spend a lot of time alone, or not with your old mates, and you don’t have anyone to talk to about your day to day experiences, except me and my brother talk pretty much every day. So the songs in some ways helped me to understand my own life: they kind of force you to distil the experiences into something, so you get an understanding of it.
“I guess I try and stay optimistic in the songs because I don’t want to listen to myself sounding pessimistic about my own life,” he adds with a sunny laugh.
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