CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS 142: BOBBY UNCLE ON DEBUT EP, MIMES MISS THE BEACH
Interview by Brooke Gibbs.
FMM: Firstly, I just want to say I was in Sydney recently and I went to Yagki's Apartment single launch, which you were one of the support acts for. That was the first time I had seen you and your band, and your energy and audience interaction was incredible! How are you feeling after that performance?
Bobby Uncle: Yeah, I was feeling pretty good. I thought it wasn't musically our best performance. We tried something a little different where we had the whole show pre planned, so pretty much I produced 30 minutes’ worth of backing tracks. I edited little inputs, so we have the back of the house where there’s a little AI voice telling us what song is coming on or whatever each person needs to be doing. Then, the front of the house is what you were hearing, which were like all the backing tracks and stuff.
The problem was, because if anyone's a musician, they know that wireless in ears are so expensive. But one of the boys, his wired ears is stopped working, so he wasn't getting any of the inputs or anything throughout the whole gig and he didn't mention it to anyone. So that's why sometimes when he's performing, I'm like, why is he out of time? Like we've done this so many times and it's been perfect. Why is he like a bit out of time? It was annoying me throughout the whole gig and then afterwards I was like, man, what was that? He was like, dude, I had no input the entire time, I was just going off muscle memory from all the times we've been rehearsing,
But other than that, I still think we did really well. We're just very hard on ourselves and that's just because we always want to give the crowd the best performance we can. I think for me, especially when it comes to producing music, I always produce in with the foresight that this will be played live. I think about how a crowd would react to it or if they’re going to get bored and just end up standing around, swaying left and right. When I perform the music I’ve produced, it’s something where I hope it’s so energetic that the crowd has to start moving, like it’s infectious.
FMM: I definitely picked up that vibe. It was the first time I had seen you, so I didn’t know your lyrics, but singing other people dancing and singing your lyrics was fun. You also couldn’t tell you had technical issues, so you handled it professionally, so try not to be too hard on yourselves.
Bobble Uncle: That’s really nice. I had a really fun time though. Yagki was awesome and Ignasyo who played before me, he was super talented. He played a cover of Good Luck, Babe! by Chappell Roan and he has this awesome backing track for it. I messaged him like, hey man, could you send me that? One day I want to play that as a cover.
FMM: Congrats on releasing your debut EP, Mimes Miss The Beach. How does it feel to have it out there and what's the reaction been like so far?
Bobby Uncle: It feels great. That was a whirlwind of an EP just getting it all finished because it's the first time I've ever had a body of work that I've put out there that I've been quite happy about. Mimes Miss The Beach, the track specifically… So initially, The Way You Stand, that was going to be the last song of the EP. It was going to be a six-track EP. Eventually I was like; you know what? I just don't think The Way You Stand can be what the EP should be titled. It's an awesome song, but with the name, I’d been looking at all these new EPs coming out, like The Last Dinner Party released an EP with an abstract name and I thought I’d probably have something similar. I went through a variety of names; Mimes Miss The Beach or Mimes Mourn The Beach. I thought that didn’t really work, so I ended up landing on Mines Miss The Beach.
This was probably October 1st when I realised I need this abstract name, and the EP was going to come out on October 4th, so I thought let’s call it that. In that same moment, I realised I actually need a track called Mimes Miss The Beach, so I started thinking of ideas. The next day, I was at university in my federal constitution class, and while my teacher was talking about external affairs and power in the Australian constitution, I started having the melody, ‘you know, I haven't seen you in a little while. Don't you know that Mimes Miss The Beach?’ I thought it was a cool melody and I should go home and write that.
My guitarist, Ben, was going to come over because I was going to get him to put a solo of another track that I produced, which is one that I hope to get out next year. And I was like hey, man, we're not going to be doing that. We're going to be producing a whole new song together. These are the chords, this is the layout. I've got you. You need to help me flesh this out. And he sat with me. He did that Spanish guitar bit on the acoustic. He helped with the transition from one key to the next because it's two separate keys between the verse and the chorus. And then pretty much he left and that night I spent like eight hours just producing it straight. Just different drums, different snares, and then the next day I sang it all in one go.
I think I spent about eight hours, got all the vocals down, edited a little bit more, got it mixed within a day and then sent it to a good friend of mine to get it mastered. By October 7th, it was completely done and I added it to the EP and the full EP was done by then. But, that reaction’s been great. A lot of people have been saying they've been loving the track, they've been loving The Way You Stand. They’ve said from start to finish, the tracks are perfectly placed in regard to the moods that people are feeling where the start is just full energy and then it kind of simmers down for a little bit and then it builds at the end with Tragedy Delight, which is this big production work.
FMM: I'm curious about your project name, Uncle Bobby. How’d that come about?
Bobby Uncle: A lot of people always ask if it came from Bob's your uncle, because of the run of words, but it didn’t actually come from that. I found out about a year after I made the name when people started asking that. Maybe subconsciously I did, but the way it came about was when I was 18 or 19 and I was in my room and a friend of mine called me wanting to create a clothing business as every 18-year-old surf kid does. I was talking to him for a bit and suggested we use the name Bobby Uncle. That just came up in my head, thinking you could make it not fully surfer, but more stylistic. He thought about it, said nah, and wanted to do another one, but that name never left my head. I thought it was a really cool name. When I started producing, I remembered that name and wanted to use it for all my artwork and my music.
FMM: I love it. Going back to Mimes Miss The Beach, I love the whole concept. You gave us a track-by-track rundown and you described a mime representing you not leaving the house and missing the simple things like the beach. Can you tell me more about that and how that fits into you as an artist?
Bobby Uncle: Yeah, so I’m studying Law at uni, which takes up a lot of time. I work on Fridays, which is fully indoors, and then when I'm not working, I'm producing in my room, whether it's music or singing. And then if it's nighttime, I'm going to rehearsals. So, I guess a lot of the time I don't have the joys of leaving the house, going to the beach, or going outside for runs. If I’m going to the gym, it will be at 10pm, and if I’m seeing friends, it will be nighttime activities. In that sense, I feel similar to a mime. They’ve got the white makeup, and for me, it’s the pale skin. They don’t get to enjoy stuff like beach, because if they go to the beach and they go into the water, their makeup runs off. They express themselves not through words, but through actions or through other means. I think I was trying to compare myself to that, where I like to express myself through music instead of just talking about how I feel. That’s how I came up with the whole Mimes Miss The Beach concept.
FMM: The film clip looks like it would have been so fun to film! What are some highlights from the making?
Bobby Uncle: Yeah, that was awesome. I looked on the Internet to hire a mime in Sydney and there was a couple, but all of them were like four or five hundred dollars per hour. And I was like, oh, my Lord, look, I don't have a budget for that. That's a lot of money. I knew it was going to take a couple of hours to film. So, I hit up my mate who went to NIDA. He’s super talented. And he was like, yeah, man, I'll wear some makeup. I’ll put on some black eyeline and go around the nose, I’ll hire out a mime costume and I’ll do it for you. He gave me a much cheaper rate. I also got another friend from high school who's a great photographer and videographer, and he came down and we went down to my local beach at 5.30am, so we had daylight and we just started filming. My mate had already made the storyboard and what shots he needed beforehand. It just ended up being quite perfect. It ultimately ended up being exactly what I wanted, which was a combination of that 1920s slapstick comedy with that cool 1940s dance with eventually come to Mimes Miss The Beach to introduce the EP.
FMM: So good that your friend came through and saved you at the cost of a mime. I didn't realise they were $400. Obviously, I'm in the wrong industry because $400 and you don't even have to talk? I should be a mime. We let some fans on Instagram send through some questions as well, and someone said that they really loving Coffee and would love to know what inspired that particular song.
Bobby Uncle: That was about this person I was seeing in December last year. I first wrote the chorus when we were seeing each other, and I couldn't get her out of my head. And I was like, oh, you know, I need coffee at the moment just to get the thought of you out my head. At the time, I was studying for an exam and I just couldn't get her out of my head, and that melody just kicked in. I quickly went to my phone and recorded it. I remember I even listened to the old voice recording of it back in November 2023. I had the whole song planned out, just the first singing. I had the verses and chorus, but they were just the melodies at the time. In December, we eventually stopped seeing each other, and that’s when I wrote the verses. The verses were a lot more cynical and vindictive.
The lyrics, ‘two feet in kerosene and you’re lighting up over jealousy tonight,’ was after we’d stopped seeing each other and there was a bit of jealousy on her end when she came to a gig of mine. I ended up writing that in December and think I had it done by about February or March. But I wanted to have some other songs finished before then and I wanted to build up a PR campaign leading up to it. That song ended up doing really well. It got a Rolling Stones feature, iheartradio played it, it was played across Woolworths, it got spins on Triple J. It was definitely my most commercially successful song for sure.
FMM: Amazing! I can just imagine people shopping for coffee while Coffee comes on the radio at Woolworths.
Bobby Uncle: Yeah, it was so good. I loved it. That was such an awesome moment when that happened. I was on top of the world.
FMM: We're at the end of the year now, so what are your plans for the next year?
Bobby Uncle: I have a lot of unreleased music that I think is a league above everything that I've released now. My producing has gotten better. I always tell people this; I don't really care if my music's getting better as long as my actual production skills are getting better. I'm really seeing that pay off with these new tracks. I'm now in the thought of whether I release an album next year or whether I keep it as an EP. I'm not too sure, but I definitely have about four songs right now which have been really well produced. One of them, I even got vocal produced by Simon Cohen from Studio 301 and he helped me produce the vocals for the track. It's sounding bloody awesome.