CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS 123: TIM ROGERS ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

Interview by Patrick Staveley.

There’s only so much you can talk about in 20 minutes, but that’s all the time you need to get a glimpse into the mind and genius of legendary Australian rockstar, Tim Rogers.

While I’d have loved to pick the brain of the You Am I frontman for hours on music, life and love, I was incredibly lucky to just get 20 mins.

After 24 years, a new album has come out Tim Rogers and the Twin Set. Rogers says it’s like a ‘sequel’ to their 1999 record What Rhymes with Cars and Girls.

If you’re only familiar with his work with You Am I and the Hard-Ons, the Twin Set takes a different path into folksy and country tunes. The storytelling on this new record hits new levels two-and-a-half decades on, as he admits that songwriting is a completely different process when you’re older. 

Tim’s not only ridiculously modest and humble, but he’s way past that to the point of self-deprecation, as he doubts what reception the album will get. He also hilariously took a dig at one of You Am I’s biggest albums. When I mention how my father would blast the 1996 record Hourly Daily, in the house he says ‘well that’s child abuse.’ 

I have no doubt when I say I truly believe he is one of Australia’s finest songwriters and a great bloke to chat with in general. This new album proves that once again.

FMM: There’s new music from yourself and the Twin Set. What was the process like - deciding you wanted to put more music out under this project and getting everyone together to do so?

Tim: Twin Set only did one quick tour after the record came out. Very soon after that I got married and my daughter was born and people’s lives moved on. We sort of left it alone. About five years ago, I got approached by a playwright called Aidan Fennessy. He asked if I’d be interested in a musical version of Cars and Girls. I thought it was the most absolutely fucking ridiculous thing I’d ever heard and told him that. But, he offered to buy me a drink and within three minutes, I completely fell in love with him and I thought the idea was genius.

So, we went ahead with it and he asked if I’d be interested in being in the play - largely non- verbal, just a musical role. So, I did and I had to hear a lot of songs hundreds of times. Just each night I’d hear them and thought, ‘Oh I don’t know if that rings exactly true’ or ‘this song - I don’t feel the same about that anymore.’

I just thought as a writing exercise, I’d write sequels. I tried to write sequels - if these characters were 28, what would happen to them at 50? I thought that’s interesting, I haven’t heard a record like that before. I just started writing the lyrics down each night when I was on stage and looked through them and just kept coming back to them in between You Am I stuff and Hard-Ons things. I guess during the pandemic, I had a lot of time to look over old stuff and came across these attempts to write lyrics.

I called Jen (Anderson) and said “hey, here’s a silly question for ya.” She said “I don’t know how you’re gonna do it, but sure let’s get together and make a racket.” [We said] we’ll try and get our friend Ian back from Japan. Our bass player Stuey Speed isn’t around anymore, unfortunately. So we thought, let’s do it as a tribute to those guys. We got a lot of the same players together in the same room and we retold the songs and brought our friend Jeff (Consi) in to play drums and he turned everything around and got heavily involved. That was the process. This silly writing exercise I had, I contacted the best people I knew for the project and they all really just jumped at it. The studio was 24/7, full-tilt action. It was great.

FMM: You have a lot going on with the Twin Set, a solo career and You Am I. How do you balance them out? Or do you pick and choose when you want to focus on one in particular?

Tim: Oh, I don’t even try to balance it, really. Writing for each project is not all that different. It’s just different amounts of volume. I think when you’re writing, it’s not like I impose myself upon whatever band it is or whatever people. I’ve got a way of looking at the world that works most times in songwriting and then I just listen to my band mates for whichever outfit it is and hope that it works.

Andy, who is the bass player in You Am I, and my manager, and has been for a while now will say “hey you need to dedicate this part of the year to this.” I’ll kinda keep that in mind, but really everything’s swirling around at the same time. It’s just the way my mind works. I’ll try and concentrate on a project whether it’s writing a book or working on a play, but then by the afternoon I’ll be wanting to write new songs with the Hard-Ons or work on a new Bamboos record or call Davey (Lane) and say “get a bottle of hooch, we’re writing a You Am I record.” It’s all swirling around in there somewhere.

FMM: The new Twin Set album is just rich in storytelling as is most of your songwriting really. As you get older and have more life experience, does it make songs easier to come by as you have more stories to tell?

Tim: Oh that’s interesting….that’s a very good point, I think. I thought it was just that I concentrated more on it and didn’t leave opaque or vague sentences there on the page and I’d try and work on them. Maybe [I’d] write something ridiculous and then re-examine it weeks later or hours later and retool it. It’s very possible. I hear stories all the time. I don’t really hang around other musicians apart from Davey - the You Am I guys, Twin Set folks and the Hard-Ons people. Most days, you’re talking to people about their farm or what they’ve got going on just in their lives which have nothing to do with being on tour or being fanatically nerdy record collectors like my band mates are. So It’s possible I’m just collating stories but mostly mine tend to be pretty self-indulgent so it could be questioned how much I really listen.

FMM: Would you say there’s a big difference from how you approach songwriting now to 25-30 years ago? Is there more maturity around it?

Tim: Oh, yeah. Don’t know whether it’s maturity, just wanting it to be better and thinking well if I’m going to be singing these things for a while I want to get lost in it. Even at the time, 25 years ago or whatever-odd. I remember I’d want to get lost in the songs but certain lines would just stick out and I’d get really self-conscious and think I really should have done better with that and I let a lot go by. It all had a flavour I think and a feeling. Yeah I want to be entertained and if I’m fully committed and feel like I can do that whether it’s on the stage or studio. I just think it makes for a better performance all round. Just demanding more from myself [is how the song writing approach has changed].

FMM: Do you have a favourite song in particular on the new album that you really got a kick out of recording or performing?

Tim: Probably I live near a train station, because it was such a band arrangement. I didn’t even necessarily hear drums on it and then Jeff Consi came up with a drum arrangement that really knocked my socks off. Jen’s strings that harmonically we talked about a lot to do and she ignored all my ideas and went with her own which is always the smartest option. It just became something quite harmonically tense. There’s tension and release.

It’s just very interesting to me anyway, harmonically. I don’t know musicologically, if it makes sense, but emotionally, it does. When we played in Sydney the other day, Andy Kent came and was almost in tears. He said ‘that song, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on but there’s some sort of journey there.’ It’s a bit ambiguous in the way I like, not all the time but songs to be in: is it a song of contentment? is it a song of unease? Is it a song about locomotive travel. I doubt it [laughs]. Then, it resolves with me thinking my dad could know every train from miles away. He’d be able to recognise them by their sound and me, I just loved the sound of them. I actually do live near a train station - a country station with a huge viaduct. It’s quite something to look at these vehicles and think there’s hundreds of stories going on within them. 

FMM: There’s a tour coming up in a few weeks. Is there anything that you want people coming to these shows to take out of it?

Tim: No, I do like the feeling that most things I’ve been involved in - anyone can see it whether they’re young or old and think ‘oh if he can do it I can do it as well. There’s no alchemy about it, it’s just luck and a little bit of grift really. We’ve started the tour already and since we’ve evolved, I think people will recognise some tunes and there’s a certain… only from what I’ve been told, people have had experiences to do with the first record and like revisiting that and then hope to listen to some of the new songs. Maybe there’ll be a line in there that they’ll get something from. It might make them be a little more wistful, thoughtful for a couple of seconds then move on and throw their bottle at me [laughs].

FMM: What are your thoughts on the Australian music industry today? How much has it changed since the 90s and 00s in your own eyes?

Tim: Ahhh.. things move on a lot quicker. Records are big for about a week. You see a lot of the same faces. I think there’s too much attention on production. But, this is the pop sphere. I really only was exposed to the pop sphere through a friend I had many years ago involved in pop but smart pop. I noticed how there was a real attention that things must be completely palatable to radio. There’s always been an element of that but, our band didn’t grow up around that. That happened to us later.

We were being asked unpolitely to clean ourselves up for radio, but we didn’t grow up with that and I get a little perturbed seeing young people thinking they have to make perfect records. More than anything, I think singer-songwriters who aren’t males… this needs to be perfect because you’ve only got one chance then you’re gone, you’ve lost your chance. People like me have been given a lot more chances. The ferocity with which that happens. I also did an awards show a couple months ago ‘cause with the Hard-Ons, we were playing. I was listening to a lot of the conversations that seemed to be more evident. As far as the music industry, there’s the industry then there’s the music community. I’ve only had a little experience with the music industry and a lot of experience with the music community and getting together with people and spending all-nighters talking about what moves us and what we want out of music. Or, what we want out of reading or rooting whatever it is. I really enjoy that - running into musicians or writers, folks that I didn’t… I haven’t known for ages and just talking to them about music.

I was in New York with You Am I [in June]. I was in a band room with Denzel, Baker Boy and Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil and thought well, this is an interesting group of people. I was talking to Baker Boy about what’s going on with him and his experience in New York and Pete and his decades of experience there. I just love that bit of the music community, to run into folks and have those great talks. Been out with Tex’s (Perkins) band at the moment and my band the Twin Set and Lucie Thorne who’s playing with us. We’ve got a bit of a shorthand with everybody. We can very quickly talk about things that can probably get too intimate for people who didn’t have that shared musical experience. It’s a bit of a code you can get through and really form very affectionate relationships with people. Definitely not talking about romantically, just talking about intimate stuff. It’s nice to get through that quickly. I don’t talk to people about other stuff more than about music, where I live in particular. I have to remember that not everyone is used to talking about very private and very intimate things so quickly, because backstage magical things happen and people reveal themselves for better or worse very quickly. 

FMM: I’ve spoken to a lot of up and coming bands and sometimes it can be difficult to fund tours and get going these days. You Am I supported Oasis in the mid-late 90s. How’d you score that connection and make that jump to add to the success you already had?

Tim: We did hundreds of shows to no one, playing on anything we could jump on. The Hoodoo Gurus and the Hard-Ons gave us shows and then we played another hundred shows to nobody. We played with Soundgarden in ‘93 and they offered us a tour of the States because we got on well and liked each other. The Oasis one - I don’t know who asked who but they were aware of us, we were very aware of them. It was great because we kept those friendships for decades. There wasn’t any plan. There’s people who are good at networking.

One thing that You Am I never had is a real social savviness. We’re quite awkward socially. We did have representatives. You hope that those things happen through reputation. I remember Steve Earl getting me to do a bunch of shows with him and I think that was just through friends recommending, but I think we’re okay to hang out with. I think we were ambitious but we didn’t let that ambition override everything else. Hopefully we were good company and good to tour with. We did a lot of tours that went for… I remember a tour we did with The Goo Goo Dolls that went for 53 shows in 55 days or something through the States. It was really before they had a couple of big pop hits. We did other tours through Europe with 10 people in the room for months. I can see that for younger acts, sure that the touring circuits aren’t there anymore and you don’t really hold a lot of 57-date tours.

I think you never know when an opportunity is gonna arise so you may as well be cool and kind and fun to everybody. Don’t always wear your earphones, talk to people. You find out a lot about people, talking to them socially before you hand over your demo. Apart from being a good person to hang out with, because making music, doing touring, pretty much waiting around, people don’t want to hang out with bores. 

FMM: Tim, thanks so much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate it. I’m looking forward to the album coming out and seeing how people respond to it.

Tim: We’ll see. I’m not [laughs]. I’m hiding my head in the sand, or the pub.