Sir’s Jesse Shepherd on life within ‘The Brando Room’.

The first thing you need to know about Jess Shepherd is that he’s hugely entertaining company – a deft conversationalist with a surprisingly raucous sense of humour. Listening back to the tape of our conversation – where the central topics were his divorce, the welling up of emotional distress and the desire to be honest in songwriting at the cost of personal pain – it was surprising just how much laughter, from both of us, punctuated the interview.

Shepherd is a 35-year-old art teacher who lives in Melbourne’s inner-north suburbs. These days he’s a far neater and trimmer figure than the emotionally flayed and physically shambolic man featured on the fascinating artwork of his new album, Sir’s The Brando Room(Unstable Ape). Influenced by the likes of Lou Reed’s Berlin, Peter Hamill’s The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage, a handful of Peggy Lee 45s and Leonard Cohen’s Ten New Songs, the album is a brutally sparse dissection of a life in transition: pulmonary keyboard parts, whispered backing vocals and Shepherd’s unyielding lyrical gaze.

“I wanted the dryness of those latter Leonard Cohen records where there’s no emotion in anything, despite how heavy it is,” he explains. Sir is now a solo vehicle for Shepherd (although his current girlfriend, Cara L. Beltrame, co-produced and engineered the tracks), having previously recorded 2001’s The Night I Met My Second Wife and 2004’s Trapped In a World of Make Believe with his former wife, Elizabeth (Libby) Downey. The pair divorced in 2002, although their musical collaboration lasted, with some difficulty, until 2005.

“The Sir aesthetic is like The Ramones – always the same,” notes Shepherd. “It will always be about the end of things.”

Is The Brando Room a physical or mental space?

“There’s a concept about humour that says that every time you laugh it’s at something that you once believed in. To me *The Brando Room* is funny because a lot of that stuff is something I no longer believe in.”

It was a physical place, although it no longer exists. It was the front room of this house. It was built in 1917 and someone put a false ceiling in and what happened was we took the roof down, but above it they had taken away all the plaster off the sides and to bring the electricity in they’d taken out the old ceiling. The walls were full of horse hair follicles, so I cleared the whole room out and then Libby and I split up. So there was no money around, but I needed a tenant. So Tim Evans from Bird Blobs moved into the other bedroom and I moved into the front room. When I showed it to him he said I wouldn’t be able to live in there. The difference between being in that room and on the front lawn was purely cosmetic. I did over two years in that room and it was so harsh. There were holes in the wall and you could see your breath. It reminded me of a tough guy room, a place so harsh that you could get through any emotional state. So I started selling it to potential tenants as The Brando Room and a few people actually lived in there. Jon Michell from Mum Smokes lived in there, although one morning he came out and said to me that it was more like The Mickey Rourke Room.

Are you back in there?

I’m back in there.

What does that room represent for you?

Everything. Libby, my wife, moved out on a Friday and I was there on a Sunday with Tim next door. Almost three years of no real walls, hardly any ceiling and this big baroque painting of Libby hanging up. It was like sleeping in a barn. When I fixed it up it felt like closure, and that was when I finished the new album as well.

There’s no youthful delusion on the album, is there?

I was hoping that would come through. It’s a record about divorce and feeling jaded, but I don’t think being jaded necessarily makes you bitter. There’s a concept about humour that says that every time you laugh it’s at something that you once believed in. To me The Brando Room is funny because a lot of that stuff is something I no longer believe in.

How does ‘Time Machine’ – “Because each and every time I’m inside her/I’m back inside of you” – fit into that?

Everyone has gone through that emotion at some stage, where during intimacy they feel like they’re with someone else and they’re transported back to that memory. That’s my kind of déjà vu, as opposed to sitting in a cafe where the two of you used to eat together.

But with ‘Time Machine’ the protagonist only has sexual encounters to create that sense of memory – he’s only having sex with his new lover to revisit memories of the former lover.

That’s very true. You know, if you want something spontaneous to happen you must plan for it.

The narrative of the album suggests a lost weekend of epic proportions post-Libby and pre-Cara.

There was a real drop because I’d never been single. I’d been going out with Libby since I was 19 – she was 17 – and we got married when I was 20. We divorced when I was 30 and everything was a bit crazy. I had a job where I could fall asleep every day at the office. I don’t regret going ballistic because it hit me very hard. I couldn’t function in terms of relationships, even though I went out with someone during that time. It just got darker and darker and having [Tim] Evans move in didn’t help.

Was there an absolute nadir to this time?

I distinctly remember a woman I was seeing coming around and smashing my front door – a glass door, very nice. The cops came with a divvy van and the officer asked me if this had happened before and I said that it hadn’t, but her mother was there as well and she said that it had happened before. The policeman looked at me and said I had to accept that it would keep happening.

What was the mother doing there?

It’s a long and complicated story. I wasn’t really unhappy, but it was an odd period. You get really competitive as well – your ex-wife is out seeing someone else, so you decide to find someone even cuter than her. It’s one-upmanship and that’s not healthy. But if something is inspiring to me as a songwriter, then that’s a good thing, irregardless of the emotional state I’m in.

The premise of ‘Men Who Lie’ – “Men who lie/Are the only men I’ve ever known” – is particularly self-lacerating.

At the time I really felt that. I did feel that most of my ideas about relationships were from men and that there were certain things you take on board that might be effective in a relationship, but they’re definitely not positive. I’m not angry about that, just accepting.

What motivates you to start a press release with the words, “On March 17 it will have been five years, nine months and two days since Jess Jackson’s Shepherd’s lover, wife and collaborator in Sir left him”?

A lot of that was based around reading heaps of record reviews that would say, “blah blah’s had trauma in their real life and you can hear that reflected in the edginess of…” It’s always veiled. There’s always going be gossip about it – the band was a two-piece, now it’s just me – and you can’t really hide that. The concept of being embarrassed about someone leaving you doesn’t occur to me. I don’t want to hide that.

What did Libby think of *The Brando Room?*

The original plan was that we would both release albums on the same day. It would be her side of it and my side of it. Tim [Picone at Unstable Ape] agreed to this and it went as far as to have each of us provide a track for an Unstable Ape sampler, but just before it went to manufacturing Libby said she wouldn’t do it. I thought it would have been great.

Did she finish the album?

Yes, I’ve heard the whole thing. It’s great. Is it about me? Let’s just say that it’s about someone she doesn’t like very much. I took it personally when I heard it and I saw her do most of it live and I took that personally as well. It was much more explicit than The Brando Room. It was beautiful – I hope she puts it out.

Let’s talk about the sleeve photography, shot by Karl Scullin, a.k.a. the musician Kes.

He’s an amazing photographer. Karl’s my cousin and he’s shot all the Sir album packages. I’ve grown up with Karl and he came and lived here for a few months when we were doing the shoots. It evolved very organically: we started with a photo shoot of just me and some little dolls and then we did the shots with Cassie, who was pregnant at the time. Those shots are amazing – there’s a psychologically deep and messed-up quality to them. I thought of Lou Reed’s Berlin, where every song has a beautiful page in the booklet. Then I went to a party and met Jocelyn, who is on the cover, who’s a friend of a friend. She was quite nice and had the right look, pre-Raphaelite, like a figure from a Rosetti painting. That shoot was great, but with two it felt lopsided, then I did one with my friend Peter – two men wrestling – but none of them got in the finished booklet.

Hence the third woman, Evita.

When the three of them were done it was like someone had tried to create the perfect woman: Cassie was the warmth and security and the motherhood thing, Jocelyn was the dream girl and Evita was sexual and vivacious.

The sequence of sleeve shots appears to end in madness: multiple exposures, hysteria and you yourself look completely demented.

I was pretty fucked. That was a long day. There’s a story in the sleeve, particularly with the multiple exposures. Karl and I spent a lot of hours together in this house discussing and laughing about this stuff. I was really interested in the bourgeoisie savage concept – the idea of French guys who buy African stuff and aspire to savagery. I’m really into that and own a few artifacts myself.

Are you playing a character in these shots?

Ultimately it’s pretty real.

Do people think Jesse Shepherd is Sir?

People do mistake the persona for the real person. Obviously you amplify one aspect of your personality, you amplify situations, but at the core – and this is the reason I describe the album as “based on a true story” – these things are pertinent. Sex and wild nights are fun, but there are a lot of fears and awkwardness involved. Emotionally it’s an interesting topic, but talking about it honestly may scare people off.

It’s an album made by someone older than 30, who’s lived a life beyond 30.

Yes. What I hope is that people see that when you get older you don’t want to be singing about the same things. I was 27 when the first album came out and I’d already been married for seven years – that’s a different sort of space. You have to be true to your environment: This time I wanted to make a record about being in my mid 30s and that, while you get jaded, you also get crazy and upset by things. People think it’s malicious or confronting, but it was never meant to be that. I do believe that sex without love is completely worthless.

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The Photographer

Karl Scullin – a.k.a. Kes – on shooting The Brando Room booklet

What intentions did you have with these images?

The intention was pretty simple, as it was to be the artwork for the third Sir album, and it was a continuation of what we had already done together, having already worked on the first and second Sir albums. My attitude as the photographic artist is to document the songwriter/artist for the period of the album and their songs.

Was Jesse a character in these shots, or a reflection of the person you know?

To me the project turned out to be a really weird/interesting blend of both; being the most intensely staged photographs I’ve done, while at the same time being the most documentary. Looking back on it, it really has a strong documentary feel to me in that it documents my time living with Jesse – I am not saying everyday living with Jesse was like being in those photographs, but psychologically it was not far off. There was also a shitload of improvising on the different days and with the different girls depending on what the mood was.

What was the mood like?

The mood was intensely fun and creative and obviously very different depending on the models. There was one night where we both had a major meltdown, but that was bound to happen really.

Were the shoots influenced by *The Brando Room album?*

Yes, I was basically trying to document Jesse’s vibe, ideas, imagination and lifestyle visually as much as the music documents it sonically. The Brando Room itself was quite an enigma in my circle of friends. There was basically nothing separating the inside from the footpath two metres away except the framework, and that’s where Jesse slept. I had also stayed in the room when Tim Evans was living in the house and Jesse was on a European/American tour – I wasn’t enough of a tough guy to stay there that long as it was the middle of winter and as you tried to sleep you could see steam coming from your mouth.

Where did the ceremonial facemask come from?

Michael Noga of the Drones used to live a few doors down from Jesse and for some reason when he moved out he decided it would be a good idea to donate the facemask to Jesse. Also Jesse started to get into a phase of collecting artifacts, but a lot of the photographs with spears and artifacts didn’t work out for various reasons.

How did you explain the shoot to the different women involved once they were on location?

There was really not that much that needed to be said once the girls where in on the project, as it was very evident what the idea was and what Jesse’s relationship to them was. Having said that, I am very into writing lists and charts which I did for every photo shoot, as a reminder of ideas and to give the models cues and the confidence that we had thought about what we were doing.

Looking through the CD art, there’s a growing undercurrent of unease, culminating in the derangement of the multiple exposure shots – was that a deliberate progression?

Yes, the final placement and editing of the photographs was obviously very important. Just as the act of photographing is a form of editing itself, so it was important to make sure that there was a story or coherent dialogue between the photos. We shot the whole project on 35mm negative film and we took a shitload of images, hundreds, so it really needed to be edited quiet tightly. The booklet does show us building up our confidence in what we were doing and our freedom in experimenting more and seeing how far we could take each idea. That’s why I’m really looking forward to the next Sir artwork project.

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