Tickets To The Resurrection

After 11 years, Perth veterans The Tigers have finally gotten the mix of experiment and structure right – or have they? MATTHEW GILES reports.

The Rosemount Hotel is a venue of perpetual resurrection. Though an award-winning fan favourite and one of the major houses of original music in Perth, it has been renovated and relaunched a number of times since 2001 in an effort to attract big drinking crowds, to not much avail.

People pepper in after 8pm when a band is on then leave in the early hours of the morning, not to return during the day. Now though, while I wait for Tigers front-person Chris Cobilis in the hotel’s newest add-on, a semi-alfresco area, the warmth of plasma screens and rugs and stylish second-hand furniture circles around me in a wan miasma.

It still has the clammy foreboding of a largely empty bar, but who knows? Maybe this time the resurrection will stick.

The story of The Tigers is similarly one of resurrection. They are an old band and senior members of the Perth music scene, whose ranks tend regularly to empty of anyone over the age of 25. Their faces are known to people who haven’t even seen them play, either because they go to shows or because they work at 78 Records, the city’s most interesting independent record shop.

Cobilis’ face, as it makes it way through the Rosemount’s innards to my table, is a mix of pleasance and fatigue. He is flanked by Stina Thomas, a talented pianist, laptop composer and old friend. They smile, say hello and apologise for being late, explaining, “We’ve been playing Mario Kart on Wii.”

This brings to mind one of a handful of memories of The Tigers: Cobilis and bassist Chris Hudson standing around the bar at the Rosemount before their set playing Nintendo DS consoles. That night, if I’m not mistaken, they played a cover of one of Thomas’ songs. They may have been supporting Scout Niblett, but so numerous are the sets of The Tigers I’ve caught over the years – either on purpose or by accident – that they tend to blend into one another.

Other bands may have been around longer, but generally speaking those lifetimes are padded out by long hiatuses. The Tigers, however, even during their occasional breaks have never strayed far from the stage. The point I’m running into the ground is that they’ve been around a long time.

“I think about a lot of the other bands who were ‘stalwarts’ when we started, bands I thought were the biggest thing ever because they had an audience even though they were merely local bands, like the Hedonists and Cinema Prague,” Cobilis recalls.

“Bands who were in their mid- to late-20s already and they’d been doing it for quite a long time. I remember looking at them and thinking to myself, ‘Why are they still doing it? What is the point, if you’re not going anywhere with it, if it’s just playing to the same people every single time? I don’t know what I’m getting at here … it’s weird to think that we’re that band now.”

The issue of age has come to light in the wake of their latest album, Beautiful Forest. It’s the follow up to 2002’s Christmas Album, the band’s sole other record of the past six years. That is, apart from Never Give Up, an EP by the Sabretooth Tigers, an incarnation of the band that performed over the 2004 summer when drummer Oliver Nelson and multi-instrumentalist Ben Basell were working and studying away from Perth respectively.

If not for that flutter of activity The Tigers would have appeared entirely comatose, instead of simply limping toward an eventual death, probably due in 2006. Then in 2007, seemingly all of a sudden, they dropped the best record of their 11-year career, rendering thoughts of a break up almost unthinkable, particularly to the band.

“Breaking up?” Cobilis says. “No. There was no urgency to do anything but to let it sit there and when we got around to it we’d do it. There was never any feeling of, we need to stop doing this, and we were still able to play the odd show despite people being out of town.”

It appears that quick bursts of songwriting necessitated by long distances and small windows suit The Tigers. Beautiful Forest cuts the fat that was present on their other releases, which manifested mainly as esoteric noise or jokey jokes, and replaces them with elements of pop music – hooks, structure, melody, economic lengths and driving rhythms. This augmentation of their sound is one the band has consciously resisted and survived without for a long time, but now that it’s present one hopes it will stay. The braininess and humour of The Tigers becomes truly potent when focused through a pop lens.

“It’s important to know that while considering yourself an experimental band, you have to acknowledge that pop writing is a craft and it can be worked upon to achieve something that is good for lots of people,” Cobilis says. “Pop music isn’t bad. I probably had some bad teenage angst thing happening in my early 20s where I was like, noise, yeah, it’s fantastic, it’s the antidote for all this junk.

“But pop music is good too, it moves people. Why wouldn’t you like to write a pop song? So we thought, this album’s going to have all songs, all the way through, no dickin’ about.”

I probably had some bad teenage angst thing happening in my early 20s where I was like, noise, yeah, it’s fantastic, it’s the antidote for all this junk. But pop music is good too, it moves people.

Sufjan Stevens and the Shins – acts Cobilis says he was listening to while realising the value of pop – are only present on Beautiful Forest as tangential influences. The Tigers still resemble the gently jazzy post-rock giants that have perpetually stalked Perth over the past decade. But instead of whizzing softly over a listener’s head, their music now lands closer to the gut. There is a temptation to say that they have finally gotten the mix of experiment and structure right, but to do so might prompt them to rebelliously return to their previous ways, so I won’t.

This is a story about resurrection, and how it can be engendered, if not entirely engineered, and the release of a good album is only the beginning of it.

The rest is arriving at a philosophy of music practice that avoids the common rigours of becoming popular, meeting the right people, playing the right shows, getting the right label, distributor, and PR company. Instead, The Tigers opt for lower expectations. This arrival is the end point of a journey that began when they formed as a high school experiment. Surprisingly, they have maintained the same line-up since then.

“Everyone used to say when we were younger, ‘You’ve got your good points now but maybe this won’t be the band you end up being in the future,’” Cobilis says. “I definitely don’t think I could be in any other band because they carry me. They can play, I’m ‘Mr Crazy’ who’s interesting enough to watch. Not one of us has ever wanted to get someone else in to make it a better band. We’ve started different bands just for fun, but there’s never been any urgency to make it.”

This is the second time Cobilis has mentioned a lack of urgency with respect to the machinations of the band, and that’s certainly a quality of The Tigers that has characterized their career up to now. In Perth one lives in perpetual fear that one’s favourite bands, and one’s cooler friends, are going to one day move to Melbourne. However The Tigers have maintained a consistent line-up over the years, losing none of their five members to the lure of a state in which the liberal party isn’t on the ascendant. They’ve entertained no dreams of ingratiating themselves into a healthier, more appreciative music climate. Not that they haven’t tried.

“After taking a number of really harsh setbacks like failing band competitions, or sending demos to people and not getting any response, touring and nobody coming – after taking all those setbacks and actually trying, not-trying becomes this other alternative,” Cobilis says.

“We’ve been a decent enough band that people keep calling us to come back for 10 or 11 years, so we haven’t had to try very hard. I mean, of course we want to be successful with music, but that’s the music. And obviously we’ll do whatever we can to make ourselves better known to people, but we don’t have that whole sell-yourself attitude.”

At this point Cobilis gets into a groove, and it’s best just to let him roll.

“Young people get that attitude because they don’t any other way to build their band, so they do all this stupid shit,” he spits. “Whereas we’ve just made a bunch of friends with everybody. We’re there, and now it carries itself. I don’t know how long it’ll last, because eventually the people who are booking shows will stop booking shows and there’ll be younger people coming in whose music tastes are not the same, and I guess the law of diminishing returns says that we’ll get booked less and less until we don’t get booked anymore.” He pauses, perhaps realising that he’s writing his band’s obituary, then chirpily adds, “But at the moment it’s fine.”

One band which, in the time between Tigers albums, have generated a mountain of buzz, recorded two albums and concocted plans to move not only out of WA but out of Australia, is Snowman. The paths of the two bands could not be more disparate. Whereas The Tigers have more or less happily settled on performing in Perth as long as the town will have them, Snowman have pursued gigging opportunities within and outside of the state with shark-like tenacity. Singer Joe McKee often makes publicly known his desire to leave. As if to underscore the difference between their philosophies, McKee once described The Tigers as “too indie for their own good”.

“Perhaps he was getting at the idea that you can shoot yourself in the foot success-wise by thinking that it’s ‘uncool’ to want to be successful, or that stepping out of the do-it-yourself realm is selling out, or whatever,” Cobilis says.

“I don’t actually think like that. It’s just that no-one ever offered us any money to do anything greater with it. Maybe if I was younger and I didn’t have a job or if all the members in the band were relying on the band as their primary source of income, then there would be this sense of, let’s just sell up and go somewhere and try to make a go of it. We can’t look at it like that. In the past few years I’ve seen so many bands move to Melbourne or overseas and never succeed. I haven’t seen any of them succeed. None. I can’t think of one.”

He turns to Thomas who has busied herself with her DS.

“Can you think of any band who’s moved over east and succeeded?”

She stares at him blankly.

“The Panics?” Cobilis suggests.

“Are they succeeding?”

“Yeah, they are.”

“I guess I’m the wrong person to ask.”

Cobilis may sound counterproductively pessimistic, but conducting business in this manner prevents him from caring about the limited rewards of career advancement and spares him the grief of failing. In the meantime The Tigers stay together and – a decade into existing – have hit a creative high and are experiencing renewed interest in their music that goes beyond mere nostalgia.

Sometimes-roving members Basell and Nelson have resettled in Perth, and they still have no plans to bog down their creativity with pointless careerism. Their aims now are no more ambitious than those of the last few years, but with their combined fidelity to unencumbered music making and their new perspective on their music, the future nevertheless looks bright.

“I’d heard all these horror stories over the years of bands signing to a major label, touring their arses off, being the most successful band in Australia, and at the end of the day still only having the equivalent of the dole,” Cobilis recalls with horror.

“I can understand that egos can lead you into all that stupid shit, but surely you just need to have a job. Surely you just need to eat.”

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