Thinking Big

Sydney’s Todd Sparrow were intent on making the last big, epic album ever for their second LP, 'Modern Western', writes ADAM D MILLS.

“He’s a guy who’s in a direct lineage of Australian rock’n’roll royalty, from Nick Cave through to Peter Fenton and Crow, and then Jamie,” says Todd Sparrow frontman Robert Gibson. He’s talking about Jamie Hutchings, lynchpin of Sydney’s longstanding Bluebottle Kiss, who Gibson openly admits has been a huge influence on his own songwriting.

What the ever-humble Gibson probably won’t admit, though, is that he himself is part of this same lineage. Todd Sparrow’s second album Modern Western is a sprawling epic, a 16-track opus that sees Gibson and his bandmates – bassist Eliot Fish, drummer Nick Kennedy and guitarist David Trump – pushing way past the boundaries of their 2004 debut, Here’s to the Start of Something Beautiful, towards much lusher pastures.

It’s a gutsy record, not in the least because of its length. In these days of truncated attention spans and boorish declarations by industry “experts” like Bob Lefsetz that the album format is dead, a record that contains 16 songs and clocks in at over an hour seems to be asking a lot of people.

“It is a bit of a statement in some ways,” says Gibson. “Not trying to be a wanker, but it is a pretty big slab of music. I guess we thought, with the resources that we had, ‘Why don’t we do something massive? Why not make a big album?’ In a sense we had the attitude, ‘Why don’t we just do this as if it’s the last big, epic album that’ll ever get made. Let’s see what we can do with it.’”

Modern Western is indeed a big, epic record. Bookended by the gentle ‘Evening Star’ and ‘A Secret Place’, it’s remarkably diverse, boasting plenty of straight-up rock numbers (‘Cleveland Street’, ‘Green Bed’) alongside lengthy epics (‘Last Thing I Know’, ‘Angel’) and glistening pop (‘Into the Open’, ‘Is There Somewhere We Can Go?’). In contrast to the more traditional rock/pop arrangements of Here’s to the Start of Something Beautiful, Modern Western is flush with strings, horns, piano and female backing vocals. Having spent some of the downtime between Todd Sparrow records working in theatre, Gibson says that he has learnt to appreciate the value of a big production a little more.

“I think we wanted to try something a bit more theatrical with this,” he says. “I’ve always been happy to have my music and put it out there but not really make a big fuss about it. You know what I mean? Sit in the corner, play guitar and I’m happy. If people listen then that’s great. But doing that stuff taught me about the benefit of actually making a bit of a noise and making a show of what you’re doing. I always assumed that you had to be a bit of a wanker to stick your head out and do something. I probably had a touch of the tall poppy syndrome, so it was hard for me to think of doing an album and having big parts on it and making it slightly theatrical.”

There’s no doubt he pulled it off – and how! But all the credit can’t, of course, go to Gibson. He’s flanked by some of the most talented musicians Sydney has to offer. Nick Kennedy’s arm-long resume includes stints in groups such as Knievel, The Dead Sea and Big Heavy Stuff; David Trump’s skills as a producer/engineer can be heard on records by Bluebottle Kiss and Something for Kate, among others; and Eliot Fish has played with Centipede and The Apartments, as well as being a member of the Big Heavies alongside Kennedy.

“I feel lucky,” Gibson enthuses. “These guys are such great musicians. Nick, for example is the most musical drummer I’ve ever encountered. He’s got such a great ear for music. You might not expect that a good drummer would need that, but the subtleties in his hearing after all those years of thumping the tubs as hard as he does, it’s a great advantage.”

We wanted to try something a bit more theatrical with this. I’ve always been happy to have my music and put it out there but not really make a big fuss about it.

Though songwriting in Todd Sparrow has always been a collaborative process, the general way of things has been that Gibson would bring his almost-finished demos to the band who would then work them up into completed songs. This is certainly true of the tracks on Here’s to the Start of Something Beautiful and much of Modern Western. But five of Modern Western’s 16 songs – ‘Evening Star’, ‘Shapeless’, ‘Into the Open’, ‘Terrible Things’ and ‘A Secret Place’ – were originally written by Fish, who here reveals himself as a songwriter of no small talent. Indeed, his songs are among Modern Western’s strongest, and it’s hard to imagine the album without his contributions; part Neil Finn, part Greg Anderson, it’s surprising (and, in a way, almost disappointing) that it’s taken so long for him to share this gift with us all.

“He’s brilliant,” agrees Gibson. “He’s a reclusive genius. He basically had a CD of demos that he’d done at home on ProTools, and he just brought it in and gave it to us one day. We all went, ‘What are you going to do with these?’ He said ‘I don’t know.’ We all looked at each other and went, ‘Well we’ve got to put them on the record!’ Fishy’s even more reluctant than me when it comes to outing his creativity in public, so it took a little bit of convincing. But we managed to get most of the tracks that were on that demo onto the record.”

When it came time to get down to recording this album (the bulk of which was done at Church drummer Tim Powles’s Spacejunk studio at the personal invitation of Powles himself) Todd Sparrow found themselves with more than enough material from which to draw – 26 songs, all told. The idea of recording a double album was bandied about for a time, but while Bluebottle Kiss’ Doubt Seeds had set a favourable precedent for the much-maligned format, the suggestion was met with a resounding chorus of “no, no, no” from the group’s friends and associates.

Obviously, the idea was nixed, but not because of its lack of popularity outside the band. With no record label to appease (Modern Western is the first release on the group’s own imprint Nonlinear Records) and no concern for prevailing trends, Todd Sparrow followed nothing but their own desires in making the record. And, in the end, releasing a double album just didn’t feel right.

“Some of the album is rather grand in scope, but I think it was you who said something like it doesn’t veer over into the grandiose,” explains Gibson. “I think putting out a double album without a really good reason might break that balance. We found that some of the tracks were probably not as strong as the others, so we culled it back and there was no real reason to split 16 songs over two discs. But I still think it has that epic feel to it even though it’s a one-disc thing.”

At the heart of Modern Western lies a bold ambition. As such, it stands alongside such (largely unheralded) classics as Big Heavy Stuff’s Maximum Sincere and Bluebottle Kiss’ Fear of Girls. While Modern Western is only the group’s second album – a hard-to-believe fact, all things considered – it’s their collective experience that carries the album through, making them perhaps the only band (or one of a very small number) deserving of continuing the considerable legacies of Big Heavy Stuff and Bluebottle Kiss.

“A number of things came together that allowed us to experiment with being a bit bigger and bolder, [like] realising that we had a bunch of guys on board that could do this stuff and do it pretty well,” Gibson says.

“And we’ve been around for a little while as well. I think that’s the thing about Greg [Atkinson] and Jamie [Hutchings]. They’re pretty experienced now and they’re not doing things to try and appeal to what they think might be the hot thing that people are listening to, trusting their own judgment and going their own way. We thought we’d have a crack at that as well.”

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MODERN WESTERN LAUNCH

Thursday, November 20
Pony, Melbourne, VIC

Thursday, December 11
Excelsior Hotel, Sydney, NSW