Ahead of a Big Heavy Stuff reformation show, DOM ALESSIO catches up with drummer Nick Kennedy to discuss the glory years of Sydney’s independent music scene, the “Kennedy Curse” and why it’s impossible to make a living out of playing music in Australia.

At 38 years of age, it’s strange to hear drummer Nick Kennedy say that, for the first time in his life, he’s making a concerted effort to forge a career out of music. Here’s a man whose CV includes playing for Knievel, The Cops, Todd Sparrow and innumerable other outfits; who was not only asked to audition for Crowded House but drummed for Neil Finn on his contribution to Easy Fever, the tepid Easybeats tribute album of last year.

But perhaps Kennedy is best known for his role behind the skins for Australia’s archetypal indie rock outfit Big Heavy Stuff. Formed in 1990 when frontman Greg Atkinson and his brother Darren (the band’s founding drummer) moved from Brisbane to Sydney, they were the band that, against all odds, never cracked the mainstream. They had the songs, the adulation, the ARIA Award nomination (for 2000’s Size of the Ocean) and legions of pub-dwelling fans, but Big Heavy Stuff just couldn’t reach that upper echelon of popularity.

The last time Big Heavy Stuff were all on stage together was April 23, 2005, when the band played the inaugural Come Together Festival. The group splintered shortly after, though they refused to officially call it a day. But now, the line-up who brought us 2004’s classic Dear Friends and Enemies – Atkinson, Kennedy, guitarist Carolyn Polley and bassist Eliot Fish – are reuniting for one show at the Factory Theatre in Sydney on April 18. Kennedy will play not one but two sets, with Knievel also reforming for the gig. While he’s reticent to close the door on Big Heavy Stuff, Kennedy’s impending move to Berlin with his latest project, the ambient and instrumental Dead Sea, may put paid to any future activity.

Kennedy himself has been a stalwart of the Sydney music scene since the ’90s, not only playing in a variety of bands but working behind the registers at Red Eye Records on Pitt Street in Sydney’s CBD. He’s managed to juggle both a day job and a music career, but he’s now decided that to make a career solely out of what he does best, he has to decamp to Europe.

Where did the idea of a Big Heavy Stuff reformation come from?
Well, Loren McHenry, I think she used to book the Hopetoun [Hotel in Sydney], she’s been working on this documentary series called That Then This Now. I don’t really know the complete premise for it but I think it’s bands that she was going to see in her 20s, I guess in the ’90s, that have kind of fallen off the face of the earth. She’s contacting a bunch of them to do shows and at these shows, they do vox pops and they cut in old footage and they’re gonna make a doco out of it. I don’t know if it’s going to be a doco per band, or if it’s gonna be a big doco on a bunch of bands, I’m not sure, but Crow and Hoss did one last year, and we’re the next one: Big Heavies and Knievel. There’s been talk about getting The Clouds and, I don’t know, Falling Joys, I’m not sure, but in any case that was all we needed.

I was surprised, because Carolyn our guitarist sold all her gear, completely got off the musical train and I thought I’d ask her but I thought the answer would be no, but the answer was yes. So before we knew it we were doing it. And we’ve had a couple of rehearsals and it’s just like the old days. It’s great. We’ve got all these songs, like heaps and heaps of songs, and we just sort of throw them out there, and we generally get it together. By the time we do the gig it should be pretty tight.

Big Heavy Stuff stopped playing together in 2005?
Was it that late?

That’s what I read somewhere ...
I thought it might have even been 2004. It wasn’t long after the release of the last album [Dear Friends and Enemies], which was 2004. I remember we had a single out and just before the record came out we did a national tour with Bluebottle Kiss, which did really well. People were coming, they were loving it, radio was supporting us, it was good. Then we did a small supporting tour of the album and it kind of stiffed … This was just before home studios. At this stage we were spending 20-30 grand just on recording a record, so we were in the hole and we were faced with the prospect of touring in order to try and chip off that debt. But as anybody who’s played in a band for any length of time will tell you, touring puts you more in debt so we were faced with that prospect and that was the impetus for stopping, pretty much.

Do tempers fray in these kinds of situations?
Yeah I think so, especially when you’ve got people in your ear always saying, “Oh you guys should be so much bigger”, which happened to us a lot. People would say to us, “If you were English or whatever you’d do really well overseas.” We had a couple of releases in America and certainly respect from our peers and some of our heroes overseas really liked us, but it’s rare that ever translates over here. It’s just really difficult. I think even bands that are in the public eye and are getting a lot of support from all the systems, I’d really be surprised if they’re making much, if anything. It takes years. I was in the band for 10 years, the band had been going for three years before that, and it didn’t look like anything was going to change [laughs].

But we did love playing together. That was the thing that kept us together. When we got into the practice room for this thing, the chemistry is still there, and it’s unlike any other band that I have ever played in. It still amazes me that we can just plug in, I can start hitting things and somebody will start something, and within a minute we’re making music that sounds coherent and fresh, like us … I think that’s what keeps me interested in playing music in general is that miracle. It’s almost like a birth.

What do you think it is about the four members of Big Heavy Stuff that just gels?
Um, I don’t know, because we’re all really different personalities. I think it’s just a love of Greg’s songs and his voice and an understanding of what’s needed. Greg supported the Todd Sparrow album launch and he did a whole bunch of new tunes and his son was on drums, it was just the two of them, and I was watching it and I was still such a massive fan. I was just thinking this is exactly the kind of music I want to hear and I can’t hear it anywhere else but from this guy [laughs]. I guess that’s probably a big thing. Eliot was always a fan. Carolyn, his partner, was always a fan as well. Just a real love and respect for the kind of music we get to make together, I guess.

What do you remember about the early days of Big Heavy Stuff and the live scene in Australia?
I remember there was a lot of support … everywhere – from radio to press to the bands you would play with. There seemed to be a lot more interesting bands around. Not that I’m saying that now is no good, but it was really exciting. One of the shows I saw of Big Heavy Stuff before I joined was they were first on the bill at Max’s at Petersham and in the middle were Smudge and headlining was Pavement and in the front bar, which wasn’t a venue at all, they just sort of set up this stage on milk crates. All the industry types were gathered in there and it was like, “Oh, this new band, who’s this new band? They’ve got an amazing, amazing female front person.” And it was Magic Dirt. Just in that little shitty pub in Petersham, that was happening.

I’d been out of home a few years, and I was seeing bands Monday to Friday if I wasn’t playing. It’s funny to think that I’m old enough to think back to an ‘exciting’ time in the live scene, but it was kind of different. There were a lot more venues in Sydney at least and a lot of support coming from everywhere.

So how have you stuck at it for so many years? What keeps you motivated?
Because I love it! I mean, I’m picky. I’m picky with who I play with. I’m an absolute music snob. I’m selective with who I play with and definitely who I stay with. The bands that I’ve stayed with for years are the ones that I love and would play forever with if circumstances allowed. But that’s pretty much what keeps me going. I’ve never seen any money from it.

“I tend to gravitate towards people who aren’t interested in playing, or can’t play the industry, I guess. They’re not bullshitters … I think you do need to be able to put on your shit-eating grin and sell yourself – and I just can’t do that.”

Has it been tough?
No, no way. Not like some people do it. Some people choose this punk rock thing of really doing it hard, and I’ve never had to do that. I’ve just had to love what I do. The only thing that I wish for is that I was able to be a musician and that’s it, you know. That’s the reason for the move to Berlin. I’m hoping there’s a scene over there that can nurture people a bit more then they do there.

There’s definitely been a feeling of kicking against bricks growing up here and playing music here for so long; knowing what you’re involved with is good but not really being able to sustain it for very long, with a few exceptions. The Cops sort of did OK … Bec and Simon are friends of mine and it was great to kick around with them for a while. It was seductive playing to an audience [laughs] and being part of a machine that had a manager and a record label and radio support and there was money behind it that was getting us from Sydney to Perth, for example, which hasn’t always been there. I would have loved to have done that with some of the stuff I have a real musical stake in.

So Big Heavy Stuff never had that kind of support?
Well, yeah, they did for a little while. And fuck, you know, it was 10 years. That’s pretty good. It was sustained for 10 years. The only reason I speak about that with any element of disappointment is because we just kept getting better I thought. Greg kept writing better songs.

Some people preferred us when we were, you know, more of a grunge band, I guess. They seem to make this distinction between when we started laming out [laughs]. But I like the fact – even though it sounds like a cliché – that we tried not to make the same record twice. I thought we could have kept making records. I would love to have had 10 albums, 12 albums.

Were you jaded at the time that you didn’t hit that mainstream success, like someone like Something For Kate, for example?
I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t the case. I think all bands bitch behind closed doors. But it was becoming comical the amount of bands that leapfrogged us and became bigger - Something for Kate being a prime example. I remember they opened for us at the Punters Club in Melbourne. Their manager at the time was coming up to me when they were playing and saying, “Oh, do you think Clint’s a good drummer? I think they’ve got something”, and I was there going, “Yeah they’re great, they’re awesome.” And sure enough [laughs]. This happened to us all the time. I started to think it was the curse of me, “The Kennedy Curse”, because it happened to The Cops too. Wolfmother opened for us at Candy’s Apartment twice, and they went on to win a Grammy [laughs].

I don’t want to think about that too much because, again, that is a choice. It’s a choice on my part in a lot of ways because I tend to gravitate towards people who aren’t interested in playing, or can’t play the industry, I guess. They’re not bullshitters … I think you do need to be able to put on your shit-eating grin and sell yourself – and I just can’t do that. Most of the people I know can’t do that.

Were there times in the Big Heavy Stuff career that you perhaps should have played the industry game but didn’t?
Oh, for sure, for sure. I’ll give you a prime example of the sort of thing we used to do. We got so many opportunities, so many great opportunities. We did a national tour with Radiohead on the OK Computer tour. That was an amazing experience.

But one of the things that sticks out in my mind was Radio FBi, before they’d gotten the licence. They were gunning for that licence for a long time, and they used to have benefit shows, and they had a big benefit show at the Hordern Pavilion. We were on between You Am I and Silverchair, and – oh god, this is the sort of thing that we would do – You Am I completely blew the roof off with a greatest hits set, people were going crazy and we went on and we decided that we would open the show with a song that not only hadn’t been recorded and nobody had heard, but we’d only rehearsed twice. This was the biggest audience we’d ever played in front of, we opened with that song, we completely fucked it up. After we fucked it up, our confidence was so shot that we ended up going on to do this diabolical show. That was typical of the sort of choice we would sometimes make because, I don’t know, we were pigheaded and we were just like, ”Nah, we’re gonna fuckin’ do any song.” [Laughs.]

So you were aware of what you should have done?
We were cocky as hell and we thought we’d pull it off. There’s no way that we would have thought we wouldn’t have pulled it off. Those things were a mistake and they were things that we did to ourselves and so I guess we could have played it better. But we’re just not really career-minded people. I know it sounds like I’m defending myself, I mean it was a fuck-up in anybody’s terms, but, you know, we had our heart in the right place.

Tell me about The Dead Sea, because it seems like a very different band to everything else you’ve been involved in.
It is, but I’ve always had a real love for that kind of [ambient/experimental] music. I’ve always loved that sort of thing, I just didn’t think that I’d ever get the opportunity to be involved in making it because there doesn’t seem to be many people making it. There were more before I started playing music. There was actually a show on triple j. Arnold Frolows used to work on a show called Ambience and that went for, like, three hours on prime time on triple j so there was obviously a lot of interest in that type of music back then. We made this record and we did it ourselves, did it in a school.

What school?
Shore. Tim [Bruniges, guitarist] was teaching there part time and he ended up getting some downtime and there was a studio in there, it’s like this massive cathedral kind of place which is really fitting for the style. We just did it in the school holidays when the kids were out. We all just took a week off and just did it. Now we’ve got it and the prospect of … it just seems like it’s gonna be a bit less of a strain to work it in Europe because it’s got a European kind of sensibility. I don’t know if you could say that Australia’s a real sort of ambient, glacial, instrumental band kind of place [laughs]. They love it when it’s from overseas. I don’t know if they dig the home-grown variety.

Why do you think it is impossible to make a career out of music in Australia?
Because it’s so small.

Is geography the only reason?
No. We’re a sporting nation. That’s plain to see. There are parades for sporting stars. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, that’s just what it is. It’s a sporting nation and the arts aren’t even really supported by the government, really. Whereas in Europe, it’s plainly different.

I guess we just have to look at the whole Brian Eno vs Tiger Woods fiasco to see where the majority’s preference lies.
[Laughs] There was a fiasco?

Melbourne have paid Tiger Woods, like, four million dollars to play in some golf tournament, but at the same time in Sydney Brian Eno is curating part of the Vivid Sydney Festival. So the media have jumped on board claiming Nathan Rees is a moron for saying that he would prefer Brian Eno over Tiger Woods.
[Laughs] Really? Oh, that is hilarious. Wow! Well, then you didn’t need to ask me the question! [*Laughs] Well, that illustrates it perfectly. That’s cool, it’s been like that always. I used to worship sporting heroes when I was eight or whatever, before I discovered music and nothing else was important.

But I think it’s taken me this long to realise that you really have to go somewhere where the public is more sympathetic to what you’re good at. That’s all I want to do. In all honesty, I just want to go and see if I can do what it is I’m good at more often.

+

THAT THEN THIS NOW

Saturday, April 18
The Factory, Sydney, NSW
w/Big Heavy Stuff + Knievel