Jamie Hutchings tells ADAM D MILLS how his latest solo album, 'His Imaginary Choir', is very much the product of its surroundings.

Nestled in the quiet surrounds of Kangaroo Valley – a tiny rural town located a couple of hours south of Sydney – stands a small cottage. Actually, there are quite a few small cottages down that way, most in various stages of disrepair, but we’re talking about one in particular. One strewn with instruments, upon whose rickety porch you can sit and watch the hills change colour as the sun sets.

This cottage, which up until recently housed the home studio of Tony Dupe (who has worked with the likes of Holly Throsby and Jack Ladder, and who records fragile folksongs under the Saddleback moniker), was the birthplace of the majority of Jamie Hutchings’ new solo record His Imaginary Choir.

Recorded in fits and starts over a period of approximately 12 months, the album sees the Bluebottle Kiss frontman stretching his songwriting muscles, experimenting beyond the boundaries of indie singer-songwriter styles to draw on diverse influences such as ’60s exotica and Motown.

“Tony’s a good friend, and we’ve known each other for years,” explains Hutchings, who recorded his first solo album The Golden Coach with Dupe at his previous studio just outside of Kiama on the New South Wales south coast. “He’s had some pretty amazing locations in general, but the last place he was in was really serene. A pretty amazingly still environment. It’s like your watch kind of stops while you’re there, [Picnic at] Hanging Rock style.”

The recording locale had a tremendous impact on the eventual sound of His Imaginary Choir – from the buzz of every string to the natural decay of cymbals and the creak of unsteady floorboards.

“I think that’s great if, after you’ve recorded an album, you can remember it being recorded,” says Hutchings. “Having memories of dinging a part and playing a part are important to me. That’s what songs are about anyway. They’re a bit of a Polaroid, a blurry snapshot of whatever you were doing at the time. It’s nice to get that out of the environment.

“When you’re in a studio,” he adds, “you’ll hit a snare drum and it’ll finish straight away because the whole place is dead and soundproofed. But you have that option there [in Dupe’s studio] where the sound’s so open. Everything just resonates until it feels like finishing, because it’s just wood. It’s just a house. It’s not designed as a studio. I think the house winds up making its way onto the record, and I think it’s kind of a unique aspect of the way the whole thing sounds.”

It wasn’t only the environment that influenced the sound of the record. Though Hutchings originally viewed Dupe as the record’s engineer, as time went on they entered into a more musically collaborative relationship.

“After recording some basic tracks I started to think that I wasn’t really working to Tony’s strengths using him as some sort of engineering lackey,” Hutchings explains. “Tony and I have never really collaborated with rock music, because it’s not really what he’s into, but in terms of this record I knew it was a perfect thing to have Tony leave his mark on it, leave his grubby fingerprints on it in a way that would be really complimentary and unique and give something to the album that I couldn’t have provided.

“I guess that’s what made the record take a little bit longer too, because once you bring in that collaborative element it’s more work. He’s got a really interesting approach to songwriters; it’s more of an impressionistic approach. A producer might think, 'We’ve got to bring out this melody more or bring out this chorus more', but his approach is more to put a splash of colour against a lyric he finds interesting. The lyric will provoke something in his mind and then he’ll provide some sound that he thinks reflects that. It’s kind of an abstract impressionist take on production …

“It was just him putting in his little bits and pieces, quite accidental sounds, that create this great ambience and stopped it from going into bland singer-songwriter territory. Because even though I guess my main strength is probably as a songwriter, I don’t really want to be a traditional Ryan Adams-type songwriter: acoustic guitar and a vocal and some nice arrangements. I like the idea of things getting a bit spastic, things sounding a bit like something’s colliding in the middle of the song that shouldn’t. Those kind of things to me are really important, otherwise I’m just doing something that everybody else is doing.”

Hutchings began writing the material for His Imaginary Choir almost immediately after Bluebottle Kiss wrapped up work on their epic double album Doubt Seeds. The brashest, loudest album of the band’s lengthy lifespan, its sonic abrasiveness indirectly led Hutchings to discover a new set of sounds to explore.

“Everything I do tends to be a reaction to what I did the time before in terms of the production approach,” he explains. “You kind of satiate a particular musical desire, you have your fill of it, and then you tend to want to go and do something which is totally contrary to what you’ve done before, but still somehow linked.

“The main reason I make music is for myself. It’s not like the world’s screaming out for it. It’s more motivated by me, so if I can’t challenge myself then the whole thing is just a waste of time.”

“I don’t know if it sounds egotistical to say this, but it was kind of a courageous thing to do. [When you’re younger] it’s easy to be a bit simple and dunderheaded about things and get a bit macho about music. There were elements of Bluebottle where I was searching to make things harder and tougher and to stand out from a lot of the indie pop stuff that was around and make something that would go a bit further, that would really be unhinged. That was always a really big motivation with Bluebottle. So to actually move away from that and have the courage to go, 'I’m not going to be reliant on this bombastic, dramatic, discordant approach', and do something that maybe some older Bluebottle fans would find unattractive, to do that was a big move. And a deliberate move. It really felt like a time when I could do it and be natural.

“It’s a bit like when Bluebottle did this album Come Across,” he continues. “It was a similar thing in that I started writing lyrics that were a bit more like short stories. But I wouldn’t have had the ability or confidence to do that when Bluebottle first started, and I think this record’s the same. To make songs that just rely on the vocal and the lyrics and the instrumentation being not quite as tempestuous and dramatic, for it just to sit in a place that reveals itself in a more subtle way was a real change. It was something I really embraced. I thought Doubt Seeds was a great rock’n’roll record, and we could make another one. But the main reason I make music is for myself. It’s not like the world’s screaming out for it. It’s more motivated by me, so if I can’t challenge myself then the whole thing is just a waste of time.”

The desire to challenge himself – and his audience – led Hutchings down some interesting avenues while looking for inspiration.

“In some ways we were trying to emulate elements of exotica and different music from the ’60s and so forth, where you hear all these really exotic instruments, and also all this ethereal, more symphonic stuff. Like soundtracks from a lot of older films, like all the old Vincent Price films, and those French surrealist films where you’ve got all the operatic singing and Theremin-like sounds. My approach isn’t to study this stuff and become a real geek, it’s more the idea of hearing it once and then trying to approximate it. So we ended up varispeeding glockenspiels and doing open tunings with harmonics on guitar and speeding them up so they sounded like harps. It was more this clumsy way of us trying to do what these big-budget records did back then, and then it ended up sounding like something totally different anyway.”

In addition to Dupe, His Imaginary Choir features contributions from many members of Hutchings’ family, particularly his siblings Sophie and Scott. Having both collaborated with Bluebottle Kiss on a number of occasions, they’re no strangers to the singer's musical endeavours.

“It’s really easy, because they’re friends and family and you feel comfortable,” Hutchings explains. “There’s definitely that thing there, that understanding, that connection, that honesty. That natural ability to fit in and understand each other’s perspectives. I’ve had that with Bluebottle many times too. Recording Doubt Seeds we had a great connection as four musicians. There is something special about it; it becomes something more than the music. I guess too, there’s that emotional bond you have with your brother and your sister that makes it a bit more than making music.”

Ever since Bluebottle Kiss’s 2003 album Come Across, Hutchings’ lyrics have displayed his exponential growth as a storyteller. On His Imaginary Choir, those skills are on display more than ever – not least because he doesn’t have the option of hiding his vocals behind a wailing wall of guitars.

While some of the album’s songs – ‘Montgomery on Central’ and ‘Indian Ocean Virgin Snow’ – appear to touch on personal subjects; others, such as ‘Buried By Trouble’ and ‘Sir I’m Going to Have to Ask You to Leave’, seem to inhabit the world of fiction. Hutchings says that, in most cases, it’s really a little bit of both.

“Before, I really cared less about Paul Kelly or Tim Rogers or those sort of songwriters, because it was in the real world, and to me music is an escape,” he explains. “But now I feel like I’ve come somewhere in between. I used to really like songwriters like Steve Kilbey from The Church, who to me had this ethereal, esoteric element of, ‘What are they talking about?’ There was something very enigmatic about it, and I was really seduced by that. What I ideally wanted to do was have a bit of that and also have this almost novelistic approach, because I’m such a fan of literature, of being able to bridge the two. That’s, I guess, more and more where I ended up heading.”

Currently, Bluebottle Kiss are on an extended and potentially permanent hiatus. Hutchings laughs when asked about the future of the band he formed in 1993, saying that not even he’s sure what’s going to happen.

“We’ve never been through anything like this before,” he explains. The band was always a constant … and it’s been interesting to step outside of that cycle. It’s a bit scary – it almost becomes kind of like a routine. But playing under my own name, and if people are waiting around expecting me to do this other thing, I just have to deal with that. You just have to strike out and make these decisions if you want to keep being creative …

“I guess my perspective on it is that if I want to keep playing music, it’s ridiculous to be tied to this one basket.”

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His Imaginary Choir is out now through Nonzero Records.
Photos of Hutchings recording the album here.