From a near clandestine existence, Mum Smokes have emerged with a sprawling 31-song double LP. Jonathan Michell tells DOUG WALLEN how it almost never happened.

Momentum is a funny thing. The last time Mum Smokes emerged from hibernation, it was in 2007 to play All Tomorrows Parties in the UK at the request of the Dirty Three. The Melbourne four-piece hadn’t played live much since their 2005 winding psych-folk debut Railroads Chasms And Fantasies. With Jonathan Michell (also of the Ancients) overseas, Karl Scullin and Julian Patterson focusing on Kes Band and Justin Fuller (also of Zond) tied up in various musical pursuits, Mum Smokes might have stayed on ice for good if not for the rarified invitation to play overseas alongside Cat Power and Spiritualized.

The Dirty Three had inadvertently prodded Mum Smokes into action before. An opening slot for the instrumental trio was the catalyst for the band’s second LP Easy. And when the band returned from their ATP jaunt, another full-length – House Music – spawned.

After being shut away from the world for so long, Mum Smokes now had a 31-track double-album in the can; an ambitious yet decidedly organic representation of the splintered songwriting and playing of each of its four members. There are sprawling jams, porcelain pop tunes and everything in between, with constant detours and wowing diversions along the way. But somehow it all works, from the tongue-in-cheek ramble of Easy’s ‘1949’ (as in “I’m gonna party like it’s…”) to the cool clutch of slow-burn instrumentals on House Music. It’s an unassuming, warts-and-all opus that nearly didn’t happen, as Michell makes clear during a telephone chat that was as leisurely and thoughtful as a Mum Smokes track.

It seems like Mum Smokes got a second lease on life after the Dirty Three invited you to play ATP. Is that what it’s been like from your perspective?
Yep. That’s pretty much it.

Besides the festival, what was it like touring the UK, where the band isn’t well known?
Well, we got invited to go up to this depressed industrial town in the north of England. That was just because [the organisers] asked The Drones to come as well. The other show we played was with HTRK in London. That was cool. They’re friends of ours, and I’ve played with them on bills in other bands before. But as you said, we’re not well known. We had another gig in Berlin, but that [was cancelled] because of a death in the family of our bandmate. So it wasn’t much of a tour, to be honest. Just a few gigs.

But it was enough to jumpstart the band into recording again?
Yeah, well, in the start of 2006, we had started recording a bunch of new songs that had cropped up. Without going into too much detail about the way things were going at the time, people had different ideas about the band. I for one just wanted it to be a normal band that played gigs and recorded and just did what bands seem to do, but there were other priorities. I definitely agree that you can only really give a proper shot at one band, if you’re going to be serious about it and play live and tour. And unfortunately, because two members of Mum Smokes are in Kes Band, that was justifiably a greater priority. So Mum Smokes is kind of on the backburner. It was the extent of that opportunity to go over and play that festival that swayed things to put Mum Smokes in the sun for a little while. But it’s sort of been in the dark since, in a sense.

And when did you embark on Easy?
Most of the basic tracking for Easy was done at the start of 2006. Then I went overseas for about a year. I came back to rehearse for the ATP gig. When we rehearsed for about six weeks, we did some more recording and overdubbing. When we came back, we pretty much finished all of that and started a new record, just from the basic fact that when we get together, people always have some new idea [and] they want to see how it flows with the other guys. Enough of those came up that something started to form, and this idea of a double album started to make sense, because there were definitely two different moods in the camp over two different periods of time.

So the albums are definitely distinct in terms of chronology?
Yeah, pretty much. There’s a song on House Music called ‘Gypsy Joker’, which was originally supposed to be on Easy but just didn’t get finished in time. But apart of that … the songs that I was contributing were written for Easy in about 2005. They weren’t necessarily going to be for Mum Smokes, just because that seemed a bit shaky at the time. And all the songs on House Music definitely sprang up after. There’s very little crossover, and about a year separating them.

How do the two albums separate in your mind, apart from time-wise?
There was definitely a sense … we’d put out [the first] album, and when we were doing Easy, the Dirty Three asked us to play with them at the Northcote Social Club. Just the rehearsals meant that we were together again. When you’re preparing for a gig and there’s a bit of pressure, you want to put your best foot forward. If you think that you have some weaker songs that weren’t working that well live, you definitely want to replace them with some better songs. That kind of pressure creates an impetus to create better material so you don’t come off looking like a bunch of half-assed hacks. So just the fear of that probably spurred us on to work up more material. Just because we felt like we had to come up with more good material, we ended up coming up with a new album. Julian’s Minimum Chips had just come to an end, and he would always be working on songs, so the songs he contributed to Easy probably would have ended up as Minimum Chips songs. And the songs I contributed … if they hadn’t been in Mum Smokes, I probably would’ve put them in The Ancients.

Now that Easy/House Music is out, do you still play songs from the first album live?
Yeah, we played three songs off it [last] Friday night in Hobart.

How did that show go? There’s a lot of instrument and vocal swapping on the new album.
I think we did a pretty good job. There’s a lot of ups and downs and a lot of stylistic changes. I think a lot of bands do a lot of that switching around, and that it can be a little bit annoying or distracting, and it may well be with us too. [Laughs] I’m not sure. We’ve been rehearsing a lot, and we’ve put together a set list we feel minimises those kinds of inefficiencies. So we’ll just see how it goes. One of the reasons we were really happy to do this Hobart launch before the Melbourne one was just to give us a chance, in a non-home environment, to iron out a few things.

“The process of trying to decide which songs to cut probably would have been too much for us.”

How did Mum Smokes rise from the ashes of your previous band, the Look of Love Orchestra?
The Look of Love Orchestra was a revolving lineup of friends of ours. It was the initiative of Nicole [Thibault] and Julian from Minimum Chips, who have always had this interest in easy-listening music: Burt Bacharach, Glenn Campbell, Jimmy Webb. So we did ‘Wichita Lineman’ and ‘The Look of Love’ and some Serge Gainsbourg. It was playing with some fairly rough instruments [and] cobbled-together arrangements. People were picking up a trumpet or a trombone that they hadn’t really played since their high-school days. We ended up playing some really awesome shows, just through friends. We played at a winery and the opening of a few bars and at St Kilda Town Hall with Pseudo Echo, the famous Australia band from the ’80s. At the time I was into T Rex, and that fairly flat blues approach to music and all those [easy-listening] acts have a far more interesting selection of chords and approaches to arrangements. I’d learned a few things and I wanted to put them into action in a new band.

Did the Look of Love Orchestra record anything?
No. There was talk about doing some kind of Christmas album, but I think that was bullshit really. It was just about having fun. I’ve been trying to encourage people to get it back on the stage.

Who named Mum Smokes?
It was sort of a combination of Karl and Julian. How it happened I don’t really remember. I think I’ve been operating under a misconception about that for a long time.

I’m sure it’s something that people ask about a lot.
Yeah, a bit. It draws a certain amount of attention because it’s slightly abrasive. I did a Google search and some guy in Adelaide has reviewed the album. I think he thought it was going to be some heavy rock experience. He’s written this bewildered, dismissive review of it because of the misleading nature of it. A lot of the ideas we have, people just stand around taking about stuff. And if at any point all four of agree on it emphatically, that will be what we do, which is almost such a rare occasion that we’re happy to proceed.

Did it seem daunting for the band or Sensory Projects to take on this double album?
No. Steve [Phillips] from Sensory Projects had contacted us just before we were going overseas and asked if we’d be interested in re-releasing our first album. We couldn’t deal with that at the time; there was too much going on. But we kept him in mind as someone who might be interested in our new material. There was another label that was interested for a time, but their proposal for what we should do with our 31 songs of new material … actually, they weren’t that interested in the rough mixes they heard of Easy. And, admittedly, they had a lot of work to go. There was talk of cobbling together some sort of compilation of that first album and [Easy]. They just weren’t seeing it the way we saw it. It made sense in our minds to keep it all together, especially in light of it being so difficult to agree on what to edit out. It could have been very different. I’m glad it came out the way it did. The process of trying to decide which songs to cut probably would have been too much for us [laughs].

The packaging is really beautiful, especially the artwork. It’s really compact for two albums, and it’s got the complete credits for every song.
That was an important part of it working, in our minds. We didn’t want to have some bulky jewel case. Nor did we want to release it as two albums that you had to pay for separately. It was good that we could get our friend Mark [Rodda] involved with it again. He gave us these discs of all the paintings and sketches he’d done, which amounted to hundreds of individual items. We scanned through them and found the ones that seemed to appeal to us the most.

Are you surprised by how much positive press the albums have gotten already?
Yeah. I’d say the general approach to these things among us is to play down [our expectations]. When we were putting it together, we were doing everything we could think of to make it as realised as possible and make sense and be enjoyable and worthwhile. But having said that, if it had received a lukewarm response, I for one would have been very used to that. So that would have been fine, I guess [laughs].

Does all this attention mean that you guys might focus more on Mum Smokes now, or will you just do these album launches and retreat back to your respective bands?
I tend to think the latter, actually. We haven’t discussed anything that we’re going to do beyond the dates that we’ve booked. I suspect that the response will mean that we’ll get back together at some point, if anyone has any good ideas. Judged on previous experience and the history of the band, all I’d really hoped for was that we’d actually launch it, which wasn’t necessarily going to happen, and maybe play a few dates around Australia. And now that we’ve done that, I won’t necessarily be pushing for any more.

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‘EASY/HOUSE MUSIC’ LAUNCH

Friday, June 26
John Curtin Bandroom, Melbourne, VIC
w/Fabulous Diamonds + White Woods

Friday, July 10
Ric’s, Brisbane, QLD
w/Greg Brady and the Anchors

Saturday, August 1
Spectrum, Sydney, NSW
w/Songs + Dick Diver