Despite a university degree in music performance and a dense new album, Ned Collette confesses to DOUG WALLEN that he doesn’t like music that sounds too complicated.

Always one to stray from his comfort zones, Ned Collette has etched out a fascinating career this decade. Following two albums as leader of the Melbourne ensemble City City City, he set out alone to translate his university chops and mostly instrumental, improvised musical experience into the work of a very unique singer-songwriter. With open-ended structures and a droning, conversational singing voice, Collette turned heads with 2006 debut Jokes & Trials and its 2007 follow-up Future Suture, both released on Remote Control’s in-house label Dot Dash. Then he abruptly changed gears, drafting longtime collaborators Ben Bourke and Joe Talia as bassist and drummer, respectively, into his touring band. The pair have recently been christened Wirewalker.

On new album Over The Stones, Under The Stars, Collette and Wirewalker explore vast spaces with gorgeous, understated malleability while Collette lets loose with keenly observational lyrics that betray his mistrust of the world around him. There are cues to such past iconoclasts as Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and John Cale, but the songs are infinitely more than the sum of their influences, as Collette made clear over a cold pint at Edinburgh Castle in Brunswick, Melbourne. Over the course of a serpentine 45-minute chat, he charted his course thus far, illuminated the origins of Wirewalker, cast doubts on the Pitchfork school of American music and explained why – even with a move to Germany on the horizon – he has bittersweet feelings for Melbourne’s fickle, overprotective music scene.

Before you started making solo records, you were in a band called City City City.
Yeah. Which was largely instrumental. The first record was totally instrumental, and the second one had a couple of vocal tracks on it. I played guitar and then sang a bit right at the end.

Was that your uni or post-uni band?
I guess it was post-uni, because I studied music at uni. I played a lot of experimental and improvised music. That was my first stuff that I gigged. I did a lot of solo, noise-guitar-y sort of things, and then City City City was the first structured band I had. There were six of us, sometimes seven. A lot of people came and went. It was cool. It was a really heavy beast to move, so after a few years we took a break and never came back to it. Everyone was 24 or 25 and pulling off in other directions. Everyone from that band still plays music though. It was just some guys wanted to play real full-on jazz and I was starting to write songs [with lyrics], and Joe was getting more and more into avant garde music.

Is that Joe from Wirewalker?
Yeah. He was one of the drummers. That band had two drummers. And Ben was the keyboard player, who now plays bass in Wirewalker.

What was your focus when you studied music?
It was a degree – I guess it’s still there – at the VCA [Victorian College of the Arts] called Bachelor of Music Performance. You either did classical or improvisation. The course was founded in the ’70s by this saxophone player called Brian Brown. The reason it wasn’t called a jazz course was he hated that idea that people would just emulate jazz. His whole thing was really for people to come in with a certain amount of knowledge already and spent their time there just working on creating something of their own. But he kind of got pushed out just as I got there, and then it started going a lot straighter. So basically it was fairly focused on jazz, and now I gather, with the problems the VCA are having, it may not even exist that much longer. I don’t know. that course was weird. There’s a lot I take for granted that I learnt there, but at the same time, I find the whole learning of that kind of music in an institution really problematic.

Were you studying guitar?
Yeah, it’s always been guitar. I didn’t start singing until a few years after I’d ironed out all the shit they taught me. [Laughs]

Was your first album mostly solo?
All the songs were written solo. Seventy percent of each track was me either playing guitar or keyboards or bass and singing. Extra people played some strings and pedal steel. The next one was the same again, but Joe did a bit of percussion and Ben played a couple of bits and pieces.

And it was between the second and third albums that Wirewalker came together?
Yeah, well, I came back from an overseas tour, which was my first solo European trip, and I really wanted a band. I’d been doing this solo thing for a couple years, and I was doing lots of loops. I’d build up layers of guitar and use it to get sort of kick-drum sounds and percussive sounds. This was 2007. I was just feeling that the whole looping thing was becoming a bit of a gimmick. It’s one of those things where suddenly everyone was doing it. I didn’t stop doing it because everyone was doing it, but I was really sick of it and I really wanted to play with people again.

Since you write these sort of sprawling songs, I imagine it’d get boring playing them on your own. You’d want someone to jam with… There are pros and cons. One of the nice things is this amazing control over what happens. And good solo shows were amazing; the bond was just you and the audience. Whereas with a band you’ve got to get it together between the three of you and then present some sort of unified thing to the audience. So I did have some amazing shows, especially in Europe when I was supporting bigger acts, where it was just me and a thousand people.

You toured there with Joanna Newsom, right?
Yeah, I played shows with her. Her audience was so respectful.

You also did some shows with Bill Callahan.
Only here [in Australia]. I just got booked on a few of the shows [he and Newsom] did together here, and we had a couple of long drives, so we got to know each other. He’s a great guy. He’s amazingly, amazingly shy, I think. My tactic became just to be loud and obnoxious, and he actually seemed to react quite positively to it. I think he’s got a really keen sense of humour. He’s not a ponce or anything.

And you lived in Europe when you toured there?
Well, yeah. The first time I went [playing solo], I went for three months and had a bit of downtime. And then last year the band went for six weeks and I stayed in Glasgow, where my girlfriend was studying.

And that’s where you wrote the songs for the third album?
Yeah, most of the album. There are a couple of older ones, and I think there was one that came together just before we went into recording. But the majority was written over there, and a bunch of stuff that didn’t make it onto the album, which I think will probably make it onto the next thing.

When you decided you wanted a band, did you naturally gravitate towards Joe and Ben?
Yeah, to go back to that first tour, I got home and I knew it was those guys and I knew they wanted to. It was just really easy. But then it took a couple years for us to really work it out. Like when we toured Future Suture, which was heavily orchestrated, it was really fucking hard to try and play that stuff with just three people. I think we tried to cover a lot of bases; Joe was trying to play little keyboard lines and keep time, and I had loops going and all this shit. It was hard. It was a hard album to tour. It’s a fairly tricky album to get into, so a lot of regional places in Australia weren’t that interested.

It’s weird to imagine you guys playing regional pubs.
It wasn’t so great. It was a tough tour. I started drinking a lot before shows on that tour. [Laughs] It wasn’t good. But that was just the early days of a band. Like, we played Meredith, and I don’t think we were even ready for that yet.

But after that, you then had the benefit of writing and recording as a band.
Yeah. Everything changed on that tour, about this time last year in Europe. I reckon it takes a while for bands to settle, or in my experience it does. On that tour, because we were working on material that had their input in the arrangements, it was the first time where I just relaxed and started giving them their space to just play the way that they naturally do. I remember Joe saying to me, “Look, how are we going to be different from every other band out there?” And I was thinking, “The only way we can do that is if you guys play to your strengths.” Because they’re really amazing individual musicians. Joe’s solo work is really legitimately good experimental music.

Is that under his own name?
Yeah, it’s just Joe Talia, and he’s got a duo with this guy James Rushford. They play around. And Ben does all this crazy ambient synth music. So the band turned into a band on that tour and stopped feeling like Ned Collette Band.

When did you decide to name the band and give it equal billing?
Oh look, it was something I always wanted to do from the start. They never seemed that fussed about it. They were always happy. But I didn’t want it to feel like my band. But the thing was, it didn’t stop feeling like my band until it [just] didn’t. I tried to preempt it, and then when it happened, funnily enough, that’s exactly when the name popped up.

Who came up with that? Well, I watched that documentary [Man On Wire], and they kept talking about wirewalkers. It was like industry slang. I just liked it. It appealed to me. I don’t know why.

And they liked it?
Yeah, yeah. And that was the thing. They’d never really liked any [name]. Nothing was ever better than just, ‘Ned Collette Band’. I wrote to them and Joe said, “Yeah, I like it.” And Joe never liked any of the other names. He said it reminded him of a B-grade Rutger Hauer sci-fi movie from the ’80s that would sit on the sun-faded shelf of the VHS [section]. So it stuck.

“I get a lot of reviews where the reviewer talks about the state of my mental health and assumes that I take myself very seriously and I walk around with my own personal fucking rain cloud. Anyone who knows me knows that’s absolutely not the case.”

So you’re working toward being this fully functional trio, but at the same time, there’s this big focus on storytelling and lyrics.
Well, the lyrics is just unequivocally my area. Those guys don’t really have much input into that unless I ask if something is too shit. There’s never any more suggestion. So in that way, I don’t have any illusions; it’s still my band. I bring the songs to the table, and that includes chords, but musically their ideas are just as important once the song gets going. And they really inform my guitar playing as well. They have ideas about what the guitar should do, and I have ideas about what the drums should do. So I guess musically, it feels really evenly split these days.

I’ve sort of let go of trying to get them to do what I think they should do. The only way it’s going to sound original is if you have arrangements coming from the heart of the person playing the arrangements. And there’s a really vast range of influences between the three of us, and there’s a confluence with some of them, but at the same time, Joe’s never been into Australian songwriter-y bands. He just doesn’t do that. So you don’t get that element. But I have. And I like that shift. It’s not like we can all sit around all day and talk about The Bad Seeds, because those guys aren’t interested in that. And that’s awesome. Otherwise we’d just sound like one of these countless [other bands].

Listening to you with Wirewalker, certain things remind me of the Dirty Three musically, but the way you write songs reminds me of Leonard Cohen. And that goes together well.
Well, it’s interesting to work out how to use a band in that way. I’ve been totally influenced by Leonard Cohen, but he isn’t like a band guy really, is he? You never think, “Oh, wasn’t Cohen’s band good then?” the way you do with Dylan.

I saw Mick Turner from the Dirty Three support you guys earlier this year.
They were big for me. I always feel that Mick is the most, I won’t say underrated, but he’s the least showy of those three. I actually came off stage at that gig and said, “Y’know, Mick, I’m sorry I’ve ripped off all your licks.” They’re totally influential on me, and I know Ben was into them when we were a certain age. But Joe is often being compared to Jim White, and I don’t think Joe has ever really listened to Jim White until recently. But they’re a band that obviously processes their influences in a really unique and honest way. They don’t just go, “Alright, well, we really like AC/DC, so we’re going to sound like AC/DC.” But I know they do like AC/DC. There’s this thing in music, being influenced by something but then putting that into the pot of everything that influences you – from the newspaper to whatever. And actually thinking about what you make and processing those influences, rather than just saying, “Well, we really like Cream, so let’s just be Cream.” There’s no art in that, and there’s no creative process in that, really. Jim White is obviously really influenced by people like Elvin Jones, and Joe studied all that stuff. So when they met, they talked heaps about that stuff.

Is there a theme to Over The Stones, Under The Stars? Our reviewer took it mean, “The whole world is going to shit.”
I mean, there’s a lot of that in there.

But is there one theme running through it?
Not really one that was preconceived. I’ve never had, before any album, a concept of what the lyrical theme was going to be. But at the same time, when we sat down and chose songs, it was interesting what songs made it on there. There are a couple of songs that are sort of like ‘Polly Angel’, but there’s no point putting all three of them on. It was more like finding the right chapters for this record, and the songs that got left off weren’t necessarily worse. They just didn’t fit this story. So I guess after all the songs were recorded, then certain themes emerge. But they certainly weren’t things I was thinking of before.

Were you feeling somewhat cynical when you wrote these songs?
Oh, no more than usual. [Laughs]

And this was in Glasgow?
I don’t think living in Glasgow really came into what I wrote about. It just helped me have a lot more time on my hands to write. And I think I write better about places when I’m not there.

That’s always the way.
It’s weird, isn’t it? I used to think I just write better about home when I’m not at home.

No one can see truly what’s around them until they’re away from it.
It’s funny how you don’t know how these things work [beforehand]. I didn’t expect to write things about Melbourne. I guess my lyrics are generally abstracted enough that it’s never really clear, but there are definitely references to this city on this album that, though hidden, I didn’t even expect to come out at all. Like that lyric, “The age is just for show”, in the context of ‘All The Signs’ is about the age we live in, but actually when I wrote it, it was all about [Melbourne broadsheet] The Age. I hadn’t read any Australian news for a while, and I checked in [online] and it was fucking Cup Week or something.

It’s funny, because I get a lot of reviews where the reviewer talks about the state of my mental health and assumes that I take myself very seriously and I walk around with my own personal fucking rain cloud. Anyone who knows me knows that’s absolutely not the case. But in art I appreciate ideas that have a certain weight to them, and I think that’s really unfashionable in music at the moment. I think especially with what we’ve seen coming out of the States in the last five years, the Pitchfork-endorsed happy music. It’s fine, but have we not got to the saturation point?

It’s funny that Fleet Foxes’ ‘White Winter Hymnal’ is playing as you bring this up.
But this song is always playing, as far as I can tell. I don’t mean this song literally. And some of it’s great, and Animal Collective do this amazing thing. But I think the problem is I don’t like Brian Wilson and I don’t like Pet Sounds. I don’t hate it, I just don’t love it. I mean, listen to this [Fleet Foxes]. It’s too much. It’s like Oasis sounding too much like the Beatles. I’ve heard enough. But that’s kind of funny because we went and mixed the record in Brooklyn, surrounded by everything we find so abhorrent.

I was going to say, you mixed and mastered it in the States after recording it here.
It still sounds like an Australian record to me, but that’s a testament to Joel [Hamilton], who we mixed with, who I can’t stress enough was just one of the best people I’ve ever met.

How did you come to work with him?
It was just a fluke. There were those cheap flights to New York, and I mentioned maybe doing a few shows to Joe and Ben. But we don’t really have a whole lot of contacts in the States yet. We wanted someone else to mix the record, because usually we do this stuff ourselves, and no one here was really jumping out at us. Joe had that light bulb moment, like, “Let’s go and mix with this guy. I’ve read heaps of his columns in music magazines and forums.” Which Joe is really into. And Joe recorded the record. Joe was really enamored by his whole philosophy. I was up for it.

Joel just turned out to be a fucking champ, a real clever guy who knew exactly what our influences were but had also never heard music like this. He seemed genuinely turned on by what he heard. He kept saying, “Well, I guess I’ve never really heard Australian music. Are there other guys that sound like you guys?” And we’re like, “Well, no, but there’s a lot of other guys that sound like themselves.” He was really intrigued. It must be weird being in the States, and being surrounded by so much music that’s just from the States. But Joel is one of the good guys. We’re really into Milton Nascimento and that old Brazilian kind of psychedelic music, and he was like, “Have you checked out Jorge Ben?” And now I’m [obsessed with Jorge Ben]. He’s fucking amazing. He’s so raw but so skillful. I love skillful music that still sounds really garage-y.

You guys are a bit like that.
Well, I hope that comes through.

It’s raw but fairly complicated.
But I don’t like music that sounds complicated. It should never sound laboured. I think that happened a little bit with the second City City City record and the whole concept of that band started tiring me.

Were you the leader?
Yeah, but again, I wanted not to be the leader. I’m always wanting not to be the leader of the thing I’m involved in, but of course if anyone does something I don’t like, look out. [Laughs] I’m a passive-aggressive dictator.

What do you guys plan to do after launching this record?
Well, I have written a few things, but they seem really different so I’m not sure what that means yet. They’re more solo-y, like actually recording everything myself, which I haven’t done since before the first album. But as far as the band goes, I think there’s almost half a record from the sessions for this album that could resurface, and there’s certainly more writing I want to do in that vein. But I’m going to move to Berlin in March, and we’re going to do another tour in Europe around May, and I think Joe is planning to spend a fair bit of next year over there as well. I suspect I’ll probably write the remainder of the next Wirewalker album over there, come back here, record that, but also in the meantime start turning over some new ideas.

How long are you planning to stay in Berlin?
The plan is at least all of next year and then see what happens. It’s a well-trodden path.

So people here should see you play now, because they won’t get a chance next year?
We’d be happy to have a few good shows before we leave, but at the end of the day … I got more people at a solo show I did in Hanover where no one had ever heard of me on a Tuesday night in January than we’ve had for any of our shows this year. I think there’s a different culture there in the way people discover music. A lot more people go out and discover something they’ve never heard, especially if it’s from overseas. Whereas here people seem to want to know all about the band first.

Seeing a band live used to be a low-risk way of deciding if you like them, as opposed to buying an album, but now you can just listen to their songs on MySpace.
I just don’t trust a lot of people’s recorded output these days. For me, live music is still the place where I’m more likely to really get affected by music. I’m really going to miss the music scene in Melbourne. I’m not going to miss having very few other options in this country though. We’re not even going to Perth or Brisbane on this tour.

Also, I’ve had people who never came to a single show after I stopped doing solo shows. That’s the other thing; people are really parochial. I mean, fuck, you can go anywhere any night of the week and see people doing loops. People here are very possessive about the music they like. And that’s OK, at least it’s passionate. But it’s baffling sometimes. It’s totally about ownership. I got to a point in my life where I just had to actually consciously decide to find that stuff amusing and an interesting way to study how people work. I had to stop thinking in terms of me as a music maker and what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad review that I couldn’t write a worse one of myself. I could crucify myself with the shit that I feel insecure about on my records. But I’ve seen comments on forums and blogs that get much closer than reviews ever have. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if that makes me hate them more or actually appreciate that there’s people who are kind of thinking along the same lines as me.

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Over The Stones, Under The Stars launch dates here.