ANDREW MCMILLEN talks to Ben Salter, Conor Macdonald and Bridget Lewis from The Gin Club about recording in a 100-year-old cottage, their respect for one another and how they’re not all that different from English pop act La Roux.

Of all the paths my conversation with The Gin Club ventures down, I'm most surprised when Ben Salter defends one of 2009's biggest pop hits. In recent performances, he's been known to inject the chorus of La Roux's 'In For The Kill' into the coda of 'Drugflowers', one of The Gin Club's best-known tracks. We're talking about art, commerce, “crappy music” and a perception of privilege that some musicians seem to associate with, well, being a musician. I raise the La Roux cover in the context of “crappy music”, and Salter seems momentarily offended by my suggestion.

"I don't know if that many people think that's crappy," he replies. "This is one of the many things I'm always raving about: people seem to think that because a lot of people like something, it must be bad. Which is just such bullshit. The only difference between popular music and indie music is a production aesthetic and a name.

“If you're talking about avant garde metal or experimental noise music, that's different," Salter continues, "because it's challenging peoples' perceptions of what a hook is, or what an aesthetic experience is. But all The Gin Club do is really pop music. People call us indie, but what we do is MOR pop. It might be delivered with a certain honesty of intent, or honesty of conviction, but really it's not that different from what La Roux is doing - except that she likes synthesisers." He concludes his clarification with a wistful compliment: "That chord progression [in 'In For The Kill'] is beautiful."

I don't realise it at the time, but this statement cuts to the heart of why The Gin Club are so revered among the current generation of Brisbane rock acts: they can appreciate a wide range of musical influences, while still maintaining an unmistakable originality. It's no small feat for Salter - who also plays with rock act Giants Of Science, bluegrass collective The Wilson Pickers and garage band The Young Liberals - to acknowledge a saccharine pop act for their artistic convictions. At the same time, this ability to think outside genre-based boundaries surely contributes to why The Gin Club produce songs of such a consistently high quality.

It helps too, that they can rely upon a multitude of songwriters to influence their style. Salter's being modest by tagging The Gin Club with “middle-of-the-road” pop. More accurately, they're a rock act who regularly lean toward folk and country influences. Discounting co-writing credits, the band includes eight songwriters and multi-instrumentalists. There’s Salter, Adrian Stoyles, Scott Regan, Gus Agars, Dan Mansfield, Ola Karlsson, Conor Macdonald and Bridget Lewis.

“People call us indie, but what we do is MOR pop. It might be delivered with a certain honesty of intent, or honesty of conviction, but really it's not that different from what La Roux is doing.”

I meet with Salter, Macdonald and Lewis at a South Brisbane bar the week before their fourth album, Deathwish, is released via Brisbane label Plus One Records. I’ve been spinning an advance copy on repeat for a week. When compared to their previous release - the two-disc, 26-track banquet Junk - Deathwish is a snack; easily digestible, and immediately satisfying. Over rounds of Heineken, we speak for an hour before they cross the road to watch a production of King Lear at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. Of the three, Salter is the most vocal. He speaks his mind at length, and occasionally defers to the others for clarification or confirmation. Macdonald is softly-spoken, and somewhat reticent to speak freely; Lewis is assertive in her responses, and displays a curious mix of cheerful self-confidence and self-deprecation.

On Deathwish, The Gin Club have halved Junk's 26 tracks, though Macdonald points out that this was largely to meet the 45-minute requirement for an eventual vinyl release. As with the recording of their previous album, the band decamped to a North Queensland property named Prior Park - owned by Salter's sister, Anne, and her husband - for a two-week stint with longtime sound engineer Murray Paas. Their eyes light up when I ask them to describe the average day at Prior Park.

“Some people get up earlier than others and potter around, but generally everyone's up and about by about 11,” says Salter. “Someone makes breakfast. Bacon and eggs … Then Murray will go down and fire everything up. One person can go down with a song, and just go and start working on it with Murray; the rest of us are just happy to just read or wander around, or play cricket or something. It's pretty much like, ‘Who wants to play?’ You'll be like, ‘OK, I'll play bass’, or ‘I'll play drums.’”

Macdonald suggests there's usually at least four people in the property's makeshift recording studio: a worker's cottage that was built over 100 years ago. Salter assures me it's "very sturdy".

“In winter, as it gets to dusk, it's just spectacular,” he reminisces. “The whole countryside turns all these different shades of purple. It's a really cold light. All the while, people are still recording. We try not to start drinking before the sun goes down. It's very easy with so many friends, at a campfire."

Although the band enlisted a producer named Lachlan Goold for Junk (better known as Magoo, he’s worked with Queensland musical elites like Regurgitator, Custard and, um, Operator Please), this time around they relied on Paas and Gin Club member Dan Mansfield to oversee recording.

Salter: "There's at least one person there just to have an opinion, because Murray's not much of a one for having an opinion. He just engineers. So there's no dearth of producers, ever. But Magoo was really good at teaching me the practicalities of productive work. He was like, ‘You can keep recording stuff well into the night [while drinking], but you're going to wake up the next morning and listen to it and it'll just be shit and you'll have to do it all again. When you start to get sloppy, you'll do take after take and it'll just get worse.’ So generally we'll stop at around 10 or 11, but if you get excited, you can do overdubs until three in the morning."

"If you decide you want to re-record the whole of The White Album, then you can be there all night,” adds Lewis.

"We did that, and we recorded a couple of rap tracks. That'll be on the next Hissy Fit," Salter jokes in reference to a collection of The Gin Club's outtakes, b-sides and live recordings.

Salter looks at me, and states bluntly: "I cannot describe to you how much fun it is." I believe him. "There’s no mobile phone reception, so once a day someone bunks all the mobile phones into a car, drives 50 metres down to the grid, gets everyone's messages at once, and then drives back and everyone checks. There’s TV and stuff, but you’re just so focused. The beauty of it is that as soon as you get bored, or you’re sick of hearing stuff, or you’re sick of recording, in The Gin Club you can pretty much take a day off because there’s so many other people. I remember listening to all the other songs we’d done and going, ‘What’s this song? I’ve never heard it before.’”

Deathwish includes a song called 'Book Of Poison' that was written by Salter's brother-in-law Gordon Stunzner. "He lets us use Prior Park for free," says Salter. "He's a farmer, but he's pretty rock’n’roll. I'm in a band, but I really think that being a farmer's amazing. So I always said to him, ‘We'll take you on tour when you turn 40, and you have to write a song.’ There was absolutely no expectation that it would be any good, or that it would go on the album or anything like that. I just thought, ‘We'll force him to do one’, but it just came out really beautiful.

“It goes to prove that everyone's got at least one good song in them. Gordon's written a few more now and so he's going to come down and play the songs at the [Brisbane] launches. It's just so satisfying to write a song, record it, and release it,” he continues. "Gordon came up to me after he finished recording it, and he was just beaming. He was like, ‘Oh, I understand now why you do it. I understand.’”

Of the three members sitting before me, Salter exudes the most enthusiasm. He meets my questions with passion, eloquence and wit. He seems used to being heard. In turn, Lewis and Macdonald respect his experience and confidence. When I ask what compels each of them to write and share songs, Bridget looks to Ben and says simply: "You wouldn't have anything else to do."

"I just love it,” Salter beams. “Since I've first done it, I love the attention, I love being on stage and people acknowledging you. It's like a craft, because it's something that you've made, on par with a poem, but then it's also poetry mixed with a technical ability. So it's good to be acknowledged by your peers for being able to produce [music], and then the courage and confidence to get up [in front of a crowd] is attractive to people."

He continues: "I'm always saying this, but if you ask most people what their biggest fear is, the majority say 'public speaking'. People are terrified of it. It gives you so much confidence to get on a stage, but then I love the writing part, too. I love words and I love music, so why not do it myself? I just love it. I love lots of things, but it's the thing that I've been doing the longest, and that I've had a chance to develop."

As for Macdonald, he says he’s not fussed about the performance side of things. “I write songs and I play them. I pretty much write them for myself and sort stuff out in my head, or express things. And so even if people weren't listening, or if I wasn't in a band, I'd probably still be writing songs. I've got songs that I've written that I don't play live when I do solo shows or anything, just silly, short little songs that I play for myself now and then.”

Lewis agrees. “It [songwriting] is not something that comes naturally to me … Sometimes when I've got nothing better to do I'll tinker around and occasionally something will come out of that that might have potential, but I don't consider myself to be a songwriter.”

Lewis is being massively modest. Despite the silly title, her contribution to Deathwish, ‘Milli Vanilli’, is perhaps the album's most striking song. Accompanied by dirge-like, down-strummed acoustic guitars and sparse percussion, Lewis' voice describes a house decimated by floodwaters ("Fences, Falcons, favourite toys/All these things have been destroyed"). I ask her whether the song is based upon personal experience.

“No one is entitled to make a living from being in a band. No one's entitled to make a living out of doing something they love. It's a privilege, not a right.”

"It's real,” she says. “It's about neighbours of mine, across on the other side of the creek where I used to live. Their house got badly damaged in the first of those bad storms we had in November 2008, and then again in March 2009, by those bad storms that hit [Brisbane suburb] The Gap. They lived right by the creek, and they had to move out of their house. They gradually rebuilt it, and about a week after they moved back into it, the second lot of storms came and knocked the whole thing down. I wrote pretty much all of the lyrics while walking back from the bus on Waterworks Road, back down to my house, as I walked past where they were cleaning out their pool again for the second time." She laughs, then catches herself. "I shouldn't laugh. It's not funny at all. It's based on fact, inspired by truth. And I love Milli Vanilli, they're awesome.”

“She does not, that's bullshit!” jokes Salter.
“She's actually a massive No Doubt fan,” Macdonald adds.
“It's got such a sting in its tail,” Salter says of ‘Milli Vanilli’. “It's a great song in that you can apply it as a metaphor for so many things. You can use it as a relationship metaphor, because it's like a sonnet or something. The whole bulk of it lies within that last line: ‘If you live beside the bank, guess you've got yourselves to thank.’ All the way through, you're feeling really sorry for these people, but then you're going - not quite, ‘It's not your own fault’ - but it's kind of like, ‘You reap what you sow.’”

“It's deep,” I suggest, to which Salter quips, “It's mega deep.” “So was the water,” jokes Macdonald, prompting more laughter. “It really did carry a Falcon down into the creek. It was pretty intense."

Throughout our conversation, I'm struck by the sense of camaraderie on display. I'm certain that, were I speaking with the dozen or so members of the extended Gin Club family, they'd be clamouring over one another to complement each other’s songwriting styles, chord progressions and vocal performances.

“I think one of the nicest things I like about watching you play, Ben, is that you have a confidence that allows you to actually be really humble about the way you do it,” says Lewis. “And that stuff you say to us all the time about how, ‘If people pay their money then they're entitled to talk.’ I think that's really meaningful. It shows that you don't have an attitude that, ‘Everyone in the world should shut up and listen to me.’"

Salter: "If you want to teach someone a bit of humility about what the entertainment business is really about, then make them go and busk for five years, because it just takes your ego and just destroys it. You're just there to entertain people. They don't want to hear your songs. And that's such an awesome thing because for every time that you just go, ‘Oh my God, I just want to kill myself’, there's a thousand other times when people just come up to you and go, ‘Oh my God, I was having such a bad day and you played that song and it made me so happy.’ And that sounds so trite but it's not. It's really awesome.

"That's what we are. We're entertainers. We're artists as well,” he continues, “and the art always comes first, but I also want to entertain people, so it's a delicate balance. The busking thing is so true because you just realise that making people happy is not the worst thing in the world. It's a really cool thing and if you can make people happy through your own expressions of your own songs, then that's even more amazing. I'm pretty much the only person in the band - apart from Gus [Agars, of The Vandas], sometimes - who makes their living out of doing music all the time. I've got to be in like four bands or something and play all sorts of other gigs to do it, but I just feel that's an absolute privilege. We're very privileged.”

He concludes: "I just can't stand it when there's a sense of entitlement from bands or from people towards being in a band, where it's like, ‘The government owes me a living because I make songs.’ It's like - get fucked. Go get a real job. No one is entitled to make a living from being in a band. No one's entitled to make a living out of doing something they love. It's a privilege, not a right. We're just very lucky that we're able to do it.”

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THE GIN CLUB LAUNCH ‘DEATHWISH’

Friday, June 18
The Annandale Hotel, Sydney, NSW
w/The Eagle and the Worm + Aerial Maps + The Shipwrecked

Saturday, June 19
East Brunswick Club, Melbourne, VIC
w/The Eagle and the Worm + Joel Silbersher and The Baggage Handlers

Friday, July 2
The Troubadour, Brisbane, QLD
w/We All Want To + The Eagle and the Worm

Saturday, July 3
The Troubadour, Brisbane, QLD
w/The Eagle and the Worm + Dale Peachey (Dollar Bar)

Sunday, July 4
The Troubadour, Brisbane, QLD
w/Rocketsmiths + Ridgeback County