Expectations have been percolating for the JSS for some time now. The band was formed close to five years ago by Brisbane natives Morrissey and fellow songwriter Scott Bromiley, the project being named in homage to Morrissey’s childhood toy horse, John Steel. “I wanted to start a band since about grade eight,” he says, eyes boring intently through his glasses. “I didn’t know how to play anything so I would just write songs in my head. I would meet people, and I was always trying to envisage them in my band, but it wasn’t until I was actually twenty years old that I met Scott… He ended up teaching me some guitar, and we ended up forming a band after that.”
From this seed the pair gradually expanded the line-up (currently stabilised at an even six), juggling personnel (“we’re like Spinal Tap with bass players”), incorporating brass (a move that was “never intentional”), cutting their teeth through some persistent touring up and down the east coast while developing their own idiosyncratic style with a pair of EPs and mini-album. And acclaim began to flow, the band taking out triple j’s Unearthed Artist of the Year award back in 2008, while garnering a reputation among punters for live sets brimming with youthful exuberance and prodigious quantities of hair.
It’s odd then that their debut long player Tangalooma, a collection of breezy pop songs buoyed by some creative arrangements and tempered with lyrical bite, has taken so long to emerge. “We’ve always taken a long time to do things,” says Morrissey. “We never did any really rough early demos, we just went into the studio after we’d saved up enough money to do it, and I think that was a little bit like the same thing with the album – we wanted to make sure we could do it the way we wanted to do it.” The album was actually mixed and mastered by October last year. After that, he says, the “music industry side of things” took over. “It has definitely been a year longer than we hoped,” he continues, “but that has its benefits as well – in that year we’ve been writing new songs, and the next album definitely won’t take as long as this one did.”
In order to get the right sound on the record, the band were fortunate in being able to call on the talents of Robert Forster; producer, critic, songwriter, and one of Morrissey’s musical idols. “The Fire and Flood benefit up in Brisbane was on, and we were playing and Robert was also on the bill,” he explains. Forster’s drummer Glen Thompson and bassist Adele Pickvance weren’t available, “so he actually asked us if we wanted to be his backing band. For people who are massive Go-Betweens fans, to [be] asked to play Go-Betweens songs as Robert Forster’s backing band, that opportunity doesn’t come around very often … [it] was bloody surreal,” Morrissey says. “We wanted to get a producer and Robert’s name came up, and we were like, ‘yeah! Let’s do it!’”
The result is one of the best Australian releases in a year that has seen no shortage of strong debuts. Morrissey claims inspiration from sources as diverse as David Byrne, Ray Davies and The Kinks and widely influential English post-punk group Wire. He also pays due respect to the morphing euphoria of post-rock pioneers Talk Talk, with the moody atmospherics of Spirit of Eden being an important shaping force for Tangalooma, particularly its closing track, ‘Sleep’. “I guess the album’s pretty densely layered so there’s parts you’re not necessarily aware of,” says Morrissey, “Nicholas [Vernhes] the engineer [who’s previously worked with Animal Collective, Deerhunter and Spoon] probably stripped away a lot of unnecessary stuff as well… Hopefully it sounds like John Steel Singers, and hopefully whether we flop or go well it’ll rest on us sounding like the John Steel Singers.”
While the JSS sound is generally bright and bouncy, lyrically Tangalooma delves into darker territory. Although it’s “definitely not a concept album”, Morrissey and Bromiley’s thoughtful and literate lyrics draw on a shared fascination with Ernest Becker’s 1974 Pulitzer winner The Denial of Death - exploring ideas of mortality, desire and the stories people tell themselves to stay sane in a material world. “Both Scott and I were getting to a time in our lives when we were experiencing similar anxieties about the nature of everything,” explains Morrissey. “You sort of have to lie, have a vital lie to keep yourself going as a human being … most functioning humans lie to themselves about certain things, but everyone does it and it’s vital to being human… I dunno, I’m not very good at explaining this out loud!”
Rather than buying into any of the solutions offered by the world of the gainfully employed, the John Steel Singers seem intent on becoming their own heroes (as the caped horses adorning the cover art of Tangalooma might suggest), throwing themselves into the musical lifestyle with total dedication. The forecast for their next year is a whirlwind of touring, writing and recording. “I worked out the other day that I’d only, in my twenty-seven years, worked about three or four months at most of full-time work in, like, jobs,” says Morrissey. “So, as long as I can avoid doing that for as long as possible, that would be excellent.”
First Published in The Brag, Iss. 390, December 6th 2010
