Now Everybody Knows

RAM Magazine 1988
By Vivienne Lawrence

Panic in the streets of Camperdown, well only in one house actually and it's less panic than distress really. Greg Appel and myself, upon simultaneous arrival, were greeted with the news that a member of the Juliet Ward menagerie (two dogs, two cats, a chook and a rabbit) is missing - it's the rabbit.

"Well, I hadn't seen it around for quite a while and wondered where it was - then I went to watch TV and when I turned it on it didn't work.' Yes, avid readers, there is a link between the two incidents and already the more mentally alert amongst you must be reeling in horror at the conclusion. The power cord to the TV had been chewed through and around it was strewn scatological evidence of rabbit. The corpse, however, was at that time undiscovered, and deepest sympathy is extended to Juliet for any nasty surprises.

A rather brief history of Greg and Juliet for the out of touch, ignorant or uninitiated. Not only is Ms. Ward an animal lover, she's also a fairly talented vocalist and has fronted the three bands she and Greg have been in, as singer and songwriter respectively. The bands, well the semi-legendary Lighthouse Keepers, the interim Rainlovers and most recently the sublime Widdershins.

The Widdershins first big vinyl release (as in 12 inches instead of seven) has just hit the shops and is cryptically entitled The Bottle Man's Wife. Greg deciphers.

"A friend of mine lives in a house that harks onto a lane where these kids play, and one of their favourite pastimes is smashing bottles lots of bottles. He always goes out and yells at them to stop and has earned the moniker The Bottle Man. One day his girlfriend appeared with him."

Thus an EP title, and a delightful collection of five beautifully crafted songs–three belong to Greg, one belongs to the Widdershins' lead guitarist, James, and the remaining track was originally penned by an American Indian folksinger from the late 60s called Buffy St. Marie. The song, Codeine, caught the ear of Juliet and in doing so made its way on to the EP.

"I liked the song, I liked the feeling of it, I liked the words. I think it's quite funny in a serious way and I like Buffy St. Marie. It was a song I was singing in the shower anyway. I only recently discovered Buffy St. Marie I've seen her on Sesame Street and l bought one of her records for one dollar and it was great. The whole album was different.

"Apparently she never got the popularity or esteem that she should have earns, because she would never fit into a particular genre. She wouldn't stick to one form of playing, and this was in the 60s where people were grasping onto identities, but she refused to do it. Any album of hers you pick up you're bound to like at least a couple of tracks on it because there are different musical styles, some of which you'll hate and others you'll like."

The EP itself saw various recording environments that weren't limited to consoles and studios. Two stacks, Foxtrot and March Of The Green Men, were recorded in bedrooms; the song, Codeine, was recorded live at a Widdershins performance in Sydney's Harold Park Hotel (soundwise, this is arguably one of the best tracks). A 24-track studio, according to drummer Peter Timmerman, was the only way King Ben and Railway could have been recorded, due to the drum sound which threatened to drown out the rest of the band. But why record only two tracks in the studio why these various venues, Greg?

"It wasn't any conscious decision. We started off doing the four-track recording in the bedroom and found that a couple of songs weren't working with only the four-tracks, so we tried to do them live and we got Codeine out of that. The other songs that didn't work in either the bedroom or live environment ended up being done in the 24-track studio. We thought the results of the recordings sounded good together. A lot of people that I've played the record to think Codeine sounds the best, and that was a live recording."

On the inner sleeve of the Widdershins' latest offering can be found a charming literary extra titled The Bottle Man, a story about a rather repulsive, unsavoury character whose main challenges in life amount to (a) getting down to the local DSS once a fortnight and (b) doing it on time. The latter, it seems, is beyond him. Are these real life Widdershins experiences? The author, Greg, hesitates.

"I don't know. I don't know what mum's going to think of it when she reads it." Juliet seems sure "I think it's definitely from experience."

Greg ignores and expands.

"It's just things it's the volume turned up on experience. I'm not really quite as pathetic-and snivelling as that. I had one guy living at my house (Blue — guest blues harpist on The Bottle Man's Wife) who read the story and got really sulky and said 'That's about me'. Another guy who lives in my house to show how drunk he was one night I gave him the story to read and he said, 'I think you were trying-to say the Lighthouse Keepers were finished now and the Widdershins are a new thing'."

Much sound of mirth follows.

"I wrote the story for the record because I thought it would be good to have something extra with it. I used to like those records that came with a long spiel saying how good the songs are and how they came about and what a good bloke so and so is. I thought it would be nice- to look at while you were listening to the record." The Widdershins' past, namely the Lighthouse Keepers, is stilt in the minds of their public, and for a good reason. The Lighthouse Keepers, apart from achieving fame and recognition in Australia, managed to stretch its wings and head off overseas, namely Britain and Europe. Fame reared its head again along with (gasp) critical acclaim from the British music press–but poverty struck and saw the band return to Australia.

Have the Widdershins managed to capitalise on their past?

Juliet: "At the time the Lighthouse Keepers were playing they were never as popular as they are now. There are a lot of people crawling out of the woodwork now saying that they saw them then it wasn't such a big deal at the time. But I think for me and Greg it's made it easier for us to get work because we're known."

Greg: "We don't have the same crowd. There was a period when we first started when we thought we might as well advertise it as the people from the Lighthouse Keepers and we got people to come along and be interested that way. The people that liked it stayed and the people that liked the Lighthouse Keepers, well, I don't know"

Juliet: "We didn't quite know how successful the Lighthouse Keepers were - until we split up. The Widdershins formed because we needed to do it not because there was a public demand for it."

Greg and Juliet have volunteered in previous interviews, the information that there is a greater commercial element in the music of the Widdershins as compared to . . . well, you-know-who.

Juliet: "I think that just means we're better. I think there's a more professional attitude in this band."

Greg: "What I meant was that it wasn't as rough around the edges as the Lighthouse Keepers. To a certain extent it remains that way."

Juliet: ''The thing was, the Lighthouse Keepers went out of their way to be noncommercial."

Greg: "I don't think so. We did what we did with the people in the band."

Juliet: "Yeah, but if you were going to put a band together to make money you probably wouldn't have done it that way. It was more for fun than money." And this one's for money?

Greg "No. Certainly not!"

Widdershins

RAM Magazine July 1989
By Shane Danielsen

Widdershins was the title of a 1911 collection of ghost stories by the British writer Oliver Onions, second only to M.R. James as the master of that most underrated of genres.

Juliet Ward has a uncommonly wonderful voice. Sensual, husky, plaintive. Even (dare I say) more than a little sexy. And utterly, utterly unique.

Both are facts deserving of considerably wider recognition and acknowledgment.

The first time I saw them – then as The Rainlovers (at the Mosman Hotel, I believe) – they performed, as an encore, a song that made everything else that night seem almost clumsy by comparison. It was, I knew at once, nothing less than a manifestation of that rarest of beasts the perfect pop song. It was Return Of The King.

But they had not completely shaken, then, the minor legend that clung still to their collective bootlaces. The small legion of Lighthouse Keepers fans– mostly students, Greg Appel notes bemusedly "I don't know why . . . perhaps because we were so bad sometimes that they admired that we had the gall to get up there and do it" –came devoutly to the shows, expecting a virtual replay of the familiar pleasures. They were usually disappointed, and left. Some, seeming to believe that to go - forward, to change, meant to dishonour their ghosts, never came back. Others– wiser, less sentimental came slowly to realise that the past really is another country, and one to which there is no return, save in memories, fond or otherwise.

Then came two or so years of the kind of typical obscurity that either breeds great art and tempers one's resolve, or else kills like a winter frost. Playing once a week to mid-sized crowds, in small verges; the hype, little as it was, had long since dissipated. But somewhere along the lines, they obviously decided (consciously or not) to persevere. To live.

Now Ascension, the record the Widdershins have always been capable of a collection of eleven songs, not one of which is perceptibly weaker than any other. And for those who believed Appel had written his allotment of pop "classics" in Ocean Liner and Gargoyle, the sheer perfection of a song like Demons will come as no small surprise.

Ms Ward is, as we speak, in Canberra, and unavailable for comment. My encounter with Appel takes place in a coffee shop on Pitt Street, late afternoon, long shadows flung down on the wet pavement. It's cold, and he's just come from living out a little more of the secular mythology of rock and roll– washing dishes in a restaurant. (The moral? Mothers, don't let your children grow up to be anything but merchant bankers.)

He's wearing what could easily be his trademark outfit: blue jeans and a red & black check shirt open over a navy blue singlet. Reports of his silence when confronted with a tape recorder prove utterly groundless he promises to do his best to answer fully and well, laughs easily, seems a genuinely nice bloke.

He remains perfectly agreeable, even when I ask how I felt to start all over again from the bottom of the heap.

"It did turn out to pretty much like that, yeah. I had thought we'd be able to keep going on something near the same level, but it just takes so long to get used to playing with other people . . . you don't really think about that initial, settling-in period when you start something; you assume it'll all come together easily. Whereas in reality, it's taken over a year for us to become a real band. They're very good musicians, all of them, but it still takes a while. We've been pretty lazy, too, so I guess that comes into it . . .

"I don't think we really started from the bottom, this time. Damn near it, maybe, but not quite the bottom–for better of worse, we still had that 'ex-Lighthouse Keepers' to come to terms with. I think we really pissed a lot of Lighthouse Keepers fans off, though. It still seems weird to me that people wanted us to be exactly the same as we were–because I certainly didn't want to keep doing it as we had been, for various reasons. I didn't think there was that much more we could do, with that band. I mean, I'm still friends with the people, and 1 still think those records we did were really good–but we'd just had such a gutful of living with each other for that long. In poverty.

"That European tour we did was good, in a lot of ways. We got some great press, people liked us, good reviews– but we just miscalculated with money, as usual. We were just so poor at the end of it. And when you're sleeping on floors every night, you tend to get a bit too intimate with people; no one wanted to see each other much' any more. Unless you're in a sexual relationship with someone, it's really hard to live like that.''

Well, funny you should mention that, Greg . . . since Appel and Ward are among the group of very few ex-couples to come through a relationship and maintain their creative collaboration intact.

At this, he looks slightly bewildered, and more than a little amused. "I wish I knew how people got to know all this." It was always fairly obvious, I thought.

"Really? That we were a couple?" He smiles. "Hmm. That's interesting. Well, yeah,-we were. For ages. We just got tired of one another, seeing each other all the time the same old story. But we still get on OK. It was difficult for a while, which was why we didn't go straight from the Lighthouse Keepers into a new band. But it's sort of good, to work through a few things like that. And we still sort of treat each other as a couple just without the physical, sexual signs of affection.

"You usually don't tell people what you think of them or what they're doing for one reason or another. But when you've been together like that, and been that close, you can be that much more honest with each other. She doesn't always like it, and I don't always like what she says to me but we listen. The others in the hand might think, sometimes, that we're-not getting on very well, but it never worries me, because I know that we have some sort of level on which everything's resolvable.

"We wanted to keep working together that's what kept us together. I really like her singing. I hear criticism of it all the time, and I think, maybe there's something wrong with my ears. I don't know. I just like it for its emotional value; it makes me feel something, when I hear her sing, and I don't think many people have got that. I even like her technique, though she's not technically good. Mind you," he adds, "she can sing really badly But overall, I just like that tone of her voice. And she likes the kind of things I write. So we keep going."

Last year's mini-album that preceded this release, Bottle Man's Wife, was a patchy, rather uneven affair–a compendium of stolen moments that perhaps lost a little in their preservation.

"It wasn't really a planned thing, that one. It just happened. The whole exercise was entirely different with this one, we just tried to do the 'correct' thing. To get as good as studio as we could, the best people to work with we could. Whereas with the other one, it was basically our mixer with his four-track.

Ascension seems to be trying hard to stand as the more definitive statement of the two..

"Well, you don't really think of these things when you're recording it–but, yeah, I guess you're right. Bottle Man was not really done with a view toward putting it out, though we did. It was just trying to get away from the technology, the bullshit." He pauses, lost in thought, before adding, quietly, "Maybe that was the wrong thing to do."

In terms of the big career masterplan?

"Yeah. Maybe we should have put that one out now, once we'd established ourselves a little better, this being more 'accessible' and all. But I just wanted to do something different to that first single (Now You Know b/w Dishwashing Liquid and I think we're beginning to understand from where Appel derives his titles), which I didn't think represented us particularly well. I thought we were about something completely different, when that came out. It was a bit too. . ." He lets it trail off into a shrug. "The B-side of that is by far my favourite."

But you've stayed a little unpredictable all the way through I was sure Return Of The King would be the first single you'd release–rather than Now You Know. It just seemed the more classic pop song, the one more likely to grab people's ears from the start.

"Well, we did actually try to record it when we did Now You Know, but that one just wasn't working. And I still think perhaps it hasn't quite made it, that song. I still reckon it works better live– but this one, on the album, is a lot better than the attempt we made on it before."

Appel has often been quoted in the past as hating the weight of lyrics, claiming they were the weakest link in the slender chain of his compositions. No longer, it seems.

"Well, as far as not putting a lyric sheet in this album it wasn't a matter of not being confident enough. I just don't particularly like them. On the record, I realise you can't quite hear all the words–but when you get a record and read the lyrics, they always seem to lack something. They're always pretty banal.

"And anyway, I probably only said that –about hating my own lyrics – for something to say." He laughs, looking up at me, "You really don't know what to say half the time, in interviews." He could be apologising; and l assure him there is no need. The wind is literally howling outside, screaming down long corridors of skyscrapers and there are few places, right at this moment that I would rather be, than a warm cafe, discussing the sanctity of Art.

This assurance seems to spur him on. A further confession: "I feel more confident singing now, I must admit. I think if you sing live, it kind of hardens your vocal cords or something; it gets to the point where it feels better and you project more and the notes don't wander all over the place. I don't really see myself as a singer –but I think it's good sometimes to break up Juliet's voice, especially since everyone seems to hate it so much. Different voices are good. James (Cruickshank, guitarist/keyboardist par excellence) is singing a bit, now. He's a good singer, too."-

Is there anything he doesn't do well?

"No, he's quite painful like that, actually. He's just one of those people who really makes you sick`. It like that with everything he touches …" Appel shakes his head sadly. "Dreadful, really – but it has its advantages, too.

"See, in the Lighthouse Keepers, I was mad on arranging everything – right down to the drum beats. I'd explain things in great detail, trying to get what I wanted. But I don't think about that so much with this band, 'cause they like being left to do their own thing, and they're good enough to do it well. It's usually not that far off what you would imagine it to sound like, which is good. Saves me a lot of work and anguish.

''But, that said, I've just begun to - listen to those albums again, and I've gotta admit, there are some really good things those guys were doing, then. But it's a lot different, now."

The inner sleeve of Ascension features another in Appel's occasional series of twisted liner notes this time, a short story - dealing with one man's struggle to preserve his rights to welfare payments - a subject on which Appel waxes most eloquent.

"The dole is essential to musicians. They're making it harder and harder to be on it, too so I guess it'll come to the point where there won't be any bands. Now, I don't particularly want to be on the dole, but sometimes it's the only option. People see you at a show, there's a couple of hundred people there and they think, six dollars times 300 people–you're making a good living. But they forget about the publican, the PA, and just the cost of paying for records and things. Hiring buses and god knows what." I tend to see the dole, for artists, as a form of public patronage en way.

"Yeah. I don't think the dole office see it like that, though. Pity. It would be nice." The smile fades. "I got hauled in the other day, for the interrogation; they said, what have you done? I'd filled in the form, told them some pretty vague stuff. I wished I could just show them the story and say, 'Look! This is what I've been doing, Miss'.

"I would like to make a living out of it, someday, though," he admits, rather wistfully. Stirring his coffee slowly. Do you think the Widdershins have what it takes to achieve that?

His brow creases. "I don't know. I'm still not sure. I do get a bit worried about the future, and money and things. And even if we do do well, you've only got a few years during which they tax the fuck out of you -and then you're back at the bottom, presumably doing exactly what you were doing before, for the same people, who've gotten too old to try anything new." That's when you form the Gargoyles– the Lighthouse Keepers covers band.

He laughs. "It's a real possibility, yeah."

RECENTLY, AN ARTICLE IN THE Sydney Morning Herald spoke briefly of the Widdershins if only to cite them as symptomatic of that breed of indie bands doomed never to raise themselves from the ghetto, chiefly for reasons of "attitude" - that most nebulous of qualities.

"Yeah." He smiles wryly into the empty cup, orders another. "My mum - didn't like that bit, when she read it. I don't necessarily agree entirely with that point of view, if only because I don't honestly believe that people are so stupid as to only want the lowest common denominator in entertainment. OK, I admit there are times when you go into a pub and think, yes, people are stupid. That all they want is Johnny Diesel, 'cause he's a bit of a spunk and can play come raunchy guitar and they don't have to think or extend themselves in the slightest. But all in all, no, I don't think people are so stupid that you have to cavort about like an idiot and talk down to them. There is a glimmer of hope out there–I still believe that.

"And I'd just feel absurd; it would be so false, and so forced, to do anything but what we do. It's not us, and it never could be. And I don't think we're so bad sometimes we have quite a bit of fun with the audience depends on the night, the crowd. I think Juliet does make an effort to try and communicate something, most of the time."

As he finishes his second cup of coffee, and prepares to return to the suds, he says something that is at once depressing and optimistic, resigned and hopeful. In short, the perfect conclusion.

"I've been writing songs for just on 10 years, now. Which is a fair while, I suppose. I tend to write in a certain style, and I suppose in some ways I do repeat myself slightly but that's pretty inevitable, if you're working in a genre. All I can do is try to develop it, make it better.

"Sometimes I get worried, I think I'm not writing enough; when that happens, I just leave it a while. It always comes back. But you get a bit tough, after a while. You reconcile yourself to the fact that they just won't make it. I've given up worrying about that–there's nothing you can do about it. You just press on regardless. I keep doing it. I'll keep doing it." He drains his cup. "That's all."

Yep. End of story.