Fifteen minutes with: The Paradise Motel

Melbourne’s The Paradise Motel have returned to the stage and the record store shelves for the first time in more than a decade with their latest album Australian Ghost Story.

The Paradise Motel left behind a string of revered records before disbanding in 2000, they now return with a new album, Australian Ghost Story, and their first tour for more than a decade. yourGigs spoke with The Paradise Motel’s Charles Bickford ahead of the band’s first tour

yourGigs (yG): What prompted The Paradise Motel getting back together initially and what doubts and fears did you have?

Charles Bickford (CB): Going back to when we stopped playing together, which was 2000, we were living in London for a few years and  it was good, but I found that I had run out of things to say, so I kind of felt like it was time to shut up. Subsequent to that, various members pursued various different things and I was living in the UK for about ten years. When I got back to Australia, I had thought I had completed that sequence of my life, everything started speaking to me again and I started hearing the songs and the music again. It was pretty straight forward after that, I just rang a couple of band members up and just talked about some ideas. Things in The Paradise Motel had never really forethought unfortunately, we always just followed our noses, and that did hold true for when we were looking at working on new material. So there was never really any concern about what it meant, it was just that the whole music world had changed for all musicians irrevocably, and it seemed as unfamiliar to us as it did to anyone else, but the motivations had stayed the same.

yG: When you recorded the I Still Hear Your Voice At Night album – was it just like taking it up from where you left off?

CB: That record was just like doing your first record again. Over the years everyone had squirreled away songs that they had been thinking about and there was a lot of material to work on. As a result it was a long record to make, it took a long time - we spent a long time in pre-production and along time in the studio. It was a very different record to Australia Ghost Story which we did quite quickly, we didn’t have to talk about it much we just had to make some decisions about songs and just played them really, for a long time.

yG: Did the time passing and the things that the various band members were working on caused everyone to come back as noticeably different musicians?

CB: When I listen to The Paradise Motel now, I think the band was such a quirky, strange mix of people that were making quite odd music at times. I don’t really feel those traits ever changed. The principal elements – like Matthew Aulich’s guitar playing - had developed and sure we have taken on some other music influences from various other projects, but I think the nature of the band is intact.

yG: Was the band’s existing legacy a consideration at all or was it more just being the same band but who you are as people now?

CB: Very much so, I was aware at the time of a couple of local bands of the same sort of era who were playing music again, but were just playing old material, and that couldn’t be of less interest to me really. That was one thing the band had in common in this instance – we are only interested in performing and recording new material, the idea of a revival tour was pretty tedious really. We discovered some of the old material that fitted well with the new material and we’ve been playing that as well, it was all very easy really, it felt like the same band. But definitely time had passed. Everyone looks the same though. Definitely a lot of the material we recorded with Australian Ghost Story, we needed a lot of time of earth before we could have recorded it, we couldn’t have done that album ten years ago.

yG: With making Australian Ghost Story as a concept album – what drew you to it initially and how does it compare to how you would usually go about recording a more conventional album?

CB: It was a record I really wanted to make for a long time; I really wanted to make an Australian album. It was just a particular point in Australian history that was interesting because an opinion on it was shared by a lot of people, including me as a child, I remember it very vividly. It was a very sad story and I was interested in examining lives that surround extreme events and the way Australians have reacted to these events and it was a really easy thing to talk about and I had been keeping notes when anything came up, so it was a very quick record to make.

yG: Do you think that our society in general know enough about the history of Australia?

CB: I think we have a bit of a tendency not to scratch too deep under the surface. There are definitely individuals in Australia who want to address the fabric of Australian consciousness, but there aren’t that many. For me this whole Azaria thing wasn’t just about sad story a small child dying in the desert, but it was really a tale of the nation’s reactions to that. It drew a lot of passionate responses from people, but mostly that was evoked by the Chamberlain’s differences to them, and their strange religious beliefs perhaps, these are things that are important to Australians and I was more interested in examining that rather than whether a dingo did it.

yG: Do you think there is a difference in how a musician or artist can explore things as compared to the media – who take a more sensationalised view of things?

CB: Absolutely, it is just a different way of looking at it. I tend to leave the judging to the judges and the jury and the media – and what are musicians and artists there for? They are there to examining the emotion behind it and the poetry of it, and these things were definitely there, and people’s reactions to this event were definitely worth examining, and it’s naturally not the role of the courtrooms or the newspapers to make judgements of those, but it needs to be judged and that’s what the album is for.

yG: What reaction are you hoping for from the album in terms of the whole story and what they can take from it?

CB: A lot of people have listened to the record and I would hope that people reflect upon their own feelings of the event, it’s a very meditative record, and it is a record that is very interested in people’s secret lives. When you give insights into secret lives, even if they are imaginary lives, it makes you consider your own, and you consider your country and your environment and I guess that was what I hoped.

yG: In terms of writing the album Australian Ghost Story did you enjoy the process of just writing within the structure of that one concept and would it be something you would be willing to do again?

CB: Yes I really liked it actually; I found it very powerful having a broader story to ponder. I’ve never been the kind of guy who has been interested in writing - or able to, more correctly – to write songs about traditional popular culture subjects, it was very natural for me and very suitable. Would I do it again? Maybe – we are a band who just follows our nose, so if the right kind of idea comes along we would do it again. It is not that different to any other record we did, it’s not like it was a straight narrative concept record as in this happened and that happened – it’s a lot more impressionistic than that.

yG: After all these years do you still find you are inspired about the same things to write about?

CB: I’ve always been drawn to people in extreme situations, as a story writer that is something that there are innumerable stories. The subject matter is different, but my interests remain the same.

yG: How do you find the industry around you now has changed?

CB: It’s not really that different, we were signed to a major label in the nineties and there are more people involved in the process now. We had a very good A & R guy who was a very interesting person and he had a very good grasp of music, so I had a lot of interesting conversations with him and that’s an element of making music that no longer exists for us.

Everything else, it is not like we were ever a Powderfinger style band, we were always a very small, arthouse type band that were fortunate enough to be known in a lot of territories around the world that made this thing viable. Now touring is very expensive, but it always has been we are a very big band, seven-piece, so it doesn’t seem that difference to me. We do some stuff more ourselves, with the internet, we have our own website and sell stuff through the internet, but I think it is a very good time to be a band of our nature to be around. I like making things, that is very compatible with small scale runs of music, so that is good for us.

yG: Has the internet allowed a lot of people hear your for the first time or be aware of you?

CB: Maybe we are more aware of them. It never ceases to amaze me – I sent some records off to Portugal and Germany this morning - that people have bought from the website – it seems incredible to me. We played throughout Europe, but it was always quite an abstract experience really, but you are able to interact with people about your music more directly. As a consumer of music I feel like it is easier to hear music now, possible too easy, and I am amazed that people buy CDs from our websites, anyone can Google the name of our record and download it from a pirate site in Isreal. But people have an affinity with us and have a physical attachment to the material that is comparable with owning a physical object rather than just the digital version of it.

yG:  Do you find the people coming to your shows are ones that grew up with the band – are there many younger people getting into it?

XB: I am amazed that there are younger people who were aware of the band but were much, much younger when we were playing music in the nineties, I have also been amazed to discover new fans who are older as well. The Paradise Motel have found that your audience can be quite broad now, I found that playing in the nineties I would be playing to only people my own age, where as now we are playing to a broad spread of people and that’s a reflection on the amount of access I guess, it cuts both ways.

yG: You were always a band that were quite lauded critically- did that put any pressure on at all?

CB: Like a lot of these things, it is external, you are in something and – anyone who is lauded there is always going to have the other side of it as well -  The Paradise Motel,  we had some incredible responses from people. Things that really were interesting to discuss, even with this record, it’s been amazing, some people who have reviewed it have said some things that made me look at it in a different light. But there’s the other side of it as well, you are in a band or making anything, some people aren’t going to like it.  But you can’t really let either of them, the good or the band dictate anything to you anything – I’m always restrained about it -  say what you like - You want people to like your material and want them to listen, but that shouldn’t be the reason why you are doing it, you are in trouble if you are.

yG: Merida Sussex voice is such a distinct thing – did you ever find yourself writing music towards it as if it was an instrument of its own?

CB: Paradise Motel is a collaboration between seven people, and she has this ability to resonate with material that is quite remarkable – she’s is quite tuned in. I could never take any credit saying that I wrote anything for her, she brings her own qualities for the material, she takes them places very different that I expected them to go, always in a good way.

yG: How was the process of preparing to play shows again?

CB: When we started playing again we were just doing Australian Ghost Story, so we were pretty familiar with the material, but we gradually started playing some older songs as well that fits in with that – and it’s been good. It’s been weird, of course, some of that stuff I haven’t even thought about for ten years, but its been great and pretty straight forward. Anyone who has ever liked music knows how powerful the emotions are that are attached to it. That’s been the case preparing these live shows, in that way it has been a very good thing.

yG: Did revisiting those old songs take you back at all to your feelings when you wrote them?

CB: It certainly takes me back to some shows I played them in. Some of the songs are about things that I still think about – the backpacker disappearances in Tasmania – those suite of songs are still open to me and I think of them a lot. So they did take me back in a sense.

yG: Are you the type to plan things for the band or are you just in the present?

CB: It is ever harder to plan for the future, we are in the midst of a very energized session right now, we are working on the next record, we have yet other album we recorded before, and there is a lot of material and a lot energy and we are just doing it as we can and when we can.

yG: Is there any element of unfinished business about it?

CB: Not at all, I would do everything exactly the same, I wouldn’t really want to change anything, I’m a fatalist I’m afraid.