Fifteen minutes with: Russell Hopkinson, You Am I

Australian rock stalwarts You Am I have just released their ninth studio album and prepare to hit the road to launch their self-titled record.

We caught up with Russell ‘Rusty’ Hopkinson to find out the things we hardly knew about You Am I and their latest album.

yourGigs (yG): Can you tell us about how the band’s latest album came together?

Russel Hopkinson (RH): It has just come together in a weird mix of different sessions. I recorded a whole bunch of drafts over a couple of days with Tim and it just went along from there in various warehouses where we would set up and record stuff. It has all come together in this really great way. We thought about it a lot, it is just a really nice You Am I record and it had got a few different flavours on there. But I think it is just a really strong collection of Tim Rogers songs played by You Am I which is what we are pretty good at doing, I’m really happy with it.

yG: What was the thoughts and reasoning behind putting the album out independently?

RH: There wasn’t a great deal of thought. The industry is changing and it was a change to take a little bit more control. At the end of the day it was more down to the fact that timing wasn’t right with other labels that we looked at, and Nick came along with a really good deal from Other Tongues that made sense to us, it fits in with what we want to do and fits in with Other Tongues and how they want to be perceived and what they wanted to do, so it was a really easy decision to make. We are doing a vinyl version ourselves getting cut by a really good vinyl engineer in the States and getting  a really nice package and just making it a really fun experience, for us more than anything, and we are just trying to make the best product we can and also move with the times a little bit.

yG: You all now have so much music industry experience behind you now – do you think you do have the knowledge to just make a go of it yourselves?

RH: In this day and age – when you get to a position like ours – when you are not the new young gun band from the end of the street that is going to get money thrown at it by a record company, those days are over I think anyway, and when you do have a fan base and a bit of a career you have to work out the best way how to work with that. And that is what we have tried to do is make sure that we can make a really good record and put it out so that people can get it in a lot of different ways and not just by going to the store and buying it, but lots of means and moving forward with it and staying on top of it.

yG: Where do you see the band and how they fit in with the industry these days?

RH: This is our ninth album, we’ve been around for twenty years, I’ve been in the band since 1993, and Davey Lane, who is still the new guy has been in since 1999. We are a band who can quite happily get together and play music together and a few people out there like that fact, and that is fine by us. It is not like it is a huge chore to get together with those guys and play music, in fact it is actually a lot of great fun. We probably don’t nearly do it as much as we would have liked in the past six to 12 months so it is actually a really good period to get out on the road and play some music and let’s thing about a record and all that stuff is great to do and we are really lucky that we are in a position where we can just go ‘this is how we are going to do it’ and we are going to do it through these means and go and play these shows, and that’s a really good way to do it.

yG: With everyone having done their various side projects – do you notice any differences when they do come back together to play as You Am I?

RH: Not really, it’s been like that for a long time – probably for the past five years. We live in different cities so it is not always that easy to get together, we can’t just rock over to someone’s shed and set up and play music we’ve all got to get together to do it. It just seems natural, there is a really natural rapport within the band. The old adage of like riding a bike, it is not really like that but it is like that in some ways - as soon as you start playing it just feels natural.

yG: Do you still surprise each other and is it still a challenging band to be in?

RH: The way we made this record was a lot different, especially from the drums point of view. A lot of times almost all of it is impulse playing. Not having any rehearsals and just getting in there and playing off Tim and being impulsive with the drums. This record quite a few tracks we demoed – I demoed at home - and we worked pretty hard structurally on some of the songs, then again there were others that by the time we got into the studio they were fairly fluid. It was a really good understanding of the songs and we talked them about them a whole lot more than we have on other records. So a lot of the time there was impulse playing, but a lot of this was a lot more considered on a lot of levels. There are two different ways of doing it, but both of them have their advantages. It is always surprising when you get a great song and you get a chance to work out the drums for it. You can’t beat that. It is always going to be a great thrill to hear a new song of Tim’s and get to bang your heads together over it. It’s a lot of fun.

yG: Do you ever feel conscious of not trying to sound like something you have done before?

RH: I don’t think about things like that – I don’t think any of us sit around listening to our records going “oh we made a mistake here” we pretty much make records and we go out and play them. I don’t really think about them in terms of things that I listen to or in terms of songs I play. I know ‘Purple Sneakers’ is a song I play more than I sit down and listen to and think ‘oh why did I put that kick drum there’. I don’t think I’m that self aware of that, it is more about honest reactions to the music that is put in front of you, that is what it has always been.  With this record there was the thing that we maybe talked about it a bit more and there were songs which started out that my ideas for them was so minimalist that Tim burst out laughing. ‘Shuck’ the new single didn’t even have any drums on it for ¾ of the song on my first version of it and Tim said ‘oh nah, I hear you playing drums on that’. We just talk about records it will be everything from the things you’d expect to the things you don’t expect. Everything from the early nineties bands on Creation right back to eighties hair metal bands, there is just so much stuff we listen to and so many different influences there it is  more just having fun with it rather than thinking too hard about it.

yG: There seems to be a lot of bands from around your era who you would have played with and they are now reforming and there seems to be a lot of interest in it – what are your thoughts on that and why that time is still so popular?

RH: I don’t know. I’ve been playing in bands since the early eighties, I’ve seen bands I was playing with when I was 17 get back together in the nineties. I think it is just the people. It always gets made out that these people were having such a hard time that they had to split up, but when they sit down and think about really after a few years they think actually that was a lot of fun and why did we stop doing that. That is one thing with You Am I we would never consider going through all that break up thing because we know we would want to do it again. I don’t think any of us hate each other or anything like that, so there’s no reason to do it. That’s always been our motto. So if you were in a band in the nineties and it was a lot of fun and you haven’t done it for a lot of years, then why not!

yG: Will this album see you hitting the road and take you overseas?

RH: Yeah, we will be working on it for the next eighteen months, just cruising around, we always like to get over to Europe and the US we have our favourite spots where we like to play shows.

yG: Is touring still something that the band loves doing?

RH: Yeah, I mean you can always whinge about being on tour, and I’m sure everybody that has been in a band has, but the first thing they whinge about when they get home is that they want to go back out on tour again. You just go out, hang out, play music and have a good time. The less you do it, the more you miss it. We don’t do it as much as we did in the nineties when it was a bit of a slog, now we actually have a bit of control we can say okay we’ll do these gigs here and we can be a bit more on top of it.