Ben Salter
Subscribe
X

Get the latest from Beat

Ben Salter

bensalter3med.jpg

“I’ve wanted to do solo albums forever (and) felt it was time to release this record for a number of reasons,” says Salter. “I’ve been playing for the Gin Club for ages, and kept putting it off, putting it off and then one day I thought, ‘Now’. The time seemed right, and the opportunity to work with [co-producer] Gareth [Liddiard] came up and I thought, ‘now or never’.”

According to industry gossip, Salter has been threatening to release a solo record for the past decade. The songs on The Cat have been collected over years of writing and recording for other projects, and are accordingly eclectic. “Some of them are very old,” he agrees. “They span my career. I wrote them and then either by design or by accident they not been included on the albums of my other bands. Either they wouldn’t work on say, a Gin Club record and were put aside, or I deliberately put them aside thinking I was going to record them one day.

“Structurally, the songs are quite similar to work I’ve done before. I wanted this record to be special – I didn’t want it to be a boring singer-songwriter thing. The arrangements are where you make a difference.”

To that end he recorded and produced it with Gareth Liddiard and Robert F. Cranny at Liddiard’s rural studio in Havilah, Victoria, recruiting players ranging from other Gin Clubbers to legendary jazz saxophonist Julien Wilson. “It was a bit like assembling the A-Team,” Salter recalls. “I was mates with Liddiard and I knew he had a Protools rig. I started sending him demos and he was into it, luckily – it was a bit scary, because you just assume that Liddiard doesn’t like pop music. Gaz was very good at helping me when I needed it and letting me do my own thing when I needed that.”

The slightly schizophrenic mix of instruments – minimalist drumkits, hurdy gurdy, saxophone, Swedish bagpipes – and musicians helped record the songs in a blend of avant-garde pop, rock and folk, which captures an element of spontaneity that is reminiscent of Salter’s work with The Young Liberals.

“I wanted to introduce that chaotic element. I didn’t let the band hear the songs prior to the recording. I had vague ideas of where I wanted parts to be, then I gave them the chords and ran it through their headphones and let them do their own thing. It was a bit of a gamble, but the results were awesome. I’ve found that a little bit of improvising keeps the spontaneity in it, and it helped me discover new bits of songs like The Coward and I’m Not Ashamed. The lyrical themes on this record are very close to my heart, so to capture a bit of that energy was amazing.”

Equal parts suburban Brisbane ennui and cock-eyed McGowenesque broken genius, Salter writes about the everyday with a lyrical flourish and clarity of vision that is breathtaking in its scope but invigoratingly free of pretension. He cut his teeth busking as a teenager on the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane, covering Beatles and Radiohead tracks. While his songs have gotten more sophisticated over the years and he’s become something of a cult figure, he’s retained an uncanny ability to frame the everyday in a way that articulates vital truths about the human condition. Take the song The Cat from this record, a study in revenge and longing as well as a fun tune about a housecat.

Given that Salter nominated this track as one of his favourites, along with his habit of Tweeting and Facebooking about his cat Stubbs, I ask if Stubbs served as his muse on this record. Salter denies it. “Most of these songs were written before the cat. It’s not even about cats, it’s using the image of a bird watching a cat as a metaphor.” Salter tells me, not entirely convincingly. Of Stubbs, he will confess: “I get teased a bit because I’m a bit of a sook for the cat, but when people meet her they understand.”

A similar sentiment could apply to Salter’s work. Whatever the idiosyncracies of Salter’s creative process, it speaks volumes of his work that he was able to not only able to summon his A-team to record the album, but that he was able to fund the venture entirely on the basis of his fans’ faith. Crowd-funding supplied him with the cash to produce the record, sourced from fans who were reimbursed with a completed record – a gamble that requires a reputation like that Salter has cultivated to pay off.

“I think it’s (crowd funding) awesome. We’re just about to launch a Gin Club project on the same basis. It was a wonderful way to do it because it’s about having people ready to take a punt and pay for something before it’s made, and it kept money coming in right when I needed it and really it saved my arse. It’s actually a pre-sale, it’s about people investing in you, so it’s not like a charity. I think once people get the vinyl in their hot little hands they’ll be happy with the product.”