“With The Pictures, the band hasn’t really broken up, I just kind of thought for the time being that the band had run its course,” he states. “It stopped being fun, so I decided to wipe the slate clean for a little bit. With The Pictures we kind of painted ourselves into a corner in terms of what the band is stylistically and what the band is perceived to be. We kind of wrote – I hate using the term – retro kind of guitar pop, rock ‘n’ roll. I just thought that I’d been working in the past years on a range of stuff. Some of it is scrappy, Jay Reatard-y punk rock, some electronic stuff, and some straight-up late-‘70s, Stiff Records-style rock ‘n’ roll. I liked the idea of there being an extra bit of freedom putting stuff out under my own name, because there was no expectation as to what a record with my name on it should sound like. I just holed myself up for a good couple of years recording, in between doing other things obviously. We’ve only just put the first EP out now, but there’s about three or four more just sitting in the can, waiting to be mastered and put out there.”
Despite the bevy of tracks composed by Lane, the decision to initially unleash an EP’s worth of material is a move that he feels comfortable with. “I’ve got a ludicrously short attention span, so an EP sits well with me. That model of releasing a single, then an album, then another single, then you wait a year, and repeat – it’s pretty antiquated now, it’s redundant. There’s no right or wrong way to get your music out there. I made a full-length album; I did have that other music sitting there. But in terms of productivity and getting music out there, I could put an EP out every three months and get two albums’ worth out in the space of a year. That was part of the appeal for me.”
Released to acclaim earlier on in 2013, the track You’re The Cops, I’m The Crime was the first taste of material under the Davey Lane banner. In between the release of the single and the release of the EP, Lane toured extensively with You Am I as part of the reissue of their first three albums. Still, Lane managed to avoid any major disruption to his solo venture. “The You Am I thing came up earlier in the year. I probably would have put the EP out earlier. But that’s the thing, we work everything out well in advance so everything can coexist. Tim’s always got a lot of other projects on the go, so that helps me out too, getting my stuff out there, and getting out there to play it. I’m glad we waited till we had enough time to get it set up. I was umm-ing and ahh-ing about mixes up till a couple of months ago. So it is probably fortuitous it was held back a month or two.”
Having just kicked off a national tour to celebrate the release of The Good Borne of Bad Tymes, Lane is heading into uncharted territories in terms of his setlist. “I have been recording a bunch of different stuff. I guess we’ll put the stuff that’s a little more challenging to the audience at the top. I want to cover the breadth of what I’ve been working on in the past couple of years. It’ll be all over the shop, really,” he assesses. “There’ll be a bit of psych-folk stuff, and maybe end out the set with good time rock ‘n’ roll.”
As for future pursuits in the solo guise, Lane feels assured that he will have room to breathe in 2014. “With You Am I, we’ll be working on a record sometime next year. All that stuff is full steam ahead. But my solo project is my main creative outlet for songwriting. So it’s not really a side project, it’s a little more important to me than that. The plan for now is to keep putting EPs out for myself. With EPs, of course you’re flying a little more under the radar than you would putting a record out. But doing that, I can duck and weave between what You Am I has planned and make it work. The guys I have playing with me are fantastic. When other stuff comes up, it might be a welcome little break. We’ll make both things coexist.”
BY LACHLAN KANONIUK
