Mike Noga is sitting in a cafe in North Fitzroy picking at a tuna and avocado salad. “I really like this place because it’s not cool,” he says
Mike Noga is sitting in a cafe in North Fitzroy picking at a tuna and avocado salad. “I really like this place because it’s not cool,” he says. Noga has just returned from a European tour supporting Band Of Horses, an experience that he found immensely satisfying. “When I was first asked I thought ‘Great! But how am I going to pay for it?’ But thanks to some favours, and frequent flyer points, we managed to get over there,” he says.
When Noga discovers that I haven’t heard his new record yet, he’s disappointed. “Oh, that’s no good.” An impish grin replaces the initial sense of disappointment. “Well, it’s a hip-hop record…” he smiles. Actually, Noga’s new record, The Balladeer Hunter, is almost as far away from a hip-hop record as you might want to go. “I’d had these songs sitting around for a year at least,” he says. “So it was just a case of finding the time to record the songs, and to give the album the treatment – and to tour it, and promote it – that I wanted to do,” he says. Having released his previous record on the eve of a Drones tour, Noga was keen to devote the requisite time to his latest album. When Drones front man Gareth Liddiard announced his intention to record his own solo album, Noga carved out his own time to finish The Balladeer Hunter.
With space cleared in his usually busy diary, Noga grabbed two-thirds of his Gentlemen Of Fortune, drummer Gus Agars (The Vandas) and Pat Bourke (Dallas Crange) and headed into the studio. Noga’s musical was simple – a natural sounding record with minimal production fanfare. “Acoustic guitar, drums, bass and violin – that’s pretty well it. No electric guitars, no overdubs, nothing like that,” he says. “We recorded it in two nights, rehearsed up the songs and then put the tracks down.”
Noga was looking for a record that would withstand the test of time. “Just before I started recording it I started thinking ‘why do I keep going back to that Neil Young record, or that Bob Dylan record or that Led Zeppelin record’,” he explains. “And while I like lots of new stuff, will I pull out the latest Arcade Fire record in 25 years’ time and put that on? No, I probably won’t – but I will pull out Nashville Skyline in 25 years’ time. So I wanted to make a record that sounded like one of those records,” he says.
The critical ingredient wasn’t so much a prevailing music style, but the ‘rawness’ of Noga’s favourite records of yore. “They sound raw, and you can hear little mistakes, sometimes the backing vocals are a bit out – that sort of thing appeals to my soul, I guess,” Noga says. “So that’s the type of record I was trying to make – and I think I succeeded. It sounds pretty earthy, for want of a better term.”
Having had the record thought out in his mind for a while, he knew where the album was headed, right down to the preferred tracklisting. “There’s only nine songs on the record, which was also something I wanted to do,” he says. “All my favourite records are only about 40 minutes long – I think my mine is about 32 minutes.” Noga chose to put the record out on Sydney label Other Tongues, who’d recently released the latest You Am I record. “They wrote me this lovely email, saying they’d be absolutely distraught if they couldn’t release the record, which was so nice,” Noga laughs.
With the Gentlemen of Fortune being “on hiatus”, Noga is focusing on his acoustic solo project for the time being. During the recent Band Of Horses tour of Australia, Noga was approach to back the American band on its European tour. “I’ve known those guys for years. They really liked the new record, so they asked me to come to Europe with them for a month,” Noga says. The result was worth the logistical and financial effort in getting over to the other side of the world. “It was incredible,” Noga says, “and really strange, because we hadn’t played the songs live before with the band before. The very first gig we played was in front of about 3000 people in Lisbon, and they were going beserk!”
With his prior exposure limited to playing with The Drones on previous Drones tours, Noga was pleasantly surprised at the reception. “They didn’t know who I was, or the songs I was playing. Some people knew I was from The Drones, but mainly they just knew we were from Australia and that we were friends of Band Of Horses,” Noga says. “The response was incredible – we sold out all our merchandise in the first few shows. But now I have to snap myself back into reality, and realise I’m going back to playing in front of 100 people, not 20,000.”
Noga and his band were keen to replicate thesongs on The Balladeer Hunter in a live context, although the absence of a violin player necessarily led to a level of improvisation. “We wanted to present the record as it was recorded, because it’s a very live sounding record,” Noga says. “But the problem with that was that we didn’t have a violin player, and the violin takes a leading role – almost like a lead guitar – on a lot of the songs on the record. So we kind of reworked the songs, and introduced more harmonies, harmonica and percussion. We had to fill up the songs a lot more, because going on stage before Band Of Horses, who’re huge sounding, we didn’t want the songs to sound puny,” Noga says. “I think we succeeded.”
With the Drones’ activities on hold for the time being, Noga will be dividing his time between promoting and performing the solo record, playing drums with former Augie March singer Glenn Richards and whatever other musical interests come his way. Noga concedes that the life of a full-time musician can be challenging. “I worry about it every day of my life,” Noga laughs. “I’ve been lucky over the last five or six years, but you’ve got to look after every single dollar, and that gets tiring after a while. But I feel that’s all I can do.”
MIKE NOGA will be playing tracks from his new album at the Toff In Town on Saturday May 7. The Balladeer Hunter is out now through Other Tongues.
