On this fabulous new album Mikelangelo sings dramatically about landmarks such as Nicholson, Bourke and Swanston Streets, as well as Flinders Street Station. He even manages to slip in a reference to the No.96 tram. Interestingly, this entertaining exploration of the familiar and the local was not the result of some conscious plan. “It happened very intuitively,” he says. “I didn’t set out to try to write the songs. They almost started writing themselves. I would walk around the city as I do my things and I’ve always liked looking at the city. Bit by bit over the last couple of years I amassed all these songs. They were just ideas at first and eventually I went ‘I think I’ve got an album here’. It’s hard to stop once you get going. Melbourne is like a community. It’s a big city but it sometimes feels like a village. It’s not a good place if you want to be anonymous, but it’s a great place if you want to live in a city where you have all this incredible stuff going on yet you can actually relate to people on a one-to-one personal level. I think it’s an amazing thing you don’t get in many cities.”
Mikelangelo has collaborated with a host of fellow artists on Melbourne – City of Dreams such as Miles Brown, Rob Snarksi, Clare St Clare and The Nymphs. “As I amassed the songs for the album it didn’t seem the right thing to use one of my existing bands,” he explains. “I thought the best way to do it is to work with a whole lot of my favourite Melbourne artists and to use this as an opportunity to engage on a whole lot of different levels. The way the collaborations worked is that every song came up really well. I loved working with each person. There were a few collaborations where those artists, which were in particular Miles Brown and Clare St Clare, got quite involved in the album and we ended up doing some co-writes together in the studio and the album evolved from there. The journey of recording is a creative journey. You can be writing and morphing and changing over that time. The album is the vision I wanted but I hadn’t known how to get there. I could see it glimmering somewhere in my unconscious and the artists I worked with helped me find it, which is the wonderful thing about collaboration.”
If you witnessed Mikelangelo performing City of Dreams on RocKwiz, you will know that he is that rarest of artists: a bona fide showman capable of electrifying the audience and drawing them into his world. “As an artist it’s up to you to engage the audience,” he says. “People come out wanting to be engaged and to have a great time whether it’s a sad gig or a celebratory gig. People want to be engaged with the music. It’s your job to actually make it worth their while to be in that room. I like to put on a show. I can’t help it. It’s just my natural instinct. The rock’n’roll performers that have inspired me over the years always have that element to them. I remember going to see The Cramps when I was 15 and that concert is indelibly etched on my mind. Lux Interior, Poison Ivy and the whole band were just so completely possessed in that moment that the rest of the world didn’t exist while that concert was happening. This is what I like to create. You walk on stage and you do your thing and nothing can sway you from that!”
Considering Mikelangelo’s commitment to adrenalizing the audience, his upcoming gigs at the Foxtel Festival Hub promise to be memorable events. “Sonically things keep changing in the world of Mikelangelo!” he laughs. “Musically it’s got an evocative, almost cinematic and epic sound. We have really given the songs a scope. The idea is that you can feel that you are inside this city as you listen. The city is almost like the film and we are making the soundtrack for it. We are working with a filmmaker who has been filming the city and has made all these projections for the show. It will be a multi-media show. The band will be on stage with special guests from the album. There will be different guests on different nights. I hope the whole show feels like you have been drawn up into a dream. And like a dream, some of it will make sense, some of it will be mysterious, some of it will be beautiful, and some of it will be a bit nightmarish. Hopefully it will be an emotional journey!”
BY GRAHAM BLACKLEY
