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Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier: a different drum

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PH: What has your strategy been to continue to work as performing and recording musicians?

DC: Well I don’t think it’s the end of the musician. It’s just the end of the record companies as we now know them, and the record companies having license to control destinies, like they’ve always done before. Mainly this is because of the breakthrough in technology. Anyone can own a home studio and produce records that are good enough to appear on the radio.
Of course the flip side of that is that you can make as many copies of that record as possible and it doesn’t lose quality. Gone are the days when if you really loved someone… something… you’d initially tape it off your friend’s record. It would really get crappy and you’d have to go out and buy the vinyl yourself. So you don’t have to do that any more. But you can actually make a record for a fraction of the cost and of course you can also market it for a fraction of the cost too.
Marketing is still a reasonably conventional process. I think that the Summerware party is still one of the brand new ideas that could come together.

PH: Can you explain the Summerware party?

DC: People go to [our] website, buy the minimum amount of copies needed to trigger a Summerware party - it sort of varied between twenty-five and thirty depending on where you were.

PH: The term "Summerware" plays off the title of your recent album.

DC: Summer Town. It was expressly to promote Summer Town, and the idea of Summerware was …

AC: Tupperware.

DC: The homage to Tupperware. That’s right.

PH: It’s very catchy. People buy the plastic.

DC: You just bought the plastic first. So they’d buy the correct amount of CDs to trigger the party, then Willie and I would turn up to their place to deliver them, sign them, play a short set off Summer Town, and sign all the CDs for the various people. But the beauty of this idea was that … one person to organise it, and then to infect all of their friends with their enthusiasm. So by and large you’d be playing a very small handful, a very small percentage in the room who were actually fans of ours. The vast majority of them were there because they were roped into it.They liked the idea of spending an afternoon with their friends. It was a novel idea, why not try it out? But of course they come away with this wonderful memory of an afternoon or evening spent with good friends, good food and great music, and it’s a really up close and personal way to listen…

WZ: Yeah, very different to a normal gig because there'd be no PA in between musicians and audience.

DC: It’s a really old-fashioned camp-fire, traditional musicianship, minstrel…

WZ: Travelling minstrels.

DC: Yeah that’s right. So it had this lovely combination… the kind of perfect synergy between the modern technology and traditional methods of delivering music.

PH: I suppose it’s a much lighter feel than your traditional pub gig or arena show?

DC: Well lighter particularly since you’re not taking any amps around with you… Everything about it. It was a real nice sampler.

WZ: And interestingly it’s affected us too because we’re now just playing as a duo,
probably because of these Summerware parties, because when the record came out there was still a band. So it has gotten lighter and lighter as we’ve gone along.

DC: That’s right. We’ve enjoyed the process enormously. We’ve enjoyed playing our music acoustically and just being able to hear everything that goes on, and not having the interference. Cos I mean it’s really different to playing with a PA.
You’d be amazed at how many people can screw up two voices and two guitars. It never fails to make me wonder and scratch my head, how they can do it in so many ways.

WZ: And still have a job.

DC: That’s right.

PH: As a recording engineer who has heard too many bad gigs, I can understand what you mean. I’ve seen it happen a lot.

DC: As an acoustic act we’re completely in control of our sound. If one of us is too loud we just stop, play a bit softer. It’s good.

WZ: So it’s making people more creative, I think. Record companies aren’t particularly creative. But when you’re selling your own record, in some way…You can try to think of interesting things.

DC: There’s a stake in it, yeah.

WZ: I guess that’s what Radiohead are doing by… you know? That was a way for them to get publicity for their new record.

DC: Very effectively.

PH: There is a sort of a background condition for all of this stuff, and that is that both you and Radiohead (if I can mention both of you in the same breath)…

WZ: I think so.

DC: (laughs)

PH: … have had a very high profile to start with. In a marketing sense you have a brand to trade on already. Whereas for someone doing this from scratch it might be a little more difficult because one thing a big record company does give you initially is massive marketing. And Radiohead have reached that plateau, and you guys have also reached a very high…

DC: What about John Butler and The Waifs? And Ani DiFranco?

PH: So you think it’s still possible to do it via the grass roots as well?

DC: I don’t think, I know. I mean, we all know. ‘Cause it’s been done. And… it will be done and done again. I mean the record companies, as much as they’d like to, don’t control radio.

PH: Mmm.

DC: God knows they’d love to. They’d love to be able to say “Play this, it’s fantastic!” But you know, they still can’t. And they don’t.

WZ: Well you know, even more than that, they don’t control the buyer.

DC: They don’t control the buyer.

WZ: Often the radio would play something, because a record company wanted them to or paid them to or whatever went on. And there would be radio hits. But people still didn’t buy that record. I guess in the brave new world, people will either connect with the music or won’t connect with the music.

AC: You’ve found people from a broad range of genres who I hadn’t heard of before, like the Sally Seltmanns and Sara Storers…

DC: [You'd] never heard of her?

AC: Sally I had. I was a big fan and that’s what drew me but then there was a clipping with Sara storer that …

DC: Blew you away?

AC: Yeah!

DC: Yeah she’s great.

AC: How did you discover…

DC: The people that I didn’t know about?

AC: Yeah.

DC: Well it was just a matter of research. If you’re looking then you’ll find. There’s certainly not a shortage of wonderful talent out there.

AC: No, absolutely.

DC: Male and female. I mean I’ve happened to concentrate on the female but only because I’m looking for a hook to hang this thing on. There’s plenty of really fantastic talented people who are doing interesting things and are just waiting to explode. You just have to look for them.

AC: I believe you discovered your keyboard player from just hearing him in a gig?

DC: Cameron Reynolds! We were at the Brunswick Festival and we went past the Push stage, and whoever the band that Cameron was playing in at the time was on and we found out about him. How did you know about that?

AC: I’ve read it somewhere, because I saw him on your credits and I liked the sound.

PH: It’s somewhere on the website.

DC: Right. We remembered [what] time [he had performed] and we rang up the Push stage and said “Who was on the stage then?” It was just a matter of a bit of Sherlock Holmes detective work and we finally traced him.

WZ: And it is easier to find people too because people generally have internet presence. Somehow, somewhere you can google people and…

DC: Oh it’s much easier now. MySpace is a great boon for people like me, not that I have a MySpace site ‘cause I don’t, and I probably should because – it’s just that I’m being lazy but [for] a producer it’s wonderful resource to be able to look people up.

PH: And with the Summerware thing, how’s it gone? Have you felt that it’s been successful? At least, obviously it’s been successful artistically or in terms of enjoying intimate gigs. Has it gone well financially?

DC: Very well.

WZ: Yeah.

DC: We’ve done over a hundred of them.

PH: Really?

DC: Yeah! So what started out as a marketing exercise became the way to actually…

WZ: When it began, it was a way of getting standard media attention. “Look, isn’t this an interesting thing that we’re doing?” But it actually… took on a life of its own.

DC: … became much more than that. And I think it managed to extend the life of an album way beyond that of a normal independent release which you know tends to last the length of the publicity campaign and that’s about it.

PH: Yes. There’s this promotion cycle.

DC: Yeah. But you know we’ve sold huge amounts of records just on the back of this one idea because people love the concept of being able to introduce their friends to something that they love and hang a party around it, or an event, a musical soiree, whatever you want to do.

PH: Do you take multiple releases and back copies along to the show?

DC: No we haven’t done. Not really.

WZ: No it’s purely to do with that record. We go there, we play four songs from that record and then we sign that record and… that’s what it is, yeah. No hits or…

PH: Very neat. I’d just like to ask you a question about your careers, together and separately. It seems you’ve been travelling in parallel, and intersecting career-wise for quite a while now. Do you consider that you’ve got blended careers or do you both have side things as well? Or is that an open question at the moment?

DC: No. I mean I see my career as intimately connected with his.

WZ: And I see your career as intimately connected with mine.

(laughter)

DC: You know but there are…

WZ: There are occasional things…

DC: There are things that we do on our own too. Willie’s been scoring some films, he’s doing one now, and television shows.

WZ: You saved me.

DC: I’ve just curated the song trail for the Queensland Music Festival where I took Kev Carmody, Dave Fawkner and Uncle Henry Seaman down around regional Queensland conducting song-writing workshops.

WZ: Yeah the great bulk of our careers is together.

DC: When I release an album, we are Deborah Conway. But the last album had "Deborah Conway and Willie Zygier" on it on the credits and on the cover. So by and large the song-writing and stuff that we do is together but there are other things.

PH: Do you feel like you’re heading in a particular direction musically speaking? Or do you feel like every new piece of work that you do is attempting to be new and different, a new departure?

DC: No I think the former, definitely.

PH: And what is that direction? Where are you going?

DC: I don’t know.

(laughter)

PH: Somewhere!

WZ: Over the decade and a half we’ve tried to probably surprise ourselves with each record. So there was a case of novelty about it. But I think at the moment…

DC: …we’re looking for…

WZ: … we’re getting sparer and sparer and sparer and less…

DC: … and we’re looking for the ultimate way that you would finesse the last release. Where would you take that logically to its next conclusion? That’s where we’re heading. Wherever that record would point most people in the direction of, that’s where we’re going.

WZ: I just think there’s so much music in the world, so many different styles, so many different ways to play that I’m just trying to focus now on playing my instrument, writing the song and that’s what counts. It doesn’t need any extraneous sounds or notes, which I’ve been guilty of in the past. Very guilty of in the past, your honour!

PH: Do you find that as you get older, those disparate influences that all… that push you one way or the other when you’re younger tend to strip down a bit? And you become more purely yourself as a musician?

WZ: Well hopefully. I think that I’ve got a particular harmonic and melodic language that I recognise as myself. I don’t know if anyone else can… I don’t know if it’s particular enough that other people could pin my language down, but I know when I’ve written something that satisfies what I need out of music. And I think that Deborah’s probably doing the same and doing it lyrically. Yeah, I feel… I think that’s what you ultimately try and do, be an individual. And you achieve it or don’t. You try to achieve it.

DC: And I think there is something about getting older and seeing and being able to say things more sparely. When you’re younger, you probably are more flowery, more verbose. The challenge really is to say things with fewer words, with less augmentation.

PH: How does the genesis of the song work with you two? Do you play together to see what comes out? Do you start with words?

DC: It has all kinds of different open beginnings and… different finishes.

WZ: I’d say that more often than not we’re together in the same room rather than one of us is off on their own.

DC: Yeah.

WZ: We really do write together. Which is an interesting thing to do.

PH: Lyrics and music? How does that work in your writing process?

WZ: Deborah probably does ninety-five percent of the lyric. I’d say.

PH: Do you tend to start with the lyric or do you develop that from some musical theme? How does that work?
WZ: Nah, we tend to finish with the lyric.

DC: Sometimes it’ll be a title. Sometimes there’s a few lines and it’ll sort come from that. Sometimes the lyric gets reworked many, many times over. In fact the last few songs have been a lot like that. Things that have started out life as one song and been completely transformed into another. And I wouldn’t be able to tell you which came first or anything, but what a successful song is for me is all about the perfect marriage between the mood of the piece, what the words are saying, and how they come together. And uh, that’s always the biggest challenge for me. A good lyric is fine but if it doesn’t completely mesh with the music to make the perfect marriage then turf it and start again. God knows I’ve done that… so many [times].

AC: That’s a hard thing to do though.

DC: It is actually. It’s incredibly time-consuming. Musically it tends to come together much more quickly, and lyrically it tends to be something that you can sweat over for months.

WZ: We’ve been reading lots of pertinent things about that you know, like Mark Steyn…

DC: Oh that Mark Steyn piece is fantastic. Do you ever read Mark Steyn?

AC: No.

DC: Let me see if I can find that quote, it’s a really good quote.

WZ: Mark Steyn’s a kind of political commentator, but he also writes about composers. He loves Broadway composers. But he writes about them very seriously and musically.

PH: Broadway composers are astonishing, in terms of lyrical and musical skills.

WZ: Yeah. Completely.

DC: This is a great quote [from Mark Steyn]:

“Well I think when you analyse the song you can see all the little tricks and things that go into it, but at a certain level a guy doesn’t write it like that. I think you’ve got to write it instinctively, and then you go back and clean it up a little. Interestingly to me, I think music is a largely instinctive thing, because when you talk to composers and lyricists the composer always says “Oh I wrote it in twenty minutes,” and then the lyricist says, “Oh it took me two months to get the lyric right". And I think that’s usually true. I think writing music is instinctive but I think writing lyrics has a lot of craft in it.”

Which I think is a fantastic quote. That wasn’t a piece of his writing, he was just speaking.

AC: So with your work, do you get bits and pieces, do you have a book, is it all stream of consciousness …? How do you find things?

DC: You write things down as they come to you; hear snatches of conversation or something on the radio or a newspaper article or whatever. You’ve got notes & stuff. I go back over old lyric books and pull things out that I might not have used and see if I can rework them in a different way, a different angle on it. Or the other thing that I do is that I sit there with a melody in my head and singing it and you sing nonsense lyrics. And nonsense lyrics actually can become things. Often. And ah… you’re a songwriter?

AC: Yeah. (laughs)

DC: So you know that the way the words sound is almost as important.

PH: And I suppose it’s also a little tap into the subconscious as well.

DC: That’s right. So you’re kind of opening up things that you might not have thought about. Sounds tend to suggest themes.

PH: Coming back to the Summerware parties, how have those sort of gigs changed the way…

DC: You love those Summerware parties!

PH: It’s such a great idea! How have those sort of gigs changed the way you’ve performed?

DC: I think Willie answered that question earlier on. We have started playing as an acoustic duo.

PH: I was more thinking in terms of… what’s the difference in the way that you interact with the audience or the way that you sing a song compared to a traditional gig? I mean you know, an old-fashioned gig if I can put it like that?

DC: Actually I think since the Summerware parties we’ve both been sitting down. You know what happened was that you got the resonator, the National guitar which you refused to put a pin into. So you’ve been sitting down since then so I’ve been sitting down and so I guess that makes it more casual and certainly makes it less…

WZ: Very relaxed.

DC: … of a rock performance. So I guess…

WZ: Trying to take away the artifice of whatever.

DC: You become more conversational with your audience. So that’s part of it too. They’re sitting down, we’re sitting down. We’re all there to listen to music as opposed to watching someone strut.

PH: It’s a little less Victorian than standing up at the piano to sing your piece isn’t it? I mean in a sense you’re sitting down on a level with everybody else.

DC: Oh yeah but you know there’s a lot of examples other than [that]. It’s the rock god sort of thing that I can’t…the elevated stage. That’s more about the performance as opposed to the music. I guess the Summerware party in some way has made it just turn back to the music more.

WZ: For me I’ve found in life that the best musical experiences as a listener are unexpected performances, places that I didn’t go to hear music – just finding people playing wherever and being moved by it. The last time was at the…

DC: Yumanda Costa?

WZ: No – Yumandi Market!

DC: Oh yeah! That’s right, you’re right!

WZ: There were two old-timers…

DC: You’re right, that was great.

WZ: … out of the Slim Dusty school just sitting out playing at the market. And an American mother and daughter sat down with them and sang a Neil Diamond song… and it was amazing!

DC: Sweet Caroline, and they made it sound like it had just come back out of the back of Kobar, it was hilarious!

WZ: And it was this two Americans and two Australians who’d never sung before and these two women could sing like, beautiful harmonies but not like professional singers, and these two old-timers who also had these really kind of ragged voices…

DC: You know, rough as guts but really good.

PH: So there’s a sense of community and connection coming through this whole idea as well. It seems like that kind of experience of those people at the market and the kind of experience you have is community starting to become a bit more important, and the old rock paradigm is much more to do with separateness.

DC: I had this theory a long time ago, many many years ago now, that musicians were heading the way of plumbers. You know, that a musician would service their local community pretty much. And I think it’s happened. I think it’s transpired. Really. You know, the old idea of a musician uniting the world with a release like I don’t know… Madonna might have done or you know… The Beatles…

PH: U2.

DC: U2, Michael Jackson, all of those enormous releases where everybody rushed out and bought it – that just doesn’t happen any more. You don’t need to go run out and buy it. There’s so much on offer, and the market is, and radio and music is so completely, so fractured and everybody listens to different things. It’s a really different way of cultural exchange or cultural unification between us. So that feeling of being entertained locally by someone that you can relate to, that’s a much stronger kind of – there’s nothing shameful in that you know. It’s really… nice! I think.

PH: Mmm. So we’re almost at the end of that romantic hero aberration thing that we’ve been into for the last hundred years where musicians have been heroes…

DC: Hundred?

PH: …beyond normal human beings… 150 years… Beethoven…

AC: Castrati – they were the superheroes…

DC: You know, musicians that unite the world, I don’t think…

WZ: You’d have to be a hero to go through with the op!

AC: Are you doing Broad in 2008?

DC: Did you see the first one with Katie Noonan?

AC: No but I’ve seen Katie Noonan so many times over the years…

DC: … an awesome performer. She’s one of the best musicians I’ve ever worked with. She really blows me away.

AC: She is, she’s a freak. (laughter) She’s an absolute freak. I love her. I saw her at The Prince about a month and a half ago.

DC: Nice record. Skin.

AC: So much joy in that record, that’s what I got out of the performance. You just floated around because she’s just… on this other plane. There’s none of the angst of before.

AC: So are you going to do one in 2008?

DC: Broad? Yeah I think so. I think I am. It’s a lot of work. I need to make… put out a record. They really are incredibly time-consuming.

AC: So have you done recordings of [Broad]. You’d obviously have recordings from the previous ones.

DC: Oh we did record the last one. Filmed it as well.

AC: Yeah I can imagine everyone who was there wanted a copy of it.

DC. Yeah. I imagine they would.

WZ: Deborah actually means "we" need to make a record. ‘Cause our last record was 2004.

DC: And since then there’s been three Broads but no album for us.

AC: But you’ve been writing a lot?

DC: We’ve got lots of songs but I think we need more. It’s just good to have more to choose from. But I think we’re close.

AC: Do you think you’ll do it with a full band? Or do you think it’ll be more acoustic?

DC: No I don’t think we will do it with a full band but you know…we’ll think. As it sort of becomes evident. Hopefully it’ll tell us.

WZ: Just you, me & Buddy.

For those who might be interested in hosting a Summerware party for your very own private performance by Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier, just go to www.deborahconway.com.

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Covering the legals

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The single approved collection agency for licensing the “public performance” of musical works in Australia is APRA. They also license songs from overseas on a reciprocal basis with overseas collection agencies. APRA is actually a private non-profit company not a government body.

In nearly all cases it is considered the responsibility of the venue, rather than the band, to ensure that they have the appropriate license. You will find more info on the Australian Copyright Council website.

Yours virtuously,

Uncle Terry

Busking my ass - fo' what?

Dear Uncle Terry,

I want to start busking to make a few dollars, is there anything I need to take care of "officially" before I start?

Andy

Dear Andy,

Busking is generally controlled by local councils. Some require a permit or licence, here are some links:

Melbourne Council

Yarra Council

Booroondara Council

Banyule council actually conducts a "Busking Competition" but the participants are not allowed to collect money. Hmm…. Busking was also one of the subjects of their "Nuisance Legislation review". Hmmm!
And finally, they charge $130 per day (!) if you want to busk in their fair municipality.

Yours with raised eyebrows,

Uncle Terry

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