Words: Tracey Moyle – Music Maven
Gentle Ben and his Shimmering Hands is the latest musical evolution for local musician Ben Corbett, known by many as a former Six Foot Hick and Gentle Ben and His Sensitive Side frontman. It’s been a hot minute since Ben, his brother Geoff and friends Dan and Tony took Brisbane music fans on a wild adventure as Six Foot Hick or showed us a more mellow persona with Gentle Ben and his Sensitive Side teaming with Dylan McCormack, Trevor Ludlow and Nick Norton.
After a few albums, a line-up change and a trip to Europe, His Sensitive Side morphed into this latest side of Ben, Gentle Ben and His Shimmering Hands.
A name change, a new line up with Tony Giacca, Dan Baeblar and Jhindu Pedro-Lawrie (The Medics) have the newest incarnation writing, recording and touring their new album along the east coast.
Tracey Moyle had a long chat with Ben a few weeks back, taking a deep dive into a plethora of topics including their new album ‘Brut’ and latest single Spices. Ben is a seasoned artist and their chat wove between many topics including musical directions, capitalism, the struggles of the local music scene, song writing tips, music grants, touring Europe and playing music for the love of it.
Ben is an artists artist and has a wealth of knowledge and experience to draw on. Some of which has been shared right here in this in depth interview.
You’ve been in the industry a long time so I would imagine your influences are varied and wide. Listening to your latest album ‘Brut’ and new single Spices I do pick up an early ‘80s feel in some of your music, maybe tinged with a sprinkle of Nick Cave. Am I close?
There is an element in that sort of ’80s music. You know, what you’re kind of picking up on is that there was this idea where we try and make the song sound kind of compact sometimes. A good example would be something like Total Control by The Motels.
Yes. I actually thought of an old song by Fischer Z called So Long when I was listening to your latest single Spices.
Yeah amazing. So Fishers Z and So Long is a beautiful example of the kind of approached we thought we might take. The Nick Cave stuff – there was a time when I was really into that sort of thing and I think I’ve shied away from it a bit more, but as a band, I think what we try and do, that someone like the Bad Seeds has done very well historically, is have a lot of dynamics in our music as far as how we arrange the songs. We try and do that sort of epic pop song or epic country song or whatever kind of genre we’re brushing up against at the time. We try to do that but create that feel with just the four of us rather than like a really large band.
So how you arrange the song and how you play with people’s emotions and expectations throughout the song, those are the things that are in our heads when we’re trying to write songs and trying to go like, ‘does this sound like us?’ Like, how do we try and make this work in in our world and how do we make it sound kind of compact, if it needs to be compact and then how do we make it swell and explode when it needs to do that and how do we make it take off. And it’s all, hopefully, taken care of with the arrangement of the songs and then the playing is kind of secondary, I suppose.
It sounds complex.
I think there’re little tricks that you learn as you do it. But also, it is just knowing that it’s OK, just throw ideas away. This isn’t working, throw it away, come back to it later if you want to, or just completely get rid of it. Don’t hold on too tight to anything that you’re doing. We’ve got songs on the album that completely morphed from what they originally were, like completely new lyrics, different tempos, different arrangements. And, you know, they just might have been sticking around for a year or two and just not working properly and then we’ll revisit some aspect of it and suddenly it’s like ‘Ah, OK, that’s working now because we just were holding on too tight to the bits that we thought were good’.
I think PJ Harvey said something like if you want to write songs, you gotta get used to throwing away your favourite parts. And I was like, oh, that’s a great approach. Don’t get to attached. It’s common to get attached.
When you’re in a band, you’ve got more than one person contributing, so you might come up with the structure, but you need to fill in the body of it with everybody else. So, of course it’s going to morph into something that was may have been originally.
You’ve been embedded in the local music scene for a few decades now and I image you have seen a lot of change. Radio and live shows were once your segue in, but I guess the difference now is that we have the dynamics of streaming services. The advantage is having music at your fingertips and the ability discover new bands. But between the algorithms and the saturation of artists that are streaming, it’s kind of like a double edged sword. What is your take on the current music scene and streaming?
Absolutely, yeah. One of the positives that we’ve experienced is that younger music listeners don’t really know what era the music that they’re listening to comes from, because they’re just hearing it via a streaming service. In a way that way of just experiencing music, I don’t know if organically the right word when there’s an algorithm behind it, but it’s the fact that their experience is not really tempered by a ‘this is the latest new thing’. It’s just that people are just hearing things as I hear them, rather than having it recommended to them by someone at a record store or friend. So, I can kind of see that there’s a there’s a positive in that.
Of course, the negative is that it is really driven by a few capitalist assholes that head up the streaming services. It makes you feel icky as an artist that you know this is the way. I don’t really care about making any kind of profit out of anything. I mean, I never have, so I’m not going to worry about it now. It is nice to be able to not just constantly lose money doing what you like to do. And of course, making a little bit of money helps you do things like go on tour and pay for repairing instruments and pay for recording. All that stuff is kind of important, but you don’t need heaps and heaps of money to do that you just need enough. The fact is, you know you can’t really make a living out of selling records anymore unless you’re in the 0.001%.
You can make a bit of money touring, if you reached that point, you can go overseas and work your way around Europe or something, but aside from that, you really have to go, well, if I’m going to create, I kinda have to do it for the love of it and hope that people can find it.
I question whether art needs to be financially viable to be valid. That seems to be a lot of people’s view of it, but I guess, the unfortunate side effect of all this is that people aren’t being fed interesting music, they being fed the least interesting music through algorithms, and that’s like, that’s kind of depressing.
I’m, I’m still getting my head around how everything works and it will probably move on before I managed to really grasp it, but that’s OK, you know. I try not to let it affect my output or my experience of what I do.
Brisbane has such a stunning and vast live music scene with so much on offer internationally and locally but there is an issue getting local music seen and heard by our local music lovers. Venues closing is a big problem too.
There’s always something kind of cool happening. I think we have some really, great shows and musicians and groups come through Brisbane. In the last however many years, it’s like we’re not isolated as we think we are sometimes.
Brisbane has stunning music scene, it’s unbelievable. But I actually think it’s also an uphill slog. The biggest contributor to that is how difficult it is to open, and run, a successful venue. I know people who run music venue’s. It’s just a pretty bloody hard slog . The venues that have that medium capacity don’t seem to be able to hold on. The Zoo, obviously held on for a long time and now there’s a big gaping hole for that 300 to 500 capacity venue, which is ideal for a lot of small to medium size touring bands or small to medium sized local bands. It’s not because people don’t want. There are all kinds of cool, entrepreneurial people doing great things with their venues. Like Jamie with The Bearded Lady, that’s a great example. I think it’s got about 80 to 100 capacity. That’s about as big as that’s gonna be for the moment and then anyone that sells that out twice over; there’s nowhere really. You need to get to The Triffid and then that’s too big. I don’t know. For a city that has as much of a population as we do, I think it’s kind of a bummer that we don’t have some some better options in that that range.
You mentioned before one of the ways bands can make money is touring overseas. Gentle Ben and His Shimmering Hands toured France recently how was that experience?
We were only over there for a few weeks ago. We fit these things in where we can with life and work and everything. And yeah, it was amazing. Last time we were there was 2017 and we’ve been trying to get back ever since, but of course COVID happened.
We were booked to go back last year but our record wasn’t quite finished, and we were just there a bit low on funds to cover flights etc. But this year, we managed to get over and we based our tour around what’s called the Binic Folk and Blues Festival, which isn’t a folk and blues festival is just like a big rock’n’roll festival basically, in the little seaside town of Binic in France.
We’ve got a good relationship with the organisers of the festival and they have a kind of a relationship with our French record label Beast Records so we got to go and roam around the French countryside, eat eclairs, visit Cathedrals and play some really amazing shows.
We’ve done that kind of stuff with Six Foot Hick numerous times, did it with Sensitive Side, once with Shimmering Hands, just very briefly, off the coat tails of Six Foot Hick. This is the first time that Shimmering Hands have managed to go over and tour with an album and play some of those bigger festival shows as well, which is really cool.
Getting back to the point of bands being able to do that and actually make a bit of money, or at least make enough money to sustain that kind of touring for a few months. That is something that is doable in Europe provided you’re prepared to do the hard yards. The way they run the smaller club shows in Europe, is that you play, you get some Euro’s, you get some food and you get accommodation and so if you can line up a pretty constant tour where you just play nearly every night, you don’t have any expenses apart from fuel for your hire car and flights to get over there. You can tour around Europe for quite a while. Ben Salter for instance, ex-Brisbane artist, amazing songwriter, ex-Giants of Science, who now lives in Tasmania, he was on the same festival that we’re on over there and he’s currently doing an incredible amount of touring with himself and another Tasmanian, Jethro Pickett and because there’s only two of them, they can be quite agile as far as how they tour and their expenses. So he can go on tour almost indefinitely, which is really cool.
I mean you’ll probably go completely insane doing that for too long but the option’s there. It’s not something we can do in Australia. There’s just not the population to sustain that type of touring.
So Shimmering Hands managed to get the Performing Arts Artists Market Development Scheme Grant. How did that help the band? Was it a worthwhile programme? Do you think it could work better with any changes?
From my perspective I wasn’t super involved in the Grant writing process. Dan did a lot of that along with Rachel who was our PR at the time. So I would pop in everyone now and then when they said “we need this piece of information’ or ‘we need this bio written”, so that was my contribution. It was a pretty full-on process to go through in so far as it being an application for government money, you have to tick a lot of boxes essentially. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just means you have got to be prepared to do that. For us we had already decided were going to Europe no matter what, so we’ll apply for some grants for a little bit extra that might help with whatever expenses we accrue – mainly flights. As it turned out we paid for out own flights and the grant was enough to reimburse us. The rest came out of band cash. That said we did well enough on the tour to break even and come back with a little bit, which is really cool. And that money will go back into the band. We have the Australian album launch shows so there’s flights and expenses for that and then if there’s anything left over we’ll put it back into recording the next thing. And that’s what any band I’ve been in has done. Any money you make just goes back into the band. You don’t do it to line your pockets.
You’ve released your new album ‘Brut’ and you have an east coast tour coming up. The album seems to have a strong social voice. The video for your single Spices is powerful and to the point. I see the song as making us look at the true cost of the way we live. Is that correct?
Kind of. The catalyst for that song was it was written at a time when we had a government that was openly courting racists and elements like that, and some moments of where we were like “what is happening here”. I was watching how people were getting away with it, this ridiculous behaviour. Which is what people in power do. So I think I was looking at the structures that prop that up. So the catalyst of that song, was when you’re driving along and you see a local politician, just standing on the side of the road with their A-frame sign and they wave at passing traffic. I had this blinding rage because I knew that the party this person belonged to was just openly dog whistling to get Nazi’s on side and all this kind of like ‘Wow’. So I just plucked that example of obsurdity that was going on at the time and that’s where the lyrics came from.
There’s a couple of bastardised quotes in there, the one “a ship full of corpses is fine as long as the spiced are dry” is from a book called ‘The Devil and the Dark Water’ by Ian Turton. The book itself is based around the Dutch East Indies Trading Company and there’s that line that just stuck with me as a really good summation of the interplay of capitalism and colonialism. And then the other line is from an anarchist who is hanged following a riot in the early 1900s or late 1800s and his name was August Spies and he said how you can tread upon a spark, and here and there around the world these sparks will rise up (“Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up.”) and that’s the common people fighting for their betterment. In this song, I took a cynical approach to that because sometimes I’m singing from the point of view of the oppressor who’s treading on the spark and saying your powder will never ignite. Sorry, I probably went too far down the rabbit hole there.
Actually I had a conversation with my son recently about what the would be like living in a post-capitalist society…
There’s another quote from Ursula K. Le Guin who is a science fiction writer who said something along the lines that people can’t imagine what it would be like to live without capitalism, forgetting that capitalism was not the norm for the vast majority of human history and people use to believe in the divine power of kings until very recently. There are things that can change in the world, and I’m not saying it will happen in my lifetime. I think that human beings have such capacity for progress and for great things and often it’s just these ideologies and ways of thinking that hold us back. I think that capitalism is one of them, colonialism is one of them. I’ve come to politics later in life, I would have considered myself progressive in my 20s and not very well informed and as I peel back the layers I feel more confident in writing this stuff because there’s only so many ‘poor me I’ve been broken up with’ songs you can write.
It’s the authenticity in music that comes across from a band that helps you connect as a listener. That’s what I find I am drawn to in music.
I remember, Dylan McCormack, who I use to play with in the Sensitive Side, he said to me when we were trying to write songs years ago, how he feels that the best pop songs have and element of ‘kitchen sink’ about them. There’s that element of the every day and that’s something that I’ve embraced a lot, even when I’m writing about more grandiose ideas like in Spicers or Five Stars, I’ll often try and bring it back to the individual feelings and the individual details. For example the song Five Stars is broadly about colonialism but from the individual perspective it’s about an Aussie bloke sitting in his ute with his southern cross sticker in the back window, not really getting where he really exists in this grand scheme, and how he sits in this colonial world and this ongoing colonial project that is Australia.
These are all things that have only started coming clear to me in the last however many years but I think if you’re trying to communicate these concepts sometimes it’s best not to do it from a lofty perspective, its best to doing from down amongst it, down where people are actually feeing and experiencing these things. I try and write a lot of the time from the perspective of someone who might not necessarily want to hear from.
So you’re the antagonist?
Yeah that’s probably the best way of putting it (laughs).
I think that’s and interesting starting point, especially for the type of music we write, it’s got to have a sort of an edge to it. There’s got to be a bit of urine in the sugar.
There’s your lead! (both laugh)
