Music: 0:00

Just remember that death is not the end.

Lo Carmen: 0:15

I've been inhaling the incredible, haunting songs written by Gareth Liddiard since we met playing in bands in the early 2000s. But it wasn't until I looked around at the pin drop quiet audience when I last saw him play and noticed that what seems like at least half of them were standing there with their eyes closed, lost in some private moment of deep intensity that Gaz had somehow brought to life for them and was then giving them a kind of cathartic release from, that I've really thought about the role music plays in processing the darker stuff of our collective experience. And how even though his words are often very specific, they have a power to plummet people right back into a very personal moment of their own and feel maybe less alone in a desperate place. Even though Gaz is a very cheerful, funny person, he can write about the human condition in all of its mess and brutality and bleakness and ordinariness, which somehow makes it burn with a vividness that few ever capture in song. Alongside songs of his like I'm Here Now and Locust, his song Shark Fin Blues, that, according to Wikipedia, Gaz wrote after his mother's death as an anthem of sorts for the disenfranchised and melancholic which has become a genuine Australian anthem, t hese songs all wonder how to exist in a senseless world that's lost its anchor, while trying to resist being dragged deeper into the abyss of despair, with little to cling to but meaningless platitudes and the debris left behind, both emotional and physical. I wanted to know if he'd speak to me about... How music and songs work to help us transcend, alleviate or make sense of stuff that's hard to talk about. For a while we kept missing each other and couldn't find a time and then late one night, a few years ago now, Gaz texted out of the blue and said, let's do it now. We were both at the end of big projects and tired and both had had a few drinks. So a word of warning, it's a pretty loose conversation. And a further word of warning, if extensive profanity or talk about suicide, drugs and the human condition are triggering for you, you should probably give this one a miss.

Gareth Liddiard: 2:44

So death, death and... Death andmusic...

Lo Carmen: 2:55

Yeah, death and music. So I tell you why I wanted to talk to you was because I looked at your list of songs and I went, gosh, a lot of them have got something to do with death, which is not actually that common. And that's coming from like a lot of my songs have got something to do with death too. So I think it's kind of. how some people choose to explore it in songs and some people don't. And maybe you know more about it. Do you remember the first song that you wrote that might have had something to do with death?

Gareth Liddiard: 3:39

Yeah, like... I can't remember. It's a song called Legal Ghost. You said come in, wipe your feet And I walked in off this street I got nowhere to be There's a song called I've Been Told I've been told Is this crap or some sort of loss Left me yawning at the big unknown While he folded all the tiles Like I folded some way, some time someone I got I ended up doing the task of sensing he'd never wait an hour to come and kill me tonight The doc said I found pills by his bed and his liver had bled I sweated to the coat hanger from around his neck This one accident This song called... Oh, there's heaps... just heaps, like... But, um... It's interesting you say that, and I was thinking about it the other day because I heard a song on the radio and it was talking about death, but I think this was like fucking Smooth FM or some sort of crappy Top 40 station, and it annoyed the shit out of me. It was like fucking, you know, some top ten hit talking about death. And then I realised, oh, fuck. Oh, my songs are full of this shit. Oh, no. Is that what I've been doing to people? Just putting them off. But hopefully I think... Hopefully mine were a bit less kind of sledgehammer fucking, you know, corny.

Lo Carmen: 7:02

Yeah.

Gareth Liddiard: 7:03

So, yeah. I mean, there's heaps. There's like Dekalb Blues, which is a Lead Belly song that we did.

Lo Carmen: 7:09

Oh, is that a Lead Belly song? I didn't know that.

Gareth Liddiard: 7:11

Yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful song. It's... It's all about that. It's all about, you know, a dead girlfriend. What else?

Lo Carmen: 7:21

What, as in it's a cover or you took it and changed it?

Gareth Liddiard: 7:26

Well, there's a few versions that he did and I would just move them, move bits that I needed in and around it and, yeah. And, I mean, the music itself is different from the Leadbelly music but the lyrics are pretty much... I think just all lifted from him. Yeah. Yeah, it was the decal blues made me feel so bad. I get thinking about all the times we had. Yeah, when I was with you, it was a golden time. The days along, you're always on my mind. Yeah, Dekalb blues made feel so bad. Yeah.

Music: 8:10

Yeah.

Gareth Liddiard: 8:15

She would not have no heart When I was with you, Lord It was a golden time When I was with you, Lord You took up all my time

Music: 8:40

And I'll chase my baby

Gareth Liddiard: 8:55

You know, he was the sort of human jukebox. He didn't write a lot of his shit, but he definitely wrote Dekalb Blues.

Lo Carmen: 9:05

And why did you relate to that?

Gareth Liddiard: 9:08

Oh, when I was fucking... Oh, man. I mean, in WA, you leave high school when you're 16th year. Yeah. Or the year you turn 17. So I moved out when I was 17 and then hooked up with this chick who was amazing. Just blew my fucking mind. And then three years later she died. And that's like, so we had like a on off thing, but mainly on. And when I was 21, nearly 22, she died. She was 22. And

Lo Carmen: 9:51

That's gotta be pretty traumatic.

Gareth Liddiard: 9:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was where I went from being, you know, someone who was obsessed by music and kind of without really knowing it completely, like fucking just.

Lo Carmen: 10:05

Obsessed as in you were playing it or like just listening or playing?

Gareth Liddiard: 10:10

Both, both. But like sort of a congenital kind of thing, like I was from birth, like I was music and all my parents and shit going. It's weird what he does. I've tapped to music and shit. Yeah, and I can remember, I mean, I remember I was in, when I can first remember being alive, I was in London and I remember hearing Heart of Glass and I remember hearing Another Brick in the Wall and all that stuff and just going, whoa. You know, it was like this sort of someone casting a spell on me. And, yeah, so I've just been heavy into music and when I was young I would get those Casio keyboards and I would just rip them open and rewire them so they sounded weirder. Yeah, which is now like a thing people do, you know, circuit bending and shit. But I was just doing it to try and fuck it up and make it sound even

Lo Carmen: 11:12

That is a very cool skill to have.

Gareth Liddiard: 11:14

Yeah, well, it wasn't. I wouldn't say it was a skill. It was pretty sort of kind of.

Lo Carmen: 11:19

I'd be scared of electrocuted anyway.

Gareth Liddiard: 11:22

No, it's got batteries. They've just got batteries. I've been electrocuted properly and you can't get electrocuted off a Casio. Yeah, so I was always into it. But then when Cherie S died, I finally took myself seriously. I didn't feel like, you know, if I was listening to John Lee L Hooker or Blind Willie Johnson or Stravinsky, usually I would feel like, You know, they were qualified or something. I mean, they obviously were.

Lo Carmen: 11:53

What, like they knew more than you, you mean?

Gareth Liddiard: 11:57

Yeah, and they had more of a right to do it. You know, I'm not talking about virtuosity or any shit like that. But when Cherie died, I...

Lo Carmen: 12:06

Just like experience.

Gareth Liddiard: 12:09

Well, yeah, I just went, you know, the world can get fucked. The world can, you know...

Lo Carmen: 12:17

Because you felt like you'd gone as deep as you... can go

Gareth Liddiard: 12:21

Yeah I hit the bottom I hit the bottom and I suddenly realised the world can fuck off and I don't owe anybody anything and I can do exactly what I want and this is all again like musically speaking because that's I was obsessed with music like like you know my first my first girlfriend before that you know technically had to almost raped me because I was just listening to, all I would do is, if the music was on, I would go, you know, I could go to parties and if a girl was trying to come onto me, I wouldn't even notice. I just never noticed anything apart from LSD, marijuana and music. And that's what I'm saying. All I am is music. So when Cherie died, my girlfriend died, my second girlfriend died, I just went, the world can just go and suck on an exhaust pipe. I'm going to do exactly what I want. I'm just going to do this. Yeah, and was completely liberated. I didn't need to check off any boxes or I didn't need anyone's permission or anything like that. So that's, you know, yeah.

Lo Carmen: 13:41

Was she into your music? Before she died, like without something you shared together?

Gareth Liddiard: 13:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she was really hip. She was into, you know, she showed me things like I think it was her that got me into, you know, birthday party and stuff. I mean, we'd been into shit like Stooges and, you know, suicide and all that shit in high school.

Lo Carmen: 14:09

Wow, that's young.

Gareth Liddiard: 14:10

Yeah. But, yeah, but being in Perth...

Lo Carmen: 14:13

That's young to hear that stuff. Or is Perth a pretty hip place musically?

Gareth Liddiard: 14:21

Nah, we just had... Well, in school there was a guy called Ben who was this... He was an autistic kid who's now an autistic adult who's, like, down in the south of WA. But he, you know, being... I don't know, he was like a year or two younger than us. And his autism, you know, his little spot on a spectrum was just this mad obsession with music.

Lo Carmen: 14:52

That seems quite common actually.

Gareth Liddiard: 14:54

Yeah, yeah, it's a good one. And he saw us coming from a mile off and then so he would just hip us to, okay, this is Iggy Pop, this is Tom Waits, this is Suicide, this is... Tim Buckley, this is, I mean, it goes on and on and

Lo Carmen: 15:13

God, those people that do that, show you all the cool stuff. You never forget them, do you?

Gareth Liddiard: 15:19

Well, you had that. I mean, your old man was like that, right? Like your old man had some serious taste.

Lo Carmen: 15:25

Absolutely. But, I mean, things like Suicide and Stooges. I learned all of that from Tex Perkins, actually, when I was young.

Gareth Liddiard: 15:35

Yeah, right, yeah,

Lo Carmen: 15:36

In my early 20s, I was really close friends with his girlfriend and hanging out at his house a lot and there'd be this music playing and I'd go, fuck, what's this? Oh, this is the Stooges. You haven't heard this? He'd make me a cassette. I'd go home and listen to it and go, this is so good. Those moments where people show you really great music, you just don't ever forget.

Gareth Liddiard: 16:00

Oh, no. I remember right after high school and with Cherie, my girlfriend that died, we were watching Rage. It was quite a funny night. It was always warm in Perth and I grew up on a beach so I didn't really care about anything and I just listened to music. I liked Charlie Parker and I liked John Bonham and I would just– wander around. And I used to wear tracksuit pants. That's all I would wear and just get around. And I went up. No top. It was warm and no shoes. And I

Lo Carmen: 16:38

I bet no undies either.

Gareth Liddiard: 16:40

Yeah, no undies. And, yeah, just walking around like an idiot, like, and just I went and I was at Cherie's share house really early on. So I was like 17, tripping balls on acid. And it was late at night and I think it was the Cruel Sea they were on. And Tex, I remember he said, all right, this next thing's called Armenia. It's by a band called Einstürzender Neubauten. This is, and I remember this, he said, this is the only band in Europe that rocks. And then that clip came on and it literally changed my life. I just went. Because I was into Black Flag and, you know, real manky kind of, you know, the proper punk , you know, New York Dolls.

Lo Carmen: 17:31

That did crazy things to your brain.

Gareth Liddiard: 17:33

Oh, my God. I was so like, fuck, this is so cool. It was the most outrageous thing I ever saw. So, yeah, he was responsible for turning me on to something that was life-changing. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, this kid, this kid, this Benny, this kid at school just– showed us so much incredible music. So we were educated early. But Cherie, back to your question, Cherie was, yeah, she was into, you know, Rowland Howard, like solo Rowland Howard, Birthday Party, all that stuff. She was into Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle, Misfits, you know, yeah, she was down with all that.

Lo Carmen: 18:13

The full catalogue of all the cool stuff.

Gareth Liddiard: 18:18

So, yeah, and then... But she died when she left a suicide note and said, good luck with your music career. It's weird.

Lo Carmen: 18:27

Really?That's what she said? what

Gareth Liddiard: 18:29

y s Yeah, I've still got the note. It's a weird thing. It's like in my life, my life isn't.

Lo Carmen: 18:37

Did you suspect it was going to happen?

Gareth Liddiard: 18:39

Yes and no. But you don't kind of, when you're 21, you don't get how full on it is. Like she was a chronic, this was when heroin was huge and like,

Lo Carmen: 18:53

yeah. was such a thing.

Gareth Liddiard: 18:56

Yeah, but I could never do it because I'm allergic to codeine. And every time I say that.

Lo Carmen: 19:04

Oh, me too.

Gareth Liddiard: 19:05

Are you allergic to that shit? Yeah.

Lo Carmen: 19:08

I mean, that's not why I never did this. I was just always scared of it. I just never did it.

Gareth Liddiard: 19:12

Well, yeah, I'd had friends die before her.

Lo Carmen: 19:16

That's crazy. So after she died, was music a way to be close to her? Like did you write songs to kind of conjure her up? Or to say things to her that you couldn't say?

Gareth Liddiard: 19:34

Yeah, yeah, I would. I would. Yeah, without knowing, that's what I was doing. Yeah, it was confusing. Like it's not like that part of your life. I mean, I don't know what it's like to be a female, but as a young male that grew up on, you know, a surfing, heavy surfing beach, like I wasn't incredibly in touch with my feelings. Yeah. So I would kind of do it. I remember a nun saying to me after she died, a nun said to me, all right, you're going to feel really sad and then you're going to feel, really angry and then you're going to feel really guilty and then you're going to feel like even worse than all those things put together and you are you just you have to be careful you have to just look after yourself and not kill yourself with booze and drugs and i remember thinking who is this idiot what the fuck does she know but uh Sure enough, she was right. All those stages.

Lo Carmen: 20:44

Yeah. And you remember what she said.

Gareth Liddiard: 20:46

Oh, man. But then I had

Lo Carmen: 20:47

Did you know her? The nun?

Gareth Liddiard: 20:51

No, she was her– no, I didn't. Well, no, I got to know her a little bit after. There was a priest and a nun who were friends of the family of Cherie, and Cherie's family was– dad was a vet and– Mum was someone he'd met during his adventures in Southeast Asia. And they were Catholic for some reason. I don't know why. But the priest was great. The nun was great. The priest would ring me and he would keep ringing for about 18 months. He'd ring every week. And he was really nice. So I've never been chronically cynical about organised religion because there's, you know, I've always, it helped me realise that with anything there's a good side and a bad side. There's no utopia. There's no perfect way of doing things.

Lo Carmen: 21:59

Yeah.

Gareth Liddiard: 22:00

But, yeah, like what she was talking about was... was true. But then I always, you know, just put everything into music. I just, my blinkers were on and, uh, I put everything into music. I literally live. I mean, I just live and breathe music anyway. I can't, I, I can't not think about it. It just keeps coming into my head. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's, it's weird. So it really helped. So if you're talking about me trying to conjure her or, yeah, in a way I was, I don't know, I don't know what I was doing. I was kind of trying to figure out this.

Lo Carmen: 22:47

Like when you sing songs where she's in them now, do you feel any sense of connection?

Gareth Liddiard: 22:56

Yeah, I do. I still think about her. I think about her all the time. Yeah, like, yeah. Like...

Lo Carmen: 23:05

Do you ever imagine that she's kind of looking down and going, yeah, cool, I'm glad you're singing this?

Gareth Liddiard: 23:11

I don't know. I hope so. I mean, I'm an atheist, but I'm not...

Lo Carmen: 23:18

I'm an atheist too, but I have some weird kind of romantic weird thing that I know is probably shit, but I like it anyway, of imagining people that I've... Loved that

Gareth Liddiard: 23:30

Yeah, yeah. Looking down. Yeah, yeah. I kind of have something like that. Like, yeah, it's more of a, I don't know, a physics-based approach to things, but theoretical physics or something. But, yeah, I do. But it's that thing as well. Like, you know, I'll be playing at the opera house or something like that, playing a song about her. Just thinking, fuck, I mean, she would have never guessed that would be possible. You know, it's weird.

Lo Carmen: 24:06

Yeah right.

Gareth Liddiard: 24:08

Yeah, so it's weird.

Lo Carmen: 24:11

That's got to be a nice feeling.

Gareth Liddiard: 24:12

It's nice.

Lo Carmen: 24:13

A n f a nice kind of way of tribute. Not that it's. ever going to be a nice feeling.

Gareth Liddiard: 24:24

Well, no, but no.

Lo Carmen: 24:26

As nice as you can get in the circumstances.

Gareth Liddiard: 24:28

It is, it is. And it's love, though. It's like, you know, there's plenty other, we've got plenty other songs, love songs.

Lo Carmen: 24:37

That's a way of honouring people sometimes.

Gareth Liddiard: 24:40

It is.

Lo Carmen: 24:42

Writing a song about someone who's not there. Even someone, I mean, you know, I know you've written songs about people that you don't necessarily know that have died and you've given them a story and and a existence that they never had in their lives

Gareth Liddiard: 25:04

yeah yeah it's it's all

Lo Carmen: 25:06

you've got a bunch of songs like that

Gareth Liddiard: 25:08

yeah and they're all love songs they're

Lo Carmen: 25:10

all Like somebody's story grabs you and you write a song. They're all love songs to someone that maybeyou don't know.

Gareth Liddiard: 25:17

you don't know. Yeah, and you can write a love song. Yeah, you can write a love song to, you know, your spouse, someone you love. And then as well there's a sort of a more general thing where it's like a species-centric love, you know, and a you can at least try to put yourself in their shoes and, you know, someone you've never crossed paths with. We all have a pretty basic experience. It's the kind of whole– the basic premise to human experience. It's not a huge premise. I know that people like to think there's a popular thing now where– People like, I think, with identity politics or whatever, that experiences are specific to specific identities, but it's just, it's not fucking true. Like, at the end of the day, once you've lived...

Lo Carmen: 26:24

It's just human.

Gareth Liddiard: 26:24

Yeah, once you've lived a few decades, you start to realise everyone's getting the same shit, that they get it in different ways, but it hits you the same way... As you know, like we have human drives. Everyone's got the same drives. Everyone has the same injuries, but those drives express themselves in different ways. The injuries come at you in different ways, but everybody gets them.

Lo Carmen: 26:56

The injuries come from different places.

Gareth Liddiard: 26:58

Yeah, and obviously there's a scale. It seems like everyone's trying to get to the bottom of the scale to win, you know, with the whole kind of, I don't know, the fucking... It's like a whole Olympics of oppression, but everybody cops it. Of course, there's a guy in Africa with his head down a gold mine breathing fumes and he'll die when he's 20, but you can't– there's someone that dies before him as well. You know what I mean? There's a fucking French kid in Normandy that had a fucking– bomb dropped on the house while we were trying to kill Nazis. You can't, I don't believe

Lo Carmen: 27:46

Yeah, life's not fair.

Gareth Liddiard: 27:49

Life's not fair and everyone cops it in some way or the other.

Lo Carmen: 27:52

There's no rhyme or reason.

Gareth Liddiard: 27:53

No, and at the end of it all, we all fucking die, you know, which is a drag. But then, you know, Mark Twain said he lived to a ripe old age and he was like, Great thing about getting old is you get sick of this shit. Yeah, he said you get sick of it.

Lo Carmen: 28:11

What was the ripe old age for Mark Twain?

Gareth Liddiard: 28:14

In his 70s or 80s, and he was sick of it by then. He was like, kill me, fucking kill me.

Lo Carmen: 28:20

Really?

Gareth Liddiard: 28:22

Yeah, so it's not all bad news.

Lo Carmen: 28:26

What's your favourite song about being old?

Gareth Liddiard: 28:29

I don't know. There'd probably be some by Randy Newman or... I love that. What's that song I sing often? My shit's fucked up.

Lo Carmen: 28:43

Oh, yeah, Warren Zevon. Yeah, yeah, that's a great one.

Music: 28:48

Well I went to the doctor I said I'm feeling kinda rough He said I'll break it to you son Your shit's fucked up I said my shit's fucked up Oh I can't see how He said that shit used to work Well it won't work now

Lo Carmen: 29:17

Have you ever seen that Letterman interview? Yes. Yeah, yeah, the last one. When he knows he's dying? That's amazing, isn't it?

Gareth Liddiard: 29:28

Yeah.

Lo Carmen: 29:29

Excuse me, I'm just going to slide in here to tell you more about this and you should really look it up on YouTube if you... Have the time and the interest. The great singer-songwriter Warren Zevon's last interview that aired in October 2002 was on his good friend David Letterman's Late Show. Between non-stop joke-cracking between the two of them, Zevon fairly comedically slips into the conversation that he's been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and he doesn't have long left to live. I really wish I could play you the interview, but I don't have $3,000 to pay Letterman, so I'm just going to have to kind of paraphrase. He mentions that the title of his new album is My Ride's Here, that there's a song called I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. His previous album was called Life Will Kill Ya. He's got a song called Mr. Bad Example. He says, I guess artists have some kind of instincts or, you know, feelings about things that can't be put into words. And that he took copies of his albums to his doctors and says, this is why I'm not so shocked. And He also says, I don't know what the connection is. I don't know why I was writing those songs, but you know I've always written them. Letterman asks the notoriously hard-living Zevon if, from his perspective now, is there anything that he knows about life and death that he wants to share. And basically he says, 'enjoy every sandwich'. I've watched that quite a few times and I love how he talks about how in some ways his songs kind of pre-empted his story.

Gareth Liddiard: 31:21

Yeah, hedid.

Lo Carmen: 31:22

And he's quite amused by it, like he finds it quite bizarre and audacious.

Gareth Liddiard: 31:28

It's a story in itself. It's fucking funny. Yeah, he was always making those little arcs, those storyline arcs in songs and suddenly... He can see the big arc, you know, the big storyline.

Lo Carmen: 31:42

He can relate.

Gareth Liddiard: 31:43

Yeah, yeah.

Lo Carmen: 31:43

Yeah.

Gareth Liddiard: 31:45

But, yeah, man, like, fuck.

Lo Carmen: 31:47

Have you ever written a kind of premonition song?

Gareth Liddiard: 31:50

I think, yeah, probably heaps. Yeah, heaps.

Lo Carmen: 31:53

Do you use songwriting to make sense of things?

Gareth Liddiard: 31:58

For me they work like dreams work, you know, the way dreams seem to sort through shit. Mm-hmm. I mean, dreams are insane. They, you know, phobias, whether it's fear of flying and then desires, whether it's, you know, money or just a fucking holiday or someone, you know, you might have the hots for or you didn't even know or you don't have the hots for. I mean, the other night I had a dream that Fi came out said, oh, I'm gay. I was like, oh, yeah, cool. And she's like, I would like to add a third person to our relationship. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay. Who's that? And she goes, it's Lorde. You know the singer? Anyway.

Lo Carmen: 32:58

Had you been listening toher?

Gareth Liddiard: 32:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've never been a fan of Lorde. I don't know. I'm not against Lorde. I'm not saying– I don't care. I just don't fucking care. That's not my–

Lo Carmen: 33:09

Right. It just wasn't in yourworld.

Gareth Liddiard: 33:10

– No, no. But then–

Lo Carmen: 33:13

But suddenly there you were in a relationship with t Lorde.

Gareth Liddiard: 33:16

And she was– Lorde was

Lo Carmen: 33:17

– And how was that?

Gareth Liddiard: 33:18

It was really good. Lorde was really nice. She was beautiful. I just thought, wow.

Lo Carmen: 33:23

She is really nice. I've seen interviews.

Gareth Liddiard: 33:26

Okay. But then the rest of the day– I've never seen interviews with her. Anyway, for the rest of the day, it was hilarious. I was talking to the girls in TFS, just having a laugh, just going, I've literally, today I've literally got a crush on Lorde and I don't know anything about her apart from the pictures I've seen on the internet occasionally.

Lo Carmen: 33:46

That is a very weird thing when you have a... dream like that and suddenly you see people in a whole new light.

Gareth Liddiard: 33:54

But then, I mean, getting back to the point is like...

Lo Carmen: 34:02

Yeah, let's get back to death.

Gareth Liddiard: 34:03

Well, back to songwriting, I think when I do good stuff and I don't always do good stuff, like anybody, like half of it's crap, half of it's, you know, good, I guess, or something, like... The good stuff, the mechanics of it seems to work. It seems to work shit out like a dream works shit out. It doesn't come up with an answer and it doesn't, you know, kind of have a punchline maybe, but it just somehow it almost sweats it out. It sweats out that thing, you know.

Lo Carmen: 34:46

Gives you a perspective.

Gareth Liddiard: 34:48

Yeah, but not an answer, not an answer, just a perspective.

Lo Carmen: 34:53

No, just a new way of seeing. I mean, I feel like as musicians we end up knowing a lot of people that die too young. And I don't know, sometimes I see some of those people in dreams and it's– It's really nice. It's like this really sweet, pure little visit. Just a moment of, I didn't know you were here. I thought you were dead.

Gareth Liddiard: 35:24

Yeah, yeah.

Lo Carmen: 35:25

Oh, no, I just popped down.

Gareth Liddiard: 35:27

Yeah.

Lo Carmen: 35:28

Yeah, great. Yeah. That kind

Gareth Liddiard: 35:30

of thing. Oh, man, yeah. It's

Lo Carmen: 35:32

really weird.

Gareth Liddiard: 35:34

I get that with my mum. I get it with my mum. I get it with friends. I get it with, yeah, I get to see them. Yeah. And it's, I mean, there's that, so back to Einstürzende Neubauten, they, There's a beautiful song, and the chorus sums it up. There's a place around the corner where your dead friends live. I mean, that's a beautiful song about that. That's a great one. You bump into them every now and again, you know.

Lo Carmen: 36:06

Personally, I feel like the older I get, You know, the list of people that I know that are dead and that are alive is kind of getting a little bit murkier in terms of how many are on which side. And it almost doesn't matter.

Gareth Liddiard: 36:25

Yeah.

Lo Carmen: 36:26

Like my relationship to them doesn't change. Yeah. whether they're dead or whether they're alive, I still feel exactly the same. I just maybe miss them a little bit more because I know that it won't be next year or in two years that I see them. It'll be, you know, in some other realm if I ever do see them again.

Gareth Liddiard: 36:46

Yeah, if that works out,

Lo Carmen: 36:49

If that stuff happens or if we just turn into dust and disappear.

Gareth Liddiard: 36:53

Well, it's hard. I mean, obviously it's hard to know. I mean, I remember, you know, I was... I was holding my mum's hand when she died and I just remember thinking, yeah, I would have been 25 or 26.

Lo Carmen: 37:09

How was that?

Gareth Liddiard: 37:12

Well, it was wild

Lo Carmen: 37:17

Was it just the two of you or was it all your family?

Gareth Liddiard: 37:20

Me and my sister and my mum's sister, Anna, yeah. And, yeah, it was wild. But I just remember thinking, all right, like, you know, I'm not going to live forever. So fuck it. I'll see you next time or I won't see you. All I've got to do is this next blink of an eye, which amounts to a human life, and I'll be doing what you're doing and that'll be

Lo Carmen: 37:56

Yeah.

Gareth Liddiard: 37:57

Yeah.

Lo Carmen: 37:58

Was it nice to be with her?

Gareth Liddiard: 38:00

Yeah, it was. And it was profound because that was the person that brought me into the world.

Lo Carmen: 38:12

Yeah, how amazing. Into the universe. To see her out. Do you think that was really comforting for her to have you there?

Gareth Liddiard: 38:23

I think so. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah, it would have been, yeah. And, yeah, it would have been. But, yeah, it's a wild thing. Existence is a wild thing.

Lo Carmen: 38:35

Yeah, that's a...

Gareth Liddiard: 38:37

It was a profound, I would say, profound experience. And it was crazy because it was, you could say, was it sad? I don't know if you've been there when someone dies, but... You kind of, especially someone you love.

Lo Carmen: 38:52

I haven't actually been there at the moment that somebody died.

Gareth Liddiard: 38:54

Well, you kind of, you feel everything all at once. It's a pretty wild experience. You feel, you don't just feel sad. I mean, you obviously feel that. You feel completely traumatised. But you also feel everything else simultaneously. And you kind of get what it is to be a part of the universe and you kind of get a little insight into the mechanics of it all. It's beautiful in a majestic way, but it's unbearably painful too.

Lo Carmen: 39:35

Yeah. Every single one of us is going to deal with some incredibly profound death. And yet none of us...

Gareth Liddiard: 39:46

Not Jeff Bezos.

Lo Carmen: 39:49

Why is he not dealing with it? Because he'll be in space or he'll be on the internet or something?

Gareth Liddiard: 39:58

He's going to upload his bald head to the internet, I

Lo Carmen: 40:03

think. Has he got some really crazy...

Gareth Liddiard: 40:05

I don't know. Well, they're all trying to be immortal. They're all trying to be fucking immortal. But imagine being immortal. Can you imagine that? You know, the one thing worse than death? is being immortal.

Lo Carmen: 40:19

Haven't you seen Interview with a Vampire? You know what it's like to be immortal!

Gareth Liddiard: 40:21

Yeah, but they are like, you know, 2,000 years old, which is nothing. Imagine being 2,000 million billion 400 gazillion bazillion gazillion gazillion squared by itself gazillion, bazillion, bazillion, bazillion years old. You know, that's what a mortal is. But they would be fucking unbearable.

Lo Carmen: 40:46

Yes, good point, Gareth, very good point.

Gareth Liddiard: 40:49

You would be going to every gun shop in town.

Lo Carmen: 40:51

Yeah, right,

Gareth Liddiard: 40:51

right. You would be scoring smack off every cunt in town. You'd be putting lead in your head, heroin in your vein. You would just be like, fucking kill me, jumping in front of every cunt.

Lo Carmen: 41:03

No, actually be over that by then and you'd just be lying there enjoying the sunshine, enjoying the rain and trying to sleep every now and then.

Gareth Liddiard: 41:13

Oh, I don't know. There's a great, do you know Borges? He's an Argentinian writer. Luis Jorge Borges, he wrote a great song called The Immortals. Not a song, a short story.

Lo Carmen: 41:25

No, tell me.

Gareth Liddiard: 41:25

He only writes short stories and they're mind-boggling.

Lo Carmen: 41:29

Are they contemporary or from some other period in time?

Gareth Liddiard: 41:33

20th century, mid-20th century, and he wrote, yeah, a great thing called The Immortals, which pretty much sums up what you would be like if you could indeed prolong your life for millennia, you know, let alone what's millennia, thousands, what's a million, like for millions of years or forever, like fuck that. Yeah, so.

Lo Carmen: 42:00

Thousandia. Yeah.

Gareth Liddiard: 42:02

Thousandia, yeah. But coming back to the thing, I think, you know, like I've always really got into heavy shit like flamenco.

Lo Carmen: 42:15

Yeah. I used to study flamenco when I was a teenager. That's dark stuff.

Gareth Liddiard: 42:20

It's dark as fuck. But it's, you know, it's like Jim Morrison said. People give Jim Morrison heaps of shit and I don't think. I don't think he's a great poet by any stretch. But, I mean, as far as just being a singer in a band, he had his shit screwed down. He was good. And like what he said, it's just sex and death. And he was probably just paraphrasing someone else. It's sex and death. Music is fuelled by sex and death. And then, you know, the pepper in the sauce is things like, you know, booze, amphetamines or heroin or LSD. But the main thing is sex and death. There's, you know, you are, your life force is your fear of death. You want to live, you want to party, you know, and that's because we're here for a short time. What is it? We're here for a good time, not a long time. And then fucking... And as well, you know, for a boy, I don't know what it's like for a girl like you, but there is definitely an element of– and it's not something you do all the time, but the peacock thing definitely comes into it. There are definitely times when I am– What do you mean? Well, I could be trying to impress Fi or I could be trying to impress, you know, like before I was– going out with Fi, you would be trying to impress girls, but not necessarily in the way that you would read about in the old-school Rolling Stone magazine or you would read about on Twitter now. There is an artistic thing, which I think really comes out in flamenco, where the peacock element... And the girls in flamenco do it too, where they strut their stuff.

Lo Carmen: 44:28

Literally, yeah. Like the chest puffs up andit's very...

Gareth Liddiard: 44:31

i v So sex and death. So they're doing that very, very sexy, attractive thing over music which is really fucking morbid, which is all death music. it's all just so that's it i mean you can't have art without death you can't haveit.

Lo Carmen: 44:53

N o you can't, I mean it's it's what you've just said is so perfect in terms of you know the line of what actually matters in life really does come down to that but then in between why do we make ah, why do we paint, write songs?

Gareth Liddiard: 45:16

Well, yeah, sure. Like, yeah, okay, yeah, sculpt. Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of art forms.

Lo Carmen: 45:22

We try and make sense of stuff through things that you can't define or you can't explain. And I don't know, maybe that's what art is. It's trying to make sense of the unexplainable and maybe that's... Why songs that we write or that we listen to that make sense of a world that we can't be in or a world that our loved ones have gone to, that there's some kind of...

Gareth Liddiard: 45:58

We do it because we can conceive of it. You know that joke, why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can. There you go.

Lo Carmen: 46:11

Good point. Thanks, Gaz.

Gareth Liddiard: 46:14

It's pretty basic. That's exactly right.

Lo Carmen: 46:17

Yeah, it's pretty basic. It is pretty basic, isn't We need to make sense of stuff.

Gareth Liddiard: 46:20

We can conceive. We have the faculties to do it. So we do. And then we can't quite do it.

Lo Carmen: 46:26

In this kind of exploration that I've had, I've read a lot of stuff about funeral songs and eulogies and whatnot. And I will admit, I'm a... awful judgmental bitch and a lot of those things that I've read I've gone oh my god really like imagine if you died and somebody played that um which is terrible and you know because we're all different and there's different songs for everybody and who who are we to judge what song sums you up or whatever but it I don't know it just kind of fascinates me that there's some things that just encapsulate perfectly how we feel or what needs to be said and there's not enough of them

Gareth Liddiard: 47:29

I mean yeah yeah and there's so many ways to frame that ... so like I got a good idea, t say like The people I hang out with, say you guys up in Sydney or all the crew down here in Melbourne, all my crew in West Australia, old friends, friends I know from touring all over the world, a good song would be at a funeral for me would be Stairway to Heaven because it's apt that I'm climbing a stairway to heaven. But they would all just piss their pants. It would just be the stupidest.

Lo Carmen: 48:09

I was going to say, is there an element of humour there, right?

Gareth Liddiard: 48:12

Well, yeah. Everyone would just go, you know what I mean, you could punish your friends.

Lo Carmen: 48:16

But for a lot of people there wouldn't be an element of humour to that.

Gareth Liddiard: 48:20

Yeah, but for me there would be.

Lo Carmen: 48:21

You know, like you're a cynical bastard. I would think it was hilarious too and I would love that at your funeral. If somebody were to play Stairway to Heaven. I think that's a good idea.

Gareth Liddiard: 48:30

I think, yeah, it would be reallyfunny

Music: 48:35

LAUGHTER

Gareth Liddiard: 48:36

Tell Fi. You can tell Fi when I die o

Lo Carmen: 48:38

Do you think she's got a list?

Gareth Liddiard: 48:41

No, she's... No, when we make up funny band names, whenever we make up a funny band name or a funny song title or, you know, an idea like a good funeral song, we always fail to write it down and then we can never fucking remember what it is. We're like, oh, yeah, we'll remember that. We'll remember that. It's like, no, you won't.

Lo Carmen: 49:05

I know. No, you never remember the goodstuff.

Gareth Liddiard: 49:08

. All through like the 2000s, you know, when the Drones were coming up, like me and Fi, we either worked in this little cafe, lunch bar that basically served human services in Melbourne. So we either had all these sortof...

Lo Carmen: 49:28

o What do you mean? What are human services?

Gareth Liddiard: 49:29

Well, it's like, you know, looking after homeless people or people with chronic medical conditions, people who were in need. We were feeding all these people. They're all burned out, underpaid, burned out. And then as well, the human services would pay like a stipend or something like this sort of income to this little lunch bar to feed homeless people. And it was homeless people who had really serious mental problems like cancer not just sort of depressives, but people who were really bent out of shape by, you know, I'm not even talking genetics.

Lo Carmen: 50:14

Life had dealt them.

Gareth Liddiard: 50:16

Yeah, at an early stage. And so we would, you know, I spent almost a decade washing dishes with just some of the most hilariously fucked up crazy people. standing next to me just talking at me like like um you know and they would uh like one woman she had pet iron bars that was her thing she would wear like a karate outfit

Lo Carmen: 50:47

iron bars

Gareth Liddiard: 50:49

yeah she would keep pet iron bars or like spikes about 16 inches long she would keep them they'll call her pointies She was completely, I'm talking about, I mean, I didn't even know how I would diagnose her. Like I'm not an expert in that, but she was off the planet. Like she wasn't, she was, she was insane, I guess. But, um, and then you would, yeah, she would, you would, you would give her five bucks. She loved VB was the best thing in the world. Newcastle where they make, you know, steel, steel city was her idea of, of heaven, but she never got to go there.

Lo Carmen: 51:25

Yeah. Like the log lady in TwinPeaks.

Gareth Liddiard: 51:29

P Yeah, there you go, yeah. People like that. And these people would come and go. A lot of them would be around the whole time. A lot of them would die. And then after that job, we wound up having to work in this fucking hospital. The dole made us work in this hospital. And so just cunts dying left, right and centre.

Lo Carmen: 51:51

What do youmean?

Gareth Liddiard: 51:51

Well, we'd have to fucking rent TVs to them. Have I not told you about this before? It's the most fucked up.

Lo Carmen: 51:58

No. Tell me.

Gareth Liddiard: 51:58

We'd have to. It was like the Liberal government, when they pulled all the TVs out of the public hospitals and then this company came in that worked in New South Wales called Hospital Television Rentals, made it so you had to pay. And so you'd walk in. I'd have a trolley with a laptop and Fiona did the same shit. Walk in. All the wards, so there's AIDS wards, tuberculosis wards with all of the vacuum sealed rooms, trauma wards, IC wards, fucking like, you name it, the burns wards. You go in and someone who's just had their fucking nose burned off would be sitting there watching TV and you'd go in and knock on the door and go, hi. I can see you watching the TV. You've got to pay for that or I've got to turn it off. And they were like, what the fuck? Yeah, and it was like seven bucks a day for just free-to-air shit and then you'd have to pay for Foxtel on top. So we would do that. Oh, my God. Oh, it was the worst.

Lo Carmen: 53:14

That's a really shit job. Yeah. But, gee, I bet it taught you a lot about humanity.

Gareth Liddiard: 53:20

It did. It taught me a lot about nurses. and how cool they are. Although my step-mom was a trauma nurse, so I was kind of ready for it in that sense, but then it was more just the war of attrition that nurses just live through day by day, let alone with fucking COVID.

Lo Carmen: 53:42

Yeah, they reallydo.

Gareth Liddiard: 53:43

d Well, we had to do this shit and just extort people for money because of the Liberal government. And if anyone out there is a... fucking a member of the United States of America liberal means right wing in Australia like they were cunts like it was fucked but the computers were old we had these laptops we'd wheel around on a trolley that had all the you know you have like a fucking a receipt machine an FPOS machine kind of thing but you know learned how to

Lo Carmen: 54:22

did you ever come across people that didn't have the money to pay

Gareth Liddiard: 54:26

yeah well that's what i'm sort of saying i won't say in clear terms but you could get around if you could learn a bit of coding you could uh rig the system otherwise you just go home and kill yourself like so i learned how to do that because there was nothing in it for me to make more people pay for tv but then you know you'd go into some rooms there was a where some people would put their money in this little envelope you gave them and they would put it next to themselves on the bedside table and if they were asleep when I came around and did my rounds, if they owed me money, I could go in there and the money would be on the bedside table and I could just take the money, right? They'd left it there for me. But the caveat to that is that you can't just take the fucking money. You have to wake them up and say, hi. I'm

Lo Carmen: 55:21

taking your money.

Gareth Liddiard: 55:22

I'm just going to grab the money. Don't want to disturb you. See it. But often. Oh, my God. Couldn't wake the fuckers up, you know. And then a nurse would come in and just go, what the fuck are you doing? They're dead. Like, it's just like, oh. And then you take the money anyway.

Lo Carmen: 55:39

What?

Gareth Liddiard: 55:39

Yeah, like, well, it's not coming out of my pocket. They would make me pay for it. Yeah.

Lo Carmen: 55:46

Oh, like they were dead and you were trying to wake them up.

Gareth Liddiard: 55:51

Yeah, they were dead. And then like because, you know, people just die. But you couldn't tell.

Lo Carmen: 55:55

It wasn't obvious. They were dead.

Gareth Liddiard: 55:57

Well, they look sick anyway. They look sick. Can I just say like someone in a heart ward who has like a heart thing where it just, you know, the aortas shred, they're looking pretty bad while they're alive. You could be talking to them and it's not like this job was– bang, bang, bang, high pressure in a kind of velocity sense. Like I could walk around and talk shit to people. So one day I was talking to a fucking teenager man. He was like 16 and we were talking about music. And the next day they just wheeled him out past me with a sheet over his head and all that. I was like, who's that? And they're like, oh, that's– I wa s like, Jesus, that's fuck... And like, yeah, so like I saw so many people die. Anyway, and then after this, back to all my mates, because we had a huge share house, and they'd all either had been working or not working, and they're like, how was your day? And it's like, oh, yeah, good. So it's just, you know, its just endless.

Lo Carmen: 57:01

So in that time, did you ever write songs to kind of process that ?

Gareth Liddiard: 57:05

Ah, heaps. Yeah, heaps. There's a song about that on that solo record I did, that Strange Tourist album. The song Strange Tourist mentionsit.

Lo Carmen: 57:14

Yeah.

Gareth Liddiard: 57:15

Yeah, like yeah, it was just, it was fucked up. It was really fucked up. And that was the last job I ever had.

Music: 57:25

working in a hospital renting TVs to the bored and the blind it seems the DSS got sick of my BS and had my unemployment privatized they made a date with me in some agency I went down there like a fool in love they made a few phone calls and I real cure all like I was from miserable and numb yeah I was working night shift when he got there the first time I'd seen a coma on the ward well the

Gareth Liddiard: 57:55

So what songs have you got that don't have death in them? I've got over 100 songs. I don't know.

Lo Carmen: 58:14

What have you got? Anything?

Gareth Liddiard: 58:15

I can't even remember my songs before agig.

Lo Carmen: 58:19

It's a lot, isn't it?

Gareth Liddiard: 58:22

But it's not, I mean... The songs I write about death, I would not.

Lo Carmen: 58:27

I'm not saying you're a maudlin guy. I don't think you're a maudlin in any way. I've got a lot of songs with death stuff in there and I'm not maudlin. I'm fun. I'm very fun!

Gareth Liddiard: 58:41

Well, I do believe that the people who enter the most morbid shit are the most fun people. You know, you talk about the Dirty Three, one of the heaviest bands of all time. Yeah. They're fun dudes.

Music: 58:54

Some of them jump like flies.

Gareth Liddiard: 58:55

Yeah. Sue's Last Ride. They're some of the funniest dudes out there.

Lo Carmen: 59:01

Absolutely.

Gareth Liddiard: 59:02

You know, back to the Neubauten guys, we've played gigs with them and hung out with them a lot, and they're fucking hilarious. Like they're the heaviest thing you've ever fucking seen.

Lo Carmen: 59:16

When you hung out with them, did you tell them how you learnt about them?

Music: 59:22

No.

Gareth Liddiard: 59:22

I can't remember the first time we met Blixa. It was weird. Me and Fi went into a Japanese restaurant and he was there. And as we were walking down the stairs into this restaurant, he looked up at us and we looked at him and we met a million famous people or whatever. And then he just came over to our table and said, Either I know you or you know me. And we went, oh, yeah. And then we were– that was it. We were off and racing. And then it was– it turned into this weird thing where Fi and Blixa instantly ganged up and teased me. That was the dynamic of the evening. And then we've had–

Lo Carmen: 1:00:13

He's very funny.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:00:14

He's really funny. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Lo Carmen: 1:00:18

And very droll.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:00:19

Oh, droll as. Oh, yeah. But he knows Australians too. So he's a German that's hung out with heaps of Australians. So generally

Lo Carmen: 1:00:29

He knows how to work Australians.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:00:31

Yes. And understand. So I can still just be my accent's quite thick and sometimes I change it for people. I change it for some like Americans or some Europeans that I meet.

Lo Carmen: 1:00:46

What do you change it to?

Gareth Liddiard: 1:00:48

I kind of just more of the Queen's English. I will talk a little bit more. I would probably talk a bit more like this. But what was the question? Like the Neubauten guys, the Dirty Three guys, they're all the funniest dudes, like the Jesus Lizard guys, the guys from Suicide, the guys that we've met all these people and played with them and they're the funniest people.

Lo Carmen: 1:01:15

Or the music that you love. Do you feel like the songs that you love face up to death? I mean, I feel like most popular music does not really deal with death at all. But I feel like a lot of alternative music, for want of a better word, does address it.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:01:46

Yeah. Yeah, the deepest stuff. Like, yeah, I think, you know, say if it's really popular stuff like Cat Power, you know, that's in there. I mean, I'm not really up with extremely popular stuff. Like, I mean, you know, there's a lot of Rihanna stuff that's in there, you know. I think she's a real pop star that has a lot of depth. Like, I don't know. There's... I remember back in the 80s when there was shit like Eurythmics and The Bangles and Pink Floyd and that had that undercurrent. You don't necessarily have to be speaking explicitly about it, but somehow mortality is factored into it and it becomes the engine of the yearning of the song to a degree. I mean, say Unrequited Love. If you could live forever, well, you wouldn't care, would you? There'd be more fish in the ocean, and the ocean would be endless. So in the best stuff, there's always some sort of recognition. But what is popular, I don't know. These days, pop music is just, I don't know. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's shit. I think when it's good, when it's got soul, when it's got soul, the soul seems to somehow acknowledge that we're not going to be around forever and if it's a love song, yeah, the yearning is come on, time is ticking, you know, let's get it together.

Lo Carmen: 1:03:37

Sometimes I've written a song about somebody that's dead Just in kind of thinking about them, just in wanting to sum up who they were and what their existence was worth or without wanting to be heavy handed or morbid or anything like that. Just kind of wanting to tell a story about somebody, like you were this person and this happened and this weird thing was happening. call and I want to sing about it. Honestly, it's not driven by wanting to sing about it. It's just the words kind of write themselves and then that's what you do with the words. You sing about them.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:04:17

And to the casual observer, someone who's not into the nuts and bolts of songwriting, they might think what you've just said is morbid, but then they would do the same thing when they're just thinking about summer holidays and in high school or not even just thinking about time's gone. I mean, you don't have to necessarily think about someone being dead, just that time has passed. That in itself is an acknowledgement of, you know, reminiscing is an acknowledgement that we're not going to be around forever, you know. And if we were around forever, yeah, I don't think we would or we certainly wouldn't generate the art. that we do, and it's age old, that sort of art, whether it's Homer or fucking Handel or, you know, I don't know, fucking Mozart, fucking Miles Davis, you know, anything in between, like it's all, there's some longing and longing for something that's gone, knowing that, whoa, sooner or later, It's really going to be gone. And the horrible joke. I mean, my thing is, like, the thing that kills me is just, okay, if what I suspect is true and we do die the way I think we die, where we're just annihilated, turn to dust, we go back to the universe in molecules the same way we came together in molecules, you know, like... You're not going to remember any of this anyway. So none of this is real. You're not going to be– when you're dead, you won't remember living. So none of this existed. It's weird. I remember when Cherie died, like, you know, that was weird. I went and picked up the car she died in, went back to our house, went into the room.

Lo Carmen: 1:06:25

What do you mean, she died in a car?

Gareth Liddiard: 1:06:27

She died in my car, yeah. She died of heroin overdose in my car. And then, you know, her clothes were on the floor. They smelled like her. Her pillow smelled like her. Yet she had ceased to exist as I knew it.

Lo Carmen: 1:06:45

Right, so all of her things still existed but she didn't.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:06:51

Yeah, they were there, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, can you imagine, like, that's it. It's gone. Bang. She's gone back to the universe. Like Yoko Ono says, we're made of stars when we are. We are born of our nearest star. All those chemical reactions and all that shit that comes out of it makes us. You go back to just being these component parts rather than... The full thing, which could be you, me, yeah. So, I mean, it's always lurking.

Music: 1:07:31

You're the old sneakers on the floor The coat by the front door The ashtray by the milk crate in the yard And you're the dead phone in the hall All the blanks in my recall The old toilet van I sold for parts You were the house that they tore down It's now a vacant block of land The ache I try to shake when I drive by And you're the dog ear in the book I didn't even know you looked at And then other times you're furthest from my mind Then I get something in the post And there is your legal ghost And it just goes to show you know You're kinda hard to leave behind Man, I don't want to go out no more Just a thought makes me recoil Got a feeling when I want to guess Come banging on your door They're either too smart or too dumb They're too weak or they're too strong You said I'd be your

Lo Carmen: 1:08:25

Did you feel like she knew what was doing?

Gareth Liddiard: 1:08:48

I think so, yeah, I do. I do, I do. Yeah, because her dad was in the Vietnam War, so he... I mean, he definitely knew what was going on. So I think that by osmosis sort of went into her. Yeah, she was very real, you know. But, yeah, so, I mean, that– but if you are– I hate that word creative, but if you are someone who likes or is compelled to create things if you are you know genuinely an artist i guess like and then something like that happens to you especially when you're young it could be crippling if you were older but at my age i was you know just a spring chicken i was full of energy so all those emotions that should have wrecked me didn't you know

Lo Carmen: 1:09:52

Yeah.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:09:53

They were like fuel almost, but in a really damaging way. Yeah. Yeah.

Lo Carmen: 1:10:01

But I feel like your songs have given a ton of solace to people that listen to your music. Does that ever– do you realize that?

Gareth Liddiard: 1:10:19

No.

Lo Carmen: 1:10:19

I mean, you must hear it alot.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:10:21

i To a degree when they...

Lo Carmen: 1:10:22

People must say that to you.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:10:25

They say it, but I don't know. It's so abstract from where I sit. And I think even if I could comprehend it, I don't know what I would do with that information. I mean, ultimately, I mean, art and everything, music, it's all play. You know the way animals play and they'll play fight and they'll, you know, it's violence. A couple of elephants or baby lions or your dogs like play fighting or something like that. Like there are darker things that they're kind of messing around with. I think art is a lot like that. It's as heavy as it can be.

Lo Carmen: 1:11:19

Like playing with confronting stuff in a safe way.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:11:25

Yeah. I've got friends who are like soldiers and war correspondents and, you know, people who actually do, you know, get into a mud hut or a trench and get shot at and, you know, that's different. to what I do, you know. But they'll be like, wow, love, this song is really moving. And I'll be just like, wow, the Taliban was shooting at you the other day. Like it's play. It's not– I just go, wow, I don't know why that would help you in that situation. But then I've got a great video of like an Afghan National Army guy strumming away to a Tropical Fuck Song song. in an arm and hum V on his Kalashnikov, on his AK-47. I can't remember which song it is, but he's going, and the gun's half out the window, but he's using the gun like a guitar. This is some fucking Afghani guy I've met. You know what I mean? So it seems to have a lot of power, but for me it's play, and play fighting is a part of play as much as, you know, say, I don't know, There's other parts of play that aren't necessarily violence orientated, obviously, that, you know, you might be homemaking or you might be building a car or building a crane that you could move around or digging a hole in a sandpit. But the particular play I deal with is with all grief and with all existential shit. But it's still play. And if it wasn't play, it wouldn't have that sort of, even though it's morbid, it wouldn't have the joy of, that carries it across, somehow makes it a force of nature where it hits somebody else and then moved by it. You know what I mean? So it's, yeah.

Lo Carmen: 1:13:21

Yeah.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:13:22

It's complicated, but it's simple.

Lo Carmen: 1:13:25

Yeah. Well, I guess like grief, right? You just got to feel it and get through it and live through it. you can find something that helps you do that, and that's great. And if you can sing... Well,

Gareth Liddiard: 1:13:41

yeah, it's like play fighting, but play fighting with grief.

Lo Carmen: 1:13:45

Oh, my God, that's perfect. Yeah, it is.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:13:47

Play fighting with grief. Play fighting with grief.

Lo Carmen: 1:13:50

WS ow. You summed it all up, Gareth. Nice one!

Gareth Liddiard: 1:13:56

I do my best, but, you know, look, I'm fucking... If I haven't figured it out by now, I'd be a fucking idiot.

Lo Carmen: 1:14:03

I haven't even begun to figure it out. You're like way ahead of me.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:14:07

Yee-haw!

Lo Carmen: 1:14:10

Gaz mentioned songs working like dreams for him. From what I can tell, the function of art, in this case songs, whether purposefully or not, is to stare stuff straight in the eye and put a name to it. Much like how dreams allow us to see or work things out that seem unsolvable or impossible in life, or confront the most terrifying things that we can't control, songs, art, give us a kind of window into exploring sometimes unexplainable or unimaginable feelings and experiences. They both occupy the same nebulous state where there are no rules or expected outcomes and where sometimes the experience of play fighting with grief, as Gaz so eloquently put it, helps us build up our muscle and connective tissues and carry on.

Lo Carmen: 1:15:08

Really big thanks to Gareth Liddiard for talking with me here. And to hear more from him, please head to tropicalfstorm.bandcamp.com. Our conversation was lightly edited for clarity and time. It was written, recorded and edited by me, your host, Lo Carmen. If you'd like to talk more about things we've discussed today, please head to locarmen.substack.com and we can get into it there. Excerpts from sound recordings by Gareth Liddiard, The Drones and Tropical Fuck Storm, used with permission. All details are in the show notes. The Death Is Not The End theme music was composed, performed and recorded by Peter Head. The Death Is Not The End sting is from the Bob Dylan song, also performed and recorded by Peter Head. The repertoire on this recording is licensed by Apra Amcos. The artwork used on the podcast was created by Craig Waddell. Death Is Not The End is a Black Tambourine Productions production. Thanks for being here with me and see you on the other It was nice to see you and I talk to you.

Gareth Liddiard: 1:16:32

Groovy doovy. We'll see you Love you guys heaps. Toodles.

Lo Carmen: 1:16:35

Bye.