I knock on the door, eagerly awaiting his arrival. Some shuffling and commotion, then ‘BAM’, it opens with vigorous intensity. I am greeted with an eager smile framed by a beard that Ned Kelly would be proud to call his own. It is Melbourne’s very own Chet Faker , accompanied by his furry companion, Bessie.
Chet Faker has created an undeniably extensive following during the first official year of his project. The soul enthusiast’s popularity soared throughout 2011 and 2012, evidenced by being featured on triple j , hitting #1 on The Hype Machine , getting Beat Magazine ’s single of the week and traveling to SXSW in the States. It is a hectic time for a musician who is still coming to terms with his impending fame. He lured us into his garage, a shrine to all things music, and told us how it all began.
***
Chet Faker: It was almost a year ago that I first put ‘ No Diggity ,’ which was my first track, up on YouTube . Yeah so a couple of days ago it was my one year anniversary of starting the project. [When] The project initially started I wanted to do something with no singing in it. So I wanted to focus on production and beats.
Huw: Is this why you do so many remixes?
Yeah I wanted to really focus on the production side of things… Cause I’d always sung and that had always been my strong point from the feedback that I got. I never had much time to focus on the sound of the recordings or anything, so I was like “I’m just going to focus on the production side of things.” But I fell back into bad habits and put some vocals to ‘No Diggity’, which by the way wasn’t even ‘No Diggity’ when I first started writing it, it was going to be an original. So I just messed around with that and I was like “yeah this is kinda cool.” I put it up and then that went pretty well, so it kinda changed the direction of that project.
There has been an insane amount of love for your cover of ‘No Diggity,’ getting to Number 1 in The Hype Machine charts. The overwhelming support of a cover must be humbling, but does the love for a specific track ever get tiresome?
I’m sure it will. It hasn’t yet. You hear people all the time, like drunk girls, “oh put something on we can sing along to.” So the fact that it was a cover automatically helped people get into it more. It actually motivated me; I wanted to back it up with one of my own pieces.
What about playing it at live shows? Can you see the logic in big bands not playing crowd favourites?
Yeah I can understand that. We’ve started playing it [No Diggity] a bit different live, just kinda jamming it. Im sure I could get very sick of that song. But we have only played like 7 or 8 gigs all up, which is not much. At the moment I still like it, it’s fun and it’s great to have crowds excited about something.
On the back of the ‘No Diggity’ success, was it difficult finding that balance between rushing into the studio to capitalise on your new found popularity, and maintaining artistic integrity within your songwriting? There must have been some pressure on you to get more songs released?
Yeah. I mean the pressure was on myself, I put it on myself. Cause I didn’t have a label or anything, so no one was telling me to. But I started to worry; “what if, what if I’m a one hit wonder. What if this is the only thing I ever do right?” But then, y’know, I was chatting to Oscar, and he was really good about it…
Oscar is your brother, yeah?
Yep, and he just sort of put it in perspective. He’s like “just because a song does well, doesn’t mean it’s actually your best song”. It just means a lot of people like it. But I mean basically if I was doing something right, I just had to keep doing what I was doing. So the big lesson for me there was to just not worry about having to do it and just do what I do. If people don’t like what I’m doing, well then bad luck for me y’know? You can’t let pleasing an audience affect your music.
Well it seems like they are liking it with ‘Jeans & Wallet’ getting on high rotation on triple j, what sort of exposure does that provide an artist in contrast to the Internet?
That was really good within Australia, So ‘No Diggity’ kind of got me a little bit of blog cred online, but yeah it was really cool to have ‘Jeans & Wallet’ on high rotation. It was cool that triple j picked that and not ‘No Diggity,’ because that was my song. And what was really cool is that I put that song up because I was like “ohhh I like it but I’m not going to keep it for a release.” I didn’t feel like it was my favourite song I’ve written. Yet when it got picked up I was like “Oh cool, didn’t see that coming”. Which was cool… But in terms of what it does for you? It just gets a whole lot of new listeners which is great.
The live show has come a long way since playing at your local bar in winter of last year. You now have a band behind you, with additions such as Josh Delaney of Northeast Party House and RedBerryPlum fame. What has the transformation been like?
Oh it was fucking stressful. See that solo stuff that I did was always a simple set-up. So that was kind of different stuff. Like I said, this project was for me to focus on production skills, I never dreamt of doing it live. Then all of a sudden I’m getting all these offers for gigs, and I’m like “I have no idea how to do this stuff.” It’s like the reverse way of writing music. Usually a band practices and writes it live, and then they work to produce it and record it. Whereas I wrote it as I was recording it and producing it. Then I’ve got to go backwards and work out how to do it live. So I had to research and buy all this gear that I didn’t know existed. It was pretty heavy but i was learning a lot too which was good.
I supposed that’s happened with a lot of artists that have been discovered online. They are releasing stuff that they have produced in their bedroom and then find it hard to establish a live sound with a band.
Yeah, one big thing for me is now I realise I am just one of a million; a dude sitting at home doing stuff in his garage. Because I was from a performing background I wanted to focus on that and make it as live as possible. So I said I didn’t want it to just be me on stage with a laptop and a midi controller. That’s not to say I don’t still use the computer and controllers, but, the main live thing that I do is play the keys, play the wurlitzer and sing and I’ve got the drums that are live, the bass that is live and the guitar that is live. Even if you took away all those other computer sounds, some of the songs sound even better when you loose all the electronic parts. Sometimes in practice we will just switch it off and jam some of the song. I was surprised, some of these actually sound better. “We should just burn the computer!”
Online everyone is classifying your music as post-dubstep, which Pitchfork claims isn’t even a genre. Do you like this classification? What would you classify yourself as?
I’m not going to argue with Pitchfork on that because you know, Pitchfork is Pitchfork. I mean, I don’t know, I think there’s a cultural shift at the moment, in terms of music in general. So a lot of different genres are all moving into new directions, they are all feeding into each other. So you’ve got electronic music but then you’ve got like hip hop vibes or dub vibes…. So post-dubstep? I suppose it works. But I dunno, I like to call my stuff soul, maybe a variation of soul. I try and focus on soul vocals; that’s usually the core of every song I write. But you know, you can call it lots of things. I think the worst description I had was indie R&B, which just made me cringe (laughs).
Melbourne’s Live Music Scene seems to be doing much better than the rest of the Australian states. Do you think live music has been helped or hindered by the Internet?
Ummm probably helped. I know that Melbourne has this thing where their local artists don’t get given as much attention, but if they have any sort of attention overseas they are immediately accepted or acknowledged by the locals in Melbourne. So when ‘No Diggity’ went well on Hype Machine and then triple j playing ‘Jeans & Wallet’, my first show sold out at The Toff, which was an awesome feeling. So I think, yeah it’s good, there are kind of two ways into the industry now. Whereas in the past you had this wall of record labels, and they could pick and choose who was going to be big and who was going to be accepted. Now there is this free reign Internet thing where anyone can get their grubby hands on whatever they want. So if you’re making something that people like, the label can’t stop it getting there. If anything the label works for the people now because of the Internet. So tying that back into what you were saying, I think that a lot of people these days go to gigs if they have heard of you online, do y’know what I mean? So I think if you are doing well online that certainly improves things.
Chet Faker, thank you for your time.
***
Chet Faker is venturing overseas this year to play plenty of shows and he’s even featuring on the SXSW festival and The Great Escape festival bills. His debut EP ‘Thinking in Textures’ will be out in Australia through Remote Control/Opulent on 23 March. The first track to be heard from the release is ‘Terms and Conditions,’ we heavily suggest you buy this record..
INTERVIEW BY: HUW NOLAN
WORDS BY Huw Nolan
Comments
6 Comments »