Taylor Made To Delight And Disturb
Noah Taylor. One of Australia’s most beloved actors, although he wouldn’t have you believe it. Despite playing significant and deeply memorable parts in Shine, He Died With a Felafel In His Hand, Almost Famous, Flirting, Red Dog (I could go on) he’s “not much into film these days” because of just that; he merely plays a part. But more on that later.
When not lighting up the silver screen with pitch perfect portrayals of the human condition, he is harnessing his emotional acuity as the driving force behind Noah Taylor & The Sloppy Boys, releasing an album that friend and musical influence Nick Cave described as “Some of the strangest, funniest, rawest, most heart-wrenchingly deranged music I have ever heard... A flat-out, freaked-out masterpiece.”
Indeed it is. So dripping in emotive post break up angst and sexual malaise it had me, at the very start of our interview, braying into the phone that his December-released Live Free or Die!!! six tracker was so raw and exciting that it made me want to wank into my own mouth.
“Umm... Wow. Umm... OK. Well. I can honestly say I’ve never heard that one before.”
It’s 10am in Brighton, England where Taylor is fielding this call, so despite the man’s gentle candour and freewheeling nature this graphic image may understandably not merge well with thoughts of breakfast. But as this lovable rag’s wily Editor Julia Winterflood espoused in her recent review of the album, “second track Fuck You, with its smashing cymbals and simple chords is the raunchiest, most honest confession of insatiability (“I wanna fuck you all night long / And all the next day too”) since QOTSA’s Make It Wit Chu.” So you see, we’re dealing with the kind of virile material that elicits such fowl interviewing behaviour.
“It’s nice to hear you enjoyed the record,” Taylor says. “It’s hard to be objective about your own work. Sometimes you read reviews that are so vitriolic it’s as if you went to the publication offices and personally defecated on their table. So it’s nice to hear the other side of things.”
You could forgive people for misunderstanding Taylor’s musical work; it’s a frenetic wall of sound, a crunch of guitars and wailing vocals about all things sexual.
“Fuck You is about what’s on everyone’s mind,” Taylor asserts. “It’s about what so many people think but, in a strangely conservative world, we’re not allowed to say. It’s the rock equivalent of lyrics like ‘I want to rock you all night long’ and ‘I want to give you every inch of my love’ but just coming straight out and saying it. One of the purposes of the album is to be out in people’s faces.”
Taylor’s tone is relaxed and measured. He takes regular pauses between forming and articulating ideas. Despite living in the UK for the past 12 years, a warm familiar Australian twang still peppers the voice of this eminently friendly gentleman. His music and lyrics may be raw and uncompromising, but his manner is that of a person you would happily while away a jolly afternoon in a London pub with.
“The whole album is written as an amalgam of the different ideas that flow through us at some point,” Taylor continues. “That post love stupor surrounding ideas of sex and love and what it all means.”
Indeed Fuck You’s forthrightness is immediately followed by the fear of love found in Scary (“I’m shittin’ my britches / And life is a bitch cos / I’m scared of falling in love”) which presents itself as an inspired piece of track ordering. Taylor is more humble when commenting on it.
“With only six tracks on the album, we didn’t overthink the order. Fuck You and Girl sound quite similar so we split them up. That’s about as involved as we got.”
Friend, neighbour, and inspiration Nick Cave is thanked on the album’s liner notes; indeed Taylor’s Sloppy Boys supported Grinderman late last year. I wryly congratulate him on getting Grinderman to support them.
“Ha, yes, it was nice of us to let them come along,” Taylor jests. “Nick’s always been very encouraging. Giving us that quote went a long way to helping us get noticed. His music has always been an inspiration, and he’s a good friend, and that quote helped open a few doors which was really good of him to do considering how busy and successful he is. So that warrants a thanks I’d think.”
From here we move on to a surprising portion of the interview. Gearing up to ask how he reconciles being a well known actor with a not-as-well-known musician (“You’ve made a pretty decent fist of this acting game,” I jest) Taylor derails my line of questioning with stupefying humbleness.
“Well, not really. I think you can give the illusion of success, when three films all come out at once, but it’s not necessarily the case. I’m not much into film these days, as in I don’t find myself watching a lot of them. It’s all about music and books for me. To use a music metaphor, acting in a film is like being a session musician; you’re playing an important part in essentially someone else’s creation. With music, you get to control and say exactly what you want.”
So those long, boring stretches between takes on set are often filled with daydreaming about being in the studio or on stage?
“No, I’m there to do a job, so my mind is focused on that,” Taylor says. “I find I often have side projects going at the same time to keep me busy. It pays the bills.”
With the happy news that Taylor has spent the first trembling steps of 2012 working on more music, I leave the man to his busy day.
“Hearing that you were on hands free earlier makes me slightly worried about that wanking comment,” Taylor takes the chance to say before we part ways. “I bet you won’t put that in the article. If I had said it, it would be the lead quote,” he says with a smile in his voice.
What can I say; good music makes journalists do strange things.
Noah Taylor & The Sloppy Boys’ Live Free or Die!!! is out now through Z-Man Records - http://www.zmanrecords.com/
