Here’s a hot tip for all you wannabe music journalists out there: try not to kick off an interview with a pair of media-savvy musicians by asking them what questions they’re sick of hearing from the press.
The problem is not so much that they’ll consider the query intrusive or annoying, but more that you’ll find yourself red-faced when they invariably rattle off a whole list of enquiries that you yourself were only minutes away from asking.
“‘How did you get Tina Arena?’” says Client Liaison’s Harvey Miller, deadpanning his band’s FAQs. “‘How long did the album take to make?’ ‘What is it about the Australian themes on your album that you like?’”
“‘Why do you like the ’80s so much?’” pipes in Monte Morgan, the band’s other half.
“You answer the same answer because everyone asks the same questions,” Miller sighs.
Ah, yes. About that… there’s a pause, and then your humble correspondent has to summon up the courage to ask how long exactly it did take them to make their new record, Diplomatic Immunity, trying to load the question with enough varied intonation to make it sound like a different line of interrogation entirely.
“We wrote a bunch of songs,” says Miller, kindly not taking this journalist to task for his lack of imagination. “At one stage there were 20 or 50 songs and then it was just about narrowing them down to a deadline.”
One can imagine that such an intensive period of whittling down a prospective album would leave creative types feeling cut off from the real world, unsure of how their songs might be received by a general listening public. But as far as Miller and Morgan are concerned, maintaining the intrigue of their audience is paramount, and they make pains to never get too caught up in their own creative process.
“We’re always imagining putting it out there,” says Miller. “We already start thinking about the music videos even as we have the songs written. It’s a natural progression for us to release it out there. The hard thing for us is that the first part of writing the song is fun, but everything that you add thereafter has to be better than what’s already in the song.”
That initial element of fun is central to the Client Liaison brand, and particularly their new record. Though it’s unfair to dismiss the Melburnians as a mere novelty group, a very deadpan sense of comedy is integral to everything they do. After all, this is a band with a fondness for white pants so ingrained that it almost seems at the very core of their character, and their music videos are all kitsch, throwback wonder.
But despite that outwardly projected frivolity, Morgan and Miller are obviously two very committed men, and they speak at great lengths about their creative process. One might expect to go into a Client Liaison interview and end up discussing pagers, Walkmen and champagne. One would be wrong.
“Our mixer, Eric Dubowsky, would say you get diminishing returns when you record,” says Miller. “The more you work on a song, sure, it might be getting better, but you have to work more on it to get that extra one per cent.”
“You do just lose the initial zazz,” agrees Morgan. “The initial spark fades as you continue to work on a song, to the point where it just becomes laborious. It’s important as we’re developing our craft as writers to take ideas and be able to flip songs quickly or easily pivot onto another song, or just remain open.”
The writing process the pair have developed over the years relies on a great deal of mutual trust, and they have unshakeable faith in the way the other works. “We talk about writing together,” says Miller. “We talk about music together. We’re constantly working on it. It’s an obvious process and we take the route that many musicians take – find something that we like and then slave away at it.”
Nonetheless, they both throw off a keen sense off resistance when it comes to breaking down that ‘route’, and when pushed on their writing habits, they nearly give up on the English language altogether.
“It’s almost impossible to describe,” says Miller. “I mean, we could sit here and pretend and use some adjective to describe the specific emotion that we were going for. But the reality is that we like the sounds we like, we like the topics we like, the lyrical subject matter we like, and we just throw everything we have at it and the result is just a combination of all these hours of work. So to try and pin it down to something or a single emotion would be a lie.”
At first glance, writing in such a way must be like fumbling around a room with the lights off, never sure if what you’re doing will work out properly. But again, the pair are eager to stress they do have a secret weapon up their sleeves: each other.
“It’s more so that we just rely on each other and our collaborators to like the music,” says Miller. “If everyone likes what we put on the table, then that’s good. That’s great. That’s the trust you need.”
Diplomatic Immunity by Client Liaison is out Friday November 4 through Dot Dash/Remote Control.
