Imagine it: you’ve got together with some great friends, amazing musicians you know you can achieve great things with.
You work on writing and recording new material with fine prospects ahead of you. Then out of nowhere, your frontman gets sick: it’s cancer and it’s incurable.
Melbourne group Big Smoke have faced incredible musical and personal hardship over the past two years. In early 2015, frontman Adrian Slattery [top right] was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer. Spurred on by his strength, Big Smoke kept on working and performing around Slattery’s treatments. Sadly, Slattery lost his battle in May this year, never getting to see the release of his band’s debut album Time Is Golden.
For bassist Alex O’Gorman and drummer Luke Brennan, discussing the record’s impending arrival puts them in a strange position.
“I think it’s as weird for all parties as it is for us,” says O’Gorman. “I don’t think releases proceed in this way – there’s no real handbook for what to do when you’re sort of carrying out a lot of this work on behalf of Adrian. [But] it’s been cool – it’s good to see the record grow, to find its way into people’s consciousness.”
Though Time Is Golden resonates closely with their experiences, its title wasn’t planned around Slattery’s illness. As Brennan explains, the name offered strength in more ways than one.
“Back in January 2015, when we were doing a demo recording session of the album-to-be up in Sydney, I was listening closely and at the start of ‘Best Of You’, that lyric “time is golden” was just such a beautiful phrase. Adrian and I discussed the dimensions of it and it seemed really astral.”
O’Gorman adds: “We decided we were going to make this record in less than six months, so it has a dual meaning.”
Both O’Gorman and Brennan speak with nothing but admiration and affection for the late Slattery; his passion, determination and energy proved a force to be reckoned with as they continued touring around his struggles.
“Adrian set the tone for determination straight out of the blocks – it was incredible how he viewed it as a terribly inconvenient thing,” Brennan says. “We had to jam and play gigs between when he was feeling strongest – it was never an option to stop altogether. I guess we just started working harder.”
“Adrian was an energetic and DIY kind of guy,” says O’Gorman. “He was so used to doing everything – booking shows, promotion – but it kind of got to the point where he relied on us to do the menial tasks.
“In terms of playing shows, hassling people, sending emails, he didn’t slow down one bit. We would always let people know if it was going to be touch-and-go, which happened a few times, because it was Adrian’s number one priority to play the music, to show people what we’d been working on.”
Time Is Golden isn’t purely centred on the recent trevails of Slattery and the band, and it’s easy for the remaining members to draw broader meanings from it.
“The majority of the record isn’t about anything other than just a band,” says O’Gorman. “Adrian used to say it was about life and all that it entails. It’s a very broad record in terms of meaning, and there’s only two songs he wrote after he was sick, so a lot of the music, like ‘Something Good’, just talks about a band, a bunch of people playing music together, trying to get it right.”
“We appreciate the irony that all those lyrics are so applicable to what we’re going through now, the challenges of being in a band and committing to rock’n’roll,” Brennan adds.
For Big Smoke, Slattery’s legacy will lie in how Time Is Golden resonates with outsiders. “The thing that’s beautiful about Adrian’s writing is that it’s completely universal,” says O’Gorman. “I’d like to think people having a hard time in a relationship could listen to it and find meaning, and anyone from any walk of life could listen to one of Adrian’s songs and it could apply to them. His songwriting can decide what it’s going to mean to you – the lyrics, the mood they conjure, they’re very obscure, I believe.
“Because Adrian liked to keep things open, anyone’s opinions are correct really. He really enjoyed when people told him what the songs meant to them – he was never the guy who answered what the song meant, it’s what it meant to you that mattered.”
Though Big Smoke persisted with determination and camaraderie through Slattery’s trials and tribulations, they will do so no more. The release of Time Is Golden marks a bittersweet endpoint: it’s a commemoration of both Slattery’s life and the experiences of the band as a whole, and ultimately draws the curtain on both.
“Adrian was such an integral part of Big Smoke,” says O’Gorman. “For us to continue would be impossible – it was the creative outlet for Adrian, he performed under the name for years. It was an important time in our lives. It’ll continue within the releases we’ve managed to put out there, it’ll always be something that connects the four of us, but it’s not going to be something that’ll continue to operate in the traditional sense of a band.”
“All of our close friends who knew Adrian well, it’s not a shock to them,” Brennan says. “It’s not something we felt we needed to announce, either. A lot of people understand he was essential to the project. For the general public, Big Smoke was Adrian – and I say that with a smile on my face. It’s not something I say with sadness; he was the captain of the ship.”
Time Is Golden out Friday October 28 through Barely Dressed/Remote Control.
