20 August 2009 — Interview With Aleks Bryant

Last week I interviewed Aleks Bryant, of Aleks and the Ramps. I've known the Ramps for a couple of years now, after playing a few gigs with them when I first joined Plastic Palace Alice. They've recently released an album, Midnight Believer, which is out through Stomp. We talked about the industry, reading reviews and how bands go about paying their way.

Huw Murdoch: Well, first off, congratulations on the new album, which has been critically acclaimed. You seemed to get a lot of good reviews from the papers and street press.

Alex Bryant: Yeah, I didn’t read all of them, but most of them were pretty positive. But it’s really weird how we haven’t really sold many records, and I don’t even know how many, because I was too scared to ask (laughs). I had a meeting with our label manager a little while ago, and it was one of those things where they said “ok, we’ve got the figures back for the first for the first month, and it’s so much worse than expected.” And that was mind blowing. Even taking into consideration the fact that people aren’t buying CDs anymore, it’s still worse. I don’t even know why, because all those things like the radio play and the reviews have been really good. Probably better than expected, to be honest.

H: What kind of contract was it, between you and the record label?

A: They have the world rights for this album, which means they can license it to labels overseas. They gave us an advance on sales, and they have the dibs on our next album, so they have a two record contract. We paid for the recording and the mastering, and they pretty much paid for everything else, like duplication. All that stuff about recoupment and us getting paid from record sales I don’t see happening at this point, or if they’re even going to recoup the costs. I hope they do.

H: I was kind of surprised, not that you got good reviews, but I was surprised at the level of attention that you got, and then I thought “oh that’s exciting, because it means that they’re going to sell more albums,” which seems not to have been the case. When you look back to Pisces vs Aquarius, what was the situation then?

A: I’ve almost wiped that out of my memory. I really feel like that album was a kind of blemish – I really didn’t like it at all. Sometimes I say that to people and they’re like “nah it’s really good, what are you talking about?” and I’m like “there’s something wrong with you!” But we never got sales figures for that either, because it was a pretty un-sellable record, and it was on a label that was just one guy running out of his basement. He didn’t really have the time or resources to do it that well. It got a handful of good reviews, but I don’t even know how many sold. If it was six it wouldn’t surprise me.

I had a meeting with a friend the other day who did an EP a little while ago, which he gave away for free online, and he had a donate thing through Paypal. And the lead single off that got quite a bit of airplay, it ended up getting picked up by a bank for one of their commercials, so it was, you know…

H: A relatively big deal

A: It wasn’t huge, but it was getting played on Triple J, and after the experience of this album, I’m thinking of doing something like that: doing an EP and just giving it away for free and having a donate thing. But I asked him what his figures were for that and he had about five or six people donate a total of around ninety bucks, while around 8000 people downloaded it. So, in one way it was a success, because his music was heard by a lot of people, but at the same time, the actual sales were appalling. I mean, that’s really bad. Then again, if you made an EP and released it on an indie label in Melbourne, you’d be lucky if the label made their money back, let alone you make ninety bucks. You wouldn’t make ninety bucks.

H: I just wanted to go back to the review thing, because you said you didn’t read them. Do you care about reviews, aside from their impact on the commercial side of things?

A: Do I find it gratifying if people like my work? I guess so, it’s just kind of natural. I don’t really like reading reviews though, just because I wish I could not care what people think. I actually do care, but at the same time I don’t want to know what they think, it’s kind of paradoxical. I don’t want to be get too wrapped up in people’s expectations of us, either playing against them or up to them. I wish I could just read them, but I’m scared that I will start to worry too much about what people think. It’s not a huge deal, though.

H: Is that about reinforcement? Positive or negative, either way, you worry that it’s going to affect what you feel you need to do next time around. If you keep reading that they don’t like a particular thing, you might start thinking “maybe we won’t do so much of that”, and if they really love a particular song you might think “do we keep…”

A: Keep on doing more like that, exactly.

H: I guess you know that’s not what you want to think that you’re doing with your music.

A: Yeah, I guess you try to delude yourself into thinking that people’s expectations of your art isn’t going to affect your art. Ultimately it will, even if you don’t realise it.

H: I read a couple of positive reviews of your album, and a lot of the things that people say about your music will talk about this kind of kooky pop thing, which I don’t always feel is particularly representative of what you do.

A: Also the genre mash. I always read stuff about us like “their songs can cross from jazz to metal, back to grunge in five minutes,” but there’s not metal!. Just flat out, I’m not even going to say it’s a matter of opinion: there’s just no metal (laughs). There’s no metal! I mean, we’re not really concerned with this kind of post-modern dissection of genre, that, to me, is so fucking boring, and sometime reviews seem to latch on to that. It’s just a lazy thing because journalists need some sort of point of reference to make sense of the music scene. They can’t say that the verse sounds kind of aubergine, then moves into a more pastel thing in the chorus. They have to say that it has this thing which is kinda like… metal! (laughs).

H: I remember reading a story a while ago, about how you picked up the banjo because you were stuck in Newcastle with no band.

A: Yeah.

H: But I imagine you’d been playing music before then?

A: Yeah, I started learning classical guitar when I was 14 or so, and then my brother and I bought a shitty drum kit and I taught myself how to play drums. As for that banjo thing, I played in a band with Simon (Connolly), Hugo (Temby) and Don (Martin). Actually it was pretty much the same lineup as Potential Falcon, but no you, and me instead of Joe (Foley), but it was kind of like a dual songwriter thing, it was Hugo and Simon.

H: What was that called?

A: Hettie’s Lament. I played with them for a little bit, not that long really, and we did Canberra, Newcastle Sydney, but I couldn’t get the shifts off work so I had to play Canberra, then go back to Melbourne and fly to Newcastle to meet them there. I had my ticket booked, but the gig got cancelled and I thought “fuck it I’m still going to Newcastle” and I went there, and I got my tax return, so I just went and bought a $350 banjo or something. It’s not really the most interesting story. I just bought it on a whim, then for a little while it was just this novelty thing where I would play it now and then.

H: Did you become the banjo go-to guy for a while?

A: Not really, because I’m not really a banjo player. I just found it easy to write songs on for some reason, I don’t know why. I haven’t written a song on banjo for ages, though.

H: You still play it live though don’t you?

A: I’m actually in the process of phasing it out, which might be met with some protest within the band, and within our fan base.

H: Well it’s been a fairly integral part of the band’s sound.

A: I guess so, but the whole setup of our band is so unintentional. At some point I just looked at it, this group of five people and what we use to make music, and it seems to me that we’re all playing instruments that aren’t necessarily what we’re best at, or what we actually like playing. Except for Simon – he really likes playing guitar.

H: When did you start playing in bands?

A: In high school, but I never really did anything good, because I never really found like-minded people. I played in a band with some friends, but everyone had such different ideas of what… there was slap bass involved, let me just say that! I was into Sonic Youth, and the music we made was fucked, it was horrible. There were all these really disparate ideas that shouldn’t ever go together.

H: Which is what some people would say about your current band.

A: (laughs) Yeah I guess so. Those people are arseholes.

H: Did you always want to be in bands? Did you have any vision of a future of performing at this stage?

A: I was a big music fan in high school, so I always wanted to be in a band. I just wanted to be Thurston Moore pretty much. But I never really met anyone like-minded. When I moved to Melbourne I didn’t know anyone so I just answered an ad, and it was Simon and Hugo’s band, which was a bit of coincidence, because Hugo went to the same high-school as me in Canberra, and I knew their band already.

H: Simon lived in Canberra too, didn’t he?

A: Yeah, but I didn’t know Simon then. I only vaguely knew Hugo. But then I quit the band because I got into Film school. And then, I didn’t really think of being in a band or anything, until I recorded a solo EP, we put a band together just to have a launch for it and we just stayed together. And then all of a sudden I was like “oh, I’m in a band!”

H: Are you still studying?

A: I finished ages ago, but I only just got my degree. Film school seemed to kill my interest in making films (laughs). By the end of it I was thinking “oh, the film industry is fucked!”, I mean, even more than the music industry – in terms of the competitiveness and the bitchiness and how hard it is and all that kind of stuff. The film making is just so much harder, I think.

H: Is film something that you still want to do, though? Was it something that you really wanted to do when you went into it?

A: I still want to. I still work in that area. I was thinking of making an Aleks and the Ramps film, like a musical, but I don’t really know exactly what it would be. It would be an enourmous amount of work, and it could be the most un-sellable thing ever. Talking about making money off music, then making a 15 minute indie psychedelic musical… there aren’t many avenues of distribution there.

H: What about video clips? You did the video clip for your clip which was great, and it got played on Rage.

A: When we heard that they were playing our clip on Rage that night, we thought “whatever”, really, it’s like 5 stoners in the country are going to see it, because it’s all youtube and viral stuff these days. But it was bizarre, the first time they played it they put it on at about one in the morning and then eight or nine in the morning, and we got heaps of text messages from people who saw it. I didn’t know people still watch it.

H: Is making video clips something that interests you?

A: Yeah totally. The only problem with it is is that there’s a really steep curve in terms of the amounts of money involved. The one that I made for the Ramps, if you guys, or another band at a similar level, said “I want you to make a clip along those lines,” I would have no idea what to charge, because the amount of work that went into that was so absurd that I would probably ask for… I don’t even know.

H: Thousands of dollars.

A: Yeah, thousands of dollars, and no one would be able to pay that, because they could say “we’ve just made a record for that amount of money,” you know what I mean? You could spend six grand on a music video or you could spend six grand on making another album and touring, so I can’t just shop it around to people. But when you actually do get into the level of mainstream pop music, the amount of money that they put into music videos is obscene, it’s like 30 thousand dollars, that kind of thing, it’s ridiculous, and that always goes to production companies and people with connections.

H: So what is your job?

A: I do freelance video post production. At the moment I’m working almost totally on an online fashion and culture show, working from home. I did a lot of work for a production company, but it looks like they’re going bankrupt, so I don’t think I’ll be doing much more work for them. I just finished doing some work for a cooking show.

H: Do you ever make a profit from music?

A: In terms of real profit, not at all. We lost money on the tour, we lost money on the album, and even the idea of making money off music seems farfetched at the moment.

H: Would you like to make a profit from it? That may sound like a stupid question, but some people would say that they don’t necessarily have any interest in making money from music.

A: I would, just because it would mean I wouldn’t have to do anything else. It’s all I want to do, I don’t want to edit cooking shows, (laughs) that’s not my passion. If I could just make music and then have all my spare time directed into making music then that’s what I would do. But most non-music people would find it surprising how many biggish bands are really not making any money – not even not making any money, but racking up huge debts. It wasn’t very long ago that “–––” were still entirely dependent on their girlfriends and families, and this was recently, like a year or two ago. It’s only now that they’re actually making money, in that they don’t need to work anymore. But that’s after how many years of solid touring? Even now, I wonder what the figures would be, considering what they’ve sunk into the band. They’ve had a lot of songs in commercials and on TV shows, and that’s really where you have these massive windfalls that wipe out debt.

H: Do you think any bands in Australia make money from touring, aside from bands like Powderfinger and Silverchair?

A: We made money touring, once, and the only reason was because we played a festival that payed us about 800 bucks, which just payed for petrol. If you include a festival in your circuit, then that takes care of it. We were asked to do this thing in Brisbane, and I did the maths on flying there, getting a hire care, petrol and everything and I told them that it was going to cost $1600 and they came back and said “we’ll give you $1500” and it’s like $1500! that’s absurd.

H: Do you find it hard to organise rehearsals and tours, given that everyone must have jobs to deal with?

A: Sometimes I feel like it’s really hard for us and I get jealous of other bands, where everyone in the band is just like… that’s their thing. But then sometimes I think we’re ridiculously fortunate, it just depends on how optimistic or pessimistic I’m feeling that day. Sometimes it’s really hard to mobilize people and it turns it into a chore, rather than an interesting, creative pursuit. We’re not really a band that just rehearses for the enjoyment of playing music, as a communal thing. It’s always like “oh we need to do this tour, we’re going to record soon, we need to rehearse.” We don’t jam, we don’t have like big wig-outs and stuff like that. It would be so awesome to play in a band where you just have a rehearsal space set up and twice a week, you know, you’ll all just come and hang out and maybe two of you or maybe all of you will just fuck around with ideas and do stuff, but we’re just not like that. We’re all pretty good friends with each other, and sometimes we go big stretches where we don’t see each other very much, so sometimes you can just spend the first hour or two fucking around.

H: If you were able to do similar things to what you’re doing now in 15 or 20 years, but just be making more money for it, would that be something that you could imagine being satisfied with?

A: I don’t really see myself lasting as a video editor, it can do your head in after a while. The money that I’m earning at the moment isn’t that bad, I don’t really need to earn any more, but it would be good to just be working on interesting things. That’s what everyone says, but how do you even do that? It’s just unfortunate that the things that I would find interesting to work on don’t…

H: Necessarily pay?

A: Yeah

H: Did you get a grant for recording the album?

A: Yes, we did, not a huge one, but we got really lucky, because we got a grant to go to Canada, too, which was an Export Market Development Grant. Not a great deal of people know about it as far as I know, but if you’re a business operating in australia and you go overseas on a marketing trip and you lose a fuckload of money, then you can apply to get a rebate. It’s not designed for bands at all, but bands fit the criteria so perfectly.

H: Because you’re guaranteed to lose money?

A: Yeah. We were in a pretty good financial position when we started the album, but we’ve run out of money now (laughs). That dried up.

H: Are you planning to go overseas again soon?

A: We’re looking into doing something. It looks like we may have a label interested in doing something with us in Japan, maybe. It seems to make the most sense to go to the U.S, but in terms of culturally… (laughs) I’d much prefer to go to Japan!

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