Interview: Green Buzzard
From Australia to Switzerland! Shot right after the interview!
I remember discovering Green Buzzard in 2015 – I immediately loved their sound and their lyrics. Paddy also agreed to do a quick email interview even though I was just starting with my little blog. I kept following his project ever since, and it has been great to see the evolution of his sound. I fell in love with each new record, but when Amidst The Clutter & Mess came out it really felt like the beginning of a more personal yet ambitious era. I naturally wanted to know everything about one of my favorite records of 2019, so I wrote Paddy to see if we could set up an interview through skype. We managed to find a time despite living on opposite sides of the Earth, and here it is! From Lausanne to Sydney, join us as Paddy tells me about his city and his favorite record labels, Amidst The Clutter & Mess, taking pictures in the suburbs of Paris, bush fires, how to deal with asthma and more.
Many thanks to Paddy for agreeing to do this and hanging out with me, I had a great time!
For a Swiss person like me who has never been to Sydney before, could you describe what the city is like musically wise?
Paddy Harrowsmith: Well, it has changed quite a lot. I’ve been playing in bands in Sydney for a while, maybe ten years or so. There was once upon a time – It used to be really grand, it was exciting. There were lots of venues in the city, and lots of bands playing. But overtime, the venues started closing down. I’m not sure if you have heard about the lockout laws? There was a lot of controversy, it was in 2014. Some kids were celebrating New Years’ Eve in King’s Cross, and one of them ended up getting punched and dying. Since then, there’s been an outcry and they started closing down venues. They could have dealt with that in other ways, like putting better police or better transport. So now there are curfews for venues and bars, and it killed the music scene quite a bit. There are a lot less venues and a lot less bands playing - that’s the bad side of it. I just hate to start this interview on a dark note! (laughs)
It’s alright, that’s life! (laughs)
But as a result of these laws, there are a lot of great punk bands and venues on the outskirts of the city. My label I OH YOU has a lot of good bands as well, and there are other really good labels like R.I.P. Society who has a lot of great punk bands. One of my favorite bands, Royal Headache, is on it. They are from Sydney, and they are one of the coolest punk bands going around. So there is still cool stuff, but now you have to really look for it. It’s a bit more hidden and you have to know what to look for, whereas before you could just go out in the city and find cool bands any day of the week.
All these venues closing – in what ways does it affect you?
It makes it way harder. When you just want to play a show, there is just not that many venues to play at. If I were just starting out in music in Sydney now, it would be a lot harder to find a gig.
Could we talk about your album Amidst The Clutter & Mess? I know that the picture for the cover was taken in France, but how did you get this idea?
At the time when I was recording the album, I was living with my girlfriend in New York. I was also playing guitar for another band called Hatchie. We had shows in Europe, and the last one was in Paris. My girlfriend and I were planning to go there anyway. I told her about making the cover art for my album. She had been in Paris before, and she told me about these beautiful brutalist buildings on the outskirts of the city. I thought that it made sense with the title of the album - Amidst The Clutter & Mess, these beautifully ugly buildings in the middle of the chaos. The brutalist architecture is rough around the edges, and that’s what I have been trying to do with my music: you never want it to be perfect, but the decorum is beautiful. So we took a bunch of photos over a few days in different areas, and when we got back we got through them all. We chose the one that made the most sense to us. It looks a bit like a collage.
Yes I love it! By the way, could you also tell me about To Be Like You? It’s one of my favorite tracks from the record. I read in an interview that the song was about a breakup, but to me it seemed more like you were sometimes talking to yourself, especially after seeing the music video.
Yeah, I mean the whole album is about that year which involved a breakup. I was a little bit lost. To Be Like You wasn’t necessarily 100% about a breakup, it’s a bit more introspective. I am looking at myself and saying that I never wanted to become the kind of person I was. That’s what we wanted to do with the music video. I was working with the director W.A.M. Bleakley, and we got the ideas of the mannequins as an extension of ourselves, the mirrors and me talking to myself. When I saw the final result I thought “fuck, it looks a bit narcissistic!”, but it’s actually the idea of not wanting to be anything like yourself!
Don’t worry, it didn’t seem narcissistic to me! It looked more like an introspection. (laughs)
Ok, that’s good! (laughs)
I wanted to talk about your lyrics as well. They really sound like a poem that could stand on its own. Do you usually write them before or after you have found the music?
Hmm… It differs, but I think I mostly write the lyrics afterwards. I would find that a lot of the time the lyrics and the music go hand in hand. I’m one of those people that think it’s like a stream of consciousness. So when you are writing something, it’s best to go with what you first sing. That’s the mood you’re in. For To Be Like You, I didn’t sit down and thought “okay, I’m going to write that”. I just thought the line “I never wanted to be like you” was cool, and I started writing from there. For other songs like Suburban Dreaming, it was premeditated. The idea was to write about my hometown of Sydney, and at every line I asked myself “what does that have to do with the theme?”.
I now have more of a general question. When you started Green Buzzard, I saw the press pictures and it looked like you were more of a duo or a band, whereas now it seems like it’s just you.
When I started Green Buzzard in 2014, it was basically myself and my friend James West who plays drums. The band got together after that. I didn’t want to make it just a solo thing, I wanted it to appear like a band. So I did all the press shots with the band. We did that for a good couple years and released a couple EPs. They also had their own things on the side. It was getting more and more difficult to coordinate, and I wanted to go and make an album. It was a bit idyllic to think “I want to make this big band and roll in!”. I realized that if I wanted to go overseas and record this album, I had to do it by myself or it was going to take forever. All these guys are still friends of mine – James went overseas with me and played drums – and I really wish I could have brought them all along, but it just got too hard.
Could you also tell me about the story behind Country Life?
I was born in Sydney, but I used to live in farm in Oberon, which is three hours out of Sydney. I went there by myself in 2013, the year my dad passed away. My parents were living there together. So my mom spent that year living down there in Sydney, and I went to the farm to look after all the animals. That’s when I started writing music really. I was very creative and writing all the time, but I was also very sad and alone. I was super introspective, and since I was alone I could play as loud as I wanted. There were ups and downs, but I look back at it thinking “wow, what a crazy and weird year that was!”. I wanted to write a song about that year because it was such a weird feeling. When I came back to Sydney, I felt like it wasn’t my hometown anymore. It was very strange.
Thank you for telling me all this. It seems that all the songs on the album are so truthful. That’s amazing.
Thanks. I guess I just tried to be honest with this album because I’ve never really done that. I thought “fuck it. You know what, if I’m going to make an album, I’m going to make it truthful and tell the story of where I’ve been at.”
I have a weird question now, so let me know if it gets too weird (laughs). I know that you have asthma from a story you posted on Instagram a while ago. I have asthma too, and I wanted to know if you sometimes had a crisis before getting on stage or while performing. I know that sometimes there’s a lot of smoke inside music venues!
I’ve had it all my life! But mine is almost like a mental thing. If I have my Ventolin in my pocket or my bag, I’m fine. But if I leave home and I don’t have it, I start freaking out and then I need it! And then it gets worse as you breathe in. I just need it around me. For example, when I go to sleep at night and I don’t have it near me, I start panicking. Now in Australia there has been heaps of bushfires, and at the moment the air quality is so bad. Everyone with asthma needs to be very careful and stay inside as much as they can, but I have never had it at gigs and I have learned to embrace it. I haven’t taken it (ndlr: Ventolin) with me on stage a lot, but maybe I should to spread asthma awareness (laughs).
Yeah! There’s a venue here in Switzerland called Romandie, and there is always a lot of smoke on stage. Sometimes it affects me a bit (laughs).
We should start some awareness group! Like climate change, or asthmatic awareness…
…In the music industry.
Yeah, not enough talking about that.
What can we expect from Green Buzzard in the future?
I have a few shows coming up in Australia in the next months, and hopefully we can go overseas next year. We also have a couple releases coming up, we’re working on a remix thing with a friend of mine which is going to be released very soon (ndlr: one of the tracks is already out, Clutter & Mess (Masquerader Version)).
https://www.facebook.com/greenbuzzardband/
