It’s been nearly three years since Powderfinger broke up and since then frontman Bernard Fanning has gone to extraordinary lengths to assure people around Australia that the band will never ever reform “unless Kevin Rudd becomes the leader of the Liberal Party”. No small task given Rudd can’t even manage to lead his own party.
According to his bandmates in Powderfinger, the deepening of the rift between band members had really begun with Fanning’s solo breakthrough release, 2005′s Tea And Sympathy. Although most other members had also made records it was the success of Fanning’s that cause jealousy and a sense of betrayal with the rest of Powderfinger.
When a label in the US offered to release Tea and Sympathy in the United States drummer Jon Coghill was particularly indignant angrily telling Fanning ”Mate, if you want a f—ing solo career, then go and have it.”
Since the break up, Fanning has released the follow-up Tea And Sympathy; enlisting the help of American producer Joe Chiccarelli, who had also worked with fellow Australian artists Augie March and Boy & Bear.
The aptly named Departures, which has seen Fanning focus on beats, textures, and loops, has had mixed reactions from fans and critics with Tone Deaf’s Paul Bonadio writing that Fanning is “now pursuing a style he believes best satisfies his ambitions” but ultimately deciding that Departures is still an inferior addition compared to Fanning’s solo and early to mid Powderfinger catalogues.
“You were starting to make considerations and compromises at that very early stage, and that to me is death. Design by consensus.”But Fanning is unrepentant. Talking to TheMusic earlier this week, Fanning revealed he had delibrarely set out to write a record for himself and attributed Powderfinger’s demise to the compromises that had to be made to accommodate all the members musical ideas.
“Even that consideration is a complete road to ruin,” Fanning responded to a question about alienating his fanbase. “Thinking about what people think of your songs before you’ve written them… there’s so many things to be paranoid about already, especially on that level of being popular – having been in a band as popular as Powderfinger, there’s already a certain amount of negativity that gets directed toward you from within the music community, not from the wider community but from the general hater crew.”
”But if you were going to worry about that, and then you were going to worry about the people who do like you or worry about people who might like you, and what will radio think, and how short should this song be – if you did that at the beginning of the process, you’d go insane,” Fanning reveals.
“Nobody can afford to do it or else the situation becomes counter to why everybody begins to do it in the first place – because you want to make some shit up, because you want to sit there and invent something that hasn’t been there before – and if you start having all these fences around it, it just sucks.”
“And that’s one of the things with Powderfinger that I found frustrating at the end, because everybody was starting to have different ideas about how things should happen musically, then you were starting to make considerations and compromises at that very early stage, and that to me is death. Design by consensus.”
While the former voice of Powderfinger is keeping busy on the musical front, fellow bandmate and guitarist Ian Haug has been occupied with his own recording space, Airlock Studios, in his native Brisbane – conveniently located near the Eatons Hill Hotel, the live music venue where Haug was recently named Director of Live Entertainment as the venue’s new band booker.
