Larry Schwartz
Mark Seymour doesn’t know why he didn’t quit the band much earlier. Without the “tribe”, as he calls them, the former Hunters and Collectors frontman has found freedom from the “emotional thread” expected of his melodies and lyrics.
After 17 years with the now defunct band, Seymour, 41, went solo; his debut album, King Without A Clue, showed a move towards a gentler, more introspective sound. It’s 18 months since that was released, and six or more since the band split, but Seymour uses the present tense as if still
in the midst of it. In a sense he is.
For a man who was at the helm of one of the most celebrated Australian bands for so much of his adult life, he comes across as somehow vulnerable. He’d clearly have preferred an easier transition from band to solo career.
“I felt after a while a bit like the guy in The Emperor’s New Clothes,” he says. “People were giving me stuff that … largely centred around my willingness to jump up and down and make loud noises and be emotional and passionate and perform.”
“I started realising that people were serving chords up to me that they knew I’d like,” he says. “The guys in the band who were best able to do that were the ones I tended to work more with.”
The last few years were the most difficult. Seymour says he found it increasingly difficult to write songs. “Eventually I had to confront it and say, ‘What I want to do is to write the chords. I want to have more control’.”
He started out playing solo at the Public Bar in North Melbourne; other gigs have included a special Australia Day open-air concert outside Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and a radio promotion at Hamilton Island. This month, he’s at the Continental Cafe in Prahran.
Seymour has been writing ballads lately. He says he’s getting better at “big, big expansive emotional melodies that have a lot of power and aren’t necessarily driven by loud drum kits.”
Perhaps it’s those lines about the mouth that give Seymour an air of intensity. Then again, maybe it’s a comment in a newspaper article he wrote earlier in the year, bemoaning “questions from hack journalists who are paid to ask the obvious…”. You expect combativeness. Instead, he talks
with surprising candor of the agonising that preceded the demise of the band and his concern about an uncertain future.
King didn’t quite make the impact he might have wanted, and was largely overlooked in publicity about the last Hunters album, Juggernaut.
“We went out and did the break-up tour,” Seymour says. “I made my own record before the band finished and then the band produced another record.
“I felt compelled to be involved in that because I think we all shared the desire to finish as well as possible.
“I couldn’t bring myself to say no, even though I knew that to some extent it would compromise the prospects of my own record.”
“Now I’ve paid for all my troubles/ And I’ve risen to the top,” he sings on Home Again, a track about coming back to Melbourne, co-written with Hunters guitarist Barry Palmer, that is to be released as the third single from the album. “But I’m still living in the land that time forgot/ I’m the
kind who never knew when to stop/ But change is in the wind ready or not…”
He has penned songs of the calibre of Throw Your Arms Around Me, Talking To A Stranger and Holy Grail, but Seymour measures himself against his solo work. He’s written much since Hunters. And not since the 1986 album Human Frailty has he felt so free to write about his home town,
Melbourne, a city in which he notes “a melancholy and a sense of an inner life, or a life behind doors looking out.”
“It dawned on me that I hadn’t really had a chance to do that for a very long time in Hunters because its national profile compelled me to write songs that didn’t have that parochial feel. But at the same time, I think that writing that way is for me a lot more artistically successful because it’s
immediate. I think the language I use has got more power.”
He muses about “a kind of fatalism in my songs, which I can’t escape”, worrying about likely perceptions of himself from his songs.
“I mean, I’m pretty centred,” he says. “It’s not like I’m f…ed up or anything. A lot of people think I am but I’m not really.”
Seymour is certain that Hunters and Collectors won’t be getting back together. “There’s absolutely no way it will happen,” he says, pointing out that “there are at least two other guys in the band who would be extremely uncomfortable about doing it.”
Seymour identifies with a generation of musicians who have endured for years and are determined to persist, whatever the flavor of the moment. “I think it’s a sign of a country’s growth culturally that the people who created the ’80s energy don’t want to go away.” He sees no reason to heed
pressure from a youth-oriented market ready to cast veterans aside. “Look,” he says, “I just want to be in the game.”
The Sunday Age 12th of July 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 