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It’s rare for an independent artist to put out a record
on his own label and win a clutch of national awards. It’s
rarer still for said album to be recorded and produced in the artist’s
bedroom. And for that artist to be a singing drummer with a seemingly
unpronounceable name? Gotye (pronounced: ‘Gaultier’,
like Jean-Paul, the French clothes designer) is a singular find.
This Belgian-born, but Australian based, singer, songwriter and
sampler, christened Wouter De Backer, (but known to friends as Wally)
was awarded the (Mercury Prize equivalent) 2006 Australian Music
Prize award for outstanding potential as well as the Australian
Independent Records album of the year and, in September 2007, he
bagged the Australian Recording Industry Award (ARIA) for Best Male
Artist. He also picked up, Australian national youth radio station,
Triple J’s Album of the Year for his second album Like
Drawing Blood.
Like a newfound Beck- minus the self-conscious satire - Gotye
conjures incredible tunes from the most unlikely places. Phil Collins-style
yacht rock morphs into Tijuana brass-flavoured orchestral pop on
Like Drawing Blood, while DJ Shadow-style sample layering
excursions are pieced together from second-hand vinyl, cassettes,
VHS, mp3s and a smattering of live instruments.
Part of Gotye’s unique appeal can be traced back to 2000,
when the 20-year-old musician, then residing in Melbourne, Australia,
received a strange legacy. “The lady next door to me passed
away,” recalls Wally. “She had a huge collection
of assorted vinyl, and her husband didn’t want to keep it.
He came around one day and said ‘I know you’re a musician.
Do you want these?’” This assortment of Elvis albums,
eighties pop compilations, plus a few good Herb Alpert platters,
set Wally thinking: “There’s this treasure trove
of weird and wonderful undiscovered or simply forgotten sounds out
there.”
Around the same time as he took possession of his late neighbour’s
record collection, Wally also finished putting together a simple
home studio. “I had bought a computer, soundcard and microphones,”
he explains. The intention was to record his old high school band,
a grungy outfit called Downstares in which Wally played drums, yet
the group had broken up the year before.
Seeing that the would-be producer was now bereft of band, a friend
lent him a DJ Shadow album, and suggested that he record some sample-based
material. This advice was remarkably well timed. “I used
ACID [software], got my head around how it worked, and it turned
out great for doing what I wanted to do.” Neither straight-forward
trip-hop compositions, nor conventional pop songs, Wally’s
new recordings combined freshly played licks and fills with crackly
snippets of other records. Rather than simply looping beats or lifting
melodies, he let the found sounds glide in and out of his own tunes,
in a near-orchestral manner, giving his tracks a unique and fresh,
yet retro, appeal.
When dreaming on a new artist title for this project, Wally reached
back into his childhood. De Backer was born on 21st May 1980 in
Bruges, Belgium. His parents had met at community choir, and the
music, language and culture of European traditions remained with
him. “They were very interested in folk music, choral
traditions and Georgian singing,” he says of his folks.
When he was young, his mother, a Flemish speaking French teacher,
sometimes called him ‘Gaultier’, which is the French
equivalent of “Wouter”. Wally played around with the
spelling, keeping the pronunciation the same, yet skewing the letters
a little, and finally came up with his new name: Gotye. “It
seemed to suit the music,” he explains, “taking something
old, from my past, modifying it and making it new.”
Despite sharing in his parent’s appreciation of folk and
choral music, Wally’s first passion was the magpie pop of
Britain’s early nineties rave outfit, The KLF. “The
KLF really caught me when I was 12 years old. I think the first
tune I heard was 3AM Eternal,” he remembers, “I
bought all their cassette singles, and I still love their music.
They were a big influence on me, especially for pop riffs, I love
their ear for sampling and their recycling of their own hooks. It
was only as I grew a little older that I realised they were commenting
so cleverly on pop culture, politics and the music industry”
Wally began making music on a set of African tom toms his parents
had bought for him, initially using a pair of chopsticks to bash
out rhythms. “It took me until I was sixteen to convince
my parents to buy me a drum kit,” he says, “
and when I got my first set of proper sized drum sticks I thought
they were way too big!”. Initially he played along to
Police tracks. “I remember trying to cop a lot of Stewart
Copeland’s riffs,” he explains, “he’s
a big influence, if not my favourite drummer. I was fascinated by
how he would weave reggae and rock beats together, and the driving
energy he put forth in his playing.” The sample-pioneer
and singer-songwriter, Kate Bush, also holds sway in his record
collection.
If these influences weren’t suitably varied, as he matured
Wally began buying masses of obscure jazz, classical recordings
and other, more difficult discs, partly for the samples, but also
for the compositions. “I’ve found that all the records
I tried to disown as influences or deny quality in, I’ve later
returned to, and ended up really liking them,” he explains,
“so I bought a ton of stuff from [Aussie Oxfam equivalent]
op shops, trying to pick out styles of music that hadn’t interested
me before.” In so doing, he came across some surprising
finds. “I quite like the English composer, Delius, and
I found Holst’s Planets Suite very stirring stuff,”
he says; though it should be added that he also appreciates Massive
Attack, fellow Melbourne sample-hounds, The Avalanches, as well
as eighties heavyweights Depeche Mode and The Cure, and sixties
luminaries like The Beatles and Phil Spector.
With a newly amassed record library, a suitably eclectic set of
influences and with no-one else around to tell him what to do, Wally
began work on the first Gotye album in earnest, holding down a number
of lowly day jobs and recording in the evenings and at weekends.
“I worked in cafes,” he recalls, “and
then in libraries, as well doing data entry for a while.”
His debut Gotye album, Boardface, came out independently
in 2004 with Wally acting as his own record label, and it was made
available in Australia by independent distributor Creative Vibes.
Thanks to Wally’s own hard graft and self-promotion, a few
of the shimmering, hook-laden album tracks gained plays on Triple
J; the Aussie equivalent of BBC Radio 1. Yet sales remained too
meagre to support a full-time career. Despondent, he held down his
library job and decided to try once more.
This new album, Like Drawing Blood, a distillation of
all his pop hopes and fears, laid over an uncanny patchwork of 20th
century sound snippets, proved far more successful in his adopted
home than Wally could have imagined; and though he composed and
recorded the album, he owes a debt of acoustic sophistication to
contemporary composer, film scorer and producer for the likes of
Architecture in Helsinki, Francois Tétaz; who mixed and mastered
Like Drawing Blood. “He is responsible for some key additional
production flourishes, creating a great depth of field to the mix
of the record, and developing the space and breadth of sound in
the tracks,” Wally explains.
His initial radio success with Boardface was redoubled
with this sophomore CD. Triple J began playing a selection of tracks
in 2006, before Wally had even begun to shop his album around to
labels. Bloggers began to comment, and offers began to come through.
However, having acted as his own producer, publicist and manager,
Wally thought he would try his hand as a record label boss, releasing
the album on his own label, with a little help from Creative Vibes.
“I did it as an independent release,” he
explains, “I did the artwork and packaging. I pressed
up 1000 CDs and mailed 500 out to media. It all rolled on from there.”
Radio support strengthened and the Aussie press was filled with
glowing plaudits for the album. Wally began touring the album (sometimes
as a one man show, sometimes with a mini orchestra), corralling
his new album’s multilayered tracks into workable live arrangements.
Then the nation’s judging panels began to pay attention.
Like Drawing Blood won Triple J’s, and also the Australian
Independent Records, Album of the Year. Whilst Gotye picked up the
Australian Music Prize award for outstanding potential and, in September
2007, won the Australian Recording Industry Award (ARIA) for Best
Male Artist.
Now, thanks to a random and solitary late night play of album
track Learnalilgivinanlovin on Sean Rowley’s BBC
London show back in early 2006 and after two years’ worth
of transcontinental telephone calls, Like Drawing Blood is getting
a UK release, on Lucky Number.
“It’s been a crazy time,” reflects
Wally, “at the start of 2006 I didn’t dream that
I could be a full-time musician, letalone that my music might see
a release outside Australia”
Wally handed in his notice at the library in 2007. The re-shelving
trolley may have lost a
pair of hands but music has gained a sampladelic alt-pop wunderkind.
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