Gotye (pronounced: ‘Gaultier’, like Jean-Paul, the French clothes designer) is a singular find. A Belgian-born, but Australian based, singer, songwriter and sampler, christened Wouter De Backer, (but known to friends as Wally).
His debut Australian album, Boardface, came out independently in 2004 with Wally acting as his own record label. 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.
For his second album, Like Drawing Blood, Gotye cut loops of calypso, reggae bass, Tijuana brass, 50s film score strings and combined them with emotional swathes of harmonized vocal colour and bold melodic strokes. A detailed task, the resultant brew is an evocative collage of sounds with their own cultural flavours and heartfelt melodic brilliance. It’s a distillation of all his pop hopes and fears, laid over an uncanny patchwork of 20th century sound snippets, and it proved far more successful in his adopted home than Wally could have imagined.
“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 Australian 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, he won the Australian Recording Industry Award (ARIA) for Best Male Artist. All incredible achievements for an artist who recorded the album in his bedroom by night whilst working as a librarian by day.
In 2008, Like Drawing Blood, was finally released across Europe and Japan. The album was awarded iTunes UK’s Album of the Year for 2008 and Gotye brought his one man show to the UK (including 4 sell-out shows in London), Belgium, France, Germany and the prestigious FUJI Rock festival in Japan.
Gotye is currently working on his follow up album to Like Drawing Blood, which is scheduled for release in 2010.
“The best cut’n’paste album since the Avalanches… Like Drawing Blood is a meticulously crafted mishmash that sounds thoroughly modern” Sunday Times Culture
“Belgian-Australian singer-songwriter-sampler coming on like Beck fronting The Avalanches.” The Guardian
“Makes Mark Ronson’s musical tastes seem rather narrow-minded. Royksopp but with added soul. This is an amazing orchestral offering” Zoo
“Considering he is essentially a one-man-band (and a supreme drummer at that), you can only marvel at the scale of the soundscapes” Esquire
“The Wizard of Aussie Pop” Sunday Times
