by steve phillips
article written in january 1998
published in "sadness is in the sky magazine" issue 5

SP. “The Dumb Earth recorded and released an LP(Walk The Earth) some time ago, how well was that received by your peers? I know there’s been a lot of support from people within the record label(Rubber Records) and within the press, but did has the record lived up to your expectations?

AK. Well it’s a fairly modest release, I mean we only pressed 500 of ‘em, which disturbs me ‘cause I think in years to come it will be judged as an Australian classic! (Laughs) Along the lines of “Living In The 70’s” by Skyhooks..

SP. Or “The Swing”(by INXS)!

AK. Exactly! We’d better be careful with that! I’m very happy certainly with what people tell me about it, and their relationship with it, whether it be someone from another band, I mean we’ve had some fantastic feedback from our illustrious peers. But I mean I’m really happy with it and that’s the ultimate test of how successful it is. I mean I talk to Dave and Chris and they released something like 5 albums and a couple of EP’s(as The Lizard Train) and they can’t or don’t listen to them for pleasure, they’re too close to it or it’s too much of an agonizing experience for them to relate to it, and I think it’s a mark of how happy we are with it(Walk The Earth) that I put it on sometimes and listen to it and have a great deal of objectivity. I can hear it as this thing I really enjoy, enjoy as a piece of music and not necessarily as something that I’m involved with.

SP. That must be a great feeling!

AK. It’s a good feeling because I can’t think of anything worse than not being able to have distance from something without hearing your part in it and focusing on that. ‘Cause I’m sure that’s what a lot of people do when they listen to a record that they’re ‘on’, they just hear their ‘bit’ and everything else is behind that. Invariably some mistakes are gonna end up on the final product and you’re just gonna be going “ahhhh!!&^%!!!”, twitching horribly! So I think the fact that I still like it, and I really like it, it does all the things that we talked about before the tape was turned on about how albums make you feel and the subtle things about records that you feel like you’re inhabiting or negotiating this ‘landscape’, and if something gives you a sense of actual physical space, you can get inside it. You can get inside that and walk around there. The thing I like most about the album is that it’s an album that sounds like an album…

SP. It does. It’s like a ‘complete set’ of music.

AK. Yeah, and that’s a bit of a lost art. There seems to be so little thought put into albums. A lot of albums these days, they seem to be just a random collection of songs. It wouldn’t particularly matter what order you put those songs in, like a collection of singles. And sometimes that can be great like I just think of The Liquor Giants album, and it is that, it’s like a greatest hits album, but not a false step on it. It’s just so ‘poppy’. I’m a bit of a ‘pop’ fan. I like ‘pop’ stuff as well as I like the dark, brooding, artistic, pseudo-avant garde musings that are The Dumb Earth! When we were trying to work out what songs we were going to put on this album, we’d been together for so long without recording that we had a huge backlog of stuff, there were so many ‘pieces’ of work that we had to get through that it was hard to isolate the ones that would actually form a coherent picture. We actually toyed with the idea of doing an album of all of our strongest, most accessible, immediate songs, but we felt that it would just totally misrepresent the whole idea of what we were doing. So we didn’t, and we ended up doing what was coincidentally the first bunch of songs we did as a band, but we were struggling with the idea that the only thing they had in common was they’re were first bunch of songs. We resisted for a long time the fact that they actually did go together very well because we were thinking about them in a lot of different ways. Like they seemed to me to be thematically linked, so I was pushing for us to do that, and other people were pushing for us to do that, and then eventually we achieved consensus that they worked as a bunch. And it’s funny because some of them were written like 5 years ago, some of them were written around the time we moved to Melbourne, but they’re all sort of Adelaide songs.

SP. On the most recent Dumb Earth single, “Tailem Bend” and on the LP, you guys cover a lot of musical territory. Some artists that come to mind are people like Tom Waits, and one of my favorite bands The Tindersticks. Do you respond that maybe these are acts working with a similar psyche or has the sound of The Dumb Earth been affected by these amazing talents? Do you guys ponder over what influences are affecting the songs or do you just kind of ‘record first, think later’?

AK. Well I mean your influences are inside you and so they come out in a very involuntary way, and the 4 people that make up The Dumb Earth are really disparate individuals. So all those influences like The Tindersticks and Tom Waits, and I’d say people like Captain Beefheart and John Coltrane and The Lounge Lizards and everything I’ve ever listened to. I’m sure KISS is in there somewhere and AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix is certainly in there. The Jimi Hendrix Experience I think is one of the greatest bands ever, and so if you start to listen to the influences it will be everything you’ve ever listened to and thought ‘ahh that’s great!’. I’m a big fan of making it easy for people to kind of ‘cotton onto you’ if they haven’t heard you yet, and so I do say things like “it’s a bit of a Tom Waits kind of thing, Captain Beefheart vein, Beatnik this and film noir that”, and it’s all accurate, 60’s spy themes and stuff. And you sort of start to realize that everything is an influence, and it’s not even just music, there are a lot of literary influences as well I’m sure. It’s a visionary kind of thing and a lot of the vision of the band comes from Dave, the way he paints, like his painting’s on the cover of the album and he does a lot of other paintings as well which I think we’ll use for artwork ‘cause they evoke a spirit of what his writing is like. So there are those visual queues and Dave’s writing which is intensely personal, it can be really oblique and it can also be extremely specific and if you know Dave like we do, it can actually be quite uncomfortable sometimes. When you guess what the writing is about you seeing his perspective, his really subjective perspective on an event that you’ve either witnessed or that you know about, and it’s like you’re the backing band for someone’s diary. It can be really disturbing but I also think Dave’s a really beautiful writer. He’s one of the most amazing lyricists I’ve read and I love lyrics, I love songwriting and it’s I think a real privilege to be working with him because his stuff stands up, and it stands up outside of the music which I like as well.

The full interview with Adam Kyle of The Dumb Earth is available for consumption in Issue #5 of “SADNESS IS IN THE SKY.” For ordering details press HERE.