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Interview
by SashaS
10-6-2002
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| Music loving Cousteau |
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Neo-audio vintage
Cousteau’s album ‘Sirena’ brims with exquisite songs
A Renaissance-person, at this Age of Unenlightenment, is anyone who can do two jobs – not necessarily at the same time – moderately. The general single-mindedness is bad for culture all together as demands are as low as the shag-pile carpet. Is there a light in the long dumbness? Mediocre-asses make movies, write books and other publications with music being made by people who were queuing somewhere else while God was distributing talent.
Consequently, with the exception of few artists – Bowie, Yorke (Radiohead), Moby, to name but a trio – the rest are intellectual-dwarfs. There is nothing more Zen-testing than having to endure half-an-hour or more minutes in a company of a star only talking about own thimble-sized life-bubble; it is like having a lobotomy without an anaesthetic. Thus, meeting people of the named trio kind, or Cousteau members, is like sharing a pint of water with ‘Idollectuals’. You can have a conversation with these people rather than conduct a Questionnaire, the Sixties-style.
The band’s second album ‘Sirena’ has been lodged in my CD-changer for a couple of months and it ain’t gonna be replaced in a hurry. It is a work of such beauty that it is as ideal as one’s perfect wo/man fantasy. Which is a tall order in the current pop music that is adverse to aesthetics.
“There came a crunch in our lives,” Davey Ray Moor intones gravely, “just before we started doing this that there was no music we liked, we felt the need for it, it wasn’t supplied by the record industry and we had a hunch that there are more people in the world who like this kind of music. We feel like we have to work harder to be more authentic. We just do stuff to satisfy ourselves and that’s all you can do.”
“Our situation is a very good example,” Liam McKahey continues in his deeply melodious voice, “of not just being true to your beliefs but doing stuff that turns us on. Not succumbing to the pressure of being something you are not… We all tried that in the past, to be a flavour of the month, but it never worked because it is dishonest.”
“The only brief in this band,” McKahey declares earnestly, “is to make good music we believe in rather than trying to be something we are not.”
An angel’s perspiration
Recycling is all fine to preserve our environment but it should be vetoed in culture: music’s always been at it, Hollywood’s a great supporter, theatres are full of revivals, literature’s dying, arts are just laughable and ripping off Andy Warhol ad nauseam. Tate Modern? No, Tate Moronic. In this arid landscape Cousteau’s songs are like an angel’s perspiration dripping in an oasis.
Songwriter and keyboardist Moor, born in Beirut and raised in Canberra and Sydney, moved to London and tried his handful of chords in many a project that ended in frustration. After befriending guitarist Robin Brown, the rest of the Cousteau cast joined: Liam, Joe Peet (bass/violin/vox) and Craig Vear (drums/percs). The band made their first album independently, 3,000 copies were pressed and sold before you could slice a loaf that led to the current deal.
Cousteau are not trendy, played on the radio or slaves to l’image-de-moment. They are concerned with eternity, with creating something that is outside and beyond time and as evergreen as Bacharach, respected in the Nick Cave and PJ Harvey vein, being obsessed over like this Italian woman who bought 30 albums to present her friends for enjoyment, illumination and educatation.
“People have will and desire to create beauty,” Moor argues, “but the media we’ve allowed to build around is disgraceful. Well, you get the media you deserve, and it is based around this obsession with fast-fizzy-McMusic sort of a fix. It is easy to get fit, young people with no clothes on to package and peddle. No need for any artistry, you just need a trainer…”
(And a composer, choreographer, fashion-designer and make-up artist – all musically necessary.)
“The five of us are very fortunate, “MCKahey takes over, “because we all have the same ambition and our goals are the same. Davey writes exciting songs and melodies, then we get to work on them. I’ve never been in a band where songs are presented to me and I like them all; I keep on writing songs myself but there is no need for me to bring them in…”
“We’ve all had to make adjustments; Davey is a phenomenal singer and I initially joined the band as a backing vocalist.”
‘The Illustrated Man’
If I were to find myself stranded on an island, there would only be few contemporary albums I’d like to play on my solar-powered Discman and one has to be ‘Sirena’; after few months I might be able to come up with all the adjectives that the disc deserves. Cousteau’s musical elegance is usually augmented by besuited-chic that is like ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and Rat Pack (if you are educated). The great thing is that they wear it comfortably well.
And yet, under the cool apparels the singer is tattooed as if he were a member of Slipknot, and the latest one, on his shoulder, is an illustration featuring a lady that is ‘Sirena’. As a Sunday paper remarked, they look like “capable of administering some serious damage”, should the brawl occur. But, McKahey’s singing is impassioned, powerful and as touching as the iconoclastic Scott Walker’s.
“I think it is genetic, I got a deep voice, baritone,” the signer states matter-of-factly, “but I’m a great fan of Scott Walker. I’ve got his albums, my dad was a huge fan and I do a mean impersonation of Scott. I’d love somebody to hear it someday because if I wanted to sound like Scott Walker I could. But, if a get compared to him, it is a huge compliment: if you are compared to somebody, it might as well be ‘God’. But as far as influences go I’m equally influenced by people like Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison and Stevie Wonder.”
Feeding on stress public craves superficial entertainment; to approach any level of mass appeal a compromise is called for.
“When you sign a contract you are compromising,” Moor agrees before expending that “corporisation of the world is something you can’t ignore but work within it. It is fundamental to use such machinery because you need so much support to get your music out there. Even in Cousteau we’ve set up our little organisation, we share all the royalties, because it cuts through all the bullshit and works for us.”
SashaS
10-6-2002
Cousteau’s album ‘Sirena’ is released 10 June 2002 on Palm Pictures
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