Bendigo three-piece Fountaineer have been hard at work on their debut album, and have previously shared bills with the likes of Gang Of Youths and Middle Kids, as well as performing at 2016’s BIGSOUND. Forte chat to Fountaineer’s Anthony White ahead of their album launch.
Hi Tony, thanks for taking the time to talk to Forte Mag – I understand Bendigo and small town Australia are a big part of what Fountaineer is all about – tell us a bit about that.
You end up writing about what you know, because people can see straight through things that aren’t genuine. Whilst the band isn’t made entirely of Bendigonians anymore like it was originally, Chris and Kieran are Albury/Wodonga boys respectively (don’t ever confuse the two!) and growing up in a regional area is in all our blood. There’s a shared understanding between us of the stuff we sing about. I think this is true for most country people. I’ve lived in the city before, and it’s amazing how at work and other places, how you gravitate towards people from the country. It even happened when I was living overseas! It’s almost a sixth sense you have when you meet someone: “Hey, are you from Ballarat? Wanna be friends?” (*disclaimer – we would never actually be friends with anyone from Ballarat because of our loyal participation in the “ongoing rivalry which dates back to the Victorian Gold Rush” [Wikipedia]).
There was a transitional period in your early years where you went from sports into arts and music – was there anything specific that fuelled that transition and can you tell us a bit about that period?
I’d love to say it was in my early days, but it was actually much later in life. Sports clubs, for all their faults, are simply great places for people to connect and experience a sense of community. They can form the glue that holds towns together, particularly in the really small places that are dotted all across Victoria. But you can get pretty disenchanted with watching young men endlessly fawn over each other, and seeing people put on pedestals for their accuracy in front of goal, not for anything they do outside of footy.
I don’t know if music is any better than sport in many respects. There’s plenty of sycophants in music, too. We’ve always been about doing our own thing, not involving ourselves in the bullshit of small town politics. It takes a long time for blokes to mature, and that’s definitely speaking from experience.
Your new LP – Greater City, Greater Love – is such a diverse amalgamation of sounds, with powerful anthems like Sirens and sombre electronically driven tracks like Still Life. How would you introduce Fountaineer’s music to someone who may not be familiar?
It is a very eclectic record. It’s a soundtrack to a small town, and it is very much steeped in Americana sounds. But there’s equal measure drum machines, synths, atmospherics, and punk-inspired moments. A bloke from work got to have a sneaky listen to it the other day, and he likened it to Arcade Fire. Thank you, Andrew – we’re very happy with that.
Tell us a bit about the process of recording the LP – I understand you were all off the grid when you recorded it as you hired a farmhouse – was this an intentional move when it came to aiding your creative process?
There are no recording studios in town, so doing it here was not really an option. We feel comfortable in regional surroundings, so a quick Air BnB search resulted in us stumbling across the perfect farmhouse to make our album, set amongst the trees of the beautiful Victorian town of Alexandra. We got our handsome mate Chris Wright to engineer the record (who has since joined Fountaineer), and pressed record. Trying to fit everything into five days meant we couldn’t afford any distractions, so being away from home was a definite consideration. We’ve got around 50 pubs here in Bendigo, so we might not have got any work done here.
The context and lyrics of tracks on the LP touch on so many aspects of maturing and growth – even the opening track Sirens essentially being a metaphor for taking charge of your life before the final siren sounds – was it a conscious effort to make a collective of tracks that focus on rights of passage and transitions in life?
Most definitely. For us this record has become the one thing we’ve really tried at. It’s meant not seeing friends, sacrificing a lot to pursue a dream. There’s also a much more collective notion to the stories. Our town is in transition also. It sometimes feels like one of those antiquated establishments that hasn’t moved forward, stuck in its ways; in the arts, in its politics, in the town’s identity. But to remain beautiful and prosperous, this place has got to pull together and start to understand each other.
It’s not about cafes and craft beer and food trucks and clicking on a bloody on-line petition. I’m not saying these things are necessarily negative, they are just not getting anywhere near the heart of the issues we face. We’ve gotta have some more serious dialogue around here about shit – help mend the fabric of the place. Don’t get me wrong – I love my mid-strength, but I see places like ours treading water in so many ways. If the town drowns, we all go with it.
It is hard to pin down genre wise where Fountaineer fits into the musical world as Greater City, Greater Love is quite a Journey sound wise – what artists have influenced your music?
I love storytellers like Tim Winton, Paul Kelly, Glenn Richards (Augie March), the Working Dog team that created ‘The Castle’. There is so much authenticity to all their work. All the humour, the drama, the conflict, the beauty stems from how ‘true’ their stories are. Also movies like ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?’ and the series ‘Friday Night Lights’; cinematic stories where the setting is a character in itself. Badly Drawn Boy’s debut The Hour Of Bewilderbeast is the greatest hour of music ever made if you ask my brother Franky and I. He finds magic in the ordinary, singing about family and home and growing up. His favourite artist of all time is Springsteen, so we discovered the Boss through Badly Drawn Boy. Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska was our bible, our guiding light. It’s an album built on stories and limitations. All he had was a couple of mics and a four track. Whenever there were any doubts about whether our DIY album was good enough (a daily occurrence) and whether anyone would care about the tale of our town, we’d find comfort in the songs off that record. It’s rough as guts, beautiful and haunting. I think I’ll go and put it on right now.
Greater City, Greater Love has been a long time in the works – after everything that has gone into this record, what are you most looking forward to about its release?
I think the greatest thing about releasing it to the world will be the reaction from friends and family, all of whom have been so supportive and loving. Finally people will be able to hear it for themselves, and hopefully we’ve made something special that vindicates the effort we’ve put in and helps people understand why we have strived so hard for this from day one. We played Festival Hall for the first time the other night (which transformed us into giddy school girls), but I’m way more nervous to see if anyone is going to turn up to our hometown album launch. Hopefully we can do better than the six that came to our first Bendigo show.
Thanks for your time Tony, Best of luck with the album launch – is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap things up?
Yes please. Just carrot, pickles and chipotle sauce. I hope that won’t cost extra, will it?
When & Where: Gold Dust Lounge Bendigo, Bendigo – August 5
