“I never really made any conscious decision to be a musician; I just sort of slipped into that groove and I’m still in it,” Hugo Race says of his early days in music, in a recent chat over the phone we were lucky enough to have with the singer-songwriter, producer, actor, writer, and artisan-experimental-country-goth-blues-world-electro-rocker-extraordinaire… Yeah, I’m not too sure just how to pin him down either.
It’s a modest way to frame the hard work it would take to forge a career like Race’s, one spanning roughly forty years and forty-seven album appearances.
“If you don’t like the idea of hard work, it’s probably not the right area to be in,” he says of the path of an independent musician, “It’s kind of a lifestyle”.
Coming up in the thriving post-punk scene of 1980’s Melbourne, Race was a founding member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “I was lucky…the work I did with them is a real highlight”, he says of his time with the group before he went on to front-man for The Wreckery throughout the rest of the decade.
When the group disbanded, Race set his sights for Europe as a solo artist and found himself based in Berlin by the turn of the decade. “The nineties have really become a thing, like a historical decade, which is kind of weird when you’ve lived through it because it still seems fairly recent.”
Not long after settling in Berlin Race began his project True Spirit. “Those records were a fantastic time personally and also creatively, and everything was just extraordinary [at that time], for example, because I was based in Berlin at the end of the eighties meant that I toured widely in eastern Europe in the early nineties just after communism; memories I have from those incredible sights and situations are also a real highlight.”
His history is rich, though Hugo Race is still looking to the future, “I’m more of a forward-thinking person: I’m always thinking about what I’m going to do next, what’s interesting, who’s available to work with. I’m always trying to push the boundaries on what I can do… trying to experiment and open new beginnings to future things that I can’t even imagine yet.” Race notes collaboration as an important part of keeping his experimenting fresh, “collaborating with people really pushes you and stimulates and motivates you to go beyond what you would normally do, so in that sense when I was working and recording in Marley in West Africa was a really strong highlight of what I’ve done. It was such a personal experience for us to be working with Marley musicians in Marley completely separated from the standard reality that we were accustomed to.”
Even more recently, Hugo race has released a new album with another of his groups The Fatalists entitled Taken By The Dream.
“It took us a better part of eighteen months to get it finished. Most of it was recorded in a studio on the Adriatic Sea near on the coast of Italy but then it was mixed in Sicily. It’s an album with a kind of continuous theme. Basically, all the songs are love songs but they’re atypical love songs because most of them are looking at love phenomena in all sorts of tangential ways. The songs are based on things in my own life, but they’re often expanded beyond that kind of, subjective reality, into something a little bit blurrier. Almost cinematic maybe.”
In the second half of July, Race is going to be touring this album throughout Australia.
“I’m really looking forward to it, doing a national tour in Australia. I mean, it always really opens my eyes and I love traveling interstate and playing to the audiences that I’ve got there. I’m kind of in the middle of a tour that goes until the end of the year, because after this I go back to Europe and continue touring with the band there, so this is just a great time to be home and see friends and family and be playing music up the east coast and beyond… it feels good because I really love the new album, I believe in it and the songs are still fresh. It’s just a good moment.”
When & Where: The Palais-Hepburn – July 27, The Lost Ones, Ballarat – August 8, The Bridge Hotel, Castlemaine – August 9 & Major Tom’s, Kyneton – August 10.
Written by Liam McNally
Photo by Corrado Vasquez
