radionotes podcast episodes

060 Cold Sleep

by | Mar 15, 2020 | episodes | 0 comments

060 Cold Sleep

Cold Sleep debut EP Heartcore was released in 2018 and now have followed it up with a double-A side release – Petal/Stopping All Stations Except Kensington.

Ahead of taking the stage at the Grace Emily Hotel, in their former home town of Adelaide (South Australia) Rob McFarlane spoke to radionotes…

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IMAGE CREDIT: Tim Doig

McFarlane is at home in Opera as they are the surrounds of the heavier riffs of the three-piece that is Cold Sleep.

Fun Fact: They once fronted a band called Glu, here more about that in this chat as well.

SHOW NOTES: Cold Sleep

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Feature Guest: Robert McFarlane of Cold Sleep

Next Episode: Banding Together for Support Act/Nathan Williams of TV Dinners

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[Radio Production – notes: ]

CREDITS

Theme/Music: Martin Kennedy and All India Radio   

Web-design/tech: Steve Davis

Voice: Tammy Weller  

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TRANSCRIPT

First version provided by REV team member Jane H – check to audio before quoting wider

John Murch:
Welcome to radionotes.

Robert Macfarlane:
Thank you so much for having me.

John Murch:
Why an ex-pat of Adelaide, South Australia?

Robert Macfarlane:
Well I sort of had a secure dis-route to Adelaide, I was born in Hamilton, Victoria. My dad was a teacher out in the country and he got a job in the education union in Adelaide, which prompted our family to move when I was, I think four years old.

Robert Macfarlane:
And so I spent my childhood in Adelaide, spent my teenage years in Adelaide, went to uni in Adelaide. Until I got to uni I thought I was just going to just going to play rock and roll and find a day job that would support that but I fell into classical music, into opera in particular.

Robert Macfarlane:
And opera took me first to Melbourne, singing with the Melbourne Bach Projects and lots of classical music projects in Melbourne but then it took me to Germany, to Liepzig, former East Germany and studied and later worked in Liepzig and Berlin.

John Murch:
When were you first introduced to Bach?

Robert Macfarlane:
My route to classical music was by no means conventional. I was playing in a rock band here called Glu, I remember somebody coming up to me after a gig and saying, “Look you’ve got a pretty reasonable voice, why don’t you go and have a singing lesson with somebody, just to check you’re not ruining it, pushing your way through all these gigs every weekend.”

Robert Macfarlane:
And I remember going to this lovely old guy, a bald guy, gray sideburns and little glasses and he said, “Oh my dear, sing three note.” And I did, as such, he said, “Look, I don’t know much about you but I think you’re wasting your time with rock music, I think you’ve got this operatic tenor voice,” and I said, “Well what’s a tenor?” I had no idea.

John Murch:
So no musical training at high school?

Robert Macfarlane:
I was in choirs and things like that in high school but it was so on the periphery. The rock band, this band Glu was my everything, I just thought that was what I was going to do…

John Murch:
Well that’s why they were called Glu.

Robert Macfarlane:
… we’d stick around. Exactly, to wear that old pun into the ground and I had a song with that band called, Friends and Enemies, it won some songwriting awards and it had attracted some interest. So I just thought this was going to be my life. So I was really resistant to all this classical stuff.

Robert Macfarlane:
I remember this teacher giving me pieces from musical theater, light classics and it didn’t interest me at all but then he gave me Franz Schubert, very dark, very dramatic songs in German all about goblins and killing things and ghosts appearing and eating people’s spirits. That’s a bit melodramatic, but you get the idea, high German romanticism, and I just fell in love. I was like, this is the best Bob Dylan song never written, kind of thing.

Robert Macfarlane:
And I just fell into that music completely, heavy end first. So Bach, Schubert, Wagner, still all the composers I sing professionally to this day, this big grandiose German music. And that’s what really did it for me, and I forgot completely about rock music for about 10 years.

John Murch:
What as it about Bach though?

Robert Macfarlane:
I think just this profound spirituality and immense perfection of form but without becoming… It was music that was at once perfect and living breathing, blood-pumping music and evoked such an atmosphere and told this story that I thought… Of course, all this music comes from a religious background in this point in time, in the 17th and 18th century.

Robert Macfarlane:
But all these stories, they just seem universal to me, it was like holding up a mirror to your society. And I had always thought with rock and roll that, that’s what we were doing. The great rock and roll singers weren’t just singing about sex and drugs and rock and roll but they were asking questions about what it was to be a human, around other humans. This thrilled me, and also just the drama of it. I’d always had this love of the theatre of rock and roll.

Robert Macfarlane:
And perhaps now that I’m in classical music, I think less about the drama of rock and roll and I just turn up and I want to have a good time and sing songs that have some kind of meaning for me. But when I was a kid, the spectacle of seeing a band like Led Zeppelin, this Teutonic monster with four heads and eight legs and maybe in Bonzo’s case nine legs, gracing the stage and being not quite of this earth.

Robert Macfarlane:
That really appealed to me as a kid, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Yes, Metallica, this sort of theatrical aspect to playing a big rock show.

John Murch:
What music was hitting you, Robert, at puberty?

Robert Macfarlane:
Oh, well it was an interesting period for me because it was at once when I was finding more of the Aussie, Indie underground, Screamfeeder, Nocturnal, some of the heavier music coming out of Adelaide. Testeagles, that kind of thing.

John Murch:
In terms of Screamfeeder, just yesterday, one of their albums from years ago, being re-released on vinyl.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, I think those guys are one of the most underrated bands in Australian music history. Then at the same time, I was just being a bit of an – I guess – agent-provocateur with my friends and I was finding the most extreme stuff coming out of Sentry Media and things like that, Cryptopsy and Dimmu Borgir and all these extreme Metal as well as this love of the homemade Aussie underground.

John Murch:
Was that a bit of shock and awe for the friends, or was it doing something for you to share it with them as well?

Robert Macfarlane:
I think so. It was like being a bit of a guide into this music that nobody else liked, I think. And I found that in both directions, both in what Aussie band that sold 20 copies can I worship this week? And secondly, what sound is just so abnormal to my ears? Like what can I feed myself that is so contrary to what I’m hearing in school or hearing on the radio.

Robert Macfarlane:
You’ve got to remember too, in the late ’90s, the radio wasn’t exactly shy of a heavy guitar riff or something like that, it’s not like now where a distorted guitar basically bans you from major commercial radio. You were hearing things like the rap metal movement and things like that. You were hearing big MESA/boogie Rectifiers playing.

John Murch:
Let’s talk about Testeagles because bands like that were really punching their weight.

Robert Macfarlane:
I think a uniquely Aussie voice, it was rap metal like we’ve never heard before or since. It was a uniquely Australian voice and I think of a couple of other bands, I think I mentioned Nocturnal from Alice Springs. They’re also playing this very unashamedly Aussie version of this abrasive American style of music but both bands doing it with some kind of social conscience, there was no pretense to it. There wasn’t a backwards caps and posturing, as I remember it, as a 12, 13, 14-year-old. It was quite a natural progression from the Grinspoon heavy grunge of the early ’90s and early mid-’90s.

John Murch:
This is this puberty intersection with music, I guess the blossoming of adulthood. How were you balancing those two lives?

Robert Macfarlane:
I think it only got complicated later. As I do now, I don’t think I thought of them as any different, I heard heavy riffs in Bach, I still do. Some of those massive baselines and things in the fugues, they’re as heavy as anything Metallica have put down in the last 30 years in terms of hitting those tritones, those diabolus and musica chords and things like that, I just didn’t hear the difference. It was different instruments but I didn’t hear the difference in the music, it still had the same middle finger to any kind of convention.

Robert Macfarlane:
And Bach did things that nobody would have dreamed on doing in the 17th and 18th century and people apparently at the premieres of his big works on The Passion of the Christ, that story of the death of Jesus. People apparently fled the church because this ghastly Italian opera had taken over the German church.

Robert Macfarlane:
And I think that was the appeal of the more extreme forms of heavy music, it’s abrasive but also incredibly technical delicately woven together sound world, it required more than one listen. It wasn’t something you could just devour and throw away, it left you confused. And I think that was probably the common thread for all the music I loved at that point in my life.

Robert Macfarlane:
I also loved and still do, that German period of David Bowie, Heroes, Low Lodger, this is the great pop music, middle period of the 1970s. It’s just phenomenal. I mean Lodger, doesn’t have a chorus or a hook anywhere in sight but it’s still amazing pop music and that fascinated me.

John Murch:
I know I’m pressing for that age, it’s not easy being an Adelaide teenager.

Robert Macfarlane:
No, no and I was a big fat kid and I was quite androgynous at the time and I don’t think I’d really worked myself out in terms of my sexuality and things like that. Even at a fairly liberal-minded school, it was a fairly conservative place in terms of what was expected of you and all that kind of thing.

John Murch:
And Robert, what about school, music and school?

Robert Macfarlane:
It took me basically my whole high school time to get into the specialist music school, and I was sure I was a musician and by the time I got in, I already had this rock band that was being played on national radio. But I didn’t get into the specialist music program until year 10 or year 11, I can’t remember.

Robert Macfarlane:
By then, yeah my life was in this little garage band that was starting to do things and we were playing every weekend, as 14, 15, 16-year-olds. And so it took me quite a while, in fact I don’t think it was until uni that I realized had I been less obsessed with being in this rock band and less churning out CDs and getting on radio and doing all this kind of stuff.

John Murch:
Actually doing the biz.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were huge things that I could’ve learnt from people in terms of classical music at Marryatville, which I may have completely missed while I was there, but you know that’s life.

John Murch:
But you got into the Elder Conservatorium all the same?

Robert Macfarlane:
I think I was lucky that I was a male with a reasonably strong voice, like a reasonably naturally loud projecting voice. They just saw that there was possibility there, I think I was as rough as guts when I came into the Elder Conservatorium but I just suspect that they saw some kind of lump of heavy clay, that might be useful at some point.

John Murch:
Where was androgyny at that stage, when you arrived at university?

Robert Macfarlane:
Well I still had hair down to my arse, and painted my nails. I was in a big Bowie kick at that time and the band had been going more and more from the heavy grunge end of the spectrum into Placebo-y, more of the glam stuff. So I had my lashes done when I first started and that all changed very quickly.

Robert Macfarlane:
And we’ve talked about conformity and conservatives, because I’m in Adelaide, I remember clearly, I was just told that none of that was appropriate. The hair had to be cut, makeup had to come off.

John Murch:
You’ve arrived, as you’ve said, dressed appearing like that, you were very much, I guess comfortable in yourself at that point.

Robert Macfarlane:
Well it was the way I’d worked out how to survive, I think but I don’t think I’d thought about it that much. It was just the way I’d found to be okay enough to keep putting myself on stage, as a young… I mean the band started when I was 13, so I was playing at The Gov, 13, 14 in front of five, 600 people and I’d had no training. So it just became a bit of a coping mechanism, a way to get through that expectation or to come up to that expectation.

Robert Macfarlane:
So yeah, it was psychologically difficult for me and it was always the music that drove my decision making, I’d just completely fallen in love with this music of Schubert, this music of Bach. And I just thought, well if that’s what I’ve got to do for this music, I’ve got to do it.

John Murch:
So you were told to do these steps of changing what you appeared like?

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah.

John Murch:
Because it wasn’t changing you inside, I’m sure.

Robert Macfarlane:
No, no.

John Murch:
You saw that there was going to be a benefit in terms of the other passions that you had.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, and I think I saw that I was very, very scared that, that wasn’t my world, and still am if I’m totally… until very recently still was. And so I thought that this conformity, this process of conformity was just the sacrifice you made for participation in that particular side of music.

John Murch:
What changed recently, particularly in terms of the classical side of you, that made you feel a little bit okay with it?

Robert Macfarlane:
Well there’s a few things. My personal life changed drastically, I got married quite young and I got divorced recently. And also I came back to Australia just with this feeling that if I was going to continue getting up on opera stages and things like that, it was going to be as myself.

Robert Macfarlane:
That was part of the reason why when I saw Steve and Ash looking for a guitar player, I thought, oh take that little strip off the wanted ads that Melbourne Uni or wherever it was, just remember thinking, this is just as much a part of me as singing Bach in big theatres, I have to allow myself to be who I am in terms of playing rock music. Sometimes making my living as an opera singer and a classical singer actually not apologising for it, I think I spent a lot of my early time in classical music apologising for not having been a choir boy, not having learnt piano for 10 years. Not having come from a private school, for example.

John Murch:
Right, so currently in conversation with Robert Macfarlane, from the band Cold Sleep and we could talk about the divorce and whether or not the song, Petal is about it but I have a feeling it might actually be before then. Walk us through Petal.

Robert Macfarlane:
The bare bones of Petal was one of the last songs I started working on with my band Glu. Superficially it was about the break-up of my high school relationship, however and this if fairly candid stuff, it was also about the break-up of my, I guess my major relationship at that time was with the guitarist in my first band. I had no idea what my feelings were for him but I loved him in a way I couldn’t describe and we were drifting apart.

Robert Macfarlane:
The band was drifting apart as people started thinking about what they were going do at uni and all this kind of stuff. And I saw this thing that I’d always thought would be there, disappearing and changing and every time we talked we’d say, “Oh well I’m going do this,” or, “I’m going to do that.” And I think now every ex-girlfriend and ex-partner I’ve ever had has thought, “Oh, Petal must definitely be about me.”

Robert Macfarlane:
But no, and I don’t think I’d ever fully worked it out until I came back to playing this song. There’s a very rough demo done at SAE from about 2003 of Petal.

John Murch:
Now this is the South Australian Engineering place?

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, yeah.

John Murch:
It’s all very Adelaide, folks.

Robert Macfarlane:
It’s so Adelaide. So I remember playing it to Steven, he said, “This is a monster, how would you feel about Cold Sleep doing it?” And it brought up all these feelings about not only this first girlfriend, who was the first physical relationship with somebody and it was very complicated, as things are when you’re a teenager, 15 or 16. And not really emotionally mature enough to be in a relationship with somebody but you’re trying it out anyway. Terrified and you’re meant to feel good in it. She might be coming to the gig tonight actually, which is amazing and so Adelaide, and the guitarist. So it’ll be quite a…

John Murch:
So you needed to release this song.

Robert Macfarlane:
Once I started looking at it again, yeah. It got updated and compressed into something a bit more manageable, I think in the original ideas. It suddenly became clear to me that it summed up all those, like they used to say about ancient Rome, “History repeats itself.” We tend to make the same mistakes again and again in relationships until we really stop and look at ourselves and say, “Look you’ve done this before…”

John Murch:
It actually is you…

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah. And I’m completely fallible in this aspect of my life. And a really important way to say, well we all have these little compartments of secrets and half-truths and meanderings around what we actually want to say to one another. And it ends up being this pulled out lynch pin that even though it’s nothing major, it dismantles things that were thought to be really special. And that’s what Petal is about, the chorus riffs around this settle Petal idea, calm down.

Robert Macfarlane:
And I remember people always telling me to calm down when I was a kid in love or trying to make the band work or trying to get my guitarist, who was my platonic significant other, to join me totally in the journey.

John Murch:
If there was any co-pilot, it was him.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, yeah. Well absolutely, I thought until I was about 18 or 19, he was my soulmate. I thought that other people would come and go, we’d just keep making music.

John Murch:
But that wasn’t the case.

Robert Macfarlane:
No, not the case and Petal is about that, those things that you were so sure of suddenly disappear and you wonder where that certainty came from.

John Murch:
Let’s continue our conversation with Robert Macfarlane of Cold Sleep, recorded at the Grace Emily Hotel, where I’m asking him about life, travel and really clearing the mind. How does that all work?

Robert Macfarlane:
I’ve been incredibly privileged in my life, I have traveled a lot, I’ve worked all over the place. I’ve also experienced many, many other cultures, I’m still in a bit of a haze from it but I just spent two months backpacking around Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.

John Murch:
Why were you there?

Robert Macfarlane:
Well it was a trip I’d been planning for quite some time, just to come to some kind of peace with what had happened in this relationship with my ex-wife and things like that. And also just to work out this idea if seeing the sky through the trees, kind of thing, “You can’t see the sky through the trees,” and these old adages.

Robert Macfarlane:
I think in the music industry, once it becomes a profession, it’s sometimes very hard to see what is important and what is not important in terms of you’re following, madly trying to get these gigs and auditioning and doing all this kind of stuff. And you’re in this rush and you’re competing with everybody around you and we never stop to look at our colleagues and look at our friends within the industry and just go, this is really quite amazing what we’re doing.

Robert Macfarlane:
And without getting too spiritual, spending two months around general Buddhist philosophy of unburdening in terms of thought and also just genuinely finding some way of wishing other people well whatever they want because knowing that their suffering is a burden on you as well as them.

Robert Macfarlane:
It’s had a really profound impact on me, I think. And so for me, looking at past relationships and past people that I’m no longer as close to as I was, I think it behooves all of us to try and find a way to want the best for them.

John Murch:
Because music is about memories in a way.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, intrinsically. Think about the first instance of music being repeated. It’s one of the primary functions of memory. Composers and musicians have obsessed with the idea of remembering things and things that they’ve forgotten has always been a core theme of music and my music as well, so yeah.

John Murch:
And so I’m wondering how much for you Robert, does it taunt you or comfort you that of music, in particularly of your own music that you write and perform?

Robert Macfarlane:
It’s roughly 50/50, I think.

John Murch:
That’s good, isn’t it?

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, I think so. It’s a great comfort just to be afforded the privilege to do it and to be normally afforded the privilege to do it in front of people who want to hear it. This is not something that anybody should underestimate, it’s whether or not you’re performing at Madison Square Gardens or you’re performing at the local open mic night.

Robert Macfarlane:
To play to people who will sit or stand for 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes and listen to you, that’s an incredible privilege. So on that side, it comforts me.

Robert Macfarlane:
I guess the taunting side is that it seems to have its own music, and I don’t know if other musicians are like this, seems to have its own fairly unstoppable biorhythms, it comes back to you when you least expect it. I finished a song while I was walking around in Cambodia, that I had the memory of, from about 14 or 15, it was just a two-line skerrick. This line kept coming to me, that said, “In my dreams I understand everything but while I’m awake, I’m asleep it seems.” And I kept going, I’m sure I’ve heard this and I thought, oh maybe it’s George Elliot, or something. I thought it was poem, or something like that.

Robert Macfarlane:
And then I had this realization that I’d written it down in my old gig book, so I of course went home, saw this line, it’s underlined. I think that this unstoppability of music going through your head and other people’s music going through your head. And other people trying to work out the stuff of it, the basic bones of what music is, seems like it just does itself and you come along with it, and when it tells you to wake up, you wake up and when it tells you that there’s nothing there, it’s like losing a friend.

Robert Macfarlane:
So I think that’s the biggest taunt and I think that’s what really affects you in terms of just your normal humdrum real life because it’s hard to see the person next to you if there’s some musical monologue going on in your head that you’re trying to follow. It leads to a bit of myopia as a general rule and I think it leads to a bit of self-obsession or overly inward looking behavior in a lot of musicians.

Robert Macfarlane:
I think that’s the thing that taunts you, you sometimes miss those wonderful moments in the real world.

John Murch:
And that’s why you need to find music or songs to associate with that.

Robert Macfarlane:
Exactly, exactly. And bring it all back to…

John Murch:
And make new memories.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, bring it all back to who we are and who we are… Life is cheap, life can be grown under any petri dish. You see people living on the sides of dirt roads, under tarpaulins, life can be found anywhere but our lives are incredible special to those of us around us and we have to hold on to that. And I think music is primarily for those people.

Robert Macfarlane:
I think people who have delusions of grandeur with music often miss that playing to five people who really love you, that’s actually music’s purpose and always has been. Music was for the parlor, for the group of friends, Schubert has this group of men he used to hang around. We assume now that they were all romantically connected as well but they were poets and playwrights, and they all used to get into Schubert’s little bedroom where he had a little piano, and they’d give Schubert poetry and he’d improvise a song to it and then one would sit down and try and sing over something Schubert was playing. This is what music is for.

John Murch:
There was a quote from you, “Singing is building an instrument inside of us.”

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, absolutely. If I play a guitar, if I play drums, the instrument sits outside of our body, we can see how it functions. We do something incorrectly, we can look at our hands, we can look at the position of them and go, oh we can change that. After which, we can put it in a case, walk away from it, we’re divorced from it.

Robert Macfarlane:
Singing, we’re building an instrument basically every time we sing. The inhalation of breath is like building a bellow, they way we manipulate our mouths and our voice boxes and all that kind of thing, is like building a loudspeaker system. And what makes it worse, is that we can never just pull it out, put it in a box and walk away from it or pull it out and go, this isn’t working, why isn’t it working? Get a screwdriver and make a few fixes and put it back in and it works better.

John Murch:
You went to the negative there.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yes.

John Murch:
You said, “The worst of it…”

Robert Macfarlane:
Yes.

John Murch:
At the same time I find it amazing as someone who doesn’t sing, that you’re able to do this.

Robert Macfarlane:
Absolutely, and I’ve never loved perfect singing in either classical or rock music. The flaws in people’s voices are so exciting. I mean, you listen to later era Dylan, Tempest and Time Out of Mind and things like that. I mean, his voice is worn by age like you wouldn’t believe but it just somehow makes the stories he’s telling us and the words he’s singing even more powerful.

Robert Macfarlane:
The same with an opera singer, you know Maria Callas is usually talked about as the greatest opera singer of all time, she wouldn’t pass a final year university exam for voice, I mean it’s wildly all over the place, all the time.

John Murch:
It sounds like you’re throwing shade.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, yeah. But she sings in such an extraordinarily emotive way, every tone you hear, every heartache and every love affair gone wrong, she’s ever experienced. For me, that’s a thousand times perfection because it’s human.

John Murch:
You are a singer of quite emotive loud vocals.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, in one of the style.

John Murch:
Yeah, not just in the rock-pop that you’re doing for Cold Sleep which people can hear, you sneak in your tenor operatic style.

Robert Macfarlane:
Absolutely. And I think the greatest pop singers have had quasi-operatic voices, thinking primarily of Freddie Mercury, Roy Orbison, Aretha Franklin, they all had this understanding of how breath works. We hear singers punch out a phrase and things like that, but what propels us all it’s this inhale and exhale, and that’s what makes opera so exciting. And that’s what makes great, great pop singing so exciting, when you hear these words traveling on a stream of air.

John Murch:
What’s happening inside of you?

Robert Macfarlane:
So when we inhale as a singer, basically the pelvic floor muscles release to start with, and then the diaphragm expands and descends which allows the ribs to open. And we’re not breathing in to those lower parts of the body, there’re things that happen, causal things that happen when we breathe in. We’re just breathing into our lungs of course, but that’s the feeling.

Robert Macfarlane:
Singing is exhaling on pitch, basically what we’re doing is suspending that exhalation. So if I breathe out, it’s over very quick, it’s an extraordinary strange feeling and I think probably singers and deep sea divers probably the one thing we have in common, this agonisingly slowly letting out a small stream of air. And so it almost feels like you’re holding back the air, or you’re holding back the breath but no, what we’re doing is just letting it out very, very slowly. Which is why singers can sing phrases of 10, 15, 20 seconds at a time.

Robert Macfarlane:
And it’s also what makes the voice box drop into our throats, which allows volume and power and resonant. Before this learn how to drop, we couldn’t talk, monkeys couldn’t do this so it’s a fairly profound physiological thing that happens, that allows us not only to talk but to sing.

John Murch:
Is it addictive?

Robert Macfarlane:
It can be, when you’re getting it right. And then when you’re getting it wrong, it’s like the worst feeling in the world. It’s a strange either/or, you often do concerts where it doesn’t quite go… Nothing’s quite working, like the breath doesn’t feel like its moving in the right way and things like that. And you come off thinking you’ve just lost a million dollars on the stock market, and everybody goes, “Oh what are you talking about? It was fine.” We feel those differences because they’re within us, extremely acutely.

John Murch:
There’s actual consciousness that you can develop yourself as a performer, within your walk and talk, to actually do it.

Robert Macfarlane:
Absolutely and I think that’s one of the most liberating things about singing, is that every day you make the decision on how you use your voice, basically. And sometimes you can find yourself doing things that you never realized your voice could do, that’s a very exciting thing and a very empowering thing.

Robert Macfarlane:
And when you come to different styles, for example opera, no microphone, so some opera singers might not like me saying this, but it’s primarily about volume. If you’ve got the projection and you’ve got the ring on the voice, there’s basic just level of volume required at all time, all pitches.

Robert Macfarlane:
Rock music of course, you’ve got a microphone down your throat, that’s not necessarily necessary, we still need cutting power but my ability to use really soft colors and all these different colors that we can use by using our instrument differently. They suddenly become available to you with a microphone right near you because volume is not an issue.

John Murch:
What’s your view on Mike Patton?

Robert Macfarlane:
Mike Patton was definitely one of my heroes and a friend of mine at school, I remember bringing Angel Dust… Nick Crow, if by some chance he’s listening, how are you? I remember him bringing Angel Dust and King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime, later to school and just being primarily blown away by virtuosity of the vocal performances on those two records. And then later Mr. Bungle, California and Tomahawk, Fantomas and things like that. This is somebody who knows how to use their voice and also knows how to play with the dangerous aspects of the voice in what I think is a fairly safe way.

Robert Macfarlane:
I think he goes to the edges in a way that most people would do themselves some damage, I think. And he goes to those extremes seemingly with some kind of knowledge of where the absolute line is. And that I really appreciate because I think there’s a lot of singers that either just push that line all the time or never even get close to it. And I think as a singer risk is something, we have to take risks.

John Murch:
Another singer-songwriter particularly, I want to just know why they fit into your realm? Michael Stipe?

Robert Macfarlane:
I just think he’s, maybe after Dylan for me the poet laureate of our little world, there’s something… If I’m looking at a purely technical vocal point of view, it’s probably not the greatest voice ever, but there’s something about Michael Stipe’s lyrics and vocal performances and just his completely immaculate sense of taste, compositional taste. In my personal channels, I think I’ve written that I think Night Swimming is maybe one of the most perfect songs about the tenderness of the loss of innocence.

Robert Macfarlane:
I think we often think of the loss of innocence as some kind of brutality and that song describes for me something completely different in those moments of awakening.

John Murch:
It is those clashing morning waves.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah.

John Murch:
The ones that you so want to put your feet through.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yes, exactly. Exactly, it reminds me, there’s a movie Moonlight a few years ago and there’s a wonderful scene of these two young men speaking on the beach just about life and their experiences. And the tide slowly comes in as they get closer to each other and more enamored of each other. That song reminds me of that kind of imagery that you have maybe a couple of times in your life and it’s so fleeting yet so profound.

Robert Macfarlane:
Michael Stipe, he’s like a conjuror of those moments. I remember seeing him, as I mentioned before, I’m a huge David Bowie fan. I remember I was living in Berlin, when Blackstar came out and there was all these massive posters everywhere and then of course he died and I went to Hansa Studios and paid my respects with everybody else.

Robert Macfarlane:
And I remember Michael Stipe doing a performance at a tribute, a week or two later, and I think he sang, The Man Who Sold the World, with the piano and he turned this into… I mean, it almost became like Send in the Clown, Steven Sondheim, it became this wonderful, wistful memory of youth. It was one of the most profound bits of singing, I think I’ve ever, ever seen and totally live, totally off the cuff. He had a little piece of paper with the first word of each line that he’d occasionally look at.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah, I just think it’s that, these conjuror moments that are completely fleeting, on New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which is one of my favorite records, I think it’s on the track Wake-up Bomb. He slowly scoops up onto a note and holds it for about 14 seconds and it’s got a tremor, it’s the most imperfect note you’ve ever heard while Mike, Berry and co are doing wonder things underneath. He just seems to get how to stay completely within those fleeting moments as a singer and I think combined with his profound lyrics, I think that’s what makes him for me, one of our great vocal artists of certainly the second half of the 20th and 21st centuries.

John Murch:
When your times comes, what song do you want played?

Robert Macfarlane:
Look, that’s an interesting one. The last song of Die Schone Mullerin, The Fair Miller-The Maid by Schubert is probably I think, the most profound lullaby ever. And then if there’s something by me, maybe the first song I ever wrote where I thought I might be a decent songwriter, a song called Friends and Enemies from my first band Glu. A song about the boat people and our inhumane treatment of them in the ’90s, saddened me greatly.

Robert Macfarlane:
I think that song because it’s simple, it’s humble and yet it was to my musical soulmate at the time and it was two 14, 15-year-old boys expressing something that we didn’t feel like adults were doing anything about. And we got together actually, or talked it at least recently about how the problem is still exactly the same. We have more refugees and soon to have more climate refugees than ever before and the treatment of these people is not only hostile but it’s dangerous in terms of setting a precedent for every other climate refugee that’s going to come in the next few decades.

Robert Macfarlane:
And so I think it is probably the song that means the most to me.

John Murch:
Is the protest song dead?

Robert Macfarlane:
I hope not. I hope not because I mean watching a recent docco of Midnight Oil in 1984, with Garrett running for the parliament as part of the nuclear disarmament party, the power that movement had with those songs as the soundtrack. I just think, it’s a sad thing if it is dead, let me put it that way.

John Murch:
And if I put too much of a spotlight on the fact that people aren’t listening to music as much as they used to.

Robert Macfarlane:
You know it’s funny, we’re consuming music more than ever but we’re not listening to it. Therein lies the rub, how can something represent a political music if it’s being consumed and thrown away? It goes against the very nature of what a protest song… A protest song is meant to drill into a certain point in time.

Robert Macfarlane:
And we’ve had protest songs since time immemorial, Giuseppe Verdi, the great Italian opera composer was always riding against the political system in thinly veiled context. Midnight Oil, Bob Dylan, I mean Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday, probably the greatest song of the 20th century, they’re all protest songs, they all have this piss and vinegar and fire underneath them. But if we’re not actively listening and we’re just consuming and throwing away, they’re rendered impotent.

John Murch:
Robert, what’s music done for you? Without music where would you be?

Robert Macfarlane:
Look I really have no idea because at once being everything in my life often to the exclusion of things I should’ve paid more attention to, you know relationships and school work and all this kind of stuff. And it’s also been something that’s… And I don’t think musicians talk about this, at times music has made me profoundly unhappy because like a white whale sometimes you’re searching for this way of doing it or searching for a song, or searching for a vocal technique. And the search is often in vain, and so it’s been a profound mix of elation that I can’t even describe, active interesting work, boredom and then also this obsessive quest to find something that I can’t quite… something intangible.

Robert Macfarlane:
There’s a complete mix, like life it traverses the peaks between sheer beauty and sheer joy, and real despair. And often, with music it’s often in the same couple of paragraphs or same couple of bars. For me it’s been a divining rod to extremes.

John Murch:
Is music then the therapy or do you need therapy outside of that music?

Robert Macfarlane:
I always thought I needed therapy.

John Murch:
Everyone seems to be getting it.

Robert Macfarlane:
I know, it’s very popular and I’ve had therapy and I’ve come to a point where I actually think looking outward is better than looking inward for almost all mental health conditions. I think once we look at the wider world…

John Murch:
Doing things for others instead of…

Robert Macfarlane:
Yeah. Yeah exactly, I’m just trying to do more things with our Syrian and Kurdish refugee population and more things on a voluntary basis and things like that. And I think, you don’t want to sound like Mother Theresa or anything like that but I think once you have an overview and start seeing the world as a mass of extraordinary people.

Robert Macfarlane:
I think those issues that we often find and we often feel this gaping hole inside and things like that, you just don’t have time anymore to look. And suddenly if you do look, it’s no longer so empty.

John Murch:
Robert, welcome back to Adelaide, South Australia.

Robert Macfarlane:
Thank you so much.

John Murch:
I hope we treat you well.

Robert Macfarlane:
Always, always.

John Murch:
The brand new single, the one from you, is called Petal, it’s from the band called Cold Sleep. It is a double A side.

Robert Macfarlane:
Yes, the other song has a bit of a tongue twister for a title it’s called, Stopping All Stations, Except South Kensington, and a pretty beautiful song actually about mental health and about people being stuck and feeling isolated and feeling alone. Ash used to take the train past South Kensington Station and she’d always look out on this dilapidated railway station. And she started wondering, how it would be if that was a person, if they kept going past somebody every day, neglecting them, nobody stopped, nobody even really knew they were there, how that would feel?

Robert Macfarlane:
The single has been released emphasizing those mental health aspects. And so we’ve toured in February, supporting that single and donating all the proceeds to BeyondBlue, to keep those hotlines and online forums open because they’re often the first port of call when somebody’s having a crisis. Especially if you’re alone, especially if you’re isolated. That’s a cause we all feel very strongly about at Cold Sleep.

John Murch:
Robert, thank you very much for your time.

Robert Macfarlane:
Thank you so much for having me.

 

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