{"id":69446,"date":"2023-11-15T23:02:10","date_gmt":"2023-11-15T23:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/likecelebwn.com\/?p=69446"},"modified":"2023-11-15T23:02:10","modified_gmt":"2023-11-15T23:02:10","slug":"i-often-feel-like-im-treading-water-gareth-liddiard-looks-back-to-move-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/likecelebwn.com\/lifestyle\/i-often-feel-like-im-treading-water-gareth-liddiard-looks-back-to-move-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I often feel like I\u2019m treading water\u2019: Gareth Liddiard looks back to move forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

By <\/span>Barry Divola<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Gareth Liddiard is lying on the floor of his home in Nagambie, a small town on the Goulburn River, a 90-minute drive north of Melbourne. He\u2019s wearing a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt and a trucker cap with the word \u201cREDNECK\u201d emblazoned across the front. And he\u2019s surrounded by guitars, amplifiers, keyboards and electronic equipment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is our recording studio, slash loungeroom, slash kitchen,\u201d he says in the languid Aussie drawl fans of his bands The Drones and Tropical F— Storm know well. \u201cWe live here in this demountable classroom and it\u2019s amazingly cheap. It\u2019s like living like a rich person when we\u2019re basically broke. We call the place Dodgy Brothers Studios because everything\u2019s falling to bits all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Gareth Liddiard: \u201cThere are ups and downs.\u201d<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Eddie Jim<\/cite><\/p>\n

In fact, lately things are falling to bits in more ways than one. Fiona Kitschin, who is Liddiard\u2019s partner in life and music, was diagnosed with breast cancer late last year. Treatment is taking longer than expected. Liddiard started a GoFundMe in August. In typically blunt style he wrote: \u201cThis has completely f—ed us up financially.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pair usually plays 100-150 gigs a year to support themselves, but the prospect of touring with Tropical F— Storm is on ice until bass player Kitschin recovers from recent surgery and regular rounds of chemotherapy every three weeks until April next year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are ups and downs,\u201d admits Liddiard. \u201cBut the downs are rarer than they were. You just get used to it after a while.\u201d<\/p>\n

The GoFundMe raised $130,000, which stunned the couple, but made them feel a strange sense of guilt.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor over 15 years we\u2019ve worked hard and managed to make a living out of music, but we\u2019ve always been semi-broke because we\u2019re not a huge band. So friends tried to assuage our guilt and explained that it\u2019s nice that people who have followed us all this time wanted to show that they care and they wanted to help.\u201d<\/p>\n

As well as taking time out to care for Kitschin, Liddiard thought of a way he could play music in the meantime \u2013 undertaking a solo tour behind the recent reissue of his 2010 solo album, Strange Tourist.<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Gareth Liddiard performs with The Drones in 2016.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Daniel Pockett<\/cite><\/p>\n

That record surprised a lot of people, as it was simply vocals and acoustic guitar. The Drones, which formed in 1997 and went on hiatus in 2016, were a gnarly beast of an outfit, with Liddiard\u2019s snaggle-toothed howl of a voice backed by an untamed, incendiary band that often seemed on the verge of exploding on stage.<\/p>\n

Liddiard himself has described them as \u201can obnoxious barrage of horrible noise\u201d. That\u2019s a typically self-deprecatory and somewhat harsh assessment.<\/p>\n

Their 2005 song Shark Fin Blues,<\/i> a nine-minute opus that mined Liddiard\u2019s depression following the death of his mother, was voted by a Triple J poll of songwriters as the greatest Australian song of all time.<\/p>\n

When Liddiard started work on Strange Tourist,<\/i> he approached it with the same intensity he approaches everything. For days, he read books and magazine articles and went down internet rabbit holes, mining information.<\/p>\n

All of that fed into songs such as The Radicalisation Of D,<\/i> a 16-minute rumination on David Hicks, who was held in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for five years after going to Afghanistan to train with Al-Qaeda. The song is full of Australian slang and vernacular \u2013 Hills Hoist, white Tip Top, goon, ciggie. Much like Sufjan Stevens on his perceptive take on a serial killer in John Wayne Gacy Jr.,<\/i> Liddiard tried to look beyond the headlines.<\/p>\n

There are ups and downs, but the downs are rarer than they were. You just get used to it after a while.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seemed to me no one ever bothered to think about why people like David Hicks do these things. I grew up in a rough environment like he did. Where I lived, in Sorrento, which was the northern edge of Perth back then, there were alcoholic parents, and friends\u2019 dads were prison guards and soldiers, and everyone knew the houses where weird things were going on. I could see how he could have got to the point where he felt so disenfranchised and helpless that he thought the only thing to do was go and fight in some war.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Gareth Liddiard performing at Dark Mofo in 2015.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Christopher Pearce<\/cite><\/p>\n

The title track is by his own estimate 75 per cent autobiographical. It includes references to living out of a Mitsubishi van and the last \u2013 and worst \u2013 day job he ever held.<\/p>\n

\u201cFi and I had to do work for the dole for this company in Melbourne that owned all the TVs in hospitals and patients had to rent them for seven bucks a day,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI\u2019d go into cancer wards and AIDS wards and ask people to pay up. I once had to get a girl who was in the heart ward to give us over 50 bucks she owed. I found her room and walked in, and I thought she was asleep, but as I looked closer, I realised she was dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether he was writing about the public\u2019s adoration of highwire walker Charles Blondin or betrayal and recriminations in wartime France, Liddiard worked hard at building the worlds within each song.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, songwriting is like a train set, with a diorama of a town around it,\u201d he says. \u201cYou know you\u2019re going to need a traffic light and a poplar tree and a baby in a pram and a broken window in the house on the edge of town. You have to populate it with all this stuff. A song is a universe you have to fill with everything from the weather to the state of mind of the character singing the song.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strange Tourist<\/i> has garnered many accolades over the years, and not just award nominations and rave reviews \u2013 artist Jason Benjamin was so inspired by it that he decided to paint Liddiard for the 2011 Archibald Prize; playwright Mark Rogers used The Radicalisation Of D <\/i>as inspiration for his play Superheroes<\/i>; British actor George McKay based his voice in True History of the Kelly Gang<\/i> on Liddiard\u2019s vocal delivery on the album.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just feel fortunate the record is still in print and people seem to be still interested in it,\u201d says Liddiard, shrugging. \u201cI often feel like I\u2019m treading water. I have all the neuroses and anxieties in my head like everyone else, and I do things like meditation to turn that down. But I have the music in there too. It\u2019s always there. And that\u2019s why I do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gareth Liddiard plays The Factory Theatre on November 17.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To read more from<\/b> Spectrum<\/i><\/b>, visit our page here.<\/b><\/p>\n

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By Barry Divola Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Gareth Liddiard is lying on the floor of his home in Nagambie, a small town on the Goulburn River, a 90-minute drive north of Melbourne. 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