Interview: Glenn Richards

To be honest I haven’t really checked out Wikipedia Glenn Richards in a little while. The cat part of it I find a little disturbing – that couldn’t be further from the truth. But if you’re asking me to use my imagination, I caught a very early flight this morning – a 5AM start – so I’m coming up with something on the spot isn’t going to happen!

Where did you fly from?

From Melbourne to Hobart. It wasn’t a long flight, just a stupidly early one. I’m not quite sure why I needed to fly that early. We finished some shows in Ballarat a couple of nights ago, but for some reason they had me pencilled in for an early one this morning.

How were the shows for you?

I’m never a fan of starting off in Melbourne – that’s generally where we do our main show – so starting a tour off there is not generally advisable. But it turned out really nicely. We had a good crowd turn up, everybody was into the sprit of it and it worked really well.

The spirit of this tour seems to be that the two of you are going to play whatever you feet like or whatever the crowd requests. Is it liberating to be able to do that?

Yeah. I guess it is nice to have confidence in the crowd to pick from your catalogue and also the confidence that you can play yourself out of a hole if you get stuck. It makes it a lot of fun. I could be forgiven for being a little tired of these songs, but they have a new lease.

Has this been the kind of break that you needed as an artist after doing Augie March for so long?

Yeah. I moved away from Melbourne to Hobart about three months ago, and that was kind of the final piece in the puzzle as far as re-energising is concerned. To have another crack at Augie has always been the plan. The Glimjack record was something I had always spoken to the guys about, and we figured if we could do it as quickly and as cheaply as possible then it would be a nice little thing to keep us all busy.

Is it something you plan to keep on the burner for the rest of your career?

I don’t see why not. All it’s about is making a record when you want to make a record; you’re not tied into a cycle where you make a record every three of four years. You then have to see if the record works, and if it doesn’t then you’re stuffed, and if it does then you have to go on the road forever and by the end of that you’re kind of stuffed anyway. So this was something we were never going to tour on heavily: it’s just for fun and it’s given me some ideas about where and what to do next.

What’s next?

The next one will be a little more ambitious, hopefully with the same spirit.

How much of what you write comes from that imaginary headspace? Is it OK to sacrifice personal detail and just make stuff up?

I’d have to get deep into the process to give you a satisfactory answer. Along with that would come a lot of boring dross. But the stuff that I end up keeping always has an element of the personal to it. You have to feel something while you’re writing, because if there’s no feeling you can’t perform it. I’m not a huge fan of confessional lyricists, but at the same time I don’t like it when somebody’s obviously trying to sound detached.

How do you find reproducing something that is quite personal (whether imaginary or true) onstage night after night? Is it draining for you?

It’s a difficult one to analyse. A lot of the time it’s fatigue that disables your ability to find feeling; if you’re tired then you can’t quite get there. That can lead to failure. I’ve been told that the best performances I’ve done have been ones where I maybe haven’t been feeling it as much as opposed to the ones where I really am inside it. What’s coming out of a PA is very different to the singer’s conception of it a lot of the time. It gets harder and harder to reproduce genuine emotion over time, but you do get better at giving a song its due.