One time member of the Models, professional musician and composer for the last 35 years. It’s an absolute pleasure to welcome to the Australian Music Vault, Andrew Duffield. Welcome. Thank You Jane. It’s good to be here. Your career is incredible.
I want to start at the very beginning. Your father was a foreign correspondent for the London Evening Standard. True? That’s right. Yeah. How did that happen? Look, my father was kind of an older guy when I came into the world.
I guess he was 46 or something. He was, my mother was 18 years younger. She was a model that was visiting London with her father in the about 1950 or so and met my father over in London. And he was a very cool guy.
He had been a foreign correspondent for the London Evening Standard. He’d covered a lot of the Second World War. And wherever he was stationed, which could have been in Cairo, he was based in Athens for a period of time. He after the war, he became involved in the
Israeli-Palestine, you know, the establishment of Israel, that conflict that was happening around ’48 and so on. He was, he always claimed he was sitting on the toilet of the in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when it was bombed, you know.
He would recall leaning on the piano of the famous jazz pianist Art Tatum in clubs in England. He was a fascinating guy. So you grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Armadale and I believe you were initially given piano and guitar lessons, but you didn’t take to
Them did you? No, no, I wasn’t. I wasn’t any good at piano lessons. I wasn’t a good sight reader I couldn’t make it to the end of a stave. You know, often reading, interpreting the notes, and I would become restless and want to take it off in my own make sense of
The music in my own way. Why do you think that was, that you couldn’t make sense of it? I wasn’t able to break down the music into its rhythm, the intended rhythm. They were often pre-existing pieces that were designed to build finger dexterity or strength or
Something. They weren’t necessarily about melody or that I couldn’t connect with them on any way, I suppose, on any level. So I would, in frustration, sort of move towards my own, you know, point of satisfaction. Grade five. You start a new school in
The suburb of Kew in Melbourne, and that that school that you meet somebody larger than life who would become a lifelong friend and probably changed the course of your life in a sense, I think it’s fair to say. Who was that person? That was Ollie Olsen, you know, Ollie Ian Olsen
As he was as he was known, you know, at this at school. Ollie didn’t come along until, until secondary school at Trinity, you know. So, I had an established group of friends there, and Ollie was invited at the last moment to
Fulfil a role in a school play called The Parker Plan. And he had to do it at really at the very last moment. And he did a great job. He was fantastic. And he thought so, too. Was this an acting role was it? It was an acting role.
Yeah, it was a play called The Parker Plan. And he let us know how good he… ‘I was really good, wasn’t I?’ And I’d go ‘Yeah’. I really admired Ollie’s ego. I thought it was fantastic and I wasn’t of that, cut of the same thread, and he
Really made an impression on everybody. Ollie would tell us these stories that we just somehow didn’t really believe but they were just so entertaining that that we certainly didn’t want him to stop. And so yeah, he was he was larger than life at that particular
Point. He had great musical insight. You know, he always knew what was coming up next as the flavour of the month. You know, he was he was just first onto everything. So we went through that period of glam rock, you know, so those years like 1972 were very important.
And you’d have an act on the radio like Marc Bolan and T.Rex you know. Early Bowie. Gary Glitter we adored. We thought Gary Glitter was fantastic. And you know, I had a paper round, and I was able to get a front row, middle seats for
The first Gary Glitter shows. We were getting into the Rolling Stones kind of period. It was well, where they were. Mick was wearing some very flashy kind of gear. And yeah, so it was a really exciting time musically. And Ollie was kind of, you know, pulling us all
In those in that kind of direction I think, you know. You became a regular visitor to Ollie Olsen’s house in Blackburn and became almost an honorary member of his family. What was his family like? Well, you know, he had a much older sister who doted on him, Marianne,
And she was into some really cool bands and stuff, you know, the hippie bands. Ollie’s father, Peter, was very gruff, you know, Norwegian man. And Ollie’s mum was the kind of mum that everybody would want, and she would call, when Ollie and I were together,
She would call us her two Vikings, which felt like a great thrill. So where did your love of music come from and how did you decide that you wanted… Well, my father, my father had played piano and he’d have a few drinks.
He was part of a you know… journalists love to drink basically. And that was his kind of community back here. But he had a kind of a real job. You know, he was a PR guy at an advertising agency called J Walter Thompson in William Street.
And two of the people that worked at that that advertising agency were Judith Durham and Athol Guy you know from The Seekers. And so anyway dad would kind of come home after a few drinks and he would then he would play the piano and I just adored it. He would play
Jazz. He had kind of little quite fat hands that I would try and discern what he was playing, you know, he was playing sort of jazz cluster. Yeah, kind of clusters that I couldn’t assert exactly what he was doing. And I adored what he what he was he was
Playing. He wrote songs for, for us as kids, and he would put on, feign a really growly, scary voice. I loved his way of speaking. We read the same, you know, when I was failing at school, he would encourage me to read.
So we made a relationship through writers like Kurt Vonnegut, you know, and who used a lot of very simple language often, or Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson. We went to see Hunter S Thompson do a kind of a Q&A at the Melbourne Town Hall.
He was just there to speak, and they played this ungodly noise. There was first there was a gap for all the Hells Angels eventually carrying boxes, big crates of beer to settle into this evening. And he was… I can’t imagine Hells Angels people wanting to see
Someone like Hunter S Thompson. Well, he had this connection with their brotherhood in the States, you know, and it was astonishing. And it was a great thing for my elderly dad and I to do together. And I somehow managed
To record this. There was this, you know, giant double four-way speakers and setup and it started with this almighty primal noise and it was like screaming, but it was like primates. And, and eventually when he comes on stage, the very first question he gets
Asked is, ‘Well, what was that? What was that noise?’ And it was it was magnificent. It was chilling. And it was like nothing we’d ever heard before. And he explained, he said, ‘Well, Rolling Stone sent me to do a story on mental asylums. And this guy… I was I’d had
Some mescaline and I was.. The acid was coming on and stuff, and I’m recording this conversation and this guy’s brain snaps and he started this, this screaming and well, you know, the drugs were just too good. I sat back and I recorded the, the whole thing.
And at the end of this session, I sent the tape off to Rolling Stone and said, ‘I can’t write that’, And anyway, but he’d managed to hang on to this tape. No you couldn’t write that experience down. And that was a formidable kind of soundscape to witness.
I loved things like that that pushed… Was it music? Well, kind of, yeah, it was. And was it, you know, otherworldly or something, you know, that’s what music does. It transforms us. It takes us to another place. I was kind of a sort of a… that cassette because I managed to somehow record
That performance became like a really prized possession on that community of people that I eventually shared houses. So that was the sort of experiences that I had with my dad. He was more accepting of getting me through this period.
You know, I got busted for smoking pot at the age of 16. That’s how I ended up in advertising. Because smoking pot back then was a… It was a big deal. It was white crime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they considered this, you know, this pot that was, you know, about
Maybe the size of drum packet or something like that. And they considered it a trafficable amount. So that was added to the charges, you know, and yeah, so I had to kind of announce this to my parents. My mum cried. And eventually they sort of said,
‘Well, you’re going to have to get a job now’. I was already out of school. I was working in photographic labs. I was interested in photography. We grew up with a darkroom in our home, you know. That was avant-garde. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, that was I
Mean, my dad, you know, as a journalist, you know, you would travel with a photographer, you know, and so some of his great mates were photographers. So they said, you’ve got to get a job, you know, for your upcoming court case.
And, and so it was seen that I should go to we had connections to George Patterson’s advertising agency, which was the at that stage the biggest agency in Australia. I went to George Patterson’s along with my folio, and I met a head art director and stuff.
But it was I got a job in the dispatch department. And, and that led to me being promoted to an account executive, which was kind of… the account executive is the guy at an advertising agency who is the bridge between the creatives creating the work and
The client. My father used to call them the Empty Suit department. You know, it’s like there were suits, but there was no one home there, you know. So they were, you know, they were not creative people. Well, before you got into advertising, you’d end up studying
Electronic music under the tutelage of Felix Werder, who was a classical composer and a critic in Melbourne. He wrote for Opera Australia. He wrote theme tunes for the ABC. A very influential electronic composer, I guess it’s fair to say. Tell me about Felix.
Yeah, meeting Felix was fantastic. That was a Council of Adult Education course. You could get access to the, the place and they had all these original modular synthesizers, you know, so there were all these just exotic things. It was a gold mine of early
Electronic gear. It was before the, you know, the Japanese companies like Roland and Korg and the Yamaha had really come into the market with more affordable synths, you know, and these were, you know, synthesizers in a briefcase that had been created by the people
That worked on the Doctor Who soundtrack and so on, you know, for the BBC Radiophonic workshop. And so they were tremendous instruments and they were extremely expensive. And working with Felix was very eccentric. He’d come out to Australia as,
As a refugee. He was one of the Dunera boys, effectively. His father was, they’d escaped Germany and his father was a kapellmeister, a choirmaster at a synagogue that the really important 20th century figure, Arnold Schoenberg, had had been a part of that that particular fraternity and stuff.
So that’s a great connection. I love that he’s a pivotal figure in 20th century music Arnold Schoenberg. And so Felix, you know, had to abandon Germany at the age of 16 and escaped that. And in many ways, he was kind of like a like a 16-year-old, you know, like
A rebel. He was rebellious. He was his music was complex and difficult. You know, that was kind of music that was being written in in the post-war avant garde and electronic music really fitted into that. Often they weren’t, you know, consonant and sweet and nice. They were dissonant and
Clashing and tough, you know. So it was an incredible learning ground. And of course, Brian Eno had used these instruments. You know, he would get the outputs of his band Roxy Music, and feed them in through his, you know, synthesizer in a
Briefcase. The EMS AKS that Ollie and I grew to covet, and feed the whole band through it and what he called ‘treat the band’. So it was a, yeah, it was a great period. And yes, definitely that, that affected Ollie’s and my lives forever. So not only is
Ollie taking this course with you, but also Karen Ansel from The Reels. Yeah, well, yeah. There were a number of people, you know, I mean, Karen, fantastic musician, a great band. Her band The Reels were just wonderful all through the eighties. So you and Ollie decide to form a band
Called Whirlywirld 1978, taking what you had learnt from this brand-new instrument, this exciting instrument called the synthesiser, and applying it to, I guess, a punk rock ethos in a sense. Yeah, yeah. In many ways, yeah.
Ollie. Ollie. Ollie was, he was managing to get by on the dole, I think whilst I was working at the advertising agency trying to get my own synthesiser going. I mean, look, if you had a, if you had a synthesiser, you were in the band, you know, just about, that
Could buy you a spot in the band. But you know, around this period of time, there was a synthesiser by Korg that was released called the Korg MS-20. It’s a very famous synthesiser and in many ways. I got one in Swanston Street, Melbourne, at a shop called Dynaudio, I think for $650.
And that was cheaper than you could buy a Fender Strat for. So it was all of a sudden this kind of price point, you know, it made those instruments kind of affordable and attractive. And they were they were, you know, like they had a proper keyboard fixed
To them so that you could actually play in tune, unlike these other earlier instruments that we were using with Felix at the CAE studio that were more sound design-ey kind of materials. So all of a sudden you could construct, you could play these instruments
Kind of more melodically and put them together in a band. Now there were no sequencers at that stage. Giorgio Moroder had songs with those very sequenced bass lines and so on that was all yet to come, you know. So but we were very interested in that idea
Of repetition and so on. If you wanted to do those kind of lines as very repetitive lines, you had to physically play them. So it would be bom bom bom bom bom bom bom bom bom bom. You know. It was and someone would have to hold that down, that thing for the
Duration and, and yeah, it was, it was a terrific band Whirlywirld and Ollie you know as, as you know, he wrote some tremendous songs, you know, at that particular time. The band’s name was Whirlywirld. I mean, honestly, what a
Fantastic title. He was just brilliant with song titles. He had this kind of astute eye for what was going on in the industry. And he was on top of all that stuff. You know, we’d keep on top of it by reading the English press. You know, you’d go
Into town on a Saturday morning, and you’d buy the NME or Sounds, that would have all the news from England and hence all around the world. And yeah, we were across that. It was a very contemporary band. It’s 1978. Punk rock has kind of
Infiltrated in Melbourne in a sense with bands like Boys Next Door. How did you fit into the whole Melbourne scene and what do you remember about that time? The common interest in, in punk rock through independent record stores, bringing all those bizarre seven-inch records into Australia by these exotic
English bands, English or German wherever, New York. Yeah, all of that stuff was beginning to pour in. Those magazines were of great interest to us all. There were gigs coming up, you know, that were run by people like Laurie Richards or Dolores San Miguel
And these other promoters that were just about that particular scene. So there’d be people from all over Melbourne that were interested in those kinds of all sorts of places, you know, convening to, to listen to those, those bits of music. I remember Chris,
Chris Walsh and Gary Gray were a part of the band with Ollie and I think that just came through a, you know, a newspaper like ‘Apply here. We’re looking for likeminded people, love the MC5 and the Flamin Groovies’, whatever it was. And so that was how people
Kind of got together and made those connections. By that stage, I was living with a guy called Tracy Pew, in Blanche Street, St Kilda and yeah, wonderful guy. Another, you know, tremendous person. He was the bass player for Boys Next Door. That’s right. And is that how you ended up
Playing on their 1979 album, Door, Door? Yeah, I played on I played on Door, Door. And the only instrument that I had to play was the mad briefcase synthesiser, you know, that couldn’t keep a tune. You couldn’t ask it to play a melody, so it was just simply noises.
It was great to be invited. It was kind of a completely at right angles in many ways to what they were doing. It was their first album, you know. The only conventional thing that I played on that album was the strings on Shivers.
You know. We recorded at a studio that was owned by one of the guys from the Little River Band, which was about as far away from punk rock as you can get. But that was a great studio. And but the other great studio that was in use then for all of those
Up-and-coming groups to get their act together was Richmond Recorders. And so, we were doing, finishing, Shivers with Tony Cohen by that stage you know and yeah there was a string synthesiser on the ground and it was discussed ‘well who should
Play who should play this line for these strings to be introduced?’ And yeah, so that was my contribution to that song. Tracy Pew sadly passed away. Yeah. Was it…? It was quite a bit later. Yeah. He became, you know, that was the Boys Next Door, the Door, Door
Album. And of course, they transformed to the Birthday Party. Tracy was a remarkable kind of cowboy, larger than life person, incredibly erudite. I know that Nick Cave misses him to this day. And yeah, he sadly passed away, but not until ‘85, ‘86, I’m not sure.
The Door, Door thing was simply an experiment. It was simply playing on that, adding an element to the to the Door, Door album. I don’t think Nick Cave went near a synthesiser for another 20 years. Did it help their album? I don’t think it did at all.
It just confused the whole issue. But maybe that was the point. In the meantime, 1979, you met Sean Kelly. I was living in Elwood, and I got a knock on the door, and it was from Mark Ferrie and Johnny Crash from The Models, and they were losing their keyboard player Ash
Wednesday from the extraordinary band, JAB. And they were interested to see whether I would audition with the band, you know. I didn’t know, The Models were, I knew I was aware of them, but they were a different kind of scene. It was very, you know. Do you remember the first time
You went to the rehearsal? Well, I remember going to see the Models play their last performance with Ash Wednesday playing, and they were upstairs at the Ballroom. And I mean, there were 1200 people in that room. And they had an
Extraordinary following at this point. They’d started in 1978. You know, they had the title the Models came from the original bass player, this guy Pierre, who named it after a song from Kraftwerk. You know, ‘She’s a model in a magazine’, you know, and we’ve been
Trying to live down the band’s name ever since, you know. Anyway, but so I went to that show and Ash Wednesday is a great synthesiser player and he was just all over it. He was performing on a synthesiser called the ARP Odyssey, and he was just making
Incredible noise. He was just fantastic, Ash. Anyway, so they were the boots that I had to kind of fill. And I went along to that rehearsal with and met Sean. And you know, and Ash and Johnny and just the four of us. And they had signs of going beyond the inner-city scene.
The gigs that were around that sort of dealt with punk rock, the Tiger Lounge or the, you know,the various gigs in town and Carlton and so on. And so, they had a booking agency. So, there were gigs ready to go and it was like a real,
Real band, you know, moving into that kind of pub rock scene, you know? Do you remember the first time you actually played with the Models? Yeah, yeah. We did, we did. My initiation was a pub called The Red Lion Hotel in Salamanca place in Hobart.
We did three shows down there to kind of get me going. We came back up to the Kingston Hotel in Highett Street in Richmond, up the road from Molly’s house, great pub and our support band was this new, you know, this new arrival from Perth called
The Scientists with Kim Salmon. So that was a heck of an introduction. And yeah, so that was the beginning of it. In 1980, Models released their first single, Early Morning Brain. It was a simple punk rock song with a lot of bleepy electronics on it. Yeah, Again,
It had the AKS playing on it. There’s this like really fast little sequencing going… You know, it it was a song. It’s called Early Morning Brain (it’s Not the Same as Sobriety). So, it was so it had this, you know, like a hangover.
It had noise in it and which yeah, it was it was recorded live at the Tiger Lounge in Richmond. And so it was very haphazard. That was a flip… Is that the one that we did with the Boys Next Door on the other side? Yeah. Right.
Did you have a vision? Did Models have a vision of where they wanted to go or you just happy to be playing this avant-garde, yet simple at the time, music? Uh, look, the songs were very poppy and there were a number of songwriters in the band.
You know, Mark Ferrie, the band’s bass player, had played with Peter Lillie and with Stephen Cummings and the Pelaco Brothers, and he had a songwriting approach all of his own that he would contribute to the band as well. Look, it was always a disparate band.
It wasn’t like the, you know, the grammar school kids from Caulfield, you know, being the Boys Next Door, you know, playing together. It wasn’t like the Ferris brothers, you know, who formed INXS, you know, it was a disparate bunch of people that were just came together
Because of the idea of punk rock, new wave, whatever you want to call it. It was always a bit chaotic. It was a difficult band to market, you know. What, who are we? What are we? They’re perennial questions that we still ask. In 1980 you support the Ramones. Yeah, Yeah.
Was that like? That was a remarkable thing. So we did two nights at Chequers Nightclub supporting the Ramones. I mean, hello! And then a gig at what they called the Hellenic Club in Canberra. And then as a punter, you know, I remember going to see
Them play Latrobe Uni, I think, on the Friday night, not with us supporting but just able to go and enjoy them as a band. You know, they were the key figures, you know, this idea, this collision of, of punk rock and electronic music happened for me with the
Ramones in New York and Kraftwerk in Germany, you know, this kind of they were both kind of comic book bands. You know, they both looked like cartoon characters or something. We adored both of them. And the… what you would call the post-punk scene in Melbourne was
Kind of a collage of those two ideas of electronic music and punk rock. These two ideas of approaching musical freedom, you know, by you didn’t need any, you know, I could use my first grade, you know, limited piano technique or something to bang out
These kind of songs. And it was it was a great it was a really great period. And it had a kind of an ethic to it as well. It was the idea was that everybody should play. The idea and as you’ve spoken about with Ollie, the ‘Little Bands’ and so on, they were
People that couldn’t play musical instruments, you know, if they could play a musical instrument, pick up one, you couldn’t play and bang that. And you’re in the band. You’re in the band. And so it was it felt almost like an altruistic goal to that was
Your mission was to say ‘If I can do this, you can too’. DIY ethic. Which is very punk rock. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Your debut album, Alphabravocharliedeltaechofoxtrotgolf is released November 1980, but it’s the EP Cut Lunch afterwards, which features Two Cabs
To the Toucan and Atlantic Romantic that goes top 40 for you. Yeah. And again, you know, you mentioned the cartooning. I mean, Two Cabs to the Toucan as a music video is all cartoon and stop motion photography which again you were dabbling in at the time as
Well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know that the clip made by Ray Argall and… his partner was an animator, and they were a group of people, film editors and so on that were working together to, you know, one of them produced a tremendous little film of moving around
Inside the Ballroom through, strangely enough, The Models performing, but you never, never seen. It’s just a look at the audience. It’s a wonderful film with a soundtrack by a band called Equal Local. But yeah, so that was the collective that were making the clip.
And they were they were great, great people. And that led to the first film soundtrack that I got to do in ’82. Let’s go back to Two Cabs to the Toucan. Two Cabs. Was that a cut and paste effort on the
Lyrics? Cos… Well, you know, that’s you know, that’s Sean. It’s, you know, Sean is um… Yeah, he was a very bizarre, bizarre lyricist. I love Sean’s titles for songs. That was my title. It was, it was, we played with The Police, you know. The benefit of
Working with Gudinski and his organisations, you know, it was kind of called the Melbourne Mafia and so on. I mean, Michael had his, his finger in a number of pots, and so he had an international touring company, you know, the Frontier Tours and stuff. And so we were the
Beneficiary of that often. So with the Premier Harbour Agency and traveling that circuit and, and we would, you know, we were lucky enough to score supports like that with, with a band like The Police. And that was how we got to we got offered a recording
Contract with A&M Records in Europe, based in London and the Cut Lunch 10 inch EP, not a 12 inch, but a 10 inch EP, which fit six tracks well. They were just demos. They were just meant to be demos to send over to for our next record, which would become Local
And/or General. Two Cabs to the Toucan was well what we did our show at Memorial Drive in Adelaide we needed, we thought we’d go and celebrate after the gig was the biggest show that we’d done up until that date and, and how would we get where was the place to go in
Town? It was a club called The Toucan. And how what would we need? We’d need two cabs. Two cabs for the Toucan. Exactly. There you go. So Sean just riffs on that idea, you know, of pontificating about, well, how will we get there, you know? I’ve always wondered
What that song was about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don’t know how Tel Aviv ends up in there, but, you know. You mentioned Local and/or General. An incredible album. 1981 that came out included the title track, which still to this day stands up, as well as
Unhappy. But it’s 1982 that James Freud joins the band. That’s right. Do you want to talk about that? Look, we were we’d been through a number of different line ups and drummers were coming and going. And eventually Mark, Mark Ferrie left the band and James had had been working with Gary
Numan over in England for a long time on an album that I don’t know whether it ever came out or not, but James returned to Australia and was just kind of hanging around and stuff and Sean and James were mates from school, you know, they’d been to school
Together and, and formed bands prior to that, you know The Spread or the Teenage Radio Stars was and before they kind of you know they both kind of strong songwriters in their own right, so they went off and did their own their own thing. James was a kind of a you
Know, he seemed he kind of had his own career going at that time. So it seemed like a really unusual thing. And was it going to be a how long would…how happy would James be just playing bass guitar? But yeah, he joined the band and I think we recorded On with
Lobby Loyde. That was our first project with, with James playing bass. So 1983, you start working on The Pleasure of Your Company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which would become a landmark album in Models canon. Yeah. And a very hip and happening producer Nick Launay, who had just worked with
Midnight Oil on 10 to 1. Yeah. Comes on to the fold. That’s right. And this was to be the big one, I guess. And so Mushroom really threw some money behind it. You know, the project with A&M, you know, came to an end after one album. A very good Local
And/or General album. And so we kind of regrouped and there was one tune on it that particularly stood out and that people thought, this song has real potential. You know, the Models hadn’t lived up to expectations. We were always to be the next
Big thing, and it hadn’t happened. You know, we were still… you know, getting our act together in many ways. I loved the Paul Kelly interview with Australian Music Vault, where he describes his, you know, his feelings about his first couple of records. I know
Nick Cave would feel the same way about his, and we felt the same way about our product that we were yet to go, ‘this this is the group’ and Nick Launay really cemented that for us with, he was an extraordinary, you know… a British engineer, a couple of years younger than us.
Geeky guy. And it was an amazing relationship that we were able to strike up with Nick. Although we’d worked with Tony, we loved Tony. This was… and Stephen W Tayler in England for Local and/or General. But Nick Launay was absolutely next level. And you
Bring a song to that recording session that you were working on, which at the time was called Gag Bag. Gag Bag. And was your attempt at perhaps trying to emulate Stevie Wonder’s Superstition. Yeah. It didn’t quite work out that way. However, it was a massive hit.
It was called I Hear Motion. Yeah, that’s right. So you know that. And look, it’s a funny thing to say. Well, was the technology, you know, that initiated that? But in some extent it was. It was a synthesiser from America that Gudinski
Brought back to Australia for us after we signed with A&M Records, you know, and it was called the Prophet-5 and it could play five notes at a time, which was unique. Previously you could only play a single note unless you had lots and lots of money.
You could only play one note at a time. Monophonic synthesisers. And this was a polyphonic synthesiser. And yes, I tried to… I was never good at, as I’ve said with reading music, I was no good at reading music. I was also I would get distracted when
I was trying to interpret it, figure out a tune, you know, and I’d end up in my own world. And that’s the way that that riff from I Hear Motion came about was a sort of like a clavinet sound, a bit like Stevie Wonder’s, you know, ompa, ompa, ompa, ompa, you know,
Thing. So and but it was a tap, tap, tap, tap. I was just it was just a it’s kind of… And when I try and explain it to people, it’s kind of like playing the bongos where you use the front and of your hand and the tips of
Your hands to play it. And that’s how the keyboard line works. And it feels somewhat like playing the drums. And Sean would sing the song and he would have a lyric that would go ‘when it is Christmas for everyone else. I feel like I’ve missed an appointment. And
When it is Easter for everyone else, I feel like I’ve missed an appointment’. And Sean would just mentally run through his head on stage thinking of other public festive occasions and stuff. Thanksgiving and things that didn’t belong in Australia, you know.
Hence the line Say, Happy birthday, say Happy New Year. Yeah. You know, all those lyrics didn’t come out until in the in the studio, you know, that we you know, we block booked this studio in Sydney, owned by Billy Field called Paradise, and Sean and James would sit
In the spa and they’d you know, they’d do that cut up form of song writing. That David Bowie made so, so famous. Yeah. And they were so influenced by Bowie, you know, And so it was, it was, yeah, just a whole group of… It’s so bizarre. I mean, it’s… What is it
About that song? I’ve never quite understood it. I’ve never really asked the question. It went to number 16 on the charts. So it did become the big single. Yeah. What do you think about the song now when you hear it? It still gets played on commercial radio to this
Day. Look, it took the band to new places. I still like it. I still really enjoy it. And you know, it was a master work by Nick Launay to cut up those drums. He’d already done it on the Power and the Passion for Midnight Oil. And we had this fantastic
Drummer, Barton Price, banging out these drums. And, and it’s also important because James Freud plays, the solo in that song is played on a bass. You know, it’s just it’s remarkable and it’s a beautiful line. We still, you know, Mark Ferrie, we’re still
Performing the song and Mark Ferrie copies that bass line because it’s so, so important to the song. It’s not often that a song has a bass solo in it, and it really showed a different side of James Freud that wasn’t evident at that time, that he was actually a really good musician.
Also on that particular album, The Pleasure of Your Company, No Shoulders, No Head. And I’m thinking it’s a drinking song because it mentioned you set the video in a pub, and it talks about the head of the beer? Is that…? No, no, no, No Shoulders, No Head.
No. I think it’s basically a song about a hangover where you, you know you can’t get your, you know, your head together. Right. Got it. But again, extraordinary and ‘farther to the thought’. Yeah, it’s a great song. I really enjoy that song. Tell me about landing the support to the David Bowie tour
For the Serious Moonlight Tour, which was a massive tour in Australia at the time. David Bowie was massive. Yeah. Yeah, he really was. It was, he was the biggest act in the world with that Let’s Dance period. And there was an extraordinary tour that played to, I don’t
Know, 350,000 people or something on that, on that… What do you remember about that tour? Oh, it was it was a remarkable tour to do playing places like VFL Park, which doesn’t exist anymore. But that was…We’d started with three shows in Perth and a
Venue that held 3000, I’m sorry, just 7000 people I think was their Entertainment Centre at the time. And we got to do three shows. I think it was them, you know, getting their act together for that leg of their tour, a big world tour. And when we moved across to
Adelaide and played the Adelaide Cricket Ground and so on. We had a day off in in Adelaide and it had been, it was James Freud’s birthday on this, on this day off, the day before the show. And I’d fallen asleep in the afternoon, and I woke up and
Everybody had gone out and they were clearly celebrating James’ birthday somewhere. And I kind of wondered, Well, where have they gone? And there was a nightclub at the Adelaide Hilton, and I thought, Oh, that’s, you know, I think there’d been some talk of that and stuff.
So I went to the Adelaide Hilton and I came to the desk there. And they said, well, you know ‘Who are you here to see?’ And I said, Look, I’m playing with this band, the Models, and we’re supporting David Bowie and, and the woman
Moved her list down and said, you know, the 25th floor or something. So I thought, those bastards, you know, they’ve found some… having an audience with Bowie and they left me out of it and stuff. And I, you know, I went up to this suite on the 25th floor.
I got into a conversation with a guy at the bar there, who was the security guy for The Who, you know. Of all, you know. And there were I mean, they were just incredible people. And, you know. The, and down on the floor, sitting cross-legged
On the floor was Bowie, you know, and he had and there was you know, I think they, you know, party fillers. You know, they had the local modelling agency or something kind of you know. And I thought, I’m going to I’m going to go and join in on that, I think, you
Know. And so I walked over there, sat down and I fell asleep. Ohh! Andrew! I know. Audience with Bowie and you fall asleep? I fall asleep in his… In his presence. In his presence. And this is true. I woke up, I’m telling the story for the first time, and
The room was gone. You know, it was empty. And it was just, you know. And the cleaners were in the room. It’s just a dreadful story, unfortunately, you know, if I have a few drinks, I just fall asleep. And I fell asleep in Bowie’s company. And I think he just said,
‘Okay, let’s leave this guy be.’ And what a terrible story. We might cut that out. Who knows? Were you able to tell the rest of the band that you’d been in the presence of Bowie? I don’t even know that I revealed that. I’m not sure. But look, they were a
Wonderful band, like the musicians from, you know, who played with Philip Glass, all sorts of, you know, the Tower of Power horns. And, you know, I mean, it’s an extraordinary group, you know, people from Chic, all sorts of things.
And it was a great honour. When we played at VFL Park in Melbourne. It was a gorgeous looking show and it used Vari-Lites, which I’d never seen for the first time. You know, those motorized lights that have just part of, I don’t know, everyday, you know, stage
Shows. But it blew our minds. At this point, are you able to are your parents able to understand your vocation? Yeah. Seeing the success. Yeah. Yeah. Look, look, my dad had died in ’81, and after we’d come back from recording the Local and/or General album in,
On the outskirts of London. And, and he wrote to me, you know, he wrote to me before I went to England. We’d got this deal with A&M Records, we’d done the Cut Lunch EP prior to leaving, and he wrote to tell me that he was proud of me, you know, and he
Said, you know, ‘I know that you, like me, are prone to moments of self-doubt’. You know, I’ve often thought I’ve got to get that printed on a t shirt. Prone to moments of self-doubt. Nothing could be truer. And it was a wonderful affirmation. You know, he was
Trying to, you know, cover that those areas of his belief in me, I suppose. And anyway, I returned to Australia. We had a couple of weeks before the tour to promote that album started. And yeah, he invited us up to, he’d retired to Bribie Island at that stage, and he was really,
Really enjoying that. And my girlfriend and I just had had a wonderful time being back with Dad and you know, he was an older guy. He hadn’t been well and stuff. We went on, we went on tour and I got a call… Yeah, you know, Dad, you know, died and…
I’d really like to say this a bit better than I am saying it. It had been a Sunday and normally dad would have a nap in the afternoon and, and get up to watch Countdown on a Sunday, as every Australian did in those days, and he didn’t
Wake up you know. And so I, you know, we carried on with this tour and, you know, the show must go on. That’s the kind of ethic, of course in show biz. We did a gig at the Playroom on the Gold Coast and you know. It was one
Of those shows where you don’t go on till one in the morning. And I had to finish the show and get into the hire car and get myself to Brisbane Airport for 5am flight back to Melbourne and I crashed the car and I went off the side of the road and yeah,
A retired policeman kind of kind of helped me, you know, I got the car had gone down an embankment and stuff and I wasn’t hurt, but I wasn’t able to get to the airport and I wasn’t able to… You weren’t…? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, You weren’t able to get to your
Father’s funeral? I wasn’t able to get to know I wasn’t able to get back to Melbourne to the… For whatever reason the, I didn’t get in ‘till six and I was meant to return to play that night in Queensland and stuff and, and I couldn’t do it and I missed
My dad’s funeral and that really, really affected me enormously. He was a mate, you know. And I …yeah. I was very conflicted, I think, at that particular point. It really messed with me. I didn’t know… You had to go back on the road.
One of a bunch of blokes who don’t understand their feelings or something of that, you know, not in touch with one another. You’re stuck in a hire car doing these, doing these miles and kind of trying to process that stuff. And I didn’t deal with it very well.
I kind of thought… Did you resent the rest of the band for not understanding how you felt? No, not at all. I just I just kind of I just wasn’t able to get in touch with my feelings, you know? A lot of times with death, you can understand it on one level,
You know, on, you know, what’s happened and so on. But, you know, you haven’t processed it in another way. And so I started developing great anxiety at that time. And at times I kind of left the band. I left the band for small periods of time.
I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the solution’. And you know, which it wasn’t. Yeah, but I gave myself a really hard time. But but so Dad had kind of felt that I, you know, as far as he was concerned, you’re going, okay, you know, And so, so that was great.
But I needed him, you know what I mean? And so, yeah. I think that’s a that’s a big deal for me as, as I kind of continue in, in what I do in teaching or something, trying to encourage people try to… The idea of mentors or older
People. What do older people mean? You know, those kind of things are quite important to me. Do you remember much about touring with Models? Yeah. James Freud writes a very amusing anecdote in his book that you were once showered with his urine in one of the, one of the touring vans.
You know, that’s right. I mean, look, again to go to that that Australian Music Vault video on Paul Kelly who talks about driving up and down the Hume Highway. I mean, that’s what we did, you know. In those days. And we just seemed to do it endlessly. And James was
Not, never the driver because he was always going to be drinking, you know, And I was in the back seat at this particular point. I guess Sean might have been driving, and he said, I’ve got to go to the bathroom. I really have to go to the bathroom. And Sean
Said, I’m not going to stop the car. I’m not going to stop the car. And and somebody sort of hands him an empty stubbie of beer, which was not going to be enough to satisfy his, you know, his bladder. His bladder had a bit more…
So he said look I’ve got to… Somebody hold this. You know, and, and so he passes me this boiling hot… Stubbie bottle. Stubbie bottle. Yeah. The things you do. But didn’t the car suddenly brake? Oh, no. Look, that bit, I’ve erased from my mind. I won’t go there.
Now, it’s also around this point that you, the band, relocates to Sydney and you see Barton Price performing in another band and you decide that you want him to come and play drums in Models. Yeah. True? Yeah. Yeah. We. Yeah, we nicked Barton Price from Sardine I think, Sardine X with Ian
Rilen. I mean, he was an incredible talent. I mean, he is a great talent, fantastic drummer, you know. Stadium kind of drummer. Yeah. So, 1985 you start mucking about, again on your synthesiser, and you come up with a Jamaican reggae inspired tune. Yeah, Yeah.
Look, we’d used, we’d used a steel drum band when we were in England doing Local and/or General, and we were able to record this steel drum band and pitch them up to the key of the song that we were in anyway. I’d been working, mucking around with new techniques.
You… I think the song writing is a little like fishing, you know, when you’re, when you’re composing music, you’re just waiting for things to come to you in some sense. And you get that by that’s when you do the work. And I was playing with what you call thirds,
Just, you know, a distance. You’ve got a note, you’ve got a space, you’ve got another note. And so I was just playing those in thirds and that sounded like, you know, a thing that steel drums would do. You know, you’ve got two mallets in either hand, you
Can hit two intervals and it’s nice and easy, those thirds. So it was a kind of an exercise for me in writing something. How far can I go with these playing in thirds to create this structure, melodic structure. And it ended up being a series of, yeah, of chords that
Became Barbados. Barbados, one of the biggest songs of that year and a brilliant track written about James’ I guess… He was, he was he was struggling with alcoholism at this point. Would that be fair to say? By that stage, yeah.
I mean, I think we you know, everybody pushed it pretty hard. And yes, you know, yes, James had problems with alcohol. And they became you know, he later used those words from Barbados as a title of his book. It was not until much later that, you know, had catastrophic effects for him, his
Alcoholism. You know, there was many years later, really. You know, we… I left the band after Barbados, you know. Why did you leave the band, Andrew? At this stage, you know, we’d been through The Pleasure of Your Company recordings. We’d done Big On Love
With a, you know, prior to that with a producer called Reggie Lucas. And in fact, we did the demos for Barbados with Reggie Lucas. That’s how the song started. He’d been a part of Miles Davis, Miles Davis’ band on Bitches Brew.
You know, he’d worked on Killing Me Softly with Roberta Flack, he’d done Over the Border for Madonna, and so on. And he felt like a holiday in Australia. So he came out and we did Big On Love. We did
The demos for Barbados and there was a Fairlight in the studio, Sing Sing South, which we both know very well as a sound studio. That’s where we started Barbados. And we and they happened to have a Fairlight there and we composed Big on Love on that instrument at the same time.
James in particular felt the band needed direction that we hadn’t hit a, had the success yet that others had. You know, the Models had had many bands… We had Paul Kelly, you know, as a support act, you know, in our career, you know, we had all sorts of groups. And everybody… You know,
The Sunny Boys, The Church, you know, all these groups who just seem to, seem to be a I don’t know, a talisman or something. If you played with the Models, well, you know, you could do really well. And they seem to shoot past us. Flowers were the kind of the opposite.
Our opposite number in in Sydney. INXS became our opposite number. And of course, those bands became huge. And we were still sort of on this kind of ‘weird, quirky band’, you know, this ‘idiosyncratic’ band. People would use those terms to describe us in the absence of
Anything else, because we were a bit all over the shop. You know, we had two songwriters, maybe three songwriters. Mark Ferrie, four songwriters, you know, it was it was the drummer, Johnny Crash contributed, all this disparate… ideas. Confusing song titles and album titles like Alphabravocharliedeltaechofoxtrotgolf.
You know? They’re a mouthful. We are, you know, an unconventional band. At this stage, we were unmanaged. We just had a tour manager that we would hire. We just we were able to tour and actually make some money, put some money in our
Pockets for the first time. It was incredible. And ah, but James thought, no, we need management. And we, you know, ended up going along to the Hilton in Melbourne one day and Boy George was staying there. Culture Club were on tour, or he was doing a promotional tour for them or something.
And we couldn’t get in, you know, they thought we were just kind of fans or something. Anyway, no, we’re here to see Chris Murphy, and… So Chris Murphy at the time is INXS’s manager? Yeah, that’s right. And he was interested in managing the band. He has this spiel.
I didn’t think it was the right idea. I didn’t. I felt like that was a con. What did he want to do with Models? Well, he was going to manage the band and I can’t remember any particular spiel that that he gave. I mean, obviously he was very incredibly successful with INXS.
And could he repeat it twice? I don’t know. And you know, I didn’t, I looked at the contract and I didn’t like the contract. It was too expensive. It was too, the percentage is too high. I would argue still that at that percentage you can’t return money to the
Artist. Unfortunately, you’re in a group you know. And decisions are made as a group. So the rest of the band disagreed with you? Yeah, they did. Barton became on board with me. We had our own version of the contract made up. It wasn’t a different break up than
Sean or James, but it did have different release terms and so on, different qualities to it that, I don’t know, for some reason or another James in particular didn’t feel that. He felt that, oh no we’ll, we’ll, we’ll upset Chris or something, if we were to query the
Contract you know, And so we ended up, you know, so we just were off to a bad start right from the word go, Chris Murphy and I, you know. I just disagreed with many of his beliefs. And we went from being able to finally sort of fly from, you know, rather
Than do the Hume we could fly to a gig or series of gigs in, in New South Wales. And that all went out the window because frankly, he was too expensive. At the end of a tour in, that finished on Australia Day in 1985.
It was kind of odd to see Chris Murphy backstage at the Pier Hotel in Frankston. You know, he was very much a Sydneysider, if not, you know, travelling the world at that particular point in his career. I thought it was really strange and he presented me with
An APRA cheque. Now an APRA cheque was for performance royalties, you know, that you get. And it was going to be good, because it was going to be a big cheque because we’d done the Bowie tour, for example, the year before in 1983. And I thought, well how did
He get that? That’s really peculiar. It should, it should come direct to me. It was very, very peculiar. And we did the show. Chris Murphy was no longer there, and Sean took me, you know, backstage, and he said, ‘Look, we feel that we’re all working in one
Direction and you’re going in another’, you know. And I was fired from the band. How did you feel? That was on the eve of the release of Barbados. Barbados was due to come out. Well, you know, there’d been an alternative plan for, that
Didn’t include me. I didn’t know about it. We were travelling in different directions. I was kind of… I was getting married. My girlfriend was having a baby. She was, she was pregnant, and we were going to get married and so on. So, and James and Sean
Felt a move to Sydney was what the band needed not to be in Melbourne. So there were kind of good reasons, you know, and I was beginning to feel incredibly settled. And now they wanted to uproot you and take you to Sydney. Yeah, but, but, and that discussion
Didn’t actually ever take place and look, you know, because I got. Yeah, my mum had sort of kept this a little bit of money aside after my dad’s death, enough for a deposit for a house in Richmond. It was five grand. And so, I was becoming settled. And they weren’t. So,
We were on different pages. So, in hindsight, I mean, I have no problems at all. Were you upset at the time though? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would look, you know, you’d look at the band from a kind of a distance and kind of like an old girlfriend.
You know what I mean? You couldn’t kind of help but be interested. You didn’t want to be, but you couldn’t help it. You know, I’d been in it. You know, it was six very intense years and, you know we were heavily involved.
And, you know, you’re not just I mean, it depends how you play it as being a member of a band. You know, if you really want to be involved, you’re across the posters and the
And the artwork and the look of the band and the film clips and so on. That’s kind of why you’re doing it, because you’re have an artistic personality. Well, Barbados goes to number two on the ARIA charts. It becomes Models, one of Models, biggest tracks ever.
What was it like not being in the band at that point? Yeah, that was kind of weird. And, you know, it was it was held off first place by We Are the World, I think. I think
That was that was the that was the track at number one. So yeah, that was that was kind of maddening, but it was a different production style for that, that tune. Mark Opitz had really pulled the song apart and made it what it is today. Yeah, that’s
Right. And that was the beginning of a very distinct change in the band that instead of these ‘quirky keyboards’ and all that kind of strange Andrew Duffield stuff, that it became much more streamlined pop and a lot of the, you know, the audience found that quite divisive, to be honest.
You know, James began to come to the fore. It was certainly it was the first single with James as the lead singer. There’s a whole audience of Models fans that weren’t even really familiar with that earlier stuff, as
It turns out. You know, I mean, pop kind of reinvents itself every couple of years or something. So yeah, that that became a kind of a new stage of the band. Sean… James really came to the foreground and the band had changed. Would it have suited me? Could I
Have existed in that kind of group? I don’t think so. Well, you would actually go on to work with Sean Kelly again in 1989 in the band Absent Friends, which also featured James Valentine, the Models saxophone, saxophonist and Garry Gary Beers from INXS.
Yeah. What was that like? How did that come together? Because you were you and Sean obviously stayed in touch after you left the band. Look. You know, my wife died in 1987. And let’s talk about that, because you mentioned earlier that she was pregnant with
Your son. Yeah, that’s right. And she died when your son was 21 months old. Yeah, that’s right. She’d um…it was, I’d moved into a, into a whole different area. We had a home together. Eddie was born on 21st of May in ’85, the year that Barbados had come out. So
That was kind of happening at the same time. So, you know, my issues with the success of Barbados or otherwise were comforted by those kind of new things. And we moved into different things.
I started… I met a guy; I was asked to do a single about wrestling. You know, if you if you were born in a particular point in time in the 60s, you had to watch this wrestling show on at midday on a Sunday called World Championship Wrestling by a very funny
American commentator, Jack Little. And there was a tribute done to him, met this recording engineer and we started doing advertising work together as well as that particular single. And we became very successful. I could not be happier. I loved working. It’s amusing that you got into
Advertising jingles. Something your father… Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And my mother’s family had also had a big part in advertising and stuff. So yeah, it, it was, it was ironic that that should be an outcome. But Phil and I started doing work together
And we started working on jobs that were not dissimilar to the idea of I Hear Motion. We’d moved into sampling technology and stuff by those times. So, I’d end up doing jingles as well as some very… What were some of the jingles that you remember that would we know
Some of them? Well, there was it was a… Kind of started with this campaign for Channel Seven called Nobody knows News like Seven, you know, and we’d use singers, Zan and stuff too, so. Zan from I’m Talking? Yeah, to sing those tunes, you know.
And it kind of went everywhere. And we were asked to personalise them, make it Nobody knows Melbourne likes Seven, Nobody knows Adelaide, Nobody knows Perth, wherever. And Phil was a great businessman. I don’t know. We did, yeah, Cadbury is Chocolate was a big deal for us.
We worked for McDonald’s with…That’s why everyone around the world keeps saying it’s Mac time now. We’d do versions of the Singapore Airlines theme, we’d do work for everybody. Ford, Subaru, SBS, Qantas. Strange, the Antz Pants commercial. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with that one.
Sic ’em Rex? Sic ’em Rex. That was one of ours. And so it was a very successful, all of a sudden I was not dependent on record royalties. I wasn’t punting, pissing in the wind, if you like, as you do in the music industry. It was kind of… it was real.
It was steady work. Steady work. I loved being in the recording studio when, you know. The day that my wife died, Phil and I had been, yeah, we were going to the first shoot of a new version of Countdown. The Countdown Revolution. That’s right. We
Did the theme. We’d been asked to do work for that and we kind of based it strangely enough on this idea of a Ramones tune off the End of the Century album. We’d done this theme, so we were there for the shoot. My wife, who’d had been doing an
Acting course with Deborah Lee Furness and various other people and they were having an end of course party and, yeah, anyway, so it was this big night had been my birthday five days prior and stuff, and she accepted a lift home from that party and, and she was killed
In a car accident, in the car. She shouldn’t have accepted the lift. And so that that changed, you know, my world. It was sort of like a peak. You know, it’s like I’d got my shit together as a person.
I was more settled. I was grounded. I was working on my own solo album, that Ten Happy Fingers album. And, you know life was kind of, I was really in a fantastic place. And this beautiful, you know, she was only 24. And yeah, it was truly, truly tragic.
So how did you… So that’s how Sean, Sean got back, you know, Sean got in touch, so we hadn’t had anything to do with one another, really. I mean, the Models have been busy and so on, but they’d, you know, anyway, I think they’d broken up by that
Stage. Sean came down, we reconnected. And so the Absent Friends project was… Absent friends was, you know, it was… it pointed to those things. Tracy Pew, and obviously Cassie and many others and my father. Yeah, and other deaths that that that
Happened all through that the ’80 were basically my 20s and death just seemed to be a recurring theme. You know, people were using drugs and dropping dead, you know, all sorts of stuff would happen. It was in many ways a really tough time. It’s meant to be a time of kind
Of personal, you know, coming together or something and maturation and it was a struggle for me with death and things. So Absent Friends being able to call the band that was a sort of an honour, an homage in some ways to some of those people and to,
Yeah. And you know, Gary Beers coming on board with that. I mean, you know, at this stage, kind of around that same time Ollie was doing projects with I mean, Michael Hutchence was doing his own projects so independently. So,
I guess they were Gary had his feelers out as well. If you can do something, Michael, I’ll do something as well. And that was the Absent Friends project. It’s very successful. Yeah, yeah. A lot of ARIA awards. Great chart places. Of course, the wonderful vocals
Of Wendy Matthews. I guess we realised what a what an absolute star she was. Yeah. After that, you went into teaching? Kind of much later than that. Yeah. You know, I mean, the advertising thing lasted for 18 years, you know? And you were a single father
Bringing up… A single father. Oh, no. I’d met a… I met, a met a woman. I kind of, you know, we created our own kind of Brady Bunch, if you like. Well, a microscopic Brady Bunch,
You know, So I inherited a daughter, and that was great. And our son, you know, so it was hers, mine and now ours. Oh, so what happened after that? Yeah. So you… Duffield Kenihan was this really successful broad, you know, company until 2004, and Phil wanted to do
Something different. We went our… we went our separate ways. I’d always felt really, you know, I had those, those lingering self-doubts about my musical ability and so on, you know, that I felt that I could be a better composer if I did some study. And so I
Did some odd courses at the VCA down the road here. I got asked to do an honours degree in music musical performance, which is kind of ironic because I was I mean, I’d done so much… Performing. Performing and but, but, but it terrified me. I was mystified by the
Process. And so that was… that was great. It was a wonderful experience. I was able to do all of that kind of stuff. And yeah, so and that got me moving. I was asked to teach at VCA. Wonderful. Which brings us to 2010.
Models are inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. Yeah. You get to play with your dear friends again on stage. You play, I Hear Motion. James Freud, sadly missing from that performance and from receiving the ARIA Hall of Fame.
Where was he? Look, he was back in Melbourne. You know, the awards were held at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, and it had been tossed backwards and forwards for a long time, would he or wouldn’t he be able to appear? And why was that tossed back? I think he had he felt
Some discomfort that that it was going to include everybody. It was going to have a broader… Acknowledge more of the members of the band. You know, we went through a whole bunch of people. I think there were 14 people or so on that had that had played in the band
Over its, over its main career bit. And I think he felt that, you know, that I don’t know that it, he felt awkward in his place within that you know. And we weren’t able to kind of resolve that. He couldn’t
Travel easily. He was highly anxious. He had a problem with alcohol and travel. It was it was going to be a struggle. And eventually he decided not to come. And which, of course, is, you know, really unfortunate. And some weeks after the ARIAs, you know, he died.
You know, he… It highlights to me that alcohol is, can become a, is a disease. You know, he adored his wife. He adored his two boys. And but, you know, it really it really had a hold on him and, you know, it took precedence, unfortunately.
When was the last time you saw James? Oh look, you know, we saw each other sporadically. The Models have done some unreleased recordings in the ’90s, but we’d catch up. We did a show at the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney in the year 2000 and,
And James was standing side of stage about to go on. And he was a prankster, you know, a trickster. And he’d say, we’re about to get on stage, we’re being introduced or something. And he said, ‘Look, we’re about to
Go on stage for the first time in 16 years together. And you have to start with that riff from, I Hear Motion. How do you feel about that?’ You know, and you know, so he’s always taking the piss and trying to get under your skin. And so, yeah, look, he was…
He was good, and he had other projects going. Beatfish and so on, and Martin Plaza, all that kind of stuff. And look, it was, it was a great shame that that, that that happened and that kind of schism, this kind of idea, this problem with the band as being two
Entities, the before and after James kind of who is the band you know… it confuses audiences still you know and we’re you know yeah, we should have dumped the band’s name a hundred years ago and, and come up with something some new way of dealing with… perhaps. But you know, there you go.
What did it mean to you to be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame? Yeah, it was it was a great acknowledgment and a kind of a coming together of those of those different people. And, you know, there was Roger Mason who kind of took over from me
In the band. He was he was a part of the, of that night. Yeah. There were lots of coincidences. It’s a small scene in Australia. In so many ways, the music scene. And it is it is wonderful to be given that kind of opportunity to kind of
To mature in an industry, you know as, and as I hate to refer to Paul Kelly again, but he goes on to talk about ‘the squad’ that he calls his group, you know, and he knows that they’re playing at the top of their game and the Models continue to play, and we’re
Playing at the top of our game, you know. You’ve been playing now. Yeah. Yeah. For quite some time. Back with Sean. Yeah. And various members coming and going. Yeah. Mark Ferrie is still, you know, he’s back as a, as a part of the band and we have a new drummer,
Ash Davies is just wonderful and, and honestly, you know, we’ve never played better. We’re getting to this year we’re kind of playing to a we’re going out on the road and playing some shows with Regurgitator, which is a sort of a, you know, a more 90s
Band than us. So, it feels good. And we’ll be playing. There’s a show we’re about to do with Custard, you know, on that bill too. So, it’s a, it feels really inclusive. And it’s a joy to play with those guys still and still be friends with them. Two more questions, Andrew.
When you look back at your career in music, what’s your what’s your biggest highlight? Musically speaking, look, currently I’ve been working doing some work with Ollie Olsen and Bill McDonald, two friends from school since
I’ve known Ollie since he was 13 and I’m 65. You can do the maths. It’s been a long time and we’ve been finally doing some recording together. We did a show for Melbourne Music Week a couple of years ago and we’ve been coming to my studio on and off and we just
Turn on the machines and we make some sound. Now when I play in the Models, I’ve got a number of different sounds that I’ve have programmed during every song, so I could be changing patches on my synths, you know, three times a song and, you know, it’s kind
Of hard work to keep stay on top of all of that. With Ollie and Bill and I we just set up. There is no discussion about what we play. We turn on those electronic machines, the same ones that we were using in Felix Werder’s class. And we make a noise.
And honestly, all of that anxiety, all of that performance anxiety, it just dissolves. We go to a place for… until Ollie, I mean, he always did this with Taipan Tiger Girls, which I really rather liked, they recorded one of their albums at my studio, and he
Would just hold up his hand. You know? So So let’s wind it up, you know. That was probably enough, you know, and honestly, it’s like a buzz. We play and it’s like you’ve done some extraordinary meditation at the end. It’s wild. Wow.
That’s a great… that’s a great feeling. All right. Just on the Ollie thing, you were recently involved in a rerecording of his wonderful Dogs in Space song Rooms for the Memory with Mick Harvey and Adalita. What was it like? Because you actually played on the original version of Rooms of the Memory,
A Whirlywirld song that never got released. So what was it like entering the studio some, oh my goodness, 25 years later, rerecording that same single? That was amazing. I mean, when I did that recorded on Rooms for the Memory,
You know, on the, the original one with Nick Launay and they just brought me in to add some keyboards kind of towards the end of the session. And that was me getting together with Ollie for the first time in a long time. That was… that was a great
Experience. So, to come back to it again and it was being done kind of on the sly without Ollie knowing. And the intention was to get Adalita on board and Mick Harvey on board. And, and they were, I mean, I played with Mick Harvey on the Boys Next Door record
40 years ago or something. I got to listen to Adalita’s work and wow, she, she is something. And that. Anyway, I’m a big fan now. And it was a great session down at Sing South where we did
Barbados and Big On Love and so on and yeah, it was, it was a great pleasure doing that session. I mean, Mick Harvey is a remarkable musician and he kind of knew what elements to pull out of the original that worked. You know, it’s got a good musical head
MickHarvey. And Adalita, it was a 12-hour session. It was a killer session like this one is. And, and, you know, she’s a little reserved. You know, she can be cautious. I think at the… at the… at the outset. And as the day
Progressed and as people dissolved, she just started to own that session. It was wild. And I just wanted to stay out of the way. Just, you know, you don’t have to do anything. Just, you know, that’s not easy for me to do, to stay out of the way, as you can probably
Gain from this interview. Yeah, it was a great session. Well Andrew Duffield it’s been a big deal chatting to you today. Thank you so much for your time here at the Australian Music Vault. Thank you, Jane.
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