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Features The Flood Zone Sunday, July 13, 2008 One Of The Best Roots Rock Bands In The Nation Releases A New Treat. By Brian Wise
Just in case you think that the glowing praise for The Flood emanating from these pages over the years was a little one-eyed let me quote respected music writer Stuart Coupe: “The Flood are from Sydney, Australia but listen to their music alongside that of The Jayhawks, Wilco, Calexico, Son Volt, Sparklehorse, Whiskeytown, The Scud Mountain Boys - the leading lights in the so-called 'Americana' sound, and you'll find a similar international sound and appeal.”
That’s high praise indeed, even higher than some of the superlatives I have reached for in writing about the band. The praise is not long overdue but the success to match it certainly is. A recent visit to Nashville had me wandering the honky tonks on Broadway and I didn’t see or hear anything there that came close to Kevin Bennett and his colleagues.
My career advice to them remains, ‘Go to the USA!’. I remain shocked that no record company has picked up The Flood and that their latest album Everybody’s Favourite is released independently.
“So do I!” admits Bennett, the band’s main songwriter and singer, when I mention that I find it unbelievable that his band hasn’t been signed to some major or even minor label. “We got very close a couple of years back but they [the record company] went the other way.”
“The upside though,” explains Bennett, “is that there is no-one looking over your shoulder when you are making a record saying ‘Make it more blue or more red. Pink’s selling, can we make it more pink?’ That’s the upside but we haven’t got the marketing clout that a record company has. It’s an interesting conundrum.”
“I don’t know what it is,” he muses. “Maybe it’s an age thing. I find it weird because we do make pretty good sounding records for the price we do them for.”
“I wouldn’t mind being able to knock back a few offers!” he laughs.
For the time being, the reputation of The Flood rests on word of mouth rather than overseas trips or constant touring. In fact, the band tours too seldom but is readying itself for an excursion south of the NSW border in the next few months and has recently played on Norfolk Island with Bill Chambers and at The Dreaming Festival in Queensland (on the Woodford Folk Festival site).
“A band in our position needs to get out further a field and to do that we need someone else on the bill,” says Bennett. “I don’t think we’ve got enough pulling power to go too far away from our comfort zone. So we are looking at that angle a bit and looking at ways of having the band and having another sort of mid-name group or person come with us and work out some way to attack the farther a field regions that we haven’t got to yet. We get a few festivals now and then and we do as many of them as we can but to actually tour is a costly thing.”
This year marks a decade since The Flood’s first recording, The Ballad Of KB - the band having been formed a year or so prior to that. Bennett and his colleagues all still play music for a living but, as he explains, they are all working with different bands when The Flood is not touring or gigging.
“It’s a bit of a high wire act in many ways. There are precipices that you might fall into any minute. In this climate it’s hard to keep a band together so that’s another reason why people go off and do other things because it keeps them in our band. They’ll run gigs by us to make sure there is nothing happening for us – so they do prioritise The Flood, which is great. It’s great that we’ve got four people who are basically committed to this thing.”
As Bennett points out, the other members of the group – bassist James Gillard, keyboardist Tim Wedde (who also manages) and drummer Scot Hills – are in constant demand from other musicians.
“It’s kind of funny when you think about how long you’ve been doing this with people,” muses Bennett. “It’s great.”
Of course, there is now the major Golden Guitar award and ARIA nomination to go along with all the critical praise.
“We always look at Tamworth as the start of the year,” says Bennett, “and it has been kind to us. We’ve got a really good following when we’ve played that festival and we won the Golden Guitar Award for Vocal Group or Duo. I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse. We were always the bridesmaid and it was our badge of honour that we hadn’t won. I think we had been nominated eight times ands then we actually won the thing. It spoiled our claim to fame in some ways!”
“The country audiences that we attract are really loyal and they’re looking for something different. Everybody knows we’re not your standard country band. The stuff we play isn’t couched in twangy guitars and isn’t necessarily about utes and things. Our songs are just story songs and you can hear the words and you know what we’re on about so you can decide straight up whether you like it or not.”
Bennett has taken on the main responsibility as songwriter but as he points out, the band was formed for precisely that reason.
“We were all in bands playing around Sydney and it was good fun,” he recalls, “and I was building up a catalogue of songs – more than an album or two’s worth - and I thought that maybe we should be playing them. So I just put it to the guys that I wanted to play with and suggested we put a band together. So basically from that day on I was the songwriter for the band.
“So that’s what I do,” he says. “I come down into my room each day and bang on a guitar and see what happens and if something’s working I’ll write it down and if it’s not I’ll go and dig up the garden or something.
“It is a bit of a responsibility but the thing about being independent is that it has always allowed us time between albums for me to get ten songs together. I think it’s pretty hard work to write ten really good songs in a year. That’s why our albums tend to be two or three years apart. I think this last album came earlier than most because I had a bit of a spurt.
‘Rockdale,’ on the new album, is the perfect of example of one of Bennett’s ‘story songs.’ In fact, he admits it is autobiographical and includes his uncle Billy Wilson (a famous Rugby League player), his Grandmother playing piano, and characters such as Sug and Big Black Betty. Bennett admits that the real location of his upbringing, Arncliffe, has been changed because Rockdale sounds more poetic.
“I was really inspired living there,” he says, adding that it was his cousin introduced him to Joni Mitchell and Sandy Denny. “The airplanes used to take off straight past our house.”
Then again, the ballad ‘Like Love’ sounds like it could have been written for Jackson Browne, one of Bennett’s heroes.
“I am a huge fan of those guys and of that era,” admits Bennett. “I think the singer songwriters in that era, usually their first three or four albums were lay down misère classics and that’s not easy to do. The first three Jackson Browne albums were like a blueprint for singer songwriters. Look at Van Morrison: his first four albums make you go, ‘Wow!’”
“That genre was rockin’ at the time,” agrees Bennett when I mention that even the first three Eagles albums were pretty good too.
“I was a huge Jackson Browne fan,” he continues. “I thought he walked on water. When I first heard Saturate Before Using I thought, ‘Man, this guy’s been reading my mail. He’s doing everything I’ve always wanted to do. It was one of those kind of experiences. It was a real eye-opener for me because I was just starting to write songs and feeling full of music and I buy this album by this guy and think, ‘Oh God, he’s done it all. He’s done everything I wanted to do. He was deep and meaningful and he rocked a bit and he just had it all going on. I appreciate the comparison.”
The only cover on the album is ‘Can’t Work No Longer,’ which David Lindley and El-Rayo X also recorded some years back. In fact, Bennet cites that version as an inspiration. It’s one of my favourite Lindley recordings and it’s nice to hear the update.
“I’ve loved that song too,” agrees Bennett. “We used to play that in a band called the Six Amigos, just after I was in a band called Chasin’ The Train with Kirk Lorange. We all dug up about half a dozen songs each and I dug that up and we started playing it back then.
“About a year ago I suggested that we do it again because it is a good harmony song, it’s up, and it can balance out the serious songs. I thought we could throw it in now and then and use it as a crowd pleaser when we were stuck or play it whenever we liked. So we played it and it was just fantastic. It hadn’t lost anything. It’s almost a song that plays itself! You start it and then four minutes later you stop and go, ‘That was great.’ It just rolls along and it’s just a really, really great tune.”
Recently, Bennett has written some songs with Broderick Smith and, apparently two of these appear on Smith’s forthcoming, highly anticipated album. In the meantime, if you are lucky you can hopefully see The Flood on tour soon.
Everybody’s Favourite is available now on KB Records.
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