David Bridie’s classic Act Of Free Choice has just turned twenty-one. Here’s an interview with David from our archives, republished to celebrate a significant birthday.
For the past 16 years, Australian musician David Bridie has been the driving force behind two of the nation’s most innovative yet underrated acts, Not Drowning, Waving and My Friend The Chocolate Cake.
With Bridie’s debut solo album, Act Of Free Choice, the innovation continues. An evocative album layered with atmospheric sounds, it could well be the one to earn Bridie the recognition he so richly deserves.
So far the album’s lead single ‘The Koran, The Ghan And A Yarn’ has enjoyed blanket airplay on Triple J, and this week, Act Of Free Choice is sitting pretty as the national broadcaster’s Feature Album. Such recognition attests to the album’s strength, especially considering that its atmospheric feel doesn’t really lend itself to Triple J’s usual roster.
While he’s pleased and thankful for the early success, Bridie didn’t set out to make an album possessing more commercial appeal. Ever the artist, it was about creating music from the heart.
“I wanted to make it a record that was long-lasting and an album, not just a collection of singles,” Bridie says. “It was always my intention to kind of make the record out of fairly simple piano parts and melodies and multi-layers of fairly simple rhythm loops and then surround them with these textures to kind of… I guess I just like music sounding that way.
“I wanted to come up with something that threw together a whole lot of different themes that I’ve been interested in and working on over the years and go in a bit of a different direction from stuff I’ve done with the band projects. It’s kind of weird making a solo record having done all that other stuff and doing it at this stage in my career.”
A key factor in recording the right album was finding the right co-producer. Bridie and his management team scoured the globe to find the right person for the job.
“There was a short list of a whole bunch of people based on their CVs, without having met them,” he says of the original process. “Then we did a whirlwind trip around to London and New York and Los Angeles at the beginning of last year. It was a kind of a weird trip because I had malaria the whole trip.”
Bridie caught malaria in the Trobriand Islands, where he worked on the soundtrack to the Bill Bennett film, In A Savage Land.
“I went up there for a very quick trip to tie up some loose ends at the end of the film and I thought ‘I’m only there for four days, I won’t take malaria tablets’, because Chloroquine makes you feel a bit ill. They’d just had a whole lot of rain and there were mosquitoes everywhere and they liked my white skin very much. The Chloroquine works pretty well. I’ve been up there heaps of times and I’ve only had it once before, so I was a bit silly.
“I was a mess the whole time I was meeting with all these [potential producers] – like over a drink at a bar or a dinner or whatever – trying to decide whether I could trust them with my songs or work together with them in a studio or close quarters for three months. It was a bit of a hard call.
“Ian had a very impressive CV having worked with Sugarcubes and Tricky and The Tindersticks and there’s elements in all three of those acts that I was hoping to draw on. The response he had to the material I kind of liked, and he was a pretty unassuming kind of guy. It proved to be a really good choice because we didn’t have one bad day in the studio.”
Equally impressive is some of the heavyweights who agreed to remix Bridie’s ‘Koran’ single.
“That was also another short list of acts who were sent a few songs and these people – Kid Loco and Mark Brydon (Moloko) – were very keen on it and they got sent all the original parts from the songs, which is kind of different from what’s often done which is they just get a vocal and a tempo. I think it proves good in the end in that there’s a whole lot of elements of the real song that are still in the remixes.
“There is one Moloko drum’n’bass mix which is actually only on the vinyl. That’s very very different and it goes to prove that you can do anything. It’s fantastic – it’s nothing like the song. It gives it this real swing and puts the chorus on a totally different rhythm – it’s pretty funky. I really like it but all the rest of them I think are quite true to the song.”
While there’s plenty of stand-out tracks on the album, one worthy of mention is ‘Kerosene’, with its ringing melody and tempered keys. Best of all, it comes with a top story which almost saw Bridie behind bars. He and a friend in the Northern Territory almost started a bushfire after lighting spinifex.
“This guy up there’s a classic,” he chuckles. “He not only goes around lighting fires but he also goes around shooting feral cats. He’s bit of a Robin Hood of the outback. We were fair-dinkum in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden these helicopters started coming over the horizon and these four-wheel drives and everything. They were most perturbed and I guess they had a point, too, although it was in the middle of winter and it wasn’t a windy day. But the spinifex just goes up like wildfire.
“We spent the afternoon in the local National Park office. They asked all these questions and everything. The guy is quite well known to the rangers up there and they think he’s on their side. He’s certainly somebody who protects National Parks. His point was ‘This is what the black fellas have been doing for years’. I guess that’s part of the song, too. We often see fires as this force of destruction but it’s a symbol of rebirth or regrowth as well.”
Act Of Free Choice is out on EMI Music.
