Comment - Trumped

The rain has stopped. It’s cooler now, the aroma of wet earth rising and mingling with the cigarette stench and the smell of fish off the barbeque, long since eaten, digested; we’re on to bourbon now, beer chasers, rolling new smokes and lighting them with the stubbs of the old.

A clutch of moths hatched somewhere in the garden earlier today and so the lights out the back are being bombarded. Tiny flying insects chasing their sun. Bumping and buzzing with a ferocious intent, getting stuck in your eyelashes, your ears.

Aside from their buzz though, the croak of the odd frog, the cicadas, it’s quiet. Claire’s gone to bed and I’ve shut down the endless Twitter staccato; the rolling analysis from the New York Times; the ABC; Fox News; all the rest. Shut down the apps on my phone, closed all the windows on my laptop.

A couple of hours ago, Donald J. Trump was named the forty-fifth president of the United States, a notion which, only a few hours before that, was regarded as a long shot, a laugh, a joke, and a bad one at that.

Earlier, we’d sat and followed the results as the storm front came over, lessening the humidity, the grey sky lowering as its moist loins girded and eventually birthed upon the dry and crackling north coast a torrent. We watched as Electoral College votes stacked up, and even though this was happening half a world away, we kept watching, swapping stories we’d heard via various news sources throughout the day.

I was on deadline, not an urgent one, but closing in, three days with the majority of reportage behind me, three days in which to ruminate and write. I let it lie though, gave away half a day, pulled down the rabbit hole by the events unfolding with alarming rapidity across the Pacific.

I, like everyone else, have spent the better part of a year smirking at memes, nodding with faux-educated agreement at analysis, talking with friends and work mates about how this imposter dares set foot upon the hallowed turf that is a presidential race, and yet here we are now. An angry white male, about to take up a post in The Oval Office, in The White House.

Indeed, it’s never been whiter.

At some stage, not long before the heavens opened, we talked with my sister on Skype and the three of us asked each other over and over how this could be happening. My phone, open to some graphic or other, sat on the table next to my laptop and mid-conversation, I’d lean to the right to check results. My sister, two thousand kilometres to the south, would periodically do the same.

Claire’s sister rang at some point. They talked briefly out the back. Incredulity was the tone that floated back in through the open screen door.

As we shut it down, maybe an hour ago, the analysis was starting to filter through. What next? What does this mean? Where to from here? I don’t know and don’t pretend to. All I know is this has ceased to be a sick joke and is now a sicker reality. It’s the uncertainty that’s the killer, the feeling that anything at all could happen, and that most (if not all) of it won’t be of the notion that respect, inclusion and diversity is the key to a new world order.

The uncertainty, that’s the killer.

The rain has started again. The moths and frogs and cicadas have gone. There’s another storm brewing.

Stars & Hype - Available Now

STARS & HYPE

First Time Notes On The American Deep South

THE DEBUT BOOK FROM AUSTRALIAN JOURNALIST SAMUEL J. FELL RELEASED TODAY

Australian / New Zealand Customers Only

$AU 20.00 (+$AU 5.00 Postage)

American / European Customers Only

The title is available from Amazon in your home territory

ALSO AVAILABLE ON E-READER

(Kindle, iPad, etc)

***

5

New Orleans, Part One

Newspapers read thus far: The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times (West Coast Edition), The Austin American-Statesman, the Goliad Advance-Guard, The Times-Picayune.

Someone said to me at some point prior to this trip that the Faubourg Marigny district is a burgeoning bohemian area. A little way east of the French Quarter in New Orleans, it’s home to artists, hipsters and the like, small pop-up bars and artisan shops. Still gritty and real, but only in its early stages of gentrification and so not tainted.

It doesn’t seem too gentrified at first glance though. People of dubious character (not a hipster to be seen) ramble along the steaming reach of St. Claude Avenue, others sprawled outside Hank’s where we go to buy beer, leaning against the brick walls in the shade – some with flea-bitten old dogs – drinking 40s out of brown paper bags eyeing everyone else from under low-brimmed hats and ratty hair.

A little earlier, the cab from the airport had dropped us off outside our temporary digs on Mandeville Street, just off St. Claude, a long thin stretch of concrete with tiny houses packed along its sides, an auto shop on the corner. We were met by Orly, a friend of the house’s owner, who led us down the narrow path next to the house, let us in the back door and gave us some tips on where to go, what to do. I asked him if the area is safe. He thought for a bit. Essentially said just be careful.

He left us to it and we lay on the bed under the fan and thought about what to do next, whether three in the afternoon was too early to do anything. We decided to go and buy food and so found an organic supermarket up the road down the back of a yoga studio, new age medical clinics off to the side, a hip haven amongst what seems to be a wasteland.

We go from there to Hank’s then back to the house.

I sit in the tiny back garden and sip on a can of Bud and smoke a cigarette, humid, rub my feet in the grass and wonder how this’ll all pan out. The yard is long and narrow, patchy grass and overgrown bushes on the side half hiding the rusty chainlink fence. There are a few small flower pots near the back door, flowers struggling in the heat, an old strand of fairy lights looping the rail by the steps like a translucent snake, too hot to move. The yards on either side are concrete, the one on the right with a ramshackle old shed, falling down, missing its door, most of its windows.

Despite the area’s seeming desolation however, we’re only a five minute walk from the top of Frenchmen Street, which runs parallel to Mandeville, south to the edge of the Quarter and is lined with myriad tiny bars, music of all strains booming out onto the sidewalks, people wandering about with plastic cups of beer smoking and laughing. Just a regular city street in a regular city late on a Friday afternoon except the street is exceptional and the city is N’Awlins, The Crescent City, The Big Easy, so it’s all different and ribald and loose, a permanent party except you’re always watching your back, no matter how far into the situation you push yourself.

Once we’ve eaten at the house, we find our way down there, navigating along St. Claude, missing the top of Frenchmen thinking it’d be a pulsating strip like Bourbon Street and so doubling back and stepping out of a seeming war zone – cracked grey pavement, roadworks, jackhammers blowing concrete dust into the thick air –  onto a leafy, tree-lined street with small, neat houses that eventually give way to one of the most famous music strips in the world. We feel at home immediately and see The Spotted Cat and go in and sit at the bar drinking bottles of Bud listening to Andy Forest play harmonica and a bit of guitar.

As I listen I look about and try and feel it, this famous venue I’ve known of for so long, the dancing cat mural on the back wall, the myriad bills tacked up behind the bar – I see an Australian five, a ten – the green walls and dark wood bar with the lip, so’s you have to reach across and down a little to pick up your beer. Two girls walk out and one stops to take a photo of Forest playing guitar on stage, but he snaps that they don’t even know his name so don’t take no photo, just throw a dollar in the bucket.

They slink off, a self-conscious laugh. We move off after a drink not long after, throw a dollar into the bucket, out the door into the fading sunshine, left and across the road, where to next? Wherever sounds good.

The night carries on in this fashion. Chance Bushmen’s Rhythm Stompers at Bamboulas, dusty rag-time, tap-dancin’ jazz ‘n’ jive; Higher Heights at Café Negril, all funk and groove, good for dancin’, good for swingin’.

We head down to the bottom of Frenchmen at one point and onto the start of Decatur which leads into the Quarter proper and find a tiny, dark hole in the wall where we grab two seats at the end of the bar, order beers and shots of Jack Daniels. The bartenders are switching shifts, the place is open 24 hours, the clutch of people down the front are regulars. The bartender getting off is shitfaced drunk. The one coming on is a jovial gay guy who ain’t takin’ the last guy’s shit, but you can tell they’re friends. They both joke with us and it’s a comfortable little place despite the dinge and dark, the noise and the smell. Feels comfortable. I sit out the front for a smoke, on a small wooden bench, and watch a few kids doing tricks on a skateboard outside the shop next door.

We walk back to Bamboulas and sit out the front at one of their two tables and smoke more cigarettes and drink cheap beer watching the tide of people wander past, listening to snatches of conversation wondering where people are from and where they’re going.

We head home reasonably early, via the night market, back up Frenchmen and along St. Claude, slightly oblivious to the danger – is there any danger? – past the Hi Ho Lounge which has people spilling out onto the street, past another small bar blasting out some decent heavy metal.

After dark, the bohemian element is obvious. It’s almost like during the day the area belongs to the downtrodden and broke, the hungry and desperate. Once the sun goes down however, the music starts and the temperature cools and people come out to play, a bit of money in their pocket, op-shop boots and long, slim cigarettes.

We keep walking, around the corner onto Mandeville and to the relative quiet of the back garden for another beer or two, more talk, where to next, tomorrow.

                                    ***

We sleep late. Eventually we rouse ourselves and I have a shower and then sit out the back in the shade for bit. It’s so quiet, still. The sun beats down, not a cloud in the sky and everything is trying to soak it in, let it accentuate its colour, but it’s almost like it can’t quite get there.

There’s a sense of gloom over this place. A sense of danger just under the surface. A sense of desperation. Perhaps a hangover from Katrina, a decade ago, perhaps just the normal daily feel of a poor neighbourhood that doesn’t deign to be anything other than it is. And so it feels gloomy, scary, somewhere we shouldn’t be. The feeling sits in the pit of my stomach, a dull object in my gut like I need to shit but can’t. That feeling of being out of one’s comfort zone, a long way out. I smoke more than I usually do.

We leave the house a bit before lunchtime and head back down Frenchmen, onto Decatur towards the French Quarter. Our surroundings gentrify and the feeling lifts a little. Soon we’re thrust into the Quarter itself, its own little city, twelve-odd square blocks of sin. A man drives slowly down Toulouse Street, leaning out his window shouting verses from the bible. We see him later down by the river, standing on a busy corner, shouting his bible verses. Not to anyone, just to everyone. One man trying to make a difference. Claire asks if I think he thinks he is making a difference. I shrug, maybe. We don’t see him again all weekend.

We wander around the Quarter for a few hours, just looking and watching. There’s a college football game on this evening, Florida State, The Gators, in town to play LSU and there are fans everywhere decked out in jerseys and t-shirts. Flags are flying, it’s a fierce rivalry but the feeling seems good. So the place is full, it heaves despite the early hour, expectation is in the air. We catch bits and pieces of the game later that night. Louisiana State win by a touchdown.

By then, we’re back on Frenchmen Street, but we spend the day exploring the Quarter. Even at one in the afternoon, Bourbon is teeming, college kids wandering about in packs with fishbowls and hand grenades, huge fluoro coloured drinks of god knows what clutched in tanned hands, male and female, some already stumbling and crooked, others well on their way. Bourbon smells like vomit and young exuberance gone stale and wan. Piss and the desperate remnants of last night. Stains the back of your throat.

No one gives two shits though and the bars encourage it and the drink flows and a normal Saturday afternoon on Bourbon Street carries on. The sound from countless horn sections booms from open doorways and floats up on the vague breeze enveloping the fern-laden balconies above. The music is high-octane, designed to move your feet and fill your glass.

We sit for a while in Congo Square, somewhere a bit quieter, over in Louis Armstrong Park. The grass is green and thick and I kick off my boots and look through the info pack I’ve been left at the information centre by the media people at the tourism bureau – maps, brochures, badges, a few passes to things. We throw most of it out, but keep the bits that interest us. We watch a few homeless guys wander past. We watch a tattooed and shirtless guy trying to land various flips on his skateboard as his girlfriend sits in the sun, bored. She claps when he lands something though.

We decide to head back into the Quarter and so duck back across Nth Rampart and onto Toulouse, down towards the river. We line up outside Café du Monde, famous for its beignets, but don’t actually get in. We stand and listen to a small trad jazz combo – sax, clarinet, drum, fiddle and guitar, with a self-conscious fiddler who sings but is embarrassed.

We wander the streets and generally get a feel for the place, its old-time influence, its party prevalence, countless voices from then and now bouncing back off old stone walls, a cacophony, buildings seemingly growing out of each other, a mass of architecture climbing up from the narrow streets. French doors open onto sagging balconies above our heads. Halloween decorations festoon across front porches and around ground floor windows.

Because of the football, we find a small bar serving fifty cent oysters which we have with Cajun calamari and some local beer for a few bucks before heading back to the house, have a shower and sleep for a while, smoke a cigarette in the long, overgrown yard prior to heading back out to wherever the fancy takes us. Who knows? Not us, by no means.

We end up, after dark, in the lounge at the Hotel Monteleone which has a revolving carousel bar. It’s fancy and we order cocktails. I try not to get distracted by the football being shown on a dozen screens around the room. Claire’s heard about this place, and so we come here to seek out a bit of the opulence prevalent in parts of the Quarter and I order a sazerac because it’d be remiss of me not to given where we are.

From there we wander back to Frenchmen’s where we bar hop a little before ending up at our table outside Bamboulas, drinking and watching, listening to the BackBone Blues Band and then the Johnny Mastro Band, just soaking it all up, finally finding our feet in a city known for knocking one down.

I go inside for a beer at one point and come out in a bit and Claire has been befriended by a newly married couple from somewhere in Wisconsin who have been drinking for a few hours and so the four of us spend a couple more hours talking and watching and swapping stories and the like and it’s harmless enough for sure.

I switch to gin at some point before deciding bourbon is more appropriate and perhaps I’m talking to myself at this point, but everyone else seems to be in the same mindset and so we carry on, swapping stories, listening and watching the constant ebb and flow of human flotsam up and down the narrow sidewalks, cigarette butts in the puddle off the curb, the smell from the bins across the street mixing with weed, tobacco, stale beer and sweat in a city that doesn’t sleep, even when hungover, which one gets the impression is most every day.

They tell us stories of life in Wisconsin, and we ask questions and drinks are spilt on the rickety table. I can’t remember their names.

The foot traffic swells, a band finishes at DBAs so the pavement is full. A new one starts at a joint down the street a bit so traffic wanes. On the road itself, cab after cab passes by slowly, dodging pedestrians who should be dodging cars but are just rambling into the street to the place across the road, flicking cigarette butts and yelling to friends over the way, or up on one of the balconies above their own heads.

It’s a good time vibe, there’s no malice anywhere, just a general feeling of drunken bonhomie and friendship. People bump into you and say sorry quickly, a smile and off they go, into the night looking for God knows what. A Norwegian (so he says) man stops and starts talking and the Wisconsin woman rolls her eyes and lights another of her menthol cigarettes, and this guy tries to sell us small bottles of a homemade hangover cure he says can’t fail. We take a bottle so’s he’ll leave, throw it in Claire’s handbag.

I find it, weeks later, when we’re home and I don’t even read the label before throwing it in the bin.

Eventually, I call it and we wander home again and sit outside once more and then pack our bags as we’re moving into the Quarter tomorrow. We fall asleep a little more easily, the dull feeling in my gut not as urgent as before.

Australian / New Zealand Customers Only

$AU 20.00 (+$AU 5.00 Postage)

American / European Customers Only

The title is available from Amazon in your home territory

ALSO AVAILABLE ON E-READER

(Kindle, iPad, etc)

Feature - Game Of Drones

Published in The Saturday Paper, August 6

Feelin' Kinda Free

The fledgling sport of drone racing has pilots viewing the course through cameras mounted on their stripped-down, supercharged craft. SAMUEL J. FELL meets the US champion, in his home town of Brisbane.

  

Like a bat out of hell, the little X-shaped machine, small propellers mounted at the end of each four arms, shoots off into the distance. In a matter of seconds it’s no longer visible to the naked eye, although you can hear it, buzzing through the trees at speeds of up to 140 km/h.

It suddenly reappears from on high and like a demented magpie at the height of nesting season, it swoops, pulling up at the last minute and executing a series of barrel-rolls, ripping past the two of us standing on the wooden deck of a house on a hill in Ormeau, just south of Brisbane. It banks sharply, a left turn, and darts back into the bushland, again invisible.

Chad Nowak

Chad Nowak, standing beside me, is the one controlling it. Via a set of goggles, he sees what his machine sees courtesy of a small camera mounted on its nose, beaming its feed directly back to him. A large silver remote controller hangs from a lanyard around his neck, the machine operated by almost imperceptible movements of his thumbs on the two small joysticks. He brings it back towards us, slowly now, and lands it expertly on the wood next to my left foot, removes his goggles and grins at me. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of first-person-view (FPV) drone flying.

Nowak is the current US National Drone Racing champion, having won the inaugural event last July in California. The Australian is the poster boy for FPV drone flying, a rapidly burgeoning aspect of the growing drone industry, including competition racing. Having flown line-of-sight remote-controlled vehicles and fixed-wing gliders since he was 14, the now 37-year-old is in high demand at events around the world. A year and a half ago, he was mixing automotive lubricants in a factory. Today, he has sponsors, fans and a reputation as one of the world’s top drone pilots.

“It’s just something so different,” he says when I ask why drone racing has become so popular in such a short time. “When I go flying out in the park and I’m just flying around, people [see it and] go, ‘Oh, it’s a drone’. Their reaction would be no different if it was a foam airplane or something like that.

“The moment I put the goggles on them though, they go, ‘Wow!’ It’s the same reaction every single time. And that’s the best way to explain it – why it’s taking off is because of that wow factor. It’s like playing a video game, it’s like the pod racers in Star Wars; it’s that extra dimension that we haven’t been able to access until now.”

Eliminating the lag time between drone-mounted cameras and the vision in the pilot’s goggles has been the game-changing improvement. Simon Jardine, head of drone consultancy company Aerobot, has been flying drones longer than anyone in Australia. His company provides advice and builds and modifies custom machines for the likes of the military and Surf Life Saving Australia. “Right now, technology is racing forward at such a pace, it’s hard to keep up,” Jardine says. “We can fly further, [we can fly] behind obstacles, with zero lag, so it’s instant: what you see is what you see.”

“You have to have zero latency,” agrees Paul Dumais, referring to potential delays in video transmission. Dumais is an aerospace engineer currently building a new prototype for Aerobot. “They’ve gotta be able to send a signal via a video transmitter wirelessly on a 5.8 gigahertz frequency, to his goggles, with zero latency. Or as little as possible. Because if you’re doing 140 kilometres an hour, a couple of milliseconds [out] – you’re hitting something.”

Jardine, Dumais and I are talking in a park in Byron Bay. I’m handed the goggles and Jardine flies his drone while I see what it sees. The speed and manoeuvrability of the stripped-back machine is incredible; it’s easy to see how you’d come unstuck if the feedback to the goggles was even a tiny bit out.

Nowak's Drone

Drone racing and freestyle has, in the past 12 months, become big business. The inaugural event Nowak won was a relatively small affair, but since then the profile of this fledgling sport has grown almost as fast as the accompanying technology. In March this year, in Dubai, the World Drone Prix offered a US$1 million prize pool. This year’s US nationals in August have partnered with American sports cable channel ESPN. The World Drone Racing Championships will run in Hawaii in October. With money and interest growing rapidly, inevitably so are the politics, as a number of organisations jostle for control of the sport.

“Unfortunately, [these bodies] are all just sitting there arguing, and all the pilots want to do is race,” Nowak says. “We’re going, would you guys stop fighting and just let us have some fun?”

As a result, Nowak and a handful of other top pilots have begun to distance themselves from the organised racing aspect, preferring instead freestyle flying for its own satisfaction. “It’s kinda the same as skateboarders, they go out there and they make those videos,” he says, grinning. “You’ve got the rebels that just wanna make the videos and lead the lifestyle, then you’ve got the guys who wanna go to the competitions. I’m the guy that just wants to be the rebel and lead the lifestyle.”

Nowak has just returned from the US where he’s been filming episodes of Rotor Riot, a YouTube-based series not unlike Top Gear but with drones instead of cars. He and a handful of other pilots head to different locations such as abandoned warehouses, woodlands and even shooting ranges,  and put their machines through their paces. Everything is filmed and uploaded to an audience of 35,000 subscribers.

YouTube has proven an incredibly important medium for these drone pilots – Nowak’s channel has 17,228 subscribers; American pilot “Mr Steele” (Steele Davis) has 26,361; and “Charpu” (Carlos Puertolas), the “godfather of FPV”, has 55,28. It was the popularity of his channel that had Nowak invited to the first drone nationals and attracted his sponsors.

Drones today are more and more common, being utilised for a variety of purposes from aerial filming to shark spotting. For a number of years, hobbyists have been flying line-of-sight drones – that is, kept in sight of the operator, without a camera and goggles – including some piloted via an iPad.

These racing drones are different. Their construction is stripped back to only what is necessary to maximise speed and efficiency. The technology is dazzling. Dumais talks to me about 32-bit boards, electronic speed controllers, and software like Baseflight, OneShot and Cleanflight. Jardine is flying a Warpquad 6-inch on 25 volts – it weighs around half a kilo, flies at a 55-degree forward angle, and can hit speeds of up to 140 kilometres an hour, with but a five-minute battery life. Of course, their performance is only going to get better.

"In the very near future, perhaps before the end of the decade, the FPV experience will be hyper-realistic,” says Dumais. “Like you’re actually flying in the drone, but on acid. It’ll be the combination of high-end computer gaming to provide insane virtual reality tracks, superimposed over real physical terrain." The sky is the limit – but only physically.

 Saturday Paper Website here

Cover Feature - Bernard Fanning

Published in the July / August issue of Rhythms magazine (cover feature - excerpt)

FROM DUSK ‘TIL DAWN

While BERNARD FANNING’s new album stems from a feeling of unease, it blooms as one of the songwriter’s strongest releases. He talks to SAMUEL J. FELL

It’s a Monday afternoon. Late autumn and sunny. It’s crystal clear and the air is sharp, cool in the shade courtesy of a light breeze but warm in the sun, brightening the scene; makes the grass seem greener and the surrounding shrubs livelier despite the fact there’s been no rain for a month or so.

Bernard Fanning sits on a day bed, leaning against the wall of his small studio, up on a hill above Byron Bay. You can see it down below, spread along the coastline in among the trees against the water’s edge. Out in the bay itself is Julian Rocks. It’s so clear you can see the whitewater breaking around their base. The lighthouse sits atop Cape Byron, slightly to the south, the sunlight glinting off its tall, white walls, standing guard over the most easterly point in Australia.

Fanning sits taking it all in. It is, as I’d mentioned to him when I’d first arrived, a view you’d not get sick of. He agrees and during the couple of hours we spend sitting out here, we both periodically gaze out over it all. It’s calming. Serene. Seems to me to be a perfect place to put together a record.

Fanning, in light blue jeans and black jacket, hair hanging down to his shoulders, flipping across his face, grey stubble, pale skin, is in good spirits. He smiles a lot and his laugh rings out across the green, sloping garden, occasionally startling lorikeets playing in the trees hanging over the driveway to the side. I’m always wary prior to speaking to prominent rock stars, well aware they could be completely consumed by an inflated sense of self-importance, nothing more than preening posers.

But Bernard Fanning’s not like that. Sure, he’s a prominent rock star, he fronted one of the most iconic Australian bands of all time in Powderfinger. His solo debut, Tea & Sympathy, was incredibly successful, five-times platinum. But he’s just a guy with a wife and kids, sitting here having a chat about music, about the state of the world, life in general. Just shooting the breeze like any of us.

Inside the studio, producer Nick DiDia is tinkering. Occasionally, music drifts out from the open door around the corner, soundtracking certain parts of our conversation. “It’s shit, isn’t it,” Fanning says at one point as he looks out across the Pacific. He laughs again. I do too as I follow his gaze. “Yeah,” I say. “Terrible.”

                                                            ***

Bernard Fanning’s new album, his third solo effort, is Civil Dusk. It’s the first in a two-part series, the next being Brutal Dawn, slated for release sometime next year. Civil Dusk was written in part in Kingscliff, a small coastal village a little further north, and partly in Madrid, Spain, where his wife is from. It was all recorded here, aside from the demos, in this little space on top of a hill overlooking Byron.

“Civil Dusk, the term actually comes from civil twilight, which is a photography term,” he tells me. “It’s when the sun has gone down beneath the horizon. Scientifically, I think it’s when the sun is six degrees below the horizon. But pretty much everything is still visible, but not in direct light. And it looks different. So that idea, that metaphor…”

He trails off at the end of that sentence and switches focus to the term brutal dawn, which we both agree is the perfect name for an album by a Norwegian death metal band, but the sentiment is clear. Civil Dusk is about things not being quite as they seem, or quite as you remember them, and they’re about to change. Perhaps to be revealed once more, in a different light later on, under a brutal dawn.

I ask him if, as a person, he’s a worrier, if he’s prone to anxiety. “Oh yeah, totally, I’m a real worrier,” he says candidly. The reason I ask this is because in the bio that accompanies the new record, he’s quoted as saying, “Each day, I wake with a feeling of unease.” It’s a line which ties in with the idea behind the record, the civil dusk preceding a brutal dawn.

“Yeah, doesn’t everyone?” he asks with a laugh when I read that quote back to him. “It sounds a little too depressing. I don’t mean… it’s unease, it’s not full-blown anxiety. It’s more like, I’ve got shit to do, lots to do. As an artist and a human being. Firstly as a dad, the basic stuff of making breakfast, getting school lunches ready, you know. Making sure everyone’s got two shoes on when they leave.

“[But] it’s a combination of everything. When I’m writing, I don’t sleep very much. I wake up a lot of times at night, and often with the last idea I had before I went to bed, kinda ringing in my head. And it’s pretty annoying, and pretty annoying for my wife. It’s hard to shake when you have an idea that you haven’t abandoned yet, that you haven’t managed to go, ‘I’m not gonna keep going’.

“And what I mean by that, that’s a completed song as well. It’s not like, ‘That song’s finished’, it’s ‘I’m not working on that anymore’. Because inevitably, a few months later, you’re gonna find holes in that idea and go, ‘Fuck, I wish I’d done that’.”

I venture that this is the lot of the artist, that no matter what you do, you’ll never really be satisfied. Or at least you’ll think you’re satisfied, only to realise a little while later that you no longer are. “Yeah, that’s exactly right. You have this momentary satisfaction,” he says. “Anyway, the anxiety thing, I don’t want to play that up too much… it’s more because I usually get up first in the house, at around 4:30, and I read the paper. And that usually starts that feeling of unease, just reading about the state of the world.

“And that impacts a lot on the way that I write.”

Despite this assertion, Civil Dusk isn’t a record populated with songs dealing with literal world events. It’s not an album that bemoans the state of the world, not in a direct sense anyway – Bernard Fanning, who in the past has been very vocal about, and supportive of, a number of pertinent social issues, isn’t setting out to preach to a world he sees as wrong, or broken. Civil Dusk seems to be more about a feeling and a state of being, as opposed to presenting like a list of injustices, set to song.

As well, these feelings are framed through a series of love songs, whether happy or sad, disguised somewhat – the meanings are visible, but not in direct light, the songs civil dusks in themselves.

Another strong thematic vein that runs through the record is the idea of decisions and their resulting consequences. “I guess that’s another symptom of age and being forty-something,” he muses. “Looking at decisions I made when I was in my 20s and things that I thought were a great idea at the time. I mean, I’m in the unfortunate position… of having a lot of the things I’ve said, recorded, when I was in my 20s and maybe not at my smartest.”

He laughs again. “So, things like that. But also looking at that in the wider sense, how are things like, even on a personal basis especially, Powderfinger breaking up, how that has impacted on me and other people around me, stuff like that.”

“I don’t really want to be drilling down into the detail of what the songs are about, because I don’t really like doing that,” he then says, changing position on the day bed. “I want people to have their own discovery of songs, they have that thing where they… it’s what I do, put myself in the position of the author, pretty much all the time, when I’m listening to music.

“If I can really relate to it, then I can sing that song with a real kind of verve, it resonates with me. Otherwise, it doesn’t really impact… I like people having the opportunity to do that themselves, without it being all explained and spelt out to them. I mean, you don’t really need to do it anyway.”

“The future's suffocating on an echo from the past.” A line from ‘Belly Of The Beast’, the final song on Civil Dusk. One could interpret that in myriad different ways. It’s a strong line though, one of the strongest on the album. It sums up the civil dusk, the decisions and resulting consequence. It’s powerful.

Fanning laughs again, and I sip from my cup of coffee which is cold now, and light a cigarette, moving over to a sunny patch on the grass. We both look out over the ocean and we’re silent for a bit.

                                                            ***