BLURTING WITH... Kim Salmon & Darling Downs
Oct 24, 2008
The Australian guitarist on his collaboration with Ron Peno, his musical influences, his old band the Scientists and more.
BY FRED MILLS
Longtime Oz-rock aficionados surely know the name Kim Salmon, who since the late ‘70s has been a mainstay of the Australian musical scene, first as frontman for the legendary Scientists and then later with the Surrealists, the Beasts of Bourbon, Antenna, Salmon and other outfits. A few years ago he teamed up with vocalist Ron Peno - another fellow Aussie whose group the Died Pretty blazed a memorable alt-rock path from 1984 onward until finally disbanding in 2002 - and as the Darling Downs, the all-acoustic, country-folk duo has recorded two albums, 2005's How Can I Forget This Heart Of Mine and this year's From One to Another (both available on the Carrot Top label, www.carrottoprecords.com; the latter came out in America just a couple of weeks ago).
Folks expecting vestigial strands of either the Scientists or the Died Pretty in the Darling Downs, however, may be in for a surprise. As suggested in my review of the album (read it HERE), the pair marries Salmon's sometimes spare, sometimes intricate picking (on both guitar and banjo) to Peno's croons, whoops and footstomps, and the results are a pretty far cry from the D.P.'s cinematic pop-psychedelia and the Scientists' swampy thug-punk. But it's a mesmerizing, at times deeply emotional musical summit, the product of two men clearly at ease with one another and having a whale of a good time just getting together informally - initially, at least; they've since become a viable touring act - and channeling some of the acoustic sounds and styles that they love, any expectations brought along from previous bands be damned.
Having followed the Australian scene closely since the early ‘80s, over the years I've written frequently about Salmon and his myriad projects, just as I have about the Died Pretty. (I used to pen a column in the now-defunct magazine The Bob titled "The Wizards Of Oz" in which I zeroed in on Australian and New Zealand acts, and the Scientists and the D.P. were in there from the get-go.) And two of my fondest memories are of seeing Salmon and his Surrealists play at Club Congress in Tucson in the mid ‘90s, and catching the Died Pretty once during the ‘80s at Raleigh, NC, venue The Brewery. So it's doubly nice to be able to be inspired by the men, via their music, once again.
Check out From One to Another (samples can be heard at the Darling Downs MySpace page), and meanwhile, enjoy the following interview that BLURT recently conducted with Salmon.
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BLURT: Kim, how long have you known Ron?
KIM SALMON: I live in Melbourne now but have known Ron since 1982 when Brett Myers from The End introduced him to me one Friday night. [Ed. note: Myers played guitar alongside Peno in the Died Pretty; The End was Myers previous band, and after Peno's group The 31st split in 1984 Myers recruited the vocalist for a new project they dubbed the Died Pretty.] This was at the Scientists' early residency at the Vulcan Hotel in Ultimo, a suburb of Sydney, the city that both of us had chosen to make our homes back then.
How did the idea of doing a country/folk/blues project together arise? How did you get the Darling Downs up and running?
Well, it used to be, over the interim years that Ron and I would bump into each other at gigs. Ron got into the habit of saying to me in those late intoxicated hours, "Kim, you and I have gotta record a country album together." It was just the sort of talk musos came out with for something to say to each other and I thought nothing more of it... Until one day, awhile after he had moved down to Melbourne, where I had finally settled. I thought, "Why not take Ron up on his idea?"
I had recently recorded my [2002] E(a)rnest album which was entirely acoustic so I remained in that mode and recorded some acoustic guitar ideas onto my Dictaphone tape recorder and took them to Ron's flat over in South Yarra. It turned out he had just as many vocal ideas on his Dictaphone. If that wasn't enough of a coincidence, the fact that our music gelled immediately was! I'd go over to his flat on Fridays (he can't drive) and go home with three new songs on my recorder each time. One Friday a year or so later - we weren't that diligent about keeping up our sessions - he played all of the songs we'd put down and we counted some 20 of them.
We were really just doing it for fun, and if something more came of it then that was a bonus. It seemed like it was time to make that bonus happen, so I set about getting us some shows and began to learn the best of the material we'd amassed - we were in the habit of just making them up, taping them, and leaving them the way they were. None of them have been changed since they first appeared either, by the way.
Anyway, I felt that the magic was in the sound that just the two of us made together and persuaded Ron that at least for the time being there was no need for a band to back us up. Ron had written on his tape "K&R Darling Downs," which was the name of a small goods company, the K & R being for Kim and Ron. It was just a private joke and not a serious band name. When our booker informed us of our first show, supporting Ed Kuepper at the Corner Hotel in Richmond on May 22, 2004, he needed a name to call us by and I gave him that. Given that we didn't really want to be named after an abattoir we dropped the K&R part. We thought that the name darling downs had a nice connotation, e.g. something like "beautiful melancholy" or "bitter sweet."
What are some of the artists and records that influenced you personally over the years, as well as some that you feel can be heard echoed in the Darling Downs? Did you come to some of the latter late in life, or had you always been a fan?
Me personally, fuck! Some of it's well-known to people acquainted with my music - Stooges, Suicide, Beefheart, Creedence always come up, especially for the Scientists, but I liked most of the U.S. punk/CBGB stuff - Ramones, Television, Blondie. Before that I liked British rock like Zeppelin, the Stones, Bowie and King Crimson... and when it was okay after the initial punk purges, I liked them again, ha-ha!
I've also liked jazz since I was a teenager, especially Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew and On the Corner have had as big an influence on my music over the years as any music. Of the blues artists, Howlin' Wolf is definitely the one who I've taken the most from by a long shot, although I do like most blues. I have always felt a greater affinity with jazz and punk than blues, bizarrely, even though a lot of people think of my stuff as blues - which it is not.
But none of this tells anything, really. Julie London's in there, along with Nancy Wilson, Leon Russell -fuck, when I was a teenager I was a dog for Joe Cocker! - Hank Williams, Lee Hazelwood, Can, Blue Oyster Cult... the list could go on. For the Darling Downs, I was first influenced by the British folk-rock stuff, like Cat Stevens, Nick Drake and Jimmy Page. If you listen to my playing on the first album you can see that's not such a big leap. I let Ron be the bluegrass aficionado. He liked the Carters, the Louvin Brothers and the Stanley Brothers.
I'm not sure that list really tells as much as people think. They can be a bit of a red herring if you ask me. Also, I know I've left out countless worthies.
Given your respective backgrounds, was there any discussion about - shades of Dylan - "going electric" with the Darling Downs instead of taking the acoustic route?
Ron kept on saying things like "I can here strings on this song" and my response was always, "If you can hear them already then we don't need to put them there." As I mentioned earlier, I really believed that the magic was in just having my acoustic guitar and Ron's singing. It was as though we could evoke more by not having those extra sounds, which would actually narrow our evocative power. "Going electric" would mean having a band, which would do a couple of things. It would make us more like other bands; and it would put me back into the backing part of the band, which I am, quite frankly, not up for. I didn't sign up to be someone's backup musician in this.
What the hell is up with that freaky video for "Circa ‘65" - "a 'countripolitan' song filmed in a neo-cubist style," as you have put it - and how was it created? [View the video on the BLURT site HERE.]
It was filmed by Tony Mahony, a friend of ours who has done a lot of work for Dave Graney over the years. He had this idea of doing a really cheap video by making it mostly still photos with just bits of us animated. It came from a kind of cartoon that used to be around back in the sixties and seventies where they'd just have still frames but with real peoples mouths superimposed in. There was one called Space Angel that I think you'd have gotten in the U.S., or you might have got Captain Pugwash. Anyway, Tony works for a production company and had access to cameras and post-production stuff and really wanted to try out his idea. When he saw us live, he decided we'd be the ideal guinea pigs.
In recent years you've fielded a lot of projects: Antenna, Salmon, a solo album, last year's Australian and European Scientists tour. Aside from the Darling Downs, what else do you have cooking? And speaking of the Scientists, will the monster be reanimated once again, either in the studio or for the concert trail?
It's always possible, given the right offer and person to negotiate things, that there could be more Scientists shows. I do think, however, that the set of conditions that made that band work and evolve have passed on forever and that it would be an extremely risky thing to attempt to make another recording of new material with that band. Having reformation shows has been more a matter of setting things up for just long enough for us to recreate what we did have without it going anywhere . I don't believe we'd go anywhere good if we were allowed to go on for longer than a short time. I haven't heard any reformation albums that can convince me otherwise, I hate to say.
It has been great revisiting what the Scientists did, and it has rekindled something that I can pursue with the Surrealists, who never actually broke up and are, I believe, able to grow and evolve. For me, Blood Red River [Scientists, 1983], The Human Jukebox [Scientists, 1987] and Hit Me with the Surreal Feel [Surrealists, 1988] follow a natural path that I got diverted from throughout the nineties. Anyway, it put me back in touch with what I was trying to do back then, and a lot of ideas that have been mulling over in my head for a decade and a half have just fallen into place since doing the Scientists tours. I'd never get any of it past some of the Scientists members and they're just not the right people for it now - and I'm not knocking them either, just saying it like it is.
The Surrealists, on the other hand, have just picked up all the ideas and run with them. It's amazing. We're definitely going to do another album and it's going to follow on seamlessly from Hit Me With The Surreal Feel, which was so far ahead in time compared with anything I've done subsequently that it won't be a step back in time.
Who would win in a no-holds-barred cage match, the Died Pretty circa Free Dirt or the Scientists circa the "Swampland" 45?
Come on Fred, It would be a dirty trick just trying to pit Died Pretty against all the doom and angst of the Scientists. They might be okay in a stadium but stick them in a cage with us...
Lastly, if I won a contest and my prize choice was between free tickets to a Darling Downs show, or airfare and accommodations on a tourist trip to the southern Queensland area called Darling Downs, what should I pick, and why?
I'm probably not the person to ask that. The only time I've been there, I was severely hung over and coming down off a trip - who, me?! - so I didn't really come away with the right impression of the region. Also, back in primary school we had a class project where all the pupils were given another school somewhere in Australia to write a letter to their equivalent grade. I wrote mine to Toowoomba primary [Toowoomba is the main town in the Darling Downs region] and I was the only pupil in my class not to get a reply.
Sod the place, come and see the band, man!
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