Nick Allbrook is the singer and songwriter for Pond – and also a tender and thoughtful soul that generously indulged me for the following conversation. Before Pond, there was Mink Mussel Creek, a band whose controversial denial of Perth’s 2006(?) Battle of the Bands crown I happened to witness. Nick won’t remember this, but I was also at his 21st birthday party, where I enjoyed, probably for the first time, German wheat beer.
Mink Mussel Creek was a petri dish, occupied by then obscure, talented and willful kids sharing filthy houses in Perth, and which spawned Pond and Tame Impala. Fame came, and Nick would tour with Tame for some years, before leaving, harmoniously, in 2013. In 2016, Nick and Tame’s Kevin Parker briefly reunited the Creek, while members of each band still appear in the other.
With Pond, Nick has released ten albums – the most recent being this year’s Stung! – and last week we spoke about fame, footy, and The Beatles. And also anxiety and our lingering sense of fraudulence.
I want to get into two things, I guess: Perth and creativity. But first, I have to ask you about Freo. How are you feeling? [We were speaking just before the final round of the regular season, in which the Dockers’ finals hopes hinged upon several things. One of them was beating Port. We didn’t.]
Honestly, your article touched me and other Fremantle supporters so deeply because I’ve been trying to express it to fair weather Fremantle supporters that you can always tell a Day One’r, because even after a win, you sort of grit your teeth. The Day One’r doesn’t understand. Hope is dangerous – a dangerous thing from which you can fall.
Sure.
I gotta say, the Hawks are kind of giving me the shits.
Because they might be reclaiming their success a little too quickly after their dynasty?
Well, yeah. But also, they’re just so young and loveable and cool with all their celebrations.
They have sass.
Also, I don’t like The Wizard. There’s only one wizard.
Jeff Farmer.
Obviously.
If I may, Nick, I detect some bitterness here.
Laughs. Perhaps.
I have something to show you, Nick. [It’s the book Perth: A Guide for the Curious, a collection of essays published a few years ago about the city, its culture and history. Nick’s essay, “Creative Darwinism: Pretty Flowers Grow in Shit” which had first appeared in The Griffith Review, was included.]
Oh, nice.
First, would it be weird and dull to talk about Perth?
No, not at all. I’ve spent an imbalanced amount of my creative energy talking about Perth. If someone was arriving from overseas, and driving from the airport down Leach Highway, they would be real fucking confused that I could find so much juice in this weird, flat, hot, dry shit-hole. But I love it.
You wrote that “playing music and generally being a flaming Christmas fruitcake became my sole purpose. And me and a few other school friends, Steve Summerlin and Richard Ingham of Mink Mussel Creek, and many other brilliant but criminally under recognised projects, revelled in our little corner of filthy otherness. This outlook was key to our musical and creative development. We rallied against the boredom of Perth, not with pickets or protest, but with a head-in-the-sand hubris that made us feel invincible and unique.”
It’s really hard to kind of put a finger on the hubris part of it, but it was a kind of alienated antagonism towards everywhere else. But it went along at the same time as having fairly low expectations of our home city and home state. But then when we’d leave, when we first started touring, we were surprisingly cocky. It definitely didn’t come from, for me anyway, any belief in my talent or worthiness at all. I think I was just a real prick for a while. Like, in the very beginning with Tame, I just could not stop rinsing Sydney.
I don’t know. [In those early days of touring], going over to bigger cities where people were actually good and well-practiced and good looking and had nice clothes and were really good at their instruments and stuff – well, we were probably just jealous in a sort of hick way, because we were basically like the carpet mold of the Hyde Park [Hotel].
Ah, the Hydey.
It was really cool in that time. Like, remember that front room where bands played?
I used to run an open mic there.
Yeah, exactly. So, you could literally just start something.
In Perth, for those that really wanted to, that really had to, you could still make things – or perform things. That was one place. Until it wasn’t.
Yeah. And before having a lot of access to the internet and stuff like that, there was no kind of idea that there was a bigger, brighter world to go to. It was just like, hey: let’s start a band called Dolphin Has a Dick when you’re wasted on a Thursday night and then performing it on a Saturday night. [This actually happened, and it was great.] I think being allowed to make really bad, embarrassing mistakes over and over and over again is pretty essential. I think a lot of people, including myself, forget that that is creativity. It’s not an unfortunate by-product of creativity, it’s literally part of the whole thing. And if you don’t fuck up, you don’t discover what you like.
Or get better. There’s very few born prodigies, and – at least this is my view – that those that get good are not possessed of genius, but ardent commitment. They’re passionate, and they move through the boring and bad and arrive at accomplishment only through dogged commitment and, maybe for me, a lashing of hubris too – which usefully insulated me against the knowledge that I fucking sucked as a writer for a long time.
Anyway. I think you were possessed of talent, but also great will to do what you did. You wanted nothing else but to make music and to be creative, and that commitment was never anything less than sincere and total.
Yeah, 100%. But I’m still not good. I’m not just being humble. Like, honestly, if you get a talented teenage guitarist and me, like they’ll be worlds ahead of me. I’m just not particularly good. I find it really hard to sing in tune, all of these things. But for some reason, I just really fucking wanted to make it happen. And you use all the little tricks in the book: like organising it. That’s a huge one. If you’re the only one who organises it, you win by default.
Talk to me about that.
Calling up a couple of your friends, and saying: let’s practice. Let’s do it tomorrow. I feel like that was one of my only advantages. I just had the willpower to actually be like: “Fuck it, let’s do it.”
I think it’s a superpower. And it’s attractive. Are you not attracted to such people? The ones that are possessed of passion, who are committed to something and made interesting and dynamic because of that commitment?
Yeah, I am. And what you were saying before, about people who just break through eventually because of dogged commitment, instead of the prodigy who comes down like a lightning bolt, a sort of Mozart… I’m also attracted to artists who just get better and hit their peak when they’re old. Like, I’m not the biggest Tom Waits fan in the world, but I love that he just kind of got cooler and better and older and crustier.
Can I ask you about that moment when Tame Impala starts touring, and fame begins. Quite quickly. Was there any whiplash? Was it disorienting at all? Or did you assume it as your fate, and were cocky and fun-loving about it? There are more options here, obviously. And there’s no wrong answer – cocky and fun-loving is totally legitimate, I think.
I think it was both. We had a lot of fun and a lot of times felt really good about ourselves. But I think I was also young enough to not have really developed powers of self-reflection. So, I just didn’t really know what was happening. And there was a lot of stuff going on that manifested in losing enormous amounts of weight and having lots of intrusive thoughts and, like, really, really excessive guilt about my place.
So, I think there was a shitload of whiplash, you know? Suddenly people are looking at you, and people are aware of you, and it starts taking on a life of its own. And it took me so many years to realise that most people actually just want you to succeed. They want you to come back and do a great show. They want you to come back and release an album they’re really into. It’s not this shark tank where everyone will just fucking tear you apart for looking bad or sounding bad. People are really forgiving and loving, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was terrified.
Right. If this is too personal, then please tell me to fuck off. There’s no obligation to indulge me. I remember, like many years ago, [a mutual friend] saying that you had become exhausted touring with Tame Impala. But what you’re telling me now is of course much more than that. That the exhaustion hinged upon – what? Anxiety?
I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I think that was a really big part of it. It’s multi-faceted, of course, like, you know, drugs and real problems with eating. But I think the hugest part of it was just feeling completely undeserving, and feeling like I was losing track of being a good person.
How would you have defined being a good person then?
I was thinking of really simple stuff. But I think my powers of self-reflection, of self-analysis, were very fucking limited. But I think just stuff like being in touch with your family, being able to hold down a job, being able to drive a car, being able to integrate with society, being able to have a relationship – many and meaningful relationships. Growing a garden. All this sort of stuff that I kind of framed as being a good person.
I remember on tour, my dog died, and I realised that I got multiple warnings that it was happening. And I just forgot to respond for ages. And then it happened. And my dog was so important. And I just felt like: ‘Oh my god, that is not cool.’ That’s not the guy you want to be. I was too caught up in the whole circus. Too hungover.
And as soon as I left Tame Impala, I went back to Perth and worked as an orderly at Hollywood hospital.
I think I remember this, yeah. How did that come about?
A guy in Pond used to work there, and he said it was an amazing job. And it was.
Why was it amazing?
So many reasons. You’re walking around a lot, there’s lots of walking. It’s fairly varied. And stimulating. I got a crack on the X-ray ward, which was the golden ward that you really wanted to get into as a patient services assistant because it’s really clean and like, there wasn’t anything fucked up going on in there, just people bouncing in for their X-ray and then bouncing out, there’s no literal gore: no piss, shit, blood, bones. And people are really stoked to be going there, because it’s kind of their like excursion for the day.
And yours by the sounds of it.
Yeah! And so, you’re pushing people along to the X-ray ward and yapping away, having a grand old time.
I guess we’ve partially sort of touched upon it, but can we talk about why you left Tame Impala? It was too exhausting?
It was basically that. I was just too cynical, too suspicious of fame. And my own deserving of being there, I think. And maybe there was some sort of a fear that I would give up being a good member of society just to be a touring muso and just playing my mate’s great songs.
I felt like the credit I was getting, and how nice people were being, was undeserved – because it was all Kev [Parker]. It wasn’t my shit. All the other guys just dealt with it. This is fun as. We’re touring the world, playing cool music, what could be better? But it just started running circles in my mind. And I probably started getting a bit unpleasant and dour. Kev actually noticed before I did, I think. And he asked really gently: ‘Do you think you still want to be doing this?’ I was like: ‘Actually, I don’t.’
So, it was really, really nice that he saw what was going on. And I do regret that I wasn’t able to just see what was going on myself. But, you know, like everyone else, it’s just been a long and slow process. I am actually blessed to be pretty stable, and generally have a life drive, as opposed to a death drive. My default setting is pretty sound, you know? So, it hasn’t been too hard.
But it did take a really long time for me to kind of start sussing things out [about my departure]. Because I got asked so much after leaving the band: ‘Why would you leave?!’ It’s a cool band, respected, making great music, critically acclaimed, loved by fans – and people were like: ‘What the fuck were you doing?’
People were incredulous?
Yeah. It’s taken me a while to think about the guilt side of it, I think. In modern parlance, ‘imposter syndrome’ is maybe part of it. Pop psychology, help me out here!
Are you afflicted still by this sense of fraudulence?
Oh God yeah, man. We were just talking about how my main talent is just doing it.
Will and management, yeah. You might be understating your talent though, Nick. But I appreciate that your modesty is sincere.
I can dance around well on stage. But when it comes to singing, playing, I’m still an impostor. Do you get this, Marty? Where you’re like, after every creative burst that fills you up and makes you feel like a fucking legend and you’re like: I’m a writer! I’m Steinbeck and I’m just killing it. And then the clock starts ticking, and a couple of weeks later, you’re like: Well, I’ve lost it. It’s never coming back. That was nice while it lasted. I’m glad I managed to fool everyone for a while, because when I do this next one, and it sucks, everyone will finally know the truth: I’m actually shit. And then somehow you pull it out of your hat at the last minute. And you’re like: I’m fucking Keats!
It’s definitely been said that precedent should mean more to me than it does. That I’ve been doing this for a long time, and yet that doesn’t seem to mean that much to me – that each week it’s like a 50/50 proposition about whether I fall off a cliff.
Laughs. I get it.
Can I ask you about touring? Like, what might we not know? Those of us who have not been on the road with a massive band on an international tour – the logistics of it, the fun of it, the problems of it. Walk me through touring.
When people say: ‘Oh, where are you going?’ And I say: ‘Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Barcelona.’ And they reply: ‘Oh my God, you’re gonna have so much fun, right?’ Well, it’s a bit different because you literally just get in a van and look out the window, do a bit of reading – maybe – usually you’re too tired to read. So, you put your headphones on and zone off for eight hours. It’s a whole day of exhaustion.
And you’re trying to preserve yourself for the show, so lining up to go inside the Sagrada Família is just not on the cards. You have a little nap, right? And then, like, you brush your teeth and try and avoid going anywhere near a bar.
Because it would be bad form—
—to get pissed and be shit. I’ll get into the minutiae of it.
Please.
Okay. So, you’ve done that – you’ve avoided having too much fun, exerting yourself too hard. Because I’m a singer, I try not to talk too much. So, I basically want to do absolutely nothing. You want to be in a hermetically sealed bubble until about an hour before showtime, right? And then you furiously drink.
And then afterwards – well, other people might think it’s on. Well, not fucking necessarily. Because you’re all probably staying in a hotel two hours outside of town to get a little jump on the next day’s drive. So, the tour manager comes out after collecting the float and packing up the merch and stuff. And he’s like, ‘Fellas, we’re going in 20. I’ll give you 20 minutes more drinking and hanging out because we’re knackered.’ So, it’s like: should we stay and party and then get, like, four different Ubers? Nah, fuck it. Let’s just get in the car and go. And you basically do that every single night.
You answered that very well. And I love the contrast between… like, being the best possible rock star on-stage means doing the least rock ‘n’ roll stuff when you’re not on that stage – preserving yourself in the most boring ways. Professionally, though, that’s commitment.
We used to do the opposite for ages. But if you have a couple of beers at one in the afternoon, and then you’re meant to be the life of the party at 11.00, you’re liable to stink up the joint pretty bad.
Were there other musos on tour that you sought advice from, or who gave advice that has stayed with you?
You get little bits from everyone. The most I’ve ever admired a touring musician was Neil Finn. He had his whole family there, as his band, and they were all just so unpretentious and having a lot of fun. And I rolled him a joint to smoke before his show. He always just had a little spliff – I don’t know if he still does – and some red wine. He wasn’t cooked or anything. It was just a little tickle, with all his family around him and playing the most anthemic songs. And I was just like: that’s how you fucking do it, isn’t it?
What are you listening to now? What has lit you up, and are you still as enraptured by music as you once were? Are you still seeking it out?
Yeah, I love it. I’ve just been listening to The River by Bruce Springsteen. And Veedon Fleece.
I think that’s my second-favourite Van Morrison album after, of course, Astral Weeks. I love it very much.
It’s incredible. Is it at the end of [Astral Weeks] “Sweet Thing” where he becomes the toad prince, and he’s just going – [comedic gargling] – but like, still has a direct line to God somehow?
His voice became the weirdest and most captivating instrument, and he was like 22 I think when he made Astral Weeks—
—He sounds like he’s like 522.
Totally. He sounds like a 1,000-year-old wizard. Sounds like he’s experienced so much, and yet he was a child when he made that record.
That’s astonishing. I was getting fucking obsessed with Veedon Fleece and Astral Weeks and I looked up the chords. Like, how do you play “Sweet Thing” or whatever. And it was just D and A, right? Over and over. What the fuck are you talking about? And, like, listening to it back – he’s just doing two chords. It’s the spookiest thing. He comes from another planet.
It’s like a comedy, you know? This Holy Spirit comes down to find an emissary for the music of the spheres and kicks in the door of this pub in Ireland, and finds the first person and says “You! You’ll be the one!” And it’s this fat, pissed guy.
I know that when you were young, either your parents conferred to you, or maybe you ransacked their collection, the records of ‘70s legends like Bowie, Zeppelin – I don’t know how you feel about Cream? But are you still listening to them?
Yeah, I mean David Bowie always. And The Beatles. They’ve just got an endless capacity to inspire.
I can always talk about the Beatles. The social question with the Beatles is always the obvious one, right? Which is: what’s your favourite album? And the coolest fucking thing is that since I was a boy, the answer to that question has always changed for me.
Right. And what is it?
Currently? It might be Beatles for Sale. I mean, over the course of my life, it’s probably been Revolver, which I guess is the connoisseur’s answer. But the earlier albums and their melodies are doing me now. Like, “Every Little Thing” just fucking kills me. But then there’s the White Album, and it’s messy and weird and it has some of their worst songs, but it’s beautiful in its ambition and strangeness, you know?
That’s mine. That’s my favourite. I think you nailed it. The ambition, the messiness, the humanness of it. So, my favourite Stones album is Exile on Main Street. My favourite Fleetwood Mac album is Tusk. My favourite Prince album is Sign o’ the Times. I love big, messy, overly expressive experiments where people make mistakes. I love them all. With Pond’s last album, that was the first we were allowed to make a massive big one, with tiny little in-between songs, and it was indulgent. I love those records. And I love the White Album.
You must have heard this, that [producer] George Martin said once that the White Album would have probably been their best record if it was a single album. He never nominated the 14-odd songs that would have been cut. Anyway: Paul hated the idea. He thought the album’s charm was its messiness, its unusual sprawl. And also, that history and popular reception had already made it. It was what it was. But that “Savoy” song does fucking suck.
“Savoy Truffle.”
Yeah, that’s it. I hate that one.
I think people shit on Paul too much. I don’t like the whole idea that Paul was the uncool one. I reckon Paul was [Pond’s] Jay Watson of The Beatles. He saw things through a wider lens that I think people give him credit for.
I think that’s true. Did you watch Peter Jackson’s Get Back series?
I did. I watched the whole fucking thing. [It’s eight-odd hours of intimate, though often prosaic, tape of the Beatles writing and recording Let It Be.] Maybe five and a half hours in, I remember thinking: what are you doing? What are you doing with your life? It’s just four Liverpudlian lads rinsing each other. But then they start figuring out “Get Back”. And you’re like, oh, yeah, that’s right: it’s the fucking Beatles.