Bento's Portamento

Historically, drummers and bass players have copped a raw deal with regards to their perceived creative contribution to a band - after all they're just the rhythm section aren't they? A prime example is Silverchair, one of Australia's most successful bands. While the trio of drummer Ben Gillies, bassist Chris Joannou and vocalist/guitarist Daniel Johns have achieved the unprecedented record of having all five of their albums reach number one on the charts, it's generally been frontman Daniel Johns who has collected most of the accolades. Once drummer Gillies decided he was going out on a limb and recording his own album, it was always going to be interesting to finally hear Ben's own musical voice. Funnily enough, Diamond Days, Ben's new solo project is not such a giant leap from Young Modern, the musical statement Silverchair left us with and says as much about that band as it does about Bento.

Diamond Days is essentially the threading together of a myriad musical ideas Ben had lying around in his head or documented on tape over the last decade or so. “I have always been a writer,” said Ben. “I wrote a lot in the early Silverchair days. When Dan changed his writing approach, I was happy to take a step back. That was after Neon Ballroom and was a lot of years ago, over ten years. I mean a lot of those older ideas kind of fell away but I always logged ideas either on a four-track or on my phone or little Pro Tools sessions. There were some almost finished songs through to just a chorus idea or melody idea or just a set of chords. Working on the record, I did combine a lot of those. Sometimes it would just be me in a supermarket on aisle 12, and something would pop into my head. I'd put the dictaphone on and try not to look like I was too weird humming a tune in the middle of the supermarket.”

Bento is the moniker Gillies came up with to work under in an attempt to sway people away from thinking this was totally a solo record. Ben's partner in rhyme was Eric J Dubowsky (Faker, Art vs Science), as well as a bunch of mates that also includes Papa vs Pretty's Thomas Rawle. Ben uses the Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails association as an analogy of what he was aiming for in describing his role in the project: “I really wanted to have a band name rather than just be Ben Gillies … and the Space Cadets ... I dunno! I don't personally like the perception of being a solo artist.”

Releasing a solo project was never a burning ambition for Ben, rather something he thought he just might enjoy doing one day.

“I think I have always wanted to get into the studio and have a really good chunk of time on my own and work on my own songs, without record company pressure, and just be really free. When Silverchair decided to go on an indefinite haitus, or long break until we feel the time is right, in a way it was a blessing in disguise. It gave me the chance and enough time to finally have that opportunity. There have probably been times in the past where I have had time to do that but because Silverchair is such a massive and awesome thing, there's a lot of energy you have to give to it. Sometimes the last thing I'd want to do is go back in the studio.”

The result of Ben's studio time with his mates is a joyous, upbeat pop album, abounding with positivity. The Australian Football League liked the vibe of Gillies' first single, title track Diamond Days, so much that it became an unofficial soundtrack to their finals broadcasts. Ben describes the album as a patchwork quilt of those fractured ideas he's collected over time. It's those incidental musical notions that combine to make this such a sonically absorbing and openly happy album, testament to the gratification Gillies obtained from making it.

“The experience was liberating and exciting. I think I am just an optimistic kind of person. Dark songs are cool but obviously that wasn't what I was feeling when I was writing this. I think diving into the unknown, the unchartered waters, I had that nervous excitement which comes from making music.”

Although Gillies is loath to portray Diamond Days as a solo album, he did write the material, had a stab at contributing parts on keyboards, guitar, bass, drums (of course!) and even utilised an iPhone app.

“Give me an instrument and after a while I can make some kind of sound out of it,” he admits. “The last song on the album, the really trippy one called Naked Next to Me, it came out of the Brian Eno app called Bloom. We were in the studio and I was consolidating all of those ideas I was telling you about and Josh asked me if I'd heard about the app. Between takes we were just chatting about music and he said, 'dude, you are going to love this.' I got it straightaway and began to muck around with it. I really love that instinctual reaction to a sound or song or instrument. I said plug it in and hit record, we're going to do a song right now. I fumbled around for five or ten minutes then we cut together that cool little intro part and a few other bits and pieces. Then on the spot, I put the drum track down. I put a really basic bass down and all it is is just an octave… me going dom, dom, dom and that's all it is, the whole song, but it's a good example of simplicity being all you need.”

Over his long and successful music career, Ben has accumulated a swag of music gear, some of which he dug out for the recording. “I've got a shitty old bass, a basic Gibson studio acoustic, and a bunch of drum kits. I have a couple of keyboards, a Wurly and a Rhodes. It's funny because I have never been in the driver's seat as much as I have with this. I can definitely see myself going crazy with buying cool new guitars, amps. That's going to happen very soon or happening. I now have to think about guitar sounds, tones. In a band situation everyone has their role but with this I have had control of every facet of Bento. So whether it's the guitar tone or the bass, I'm now having to go, OK I don't like that or don't like that sound. All of a sudden I want to buy Vox amps or some other brand. Once you open the door to that stuff, firstly you don't want to shut the door but once you do it, that's it, it's open forever.”

While Ben enjoyed the freedom of trying whatever musical whim entered his head, the vocal parts initially gave him quite a bit of grief. It was during a dinner with co producer Eric J Dubowsky that he aired his fears.

“We kept putting off the vocals because a lot of the choruses were written but not full songs. I was nervous about it. After a few drinks at dinner, I said there's something I have to get off my chest. I said I am really nervous about singing. I said, I know I can do it but I have never had that pressure and I just have to air it that I am nervous. The first song was Miss My Mind and it's quite exposed and there isn't a lot of band around it to cover mistakes. Anything that is a challenge, if you can confront it then you can say you had a go and then if you conquer it, you gain some confidence. I felt that within that first day of recording, I got my confidence, then I could go in and enjoy the recording process rather than get sweaty palms. I didn't want anyone in the studio apart from me and Eric but after I did half a dozen takes, it was just like I was performing.”

Even with Silverchair, Gillies has never had a huge allegiance to any particular drum set-up, preferring to mix it up. Constants have been Pearl or Le Soprano drums, Sabian cymbals, Remo skins and Vater sticks. Le Soprano honoured Ben with the production of a Ben Gillies signature kit in the early 2000s. With Bento, it was again, however, a mix and match scenario.

“It was funny. I didn't really use the kits I had used with Silverchair except for one. On some of the drum tracks I did at The Grove Studio, I used an original Premier 303 that I played on the recording of Tomorrow. It was just sitting at my house and was all shitty and dusty and even the skins on it were the same skins I had used on Tomorrow. So they were like 18 years old but still sound fantastic, so warm and old. I think a lot of engineers can get really caught up in making sure there are no buzzes. Particularly with rock music, once you get it all down on tape you don't hear that stuff... you don't hear the creaks. If you have a good sound engineer, I reckon once you get the sound right after about fifteen minutes, you are ready to go. That's the approach I took and then once we got to BJB, I just enquired if there were any spare kits lying around, partly because I wanted a different sound and partly because I was late. They just had random kits sitting around. So I'd grab a bass from here, some toms from over there - it was a real mixed bag. It went with the nature of the album.”

Bento offered Gillies the chance to release any pent-up musical ideas he may have been concealing over the years with Silverchair, I wondered if that also applied to drumming concepts?

“Not really,” said Ben. “I've always had the freedom and said my two cents' worth in Silverchair as far as songs go but I've always had the drumming freedom to pretty much do what I want ... except maybe with the albums that Dan had written, where he had a clear vision of what he wanted the drums to be. Even within that, he has been pretty open to how I interpret it. The drums came as a later thought with this though. Really it was about the tunes and the melodies.”

It's fascinating to see how the members of a band who started out with the angst of Frogstomp have, with each ensuing album, gradually displayed such a high regard for melody and pop structures. I wondered if that pop sensibility had always been there, even in the early Silverchair days?

“You know what, I really think it was. Maybe we were suppressing it because of young teenage angst. It feels really natural to sit down and hum a tune that pops into your head, being open to it and letting it flow naturally. You know, I think most people can do it. If you sit down and start to go doo do doo do, you start humming shit and usually that's the stuff that people love to hear because it resonates with everybody.”

Being such an internationally successful band, Silverchair had the luxury of working with a number of high-profile producers including Kevin Shirley, Nick Launay and David Bottril. On their much-lauded fourth album, Diorama, they also employed the services of genius arranger Van Dyke Parks. For an artist breaking out with their first solo album, you'd assume that invaluable studio experience must have been of great benefit. Gillies is more pragmatic in his summation of the Diorama recording experience.

“I guess I learned that it is very difficult to mix over a hundred tracks of audio! I love Diorama and I think it is one of our best records and I love that we did a lot of orchestration but it's that classic thing that less is more. For me personally, within SIlverchair it works. I love to put horn sections and strings on stuff but I would just really scale it back. You don't need an eighty-piece orchestra. You could get twenty guys and make this amazing wall of sound. The recording process was pretty much how we'd done it in the past. You know, it's band, some overdubs and orchestration, then vocals, so there wasn't anything out of the ordinary that we hadn't done before.”

With regards to Bento's Diamond Days, the studio process was much less formal than the massive productions that some of the Silverchair albums became. More energy was placed on the moment at the point of recording rather than afterwards in post-production.

“In terms of shuffling stuff around and making it sound good, we kind of did that on the fly,” Ben admits. “We didn't have a band to lay down a rhythm track and then overdub. Sometimes I played drums to a click track and there was nothing else. I had to imagine where everything else was going to go. Sometimes that didn't work and we'd have to go in during the process and say, well this song needs a middle-eight now. Eric would set up the keyboard and I'd make something up on the fly. Sometimes that would work, sometimes not and we would cut that in and play some drums over that. I have been describing it to people as a patchwork quilt. We didn't have a formula we worked to; it was always living in the moment, you know, what do we need right now?”

With the album in the can and released this week, Ben's focus now shifts to how he can reproduce this music live. He may jump behind the kit to satisfy the desire of some hardcore Silverchair fans he'll find in the audience, but generally he'll be Bento's frontman. It's a concept he's still getting his head around when thinking about the instrumentation he'll need on stage.

“I reckon keys, bass, guitar, drums and, what am I missing? Oh yes... singing! A lot of it can be pulled off with keys' sounds. All the tricky stuff is done on keys. It's all achievable with a minimum band. Personally I am shitting myself that I have to get up and front a band. Like I said before though, once you confront those fears you can really go out and enjoy it. There still isn't a band as such, just a lot of muso friends that I am going to get involved to play. The long-term plan is to have a stable of guys who are the band. If we go and do a record, it's just a given that they're the band.”