Dave Faulkner: 2013 AMP Long-List 'Stronger' Than This Year's

Dave Faulkner has a pretty safe place in the pantheon of Australian music.

As frontman and chief songwriter for the much-loved Hoodoo Gurus he’s been responsible for some of our country’s most enduring songs, tunes that long ago embedded themselves into the Australian psyche. In more recent times he’s shown himself to be no slouch at the music journalism game either, penning some insightful and often fascinating articles on a diverse array of artists for The Saturday Paper, critiquing albums from players such as Prince and Jack White through to relative newbs such as Ball Park Music and DZ Deathrays.

But it’s his prize role as Chairperson of the Judging Panel for the 10th Coopers Australian Music Prize (AMP) which has been taking up his time of late, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Each year the AMP panel takes on the unenviable task of trying to pick the best Australian album for that year, with no real limitations beyond that on who is eligible for the award. The process finds the panel filtering through all qualified releases and assembling an initial long-list, then focusing on this list and narrowing it down to the final nine albums (the shortlist) from where the eventual winner is chosen. That victorious artists receives not only a $30,000 prize (courtesy the PPCA) but also the respect of peers and pundits alike for being affiliated with the prestigious award.

Today the final six albums were added to the long-list for the 2014 Coopers AMP (Bertie Blackman, Daily Meds, King Gizzard & the Wizard Lizard, Krakatau, Lanie Lane and Shiny Joe Ryan), and now shit gets real and the judging starts in earnest. Although with such an incredible list of Aussie artists from nearly every field imaginable constituting the long-list, it’s certainly not a task to be taken lightly.

"That’s always going to happen when something’s popular, you see imitators come along. We’ve still got bad Blink-182 bands in Australia."

“You mean very, very long-list don’t you – it’s bloody enormous!” Faulkner chuckles. “It’s ridiculous actually. It’s been a nightmare to be honest. I wouldn’t say it’s a stronger long-list than last year personally – I thought last year was the stronger year, but that’s just my taste – but there’s five extra judges this year, which has added a bit extra in terms of people putting in things they like. You just get more diversity I suppose.

“In the long-list stage it’s a lot easier for an album to be listed than you think – it only takes two judges to really say that they love it for it to be long-listed, and the rest of us may not have even heard it yet. Usually people have [heard it], or they can check it out, but it’s not essential. The vetting process is that three judges listen to every title, and that is every album released in Australia – at least three judges listen to it. As many as we can find anyway, obviously some will slip through the cracks – usually classical albums and jazz albums that we don’t hear about – but we try to find them! This year we’ve listened to more albums than ever, I think it was a total of about 320 albums, so that’s a lot of listening.”

As chairperson Faulkner’s role (at this early stage of proceedings) is to allocate albums to the other judges and then inform the Prize director Scott Murphy (also the AMP’s founder) when an album has been selected for the long-list. How many albums would he have listened to personally in compiling this year’s long-list?

“Probably round about 50 so far I’d say, but once an album makes the long-list then every judge listens to every album on the long-list,” he explains. “That’s why it’s been so challenging this year, because with so many albums – there’s 65 albums on the long-list – and a relatively short period of time to try and do it, it’s a tough ask. Apart from the ones we come across through our listening and just general day-to-day experience, and then actually having to judge them, there’s probably another 40 that you haven’t paid that much attention to yet and are going to have to really immerse yourself into and try to embrace. Then afterwards you have the invidious task of trying to compare apples to oranges.”

And thereby lies the crux of the problem with judging albums from so many disparate musical fields – how do you compare a metal band with a dance band with an indie band (for example) on merit?

"I’ve got an instant hotline to what’s going on in Australian music, because I get to hear the best of it every year."

“I’m a bit of generalist myself, although I’m not sure every judge is – some are fairly narrow-minded in some areas and they freely admit it, and you have to try and talk them around or actually just try to see if you can just work with them on it,” Faulkner offers. “Ultimately there’s going to be a problem where a judge will just go, ‘Well I just don’t like that album, I like this one’, and you hope you do it from the point of view of aesthetic equivalency or whatever – I don’t even know what term you’d use, where someone can see the qualities of the album on its own merits in respect of its genre. Because that is a big issue – it’s probably the biggest issue in this whole concept, how do you compare an apple to an orange, or a camel to a stoat? They’re quite different creatures, and a camel’s good in the desert and a stoat’s good in the ground, I don’t know. Or what makes the best stoat or what makes the best camel? They’re not common to each other, so you hopefully have to weigh them up on what they’re trying to achieve and where they’re coming from and what’s around them in their area. You’ve just got to figure it out.

“Ultimately at the end of it all it’s got to be the judges saying, ‘This is what really excites me – this is the best fucking album of the year!’ and we can’t gainsay that, we’ve got to go with that passion and enthusiasm and just hope that you’ve got judges who are all so excited about music generally that they’re not going to be influenced by something trivial and are seeing past the ‘flavour of the month’ stuff and the fact that a record mightn’t be in a popular genre – it’s not the ‘cool’ music or whatever – and you just hope that they can do that. Generally speaking I’m very happy with how it’s been – the last two years in particular I’ve been really excited about the shortlist, although I don’t know what this year’s shortlist is going to be, but to me every album on the last two shortlists I personally have loved. That hasn’t always been the case in the past, usually on every shortlist there’s at least a couple of albums where I’m, like, ‘I don’t know what they were thinking on that one’. That will probably happen again this year – there might be a couple on there that I don’t quite cotton to – but it’s not about me, and certainly that’s just natural when you’ve got so many diverse people. And it is a very diverse panel.

“There was some adjustment a few years ago, when the idea was to reduce the panel right down because at that stage the panel itself was enormous as well as the long-list – I think we had 45 judges or something, which was ridiculous. To me it was becoming a bit like what the ARIAs suffer from, which is where the albums that are the least offensive are the ones that do the best because everyone generally likes them, whereas more challenging music can actually fail because some people take a real stance against it and that can hinder its chances. With a smaller panel like this you can talk to each other a bit more one-to-one on these things, and while it gets a little closer to a Star Chamber at the same time it hasn’t got that problem of being mob rule.”

the full 2014 Coopers Amp long-list

Is the panel’s base criterion literally as simple as questing for the year’s ‘best album’?

“Yes, that’s the idea,” Faulkner concurs. “It’s theoretically any album from any genre, and it doesn’t matter if it was released digitally only on the internet by your backyard record company – as long as it’s available commercially for people to buy in one sense or another. That definition has definitely widened since the internet has become a major [music] delivery service and people have found their own way of using that without having to rely on any distributors. It used to be that you had to sell some in a record shop or something, but that’s no longer a criteria – it never was really, but it’s certainly less of a criteria now than ever.”

A decade into the AMP and it’s already provided a wonderfully diverse list of winners over the journey – everyone from The Drones to Lisa Mitchell to Cloud Control to The Jezabels have been victorious – and this variety is part of the charm.

"Try and stop me enjoying music to the ultimate, to the maximum."

“Big Scary last year for example, that was an album that was always the bridesmaid and never the bride in a lot of other competitions and I think that that’s an extraordinary record,” Faulkner enthuses. “We were very excited by that album quite early to be honest, a lot of the judges, and it stayed with us all year pretty much. No one knows what’s going to win, but that was a very worthy winner to my mind and as I said it hadn’t quite got the recognition it deserved. Hermitude the year before that was another extraordinary record.

“The thing with the AMP unfortunately is that there’s so many great records that just get pipped at the post – you could almost name two or three any year that would probably be just as worthy a winner, if not more. Certainly the short-list generally speaking is albums that we think are just exceptional. There’s no dishonor in not winning, that’s for sure, but obviously it’s nice to get thirty grand in your pocket. These days when generally speaking the financial base has been eroded away terribly, that thirty grand is actually more significant than ever. Even with a big band like Hilltop Hoods or something, I’m sure they won’t say no to it – they can use it to get a bunch of air tickets to Yugoslavia or somewhere, I don’t know, but it’s almost like a development grant really. Eddy Current Suppression Ring used it build a studio at home and now they’re recording other bands and themselves and it’s given them a way to completely bypass the record industry and just be completely independent. It’s very useful this money – the prestige is great, but the money’s helpful too.”

You’d have to assume that an AMP judge’s ability or desire to listen to music for pleasure would be adversely affected, when on one level you’re expected to analyse everything you listen to and compare it to its peers.

“It is hard. It’s not the analysing, that’s something I do anyway – I’m sorry, it’s just who I am. If I go and see a live band that I haven’t heard of before I’m always thinking, ‘Gee, why didn’t they put the chorus there or move that there?’ I just can’t stop myself – my brain works that way. I’m always analysing stuff, and this is my passion anyway. Try and stop me enjoying music to the ultimate, to the maximum – part of my enjoyment is digging right into and seeing what it’s doing on a sub-atomic level as well as on the surface,” Faulkner laughs. “That’s part of my pleasure. One thing that I will say is that it is hard to listen to other records while you’re in the middle of AMP, because it’s just so all-consuming. As you can imagine with this long-list I’m a bit over-saturated, so unfortunately I find it difficult to listen outside that. In fact yesterday I listened to the new Willie Nelson record online, just because I thought, ‘You know what? I wouldn’t mind listening to something that’s not from the AMP for a minute’. So I did get to go outside the lines briefly, but generally speaking you don’t even feel like it – you really just want to do something else other than listen to music for a while, and you try to save your energy for the job at hand. It is really quite a demanding one.”

Does the process give Faulkner a good perspective on the relative strengths – or otherwise – of the current Australian scene?

“Oh definitely, that’s the one thing that I personally am most happy about – I’ve got an instant hotline to what’s going on in Australian music, because I get to hear the best of it every year,” he tells. “And every year there’s a whole bunch of bands that I’ve never heard of, and there’s a whole bunch of bands that I wish I was still hearing more of that I’m hoping are in-between albums rather than having disappeared suddenly. I never know because I’m not the type of person who tries to keep up outside of this particular thing – I just listen to the music on its own terms, I don’t go out and hang out at pubs to try and discover the new thing to say, ‘Hey, enter your album in the AMP!’ I don’t do that. You don’t have to enter anyway, it would just be letting us know that it’s out there when it does come out, because sometimes you don’t hear about things.

"It’s been a nightmare to be honest. I wouldn’t say it’s a stronger long-list than last year personally."

“But that’s the thing I enjoy the most, that I do get to hear what everyone’s doing and definitely see the progress in the music. Particularly exciting for me has been the development of the hip hop scene, and how Australian hip hop has got its own real identity now and it’s a really positive statement – it’s not just aping something from somewhere else and watering it down to bargain basement local conditions, it’s a really strong, vibrant genre and it’s really pertinent to what we are in Australia. The other one of course that seems to be coming to the fore in the last couple of years particularly is electronic – we’re finally starting to make some great electronic albums. There have always been the occasional eons coming through and brilliant bands have gone and done well in Europe and so forth – Dead Can Dance and things like that – overall though there’s been a lot of half-baked stuff where people just do it to a certain point and there’s not that much expertise involved. But we’re starting to see things that are really world class being made in that genre as well, and I think that we’re going to get even better at that over the next few years. There are some things in there that I think are shabby and a bit pathetic as well, people who saw Flume and Gotye and thought, ‘I could do that too!’, but that’s always going to happen when something’s popular, you see imitators come along. We’ve still got bad Blink-182 bands in Australia as well, so that’s bound to happen. But overall I’m noticing far more magnificent albums coming out in that genre as well.

“And we’ve always been strong in other areas – there’s a strong undercurrent of rock’n’roll still. Although speaking from my own point of view, great rock’n’roll is very thin on the ground – it’s probably the biggest ‘hens teeth genre’ there is in music; everyone thinks they can do it but no one can. You can make a guitar distorted and pretend to be very anguished, but that’s not rock’n’roll. There’s got to be a swing and a spirit there that makes people feel energised a bit. A good comparison would be comedy or porn – you know good porn because you get aroused and you know good comedy because you laugh, well with rock’n’roll you know good rock’n’roll because you feel like jumping around and it fills you with energy. A lot of the stuff today makes you sit on your ass and just feel like killing yourself or something – that’s not rock’n’roll to me.”