Oh, yeah, that's great.

Yeah.

And the Buffalo Club, which is amazing because it's an RSL, but they've kind of opened it up to all the musical artistic freaks.

So it's owned by all the members and it has all the grisly old cobbers at the bar have really taken to all the...

Oh, great.

So it's like, you know...

A retired serviceman with yellow moustaches sitting next to like a narco punks and stuff.

It's looking pretty good, point of recording.

Yeah.

That's right.

It's right next door to the, um, to the skate park.

I used to go there all, ev- every single day after school.

My brother worked at Captain Munchy's.

Um, it's been closed down, which is a tragedy, and so is the Australia Hotel, which is another tragedy.

[laughs]

Um, it's really weird, and there's like a bri- a footbridge that goes over the, um, over the train tracks to, like the port terminal just there.

Did that tie into sort of your listening habits at the time? Were you listening to a lot of Australian music or was it more feeding into this sort of aspirational, like, let's surf our way down the East Coast? LAUGHTER

Yeah, I think all of the above.

Probably listening to a lot of Coloured Balls, Ice House, Midnight Oil, Divinals.

I got, like, so obsessed.

I was living in London for a while, having a pretty ratchet time.

Ratchet in what way? Bad.

Bad.

an artist like yeah particularly like listening to where he's gone now with the jazz flute stuff exactly yeah he's clearly somebody drawing from all of these different camps in no matter what he does

and they're very kind of you know you name check specific things and you know you span a lot of serious topics do you write the lyrics first or do you write them separately or do you write like big batches of lyrics then pull out of it how does that work because you're a very specific writer

yeah um it's different for every song probably i'd say like um for example tourmaline on this album or through the Heather.

Yeah.

That's got, it's got such a, such a specific melody.

The

like,

or it's not really the melody.

no this is really good um so then at what stage are they at when you bring them in to the band are they at that skeletal stage that you were talking about before where it's just like a kind of dylan cords and bare bones thing or are they more developed and are you demoing also at home

I- I guess how did you discover this? And, you know, as we talk about the ritual, is that where you, is that, do you consciously create in the morning?

Well, how did I discover it? Um, I think I've always been, I don't know, you always kind of semi-aware of it.

But, um, uh, I, I...

Like, it's always been s- it's kinda family lore that my mum is like, you know, it's like a family joke that she'd wake up at ni- and you'd still call it nighttime.

Um, and, um, she'd always be tapping away writing her thesis.

It's like this, um, this memory that's kind of branded into my [laughs] into me.

Um, no, I think, I think I really started being a bit more co- cogent of it that, like, um, when my life started getting busier Um, because then you do have to kind of, um, silo your activities a bit more.

Yeah.