BEYOND DISSUADING SOMEONE from marrying your bereaved mother before you’re given an excuse to kill them, not listening to the predictions of witches you meet on the road, and always confirming your beloved is actually dead before taking your own life in despair, William Shakespeare has good advice for everyone, including, maybe even especially, musicians. If only they were to listen.
Years ago, when thinking about working with the long, thin streak of amused trouble that is Tim Rogers, he of many decades in You Am I, Lance Ferguson of (among other things) Melbourne’s modern funk/soul masters, The Bamboos, clearly ignored Shakespeare’s warning in Julius Caesar: “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much: such men are dangerous”.
Not only ignored it, but doubled down, not only making a record with Rogers and the Bamboos in 2015, touring with him, pulling him up on stage at a Bamboos show with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, but now, with the ten tracks of Style And Or Substance, recording an album together as the groove-focused, soul-dipped, loose-hipped Ferguson Rogers Process.
What was he thinking?
“[That question] has come up a lot,” Ferguson, a sleek and toned man himself, admits. “As best as I could put it is when I was coming up through the ‘90s, going to jazz school, listening to electronic dance music, drum and bass and trip hop and all that sort of stuff, apart from a few flatmates who would crank up Nirvana records loud, I sidestepped the entire 90s rock thing to a large degree.
“So when I have dinner parties with friends and mention Tim Rogers, they do get that twinkle in their eye and that thousand yard stare …”
The writer/producer/musician who has worked cross-border a number of times now, including with Megan Washington, is at pains to stress that “I absolutely am aware” of the cultural significance of You And I and Rogers, “but it’s not in me” in the way it is for indie rock fans. Consequently, “I just took him as I met him and saw him and experienced him, which was as a really nice guy who is into a lot of music I was into and shared the headspace of being into music”.
He does point out that there is a song on the new album called Multitudes, where Rogers addresses the multiplicity of reputations and asks “which Tim do you want me to be today?” as a kind of pre-emptive strike of humour.
“Tim is all of those things, but not to dispel the myth of Tim Rogers, he is a hard-working, conscientious and deeply thoughtful person who really gets down to business.”
Ok, sure, but Rogers does fit some of the brief, as described by Caesar of his nemesis Cassius, that “He reads much, he is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men”. When you’re working with Rogers, you are going to get the wit, the vibrancy, but you are also going to get someone well versed at looking at himself and looking at others and trying to work out how that all works – and why often it doesn’t.
“This is also the beauty of Tim as a lyricist,” Ferguson says enthusiastically. “There is deep level personal stuff, but they are also full of good humour, and you can superimpose your own experiences.”
All this is well and good, but we have been rather Rogers-centred, which is unfair on the man in front of me. What has Ferguson, a man with two decades of work and control and understanding of his patch, brought to Rogers to maybe change him?
“I think I’ve maybe shone a light on aspects of what he does musically that may be people, more from my scene, weren’t aware,” says Ferguson, still to a certain extent deflecting attention. “When we did I Got Burned [the first Bamboos/Rogers collaboration in 2012] it wasn’t as if Tim Rogers had never recorded or sung a falsetto vocal but when it was in the setting of a soul tune, it surprised a lot of people. And I think potentially opened their minds to his versatility.”
“I feel like Tim has freedom. I basically gave him the music and I was not going to interfere with anything he did lyrically or whatever. Maybe that gives him some sense of freedom that he can do anything he likes. I think the music is fun let themselves go to, and dance to, and I think there is a liberating motivation behind that.”
It’s worth noting that Rogers is not the only person in this group hungry for new territory to explore with the other half of the Ferguson Rogers Process boasting, several side projects, DJ and radio careers, nearly 40 albums as a producer, a label of his own, a bunch of ARIA nominations and collaborations with Tex Perkins, Kylie Auldist, Katalyst and Dan Sultan locally, and Quantic, Aloe Blacc, Alice Russell and Lyrics Born over the oceans. Why doesn’t Ferguson stay in his own box?
“For one, even though I’m known for a certain range of music, I do have really have broad tastes. I did go to jazz school and did all that stuff I was talking about but I’m really into The Cure, I’m into lots of stuff that people don’t really think I’m into,” he says. “I don’t gel very well with a real purist attitude. I do respect those people because in a way to do something really, really well you do have to have the blinkers on, but I can’t do that.
“I will infuriate my father by saying I have a vast collection of John Coltrane albums and love them but I can’t say he is better than Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo. I can have just as much fun listening to Coltrane as Olivia Rodrigo and I can’t just do one thing; I’d get bored.”
Hmm. Shakespeare might have looked at both these slender men, these restless musicians, and said “Such men as he be never at heart's ease whiles they behold a greater than themselves, And therefore are they very dangerous.”
And he would probably be right.
The Ferguson Rogers Process will tour in 2025. Style And Or Substance is out now through Impressed Recordings.
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