IN A BAND ALREADY at bare minimum – they started as a four-piece a decade ago, cut that in half almost immediately, and haven’t seen reason to formally bulk up again since – Polish Club’s David Novak is flying solo today as John-Henry Pajak is at his new day job (more on that later) so I prepare to scrub the 30 questions I had for the drummer.
“And you can just fill it in with dick jokes, because that’s usually 51% of what he says,” says guitarist/vocalist Novak, who admits he can’t really criticise. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say it wasn’t reciprocal, but I to keep things a little more classy when I can. I try.”
Well, he does wear glasses so his dick jokes are automatically a level above. “They are,” he concedes, “high class dick jokes.”
The dick jokes, high class or not, may explain why in Tied In A Knot, on the coming Polish Club album, Novak can get away with using pontificate and loquacious in one song, with a bonus Leonard Cohen reference to boot, and not automatically be called a wanker – a fate that could be fatal for a band known for vigorous interrogations of blues/soul rock. Not to mention a band whose song, Good Time – think a combination of Jet, Blur’s Song 2 and Hoodoo Gurus – was soundtracking coverage of the rugby league last year.
You hope never to hear Michael Ennis or Cooper Cronk attempts words like that calling a game.
“It’s bad huh?” Novak laughs. “I put that in as a place-holder and I kept it in there to see if John-Henry would notice and pull it up. He is usually pretty immediate with pulling up wanky lyrics like that, and stuff that doesn’t necessarily sound like something organic I would say. But he didn’t say a word and he is the first to jump on me for a bad lyric or a nonsensical lyric, so …”
So pontificate and loquacious were “placeholders”? That’s usually where people end up once they’ve raided the rhyming dictionary or thesaurus.
“I used to be one of those dickheads back in the day, when we were just starting to write songs and I wasn’t the best lyricist – I’m still not – but I struggled to get the point I was trying to make out in a way that wasn’t really basic or too vague. So I would go through thesauruses and I would google things and it would end up being lines like that there were a little bit cringy, a little bit too try hard,” explains Novak.
“Now I’ve learned that skill where there are these ridiculously long words that fit in and I automatically put them in and we’ll try and sell that idea better down the track. Sometimes they stay in unfortunately.”
He doth protest too much though because the words actually work perfectly in the song, an almost elegant ballad about a bloke who admits he isn’t as articulate as he could be, who sees what might be expected and avoids it, but the sentiment remains true. Novak should just own it.
After all there is what you might call a counterweight to it on the album, in the song Heavyweight, which wears its sentiment openly, illuminating articulately the strongest emotion. Indeed, on the evidence of this, and other sides of the new record, you might call Polish Club a bunch of softies.
“Yeah, massive softies,” Novak says. “To give credit where credit’s due, a lot of it comes from John-Henry. The impetus of the lyric and the perspective definitely came from John-Henry. He is a big softy, and so I am I, and I think it plays to our strength. I think we can be brash in our persona as very much a relatively hard rock band but we don’t shy away from being sad or romantic.”
This isn’t just words: both Club members married earlier this year. And those weren’t even the most momentous events of the year for them. Or at least not the only life-changing ones (and I’m not even referring to leaving their label and management, and going wholly independent).
“There is so much joy in that and dependence on our wives that we are really comfortable leaning on [and] John wanted to do a song that was just flat out a love song and that had the metaphor of the boxer. He basically came in and said I want to use the term heavyweight, and then I had heart surgery in January as well, so he’s like I want to use the term heavyweight heart, which ended up being the album title.”
As the double wedding year might suggest, the symbiotic relationship of the Sydney duo goes beyond the musical, into something that reveals understanding and trust.
“[John-Henry] knows he wants to make a love song, he knows the kind of song he wants to do, the emotional beats he wants to make, and then he’ll set me free to put silly little words to it and that’s how the song comes about,” Novak says, adding with smirk. “I feel like he is the puppeteer sometimes.”
Not that he is deflecting blame exactly, but maybe pre-empting some criticisms.
“With that song we gave ourselves up to being really saccharine and just really happy,” Novak says. “It’s kinda freeing when you’re like okay this is going to be a love song and it’s going to be painfully sappy about how I’m very happy with my partner and I would throw myself in front of a bus for her. It’s a wonderfully simple concept, one that I think we would have struggled with on our first or second album.”
I want to take issue with him here, describing the song and emotions as saccharine and painfully sappy. There’s nothing saccharine, ersatz, not genuine, about any of it, and calling it that sounds like he is apologising for it, the way he might have around the first or second album.
“I think the reason I go to saccharine is because there’s two distinct ways of communicating my life, and one of them is just through speaking to my loved ones, my wife and my cats, and I will be, not blunt but very matter-of-fact about it. But I don’t want to package it up like that in public,” Novak explains. “I want to know this is how I sing it and it feels to me a little bit saccharine – and I don’t mean that in a bad way; it’s just noticeably more poetic, more built-up, and the stakes seem higher when in real life I am very matter-of-fact about it.
“I enjoy the distinction between those two things because I don’t buy it when I flip those things and I am overly mushy in real life or to matter-of-fact in the songs. I feel that there is this pageantry that we afford ourselves in our songs that I really enjoy and I like to play it up because it makes it feel like theatre.”
THURSDAY: In part two of this Polish Club interview, David Novak goes international, looks to top Paul Kelly, and says no to that job. CLICK HERE TO READ
READ MORE
Heavy Weight Heart is out September 13.
Comments