There’s a certain strand of Australian, often from Melbourne, who have left the land of summer heat and cod-LA suburbia to seek a musical audience in Europe, usually London or Berlin. The Birthday Party are probably the most famous to have done it, but so did Angus Andrew of Liars, the pugilistic trio of My Disco, Devastations and, in the early 2000s, HTRK. After a spell in Berlin, Jonnine Standish, Nigel Yang and Sean Stewart made their home in London and instantly felt like a wonderful anomaly, far removed from the more up-tempo, uptight music that made up much of the guitar underground of the time. I put on their first London gig at the Old Blue Last in East London, and they nearly shook it to bits with their intense and monochrome goth dub, an almost eroticised reimagining of the harsh scree of Suicide and Pansonic. “There’s a sensuality, a sexuality, definitely bringing in different shades of feminine into a very masculine space,” Jonnine Standish agrees, “but thankfully, also in a humorous way, even if it’s just as small as being still or being demure while this crazy sound is around you, it’s really fun.” In their early years, HTRK endured the difficulty of a dubious contract that kept debut album Marry Me Tonight locked in limbo, and the unfathomable tragedy of Sean Stewart’s death in 2010. Standish and Yang continued as a duo, albeit with occasional collaborators, achieving something of a breakthrough with 2014’s Psychic 9–5 Club, which The Quietus described as “a fascinating document: a snapshot of a band slowly breaking out of the prison of their own aesthetic and bravely denying the tragedies that have marked their progress the power to define them any further.” Over the course of their two decades, their music has retained its core sound – Standish’s quietly deadpan vocals singing of the pleasure and pain of romance in all its complexity over understated, cracked rhythms. This they build on by embracing influences from R&B, pop, industrial and, recently, slightly more traditional (and unexpected) rock forms. Last year, they paid tribute to the Psychic 9–5 Club with a pop-up shop of the same name back in Melbourne (where they made tea for anyone who came in), as well as playing a series of anniversary gigs around the world. Shortly before one of these, at London’s Café Oto, Standish and Yang guided tQ through choice moments from their two decades of trial and defiance. As Standish says, “the reason why we’re happy to document 21 years is because it’s a miracle we’re still making music together – and having a really nice time.”
‘I’m All Broke Up’ – from Nostalgia (2004)
Jonnine Standish: Sean lived in this amazing basement apartment next to a jazz club in Melbourne and I lived down the road. We did this whole album in one take, really high, and recorded into a cassette recorder. Nigel fuzzed it out with so much reverb that my dad got angry and wanted to call him – he got really upset that you couldn’t hear the vocals or the lyrics.
NY: There weren’t any separate tracks to mix but it was a lot of fun to do on a hacked early version of Ableton, to just get in there and experiment with digital noise and reverb and mix it on some crappy keyboard amp.
JS: The [Nostalgia CD] was just a business card to hand out because we couldn’t get a headline show – “call HTRK for a gig!’ They’re probably still sitting in the record shops we left them in.
‘HA’ – from Marry Me Tonight, 2009
Jonnine Standish: We wrote that in the first week of jamming together. I’d never written lyrics before I met Sean and Nigel, and didn’t even call them lyrics – I have a memory of bringing some words on a Post-it note to rehearsal and then it all came out. It was a revenge vocal, like understated revenge to a toxic relationship, but it’s morphed, become a bit more dub and rather than a toxic ex, it’s now ‘I kind of do want to get back with you’ – the feeling’s shifting slightly, it’s becoming a bit softer.
Nigel Yang: Sean played that bass line with all the attack. Now, without him, it’s a sequenced 303 sample put through a warm, fuzzy bass pedal that really dubs it out. It becomes a whole lot dreamier. It was vicious at first.
JS: It was very passive-aggressive, wasn’t it? And now it’s romantically passive-aggressive.
NY: It felt like screaming out of the bottom of a well. Inspirations for that one I haven’t thought of in a very long time, but I can hear now that we were really into Einstürzende Neubauten, two-note melodies like Ligeti’s pieces in the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack. It’s seeing how minimalism might translate to rock context, guitar-wise anyway. Sean’s bass line isn’t a strict 4/4 measure, but there’s something pretty timeless in that figure that he wrote.
JS: He tapped into something really special with that.
‘Fascinator’ – from Marry Me Tonight
NY: It was only after living in London that I started to get into dub. Even when ‘Fascinator’ was written, which was in Melbourne, dub wouldn’t have really been part of our palette.
JS: We were influenced by Neubauten and Suicide, Alan Vega, Martin Rev, multiple others – but they would have been inspired by dub. ‘Fascinator’, ‘HA’, ‘Disco’ and ‘Rentboy’ were all within the first three months of jamming in Nigel’s lounge room, coming together and not knowing each other. It was really fun. We would just get high three nights a week, we all had day jobs, we were very routine about it – Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Fridays were always insane. Lyrically, I was documenting whatever happened that night, because we were all going to about five city bars and getting into all sorts of trouble. That was a way for me to process some of the drama and the gossip from the scene. In Melbourne there has to be drama, because you’re so isolated so you’ve got to make your own daytime TV.
It was a long time before the album came out, wasn’t it?
NY: It was difficult because we weren’t permitted to release the album that we’d finished in Melbourne in 2006 and we were in a limbo period for three years. It was hard to write new stuff without that first thing coming out. Paul Smith from Blast First was instrumental in wresting that album back from the people who ‘owned’ it so it could come out, but it took a long time.
JS: After three years of build-up, you expect when the day that it comes out aliens would arrive on Earth and put a medal around your neck, so when nothing happens it’s an anti-climax. We didn’t know who we were until that album was released. It was tough, we really struggled as a band in the first years and no one would even think that now – It looks like we’ve had a merry old time for 21 years. Even talking with you now, we haven’t even got up to the fact that we lost our beloved Sean.
‘Poison’ – from Work (work work), 2011
JS: We had a year in Berlin, that was really exciting and dreamy for a time, but I was really hungry – like, literally really hungry. We moved to London in 2007. I loved it here.
NY: Sean was still in Berlin after Jonn and I had moved here. And Sean would visit and we’d jam. He moved over, and it was very shortly after that that he passed away. ‘Poison’ was written with Sean in that difficult period of getting him to move over. I have videos of one of the last rehearsals, the three of us together tracking that song.
JS: Sadly it’s the night before the morning he died so it’s quite heavy. He loved the song. One of the last things he said to me when we were walking out together was, ‘I love your lyrics’. I was singing to Sean, in a way, because he was really hard to talk to and he was in a bad way. And that line, “where are we going to go, you decide”, I was really hoping that he would decide the path of health. I know why he loved it, because it’s so Sean. There were some industrial sounds coming in, and some toxic sounds, it was all his aura at the time I was capturing. I really wanted him to like it so he would be excited about making music and living in London too, we really wanted it to work, but sadly it went horribly wrong.
NY: We had a version that he played bass on, but the bassline wasn’t quite right. If he was around for longer, he would have refined it but he didn’t get the chance to so in the end we re-tracked the bass with a 303.
JS: It was very tricky. It was so surreal and heavy programming Sean’s unfinished bass lines into this very hard to use machine. We were both in silence, grieving. It also kept us moving forward with the project and somehow got us through to this point.
NY: There was romantic element too, communicating with the other side.
‘Slo Glo’ – from Work (work work)
JS: We went through every email to find any little sketches or three second motifs that Sean had sent us. And ‘Slo Glo’ was one of those.
NY: I remember having his MP3 demo of the bassline on loop and I’m just in the studio alone playing along with it, and the ideas started to come very quickly. They only came because of this weird thing where he wasn’t there anymore. To me, it’s quite a beautiful crossing…
JS: …a crossing of universes. ‘Eat Your Heart’ was like that as well. When someone’s not around anymore, you’re just like, ‘oh wow, I would have loved to have jammed this with you.’
NY: I don’t know if London at the time and the way we were living, maybe taking too many drugs, was a bit numbing, but then concentrating on making the album and grieving the flow of emotions started to come back. I remember a really strong reference for that album was Roxy Music’s Avalon, it’s so romantic, so spatial and dreamy, you might hear it in the sax in ‘Slo Glo’ and the guitar tones in a lot of the songs. I tried as best as I could to recreate Bob Clearmountain’s mix – I wrote to him and asked him if he was interested in mixing it, of course no response. We sent through the tracks to Paul Smith and said ‘maybe we should get someone really good to mix it to make it sound like Avalon? And he was like, ‘don’t touch it, this is how it should sound’.
JS: He said it was a thing of beauty, and he also told me it was a perversion, almost like a grief perversion. He didn’t go any further, but I understood at the time.
‘Blue Sunshine’ – from Psychic 9-5 Club, 2014
JS: Even though this album was a move into more hopeful music that was more healing to play, at the same time I was the most numb. I didn’t even realise how well the record had done. We didn’t even acknowledge it. It just went over our head, we were so detached from the industry.
NY: It didn’t even feel like a creative breakthrough in any sense. I wasn’t more proud of that album than I was previous records. We just kind of did it. We were proud that we’d done it, just us two, without Sean’s involvement. That was a big thing, to have to do it. We had specific ideas which started going to 9-5 Club. I’d moved to Sydney, where it was so hot and humid. I became aware of my body a lot more after six years in cold Europe, then regaining health, discovering spiritual texts, listening to Jon Hassell and being excited by his ideas of the Fourth World, and how the body might figure into our music more. That came through that record with more sculpted beats.
JS: We were asking, ‘okay, if we’re in the body, how does that manifest in music and then how does that manifest in real life?’ So then the Psychic 9-5 Club came about, that was the space where you would hook up in real life but have really healthy relationships rather than danger, and passing out and waking up next to a gremlin. Instead it would be, ‘oh, I’ve made a lifelong friend and I can actually listen to this music and draw something from it’ rather than just an obliteration.
‘New Year’s Day’ – from Venus In Leo, 2019
JS: We went back to an almost grungy imagination of our teenage years, like putting them in a blender and imagining what that would sound like now. It was a really fun album to make. I don’t know if I think it’s our best album, but it was a really enjoyable creative process together. Jamming at my house in the rainforest, we went back to songwriting as best we could. ‘New Year’s Day’ was us trying to go back to the beginning in Marry Me Tonight where some songs had more of a linear structure. The chorus came out first, and it’s my favourite in all of our songs because it’s just so incredibly me. I’m always in trouble, so I sing “I’ve got a sinking feeling I’m gonna do the wrong thing eventually”. Every now and again we’ll get a song lyrically like that – where it’s all sounding a bit Nick Cave – but it really does just fall out without any effort. You can spend three years trying to craft a song and it feels horrible, and then out of nowhere a song appears fully formed, like your hands have been possessed by a demon. That was one of those.
NY: It’s a mystery to both Jonn and I that Venus In Leo resonates with people so deeply. To us it felt like a bit of a hodgepodge. Some people write us letters about it and they hear all these things in it that makes them think of their teenage years.
‘Mentions’ – from Venus In Leo
JS: At the time I said to Nigel, it’s not the most unique take on social media that being physical is much better for your mental health than this never-ending dopamine of mentions and likes. It was pre-lockdown, we were all witnessing that people were becoming quite sick with narcissism. I tapped into something there. Nigel came up with a guitar melody that I really love, and I feel like I’ve ruined it with story content. It’s the only song where I feel like my opinion has changed. In all the other songs, even if I was a younger version of myself with toxic exes, I can still tap in there and I’m there. But I can’t get down with this take on social media. There is something I do like about that song, though. When I was thinking about the dopamine from physical touch, I learned that I have ASMR to make-up counters and people applying my make-up. That led me into a real YouTube wormhole, just listening to make-up technicians on YouTube who are ASMR trained, so ‘Mentions’ also reminds me of discovering this part of my weird self.
‘Kiss Kiss Kiss And Rhinestones’, from Rhinestones
JS: This one’s really fun to play live at the moment. Just a bit of a tantrum. Nigel got really good at acoustic guitar during lockdown.
NY: It didn’t start with that fingerpicking style at all. It was a really dumb take on a Euro trance chord progression, the most clichéd chord progression in the world, that uplifting chord progression that you might hear in a taxi in Eastern Europe. Then that quickly transformed with discovering country during lockdown, and getting an acoustic guitar, trying to not shy away from a side of music that I had paid absolutely no attention to – classic songwriting. I started to become interested in that, partially from having kids and seeing how that kind of music made sense in a family unit. That in itself is more interesting to me than the music in a way. I was surprised that I’ve come into this music because the whole career of HTRK has been a rejection of that in a way: a rejection of chord changes, a rejection of classic rock. I was like, ‘how can we take this in to what we do?’
JS: This song has got the dumbest, silliest lyrics, but I’m talking about really personal, deep subject matter of grim reapers and fear of death.
NY: It’s a funny one when there’s these chord progressions that are just in western pop and rock music. I’m a bit of a chord progression snob, but if you can pull off that, using a classic chord progression like in ‘Kiss Kiss’ and ‘Fascinator’ where they’re a cliché, but you can somehow turn them into something good, that is a recipe for success.
‘Gilbert and George’ – from Rhinestones, 2021
It is what it says on the can really – it’s just about Gilbert and George, an ode to our time in London. We lived on Dalston Lane above the noodle shop where infamously Throbbing Gristle had the black bean rice one night, all our friends were on Kingsland Road. We would see Gilbert and George nightly from the window. When their big book came out, we got them to sign it for George, who was our tour manager. We were all walking the streets in the brilliance of this pedestrian city, and always had a plastic bag with a couple of beers and some bread.
NY: That song reminds me of the arduousness of making music. The lyrics came early with an acoustic guitar and were very evocative, but then nothing was clicking, it was never finished. It went through the most ridiculous amount of iterations, trying a synth version, a ballad-y version, changing the beats, every element around the vocal until we thought, what’s the point in persisting? Then after all that time we suddenly found something that worked, changed the structure a bit and then we had the song. It was such a relief. The lines about friends really get to me – I like that sentiment in the song.
JS: It’s a song for London and we wanted to make it sound like London. The city provided us with a lot – a humour, a toughness, street smarts. Getting destroyed and getting back up again is always quite good for your music.
HTRK’s fifteenth anniversary edition of Marry Me Tonight is out now and can be purchased here
