Photo: Matt Booy
Powderfinger
by ADAM BAIDAWI
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This story first appeared on the cover of the August 2010 issue of Jetstar's inflight magazine.
There was never a decisive “moment”.
No teary realisation or stubborn surrender.
The end of Powderfinger was, instead, staggered. It was weary late night chats in dimly lit hotel bars and knowing looks backstage at major music festivals. When it came time to craft Golden Rule—album number seven—the iconic Australian quintet had all but decided it would be their last.
In early April, dressed in stubble and an industry-standard rock blazer, ever-understated frontman Bernard Fanning broke the news to the Australian media. “The Sunsets tour will be Powderfinger's last ever run of shows,” he read, perched behind a desk. “With the completion of our last album, Golden Rule, we feel that we have said all that we want to say as a musical group.”
It was an oddly sober and formal moment for the famously low-key group. “It was a strange thing for us to be sitting on a stage together and just talking,” admits Fanning. “Speaking in front of a group of people doesn’t come naturally to me…at all (laughs).”
My phone call finds Fanning lounging on a verandah in Madrid, where he’s been relaxing with his newborn baby and Spanish wife. He’s been stuck there indefinitely thanks to Iceland’s pesky volcanic ash. Admittedly, the setting could be worse.
“It’s beautiful, actually. Spring has sprung. Blue skies, warm days—it’s good,” he shrugs.
Far removed from Casa del Fanning, Powderfinger’s lead guitarist Darren Middleton is fiddling around on the piano in his Brisbane home studio.
“There’s no single moment, when everyone all agreed at once,” he sits up. “And that’s the thing with a decision like this—one that encompasses a 20 year period of your life—the band arrived at that finish line staggered.”
The decision was a momentous one for the Australian music industry. Powderfinger had reigned supreme for over a decade, sweeping 16 ARIA awards, five consecutive #1 albums as well as twice topping national broadcaster Triple J’s annual national zeitgeist, the Hottest 100.
No matter where you stood on their music, this was the bowing out of a towering presence.
Their beginnings were nothing but innocuous.
Forming in the late ‘80s (and borrowing a Neil Young song to name themselves), the young group set out with erratic musical direction, beginning as a heavy metal act. The band was surrounded by similarly ambitious acts including Regurgitator in the thriving local scene in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. After independently releasing a surprisingly competent self-titled rock EP, the band was snapped up by UK-based Polydor Records.
The new partnership soon cracked humble success: Powderfinger raised even the most-discerning of eyebrows when their next EP, Transfusion peaked at #1 on the Alternative ARIA Charts, ousting grunge’s ubiquitous kings, Nirvana—at the height of their power.
With their debut album, Parables for Wooden Ears, the band took a serious sidestep—it proved a critical and commercial failure. Today, the band openly berate the record, though it was likely a significant catalyst in their eventual success.
“We didn’t really have much direction—we were borrowing ideas from whatever was around us, and whatever was on the radio,” Middleton reflects. “It was from that period from Parables into Double Allergic that we started to find our own voice and our way of doing things…considering songwriting as really important, as opposed to how fast you could play—how many notes you could squeeze out of the guitar in three seconds.”
“It was pretty hard period,” agrees Fanning. “It was hard to reconcile whether we were going to keep going or not.
“We were really wide eyed when we started,” he admits. “I think that first album was a really good reality check for us, and actually set us up to be a much better band than we would’ve been if that album had worked.”
Middleton cites “Pick You Up” as the song that transitioned Powderfinger into their bare-basics, classical songwriting style.
“Bern wrote it and we all gravitated to it straight away. It was a really simple, good melody. That started the ball rolling,” he grins. “It was very natural after that. Simple songs: built around melody, a good lyric and an emotive attachment of some sort.”
That mantra became the crux of Powderfinger’s runaway success, peaking with 2000’s Odyssey Number Five—an album that sold more than half a million copies and became synonymous with modern Australian rock. They had finally endeared themselves with the masses.
Powderfinger long flirted with international success, but ultimately, they proved Australia’s band, and Australia their loyal audience.
The band’s final hurrah comes with the Sunsets tour—an 8-week pilgrimage across the country. Fanning has already begun crafting the shows: “I’m interested in trying to have a set-list that satisfies people that have only been to one Powderfinger show—and also people that have been to a hundred.”
Continuing their sound philanthropic tradition, the tour sees the group partnering with the Yalari organisation, who provide educational opportunities for indigenous youth. “It was a big decision, but we’re all big believers of what they do: educating the underprivileged. We all think that that’s one of the keys to trying to unlock indigenous disadvantage,” says Fanning.
Post-Powderfinger, the frontman is likely to resume his solo career with a follow-up to the well received Tea & Sympathy, whilst Middleton and the band’s other members have indicated that they’ll continue making music and collaborating with other artists.
“I’ve got no doubt that there will be a hole in my life,” admits Middleton. “The band has been half of my existence on this planet.”
It seems even more evident two decades on—but theirs was a formula perfectly brewed for our shores: an unassuming and unremarkable cast of local musos, crafting endearing, yet harmonically and lyrically simple rock mumbles.
The Australian public amplified those humble mumbles into anthems, and those anthems were soon well and truly embedded in our iconography. (Look no further than Heath Ledger’s career-making montage in Two Hands or the Transport Accident Commission’s widely successful “Hidden Toll” campaign—both inseparable from “These Days”.)
On paper, Powderfinger’s detractors had every reason to be proven right—yet the unlikely quintet endeared themselves to Australia’s everyman like few bands have. The underdogs that stubbornly marched on.