Dirty Cords

- Blunt Magazine- Australia

Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. – I Ching

Exile on Main St is playing so loud in the background I can’t hear the phone ringing, and there’s a cup of coffee and Jim Beam getting cold on the desk in front of me. A sprawling, drunken ride, Exile is as fresh and dirty today as it was in 1972, coming out of Keith’s basement at Villa Nellcôte, just a few miles up the road from the junk capital of the world, Marseilles. The greatest rock band in the world lazed in the stinking heat of the Riviera day after sweltering day to record a blistering monument to decadence that sounds like it was recorded in Keith’s bathroom. The ambience is overwhelming, humming around the room in waves.

Last week, in the side room of Corduroy Records, the Mess Hall embarked on a recording session reminiscent of the Stones’ Exile effort…replete with a haphazard crowd of musicians, vinyl pressers and hangers on completing the Nellcôte feel of the whole thing, if only for one day. The dirty-sweet ambience of seven inches of vinyl compounded with the old world practice of live recording not only give the recordings a brutally honest feel, but also give us insight into the enigmatic Mess Hall.

After a few hours of setting up a twisted mire of cables, wires and microphones in the ‘studio’ at Corduroy, things began to get interesting. By this time, everyone was consuming Cooper’s Ale at a breakneck speed, and people were starting to fill into the room, creating a maudlin atmosphere for the recording. The floor was a mine-field of old speakers, musical instruments, rock posters, cds, records stacked haphazardly and the constant turmoil of an old Tom Jones or Rolling Stones LP crackling in the background between takes. Corduroy president Nick Phillips was on hand, making sure the beer continued to flow and even getting into the game at one point with a few of the pressers to sing background vocals on Shake Shake while Steve’s Leslie speaker hums and warbles like a storm in a box. I hope they remember to thank everybody in the liner notes.

So basically, after getting the place ready to go and making sure nobody’s guitar was going to burst into flames mid-take, and before the beer-soaked affair that Shake Shake became, the engineer gave a nod and Jed and AJ started belting out Evelyn, a new track they have been working out live. After a practice take, the boys would stand under a pair of $20 speakers in the control room to listen to the mix, while the engineer tried to tweak the low end on Jed’s guitar to make up for the lack of a bass player. A couple of takes to get it right, and then straight onto the acetate. No second takes, no editing, no backing down. The recordings come out perfectly honest on the acetate; every blemish is there, but the rich warmth of the atmosphere drips out of the speakers too. The warmth of one of Melbourne’s Indian Summer days out in the suburbs.

“I really liked working in that way,” Jed confesses, about their live to acetate experience at Corduroy, “just a straight up ‘here’s your two takes and off you go’ kind of thing. And it being a really raw, kind of live sound. That was different than what the EP was. This tends to capture what we are, I suppose. It’s an interesting process. It was kind of weird to walk into the control room and Stevie just pointed to the record and said, ‘it’s on there’. I like that immediate way of working. It’s a totally different way of working, but it’s kind of cool not to have to think too hard about things. You pretty much do everything in the moment. I think as well, when you’re recording like that you’re concentrating on one particular thing. You don’t have any outside influences. It’s just pretty much what you are doing in that room.”

AJ seemed to agree a few days later as we spoke over a few strong ales in his sunny backyard on a bench that looked heisted from the local park. “We wanted to go back to more of a live sound,” he leans back, explaining himself with a gruff grin, “and produce something that would be sort of a collector’s item. We liked the idea of having something on 7” vinyl in a limited press. The nature of the band, we’ve always been a live band and recording for us is a whole different process, especially the last EP which was much more produced than the album. Plus we are playing a lot better than we used to. We’re a lot more confident in doing these kinds of things now. – I think Corduroy has a history of doing these things and I think we fit in with the type of people who have been doing it – Like the Dirtbombs and people like that.”

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is. – Noel Coward

The Mess Hall look rough. Their equipment looks rough. Everything in the way they approach music is jagged and loose. Jed’s pawn-shop guitar and AJ’s worn drums bring warmth and a certain ineffable edge to their music. On stage, they are surprisingly quiet between the aural violence of their pop/ blues bromides. As both gentlemen are accomplished actors, one might expect more show on stage, but they like everything stripped back. The session at Corduroy was a perfect expression of their bel esprit, and in a small factory down the beach from Melbourne, the facades fell away and what we heard was the blues, the real ones.

From radio airplay to being invited down to Corduroy, the boys are finally getting a bit of recognition for their toil from a fickle industry. A year ago, they couldn’t get a gig as a two-piece. Jed recounts how they had to claim their bassist was sick when they got to gigs, because promoters only hired ‘bands’. Enter Jack and Meg White, and all of a sudden two-pieces are in. “All the negatives became positive…it became marketable,” says AJ, frequently referred to as too old by Australian A&R folk before the two-piece renaissance. Of course, the danger of riding a fad is apparent for the duo. It is hard not to be compared to the White Stripes or the Black Keys, or even the Kills by the NME crowd, but it is clear the Mess Hall are descendants of the delta line: RL Burnside, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Bukka White.

“They had these little bass lines running and that train-running kind of rhythm,” Jed explains, “They sat on a beat and pretty much just rambled over it. There was an honest about that that I really liked. They really sound like they are singing from the other side. I think that what we do with a two piece is very similar to what they are doing with one. It’s that unsaid thing about when you start a band….why does one band go further than another band. Four people can play technically proficiently and not go anywhere. I think it’s literally about four or two people in a room who have that magic, the thing you can’t learn, you almost can’t put your finger on, that’s why AJ and I have gotten to where we have. There is this special chemistry there that I suppose other bands don’t have. I think that kind of relationship that you can have where you can communicate with each other without actually saying anything is an amazing thing to have, and sometimes when I think about it, it blows my mind. Sometimes when you see and old couple married for years and years and they’re coming to the end of their lives. The silences that they have, have a lot more to them than when they are speaking to each other.”

The Mess Hall have a wave of Summer festival commitments coming up. They will be playing at both the Meredith and Falls Festivals in Victoria. After that, the pair will be sidling down in Sydney to nut out their second, and eagerly awaited second LP. It’s the most important for an artist, as everyone waits to see if they are really talented or just fluked it. The Mess Hall are hoping it will solidify the respect they have gained these past couple of years. As for the 7”, it is scheduled for vinyl only release in January through Cayman Island Mafia Records, most likely a limited press of 500 or so. Stay tuned to Blunt for more details…

©Carlisle Rogers, 2004