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Ben Lee.
 "'Poetic and not very sensible' is the best description of Ben Lee I've heard in a long time," declares Ben Lee himself in a rather congratulatory tone. I was actually referring to the track-by-track descriptions he's written for his new album, 'Awake Is The New Sleep'. But Lee himself seems to think it befits a larger part of his character. "You just described me. You don't even need to interview me! You got me, you got it down."
However, I feel I laboured too much on the point of these fragmented sentences and curious uses of tense that pepper his descriptions. "What are you, fucking, the grammar teacher? It's the feeling! None of that's important, that's all form, not even the music's important. Writing's not important, none of it's important. What's important is the transmission of feeling.
"You know that what makes art great is not what it looks like, but how it makes you feel when you stand in front of it. And there's no words for that, there's nothing. So I don't even feel the need to try and do something in the correct way. The only way that I want to do it is the way that will transmit the feeling the best. So it's easy to say, 'There's mistakes.' I used to record when I was fourteen on a boom box in my parents' house and they would say it doesn't sound, you know, good quality. But the feeling got across. And that's what I learned from punk rock, the thing that I still believe in, is it's not about the form, it's the feeling. It's about the substance, not the style."
He then sums up his entire life in three short sentences. "I saw Nirvana play, and the next day I started a band. I got that feeling that you can do it yourself. Nothing matters except that your intentions are pure."
Funny, then, that someone with such an artistic, punk rock attitude toward life would buck the new-wave trend and instead create some of the catchiest pop tunes to come out of Australia for a long time. But Lee says the move from punk to pop was a very organic process.
"In some ways it seems natural now, looking back. I always loved music, and I always loved communication. I wasn't interested in doing something that was just art for art's sake, in a corner with no audience. I wanted to talk to people, know what I mean?
"I believe I had something I wanted to say, and I wanted to share it; and I wanted to be effective about that. Pop music is a great forum for that. You get this huge audience and you can talk about the things that really matter. The condition is that you have to put it into a form that is so specific and so beautiful - it has to be catchy, it has to be three minutes long, it has to be a repetition. I love the rules of pop music."
He despises the rules of grammar, but loves the rules of pop. But isn't it all, you know, strict and regimented?
"Yeah, but thank God! Or else everything I did would be like the fucking liner notes to the record that didn't impress you too much! I like the structure because it's someone else's structure, and it works. I don't really care about it - I still think that what's important is the feeling. But that structure helps me communicate with you. We're here because I used that structure. It gives you liberty to do whatever you want."
What about the rules of studio recording? If his music's all about communication, how must he find working in a studio with hardly anyone around, simply to return with a product for sale?
"The weird thing about making a record is, I don't think about it as making a thing. I think of it as having an experience that you record the sound of. For me, it's not a sterile environment. I try and it make it [the environment] as pure and as rich as possible, and then I press record. So you're hearing the sound of an experience. I didn't make a thing."
Au contraire, Lee has made quite a number of things in his life. Take, for instance, that film he starred in not too long ago.
"It's not like I decided to be in film. I got an opportunity to work on this cool thing with cool people, so I did it. I can't say I know anything about film, but I know something about 'The Rage In Placid Lake'."
Possibly, but he did do extraordinarily well in an Australian movie that was uncharacteristically successful. He says he has gotten a few more offers, "but you know how it is, you read something and within thirty seconds you know it's like, some murder or something. I don't want to be in something about a murder. I want to give people music that gives them hope and inspires them, I'm not going to take six months off to tell a story about someone getting murdered."
Ben Revi
 | 'Awake Is The New Sleep' is out now through Inertia. |
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