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The Mess Hall.
 It's an important time in the world of The Mess Hall. Their debut album is due for release and the whole music industry is waiting to hear what the Sydney based duo comes up with. Their EP 'Feeling Sideways' was hailed as one of the hottest releases of 2003, and many people were left to wonder where the hell these guys had been hiding.
Now it's time for the all important long player and 'Notes From A Ceiling' will probably receive even higher status than its predecessor. With a sound mirroring the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, it's a dirty-rock-blues record. However, it's the stories behind the record that make for interesting reading. Recorded over ten days in a studio up in the hills of Byron Bay, drummer Cec Condon nearly set the studio alight while barbecuing, and singer /songwriter Jed Kurzel suffered a bizarre case of vertigo.
"I'm better now, but I ended up doing vocal takes and falling over most of the time, so I pleaded with the doctor to get some pills," Kurzel says, adding that it felt like he was on a boat for most of the time. "Then I was OK, but it was very weird. I've never had anything like that before. I thought I had a tumour or something. But in some strange way, it added to the record."
As did Kurzel's nomadic lifestyle last year. Having moved house once, he kept moving from friend's place to friend's place - and he still hasn't found anywhere he likes. His main memory from last year is "staring up at different ceilings, wondering what the hell I was doing." Hence the album title. "Basically if you're lying in bed or anything like that, and you're just staring at the ceiling, a lot of the ideas for songs and things like that come from just doing that," he explains.
His inspirations, he says, are: "Daily things, and just how I'm feeling at the time, but also..." he trails off, hesitating, "...sometimes I've got an obsession with this place that... it's sort of like a limbo land. I don't know. As soon as I start talking about this stuff I feel like I sound like a wanker..."
No matter. Intrigued, I coax the rest of the idea out of him. "There's, like, three songs on there that are based in a place [where] a couple have been together for their entire lives and one of them dies," he explains. "I kind of get fascinated with the fact that that person who's died has to wait somewhere before their partner moves on, and what that place is like. So a lot of stuff is kind of based around that, and what kind of rituals and what kind of things you have to do to make that pass through. That was a lot of what I was interested in at that particular point."
Those three songs, he adds, are Diddley, Skyline, and Red Eyes and Sunshine. "It makes sense to me to think or write about things like that because in the end you're writing about something that isn't tangible, so it's something that's up to your imagination," Kurzel continues, "which is kind of nice; if you plant that idea in someone's head, then they can make their own landscape up about it. It's kind of like reading a book, I suppose. Everyone can read the same book but people have got a different image of where that book is actually set or what that person looks like.
"I suppose that's the beauty of songwriting; if you want to, you can go down those paths and if you don't think they're a little bit obscure, then you're challenging your listener to search through the song a little bit more, and create their own reality for them.
"Sometimes it can be more of an imaginary kind of world, but other times it can be closer to the bone or about someone else, but I suppose as long as it's engaging... I feel like a lot of lyrics and stuff that you read at the moment, you feel like someone's been given the handbook of songwriting and if you use these particular words and put them together, then you'll have a song. But in the end it's not really anything that I can continue listening to over the years and find new meanings to the songs."
Interestingly, as much as Kurzel comes across as a thoughtful soul, he's adamant that other people's thoughts and expectations of him don't influence his songwriting very much, if at all.
"I think if you start thinking like that you'll end up twisting your mind into a ball of mush and then you're left with everyone else's opinions and what you think everyone else is going to think," he reflects.
"I think we got to a stage where it really didn't enter our heads anymore about what people were going to think. In the end if we're in rehearsal and we're liking what we're playing, and I suppose if it feels like us, then we can't fault that. As long as what we're doing is us, and it's honest, then I don't really care what anyone thinks.
"If I made an album that I put out and I knew there were a couple of songs on there that I didn't like or I didn't think things sounded how I wanted them to sound or whatever, if people criticised that I'd understand," Kurzel says. "But I really like this album so if anyone doesn't like it, it doesn't bother me; that's their opinion."
Ann Marie Sosnowski
 | The Mess Hall play at Fowlers Live on Fri 17 June with Whirlwind Heat. 'Notes From A Ceiling' is out now through Shock. |
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