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Tambalane.
 Ben Gillies is walking around the Chapel Street Bazaar, continually distracted by the merchant's wares - from movie action figures to colourful light globes. In the end, Gillies takes a seat on a step in an effort to focus, when...
"I'll tell you what else I just saw; two guys walk past, with, you know how guys in the eighties used to wear gym boots, but they'd have the tongue really hanging out, and tight jeans? They had that vibe going on," he explains. "It's so bad. It takes me back to 'Back To The Future II!'
Deciding to start firing questions before he's distracted by another odd passerby, I ask Gillies about meeting Tambalane vocalist Wesley Carr. With a folk-inspired background on Carr's side, and of course Gillies' drumming connection to Silverchair, the two seem like an odd coupling.
"We met through mutual friends," Gillies explains. "The music industry in this country is so small, that even though Wes wasn't really in the industry as such, you're only one or two degrees away from someone that knows somebody that knows somebody else. I went to a couple of his semi-acoustic shows that he was playing around Sydney at the time, and we decided that we'd write some music together and give it a whirl."
The idea of coming together wasn't at all formal, according to Gillies. "It was just like, 'let's just write a couple of songs', and that was the end of it. And the more we wrote, the more we were digging what we were coming up with, so we just kept going. We ended up writing 40-plus songs, so it definitely worked!"
Their self-titled debut album, however, only features twelve tracks. I venture that the culling process would have been interesting. "It was actually really easy," he replies. "Most bands go through that teething period, the first few years they write 40 or 60 songs and lose a lot of them, just because they're finding their own sound. So we kind of fast-tracked that a little bit, I think that's why we wrote so many songs. We had a pretty good idea which ones we were going to lose. We wrote for about 18 months, and most of the ones we wrote in the first twelve months we lost, I think there was only one or two that we kept on the record, but it was the ones that we wrote in the later part of that 18 months that we really found that thing that we were trying to go for."
It appears as though Gillies is wholeheartedly embracing getting back to a grassroots level with his music, as he says the operation of the band is "guerrilla style".
"The whole experience has been pretty liberating, and it's exciting," he says. "I was involved with the writing with Silverchair in the early days, but Daniel [Johns] kind of took over those reins for the last couple of records, and I was totally cool with that. But like anyone creative I still was writing at home and doing my own thing, but it is good to actually have some kind of outlet where you can get it out to people and have people hear it and get on the road and play some live shows.
"A bit of a different experience to the whole Silverchair world - which is fantastic in its own right, but getting back to the grassroots and playing small venues and having to work from the bottom up...it's a different experience but it's fun. We're doing it because we love it and we enjoy it."
Asking Gillies whether he's bothered by the fact almost every interview published makes mention of Silverchair, he's emphatic. "No! Honestly, I seriously don't give a damn. I guess it's part of who I am, really, it's undeniable, so people are always going to ask about it. It's like any band that does anything apart from what is seen to be their main gig, they're always going to get asked about their main thing. And people just seem curious about it. I came into it fully prepared for people to ask me about it, so that's fine."
But Tambalane provides him with a creative outlet, he finds it therapeutic in other ways. "It also just to keep your sanity, too. Because Silverchair's such a large beast in its own right, it's just good to get out and do something fresh and new, so you don't get too jaded."
Ann Marie Sosnowski
 | Tambalane play at the Enigma Bar on Sun 11 Sept. |
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