Powderfinger, no show without punch

Powderfinger are the reigning champs of Oz rock and even we have started to like them. RUSSELL BAILLIE talks to frontman Bernard Fanning on the eve of their forthcoming New Zealand tour.

Bernard Fanning has made Australian rock'n'roll and sports history. Not only has the singer's group Powderfinger become the biggest, and many would say greatest, band in Australia - and the first one Kiwi rock fans have really taken to heart in years - he's shared a boxing ring with Anthony Mundine and walked away unscathed.

The league player turned outspoken pugilist is the star of the band's latest video Like A Dog. His presence helps give the song, the most aggressive number on the band's fourth album Odyssey Number Five, extra political punch.

It might sound like a homage to classic Iggy Pop and David Bowie, but its sentiments echo the heyday of Aussie politico-rockers Midnight Oil and are squarely aimed at the Howard government's attitude to aboriginal issues: "Now we're trying hard to reconcile a history of shame/ but he reinforced the barriers that keep it the same ... "

It could well surprise those who discovered the band through earlier Odyssey hit singles such as the wistful My Happiness and My Kind Of Scene that there's a political side to the Brisbane five-piece.

There is, says the affable Fanning, but it's only part of the equation.

"It's not our main emphasis - our main emphasis is we are a rock band and we want to write songs that people want to involve themselves in. But it's certainly part of what we have been doing for the last five or six years - trying to point out things that we think in our culture are wrong, that need attention, that people need to investigate and educate themselves in.

"We don't try to tell people what to do, because I don't think we are in a position to do that in terms of our knowledge base. But we certainly try to point people in the direction of trying to form their own opinions."

Yes, part of that political conscience could be attributed the band members, who are in their late 20s and early 30s, growing up in Queensland in the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era, says Fanning.

"I think that's certainly part of it. I think it's got more to do with our families than anything, just the way we were brought up. We all had loving, happy families and our parents tried to instil compassion in us - that you don't only think about yourself, and being a rock star isn't that important."

Which is another reason they got Mundine - arguably more of a "rock star" than Powderfinger will ever be - for that clip.

Nice bloke he is too.

"As you probably know, in Australia it's a real love and hate him kind of situation, but that's changing now because he is winning, so we all want to get behind him, which is pretty typical of Australian culture. We'd obviously like to see him do well. He was the perfect person to be in that clip and to kind of make a point. He's a really super, lovely guy, just ridiculously nice.



"I think it's awesome because you need agitators like him ... he really wants to make a difference and make people notice and it's necessary in Australia because, under the government we've had for the last six or seven years, people have kind of dropped off the idea of Aboriginal rights and thought more about GST or their own welfare.

"Social justice has really taken a back seat in this country and that is why it is really great to see someone like him standing up and saying, 'Well the problems are still here.' That is why we do it as well."

Powderfinger have got themselves a sizeable constituency across the ditch. They've sold more than 900,000 albums in Australia - mostly their third effort, The Internationalist, and last year's Odyssey. They were voted band of the year, best album and best single in the Australian Rolling Stone's 2000 readers' poll, losing out on the artist of the year, best act and hardest working band categories only to a certain imported group named Shihad.

"They're a hot band aren't they?"

We like them.

"So do we, mate. I reckon they will go berserk with their next album because they have got the best live reputation in the country, really, as a rock band. Apart from us, of course."

It hasn't exactly been overnight success. The band of Fanning, Darren Middleton (guitar, keyboards), John Collins (bass), Jon Coghill (drums) and Ian Haug (guitar) released their debut EP in 1992 and debut album Parables For Wooden Ears, two years later.

Those early releases were very much recordings of those post-grunge times, agrees Fanning.

"That definitely was part of it. Because most of us had been into 70s rock and that is where those bands had came from too - Led Zeppelin and Neil Young and that kind of stuff. It's just a big stew of all of those sort of bands. We have always had a mellow side even if we were playing big heavy rock.

"Our first album was a weird, complicated, half-metal extravaganza, our second album we really stripped it back and simplified what we were doing and tried to get the melody to do the work, and that is kind of where we have worked from. There are parts of this album that are as bare as it's ever going to get. I'm pretty keen to write some rock again for the fifth album."

And no, despite the band name no one has turned up to a Powderfinger gig expecting them to be the "The Australian Neil Young Show."

"Well, not for the last eight or nine years," he laughs, though he's looking forward to seeing Young at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, which Powderfinger are also playing after an excursion to New Zealand, where the sales of Odyssey are now past the 15,000 platinum mark.

"It's awesome that things are finally happening in New Zealand. We've been wanting for the last five or six years to kind of take New Zealand as part of our national tours in Australia, because it kind of makes sense to treat it like another state, although I don't mean that in a condescending way at all," Manning laughs, adding that they might have to play their big radio hit My Happiness last when they're here to stop people leaving.

Having conquered this part of the globe, Powderfinger are now going out into the wider world and have already circled the globe three times this year. They're slowly winning fans in pockets of the world and seem to be doing well in Canada, Portugal, Malaysia and South Africa.

They might have played to only 70 people in Lawrence, Kansas, on their last American sojourn, but Fanning is chuffed to know that some of those down front had driven six hours from Kentucky because they'd heard the song on the radio, bought the album, and got on to the website.

In some ways, says Fanning, Powderfinger, the biggest band in the Lucky Country, are starting all over again - local champs with hopes of breaking into rock's international heavyweight division.

* Powderfinger, supported by Garageland, play at the Wellington Town Hall on Tuesday and Auckland's St James on Wednesday.

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