By Steve Bell
In the third instalment of Francis Ford Coppola’s revered The Godfather trilogy, newly reformed Mafia kingpin Michael Corleone famously quips, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”, a maxim that could easily apply of late to Melbourne singer-songwriter Simon Juliff.
With a stop-start career tracing right back to his short-lived early-‘90s outfit The Evil Dead, followed by a stint fronting rockers The Roys in the mid-‘00s, in recent times Juliff had pretty much relinquished his musical dreams to focus on career and family. He hadn’t given up music entirely as he was still writing songs, but he’d essentially given up on sharing them with the wider world.
Until one day he received a phone call apropos of nothing from veteran Oz rock music identity Dave Laing, who had a more than decent proposal for his old friend. One which involved not only reviving Laing’s long-dormant indie imprint Dog Meat Records – back in the day home to legendary underground guitar bands like the Powder Monkeys, Hoss, Bored! and Splatterheads – to release the album, but also roping in that scene’s most venerated alumni Joel Silbersher (God, Hoss, Tendrils) to produce the affair.
“I was still writing songs a little bit, but I was fairly busy with my family and just life commitments,” Juliff remembers, “but one day Dave Laing contacted me out of the blue pretty much and said, ‘Are you doing any music?’ And I said, ‘Nah, not really, but I’ve got heaps of songs’. Then he said, ‘Why don’t you ask Joel to produce a solo record and I’ll put it out?’, and I said, ‘Are you drunk?’ And he said, ‘Nah’.
“Dave’s always been really supportive and kept up to date with whatever I was doing even if it wasn’t much – and he’d write really nice reviews and articles whenever I did put something out – he was like one of my very few fans, but a good one to have.”
And in particularly perfect timing, this opportunity came right at a stage when Juliff’s family commitments had started to ease and the songs had started to flow again.
“Once the call came and there was an album to make and Joel agreed to produce and helped put the band together and everything, I had to make sure that it wasn’t going to be me that fucked it up,” he laughs. “I finished all the songs really quickly – the ones that were half-finished – and made a bunch of demos and sent Joel 25 songs.
“It was a great feeling actually, having just drifted along missing making music but not really doing anything about it, to have someone make a proposal like that was both surreal and amazing.”
And from these humble beginnings the Simon Jolliff Band was born, the frontman joined by a cast of Oz rock stalwarts to construct their debut album Stars, a powerful collection of songs marrying the classic pop-rock sensibilities of forebears like Big Star and T-Rex with a dirtier, more roughshod aesthetic entirely befitting the Melbourne scene it stemmed from.
“I could have made quite a different record if someone else was choosing the songs, although Joel’s choices were unsurprisingly excellent in that he chose the ones I probably would have chosen anyway,” Juliff smiles. “It could have been an album of ballads and electronic noises if someone else did it.
“Even in assembling the band as he did – Jim Sfetsos from Hoss on guitar, Greg Bainbridge from Kim Salmon & the Surrealists on drums and Joel on bass – there was a lot of scope for the guitar solos and things. Jim wrote little ‘bits’ for each basic solo that I’d included on the demos, and it really suits where each song was going, almost as if it was meant to be.
“Once Joel was the producer I knew it was going to be a ‘guitar-y album’ – which is my kind of album anyway – and we just talked about how say on [1975 album] Tonight’s The Night Neil Young’s approach was to keep the mistakes and just focus on making it feel good.”
Importantly Juliff explains that while he was able to rely on Silbersher’s extensive experience in the studio, it was never at the expense of his own artistic vision.
“One thing that’s important that Joel does is just encourage me in the right direction,” the singer reflects. “There’s no disagreement, because I trust him and I trust his ear. He knows what I like.
“When I called him to ask him to do the project – I hadn’t spoken to him for a while – he answered the phone in the pub and said, ‘Oh yeah, I’d be delighted. I will make sure that you come away with something that you really like’, and I said, ‘Okay, that sounds like a good plan!’
“And he was true to his word. He’s got a really good ear and we let him be the ‘boss’ so to speak and have control across all areas of the recording and even into the mixing, but I didn’t feel in the least bit pushed around – more just ‘helped around’.”
Stars will be launched at The Workers Club in Fitroy on Saturday March 4 at 1.30pm
STARS is available via Dog Meat Records and is available onBandcamp: https://dogmeataus.bandcamp.com/album/stars