Sunday Afternoon Listening Café #16
Domestic Departures, Bernie Hayes Quartet
I was introduced to Bernie Hayes through my Whitlams fandom as Bernie was brother to founding member Stevie Plunder and his song Made Me Hard is covered on the Whitlams album Love This City. At the time this album was recorded, Bernie had a weekly residency at The Rose of Australia in Erskineville, Sydney, which was a short walk from where I was staying in Newtown1. So during my trips to Australia (2000, 2002 & 2004) I’d go to Bernie’s gigs and he got to know me.2
He would play solo guitar with occasional guests joining him for a few songs (including one memorable night when Tim Freedman joined him) and his first album, Every Tuesday, Sometimes Sunday (which was when he would play) was in that vein. This album is different. Bernie had put a band together and played a bunch of gigs with them outside the Rose residency so this became a band album. As Bernie describes it:
The last album started as a solo project and sorta metamorphosed into a multi-guest extravaganza. This one is the result of playing with the same group of people for three years now and really having an easy understanding of what we can do together. John (Encarnacao), Jess (Ciampa) and Bill (Gibson) have been so brilliant live I really couldn't contemplate leaving out their contributions to the music. I've found a group of people who really are able to get the best out of each song, who are creative in their own right, who aren't just doing the paint-by-numbers thing.
Heading off to the airport to do some shows in Melbourne we drove under the Domestic Departures sign and I thought: yes, that's what the album's all about. It's about romantic departures and life travels and deaths and goodbyes...A friend told me the second album is always an on-the-road record. Well, hopefully there's more than that here but certainly that's an element.
Bernie is an incredibly songwriter and has a folksy vibe that is just a pleasure to be around. This album captures his warmth and intimacy. I somehow missed that the album carries a dedication to Peggy Hayes (1929 - 2003). I haven’t listened to this album in years so let’s see how it informs the music.
Let’s begin.
We start up with the uptempo When I’m Wrong. It talks about waiting for a loved one to come back but with talks about closing another room and underground, it seems to be also making a statement about the dwindling of music venues in Sydney, which was a huge topic of discussion at the time.
Next up is the single Your Green Light. It captures the feeling of meeting someone new and trying to make a connection so they will feel the way you do. This is the only track not produced by Genevieve Maynard3 , instead Nic Dalton (formerly of The Lemonheads) who runs Bernie’s label Half a Cow Records)4 gets the honours here. It was released as a single a couple of years earlier and it has a radio-friendly feel to it. I believe it was to tie into the tv show Love Is A Four Letter Word that Bernie appeared on but I can’t confirm that. 5
Refuse to Know has a 70s AOR vibe to it. This is the flip side of the previous song, where it’s telling a girl that no, he’s not into her.
Bad Reception gives us producer Genevieve Maynard on background vocals along with Stella One Eleven bandmate Cindy Ryan and Julia Richardson (who had been with Bernie in the band Club Hoy) in a peppy song about hearing loss.
Silverplated is my favourite song on the album. It was a song I deeply resonated when the album came out and now it takes me back to that time and asking Bernie to play it for me. I love how the song gets into a rock groove in the chorus and that beautiful high note Bernie hits.
Well you’re silverplated
Stamped and dated
There's never been anything so fine
But you get so fragile
So complicated
and I feel so undermined
Soft Landing is back to the AOR sound and the lyrics to this song are resonate as well. It’s about accepting that a relationship isn’t going to happen and the person has frozen you out.
Whatever Moves Me has a blues groove to it. It reminds me a lot of the middle section of Harry Connick Jr’s Eyes of the Seeker. It’s about the dynamic of a romantic relationship that feels unbalanced and the song acknowledges it with the lyric We walk a thin line. It’s supposed to be romantic, as this is the early aughts.
All Good Things has an uptempo country feel to it. It’s about someone whose life has fallen apart and the narrator is noting they have brought this on themselves. Waterfall really highlights Bernie’s guitar playing and lyrical virtuosity. It’s about coping when things hurt.
Music Is A Highway has a Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds feel. Again it shows off Bernie’s songwriting and his vocals are lovely. 6 An ode to the life of a musician, wrestling with the love of music and the realities of the business without being overt about it.
Little Signs has a 60s feel to it. It’s about feeling your way in an romantic relationship, trying to find the right balance. And we close off with Intermission, a quiet coda that feels closest to the experience of listening to Bernie at The Rose.
Was really nice to revisit this album. I went looking on the interwebs to see if I could find any footage of Bernie playing the Rose but couldn’t find any. What I did find was this clip from show he did a couple of years ago. This song is from a later album but this will give you a sense of the intimate Bernie experience.
Enjoy your listening café!
Sadly they don’t have live music there anymore.
Pretty easy to be memorable when your accent is different from everyone else in the room.
Of Stella One Eleven and Tallboys. She shortly afterward opened her own studio.
Dalton also has a Whitlams connection. He formed a band with Stevie Plunder called The Plunderers (hence the name change from Anthony Hayes) before Stevie formed The Whitlams with Tim Freedman. As both Freedman and Dalton ran independent record labels, they were pretty close in this time frame.
The Whitlams did a song inspired by the show that I wrote about here. I really should have done a separate post about the song. Lesson learned.
I do wonder if the friend he mentions in the song is Tim Freedman. I’ve seen a friend win the battle but quickly lose the plot. Can you live with success? There’s no question of that group of musicians he was the most commercially successful and he has since said he was wrestling with drinking at that time. Maybe I’ll ask Bernie if I get to see him again.