Interview: Yeo & the Fresh Goods

When last we spoke to an Australian artist we found him to be tall. Allow us now to turn the format on its head and speak to an opposite-sized person named Yeo.

Yeo & the Fresh Goods – “Two Sides of a Door”

I last saw Yeo on the third morning of a muddy three-day festival; I had woken early because the sun was on my tent. It was early enough that even very normal things were needlessly surreal, and also that I got to lean on the barricade for Adam Green, who obviously was drunk at that hour. His band was a bunch of super-enthused young guys, and his bassist especially was super-lively, really clearly thrilled to be there. It was somehow unsurprising, in just no way surreal, that this bassist on stage happened to be Yeo. Of course it was! Sometimes nice guys just get to do cool shit like this, and how nice is Yeo? Super-nice!

MBV Ronnie: How did you end up playing bass for Adam Green?

Yeo: He was touring Australia for the first time, and it was more financially viable to source an Australian backing band. Some mutual friends forwarded my details because I was the only bass player they really knew that could fit his groove. Just so happened I would finish my tour in Melbourne just has he began his, so everything fell into place and I was mailed 5 CDs and a setlist of 25 songs to learn. We ended up learning 22… I sure had me a few late nights getting it all down!

MBV Ronnie: Was it fun?

Yeo: Unbelievable fun. As a musician I’ve never been more looked after. A little too well looked after – there was so much booze and food, I put on 5 kilos by the time the tour was over. We played Meredith, which was also a first for me as a punter/performer. It rained out but we battled with our ponchos and had a great time. He’s a great guy and we had a few long chats about women, drugs, stupid people, etc.

MBV Ronnie: Your songs kinda have their own (mostly slow?) groove, too. Do people dance at Yeo shows? I mean you play clubby shows, right?

Yeo: Yeah, I usually coax them into dancing. I’ve played quite a few sit down shows and its nice when you see people grooving in their seats. My CD launch and then my tour launch a year and a half later were both shows where the audience just got so into it – everyone was drunk because we played so late. We’ve played the Family* a bunch of times, and that’s been awesome fun!

(*The Family is a Brisbane club that is basically designed to keep people comfortable at different stages of high. A queuing friend was once taken aside by a bouncer and politely denied entry as they were looking for “more of an urban funk look tonight.” … Is Yeo urban funk?)

MBV Ronnie: Does the live show kind of rotate around who you can get, and when, and what they play?

Yeo: There’s a firm idea. The 5-piece is it. I try to have everyone for every show. We can operate as a 4-piece, or even a 3-piece though. Took awhile to get used to with all the holes, but we did it! Just gotta step up the energy level. “I was in my own little world, trying to be like Ben Folds, Stevie Wonder, Toto, Justin Timberlake and Daft Punk all at the same time.”This one time, it just so happened Georgia and Charles were in Melbourne for a gig I was playing, so they jumped up and Charlie played the cajon, taking place of my regular drummer. Totally different vibe, but we pulled it off well I think.

MBV Ronnie: You’ve just moved to Melbourne; have the Fresh Goods come too?

Yeo: I wish! I think they all love this city but they’ve got too much going on back home to just pack up and leave. Its an expensive venture, everybody flying back and forth, but I love my band so much I find it hard to believe I could ever let go of them.

MBV Ronnie: What are you gonna do for a band?

Yeo: Well… I’ve considered maybe getting a bass player or a percussionist to back me up so I can play small duo shows. But I don’t think it’ll happen any time soon. I like flying a couple of players from my band down from Brisbane, because we play in a trio format and get to do some songs that don’t usually work with all five of us. I guess at the moment I’m enjoying time away from the live situation so I can write. Every now and then I get offered a gig that looks great and it pulls on my heartstrings, so you never know, maybe I’ll pull together something small.

MBV Ronnie: Are you a perfectionist in recording?

Yeo: In recording, yes. I’m the silly combination of a sound engineer and classically trained musician so it’s hard for me to let go when I hear something that sounds wrong in a recording even if no one else picks it up. Playing live, I used to be, but now I don’t care. As long as we’ve worked hard enough to polish our set, I don’t really care what happens when we step on to the stage. The audience loves a good mistake too, as long as you don’t take it too seriously and crack the occasional joke about screwing up.

MBV Ronnie: Do you prefer playing live?

Yeo: Lately I’ve been looking forward to playing live because good shows don’t come that often. Ask me three years ago and you would have received a different answer – I used to be (and sometimes still am) a nervous wreck before gigs. I think a couple of years of hardcore gigging in seven different bands helped calm me a little. Recording is something I’ve done all my life, and it’s something I do in my own time, at my own pace, in my own space. It’s ultimately comfortable, but can get frustrating when you can’t nail the idea or something doesn’t turn out right.

MBV Ronnie: What do you do for money?

Yeo: In Brisbane I used to fix computers. Now I live in Melbourne, I work part-time as a sales consultant for one of Australia’s largest musical instrument retailers. I never thought I’d enjoy retail, but with this job I get to stay up to date (and also play) with the latest gear. Any money earned from gigs goes back into the music, whether it be flights, getting CDs pressed, buying batteries, etc.

MBV Ronnie: That’s super-handy. I can ask you questions about the internet, right? What does your Facebook status mean when it says that “Yeo needs you to forget everything you learnt about compression and just suck it up”?

Yeo: I went to university for three years studying audio engineering. All through that period, we were given advice on how to use an audio processing tool called a compressor. The thing about compressors is, they can either help or destroy a good sound, so to stop us from doing the latter they taught us how to use them in the most conservative way. They never covered using compressors in genres like dance music or hip hop, where you need to over-pump it a bit to get a punchy sound. Every now and then I find myself struggling to use one because I’m sticking to the rules as if I’d get a bad mark for overdoing it.

MBV Ronnie: I like your backing vocals; why does your Twitter say they’re hard to do?

Yeo: You’re too kind! You’re just not really sure how well they fit until you take a two week break from a song that you’ve been working on, listening to it repeatedly for 7 hours. Sometimes, melodies are so melodic that its hard to harmonise them.

MBV Ronnie: The album cover of you playing [uh, instruments] with yourself and having an excellent time is hilarious.

Yeo: I started doing some dodgy photoshopping to create some images I could upload to various online websites to accompany my music. I figured it’d be a cool idea for something similar to end up on the front cover. My friend Victoria Zschommler is a talented photographer, so we just found a driveway, locked the camera on a tripod and went crazy. Her flash screwed up, so I drove my car into the driveway and turned on my high-beams.

MBV Ronnie: A lot of overseas indie stuff has moved to the pop end of the spectrum from the rock end, but less so locally. You however were making pop music three years ago. Do you feel like an overachiever?

Yeo: Three years ago I was in my own little world, trying to be like Ben Folds, Stevie Wonder, Toto, Justin Timberlake and Daft Punk all at the same time. I guess not much has changed! I don’t really know where I sit as a ball-player. I just like making music similar to the stuff I listen to.

Myspace: Yeo & the Fresh Goods →

- Ronnie Scott