Who the…
I’ll start at the end of the beginning. The beginning and middle of the beginning is the usual tale of growing up, learning to walk, run, ride and fly kites. I grew up in a beachside suburb of Sydney called Coogee. The word Coogee is taken from the Aboriginal word ‘koojah’ which means ‘smelly place’ or ‘stinking seaweed’. I don’t remember it being so smelly but I do remember lots of seaweed. Coogee Beach is a couple of beaches south from the famous Bondi beach. I spent a lot of time at the beaches in my youth. Before I found music I desperately wanted to be a surfer/skater growing up but I had absolutely no co-ordination and could never stand up on a board so I was confined to the seemingly lesser recreation of the body board. Being a body boarder in the 90’s in Bondi and surrounding beaches was very frowned upon. The surfers used to call them ‘eski lids’. ‘You’ll always be kids on your eski lids…’ they would taunt us.

I grew up with five (count them, FIVE) sisters and no (count them, NONE) brothers. Two older sisters, and three younger sisters. This fact, more than anything else in my youth shaped me into who I am today. Having a strong mother, two older sisters and three younger sisters kind of means there is a CEO, two managers and three regional managers that I’d have to answer to if I stepped out of line.

I hated school with a passion. Like REALLY hated it. I was pretty bad at it. I didn’t apply myself to anything. I was what you might call a slacker. I suppose that’s why I love The Big Lebowski so much. I relate to The Dude. I failed music every year, my music teacher told me I should take wood work or metal work. I kind of liked history and English but only kinda. I went to an all boys school (why do they even exist?). I think my mum sent me to an all boys school because there was so many girls at home she thought it would balance me out and maybe it did but the problem with all boys schools is they’re full of, well, boys. 99% of them are savages, ape like, dragging their knuckles, getting into fights, bullying and generally trying to slowly evolve into men, politicians, prisoners, etc. I hated school so much that on my last year of school I had over 100 days off!

Then there was music. My mum listened to a bit of music but I wouldn’t say I grew up around music. We had a record player and I remember mum listening to Sgt. Pepper’s, Supertramp, Meatloaf (yuck!), lots of Kate Bush (who is still my musical hero) and lots of classical music. I remember once we got a whole bunch of polka records from my deceased uncle, which were really bad. I used to listen to a lot of top 40 stuff in the 80s and early 90s. Then one day in 1991 (I was probably skipping school) a friend of mine gave me a cassette tape of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. I still remember the first time I listened to it I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It changed everything for me. I was obsessed with Nevermind. I listened to it everyday at every chance I could. I wore the tape out. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that excited me about it so much. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying but it was different. I’d never heard singing like that. It was just so ‘real’ sounding. It was a very exciting time for me. I begged my mum to buy me a guitar and practice amp and the rest is what I like to call the beginning of the middle.

My first guitar was a white Strat copy with white scratch plate, white neck/head stock and white guitar strap. It was ugly as hell and I loved it. I learnt the whole Nevermind album by ear. I couldn’t (and still can’t) read music but with my trusty chord book that showed me what shapes to put my fingers in to play the chords I needed. I slowly learnt how to play most of the songs. Playing music for me has always been about shapes of chords and feeling rather than time signatures and notes on a page.

Around this time, the beginning of the middle or 1992, my sister introduced me to her friend Jamie who played in a band called… wait for it… Rubber Doughnut. He had just started a new band called Bluebottle Kiss and his bass player had gone awol. I joined the band as a fill in bass player (the original bass player never came back). We played our first show in early 1993. I was 15 years old and had to be sneaked in to clubs to play. I felt like I had found my calling, rehearsing, playing shows,  recording demos. We recorded our first demo tape (yep, a real cassette tape) soon after I joined called ‘Sonic Elevator Music For The Masses’. We sounded like a cross between Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth.

This was a real formative time for me musically. I was like a musical sponge, I would listen to everything anyone gave to me. The grunge scene really spoke to me. But also the moment my buddy played me Disintegration by The Cure I was an instant goth. I was the only ginger goth in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. I would tease my hair and have a birds nest type hair do like Robert Smith, except ginger. I never put make up on though. I was obsessed with The Cure. I remember being at school and during a year 10 math final test I wrote down, in a year by year breakdown, every Cure album that had been released. Written in the classic ‘Head On The Door’ Cure font no less. My teacher was amazed how I could remember all nine studio albums, three live albums and the best of singles album in a splendid year by year chart. I even had (in smaller writing) The Glove album which Robert Smith recorded with Steve Severin from Siouxsie and the Banshees. I was very proud of that, and I failed year 10 maths badly.

Soon after we recorded our demo tape we were signed to a subsidiary Sony label, Murmur. From 1993-2004 Bluebottle Kiss recorded, released and toured five albums, a handful of EP’s and lots of singles. We toured Australia countless times, and I mean countless times. In 2000 we were signed to a label in the States and spent all our savings going over there to tour the record. The problem was that the label was funded purely by dot com money and in mid 2000 the dot com bubble burst. The label we were signed to burst along with it leaving us literally living out of a Bedford van, sleeping in car parks, touring up and down the west coast of the US booking shows on the run. I still remember thinking how rock it was to be sleeping next to my bass amp in a van and washing each morning in a service station sink. After four months, the US touring/sleeping in a van lost it’s sheen and we went home with our tails between our legs.

It was around the middle of the middle when I started writing my own songs and formed my own band called The Devoted Fail in 2001. We quickly changed our name to The Devoted Few because I didn’t like having the word ‘fail’ in my band name. By 2004 it was becoming very hard to juggle two busy touring/recording bands so I left Bluebottle Kiss and concentrated solely on The Devoted Few. Since 2001 The Devoted Few have released three albums and I toured Australia countless times with them.

In 2006 I met singer Sarah Blasko through a friend and started playing bass in her band. After four years of touring Australia I graduated to playing guitar, banjo, percussion and a little keyboard in Sarah’s band. Sarah got signed to UK label Dramatico and decided to decamp to the UK in early 2010. I decided to put Devoted Few on hold for the time being and come along for the ride. I’ve been living and touring the UK/EU since February this year or in other words the end of the middle…

What the…
I ‘musician’ for a living. On the side I geek out. I forgot to mention apart from being a grunger, slacker and ginger goth, I was also a huge computer geek. I found it very hard to get a girlfriend! I started out with an Atari 2600 then moved on to a Commodore 64, Amega 500, old IBMs, etc. Back in the ‘end of the beginning’ when I was trying to be a body boarder I was also trying to be a computer geek. On the side these days I’m still a little computer geeky. I go on forums and listen to tech podcasts, and wait in 6 hour queues to get iPhones.

Learning…
I had very little formal education and it is something I regret now. I think I’ll be one of those annoying parents who says things to their kids like ‘stay in school, you’ll regret being a slacker, pull your socks up’. So while I quit school early and went on the road with a rock band I do regret not finishing my schooling and I missed out on the whole ‘college/uni’ thing. I learnt to play music at the same time I learnt to listen to music and I think that’s important for any budding muso. I’ve always learnt to play songs the same way from when I learnt Smells Like Teen Spirit to learning any Sarah Blasko song. I listen to it, play the bass notes on an acoustic guitar then flesh out the bass notes to guitar chords with my trusty chord book and there you have it. Easy peasy. Listening is the key.

Then vs Now…
I’m pretty much exactly the same now as I was when I was 16. I still play computer games with my buddies, quote lines from Dumb and Dumber and laugh at boobs, poo and wee jokes. I’m serious, I’m a 15 year old boy trapped in a thirty something’s body.

Self-belief…
I’ve kind of always had pretty blind confidence in what I do. If I hear something, or think of a melody in my head I’m always pretty sure I can either copy exactly what I hear and play it, or play the melody I’m singing in my head. I was always a confident singer. I’m the type that thinks everyone can sing even if they can’t hold a note. With practice I believe everyone can sing. The hard thing for me with heros like Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen is lyrics. I’ve always had to work very hard and stare at lots of blank white pages when writing lyrics. I wrote lots of bad poetry when I was young, I read the entire Kerouac catalogue and thought I would be beat poet there for a while (for more on my thoughts on Kerouac’s Legacy go here. I feel writing good lyrics can take a life time to get right.

Current projects…
With my band The Devoted Few, I’m on a bit of a hiatus while I’m in the UK with Sarah Blasko. I’ve been writing more solo type songs. Quiet songs with a nylon string guitar. A la Red House Painters or Eliott Smith. I have lots of more up tempo ‘rock’ tunes up my sleeve but I’m still working out what to do with them. I have these moments of genre anxiety when I think I never want to play or hear a loud distorted guitar ever again, then I change my mind and think playing acoustic ballades for the rest of my life will be boring. I’m thinking of starting up a band in the UK if I end up staying for a while. I may be here for a couple of years. I may be here for a year, not sure yet but I’m always writing.

Likes and dislikes…
I like the feeling you get when you’re writing and demoing. I’m the happiest when I’m writing and demoing. The freedom that comes with having your own set up in a room where you can flesh out your ideas is total bliss for me. I also love performing, that feeling you get when you know it’s a good one. It’s very rare but sometimes when the crowd and the band are in synch, you feel you’re sounding good, people are there to listen and have a good time – it’s magical.

Dislikes are being on the road for too long. Big, long, crazy 6-7 week tours are gruelling. I’m a home body. I love to hit the couch and watch my stories, or play my computer stories. I love being at home. When I’m away for long stretches of time I get into this machine-like, half-real-conscious type state. It literally becomes: up early, van, breaky, airport, van, lunch, sound check, van, hotel, drinks, gig, drinks, van, hotel… repeat. I see being on tour as kind of like being taken by a fast moving rip or current in a river. If you fight it, try to go your own way or try to swim to the shore you’ll drown so the best thing to do is tread water, keep your head above the waves and let it take you where it wants to, then at the end it spits you back out at home and you wake up again!

Environmental effects…
I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb surrounded by other affluent suburbs in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. I still don’t know how we afforded to live where we did as my mum was a full-time house mum with six kids and my stepdad worked as a baggage handler at the airport and then later on as a cabbie. I never went hungry or missed out on things I needed though. I think maybe my parents were secret bank robbers or something. I led a pretty sheltered life until I left school and joined a band. I grew up in quite a religious family and didn’t celebrate birthdays or Christmas. It was more the religious side of things that affected my life choices and aspirations than where I grew up. When I was old enough to decide religion wasn’t for me I took my own path and here I am.

Encouragement…
My mother always encouraged me. I think she thought playing music was a bit of a stop gap, a bit of a ‘bridge’ in between me leaving school early and then going back and finishing school when I got this whole rock music thing out of my system. She’s still waiting for me to get it out of my system I think. Nah, she’s cool with it. My dad thinks it’s great. He had the same job at the same newspaper for 35 years. He would often tell me he thought me being in a band was great and I didn’t need a 9-5 job to be normal or because that was what was expected from me. He failed to tell me that having said 9-5 job would actually be good to pay bills and eat though. All my friends thought it was pretty good I was in a real life working, touring rock band too. One of our first shows was supporting a very young Beck on his ‘I’m A Loser Baby’ tour in Sydney, and then we supported Soul Asylum. Remember them?!

Family…
As I said, having five sisters really made me who I am today. We were close and thankfully they never dressed me up and put makeup on me. Although there was this one time in the late 80’s when I was at primary school and my mum dressed me up as Raggedy Andy with socks on my hands and a painted face. Because my friend went as Raggedy Ann it was a devastating day for all involved. I hated it so much I cried for hours and then all the paint ran and I looked like the clown from Steven King’s ‘It’. We still all talk. Family is weird – you spend so much time with them growing up then when you move out they become kind of like old friends who you don’t see much any more.

Best advice received…
When I first started The Devoted Few I was obsessed with Radiohead. I would write these songs that sounded like bad Radiohead covers even though they were originals. I would kind of sing like Thom Yorke sometimes and even, on occasion, do that silly move he would do on stage a lot in the tour documentary ‘Meeting People Is Easy’ where he would shake from side to side the whole show. Pretty soon after seeing me live at one of the first Devoted Few shows a close friend of mine called Tanith said ‘Just be yourself’. Just like that, it was so simple. It had a big impact on me and changed the way I performed but also more importantly changed the way I wrote and approached writing songs. I never did thank her for that. So, thanks Tan.

Collections…
I have a big collection from the early, mid and late 90’s, and early 2000’s of Bluebottle Kiss press clippings. I was obsessed for a while – cutting out and keeping all the reviews, interviews and gig listings we were on, then there’s a definite point where the clippings stop and I couldn’t be assed any more! I’ve got lots of tour posters from around the same time. Some very rare Nirvana Australian tour posters from the 1992 tour they did (I saw them in 1992, I remember them being loose but explosive). I remember driving around Coogee ripping Nirvana posters off walls and poles. I keep weird things that hold a special place in my heart. I’ve still got the scratch plate from my electric guitar that I smashed up and bled all over in 2003 at some show. Lots of back stage passes, you know, just keepsakes from all the shows. I figure I will show my kids all these things and they’ll think I was once cool.

Inspiration…
At all times, I keep my copy of Kerouac’s Big Sur with me as it’s my fave Kerouac book and has some incredibly inspiring passages in it. If I’m trying to write lyrics, which I find hard to do anyway, and I’m stuck I open up a random page of that book and read from it. It’s like my holy bible except it was written by a sad lonely depressed self-hating loner in the pit of despair.

My favourite movie of all time is PT Anderson’s Magnolia. It really has everything you need in a film. For me, it’s the perfect film. I often watch it for inspiration. I love Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood too, a couple of PT Anderson classics! I listen to The Cure’s Disintegration album or Bjork or Tom Waits. I’ve been trying to find inspiration in the outside world of late as well. I’ve been making myself notice or search out at least one thing a day that absolutely amazes me about us or the world or the universe. It sounds like a bit of dirty hippy talk but it’s actually been good for me to look outwards for inspiration instead of looking inwards and over-analysing feelings and situations to create music.

Believe it or not I have no interest in music websites or music news/gossip or new music so I never visit music sites or blogs. As I said I’m a bit of a geek so most sites I visit are tech kinda sites or general left-of-centre news sites. I love me the twitter at http://www.twitter.com/benfletcher. Also I visit Digg every day for a variety of different news. I don’t mind me some macrumors.com, or some gizmodo.com I go here to laugh: 27bslash6.com/overdue.html

People…
As I’ve stated above Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Bjork, Kate Bush, Jack Kerouac, Robert Smith. I’m inspired by the long lasters, the eccentric, the people who aren’t afraid to evolve and in-fact have to evolve to survive.

Going back in time…
If I went back in time I wouldn’t do or change anything! Haven’t you seen Back To The Future? Nah, in all honesty I don’t regret anything I’ve done or haven’t done. It’s all about the now.

Immediate future…
I will be touring with Sarah Blasko for the rest of the year around the world. We had a lot of touring around Europe in July, August. We’ll be in the US in September. There’s a HUGE tour in Australia planned for October-November then back here to the UK for a UK tour in November-December. All the while I will be writing and demoing my own songs to hopefully record in full early next year.

Dream life…
Ever since I can remember I have always wanted to be an archaeologist. That is definitely my dream job. I often day dream about going to university to study history and archaeology. I believe I could still do it to. I don’t think you are ever too old to study and learn a new craft. Call me crazy but there’s something so appealing about being at a dig, perhaps in southern Egypt, with my own team of diggers, perhaps in a race to find an artefact needed to attain peace in the Middle East. There’s perhaps international intrigue and a double crossing brunette. I wear a smart hat and perhaps have a whip by my side. That is my dream job.

Advice to aspiring musicians…
My girlfriend/‘not wife’ said I should answer this one with: find a rich girlfriend. Failing that, I would say start practising, start listening. I don’t think you need to ‘learn’ how to play music in the traditional sense. I don’t feel like I have ever really ‘learnt’ music as in theory or reading charts or training my ear or anything like that. And almost everyone I’ve played with in serious working bands can’t read music. I guess I’m trying to say you can’t really learn how to play music in a college or at university or from a school teacher. You need to get out there and jam with friends or play along to a CD. It took me ages to realise that playing nothing in certain sections of songs is sometimes the best thing to play.

Links to work and life…
The Devoted Few
Sarah Blasko
Ben Fletcher’s Twitter
Hounds of Love
The Death of Us
The Sadness of Kerouac’s Legacy