Moondriven - An Interview With Mark Murphy
Mark Murphy, guitarist and vocalist for Melbourne band Moondriven, agrees with the members of Spinal Tap – the saddest chord is E-minor. “And D-minor”, he laughs, “Just the matching of yearning in the lyrics with particular chords”. For Murphy is a modern Romantic, and he’s not afraid to admit it. “What we’re doing is quite unfashionable”, he admits, “It’s strange to be doing such blatant, classic pop, given that rock is so popular at the moment. A great deal of it [new rock] has to do with how it sounds in a pub. A lot of those bands haven’t done their records yet, which will be the test. There isn’t much emphasis on songwriting in that genre at the moment; it’s more that it’s cool because it sounds like AC/DC. It’s pretty self-conscious. I think you’ve got to let the songs speak for themselves”. For some, the Moondriven sound may seem faintly familiar given that Murphy’s former band was the much-loved and critically acclaimed Ripe. It was a brilliant career that saw their album The Plastic Hassle included in Rolling Stone Magazine’s ‘Best 100 Albums of All Time’ in 1997. No faint praise, but eventually it was felt to be time to move on, and Murphy and Katie Dixon (bass) took a few years to collect their thoughts before forming Moondriven. “We started Moondriven in early ’98 - Katie and I were in Ripe up until about 1994 - and we spent those years [in between] working out what to do sound wise. With Ripe, it was in a kind of classic pop formula, then I had a big turning point where I saw Sonic Youth, and that really added to what we were doing. With Moondriven we’ve gone back to a more classic pop sound, with the influences that have been with us since we were really young: The Byrds, Big Star”. The Moondriven sound encompasses a romantic, lush guitar-pop aesthetic that is not at all in step with the current new rock zeitgeist, with heartrending lines such as “I’ve been looking at you for so long I can’t see nothing else / My eyes are blinded by your sunlight” alternately wailed or whispered with amorous abandon. It’s a sound that seems particularly evocative of the rainy, romantic city of Melbourne. Does the city have it’s own sound? “I think there is. I think Melbourne’s always been a bit more melancholy in some ways. I think it’s possibly the surroundings or the weather. It’s interesting how the geography of places influences the sound. I think Sydney has always had an ‘up’ sort of sound, even the guitar sounds are brighter”. Murphy is particularly in love with the universality of pop, in that the musical and lyrical themes spoken of can relate to anyone, regardless of age, simply by evoking particular emotions. It’s that old E-Minor argument again. “Every generation is brought up hearing those things; an eighteen-year-old may not know where it comes from, but it registers immediately as, ‘oh, that’s sad’, or ‘that’s happy’. I really think that since the Beatles, and even Buddy Holly, there’s chord progressions which were borne out of basic rock and roll which are so instilled in society now it’s probably the closest thing to white blues that you can get”. But with an EP that is bound to encourage a sob or four, does Murphy feel that romanticism is a lost art? “We feel that music is a bit cynical these days, and a bit self-conscious in being too clever. Basically, my favourite music is based in that ‘unrequited love’ theme, the greatest pop songs are like that, and even a few great rock songs. But I’ve always unashamedly been into things like Suede and The Smiths, and you get to point where those things are kind of out of fashion, but we’ve just been honest with ourselves and really gone for the sound that we like”. |