I Am the Voice Left from Drinking by James Freud

Author:James Freud [Freud, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7304-9337-2
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2002-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

So the Models were a three-piece again. We needed to put down some demos for a new album. Barton and I had been playing in a side project called Diana Boss and the Extremes with Kate Ceberano, Sherine from Big Pig and her sister, Zan. The sax player in the band was James Valentine, a formally-trained musician, so Barton and I got him in for a play and, man, the guy really blew a mean sax. We got Eddie Rayner from Split Enz in to play keyboards and started slammin’ down some tracks at Richmond Recorders—as usual. One of the songs I’d been playing around with was a rock track called ‘Engine Driver’. I thought it was really lame, but the other guys insisted it had potential. I went upstairs to the studio office and wrote a chorus for the song, calling it, ‘Out of Mind Out of Sight’.We started rehearsing it and the thing had a life of its own. It sounded fantastic! But it was missing another bit. I went back upstairs to the office, dicked around for a while and came up with the lines: Do you like the way I love you when I turn out the light/Do you like the way it feels when I hold you tight etc.

I was excited—it was perfect and it ended up being most people’s favourite part of the song. I raced down and played it to the band.

‘You wanna put that in this song?’ James Valentine said. ‘You’re joking, right?’

‘It’s my song and I’ll do what I fucking well like,’ I said indignantly.

‘Fine. Go ahead, screw up a perfectly good song. What key is it in?’

‘B.’

‘B what? B minor, B major, are there any fifths or diminisheds?’ he said sarcastically.

‘Just play a fucking B!’ I said.

Apart from that little hiccup, the sessions went fabulously. We seemed to have a whole new energy and we just knew ‘Out of Mind Out of Sight’ would be a big hit. Chris Murphy heard the demos and knew it too. Up until then he had not really been sure what to do with ‘Barbados’.We all believed it was a winner, but it was a huge departure from our earlier stuff, although, to this day, everyone has conveniently forgotten that Andrew did write the music. Not only that, the song is lyrically very dark: All I see/is washed away/I am the voice left from drinking.

I wrote the lyrics about being trapped in a relationship, when it seems like there is no way out, so you just drink bottles and bottles of gin. ‘Barbados’ was supposed to represent a light at the end of a very dark tunnel, not the beautiful Caribbean island. We decided to go back into the studio and rework Reggie Lucas’ original recording. At that time, Mark Opitz was the Australian producer with a track record of major hits. He had produced East for Chisel, ‘Reckless’ for Aussie Crawl and Shabooh Shoobah with INXS. He was on a roll.

Rhinoceros Studios in Sydney had become the hot place to record, so that’s where we headed.

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