James Cruickshank - Greeting his humanity
"There's no money and no one loves me." This is the positivity that James Cruickshank laughingly exudes toward the music industry nowadays. "I'm joking, this is me being ironic."
Cruickshank is a fixture in the Australian music scene and is best known for his keyboard and guitar work with The Cruel Sea, a band that had its main successes in the early to mid 90s. But The Sea have been a bit quiet in the last few years. After an album in 2002, frontman Tex Perkins diverged in several directions with Tim Rogers, Don and Charlie and reformed the iconic Beasts of Bourbon. It felt a little like the honeymoon was over.
Cruickshank hasn't stopped working since then but he has experienced some hard times recently. "I'd had chemotherapy for six months...the worst six months you could possibly imagine. I was only just starting to come good and someone leant me a nice compressor. I just thought: I'm going to have fun." The fun that Cruickshank is referring to is his second solo outing "Hello Human", just released this year on Vitamin Records. The first record he made was called "Hymn for Her" (released in 2003 on Shock) but he says this is a personal statement he feels that he can "make a song and dance about." Although a little tentative to go into the philosophy behind his creative process he cautiously enthuses "if it is done with all the intelligence and love you can muster...then someone will receive that."
After being in the music scene all this time he has made some observations about the role of music and musicians. "Everyone is soaking in music: telephone music, shopping music, music everywhere. You can't even get ten lousy bucks out of people to go see you." This statement would echo the sentiment of many an artist that is trying to express themselves in the modern age of digital capitalism. "I think if you're going to call yourself an artist isn't your role to play and have fun and imagine and pretend?" And this is place that Cruickshank now finds himself. In his forties, although not on the "creepy" side, he's finding new ground creating scenarios, putting Alice down a different rabbit hole or as he puts it "making life something other than it is". "There are no 'I' statements on the record. I thought: let's do a pirate song. I'll play the banjo and we'll have a croaky groaning harmonium. That can be like the ship." This description conjures up images of a Tom Waits type character: a journeyman, a musical vagrant, a shopping trolley troubadour.
This romanticism is bound to a different age but Cruickshank can easily identify with it. "I should have been born a hundred years ago. There was no recorded music...you either had to play music or get musicians to play it for you. How fuckin' cool would that be?" The bards of old would pass on tradition and tales through song but rather than looking in the past and recall it, it is as if Cruickshank wants to project his imagination on the backdrop of history, to entirely reinvent it. Another song on the album is about Billie Holiday from the point of view from the soul vocal group, the Temptations which formed a year after Holiday died. And then there's the idea about "sad white music and we'll be in Poland in the 1830s."
All this comes from a man who sounds like, through a successful life of music, is still finding joy in his art, fighting the pervasive post modern cynicism. "When I started thinking about the songs as being little bits of sound that would do as much work, evocatively, as the words would do, then it became loads of fun to do."
