Arts / Music
A little bit of surrealism goes a long way
Luke Beesley will launch his first album in Brunswick this week
Mark Phillips
SHELVES full of books compete for space with guitars and amplifiers in Luke Beesley’s Brunswick apartment, signs of his twin passions for words and music.
As if being one of Australia’s most acclaimed poets was not enough, Beesley has just released his first full length album of self-composed songs under the moniker of Cornflake Sunset.
Double Portrait will be launched at Tempo Rubato in Breese Street on Thursday night, where Beesley will be backed by the three-piece band with whom he recorded the album in Coburg last year.
About half the songs on Double Portrait are reworked versions of Beesley’s surrealist poems, including the lead off single ‘Red Lines Horizontal’.
Watch the video for ‘Red Lines Horizontal’
Beesley, 49, is a prolific writer whose most recent collection of prose poems In the Photograph was shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. He has published four books with Giramondo.
He has juggled music and writing for more than a decade, performing solo or in a duo as New Archer, but admits that for many years he prioritised writing over recording his songs, apart from a New Archer EP that was released a decade ago.
Half-jokingly, Beesley says the decision to record an album was a reaction to an impending mid-life crisis.
“I sort of woke up a couple of years ago and was like, ‘Oh my God, I still haven’t recorded my first album’. So I had a moment of like, ‘Gosh, I really need to just do this’.”
After Covid put paid to his initial plans to record an album, Beesley decided to get serious at the end of last year, taking a selection of tunes into the Sydney Road Studios of engineer Patrick Telfer.
Beesley’s approach to songwriting begins with the lyrics, which are frequently drawn from his poems. He starts each day at dawn at his writing desk where he jots down observations, experiences and vignettes from the previous 24 hours which eventually may find their way into a poem or short story. When he entered the recording studio, he had no shortage of material to work with.
“I feel like I’m lucky in that I just have all this material which is all of the poems in all of my books, plus all of the drafts of all of those poems, plus all the poems that never made it into the books, because I tend to write a lot and write every day so the books are just really the tip of the iceberg,” Beesley said.
“So nearly every song that I make, I’m just sort of running my eye over my books or through other drafts, and it always begins with a poem that’s already been worked on for a long time, and the lines are very much laboured and set in place.
“And so I guess when I come to write a song, I just sort of play around with some chords, and I try to start to just try and sing the poem.”
Like his poetry, the lyrics are often surreal and absurdist: in the Double Portrait universe sunlight is green, jumping castles wheeze into clowns’ Fanta-coloured hair, a bird is lost in the needle-eye of a cursive ‘e’ and a relationship break-up is communicated via the soundlessness of a snow leopard’s leap.
“I love the surrealism of the everyday that New York School poets like Barbara Guest and John Ashbury brought in, in the 1950-60s,” Beesley says. “They also wrote about painters and other poets and were excited by language. My poems are the same and by extension my songs reference all my influences – Barbara Guest of course, Yoko Ono, Godard, to name a few!”
The songs on Double Portrait are drawn from Beesley’s poetry.
Beesley has been playing guitar since he was a teenager, and musically he is influenced by the literate mid-1990s American scene that spawned Bill Callahan/Smog, Steven Malkmus and Pavement, and especially the late David Berman and the Silver Jews.
Beesley entered the studio with just the barest sketches of tunes on his acoustic guitar. They were fleshed out by drummer and composer Maria Moles, multi-award winning double bassist Helen Svoboda and avant-jazz saxophonist Thomas Coleman Bell.
Each musician is capable of improvisation and they took the songs to places where Beesley could only imagine.
“It was really incredible, the experience of the studio and watching these professional, incredibly accomplished musicians come in, because I’d been playing just these acoustic songs for nearly a decade, and so they became so personal to me, but then once the other musicians came in they were able to find a way to play something unique for each song and transform each song,” he said.
“So that was really exciting and it was just lovely to see the personality in each of the songs come out that I wasn’t able to even envisage or imagine.”
Beesley grew up in Brisbane and only took up writing in his late-20s after discovering literary fiction while backpacking around Europe.
He has lived in Melbourne’s inner north since the late 2000s, moving with his partner and their teenage son to an apartment in Brunswick near Anstey Station about two years ago.
His record launch will be held just a couple of hundred metres from his home at classical music venue Tempo Rubato which was chosen not only for its proximity but because it provides the kind of intimate space he feels will serve his songs well.
“When I play live I do these sort of semi-spontaneous monologues between songs that are a little bit like I’m drafting a poem live, in a sense.
“I’ve certainly played lots of gigs in pubs where things are clanging around and that’s fine too, but the songs really are very much about the lyrics so that’s why I sort of thought I really like the idea of it being a nice, intimate, quiet space, like at Tempo. It’s sort of almost like [the] JazzLab [in Brunswick], where it’s a very much you go and sit and people are very quiet.”
Beesley plans to play record launch gigs in Brisbane and Sydney as Cornflake Sunset, but then he will need to focus on his next published piece of writing, a novella that he has been working on for the past couple of years.
Double Portrait will be launched at Tempo Rubato, at 8pm on November 7. Tickets are $25.
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