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Kim's In The Kitchen Justice! Don't you talk to me about justice. With the amount of money being spent on homogenized quasi-independent pretty boy bands, flooding the market and creating shiny landfill, what the hell is Kim Salmon doing borrowing money to record an album in his kitchen? For most bands, D.I.Y is at best a catch phrase to hide behind, at worst a dodgy marketing ploy. For the man with the first name of a girl and the last name of a fish, it's just the way things had to be. Now, with a 'So Hip It Hurts' new album under his well worn belt (how many notches are on that now?), and an attitude so positive it makes a Scientologist look like Oscar The Grouch, Kim Salmon is back in the drivers seat and looks like taking the checkered flag. Ya Gotta Let Me Do My Thing isn't just another Surrealists record, for my money it's their best. A roots rock extravaganza dressed up with brass and strings, oozing backporch charm and jetset smarm. Equal parts down home style and world class panache, and all dripping with that patented Surreal feel. From the tone of the title track you'd think Kim's been repressed, held back in some way. Nothing could be further from the truth. But what exactly is it we've gotta let him do? "My thing? It's lots of things. I guess you've got to buy the record to find out. But whatever it is, I just want to be able to do it. The same as anybody should be able to do their thing. "My thing is just me, and whatever that is, you've got to let me do it." Seems, like the hero getting the girl, there's no stopping what must be. For Kim, this latest release marks the beginning of yet another leg on the rock'n'raunch journey kicked off in Perth all those years ago. "It's kind of like a starting point almost. We got this new line-up (Kim, Greg Bainbridge on drums and Stu Thomas on bass) at the beginning of last year, then we went out and did a lot of touring. We toured Europe and then we did the U.S.A, and by the end of that we'd written a lot of stuff. But because I was, shall we say, between record deals, I realized nobodies going to be handing me lots of money to make a recording. We had this huge surplus of material and it would've been a shame to let it go stale, so we recorded it promptly." Promptly is one word for it. Put to tape over the space of a week in Kim's Melbourne kitchen, then flown over for a two day mix-down in Memphis by local living legend and rock extremist Jim Dickinson (Alex Chilton, Rolling Stones, The Cramps, Aretha Franklin, need I go on?), by the last day Kim's neighbours were on the boil, but even they couldn't hold back the tide of ideas. "I sort of paid a studio engineer some money and said, 'put away your ego'. Tell us how to record and then leave us alone. So he came along and basically set it all up. He told us what to hire and set it up like a studio. Because our idea was just to get an ADAT and some mics, beyond that we didn't really know what to do." But why the kitchen, surely there's more comfortable rooms to spend a week in? "Well, it's where some of the songs originated, but really that's the room that had the best acoustics. There's a lot of reflections in there. It has a stone fireplace, lino on the floor. All the pots and pans laying around, and there's a bathroom out the back, so my amp was put out facing that." The relaxed recording process goes hand in hand with the loose jam origins of the songs. "A lot of the stuff we'd been playing for a while, some of it not so long. It was really a matter of, 'Play jam number 46. Remember, the one we did at that soundcheck in the middle of the Black Forest.' Then you'd just have to play a couple of bars and everyone would be on it. Greg and Stuart are diverse and adept musicians that can more or less play anything they like, so rather than stand in their way, I just let them do their thing, which in turn enables me to do more of my thing. "So it was over two days that we put down the rhythm tracks, then I spent a day doing the singing and the rest of the week was spent ushering in friends and acquaintances to play various instruments around that." Smooth and sexy strings, bump and grind brass, even a flute. The only thing they didn't use was the kitchen sink, but that probably had a mic in it. Still it wasn't enough. Once in Memphis, Kim cajoled Jim Dickinson into adding a touch of Southern fried organ magic. "That was done in about 20 minutes at the end. I just kind of hit him with it. I said see that organ over there, do you want to play on this song, and he said, 'Oh, so you're a fan of the B3 are you?' but I had no idea what a B3 was, I just knew it was a Hammond, so I said, 'Well........yeah' So he just went in and did it. "Afterwards we said, it's not Booker T. But it is in stereo" Working indiscriminately with both rock royalty and local reprobates, Jim Dickinson is an enigma. "Yeah, the record that he produced for Alex Chilton, Like Flies On Sherbet, really informed my musical direction for a good decade. He was very wise, sage-like you could say. Full of sayings that were almost like clichés, that kind of catalogue his vast wealth of experience. He's a bit of an anarchist, as well as a............well he's also a traditionalist. He's kind of a lot of contradictions like that. And it's those contradictions that are intrinsic to rock'n'roll." Another thing that's intrinsic to Rock'n'roll is Memphis - It's birthplace and Jim's hometown. "Memphis was an intriguing place. Far smaller than I thought with a bloody great pyramid about the size of Cheops in the middle of it that people don't seem to know about. Somebody actually pointed out to me that Memphis is an Egyptian word. But apart from that, there's not a lot going on in it. But if there was, it would be far more dangerous than it already is. "It's a bit, you know, Black culture/White trash. There's the poor blacks and the very wealthy whites. Looking around, you can sort of see where rock'n'roll came from, there's this clash of cultures where nothing quite fits together, but they do. And that's rock'n'roll. It's not one of the most pleasant places, but it's certainly one of the more inspiring." But now he's back, with the zipper pulling, bold and brassy sound he intends to stick with. Neither a progression or a regression, the new Surrealists style is both the sum of everything that's gone before, and an extension upon it. Another one of those dichotomies rock's founded upon. "A lot of the ideas I've had in the past, that I thought I was expressing on the guitar, tend to sound more dense when done with different instrumentation. People just always thought I was trying to do this guitar thing, when in actual fact I was aiming at something different, creating a horn-line, or whatever. Now there's a certain lightness that's never appeared before. Live, people get it more. They understand what I'm trying to do. Maybe I should have just done this all along." Whatever you want Kim, just do it. We won't hold you back. |