What Does Gareth Liddiard Have to Say About Love?

c.w. mentions throughout of suicide

Gareth Liddiard is a man who’s been around. For those unacquainted, Liddiard is a founding member of a few of Australia’s most revered alternative punk bands. Of those, Tropical Fuck Storm is the most contemporarily popular, as a big name among some of the 2010s noisiest rock musicians. The precursor project to that (The Drones), on the other hand, is a slightly different affair. Both bands are raucously loud, but each is a contrasting beast in style and substance. Between these bands, and some other projects, Liddiard has fronted nearly a dozen studio projects in 30 years. He probably only needed half of that time to achieve his current cult status¹, but admittedly we listeners abroad didn’t pick him up as quickly as we should’ve. Thanks to the incendiary noise of his live performances², his singing style akin to the most sorrowful of banshees, and his rich, poetic lyricism, Liddiard’s set himself apart as one of the 2000s most head-turning rockstars.   

But who’s noticing him, exactly? Well, some seventy of his contemporaries, for one, who named his track “Shark Fin Blues” the greatest Australian song ever³. That’s quite the accolade, but a deserved one in my opinion. It’s truly the epitome of what makes him such a boundary-pushing lyricist, vocalist, and guitarist; Liddiard spins tones of grief, bitterness, and fury into his vibrant exploration of death and his in-your-face performance. That makes his music sound a bit bleak, which is an accurate assessment. He writes a lot of songs like this, thoughtfully grim, and with many successes. Australia is clearly the man’s forever home, considering how often it’s the setting for his messy, confrontational stories. Liddiard, born bright-eyed and made misanthrope, writes songs about those who, like him, slipped through the cracks of society. Through his music he explores dead end mining towns, populated with deadbeat fathers and traumatized children, all of whom he will sit with at the bar once the sun nods off. Every song he writes seems like it has an objective outside of his theme of focus: chastise the Australian politicians who cheer on war and spit on the veterans, who spit on the conscripts, who all spit on the aboriginals. That conservative culture gets their feathers ruffled up by what Liddiard thinks of them (as world-class-dumbass Andrew Bolt proved in his response to being namedropped on the visceral track “Taman Shud”)⁴, but it’s that same culture that chewed up Liddiard and spit him out in disgust.

There is zero romanticization of Australia (or anything else) in Liddiard’s bucolic-for-bastards music. Whether he’s a pessimist or a realist is hard to say, coming from a woman literally living across the globe, but it’s difficult not to picture earnestness behind his vocals and in his lyrics. If anything, his condemnation of Australia’s ills has only grown sharper, wittier, and more internationally relatable with the decades, with the flavor of his latest two albums with Tropical Fuck Storm being the madness of far-right conspiracy theories. Liddiard is an exuberant author. He writes in a tough manner, about people in tough spots, forced into tough lifestyles. Because of this, I spent a long time letting his many love songs sneak past my attention.

Does his interest in love songs surprise you, based on my intro? Romance seems like it might be at odds with the folly I described above, but in reality, he chooses to set that political hat down often for some these more personal songs. Liddiard, deliberately yet surprisingly shyly, wears a stomped-on heart on his sleeve. When I first started chewing through The Drones’ catalogue, my attention was drawn to the violence, the chaos, and the rest of the shit. But two of Liddiard’s best-known songs (“Jezebel”⁵ off of Gala Mill, and “Paradise”⁶ off of Braindrops), when you really listen to what he’s saying, are modern ballads, equal parts sincere and cynical. Now-a-days, I can’t stop thinking about his love songs, and the desecrated men/man they portray. What is the throughline between all of these songs? What spat-out refrain overarches Liddiard’s lyricism? What, then, does Gareth Liddiard have to say about love?

The perspective of Liddiard’s songs is the first conflicted element we ought to confront. Liddiard likes to write two kinds of song: dives into culture and society, and more narratively focused tracks. He has explored the innerworkings, trials, and demons, of dozens of narrator-type characters through his discography. In each of these perspectives, we are never entirely Liddiard, nor entirely not Liddiard. Liddiard is inside each mess of a man he pens to song (and I do think it’s important to note here that he only writes from a male perspective), but they are still always a little bit separate from Liddiard’s truest self.

That is best exemplified by Liddiard’s solo track “The Radicalisation of D”, his fictitious pre-detention autobiography of the real-life David Hicks. Differing from a story which LARPs as true history but is factually falsified, this is a story so specific we as listeners understand it can’t possibly be quite true to reality. Instead, it’s easily appreciated as just a possible exposition of a ne’er-do-well’s background. Being separate enough from David Hicks’ actual history, we can also see how Liddiard defines himself through this track: a restless Australian boy who’s not quite right in the head, and hardly at peace in the world. In an interview by Chris Deline⁷, Liddiard details the inspiration for most of the track’s lyrics; although some are about Australia writ large and some introduce real facts about David Hicks, many other verses reference grotesque and maligned memories from Liddiard’s actual childhood. Drinking with swastika-tattooed hobos, tricked into watching abhorrent pornography, hiding roadkill in your garage, these stories are Liddiard’s, not Hicks’. And the song, taken all together, develops the coming-of-age of a set-apart man, neither Hicks nor Liddiard, both Liddiard and Hicks. The title itself explains this to us right from the get-go: David Hicks isn’t referred to by name, and instead is simply called ‘D’, implying a degree of separation from the track’s actual progenitor. This song only alludes to David Hicks, giving it the space to explore Liddiard as well.

As is the case in ‘The Radicalisation of D’, like all of Liddiard’s other songs, we are not the obvious central perspective, but we’re also not quite some outside onlooker, exploring the life of another. These stories are told as though they present logical and concise information, although that is rarely the case. These stories are complicated, nuanced, and layered with differing emotional perspectives. Perhaps Liddiard does this because his stories simply make sense to him, even if they don’t make so much sense to the listener. His introspection and reminiscing is his own, and we listeners can make whatever sense of it we like. Alternatively, maybe he builds these stories in this detached way, where the perspective is nebulous, because he can’t quite stomach how these stories reflect back on him. Either way, if we assume Liddiard is a major perspective in all his songs (which I think is fair considering how many of his songs explicitly reference himself), his complicated writing style reveals a lot about him. By painting himself in a multitude of styles, we see many angles of Liddiard in his music. By collating those many unique sketches, we as listeners can piece together the many details of his personal history. Via an interview by journalist Andrew McMillen⁸:

“McMillen: Do people you meet in the street feel like they can relate to you through your songs?

Liddiard: I guess. They seem like they do.

…

McMillen: Does it bother you that people have an image of you that’s cultivated by what they see on stage and what you write about in your songs?

Liddiard: No, because that’s the way I saw the people I liked when I grew up.”

“The Radicalisation of D”, like the other seven tracks on Strange Tourist, is a character study. All are half-fictitious, humorless accounts by and about cynics, wayward in Australia. A lot connects the lives of these characters despite their disparate circumstances; almost all of them, in their respective songs, sort through a mess of personal history, jealously, loneliness, and misanthropy. And in a way, this is all indirectly about love, love that these characters are missing. Whether it be Strange Tourist’s conniving tightrope assistant whose unsung work turns him vindictive, or the lonely mailman who rides across an apocalyptically isolated desert, or D, growing up without guidance or friends. And that all, of course, reflects on the writer. Gareth Liddiard is a lush poet. His songs may be gray, but they’re lavishly so. There’s a consistent pessimism in his writing, but also a fervor in his wordplay and world building, that shows a passion for his dour tone. I can tell from his writing some things really just get his goat, and the sincereness heard in his most romantic stories make them resound deeply with the listener.

I think we can look to one of Liddiard’s oldest songs to understand some of the personal context he brings to much of his discography, that being “Legal Ghost”. Tropical Fuck Storm fans will recognize that track from the 2021 album Deep States, although it was originally written for a pre-The Drones collaborative project from some 25 years earlier⁹. Liddiard called it the “first decent song [he] ever wrote”¹⁰, a humble assessment considering the weightiness of its songwriting. “Legal Ghost” concerns itself with a woman the narrator clearly feels for, but their relationship has some sort of expiration date; its implied, but not stated explicitly, that she is fated to die. The title and the mantra repeated throughout the track, ‘It doesn’t really matter [what you do now]; you’re just a legal ghost’, is a detached, uncomfortable admittance of this fact. In a vacuum, “Legal Ghost” is but a somber diatribe. But unlike many of Liddiard’s songs, it explicitly interpolates Liddiard’s own story. The story here about a woman fated to pass, confused and alone, embroiled in legal scuffles, are taken from Liddiard’s own life:

“It’s a song he [Liddiard] wrote about a former girlfriend, who he knew when he was in his early 20s. The girlfriend’s own former partner had taken his own life by jumping in front of a train, and she had ended up embroiled in complex legal issues surrounding custody of his child in the aftermath… ‘Then she died. She killed herself in my car, and I just had to deal with that’” (an interview of Liddiard in The Quietus)¹¹

Liddiard has explicitly elaborated on this story in at least two (but probably more) of his other songs. The track “Locust”, released with The Drones, is a reminiscence covering Liddiard’s younger self. Here, he blames generational trauma for his partner’s suicide (‘left a suicide note and I’ve got him [her father] to thank for that’). Despite his pointed fingers, “Locust” is not nearly as hostile as many other songs on Wait Long by the River…, many of which being seething commentaries on the shitty state of Australian culture (you can read along with “The Best You Can Believe In”, or “You Really Don’t Care” for evidence). On “Locust”, Liddiard blames his partner’s father for her suicide, and blames that man’s time at war for his abusive personality, and ‘our statesmen hosts’ for the war itself. This long chain of culpability Liddiard connects piece-by-piece signifies that his future feels out of his hands, and that Liddiard, his partner, and her father, were all left behind by endemic ills of Australian conservatism. It also establishes how ever-present his traumatic memories are in his life. The way Liddiard presents the narrative of “Locust” implies he feels constantly flooded by these nauseating, eviscerating memories (considering he drinks heavily to forget them), whether it be the thoughts of the childhood town he’s glad to have escaped, or the woman he now grieves over.   

The track “Aspirin” from the Tropical Fuck Storm album Braindrops is contextualized like “Locust” too, in that it’s a present-day reminiscence from Liddiard over some bitter memories. Liddiard’s sociopolitical songs often explore a more “national” unhappy history, but his most introspective tracks explore an unhappy history of his own. On “Aspirin”, he melancholically shares his last dialogues with his partner, conversations which heavily imply that Liddiard, too, was in a dark place in his life:

'I [Liddiard] remember how you [his partner] used to say: 
“when you finally go, you’re gonna find out who you’ll miss the most; 
…
when you go, you get to finally meet the one who tortured you; 
the one who hurt you worse than anyone, even me; 
and I’m just sorry that I won’t be there to tell you ‘I told you so’; 
but soon enough you’ll leave, and then you’ll see”’

‘When you finally go’, and ‘soon enough you’ll leave’ are allusions to suicide, a death which Liddiard’s girlfriend freely admits she saw as eminent. But of course, Liddiard lived on, and now decades out from those conversations, we see the state he exists in. He still remembers these conversations, in vivid detail, and is reminded of his partner all the time: in the stuff around his house (‘you’re the old sneakers on the floor, the coat by the front door; the ashtray by the milk crate in the yard; you’re the dead fern in the hall’) or the things he had to get rid of to process losing her (‘all the blanks in my recall; and the old Toyota van I scrapped for parts’).

Clearly, when Liddiard remembers his old flame is unpredictable and ephemeral. He doesn’t consciously choose to return to the bleakest things he’s lived through, but sometimes he’s just there, in the random crap in his house or driving down the street. The details which Liddiard mentions on “Aspirin” are consistent with “Legal Ghost” and “Locust” (like the van all three of them mention), but what else is consistent is what that death wreaks upon Liddiard. His partner was evidently the center of his universe during her life, and sadly too still after her death, in the cherished memories and fondness he can never get away from. Liddiard put it best himself on “Aspirin”: ‘you said I’d be okay without you, yet you’ve been here all along; you were the best times I remember, and I do ‘cause life is dull; it’s like you’re half the fuckin’ neurons in my skull’.

Even Liddiard’s covers portray this same melancholy. Consider the verse that Liddiard restrainedly warbles on one of his (otherwise) noisiest tracks, a cover of the traditional “Dekalb Blues”¹²: ‘when I was with you, it was a golden time; when I was with you, you took up all my time; now the day’s long babe and you’re always on my mind’. In of itself, considering these aren’t Liddiard’s original words, maybe this isn’t entirely reflective of Liddiard. However, this is the second song on Liddiard’s first studio album, a placement which I imagine held some personal significance for him. And even more notably, Liddiard’s “Dekalb Blues” combines the verse above with a verse from an unrelated traditional (“See See Rider”), a song about a girlfriend who doesn’t stick around for long¹³. The implication in the original version is that she either cheats on her partner, or breaks up with him quickly. In Liddiard’s interpretation however, the See See rider passes away: ‘see see rider, see what you’ve gone and done; girl you made me love you and now you’re; dead and gone’, giving Liddiard’s version a disgraced tone. Liddiard’s “Dekalb Blues” is a soulful, lambasting rendition, about a man beset by his partner’s death. The death in this song is a Liddiard-original element, which means overall, “Dekalb Blues” stands in line with the tracks discussed earlier like “Locust” and “Aspirin”.

It’s safe to say that the passing of Liddiard’s partner influenced him topically for most of his career, considering how longitudinal the songs described above are. “Legal Ghost” was written around 25 years ago, “Dekalb Blues” and “Locust” came out around 21 and 18 years ago respectively, and “Aspirin” was written only four years ago. “Legal Ghost” references Liddiard’s history by his own admission, “Locust” elaborates on specific details about that story, and “Aspirin” connects itself to the former with its line ‘then I got something in the post, there it is, your legal ghost’. Although just these three tracks are explicitly built from the same history, many other songs in Liddiard’s discography have clear parallels to this triad in their worldbuilding (as we’ve already seen with “Dekalb Blues”). And other Liddiard tracks than those may be about fictional people, but similarly explore the pain brought on by the loss of a loved one (literally or metaphorically).

The stirring and forceful “I’m Here Now”¹⁴ is one such case, although this track is (probably) mostly true to real life, as we’ll see shortly. The narrator of “I’m Here Now” crawls his way through life after his lover’s suicide, progressively detaching himself from the world around him. The first thing he does after her death is skip town, to avoid seeing her belongings going unused (‘your pots, pans, your garbage; and all your photographs; have been thrown out in the street; and I stood back in shock; ‘cause now your shit, it just looks so lost without you’). Already we see a parallel to “Aspirin”, in how painfully reminding random junk can be of trauma.   

Over the course of “I’m Here Now”, the narrator gradually accepts that everything he’s heard about grief is equal parts dishonest and disconnected from his reality. The mantra he repeatedly lies through his teeth is ‘Time heals; and time forgets’, but as listeners we see how his stupor only deepens with time, represented by the increasingly angry inflection to Liddiard’s vocals, and the building aggression in the guitars and drums. The song first breaks from its lethargic pace into opaque fury as Liddiard, tired of lying, screams the lines ‘I tell you time does not heal; and it don’t forget, no!; it just drowns you when you’re thirsty and you’re lame; it’s when you keel to drink the water; and the water is flame!’.

Liddiard practically howls the quoted part of this verse, and at the end, when he repeats that last line one more time (‘it is flame’), we hear utter exhaustion in Liddiard’s whine. It’s the caterwaul of a man stripped bare by the suicide of someone he cherished dearly. “I’m Here Now”, as a title, describes the narrator in the place his partner once was: so exhausted that you’d consider suicide (‘and for the first time now; I’m looking right at you; I am here now’). Maybe on “Aspirin”, the inevitability Liddiard’s partner perceived in him committing suicide was misplaced. At least, at the time. Maybe it took losing someone of life-shattering significance for Liddiard to understand how far one can fall.  

Towards the end of “I’m Here Now”, Liddiard insincerely admits much hasn’t changed in his life since she passed, except that ‘[her] starter motor now refuses to turn’. This reference to some vehicle (probably the van Liddiard often mentions) is especially interesting to me, because it reminds me almost verbatim of lines from the song “Cowboy Dan” by Modest Mouse, released ten years earlier, and its rousing chorus ‘can’t do it, not even if sober; can’t get that engine turned over!’. The quoted lines, and “Cowboy Dan” proper, are also about a furious man at the end of his rope. He’s utterly fed up with life, but knows he can’t bring himself to commit suicide (‘can’t get that engine turned over’). In Liddiard’s case, the side-by-side of the van and suicide is depressingly more poignant. And as a final point of comparison: Cowboy Dan, the character, is sort of an allegory for how Modest Mouse songwriter Isaac Brock felt about his own depression at the time, which the writing of “I’m Here Now” is very in line with. These songs aren’t related in any way (to my knowledge) but their parallels help to illustrate my interpretation of these lyrics.

 “I’m Here Now” is a gut-wrenching track about being driven to the edge by losing someone you love completely, and how surviving past that sort of mental fracture is equal parts harrowing and deeply individual. And with grief so rupturing, survival isn’t even guaranteed. Liddiard spits poisonous sarcasm in response to being told how he is supposed to grieve, and that grief presents a clear threat to Liddiard. He’s not just upset on “I’m Here Now”, he’s dangerously flooded by feeling. He doesn’t know what to do with his life now that it’s been irrevocably altered. He’s afraid he never will. The way that suicide begets suicide is also brought up in the outro of “Aspirin”, as Liddiard sings ‘but you’ll be fine; ‘cause you could always see a light up in the tunnel’. These lines are sung sarcastically, Liddiard is faux-talking to woman who had a very pessimistic outlook on his future. Liddiard meekly admitting, once, after those lines ‘I got it a feeling it’ll happen soon for me’ perhaps means he worries he’ll fail to see the light, too.

An interesting detail shared between “Legal Ghost”, “Locust”, “Aspirin”, and “I’m Here Now” is that no actual context is given about Liddiard’s relationship with his partner, despite all of them being about what Liddiard’s life is like thanks to that relationship. Her personhood, their history together, why he loves her, etc.: these things are not directly touched upon. Liddiard’s multifaceted emotional experience, instead, becomes the clear focus of these songs, and takes the spotlight off this person. That he loved her infinitely is still so clear in these tracks, based on the way Liddiard connotates how much he felt he lost. And I’m glad these songs are written this way, as presenting particular truths or fond memories about their relationship would obviously be an extremely personal subject for Liddiard to openly discuss in his music, and perhaps not a respectful one at that. Notably, Liddiard chooses to write many of his love songs this way. Liddiard is always his own focus, and how love hurt him is the emphasis of what he writes.

The four tracks I just noted form a sort of timeline in conjunction with one another: “Legal Ghost” takes place just before Liddiard’s partner’s passing and “I’m Here Now” takes place immediately after. “Locust” seemingly takes place after the narrator has had some time to grieve but is still gripped with misery, and “Aspirin” is a reminiscence a long time out. And in all four of these tracks, we can see how cataclysmic that death was. “Legal Ghost” finds Liddiard nihilistic in the face of losing someone he loves. He feels powerless over his impending future, he admits he’s unable to protect what matters most to him, and that causes him to act indignant and resigned. Then, in “I’m Here Now”, the narrator behaves viscerally right after her death, so overwhelmed by the nauseating pain of grief that he finally understands what brings a person to end their own life. In “Locust”, the narrator has come to terms with her death and is able to discuss the complex history leading to it concisely, but still feels the need to drink away the constant reminders of her (‘Georgie, I can’t stop drinking; seems every time I try, I can’t stop thinking’). And in “Aspirin”, the narrator is still reminded of his lover in almost all things. But no longer does he drink to forget, and sometimes, he finds himself able to catch a breath and go on with his life: ‘other times, you’re the furthest thing from my mind’. To mention an idea once again I brought up earlier, although I only see clear references in these four tracks to the same event, it’s likely other tracks in Liddiard’s discography could fill in different time periods of this narrative. Liddiard himself admits to developing upon songs in this way:  

“Every song becomes some sort of universe, or at least some sort of country, and it’s populated by ideas that have come before.”¹⁵

It’s also extremely likely, in my mind, that this sorrowful circumstance influenced just about every other song in Liddiard’s discography. The four-track narrative above exemplifies a fascination in much of the music Liddiard writes: death as an omnipresent, motivating, and usually deeply affecting fate. Even the characters on the periphery of Liddiard’s songs, who the narrator only briefly interacts with, have their own struggles and succumb to such an end. Such as the guard of the favela in “Rubber Bullies”¹⁶, a man who the narrator likes briefly and forgets quickly (‘when we checked out the next morning; we were on a first name basis; but he had the kind of features; where you can’t recall his face’). By the time he shoots himself at the end of the song with his UPP shotgun, the narrator has already moved on with his life. But maybe a different character in this universe/country, who we’ll never even hear about, loved that man and will react to this death in much the same way Liddiard did to the death of his loved one.

Death in every one of Liddiard’s songs plays out a little bit differently, but in all cases, death inspires some sort of anguish, depression, or throbbing heartache in the narrator, which indicates the level of love shared between the narrator and their deceased partner. By seeing how far the narrator falls once his partner is gone, we can see how high he once stood, so to say. An example of this can be found with the long-gone childhood sweetheart from “I See Seaweed”¹⁷, who the narrator wistfully remembers in little glimpses: ‘Admit it, she was kind of cute; …; I forget her all the time these days and be forgotten too’, or in the lines ‘I can’t remember how she looked although; I do recall her smile coming down the telephone’. This death, although once suffocating, now inspires a sort of dejected bitterness in the narrator (‘it choked my heart but spades are spades’). This is how the narrator talks about his relationship now that he’s far removed from it, but as listeners we pick up on the fact that he never completely recovered from the blow. He doesn’t remember his childhood love very well, but he does bear a detectable malaise which casts a shadow over his life without her. The writing of “I See Seaweed” is dissatisfied with everything it explores, backed by ominous guitars that travel through unexpected places, all of which imply instability and nihilism in the narrator. The narrator’s relationship is also, simultaneously, a metaphor for one of the album’s subjects: rising sea levels. Both force resignation onto a once impassioned man.

Loving a person is evidently not just one particular period of time in one’s life, in Liddiard’s point of view. Love is a story which is constantly being added to, through the sharpening or hardening of memories, or the permanent changes in Liddiard’s character. Sincerely loving a person is simply a difficult thing to move on from. It’s a universe that he’s forever a part of, with or without someone else beside him. 

What else is seemingly constant among the love songs in Liddiard’s discography is, that although his love (or at least, his feelings about that relationship) progress forever, his partner being in stride with him is usually a thing of his past. His romances usually end messily, in death or otherwise, and his love songs frequently explore relationships which ended decades prior. These memories are very reminiscent rather than recent, but even then, they find a way to wear away at him. We’ve already seen that to be true of “Aspirin” and “I See Seaweed”, and we will see that remains true while exploring other parts of his discography. “Legal Ghost” is one of just a few exceptions, taking place while Liddiard was actively in love, and we’ll return to that thought as well. Either way, Liddiard’s personal development is very based in hindsight, and Liddiard often needs space and time for introspection for his true feelings to float to the surface.  

Two songs about past-relationships on Strange Tourist explore this idea, both of which being regretful reminisces about long-gone women. First off, let’s note an interesting analogy Liddiard repeats throughout both songs: one of prettiness, and youth. Consider the line ‘hey, you’re lovely and you’re young’ (from “You Sure Ain’t Mine Now”), and the mantra repeated six times on “Did She Scare All Your Friends Away”: ‘and Anna was a beauty in her youth’. Liddiard does so to represent how these relationships happened a long time ago, at a very different time in his life. Things were more vibrant and alive when he was younger, which emphasizes an unbridgeable chasm between Liddiard and his former happiness. The world visibly loses its warmth as he ages.

But these aren’t fond memories, either, despite their rose-colored tint. Both songs describe grim changes brought on by disastrous falling-outs. On “You Sure Ain’t Mine Now”, Liddiard explores how much he still loves a woman who was never really his, a woman who reshaped and injured him permanently. Often, Liddiard’s slow paced, tonally plaintive songs such as this are reserved for his most somber stories (such as “To Think That I Once Loved You”, a song we’ll explore later), and this is no such exception. Not unlike “I’m Here Now”, Liddiard seems to have difficulty presenting these memories without fudging the truth or minimizing the scope of the situation. Consider how he claims here ‘the wounds you [his ex] loved the taste of have healed’, even though those injuries left debilitating scars: ‘she broke my ribs and the bones never knit; oh, it was an honor to even exist’. These lines in tandem represent how much dignity was stolen from Liddiard. He presents us with a lot of misery when he warbles out his rare, gentle falsetto, and this track is a little stomach-churning in how badly he clearly aches. The narrative attests to Liddiard being down three things: his pride, his passion (‘hey, there’s a light gone out; hey, nothing to get excited about;), and his optimism (‘I’m looking through my window; to all the heavens that lie in the past’). All he’s capable now is mulling over his mistake.

On “Did She Scare All Your Friends Away”, the narrator regrets chasing after a woman whose family was at odds with his own upbringing. The narrator is especially morally conflicted with her ‘small time politician’ father who ‘levied heavy taxes’ on poor local trash like him. Her father maintains his ingroup by being a fraud (‘why would he frighten off his friends?; with something useless as the truth?’), a quality the narrator tried to emulate but hated himself for it. But he still did break with his morals for a chance with the woman in the song, debasing himself in the process (‘she turned one against the other, all friends; …and that would be her masterstroke; and I am standing here as proof; yeah, Anna was a beauty in her youth’). All the narrators on Strange Tourist are stirred by bitterness over wasting their lives to people who didn’t respect them. These two just happen to still be able to romanticize their past in some small part, showing how love and obsession work to dredge up bright and dark memories in a now grey-colored life.

Over the decades of Liddiard work with The Drones, his exploration of themes relating to regret over abusive relationships, rather than subsiding, have grown sharper. Consider one of The Drones’ last tracks: “To Think That I Once Loved You”¹⁸, which doubles down on all the themes of Strange Tourist, released six years earlier, and epitomizes almost every message about abuse in Liddiard’s other early songs. Consider how the passage of time from a messy relationship enables Liddiard to find fondness for it (‘you said nothing’s perfect, though you came pretty close; but then time’s made the most of you lately’), and how the pain of that relationship continues to haunt him (‘the sun’s giving way and the last of its shade’s; grown as long as the ache that you gave me’) while his partner moved on unscathed (‘you got your refund; and now I’m paid to make rain where you burnt me’). I really like the last line of that verse, because it references how Liddiard’s exes forget these stories with far greater ease than him, but in a way, Liddiard still got the better deal. He’s able to sculpt something of far greater value from those experiences than his exes, being the music he writes, which he is paid and acclaimed for. Liddiard denotes this same idea on a very early The Drones song, being “I Walked Across the Dam”¹⁹: ‘you played me like a bow; and if the music I made, made your stomach turn; you got what you deserved, I suppose’.

“To Think That I Once Loved You” seeps regret, a feeling Liddiard is seemingly encumbered by often considering how many times he’s returned to it. We don’t just read that lyrically in this case, we can hear it vocally. The chorus here is sung as a duet between Liddiard and a vocalist from the band Harmony²⁰. While Liddiard sings this part with his typical rousing anger, the female vocalist adapts a restrained, more melancholic tone. This vocal presentation reinforces the themes of the song, in that Liddiard is boiling with pain, showcasing the deep hurt of abuse, but to his ex, their relationship was less inspiring, and was easy for her to put down once the game grew tiresome (‘but why come back for me?; I ain’t no great beauty; well, I guess you’ve got time on your hands’).

Exemplified by the patient, waltz-y composition of the above track, Liddiard is neither singularly angry nor downtrodden. If anything, he’s simply overwhelmed, hurt, and lashing out. The same can be seen on “You Sure Ain’t Mine Now”, and “Did She Scare All Your Friends Away”, and even on the absurdly heavy “She Had an Abortion That She Made Me Pay For”²¹. The narrator of this track and his girlfriend are listless and edgy, they rob each other for drugs, and communicate with each other exclusively in insults. But after she passes away, in the middle of the song, the narrator looks back on this relationship and wishes things had been different (‘it’s a long time now and I lay wondering why; laid under my guilt like it’s an epiphany’), guilt perhaps over how they treated each other. Liddiard explores death in his discography as through it’s never the story’s finale. His relationship may have ended, but Liddiard can continue to grow and his feelings about his past relationships can continue to rearrange.

So often do relationships in Liddiard’s discography end in death or irreversible disaster that it’s remarkable to witness him actually in love with a woman still in his life. That’s why the ambitious narrative of “Jezebel”²² is such a watermark of Liddiard’s career (albeit it also stands out as being one of the greatest blues-punk songs of the century), because we can see how Liddiard represents someone actively pursuing love. For a song as loud as the ring of a gun and as heavy as six feet of topsoil, it’s emotional draw is especially remarkable.  

“Jezebel” is about two combatants serving distant deployments in the same war. Over the course of “Jezebel” the narrator grows increasingly existential from the atrocities he’s witnessed and the cognitive dissonance he bears (‘how many people gonna lie?!; how many people gonna die?!; what’s best for the West and the greed?!’). But through the muck and the shit, what grounds him to life is his love for a woman far from him, and the perfunctory letters she sends him. And that potential future keeps him going, despite his desperate pull to escape (‘there ain’t no nothing here except the darkness, Lord’). But the woman in this song is a misplaced dream. The narrator is worn down over the course of the song by his love not being reciprocated (‘but I ain’t nothing but your stranger still; if I am even anyone at all’).

But no matter where the narrator of “Jezebel” is at in his narrative arc, the storm always clears for Liddiard’s chorus, where he patiently repeats ‘I… would love to see you again’. I love that this chorus summarizes the universal plight of the individuals in this essay, a wish almost never granted. It so perfectly explains the message behind Liddiard’s love songs that I can practically imagine this chorus, seamlessly integrated, into any of the other tracks in this essay: be it the despondent Liddiard of “I’m Here Now”, the seething Liddiard of “Did She Scare All Your Friends Away”, or the misty-eyed Liddiard of “You Sure Ain’t Mine Now”. Liddiard just wants one last chance. Maybe he can fix what is untenably broken. Tragically, at least in the case of “Jezebel”, he can’t. The narrator goes from optimism, to resignation, to nihilism, like all the songs above: ‘and I am gonna lose my skin; and I ain’t gonna see you again’.

Not exactly the war or the woman in the song, by Liddiard’s own admission, the titular Jezebel is a cow described in the first verse of the track. 1950s nuclear testing off the coast of Australia resulted in radiation being carried by wind across the country²³, irradiating the grass fed on by dairy cows (‘Strontium-90; removed from milk; is as curious an entity; as bullshit writ on silk’, screeches the first verse of “Jezebel”). The dairy industry, hungry for profit, encouraged Australian children to drink the poisoned milk. Hence the Jezebel of the song, the liar misleading the blind, is the cow, the cow who’s the image of corporate greed, which is a metaphor for the war the West wages, which is all akin to how the narrator feels treated by the woman in “Jezebel”. Making sense yet? I told you it was an ambitious song. “Jezebel” is death knell for any in its warpath. The original idea for the title of the song was more illustrative of this motif:  

“’It was going to have a different name that was more hysterical – but I figured, fuck it, name it after a cow,’ he [Liddiard] says with blunt irony. ‘It was going to be called ‘Death and Only Death’ or something equally as horrible as the song.’”²⁴

In the interview quoted above, Liddiard chooses to elaborate on the myriad socio-political influences on “Jezebel” and other songs from the album Gala Mill²⁵, but scantly references the love which influenced those songs. In a way, that encourages me to attend to the romantic aspect of the album even more (especially for the album’s key tracks like “I’m Here Now”). All of the violence, greed, and horror on Gala Mill is distracting, but the core narrative here in my opinion is still Liddiard’s exploration of love, drive, and loss. The narrator of “Jezebel” was fed a false promise by an insincere empire. That promise gives him hope, but what he is fed slowly kills him. But that he binds himself to a woman he loves through the terror of war establishes Liddiard believes a man who still loves, is a man who still dreams, even if he’ll inevitably wake up.

Liddiard understands that any man like him who can resist, does. His narrator’s usually fight dearly for the people they love, even if that’s illustrated rarely considering how many of his songs take place after death. For example, in “Why Write a Letter That You’ll Never Send”, released seven years after “Jezebel”, the narrator pleads to his consigned friend that he not kill himself. Liddiard begs, passionately and full-heartedly, that his friend forget about the many evils of a world plagued by war, genocide, and abuse. The sprawling verses of this track, each with dozens of brief assessments and arguments about why his friend should give life another chance, signals that Liddiard’s pleading is a desperate, stream-of-conscious dialogue:

‘And who cares about the Yanks?; 
who cares if they get overrun; 
by Chinese nukes and tanks?; 
and who cares about the Holocaust?; 
man, we didn't learn nothing there; 
and all its memory does; 
is keep the History Channel on air; 
and who cares about the Vatican?; 
man, everybody knows; 
and who's surprised they went and chose; 
a Nazi for a Pope?’

The chorus and final verse of this song are crafted in a carefully sloppy way, dropping the rhyming convention (‘stay with me; wait and see; and all you need to know is; nobody’s perfect and their needs are always stark’), to represent the overwhelming raw love Liddiard feels for his friend, and the fear Liddiard feels over potentially losing him. It’s open to interpretation if he succeeds in preventing his friend from writing a letter he’ll never send: a suicide note.

But like in “Jezebel”, we see than a man in love will eventually grow weary. That brings us into “Paradise”²⁶, which to my knowledge is the only other song in Liddiard’s discography about a character in love with a living person (other than “Legal Ghost”, which is a little more ambiguous than either of these songs). The connections between “Paradise” and “Jezebel” are numerous, so much so that I feel comfortable claiming that “Paradise” is a continuation of the narrative of “Jezebel”, written 13 years prior. “Paradise” narrates a letter, resemblant of the letters of correspondence between the two characters in “Jezebel”. The letter signifies how frustrated the narrator has grown with the uncertainty of their relationship: he has proclaimed his love for her, but sees that she is dragging her feet to either accept him, or move on. This is seemingly picking up where the plot of “Jezebel” ended. The woman in the song is painted as indecisive and unmotivated (‘what is it you’re expecting?; you need an invitation to go anywhere?’), but the narrator is clearly both lonesome and agitated. “Paradise” is like “Jezebel” farther soured. In “Jezebel”, the narrator holds on to love to motivate him to fight through the hell of the war, up until he finally comes close to giving up. “Paradise” is his last attempt, even as he acknowledges it might be the time to throw in the towel.

“Paradise” is, in a way, the literary foil to many of Liddiard’s songs. It seemingly refutes a claim Liddiard makes in some of his love songs: love has greater gravity than any human experience, and it is more valuable than any livelihood, and once it’s gone, you’ll long for it forever. This message can be found in tracks like “I’m Here Now” and “Aspirin”. On “Paradise”, just loving someone wasn’t good enough for the narrator. He needed his own closure, and to be loved too. This message is more in line with that of “You Sure Ain’t Mine Now” and “To Think That I Once Loved You”.

In summary, Liddiard portrays a complicated and multifaceted perspective on love over the course of his discography. Love isn’t beautiful, romantic, or eternally prosperous. Liddiard’s a little more pessimistic than that, not as a born pessimist, but as a product of his own experience. Instead, Liddiard believes love lasts briefly and injures permanently. The significance of love is not in its longevity or its purity, but in its immense gravity. It’s an eternal, damning thing to love someone. So much so that it’s practically a danger to him, as we saw in “I’m Here Now”. And with that gravity comes vulnerability. Being manipulated or mistreated by someone with that kind of grasp on us, as Liddiard so often was, murders his self-esteem and drive towards new horizons for decades, as we saw in “You Sure Ain’t Mine Now” or “To Think That I Once Loved You”. Liddiard recognizes how twisted up he gets in loving someone, and that eclipsing truth clearly intimidates him. And any romance, even a brief one, even one that happened half a lifetime ago, changes his character in intrinsic, detrimental ways.

Liddiard’s take on love is far from typical for any point in rock’s history. To him, love often seems far more miserable than it is rewarding, a side-effect of an unavoidable human condition. On “Dog Eared”²⁷, we hear this in Liddiard’s own words. His take away from a bad falling out is to not take a chance on something new, even though he wants to more than anything (‘my heart might hang me if I gave it an inch’ opens “Dog Eared”). If Liddiard never falls in love, he can never be hurt again. It sounds simple. Unfortunately, that’s a tricky request to make of Liddiard. It’s unnatural; he is a man who loves, he’s practically drowning in empathy much of the time, and for once he just wants to be rewarded for putting himself out there. As he connotates in this song, Liddiard is proverbially possessed by his heart, how a dog possesses its master. Liddiard hopes to build himself back up enough to try again, but “Dog Eared” shows us his difficulty in mustering up the courage (‘my heart should thank me; I’ve been patient such a long, long time’).

In other cases, Liddiard will confront those same blows a little more aggressively, like on “Stop Dreaming”²⁸. Although on that track he admits that being abused wasn’t his fault (‘it ain’t like you saw it coming; it ain’t like you were all there’), he rouses himself not to feed into his own self-pity (‘you’ve got a right to say, times have worn you down; but don’t be heavier than they’). He would rather dust himself off, ‘get [his] shit together; …; stop dreaming and get on; stop dreaming and live on’). It makes me concernedly wonder, will Liddiard be rewarded for trying again and again? Or is this a Sisyphean challenge?

Gareth Liddiard is not some self-aggrandizing misanthrope. Quite the opposite; despite the grim circumstances of most of his songs, and the constant fatigue he experiences from his own history, his songs are clearly made by a man who loves and cares deeply. His writing is representative of his experience, and he evidently just wants to be felt for too. Often his songs are written, not by a resigned man, but a man who cannot handle his own bottomless empathy. Bandmate and partner Laura Kitschin explains the same lyrical ethos with Tropical Fuck Storm’s music: 

“It’s about being overwhelmed by all this information, all this extreme feeling… it’s caring too much and getting overwhelmed”²⁹ (on the subject of their 2021 album Deep States)

There has been a glacial stylistic shift in Liddiard’s last 25 years on the scene, which may have not been clear, as this essay jumped back and forth through the years quite a bit. But as a little clarification: Liddiard released his seventh and last album with his first band (The Drones) in 2016. Between 2016 and 2018, Liddiard and company were cooking up something sassier and punchier. He called it a time to “figure out our internal modus operandi… mad experimentation really”³⁰, being their eventual new band Tropical Fuck Storm. But really, this transition was less of a jump and more a logical next step. The Drones final album Feelin Kinda Free heavily hinted at this new move with its progressive display of dissonant and psychedelic textures. 2013’s I See Seaweed, the prior album to that, was also a strive ahead, towards broader-spectrum narratives than the singularly introspective style of Liddiard’s prior decade of work. I See Seaweed felt freer to explore polarizing politics or dramatic history.  The lyrics were richer and more playful: there’re plenty of references and namedrops, alongside wittier metaphors, which again was the natural move forward from Liddiard’s lyrical ripening in 2006-2008. Jumping ahead to the years between 2019 and 2023, we’re once again seeing a shift in a new direction. Whether it be with the supergroup Springtime or Tropical Fuck Storm, Liddiard is exploring more abstract song progressions, freeform soloing, and avant-garde montage.

Liddiard’s years between 2019 and 2023 have been mostly removed in tone from the material a lot of this essay encompasses, and his last 10 years writ large lean quite a bit more melancholic than the agitation he first brought to the table with The Drones’ first years in studio. The last time he’s released original material touching on prior romances was four years ago, with the 2019 album Braindrops, although he’s released nearly three hours of studio music since. And recent short plays (like “Night Raver”³¹, “Satanic Slumber Party”³², “Moonburn”³³, and “Submersive Behavior”³⁴) display a newfound interest in covering and collaborating. The way Liddiard is thematically untethering himself from his younger heartbroken influences, I think, shows that those demons are less of an influence to his work. And I choose to interpret that those demons are less of an influence to his life, as well.

1. https://beat.com.au/an-exploration-into-gareth-liddiard-australian-musics-oddball-revolutionary/

2. https://www.audiotechnology.com/features/the-sound-of-a-car-crash

3. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/29/shark-fin-blues-by-the-drones-australian-anthem

4. https://musicfeeds.com.au/news/andrew-bolt-says-the-drones-new-single-proves-hes-offending-the-right-people/#/slide/1

5. Released with The Drones

6. Released with Tropical Fuck Storm

7. https://web.archive.org/web/20110108200116/http:/www.culturebully.com/gareth-liddiard-radicalisation-of-d-influenza

8. http://andrewmcmillen.com/2010/04/14/the-vine-interview-gareth-liddiard-of-the-drones/

9. “Bong Odyssey: Recordings 1993-1998”, a collection of songs made by Gareth Liddiard and founding member of The Drones Rui Perreira

10. https://thequietus.com/articles/30209-tropical-fuck-storm-interview-gareth-liddiard-fiona-kitschin

11. https://thequietus.com/articles/30209-tropical-fuck-storm-interview-gareth-liddiard-fiona-kitschin

12. Off of The Drones’ 2003 album ‘Here Come the Lies’

13. https://www.songfacts.com/facts/chuck-willis/cc-rider

14. Off of The Drones’ 2006 album ‘Gala Mill’

15. https://thequietus.com/articles/30209-tropical-fuck-storm-interview-gareth-liddiard-fiona-kitschin

16. Off of Tropical Fuck Storm’s 2018 ‘A Laughing Death in Meatspace’

17. Off of The Drones’ 2013 album “I See Seaweed”

18. Off of the 2016 album “Feelin Kinda Free”

19. Off of their 2002 album “Here Come the Lies”

20. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/jan/18/the-drones-to-think-that-i-once-loved-you-exclusive-video-premiere

21. Off of The Drones’ 2005 B-sides album “The Miller’s Daughter”

22. Off of The Drones’ 2008 2006 album “Gala Mill”

23. https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/first-australians/other-resources-about-first-australians/british-nuclear-tests-maralinga#:~:text=Between%201952%20and%201963%20the,and%20Maralinga%20in%20South%20Australia.

24. https://a1000mistakes.wordpress.com/2019/07/24/mns-article-gala-mill-by-the-drones/

25. Released in 2006 as The Drones

26. Off of Tropical Fuck Storm’s 2019 album Braindrops

27. Off of the 2006 The Drones album “Gala Mill”

28. Off of the 2005 The Drones album “The Miller’s Daughter”

29. https://thequietus.com/articles/30209-tropical-fuck-storm-interview-gareth-liddiard-fiona-kitschin

30. https://spectrumculture.com/2019/02/12/interview-gareth-liddiard-of-tropical-fuck-storm/

31. 2022, as Springtime

32. 2022, as Tropical Fuck Storm with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard

33. 2022, as Tropical Fuck Storm

34. 2023, as Tropical Fuck Storm with Dan Kelly