INTERVIEW: Diesel talks about the new album ‘Alone with Blues’

Lockdown has produced some great albums you could argue we may never have heard and Diesel’s latest ‘Alone With Blues’ is one of them. Alone in his home studio on a break before the ‘Sunset Suburbia’ Tour resumes next year Diesel is back revisiting the music that moves us all. ‘Alone With Blues’ is a collection of blues classics and rarities paying tribute to giants like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Otis Rush, Sam Cooke, Leadbelly, and Magic Sam. We caught up with the man himself just as New South Wales latest lockdown was rolling. Apologies for the late posting of this one, due to a hard drive crash all interviews recorded in July were thought ‘lost’, the computer is now fixed and there will be more of July’s ‘lost’ interviews up shortly!

Diesel: Hi!

Mark: Hi, how are you?

Diesel: Good. Sorry for holding you up.

Mark: Hey no worries, it’s nice and early here in Perth and I can’t think of a better way to start the day than to have a chat. It must be quite unusual though to have a new album out when we’re all still digging the last release ‘Sunset Suburbia’?

Diesel: Mmm, I guess that one was already finished, well way finished (laughs) and I just thought I’ve got to do something with myself (laughs) I’ll be making another record any minute now!

Mark: (laughs) Bring it on! Seriously though lockdown is messing with music fans and artists alike. Lockdown wherever you are disrupts the normal release and touring patterns, it must be incredibly frustrating. But as the new record shows it can be an incredibly rewarding time too. How have you found it?

Diesel: I find it kind of a combination of both. I really love the togetherness, I mean thankfully I’m not doing it by myself in some apartment. I can’t imagine how it is for some people who live alone and probably quite enjoy that because they’ve got their live outside home and their work mates and now they’re forced to spend every hour in their apartment alone. That would be a bit much, but I’m lucky in that I’m locked down with my family, in my case my son and my daughter in law came back from New York and they’re kind of stranded here. But I’ve been really grateful to have them here. We’ve had some really funny times, doing a lot of things, I’ll look back on this year and there’s gonna be a lot of warm fuzziness that I can feel amongst all the terror and the anguish and the frustration. (laughs)

Mark: I guess we’re lucky in a way in Australia in that we’re quite safe, but we’re all missing our music. Logistically for promoters and artist it must be a nightmare?

Diesel: Yeah. I did a bunch of festivals in March and April and it was like “Wow! I can’t believe this is finally happening.” It was amazing! But it didn’t happen without some stress – “You need to go up to Queensland now!” “But it’s Wednesday and the gig is Saturday?” “I know but you need to go up there and get tested then get isolated” So it’s like “OK so this is the new normal” And then the logistics of rounding everyone up like that, it’s not easy. (laughs) Just to do your gig on the weekend! (laughs)

Mark: (laughs)

Diesel: Then you get up there and it’s awesome and people have no idea you’ve just run through fiery hoops just to get there and they don’t need to know, I don’t expect them to care, but now it’s just like ‘Wow! That’s what we have to do now’ and the joke is – “Join a band, play gigs, it’ll be fun!” You know (laughs)

Mark: (laughs)

Diesel: And here I am waiting to get this thing shoved up my nose, and siting there waiting in a room to get a result on your phone! It’s like “Fuck” there’s already enough anxiety with just the traveling on planes as it is, and now there’s the added anxiety. I was talking to a friend that I was writing with and she was saying that a friend of hers, a musician, had just flown from Sydney to Adelaide to Perth and when he got to Perth they shoved him in quarantine, you know. He’d just arrived on the wrong day when the latest shit-show was going down – oh man, that’s just like my worst nightmare! For stuff to happen when you’re in the air and you get there and you’re like “But I’m not sick!” (laughs)

Mark: It’s crazy how close it gets too, I talked to Jon Stevens when he came over and if he’d travelled to Bluesfest before it was cancelled he’d have been locked down when he got here and lost his four West Australian gigs! That was literally 24 hours!

Diesel: You’ve got to be a fox!

Mark: Let’s talk about the album though, because I’m really loving t!

Diesel: Why not!

Mark: Alone with Blues’ obviously has that double-meaning – first I guess that you played all of the instruments on there which is an amazing feat in itself, but I guess there’s also the lockdown echoes and probably even more layers of meaning. I have to say though my favourite is “Lost and Lookin’” by Sam Cooke. I love Sam Cooke and you’ve really done him justice there, not an easy thing to do!

Diesel: Yeah love that song too. And I love Sam Cooke obviously (laughs) I think he’s arguably the finest singer. I just wanted to do something different to what you might expect of me – to let the bass be the hobby-horse rather than the guitar. People always think of me as ‘guitar-voice’ and that’s my vehicle, but having the bass prominent I really enjoyed, having the space around it and also being able to put reverb on it, I’ve never put reverb on bass before (laughs).

Mark: It sounds fantastic. When did you find the Blues, or when did it find you!

Diesel: I guess through my Dad’s records that seeped into my brain as a baby. I don’t know why that music resonated so much with me, I love music of all kinds and all genres, even though I don’t really like the idea of genres.

Mark: I’m with you on that.

Diesel: The Blues to me is something that’s visceral I guess, to me and you can really just ‘get on’ something and find a lot in that space. I can’t explain it, it’s really hard to put into words but it’s something that really resonates with me and I just feel really comfortable playing Blues – that’s one thing I know.

Mark: It’s such an elemental style of music isn’t it and you can see what’s been born out of it, and yet it’s still so timeless and hard to describe.

Diesel: I think it has as much subtlety and as much intricacy as any genre of much that people might think is a lot more complicated. Sure it doesn’t have complex time signatures and changes and lots of complex scales but to get it to sound good, yeah there’s a lot of intricacies. It’s like saying “AC/DC that can’t be too hard” and I’m not going to name any names, but a very well-known musician said that to me after an awards thing where we’d just done a tribute to Malcolm who had just passed away that week. And I was like: “You’ve got to be kidding right?” The detail in his rhythm playing, when you try to emulate it, it’s like “No, nah, that’s not it” There’s so much subtlety and little details that he puts in with his push and pull, yeah it’s one chord, one finger pushed across three strings and three frets. And maybe it is that technically rather than some big spread out chord, but then there’s the whole tone and when you get into the tone that’s a whole other conversation. You know. I’m not a snob when it comes to music, well I try hard not to be because that’s my least favourite music fan (laughs).

Mark: (laughs) There’s so much emotion in the Blues though as well and that’s definitely something that comes across on the record. I loved reading in the press release that because you were working alone you were trying hard to delve deep into the songs to find that essence of them. Were there any that beat you or were harder to dissect?

Diesel: No not really, there were some that were harder than others definitely. Even something like ’Boogie Chillin’’ it’ essentially just a guitar and a vocal and when I started to look at that one I thought “Oh man, this is hard” you know to keep that train rolling! (laughs).I ended up getting one of my mini Maton’s you know to do the ‘stomp’ thing and I thought, this is good. Because on the recording it’s obviously stomping on the floor and that’s what you’re hearing – him stomping on the floor with his foot. And whether they ‘miked’ him up properly or it just leaked into the recording, it’s there and you can just hear it and feel it. So I thought “That’s what’s missing” so I’ll go and get the little mini and I felt so ridiculous doing it, but as soon as I put that on, it just glued it all together.

Mark: That process must have been so much fun though?

Diesel: It was! I may as well spill the beans, I made the record literally here (Diesel is sat at his desk with guitars in the background of the office-like room).I have a whole studio over there – (He points off camera) and I’m really blessed to have it, when I say ‘whole studio’ I mean multiple multi-track and lots of outboard gear in a room that has space for a whole band. But because I was doing so much stuff around here – I was doing a lot of zoom interviews because of ‘Sunset Suburbia’ I just sort of set myself up here and it just became… someone came in actually that hadn’t seen this area for a while and said ”Wow man, it looks like you’ve been living up here, it’s like something out of extreme hoarders or something!” (laughs) I’ve cleaned it up a bit since then, but I was kind of living like a hamster in a cage and I just moved all of my instruments in that I needed and spread them out on this bit of carpet space over there and almost like out of laziness I just used this one API that I’ve got here (He lifts it up) and the Apollo interface and just two dynamic mics. I didn’t even used condenser mics, just dynamics.

Mark: Oh wow. Fantastic. So who was the first person you played it to when you’d finished?

Diesel: Well probably the people that lived in my house: our friend Elyse and my wife and Jesse and Dakota and then I probably laid it on my brother Brian when we started being able to have visitors. I remember playing him ’Hoochie Coochie Man’ a song he’s seen me playing many times as a cover but I’ve never recorded it which I couldn’t believe it myself. And he just wanted to hear it played again and again, he almost fell off his chair – it had an energy I guess that he didn’t expect from one guy. And I was really trying to get that excitement and that exuberance, I know there are so many different recordings of that song that Muddy has done, but the one that I really, really love is the one from ‘Hard Again’ (Muddy’s first album after leaving Chess and joining Winter’s ‘Blue Sky’ label) that Johnny Winter produced for him. You can really hear the vibe in the room on that one.

Mark: And they’re just a few of the great songs on the album. I guess the hard bit is taking the record on the road especially with the rescheduled ‘Sunset Suburbia’ dates – what’s the grand plan?

Diesel: Well I’m going to double-back, ‘Sunset Suburbia’ has, I guess, sailed off into the sunset to some degree (laughs) but I’ve also been doing the ‘By Request’ dates amongst these things and I’m just going to “do si dos” for the next year to eighteen months and so those ’Sunset Suburbia’ songs will just get rolled out at shows. They’re getting requested a lot which is nice, so I know that album lives at least in the heart of the fans. And ‘Alone with the Blues’ that’s something that was just supposed to be touring NSW regional, because as I live in NSW we thought that might just be a little easier logistically and then we can broaden it later and go interstate unless we’re in lockdown again.

Mark: Fingers crossed. We can’t really leave without mentioning the song ‘Six Steel Strings’ can we? And of course the re-discovery of that song.

Diesel: Well, you know, it was just one of those things that kind of gave me this feeling of somethig special while I was making the record. The fact that Ross was moving house, they’d just been able to go 5 km down the road because they were fully locked down and he had to move because they’d sold the house. So he was doing the moving thing and kind of enjoying being locked down I think because when you’re moving you need the time. And he found this storage tub and I couldn’t believe the timing – like he had this telepathy thing going because this musicologist friend of mine Aaron had been saying “Man, it would be great if you could get something Australian on there.” I’d been saying to him “Help me out” because I’m not the full bottle on Australian Blues and then the song came in! Written by Ross Wilson one of the Grand Poohbah’s of Australian Blues – that was good enough for me! And it’s also kind of autobiographical in that he was trying to write about my life in a kind of ‘Johnny B Goode’ Blues kinda way. And I thought – this is perfect! And all I had to do was kind of find a new life for it because the demo was a lot faster, and he loves it and so do I but I needed to bring it into the fold of this record so that’s what I did.

Mark: It fits really nicely too and it’s a nice little added bonus as well.

Diesel: I wanted to bring in a little of that rolling Jimmy Reed/Chuck Berry kind of vibe with the rhythm where you get that rolling circular motion.

Mark: That’s exactly what it has! And sonically it sits beautifully. Great song and a great album and I have to just touch on the harmonica playing too!

Diesel: I’m an old guy now so I should know how to do that right?

Mark: (laughs) That’s right you should be playing this out on the porch! You’re getting in early before it becomes mandatory!

Diesel: (laughs)

Mark: The album is out 16th July, I’d certainly recommend everyone gout and grab a copy! You’ve produced some great albums over the years and I think this year is also the tenth anniversary of the ‘Under the Influence’ album.

Diesel: That’s the thing about the last millennial periods from ’00’ to ‘10’ and ‘10’ to ‘20’ it flies by! I mean how long has it been since we made the “First Fifteen’ (DVD) it must be over 15,16 years! (laughs). I’ve also got an ABC TV Show in the works called ‘Days Like These’ which is kind of going through concert footage and stuff and one of the episodes is about that concert and I was thinking “Really?” that just seems like about 5 years ago. What can I say? The years are just flying by!

Mark: It’s crazy isn’t it! And ’Short Cool Ones’ with Chris Wilson was 25 years ago this year as well. Great record, I was playing that the other day.

Diesel: Yeah that was probably the first, I wouldn’t say first really enjoyable record I made, I had moments of really enjoying recording before that, actually lots of great moments, but that was the first record where I can say that I discovered recording could be really fun. We were all playing in a room together – there was no huff at the time, we didn’t even have to wear headphones we could all just hear each other and it just didn’t feel clinical. It didn’t feel like “OK we’re making a record we have to suffer a bit” it was just play, capture it and boom! There it is! And that kind of opened up my eyes to that whole ‘throw it in a room, stir the pot and it’s done’ kind of recording (laughs). Don’t overcook it!

Mark: Sounds great! Well thank you so much for another great album I’ve enjoyed them all over the years but you always seem to bring something fresh to the table. Thank you so much for your time, it’s always great to catch up and we can’t wait to have you back in Perth!

Diesel: Can’t wait to get back to Perth! Thank you!

Mark: And now I’ll leave you to get on with that next album!

Diesel: (laughs) I know! Take care.

‘Alone With Blues’ tracklisting: 1. I’m Satisfied | 2. Shame, Shame, Shame | 3. Lost And Lookin’ | 4. Hoochie Coochie Man | 5. I Can’t Quit You Baby | 6. Boogie Chillen | 7. Six Steel Strings | 8. All Your Love | 9. Work Song | 10. Mirror Blues | 11. Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

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