Sauce

When Justin Heazlewood’s Drama Teacher invited him to imagine “waking up in the middle of winter, in Burnie, and going to work at the Advocate,”it scared him so much he moved to Canberra. Life since then has been one large theatre role of gay leading men and folking successes, but on the eve of his girlfriend leaving for a holiday, Justin and I jumped right in to a steamy sauna of self-reflection and introspective excess…

So how are you going today, anyway?
Yeah, good. My girlfriend’s about to go away for five weeks… I’m devastated, actually. [Laughs]

I hope I’m not interrupting anything …
No, no… my career always comes first!

Is that why she’s leaving?
Yeah – she needs a break from it. She’s actually the brains behind the whole Bedroom Philosopher thing.

And what do you bring to it?
Ah… a Jarvis Cocker impersonation. Yeah, I’m just the frontman – she writes all the songs… It’s her creation.

So what will happen when she’s gone? Your muse will have left you?
I know… [when I wrote most of my songs] I was kind of going through a massively long single patch, and now that I’ve actually been quite happy for ages, I’ve written diddly-squat. So we think it’s best! [Laughs] If she goes away, I’ll get unhappy, and probably write something.

How important is your angst to you, to fuel that creative process?
I think it’s very important. I think, probably, every artist who’s ever created anything would say that there has to be some sort of certain… I think it all comes out of necessity. There has to be some sort of mood that equates meaning to make some sort of comment. I mean, every piece of art is really some kind of strange ethereal conversation with yourself, [that] you can only have when you’re out-of-sorts enough. Having said that, I think that, I don’t know, maybe someone like Thirsty Merc… [laughs]… They seem to write songs from a very happy place.

Well, speaking of moods… how post-modern are you today?
How post-modern am I today? Yeah, yeah, extremely post-modern. I’m wearing an outfit made up entirely of photos of myself wearing every combination of clothes that I have… which is not very comfortable, but it looks kind of cool.

Dare I ask what your undergarments are composed of?
[Laughs] Oh, a hypercolour wedding dress! It was bad luck when I saw myself… What was with hypercolour? It just never really worked… Maybe the Tasmanian climate wasn’t suited to hypercolour… I heard a rumour that it’s actually coming back; that scientists have spent the last ten years working on hypercolour technology.

To what ends?
Well, to make it work more than once, hopefully! All these disappointed kids’ faces in high school, when they put their hypercolour t-shirt through the wash, and it had just gone back to white…

To what extent does the [new] album name, Brown & Orange, represent a fascination with hypercolour or the football team Hawthorn?
Hey, you’ve done your research! This is good! Well… orange doesn’t actually feature very much in the AFL, I find. It’s my second favourite colour – brown’s my favourite colour. It all flows back to… I guess brown and orange is the flag for the mythical country called the 70s which I live in, and like to think I’m the ruler of… I was never there, but I want to go back, because I’ve sort of pieced together that there was something a lot cooler going on then than anything in the 80s and 90s and today, which I kind of existed in… So I guess, artwork-wise, I thought it was an opportunity to pay homage to the vast amount of 70s ties and clothing that I’ve collected from all my trawling through op-shops for the last ten years… In some ways, certain aspects of the album are about that… sense of nostalgia – that you would like to go back. You look through your family’s photo album, and they’ve got that great sunset sort of tinge to it. You just want to be able to crawl into them, and just know what it’s like. But it’s an impossible dream, and it would never work…

So it’s nothing to do with poo and wee, then?
Oh, wow! Yeah! [Laughs] No … Or [have anything to do with] Hawthorn, because I go for Carlton. But I think I might change teams, because they’re a bit ridiculous.

So we can say here that we got the world exclusive – “Justin Heazlewood Has Switched Teams”?
I know what that means – you know, the ethics and the morals behind football codes. There is no option – there is no switching teams option … I don’t know – maybe have some operation where I forget everything that happened in the last fifteen years and go back to 1995, when we beat Geelong.

Justin Heazlewood, a.ka. The Bedroom Philosopher, will be performing at Launceston’s Royal Oak Bar on September 13 and Burnie’s Stagedoor Café on September 15.

Listen to the mp3 of this interview to hear Justin philosophise about his old Drama teacher, being a jock, and his shame at the sham of his alter-ego.

http://www.bedroomphilosopher.com