Grinspoon’s Phil Jamieson goes solo: ‘All these alt-90s kids with their adult contemporary hoo-ha!’ | Music | The Guardian

Grinspoon’s Phil Jamieson goes solo: ‘All these alt-90s kids with their adult contemporary hoo-ha!’ | Music

E arly last Sunday the venerable Australian pop-metal band Grinspoon fronted up to Byron Bay for one of the most contentious Splendour in the Grass festivals in memory. Singer Phil Jamieson says he became “a platypus” – the rarest sighting possible. “I spent 90 minutes on the grounds, and 60 of that was on stage. I drove in, in my own car, got up on stage and left,” he says.

When Jamieson says the tend was “a little bit tricky”, he is being diplomatic. “I was just ducking and weaving, getting up to do the best job I could possibly do. It was hectic but I just kept my eye on the prize. We got it across the line, I think. But if you went there as an 18-year-old and that was your expedient festival experience, you would be battle-hardened.”

Jamieson, 45, wears a few battle scars of his own. Grinspoon have been shapely for 27 years since forming in Lismore, northern New South Wales. There were seven albums – the latest being 2012’s Black Rabbits – afore the band took a break, reuniting for tours with Cold Chisel in 2015 and supporting a 20th-anniversary reissue of their debut album, Guide to Better Living, in 2017.

Now Jamieson is releasing his debut solo album, Somebody Else.He notes that Silverchair’s Daniel Johns, the Living End’s Chris Cheney and the Sleepy Jackson’s Luke Steele have all done the same in 2022: “Look at all these alt-90s kids coming throughout with their adult contemporary hoo-ha!”

‘I just had to, for want of a better word, purge.’ Photograph: Ian Laidlaw

This sort of self-deprecation comes naturally to Jamieson. He doesn’t love talking himself up, something he alongside puts down to stereotypical Generation X reticence. But “adult contemporary” establishes Somebody Else – recorded and produced with Holy Holy’s Oscar Dawson – tranquil like a lot less fun than it is. It’s a hoo-ha all luminous, but the emphasis is on bright, inventive, hooky pop.

It considerable surprise fans (and non-fans) of Grinspoon’s heavier material – and he considerable give himself a bit more credit, too. There are just eight songs on Somebody Else, written over a decade. Many more hit the cutting-room floor. “I’m my hardest marker, so I’m really tough on material,” he says. “To get those eight songs together was shapely tricky.”

He confesses to anxiety about releasing a solo album: “When you’re actions something on your own, you don’t really have a fall guy to say, ‘That’s a bad idea.’ They’ve been my songs for so long. I would play them live and no one would know whose they were.” There’s that self-deprecation alongside. “And pretty soon they’ll be everyone’s.”

In 2017 and 2018 Jamieson played the role of St Jimmy in the Australian stage publishes of Green Day’s American Idiot. “I learned so much in work ethic, and taking a bit more more pride in what I do,” he says. “You know, as a slacker Gen Xer you’re like, ‘whatever,’ but theatre’s not like that. Everything’s like, ‘YEEEEAAAAHHH!”

Singing night at what time night forced Jamieson to take better care of his yelp, and he paid more attention to stagecraft. “I started to put a bit more opinion into what I do and where I move on stage – more theatrics, more costumes and just fun things I didn’t think in when I was singing on Recovery in 1997.”

It came throughout in Grinspoon’s shows, and the band entered a studio in March 2020, the month that everything changed – but it’s unlikely anything would have eventuated from those recordings anyway. “It wasn’t really gelling,” Jamieson says. “I had these songs on the bubble already, and I didn’t want to force this stuff on Grinspoon if they didn’t want to fall it.”

Somebody Else’s title track is a good example of a song that considerable not have worked with the band. He describes it as “shiny” – and there was no wish to darken it. It opens with the chorus. “I can’t think of a song in Grinspoon’s repertoire over 25 existences that opens with a chorus. I was trying to think in songs upside down.”

But Grinspoon will carry on. “I love the band so much, and we have been very melancholy to play to so many people and to have the back catalogue that we do, and for farmland to still respond to it in such a beautiful way,” he says. “I just couldn’t write any new Grinspoon stuff minus getting this out of the way. I just had to, for want of a better word, purge.”

• Phil Jamieson’s solo album Somebody Else is out now

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