Thirty years after the release of You Am I’s album Hourly, Daily, frontman Tim Rogers seldom finds a moment to stand still. As the band revisits the album with orchestral arrangements, Rogers reflects on literature, melancholy and his ambition to write something eternal.
Through the hiss of a telephone line comes the hum of a car engine and the rhythmic click of an indicator. “I’m a big fan of your music,” I say, “probably not the best way to start an interview.” Rogers replies, “could be worse”.
Rogers recalls that You Am I had ambitions to incorporate orchestral sounds from their earliest days, inspired partly by the Bee Gees’ first five records, which the group “adore”. “With orchestration,” Rogers explains, “it’s always a real delight to hear the timbre of the instruments.” Budgetary constraints initially limited that ambition. “By the time we made our third record, we could afford to ask an arranger to get involved,” he said.
More than nostalgia, the orchestral tour offers the group an opportunity to experiment and expand upon their earlier work. “You’re always hearing new little things, whether it’s a timbre or a harmony that wasn’t originally there…” Working with Australian arrangers Melanie Robinson and Rosco James Irwin, Rogers says the band encouraged them to “fly the freak flag”.
The commitment to creative freedom also reflects a determination not to “condescend to an audience by playing how the record is”. Rogers is critical of the constraints imposed by backing tracks, which he believes limit opportunities for spontaneity and reinvention in live performance. His philosophy draws partly from traditions beyond rock ’n’ roll. “Being a fan of jazz music, where standards and particular compositions are rearranged every night, I like to hear that with other groups,” he says.
Rogers, who describes himself as “restless to learn”, brings this impulse to revisit and reimagine music into the creative process itself. His songs, he explains, “started out as little daydreams” that he brought to his bandmates, who, much to his surprise, were willing to bring them to life.
The minutiae of everyday life have a certain appeal to Rogers. “Because I live quite a meagre—very lovely, but meagre—existence,” he explains, “a whole universe can sometimes be pictured in stirring a cup of coffee or a cocktail.”
Rogers associates this appreciation of extraordinary meaning within routine moments with what he describes as a “solitary existence”. His literary interests range from Virginia Woolf and H. P. Lovecraft to challenging works such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Yet he is less enthusiastic about philosophy that approaches “big questions with huge concepts and impenetrable jargon”.
“I’ve really quite hated reading philosophy,” he says. Rogers is not averse to artistic complexity itself but appears wary of intellectual difficulty pursued for prestige rather than pleasure. “It’s not about getting through Finnegan’s Wake so you can show off about it. It’s what you enjoy about it.”
Beyond this, literature for Rogers also serves a more personal purpose. “Whatever appreciation I have for language is really just a simple way of keeping myself out of dreadful melancholy.” Rogers describes setting himself a daily reading target partly to delay drinking. “If I set myself 100-pages-a-day, then I’ll stay off the turps until later in the in the day.”
Having recently appeared in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Rogers has inhabited a work preoccupied with waiting and uncertainty—an intriguing contrast with his own restless curiosity. “I’m getting better at not being so restless,” he says. “But I’m still an insomniac and worry quite deeply about things.”
Yet Rogers distinguishes his restlessness from worry. “I’m just restless to learn,” he explains. For Rogers, age has done little to diminish his enthusiasm for discovery. Whether studying literature, pursuing theatre or contemplating learning Polish ahead of an overseas trip, he remains conscious of how much there is still to discover. “There’s just so much to learn,” he says.
That restless enthusiasm extends to his bandmates, even after 37 years together. Rogers recently proposed a three-month tour of Australia’s smallest venues, with the band loading its own equipment and travelling without crew. Bassist and manager Andy Kent was less convinced. “Tim, do you really think we’d be able to do a three-month tour together?”
Rogers remains undeterred, recalling the band’s extended tours through America, England and Europe. “You really couldn’t get four more different people in a group,” he says. “We’re very different people. But somehow it works. I guess that’s true love.”
It’s an optimism that also informs his songwriting. “We’re kind of demanding something eternal when music is regarded as so ephemeral these days.” Despite having written more than a thousand songs, Rogers continues to believe he might produce something that endures. “In the art game, why not shoot for the stars?” he asks.
For Rogers, artistic ambition requires both patience and a degree of audacity. “It takes a bit of attention and some patience and a little bit of lunacy, and you’ll be there.”
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