Gareth Liddiard

First published on 1 Sep 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

The man who fronts The Drones comes alone to Sydney in support of his magnificently haunting voice'n'guitar solo album, Strange Tourist.

Gareth Liddiard might be one of the nation's finest lyricists and songwriters, but the Drones frontman is anything but difficult to speak to. The man exudes a comfortable front-bar charm, describing the recording of his sparse, atmospheric solo debut Strange Tourist with producer Burke Reid (producer of the Drones, the Mess Hall and Dan Kelly, as well as being a third of the much-missed Gerling) in the way that you or I might describe a camping trip with a mate.

"We did it in this 19th century mansion – like a big, proper mansion – in Yass. It was a little bit run down, not too much, but very grand. See, Burke was doing a record with Jack Ladder and had just rung around tourist information centres all over the east coast [to find a place to record] - he's very resourceful like that - and eventually he got lucky and found that place. We were originally going to record at Havilah [where the Drones' recorded their thusly titled album], but Jack had hired our studio gear so it was all in there already. So when I rang Burke and said ‘when are you gonna get here?' he said ‘ah, fuck it, why don't you just drive up here?' So that's what we did."

It was recorded remarkably quickly too, taking only "Oh, nine or ten days. It was a couple of days faffing around, miking shit up and making it sound good, and then a couple of days really learning the songs, because I'd only just finished them."

So the songs weren't Drones offcuts or songs he happened to have lying around? "No, no. I never have anything lying around. What you see is what you get."

Was it hard working on the record without three other people to bounce ideas off?

"Not in the idea stakes, that was perfectly OK. But it was hard, because I like recording, but I realised if you do it by yourself you've got to do it yourself all the time, and I soon started to realise that what I enjoy about recording is sitting in the control room telling some other cunt what to do. You can't really go play ping pong while the rest of the band set up, you know?"

And fans can breathe easy: he sounds genuinely surprised when it's suggested that the solo album might mean he'd lost interest in the Drones.

"No no no," he says, astonished. "It's just something different to do, you know? That's all." Andrew P Street