Sorry, this video has expired

Gotye shares secrets of latest Aussie music success

Updated July 31, 2012 21:44:00

Gotye, the Australian musician known to his mum as Wally de Backer, welcomes us into his home to discuss dealing with success, experimenting with sound, and having music as a day job.

Source: 7.30 | Duration: 8min 7sec

Topics: bands-and-artists, music-industry, composer, australia


An extended version of this interview is also available but below is the version that went to air on 7.30.

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: If you've switched on the radio in the past 12 months there's every chance you've heard the song "Somebody That I Used to Know". It's the biggest Australian hit in 12 years. It's gone to number one here, in Britain, the United States and a couple of dozen other countries, and its unique video has had almost 300 million hits on YouTube - 300 million.

Behind the sensation is an artist known as Gotye, whose real name is Wally de Backer. He's about the start a worldwide tour wrapping up in Australia in December.

He agreed to sit down for an interview with 7.30 at his studio in country Victoria, but before that here's a reminder of the massive song that's made him a star:

[Excerpt, Somebody That I Used to Know, Gotye, 2011]

LEIGH SALES: Wally, thanks for making time to speak to us.


LEIGH SALES: You've had such incredible success with the song "Somebody That I Used to Know". Are you at the point yet of wishing you never have to hear the damn thing ever again?

Just recently I found myself in rehearsal being in the middle of some lines and feeling like there's such an overwhelming sense of... it's beyond familiarity. Yeah, that I've wondered whether I need to actually prepare myself more actively to be able to kind of just connect with the song as I wrote it. I don't know, somehow in a pure way without the baggage of having heard so many interpretations.

[Excerpt "Somebody That I Used to Know", Gotye, 2011]

LEIGH SALES: What's it like to see something that you've created go out there into the world and then it has this whole meaning well beyond, you know, perhaps what you originally intended?

WALLY DE BACKER: Inevitably it's very mixed. It's, you know, it's one second it's incredibly exciting and the other second I feel very self-conscious about it - especially more recently when I feel like the song is really overplayed and probably saturated to the point of absurdity.

Where I feel like I'm... it's out of my hands, that I'm some sort of annoying audio presence in people's lives that they'd prefer not to have there - especially if they listen to radio.

LEIGH SALES: Did your parents have a big record collection when you were a kid, and did you trawl through it?

WALLY DE BACKER: They had a bunch of records, yeah, mostly classical which I wasn't... that I didn't naturally gravitate towards. But I found the Beatles' "Abbey Road" very early on, some seven inchers by Kate Bush; I do remember they had Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy". So yeah, there were a bunch of things there - and folk records they used to play a lot.

LEIGH SALES: How did your music taste evolve then. So your parent had that sort of stuff in the house, where did you tend to go from there?

WALLY DE BACKER: It was probably like most kids watching Saturday morning video shows, the radio. I'd listen to commercial radio when I was doing homework and yeah, and through friends. And it's probably still like that.

It's a mix of probably now discovering things more online; still having friends suggest things; and being a more avid, I don't know, searcher for obscure music - so second hand shops, record shops, finding things on vinyl that have been forgotten, never reissued on CD. Especially with stuff you don't even find online.

So, yeah, it comes to me in all different ways, and being someone who is always looking for something new to listen to.

LEIGH SALES: Tell me a little bit about how you experiment with sound and how you come up with some of your music?

WALLY DE BACKER: I think I have kind of multiple end points in mind. I'm wanting to try to find sounds I haven't ever heard before and make music that sounds at least somehow peculiarly different to anything I've heard before, and yet I also really relish using existing pieces of music as the building blocks for what I do.

So, I love sampling records and cassettes and collaging pieces together, and I love that searching and discovering process which actually defines a lot of the music I've made.

LEIGH SALES: What about sound in everyday life - you know, you're on a train and it's making a rhythmic click-clack, and things like that. Do those sounds inspire you as well?

WALLY DE BACKER: Definitely. I've found an instrument in the outback called the Winton Musical Fence, which is large metal strings attached to wooden fence posts, and it had a little wooden resonant chamber attached to it. It's like a public instrument in a way, but I sampled sounds from that and that turned into a bass line in a song.

[Excerpt from Eyes Wide Open, Gotye, 2010]

LEIGH SALES: I heard somebody talking once about being aware of the pitches of all of their household appliances, being able to sing along to the blender or the vacuum cleaner or whatever.

WALLY DE BACKER: Yeah, it's incredible when you tune your ears to different parts of the world, because there's so much hiding out there. There's so much as humans we naturally zone out from - so much of the natural world even.

LEIGH SALES: How do you know when you're working on a song when it's time to stop tinkering?

WALLY DE BACKER: People would assume I'd find that very hard, and I do sometimes do multiple mixes of my songs 'til they, I dunno, get that thing that feels really right to me. But often I have... I have a very strong gut feeling.

Yeah, actually, I think when I step back a bit from songs and records I've made over the years I feel like mostly it's the simplest things I've done that often have the greatest power - and I look at the songs that I've maybe spent months tinkering endlessly with loops of high hats and more electronic sounds, and there are 200 channels of audio in the song, and they may be OK songs - but they're often less successful than the ones that have one clear idea married with some chord progression, or a really choice sample that create a certain mood. So yeah, I kind of... I take a lot of stock in that.

LEIGH SALES: Given that your music is very layered, I suppose is the word I'd use, how do you perform that live?

WALLY DE BACKER: At the moment I've been going between a five-piece band and a 10 piece band in Australia, and so everybody plays multiple instruments, and they all sing. Some of the instruments are quite electronic so using laptops and software. As a bass we've got a lots of things like a thing called a malletKat, which is like an electronic large xylophone.

LEIGH SALES: Do you break the news to people, "You've got to learn the Winton Fence? You've got to learn these Chinese bells?"

WALLY DE BACKER: Well, I actually investigated trying to build a small-scale fence to take on stage with an instrument designer - the guy who actually built the Winton Musical Fence, Graham Leak - and he said it was, you know, feasible but we didn't quite get that far. So in those cases maybe I'll have large electronic pads which can then trigger samples that are pre-prepared.

LEIGH SALES: Hearing this makes me feel anxious because I feel there's so much scope for things to go wrong in a performance. Do you have performance anxiety?

WALLY DE BACKER: I've gotten better with that other the years. I've never been debilitated to the point where I haven't been able to get onstage or I've had to escape. I've certainly had incredibly tense, nervous moments. It's never usually been with the possibility of technology going wrong. Because technology has gone wrong in plenty of my shows and I've never felt too embarrassed about it. In fact, I often feel that adds a human element. The fact that you kind of go, "Well, you know, sometimes a computer goes down!"

LEIGH SALES: So, how has this success changed things for you?

WALLY DE BACKER: I'm not sure I completely understand it yet. It's only happened in the last year, and I'm amazed sometimes that it is only a year that things have sort of exploded so much, because it feels like many years - and I guess that's just a reflection of how incredibly busy I and the guys in my band has been, but that's been an incredible experience.

So, at times here and there I guess I will feel a bit overwhelmed by all the challenges and the feeling of just kind of constantly having do something for my career, I guess. But then, you know, the other times I guess I just love the fact that it's always new experiences, and there's probably not much more I can ask for.

I'm very lucky, I think, like that - the fact that when new opportunities come along, they present all sorts of challenges, but they present a chance to experience new things and I guess learn new things, and learn new things about yourself through that process.

LEIGH SALES: Wally, thank you so much for making time to speak to us.

WALLY DE BACKER: No worries, my pleasure.

You can also watch the full interview with Gotye.