Bob Dylan may never have made it and Ricky Gervais would not be funny if both were as afraid to tackle taboos as the entertainment industry is today, Australian music legend Gareth Liddiard has said.
The Tropical F**k Storm [TFS] and Drones frontman, who is gearing up for a national tour with his new outfit, Springtime, said so-called cancel culture had left the industry afraid to take risks on controversial work.
"If [comedian] Ricky Gervais self-censored so that whatever he said fit into today's puritanical conservatism, it wouldn't be funny or insightful, and if Bob Dylan did that back in the day, he wouldn't have been good or even useful," Liddiard said.
"Songs like Hurricane would not have been incredibly shocking and powerful.
"I've seen people online condemning him for using the N-word in that song when he's just quoting the African-Americans who were critical of the innocently imprisoned African-American guy he was actually defending."
Liddiard said trawling the past for moral impurities was "a really weird hobby for a person to have, and it's just that, a hobby".
"Yet working for real justice isn't fun and you don't get an internet round of applause when you've changed a bed pan or just been bashed by the meth-head you were trying to help".
Neither Bob Dylan or Ricky Gervais, who was criticised over a joke deemed transphobic by some in late 2019, have suffered from being "cancelled", although the overall environment has made the industry far more risk averse — especially for lesser-known acts.
You've got to walk the line
Liddiard is known for prompting controversy, most notably with a scathing satire about elements of patriotism in The Drones' Taman Shud (2015), where the band wreaked havoc on taboos such as Australia's glorification of Gallipoli and its fanboy take on Ned Kelly.
"But with a song like Taman Shud, it's not enough to just spout a bunch of left wing stuff and then call it a protest song," Liddiard said.
"They get right up to being offensive, then they pull back with the punchline, so there's that kind of risk-taking."
Hypocritical stone-throwers
And that, Liddiard said, is what is at stake in contemporary music and art, the bravery to take a risk and stay the course in an era where controversy can lead to a social media pile-on and the withdrawal of support from distributors.
"People are so protective of their brand, and their career, it would be easier if they just towed the party line in its most draconian form and behaved themselves," he said.
He also considered it entirely hypocritical because nobody was perfect, including those "throwing stones".
"Everyone's done and said dumb shit, but that's what it is to be human," Liddiard said.
"It's so weird, excoriating ourselves over our own nature, which is to be imperfect little dickheads.
"We all need time to grow and that means forgiveness is the greatest virtue, not dealing out chastisement."
TFS fighting the fatigue state
TFS in August released its third album, Deep States, which arguably picked up where Taman Shud left off with its second song, Give a F**k Fatigue.
It has a similar feel Liddiard describes as "kind of funk, but strange" and bristles with ongoing themes about apathy, negative collective mindsets and paranoia.
The rest of the album continues with TFS' signature chaotic, messy, sometimes electronic sounding rock, tackling themes such as state surveillance, the threat of climate change and imperialism, global fascination with resurgent fascism, and a state of "contemporary panic".
A Springtime debut
Just months later he released his second album for the year with new outfit, Springtime, a self-titled debut that starts by questioning where, and what, is behind peoples' drive to dominate others in its rocking single, Will to Power.
Beyond its opening song, the album offers a distinctly different vibe and feel to Liddiard's previous work, sounding more improvisational than usual, which, considering his unique collaborators, is not all that surprising.
Springtime includes Jim White from The Dirty Three, a uniquely unconventional drummer who complements Liddiard's own jaggedly poetic style and shifts seamlessly between rock, swirling ballads and atmospheric percussion.
It is also features Chris Abrahams, the keyboard player from The Necks, an Australian band built on improvisation that may see an entire set — or album for that matter — devoted to a single 45-minute song.
"Springtime isn't the Drones," Liddiard said.
"It doesn't come at you in a real vindictive way, but we do get loud, and God, we've only done two bloody shows, so who knows what will happen?"
Fronting Womadelaide
Springtime launches a national tour next week, beginning in the City Recital Hall in Sydney on February 24 before travelling to six states and territories.
Unique for Liddiard will be his first performance at Womadelaide, Australia's premier world music festival, where both White and Abrahams have played before in their respective outfits.
"I think they were a bit worried that I would be singing too aggressively or something like that and I was going to yell at the kids.
"I'm not, but the kids do love it when you yell and swear."
A stop start year
Liddiard is also halfway through a national tour with TFS that has been postponed twice due to COVID-19 restrictions and developments.
It is perhaps symbolic of the difficulties the band faced while recording Deep States, sessions that were repeatedly interrupted by Victoria's COVID-19 responses in a process Liddiard described as like "pushing shit up hill".
This is contrast to Springtime, which he said was a "really easy album to make".
"In a two-week window, we started the band, wrote the songs, did two gigs and then recorded it, because we only had that sort of window because of the lockdowns," Liddiard said.
"2021 was a weird year, because for a year where it felt like I did f**k-all [due to restrictions], looking back on it, we actually did a lot."
The TFS tour has three dates in Victoria and Western Australia before finishing in Adelaide during April.
