CAIRNS SONGWRITERS

19 JAN 2021 

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Gumpy Savidas. I reckon just about every muso in Cairns will have heard of him. Since the Cairns Songwriters group began I find myself looking deeper into the background of artists rather than just enjoying their music. And Gumpy is no exception, there is a lot of background to delve into. (yeah, I know, I ended that sentence on a preposition). Anyway, I could waffle on about Gumpy’s style(s) of music and the myriad places he has performed both in Australia and overseas but it’s best if I let him do the talking. His answers to our questions are both informative and entertaining. Have a read, a chuckle and get to know him better.

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When did you first start writing songs?

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My introduction to song writing in someways was quite symptomatic of what was to become my ongoing song writing process really. I kind of started making up little songs when I was about 6 years old to express my joys, frustrations and also to express the well of emotion that was building up inside of me without throwing tantrums … well less tantrums. Sort of like, “Why don’t you go get fu@ked do, do, do.. La, la, la” And when adults were like, “What did you just say.” I would just say. "I’m singing a song I heard on the radio." Who knew Rage Against the Machine would take one of my classic chorus's and do so well with their hit, 'Killing in the Name of.' I should have registered it with APRA, but really that process may of become slightly more sophisticated, but in essence it is what song writing is to me, kind of a sonic squirt of my inner feelings and a narrative of the world around me as I see it.

Where do you get your inspiration when you write a song?

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I sort of feel like we are all energetic sponges soaking up energy and experience and we all need a way to squeeze it out. My way of draining my swamp, so to speak, is to try to refine what I have absorbed and send it back out to the universe in a sort of narrative groove ball. I feel like songs are formed inside me over a period of time. I’ll have an experience, epiphany or interaction and the feeling of the experience will sit inside me and squirm around in my stomach and chest and kind of distil, ferment and brew until I get to the process of creating grooves at which time those various festering diamonds of experience seem to push their way like lava into my brain and usually some sort of phrase will pop out and if it hooks with the music and it speaks to me, I’ll take it further and surf the volcanic brain burst with some verbose ramblings that eventually become verses, bridges and/or laments of love and/or hate. Sometimes this process is quite quick and other times it can take years and sometimes an idea will come out and I will think, ‘hmmm kind of catchy, but it doesn’t mean anything,' so I’ll throw it in the bin. And sometimes years later something will happen and that song will come into my head and make complete sense so I’ll go to my musical dumpster and try and dig it up. So now I kind of try and trust in the process (Om shanti) and if it has a groove and a flow throw it out into the world's ocean of judgement and see if it floats.

What is the funniest thing that's happened to you during a performance?

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Well a comedian friend of mine once told me that humour is a person in trouble and well I’ve found myself in quite a lot of that over the years, so in that sense it’s all been hysterical. There was a gig I did years back with a band I was in called Freaked Out Flower Children. We were playing at this huge pub in Manly, NSW and it was a stinking hot summer night. The outfit I stupidly chose for the gig was this checkered, fake fur suit with big, thick fur pants. I knew as soon as I put it on it was a bad choice and dumped the top half but I had nothing else to wear. I thought I’d sweat it out a bit, but that it would be ok. Well one song in and I had sweated litres and felt like I was on the verge of fainting. I was so hot I thought 'fu@k it, I’ll do the gig in my underwear,' but then remembered I was rolling commando so that would be too traumatic on both the audience and myself. Our tour manager who was side of stage had picked up that I was in serious trouble and not coping with the heat and I was not going to remain conscious much longer. I looked over and he had fashioned a sort of a lap lap with a T shirt , gaffa tape and leaves off a plastic plant that was side of stage. I ducked off stage and did a fashion week quick change and dashed back on to finish the rest of the show. It was not a bad outfit, sort of like a camp plastic Tarzan ensemble. It wasn’t as tailored as I would of liked and I did lose some hair and skin on the removal of it, but it kept me covered and ventilated so I should have maybe held onto it.

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Which genres of music do you use in your songs?

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I struggled with what “my” genre was for many years. The first band I got a record deal with was a hip hop rap act called 'Mighty Big Crime'. We were right at the forefront of Hip Hop's introduction to Australia so it was kind of like the wild west of music. I’d always been into funk, soul and disco music however, when I heard “The Message” by Grand Master Flash I was pretty much hooked. It wasn’t long though before we were mixing styles within 'Mighty Big Crime' such as house and techno etc, which we got a lot of flack from the more hard core hip hop devotees. The problem I’ve always had with genre is as an artist you are very much commercially compelled to remain consistent with one genre - such as pick one genre and that’s it for life. Though I write to grooves that could really be any genre and I tend to hear the funk in anything from AC/DC to Enya. I think it is changing now and things are becoming more harmoniously musically Schizophrenic, which tends to work for me.

Lyrics or music: Which comes first for you?

I guess in a way usually the song title or idea tends to come first, but sometimes the lyrics come from the groove.. so yeah, constructing lyrics and forming grooves are actually two completely different processes. I tend to write music in bulk in a way. I’ll strap up a beat on Reason and then groove on it with the bass for five minutes or so, till it's grooving then save it and then make another. I’ll continue that process for sometimes up to 20 or 30 grooves or so. And then put them on my phone or iPod and listen to them as I’m getting about through the day. And then it’s like there are song ideas that are stored in the dark inner caves of my psyche and it’s like one of the song ideas will hear the groove and come out for a dance and before long the lyrics and the music are making sweet, sweet love together, or fighting in a hysterical hypnotic way. They both tend to work.

Which artist, past or present, would you like to collaborate with if you had the chance, and why?

Well I guess if we’re talking collaborating with artists of celebrity, I have had moments of fantasising about working with artists such as David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Tom Morello or working with producers such as Pharrell Williams, Butch Vig, Trevor Horn or Brian Eno, but to tell you the truth, I think I’ve become a bit of collaboration whore and I’m loving it. The more I collaborate with other artists the more inspired I am by the concept of collaboration. For me, collaboration really plugs into the core of what music is. It could just be my sonic delusion, but I believe that every human was put on this planet to make and experience music and it is really the last and most functional means of communication at a time when all other forms of communication are failing so drastically. The song from my first solo album - “Music is My Mobile Phone,” (available at tbxmusic.com… plug, plug, plug...) is actually about just that. I feel like I can not really communicate or understand a person until I know what musical frequency someone resonates at and once I do, it’s like we have a mega highway of understanding, communication and infinite knowing… yeah pretty deep I know, but dats da way I roll.

Which is more important to you: Success as a recording artist or performing artist, and why?

I really feel, for me, performing and recording are two sides of the one coin. I would say that performing is what I live for, but if I didn’t write/record in the studio then there would be a personal part of my music that would be hard to reach in a live format. I’m kind of like two different people in the recording studio and then live on stage. In the studio, I am quiet, serious, introverted and meticulous, and somewhat of a neurotic perfectionist. Whereas live, I tend to just fire it up and fly by the seat of my pants and am happy to surf the vibe of the jam. I’m pretty much working with the audience in the direction the show takes. If the audience is getting off on a track, I’m happy to expand on it and see where it takes us. When performing live, I often change the lyrics, structures and grooves to songs on a whim. If the studio me was in the audience of a show, I could see them frowning and face palming saying, “What the hell are you doing? That verse took me days to write, record and perfect and you’re pulling it apart and skipping right over the emotional bridge part.” I guess that’s why the studio me and the recording me don’t hang out so much.

How do you keep track of your ideas?

(notebook, iPhone, etc.) Tell us about your most recent song /single / album. Please provide links.

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The process of cataloguing my ideas has been an ongoing series of different experiments. From note books full of tangled tales, scrap pieces of paper with illegible writing, malfunctioning dictaphones, badly labeled voice files that disappear forever into the hard drive of an ageing laptop on its last legs,

and of course brilliant hit songs that come to me on a drunken night out, that are so good there is no way I could forget them, but then waking to find they have once again disappeared into the ether. The current weapon of choice for collating my mental mindstrings is the good old trusty iPhone, but I recently had a midnight phone wreck which lost about 30 ideas I was working on that were all gonna be double platinum hits… of course. Maybe someone will invent “Song Cloud” in which those ideas in your head instantly get uploaded to a mental muso cloud, but would that be the answer? What could possibly go wrong with that?

My first solo album which I did just over a year ago is available and I’ve just recently finished 10 songs which are making their way through the streaming factory to Spotify, Apple Music etc, but they are all available NOW at the Tinderbox website: