June 23, 2026 · Episode 72
1 Hr, 24 Min, 49 Sec 

Summary

Can having a corporate day job actually save your creative freedom? In this episode of Pain In The Arts, Melbourne guitarist and digital marketer Neil Boland joins Lyndon and Breallyn to shatter the myth of the starving artist. Neil opens up about the 99% of musicians who rely on outside income, sharing how his journey from Bourke Street guitar salesman to SEO consultant fully funded his life as an independent musician. It’s a masterclass on balancing a musician’s day job and a creative career without losing your soul.

Learn more about Neil Boland here
Neil on Instagram
Neil Boland Biography

Love this conversation? Get exclusive podcast episodes on our Patreon and support the show!

Transcript

Lyndon: Did you see the D Generation, their skit on that? Like, “Fat lot of good you were, Barber.”

Yeah. And the, uh — that was funny. ‘The Da, the Da.’

Neil: Yeah. You gotta be of a certain generation to understand these jokes.

Lyndon: Oh, I absolutely love that.

Meet Neil Boland

Lyndon: Welcome to Pain in the Arts, where the pursuit of meaningful art meets the unpredictable demands of real life. You’re listening to Lyndon.

Breallyn: And Breallyn, and we’re joined by a great guest today. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Neil: Righto. My name is Neil Boland. I am a guitar player and digital marketing worker. Yeah, I guess you could call me… yeah, from Melbourne, Australia.

Lyndon: From the northern… amazing suburbs. Yeah. Yeah. We’re all northerners.

Neil: Yeah, the correct side of the river. Yeah.

Lyndon: Welcome to the podcast.

Neil: Thank you.

Lyndon: I think you’re right about the correct side of the river. Yeah. What do you… you’ve been this side of the river your whole life really, haven’t you?

Breallyn: I was east. Oh. In the east, and then we were…

Lyndon: You’re at the start of the river. Yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: You’re east.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah, that’s where the river starts. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Oh.

Lyndon: You’ve got the freshest…

Breallyn: …of the water. Comes down from the mountains. Yep. Yeah, now I’m bathing in the dirty water downstream. Yeah. It’s not good.

Neil: It’s nice to look at. Like, suburban waterways are usually pretty nice to look at, but not to be in.

Yes. Not to be in. Yeah. I went for a ride last week for the first time in ages off the… Creek Trail?

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah. Merri Creek Trail.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: It’s a beautiful one. Went from North Fitzroy up to Bell Street. Nice… which is not very far, but because you’re following the river it’s more kilometres. Yeah. I was like, “This is beautiful,” but take a closer look at it. It’s not the place where you wanna eat the fish out of the…

Breallyn: …water. No, no. You don’t want your kids and your dogs to swim in it. Yeah. Yeah.

Neil: But still, really lucky that it’s there. Yeah. Melbourne’s unique like that, where you’ve got bits of bush in the suburbs.

Yeah. Oh.

Lyndon: Okay.

Neil: Yeah. Where Sydney maybe a little bit, but I think in Melbourne you’ve got access to places where it feels like you’re in the middle of nowhere, but you’re close to Collingwood. If you look at… yeah, that…

Lyndon: That is true.

Neil: Actually… Studley Park. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And how well preserved that is. Around the Yarra there and the boathouses and stuff like that, it’s… it feels like it’s unique. I don’t know, it probably isn’t, but I’ll go to other cities and it doesn’t seem to be a thing as much.

Lyndon: See, this is the observations, I think, of someone that wasn’t born in Melbourne.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: You notice this sort of stuff.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Although arguably I wasn’t born in Melbourne, I haven’t noticed a thing. But I think that’s true.

Neil: Melbourne is a very different city. It’s talked about all the time. Yeah. And it’s an understatement. It’s probably the anomaly for Australian cities at the end of the day.

Okay. It’s probably the most European… yeah, influenced city.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: You know.

Lyndon: Was that by design?

Neil: It’s probably by…

Breallyn: A little bit of both.

Neil: It’s probably by design and accident.

Lyndon: Actually, it was the gold rush, wasn’t it, that determined a lot of the… like how quickly some of those buildings went up and the style of… the…

Neil: …the architecture and…

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Collins Street, Bendigo, Ballarat, yeah… all that kind of stuff, that’s also really well preserved.

Other cities didn’t really have that.

And then you’ve got the preservation of the war culture. Like, I grew up in Wollongong, and we’ve definitely got a big influence of that there.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: Like parts of Wollongong like Port Kembla, things like that, are almost a miniature Melbourne, because you’ve got post-war migrants from Europe, yeah, working in the steelworks.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: So if you go to a place like Warrawong, which is right next to Port Kembla, that’s a big migrant suburb.

Cringila is basically a suburb on the hill which has got a view of the steelworks from right next door as well, and you’ll still find those old school delis and stuff like that.

Lyndon: Oh, they’re great. Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. So what you might find on Lygon Street, you’ll find little bits of that around Wollongong, yeah, as well. And then in Sydney of course you’ve got Leichhardt and places like that with the Italian influence and, yeah, we…

Lyndon: …discovered that when we were staying in Leichhardt.

Neil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really good. Yeah. But it’s not as famous as Lygon Street. No. And I think the people that put down their roots in Melbourne and established those businesses and stuff like that, yeah, probably actually put the roots down a bit harder and established their Europeanness, yeah, in Melbourne a bit more, and it’s still around. Yeah. It hasn’t been eroded, yeah, as much. So I really love it for that.

Melbourne Roots and Day Jobs

Neil: Like my first job in Melbourne when I moved here in ’03 was on Lygon Street.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: I’d been working in retail before I did my studies, yeah, which is another story. Had to move to Melbourne or Sydney, just somewhere to get some work, and I thought I’ll give Melbourne a go.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And my first job on Lygon Street was actually at an Italian deli. Oh. So it was a bit like an episode of Acropolis Now, like I was the one Skippy.

Lyndon: Yeah, I was gonna say. How you got the job?

Neil: Yeah. Oh, don’t know. I think it was a job out of the newspaper.

Lyndon: What’s that?

Neil: Yeah. So I got a friend of mine who’s from a Maltese family.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And I studied with her at university, Olivia Tabone. And when we first moved to Melbourne, we had no jobs, no money, blah, blah, blah.

And she said, “You can go and stay at my parents’ place out in Diamond Creek until you get somewhere to rent and get a job.”

We were only there for two weeks. And they were very good to us. It was a Maltese mansion. Had all the things inside it that you would expect: gold leaf picture frames, lots of cool Franco Cozzo-ish furniture. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So genuine…

Lyndon: …imitations. Concrete lion?

Neil: Totally. Not quite, but… not quite… I think that might have been an aspiration at some point. Beautiful house, amazing. And the first… so the first impressions of Melbourne was very much everything that everyone talks about with Melbourne, the European, yeah, multicultural. So drove straight down through Campbellfield. Yeah. Turned left and was staying with Maltese people and ended up working in an Italian deli. Yeah. Wow. Wow.

It’s a funny culture shock because, so interesting, you learn a few things like there was still a generation of the elderly Italians in Lygon Street in the early 2000s who really only wanted to speak Italian to you, yeah, as well. Yeah. So eventually I got to learn all the words for all the sliced meats. Oh. Yeah. As well. Due slice mortadella molto fine. Oh. All this kind of stuff.

Lyndon: Actually, I understood that.

Neil: Yeah. Very…

Lyndon: …fine.

Neil: Yeah. Yeah. And that was a good introduction to town. I’ve pretty much worked day job ever since being here because you have to. Like I said before, before we started this, I’m in the 99% of musicians who doesn’t make a living off music 100%…

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: …and has to have an income elsewhere. And yeah, I’ve worked at all the institutions in Melbourne, so it was Lygon Street, then it was Readings Books and Music. Yep. Transferring the books around. JB Hi-Fi, the new store when it opened up in Bourke Street. That’s a while back now. Out in then Allan’s Music, yeah, as well, including the merger and the falling apart of Allan’s and Billy Hyde.

Lyndon: Yeah. Oh.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Maybe it was… it was Allan’s Brashs too. Were you around for that or was…

Neil: No, so that was…

Lyndon: That was before…

Neil: …so I remember this in Sydney as well. So Allan’s Music was a thing. Yeah. As far as like I remember the timeline, Allan’s Music was from the late 1800s a piano and sheet music shop. Like really old. Yeah. And it was pretty much serving the classical community because that’s really, back then, that’s all there was to really play, yeah, at home.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: And then eventually, as rock and roll came along, I think they probably dug their heels in and went, “We’ll let Billy Hyde take care of that.”

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And Billy Hyde was the rock shop. Yeah. For sure. By the time the ’90s come around, I think there was some involvement. I think Brashs set up the model of…

I could be completely wrong with this. Yeah. But Brashs, yeah, existed.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: It was a CD shop. That’s right, yeah. Physical music.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: But then also upstairs you’d have musical instruments.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Pitt Street store in Sydney was that.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: And then it just became Allan’s.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: So I’m not sure how that happened, in what order that happened in. So that became Allan’s.

Lyndon: That’s interesting.

Neil: And basically by the time I came down to Melbourne and worked in the Bourke Street store, I realized it was basically like a carbon copy of the Pitt Street store.

Lyndon: Yeah, yeah.

Neil: And it’s oh, this is their business model. This is how they lay out a store.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: All that kind of stuff. I’m not sure where I was going with that, but yeah.

Lyndon: Just all the different jobs you had on…

Neil: Yeah. And I was a guitar salesman there. And I learned pretty quickly that some of the most demanding, whiny customers ever are us guitar players. It’s just like… I yeah, I realized to be a better customer after that. You have to.

Lyndon: You have to clue me in, ’cause I think I was probably… I think you still are one of those guys… a thorn…

Breallyn: …in some people’s…

Neil: …sides. No, I’m sure you were fine. As… we had some people come in and, you could tell that they’d maybe just been signed to a label or something like that. Oh. And I’d say to them, and the classic was the classic sales question: what sort of music do you play?

And the guys who had just been signed to a label or just getting their band started would always say, “Oh, it’s not really any one genre.” Oh, we’re original. Yeah, we’re original. There’s nothing been done like this before. And I’d go home and have a listen to it and go, sounds like Dinosaur Jr., or… yeah, something like that, but it was an interesting job.

It was a crowd control job as well, because oh, Bourke Street at the time, being very close to Russell Street, you come to your lunchtime peak where everyone from the local offices come down to play guitar during their lunch break. Oh, gosh. Corporates with cash. It was corporates with cash, and then people who had maybe taken a substance out on the street and decided to come in and create havoc in the shop.

It was a no-two-days-was-the-same in that place, for sure.

Breallyn: Very mixed…

Neil: …crowd. But…

Lyndon: Keeps it entertaining.

Neil: Yeah. And then, after that, what happened? Oh, yeah, that all fell apart, and I got some redundancy money, and then I could actually afford to buy a Martin guitar, because I couldn’t afford to buy a Martin when I worked for the shop, yeah, ’cause I wasn’t getting paid enough to afford one.

Lyndon: Yeah, you got one with the redundancy.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Do you still have it?

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Oh, good.

Neil: Yeah, an OM-28.

Lyndon: Nice.

Neil: And yeah, from there I ended up… because, oh yeah, so I was working in my first marketing job, which was in the marketing department for the merged entity.

So that was Allans and Billy Hyde together.

Lyndon: Yes.

Neil: And the office was out in Rowville. Yeah. And I was out there every day, just doing basic marketing assistant stuff. Yeah, okay. Traditional stuff and digital stuff as well.

Lyndon: Oh, okay.

Neil: When that all fell apart, I ended up working for an electronics company called Kaiser Bass.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: And then I went from there to… I got let go from there because the guy who owned the company decided to outsource himself as CEO and got someone else to run it. Oh. And that guy came in and said, “No, see you later, Neil. You’re done.”

Lyndon: That… yeah.

Neil: And that was right as I booked a holiday to America. And I went over there and over to Nashville and saw the Gibson… no, Memphis. I saw the Gibson guitar factory for the 335s and stuff like that.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah.

Neil: And while I’m traveling I get this phone call from Gibson Australia, saying, “We need a marketing coordinator. When you get back, you’ve got a job when you get back.” And I went, “Oh, great.” I had that job for two weeks.

Lyndon: Did you leave or did they boot you out?

Neil: I left, and, future employers, do not worry about me doing this ever again, but I’ll… it was the first and last time I’ll ever do this.

They had two weeks to get themselves organized to get me an email address, a desk, and a computer.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: I wanted to get in on a meeting with the guy who ran the company, Con. He’s quite well known on the scene. Yeah. But I’m just saying what happened.

Yeah. So I get back and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, welcome aboard,” blah, blah, blah. The office is in South Melbourne. I get in there, first couple of days, no email address, no chair, nothing. It’s “Oh, you just use his computer while he’s on holidays.” I just grabbed that chair from there that was really pretty ramshackle. I thought, “What’s going on?”

I was talking to the guy that got me the job there, ’cause he was originally with me at Allans.

Lyndon: Okay.

Neil: And it got to the second Thursday there.

Still no chair, still no computer, still no email address. And I went out for lunch, didn’t come back.

Breallyn: No chair to come back to.

Neil: I just called up the guy who hired me and said, “Look, I dunno what I’m gonna put on my resume about what I did in this job, yeah, because so far I haven’t been able to get a meeting with you to see what your marketing strategy is or what, yeah, what you wanna do.” They were still mucking around.

Oh, they’d bought the Allans Billy Hyde brand as well.

Lyndon: Oh, okay.

Neil: Yeah. So the brand went up for sale, yeah. I’ve worked…

Lyndon: What a volatile industry.

Neil: I’ve worked in really volatile sides of the industry as far as, yeah, and let’s be honest, in musical instrument supply, the margin’s not huge unless you’re selling strings and accessories, yeah, and stuff like that. If your business is purely selling guitars, drums, all that kind of stuff, it’s slim. It’s pretty slim and it’s a tough game, but you gotta do it for the love of it, yeah, as well. And I actually really enjoyed it. That was probably the marketing job that I had where, of course, the subject matter was the most interesting to me as well. Yeah. So…

Breallyn: Shame about the work conditions.

Neil: Yeah. And that got me into marketing, so…

Lyndon: Yeah, I was wondering… that was gonna be my question, yeah, but now you’ve explained how… how you got there. Yeah, like it just is, yeah, obviously a natural progression ’cause you would’ve had so much sort of knowledge just going into that, wouldn’t you? Through experience.

Neil: Yeah. I’d been in retail for about 11 years, in and out of casual or full-time, part-time, whatever, trying to support gigging, yeah, as well. And it got to the point where it’s like, “I don’t wanna do retail at this point anymore. I’ve gotta do something else.” So while I was still selling guitars at Allans I went to Box Hill TAFE and did a writing course.

Breallyn: Okay. Yeah.

Neil: So we’ve got another copywriter in…

Breallyn: …the room here. Yeah.

I know. It’s interesting you’re connecting with both Lyndon and I in different ways with, yeah…

Neil: …with your work. Yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. And of course the writing course, you could choose to do fiction and poetry and all this kind of stuff too, and I thought, “I’ve already done a music degree.”

And I said, “I don’t want another qualification that I’m gonna prop up a wonky fridge with.” I want…

Lyndon: I like the way you think.

Neil: I want a qualification that actually helps change things. So I chose the corporate side of stuff: copywriting, corporate writing, writing for the web, which was in its infancy even at that point. Okay, yeah, in 2011. Ah. Yeah. People have been doing it for years, but the teaching of it wasn’t, yeah, was only just starting to spread out.

Breallyn: Yep.

Neil: Propagate. Yeah, because of that I ended up getting the job in marketing at Allans, going from the shop to the office and then everything else went out from there.

Yeah. And of course, if you’re writing for the web, you’re getting taught how to write a webpage for being found in Google as well. Yeah. So all of a sudden the SEO door opens up as well. Yeah. I knew very little about it by working on the job.

Lyndon: Okay.

Neil: And then after Kaiser Bass, the electronic company, I ended up getting a contract at Sensis. Now Sensis is S-E-N-S-I-S. People might remember the brand from the Yellow Pages arriving at the doorstep.

Lyndon: I remember them, yeah.

Neil: Yeah. So Sensis was the Yellow and White Pages publisher. So they were originally a phone book company as well, but of course they knew that…

Lyndon: Queensland cops know all about those phone books, don’t they?

Neil: Do they?

Lyndon: For…

Neil: Oh, yeah. Make sure there’s no knuckle impressions on your face. Yeah. Wow, that’s an obscurity, that one. But it’s all right. Yeah.

Lyndon: This podcast doesn’t go to Queensland.

Neil: Oh, yeah. Yeah. They don’t have the internet up there. No. Oh, sorry. Oh. Yeah, so…

Lyndon: Bre’s shaking her head.

Neil: I ended up getting a contract at Sensis as an SEO account manager.

Breallyn: Yeah, okay.

Neil: So they’d moved into the digital space ’cause they thought, “If we’re the phone book, we’re also a marketing company, we’re already a marketing company, we’ll get into digital.”

So they were building small business websites. They had a whole SEO department. Now, they were like a satellite company of an American company called Boostability, Salt Lake City. Boostability pretty much had a lot of the American market and the Midwest market cornered for the SEO, yeah, side of things as well. So instead of building everything from scratch, Sensis went to Boostability and said, “We wanna offer the Australian phone book market a similar service.”

So Boostability ended up running all the reporting, all of the recommendations. So basically I was learning SEO on the job, or as I affectionately call it, my McDonald’s of SEO.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And I’ve just realized I’ve used the acronym a few times without explaining it. Search engine optimization. Yeah.

So that was my McDonald’s of SEO. Got to learn SEO on the job. And it kinda became a really good thing, a feather in my cap for future work, because yeah, people that saw…

Breallyn: Quite specialised.

Neil: …that I’d actually worked there, yeah, were like, “Oh, yeah, bring that to us. And do that for us, yeah, as well.” And there’s been a series of jobs since where I’ve actually just, that’s been the core thing that I just fell into, yeah, as well. So that’s paid the bills so I can afford to be a musician.

Funding Art With Work

Lyndon: See, that’s interesting. I wanted to talk to you about that because I read your article or your post on your Blogspot page. Now, when I say I read the article…

Neil: Have I still got that?

Lyndon: There’s probably more than one article. Yeah. I think it’s ’cause I typed in… ’cause you’d sent me a link, and I was too lazy to find it and click it.

And I thought, “Oh, I think it’s neilboland.com.” It isn’t.

Neil: No. .online.

Lyndon: .online. So in my sort of fumbling around on Google, by the way, there’s lots of stuff on you on Google. There’s all kinds of things.

Neil: That’s by design.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure it is. So one of them was Blogspot and, but it was the article that caught my eye, which is called “Want a Good Worker? Hire a Musician.” Yep. Remember that one? How long ago would you have written that article?

Neil: Oh, it’s probably pushing 10 years.

Lyndon: Is it really?

Neil: Yeah. So I wr…

Lyndon: Your philosophy around, yeah, earning money…

Neil: Yep.

Lyndon: …to fund your art, basically, yeah. Clearly, like it’s something that you’ve had for a long time, that philosophy.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: So yeah, I’d love to talk about that because I think it’s fascinating. I don’t know about you, Bre, but…

Breallyn: And very relevant to our audience. But yeah, like we’ve talked about a lot, like how do you afford life and still be able to pursue, yeah, that sort of intrinsic creative pursuit that you want?

Lyndon: And even the fact that, as a musician, a guitarist, a singer, a songwriter, and someone who’s fantastic at that,

Neil: Oh, you,

Lyndon: – and also qualified as well, as a musician, crazy.

But the fact that you’ve got all that behind you and then the first things that you’re talking about is all these other jobs that you’ve had and the SEO, it just shows that… what’s your handle on Instagram? Who is this Neil Boland character? Is that… who is this…

Neil: …Neil Boland character?

Lyndon: You know what I mean? Yeah. So it’s like you’ve embraced this whole thing, and like I think when you first came here today you were like, “What? Why do you wanna interview me for?” Yeah, pretty much. I was like… and I’m like, “This is wise because like…”

Neil: “You had Brett Wood, and I was like, okay, must be running out of guests.”

Lyndon: No, no.

Breallyn: Not at all.

Lyndon: But…

Breallyn: Yeah. You’ve obviously got, yeah, like Lyndon was saying, all these musical kind of credentials and…

Lyndon: Credentials.

Breallyn: Yeah, that was the word I was looking for. Musical credentials. Yeah. Plus, you can hustle, you can get gigs, you can play amazing stuff. And yet you’ve found the need to go, “I need to step away from that in order to get like sort of full-time work or, you know, like proper day job type work.” Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. I guess the main thing in that article, and it actually goes back a fair way, that triggered that article, is that probably at the time when I wrote that, I probably was looking for work at the time.

And I went through a bit of a phase there of really trying to keep my music and daytime professional life separate online, to the point where I actually changed my name to a stage name for my blues record in 2016. Yeah. Which became a branding nightmare, because people kept tagging the wrong person on Facebook and whatnot. Oh, no. That’s a whole other podcast. Yeah.

But I’ve gone… I’ve ditched that now. Way back before I moved to Melbourne, probably when I was looking for my first jobs, I worked at Woolworths like everyone else did, and that kind of stuff. And I went for a couple of jobs which were more in the, I guess, blokey side of things. So it was in construction. Oh, yeah. So there was a hardware store in Wollongong, which was pretty well known there, called F.X. Larkin. I don’t know if they’re still going. They probably are. And then there was also a job that I went for up in Lismore when I lived up there at Bunnings, right?

Lyndon: Oh, yeah.

Neil: And both of those interviews, yeah, the fact that I was a musician came up.

Lyndon: Yep. Yep.

Neil: And I didn’t get either of those jobs.

Ah. And I thought, “Is this a negative?” Like, are they worried about me coming in hungover on a Monday ’cause I’ve done a Sunday night gig, or even a Sunday morning, you know, after I’ve had a late night Saturday? Or am I just not reliable because I’m an artist or something like that?

And I thought, “I wonder if that’s a thing.”

And sometimes I still think it is a thing for certain companies as well. So back when I wrote this I was really trying to pitch the aspect of a musician who’s come to a certain point in their life.

Lyndon: Yeah, you made that point.

Neil: Yeah. Yeah.

They will get to the point where they go, “Okay, I’ve just done 10 years of corporates and weddings. And I’ve been away from my partner every weekend to make the money. I need to have a normal Monday to Friday life where I’m in the rhythm of my peer group, my friends, my family, so I can see people and whatnot.”

Yeah. “Let’s get the day job sorted out.”

“And let’s just at least make sure there’s some sort of reliable income coming in so I can actually pick and choose the type of music I wanna play as well.”

Because we all know that when you get to choose the music you wanna play, it pays less.

So…

Breallyn: Usually you pay for it.

Neil: You pay for it. You pay…

Breallyn: …for the privilege to…

Neil: There’s…

Breallyn: …record it and to do it.

Neil: There’s a great… there’s just a sidetrack there a little bit. There’s a great podcast out of America called Guitar Wank. I don’t know if you’ve ever…

Lyndon: I’ve, yeah, I 100% have heard of…

Neil: …and have listened…

Lyndon: …to some of…

Neil: …it. Yeah. It was Troy, and Troy’s originally from Gippsland way. Yeah. But he’s been living in America for a long time doing gigs and production, stuff like that. And he has Scott Henderson, the fusion guitar player, and the great jazz guitar player, Bruce Forman, on there.

Lyndon: Yep, yep.

Neil: And Bruce’s joke about, ’cause he’s a great jazz guitar player, yeah, every time someone rings up to offer him a jazz gig, yeah, he says, “How much is it gonna cost me?” And it’s absolutely true. So true. It’s like, and you’ve gotta have some sort of… most people need to have some sort of steady non-musical income where you’re adding value to someone else’s world, to make sure that the money comes in and you can choose the gigs that you wanna do.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah.

Neil: And that’s what that article is about.

Breallyn: Is that a difficult realisation to come to? You talk about you get to a certain age and you come to that. Is there pain and tension in realising that?

Neil: There’s always the comparison monster in everyone as well. Yeah. And you’re always reminded of someone who’s just not gotten lucky. They would’ve worked hard for where they wanna be too, but they’ve gotten the lifestyle where they do live off music.

And you’re looking at it going, “Why not me?” And how much more do I have to hustle to get to that or whatever.

Lyndon: How much more, how much longer?

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah.

Neil: But it’s, how much better, how much… it’s totally not a healthy way to be, yeah, mentally.

Breallyn: Yep.

Neil: And I thought, you know what? When you actually really look into the background of someone who is working full time in music and how they got there, most of the time they have actually done things that I haven’t actually pulled my finger out and done.

The guys that’ll get…

Lyndon: Truth, truth bombs.

Neil: Yeah. Like the players that end up getting the gigs where they’re maybe touring with a fairly big artist. I came to realise after a while that they’d actually really just went hard cutting their teeth in really good covers bands. Because there was crossover there, like the covers band and the rock scene seemed to be a little bit of a gateway for the better players to get through to playing for a well-known original artist.

That seemed to be the way.

Lyndon: Wow.

Neil: But get seen by staying at home.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: You’ve at least… isn’t that true… gotta go out and play other people’s music as well as possible. Because when they see you playing other people’s music really well, they’re thinking, “They could probably play my music really well as well.”

Lyndon: See, that… I remember too, that thought never popped into my head ever.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: When I was…

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: …never occurred to me.

Neil: Yeah. And I did my tertiary studies. I’ve done…

Lyndon: Has anyone got tissues?

Neil: Yeah. Yeah, man. It’s… this is gonna be like a full therapy session now. But when you think about like…

Lyndon: How much is it gonna cost me?

Neil: Everybody who does tertiary studies like I did, yeah, I think there’s a real risk in going into those studies thinking that the studies alone will give you the career.

And it’s not. Like, when I was studying my degree in music, my teacher, Jim Kelly, who’s like an Australian legend in the session scene from the ’70s through to the ’90s, and then tertiary teaching, he was basically encouraging all his students. He goes, “You’re not just a student, you’re a musician already, and get out and do… get out and do your gigs. Yeah. And if you have to skip a semester to go on tour with someone…” Wow.

“I’d rather you go on tour and learn what you learn there than in the classroom, yeah, as well.” How good. Yeah. And he was basically saying, “Just defer.”

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: “Just defer and go and do the gig. It doesn’t matter if it’s a metal gig or whatever. You just gotta get out there and play.”

Lyndon: ‘Cause that’s where the opportunities are. Yeah. Yeah. They’re not in the classroom, yeah.

Neil: Yeah. And so it’s a reality that if you… I think everyone subconsciously even makes a choice to not do those things. You get out of uni and go, “I’ve got this degree and I know these chords, I’m amazing.”

I could probably read any jazz chart I want and, yeah, someone hire me please. But it doesn’t work like that.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: Yeah. You’ve just gotta be a badass.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: You just have to be a badass.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And I’ve tried to balance working towards being a badass in two different worlds and trying to get one of them to come up trumps.

And sometimes one wins over the other, and then it completely reverses the next year as well. So yeah, yeah, it’s so…

Lyndon: …funny too, ’cause there’d be people like other players that would look at you and say, “Neil’s managing to do it. He’s managing to sort of… he’s living the life… straddle both spheres, and he’s a gun player and look at all the things he’s doing.” So that’s that comparison thing you’re talking about. Yeah. So you’re still sorta trying to, in your mind, trying to make it all work, but someone from the outside is looking at you going, “Oh, I wanna be this Neil Boland character.”

Neil: Yeah. That, well, that’s the funny thing about socials, is that you can pick and choose how you wanna present yourself online. Yeah. And my work stuff during the day is pretty boring. Oh, so I’m not gonna bore my network to tears with this keyword report that I pulled last week.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: I’m gonna put up the interesting stuff. And all of a sudden I look like a full-time musician online. So people who have been following me online and come to a gig, they come up and speak to me at the end and say, “It must be so great to make a living as a musician.”

Yeah. I’m like, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

Lyndon: Oh, do you tell them, do you?

Neil: Yeah, I tell ’em. It’s just “Thank you for a start.” Yeah. But like, I’m part of the great majority who are hustling, and musicians who decide to actually dedicate themselves to being a great musician and survive financially as well end up working more hours in the week than anyone else.

Lyndon: You know?

Neil: It’s a… it can be a 60 to 80-hour week depending on what you got on. You could be working on tunes for another gig that’s coming up that you’ve never done before.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Get home from work, straight into the headphones.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: You’re doing it. So. And then you’ve gotta keep the illusion up on socials a little bit as much as possible. But also, the other thing that people come up to me and say, and it’s usually… I’m gonna annoy some people here, but…

Lyndon: That’s all right.

Neil: This is what you want, right? This is what you want. Controversy.

Lyndon: I, I… oh, we’re all…

Neil: …controversy.

Lyndon: …about…

Neil: I dip in and out of the blues scene a little bit too. Yeah. ‘Cause blues, as a guitar player, is my core love. Oh. Like it’s what the guitar does the best.

Lyndon: Well, haven’t you got Blues Snacks? Is that right? Blues Snacks.

Neil: Blues Guitar Snacks. Yeah. That’s another hustle that I started and didn’t finish. Okay.

Lyndon: That was good though. I watched a couple of those. Yeah.

Neil: I…

Lyndon: I learnt some stuff.

Neil: That was basically me bringing my Jim Kelly knowledge from uni, yeah, into small bite-sized pieces. But, it was great… people would come up to me at the end of a gig in the blues scene and, because my influences are a little bit beyond the standard blues stuff, I love Robben Ford and, yeah, all the jazz-orientated players.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Plus I’ve had the training.

People come up to me and say, “I wish I could play those chords,” or, “I wish I could play like that.”

Lyndon: Oh, the expensive chords.

Neil: And I say…

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: “Do you think I wished it? I didn’t wish it into existence. Like I worked on it. Yeah. I figured this out, yeah, or I was taught it, and then I had to go and work on having it under my belt, yeah, as well. So it’s not… I know you’re trying to be nice, but it’s not…” It’s a bit of a compliment at the same time, but it’s not, yeah, it devalues the work that you’ve put in to actually get to that point.

Lyndon: And they’re saying it without thinking, aren’t they?

Neil: Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah. And so to those people…

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Good segue, by the way.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: I’ll say go and check out Blues Guitar Snacks on Instagram. And you can learn how to do that stuff as well.

Breallyn: And just practice like crazy for 10 years, and you got it.

Neil: Yeah, or just get to know certain concepts harmonically, yeah, and just get it.

And just understand it. It’s actually not that hard to understand the fundamentals really quickly.

Lyndon: It’s one thing to be taught something, and thinking about it from a guitar point of view, it probably relates to anything really. It’s one thing to be taught something, but it’s another thing to know it, and then it’s another thing to own it, isn’t it?

And that, yeah, and there’s no shortcuts there. Yeah. So for guitar, it means actually playing it.

Neil: Yeah.

Well…

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: …it’s in the application as well.

And the only way to really grow a certain aspect of your musicianship or your playing is to book the gig. Like, yeah. I honestly, like, yeah, when I first moved to Melbourne, yeah, of course I was fresh out of uni, so I had a head full of McCoy Tyner and John Scofield, and I wanted to be a jazz and jazz fusion guy, and funk and R&B, and I still am. But I’ve dropped that ball.

And so when I first moved to Melbourne, I was playing in a Hammond combo and doing as many sort of jazz-orientated gigs as possible. And cutting my teeth in that area, and dedicating myself to the genre.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: The language, all that kind of stuff. But like, I haven’t really been nurturing that side of my playing for quite a few years now, because since COVID I’ve taken the most random gigs.

Lyndon: Really?

Neil: Just for fun.

Lyndon: Okay.

Neil: So like, yeah, a Def Leppard tribute band.

Lyndon: I did read that.

Neil: Yeah. And I was like, “What?”

Lyndon: That’s cool. Yeah. Hysteria, I love that album.

Neil: Yeah. In, from a guitar player’s perspective, you’re getting everything from Jimmy Page to Andy Summers in the guitar parts. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s fun.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: That’s fun to do, plus the vocals. Yeah. Which is not anything to be sneezed at.

Lyndon: Yeah. Were you singing in that as well?

Neil: Yeah, I was trying to. Wow.

Lyndon: In the Def Leppard one?

Neil: Yeah, I was doing backing vocals.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: I was, yeah.

Lyndon: Geez, still.

Neil: So I was doing the Phil Collen…

Lyndon: …part. The high? Yeah.

Neil: Wow. But recently, through the keyboardist/organist in my band, which I currently have now, Hawker Heights, he’s put together a Hammond combo.

And so I’ve actually just recently found myself doing Hammond combo gigs again. Yeah. And that repertoire from, yeah, university is coming back to me again.

Breallyn: Oh, nice.

Neil: Yeah. And I need to not wish my skills back into existence. I need to go back and actually dedicate myself to the improv language.

Lyndon: Yeah. And are you enjoying that?

Neil: I’m only just starting to get back into it now. Ah. And I’m enjoying the prospect of knowing there’s a gig on, yeah, where I need to have a certain amount of shit together.

Lyndon: Doesn’t that make a difference?

Neil: Yeah. It’s yeah. The gig has to be on. Yeah. Just book the gig. Yeah. Even if you’ve just got a small snippet of yourself playing a certain thing that will sell you to get the gig, get the gig and then make sure it’s three months away.

I mean…

Lyndon: To give you like a good solid 10 weeks of anxiety.

Neil: Yeah. Pretty much.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: But also, be honest about it as well. Like, what can you pull off? Choose the repertoire that’s gonna actually showcase how you play right now.

Don’t overextend because it’s a bit of an insult to the people who have actually dedicated their lives to that style of music and can actually turn up to any gig and pull it off.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Just go back to working on it at home and get certain aspects that you used to have back up to scratch again, you know?

Lyndon: So interesting too, like you’re gonna have people come to that gig and not understand what went on in that three months prior.

Neil: Yeah.

Yeah. And they’re like, “Oh, your playing’s come a long way.”

And it’s “Yeah.” It used to be here before, but I’ve never needed those tools for a while because I was playing in other genres as well.

Lyndon: Yeah, that’s right.

Neil: Like, when I lived up north up in Lismore, I had a bit of a regular country gig with a guy called, a Kiwi guy called Michael King.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And we had a few gigs up around Tweed Heads and Byron and that kind of area as well, and I found myself in that space.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: It’s all of a sudden it’s whatever else I’ve been looking at uni, forget Jim Hall, forget Wes Montgomery. Yeah. This is, I’ve gotta start listening to some Brent Mason, yeah, and at least try to do 10% of what he does, yeah, just to get this gig done.

Lyndon: Just to get some of the licks.

Neil: Yeah. Yeah. And not have it come across as a cosplay of the genre. Yeah. It’s gotta be authentic and you’ve gotta listen a lot.

Lyndon: It’s not easy. Yeah. It’s not easy to sorta do that.

Neil: But mostly listen to what the song needs as well. The main thing is what the song needs. Yeah. And if you don’t have the chops, just play what the singer needs to hear to make them sound great.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: As well, so yeah. Not a lot of country.

Breallyn: Complex…

Lyndon: …job. Professional. To, yeah, see?

Ryan Adams Debate

Neil: Melbourne’s country scene is a bit more folky and a little bit more, I guess there was an alt country thing there for a while, which I love.

Lyndon: Yeah, I love that too.

Neil: Just looking at Ryan Adams on the wall there. Yeah.

Lyndon: Hasn’t…

Neil: …he…

Lyndon: …taken a few left turns. Yeah. But…

Lyndon: I met someone who was at his Melbourne concert recently.

Neil: Oh, yeah.

Lyndon: And ’cause you heard a lot of different rumours about what did and didn’t happen, and he was telling me from the horse’s mouth what actually went down.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: And then I came home and I looked at my Ryan Adams poster and I thought, “You’re still gonna stay on the wall.” Yeah. “I wasn’t at that gig.” Yeah. “I’ll pretend I never heard that.”

Neil: Oh my God.

Lyndon: I…

Neil: If you get onto the NPR app and start streaming stuff on there, like those episodes will come up.

You’ll hear all about it.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. Looping back to… oh God, there’s corporate speak.

Lyndon: Looping back.

Neil: Yeah. Looping back. Let’s…

Lyndon: Visit that… circle back…

Neil: …around. Yeah. There’s always, throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

Corporate Meets Band Life

Neil: But balancing the corporate and artistic life, it’s gotta actually work for each other.

Lyndon: Oh, gosh.

Neil: Yeah.

Breallyn: This is a question I wanted to ask you. How do you, how do you do it? You as a person, I feel like not everyone can do this.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: But you’ve obviously managed to be successful in both areas, which is really quite incredible. And do you find these are two kind of very different headspaces for you, or is it very similar, or like how do you balance, how do you embody one and then embody the other?

Neil: Yeah. I guess there’s two sides of it. It’s either the culture of the business, or the application, the implementation of it. So I guess the culture of it is so different. And I realised once I spent eight hours a day working at an office doing digital stuff, and then I go to rehearsal at night I’m dealing with a whole different beast of human, yeah.

Yeah, right there, very different people, yeah, as well. It’s just how we interact and how we actually convey information to each other is completely different.

Lyndon: Hey, which one do you like better?

Neil: Yeah. There’s pros and cons to both. I actually find, since being partially corporatized, yeah, I actually bring some of that to the bandstand and to the rehearsal room as well, as far as how I put together a band, write the music, arrange the music, organize rehearsals. It’s actually been a really good tool for being organized as a musician.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: So I’ll…

Lyndon: So what was that word again?

Neil: I don’t… organized. Yeah. So I’ll actually, if there’s a rehearsal or a gig on, I’ll actually send out a Google Calendar invite to my band.

Lyndon: Oh, okay. Wow.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: And say, “This is in your calendar. Don’t double book yourself.” Like…

Lyndon: No excuses.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And this is the date, yeah, that it’s on. Yeah. Please don’t pull out. So I organize myself in that way, otherwise I get too stressed not knowing what’s about to happen. I’ve gotta have a little bit of control over the destiny of where we’re gonna go for the gig.

Lyndon: Yes.

Neil: So that’s the good thing about the corporate thing, yeah, it’s actually made me more professional as an organiser, on the gig side of things. Yeah. Like I’ll, even if I’m playing in someone else’s band, I’ll put my hand up to do the artwork for the socials and stuff like that as well. So it helps. It’s…

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: Got lots of skills…

Breallyn: …to bring.

Lyndon: But yeah, it’s interesting, you’ve answered the question about not being hired by Bunnings or FX Hardware or whatever. It’s like they…

Neil: I’m okay with it now, I’m fine.

Lyndon: I’m gonna bring it up later again. It’s hard, I’ve been fired a few times. It’s…

Neil: All right. I did work at a hardware store once before that, so I was fine.

Lyndon: Yeah, that’s right. You’ve had that experience. Couple of low-key experiences. Yeah. In the corporate world, it’s… there’s that dependability, you know. I don’t, look, I’ve got no idea ’cause I haven’t really been in it.

But from what you’re saying, there’s the dependability, you know that meeting’s gonna happen. They said there’s gonna be a meeting, everyone has to turn up. Whereas with the band stuff it’s “Please be there. Yeah. Please.” And I know that ’cause I’ve had my own band for a while, and it was, yeah, different players in it and stuff, yeah, and it’s just “Oh, is that person gonna pull out last minute?”

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s stressful.

Neil: It’s like herding cats.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah.

Funding Albums and Bandmates

Neil: And the thing is too, yeah, the other good thing about the day gig feeding the night gig is the day gig gives you a bit of a budget for giving people inspiration to come along. Ah, yes. So…

Lyndon: You mean you’re getting paid for this, yeah, and you’re getting paid…

Neil: Yeah, like okay, my first…

Breallyn: A carrot to dangle.

Neil: My first album that I did in 2016 was completely self-funded. That would’ve been completely impossible without having a job.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Which album is that? Can…

Neil: It’s called South by East.

Lyndon: Oh, that one.

Neil: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Cool cover. I was…

Lyndon: I was listening to that, yeah.

Neil: And I’d love to go back and do my vocals on that again, but anyway. Yeah. But that’s when I was, my vocal ability was in its infancy and I just needed to get it done.

Yeah. And just recently, my band Hawker Heights, which is basically the same bass player from the South by East album, okay, 10 years ago, who I play with quite a lot, Craig Strain.

We do a few different things together. But this album that I’m doing at the moment, again, I’ve put together a budget for it. This is how much it’s gonna cost, X amount. I’m recording it in Eltham as well. Okay, yeah. In a guy’s house in Eltham, Mark Lowrie. All the rhythm tracks are done. It was organized. I had a spreadsheet of basically the personnel who was, wow, gonna be on what part of the record.

It’s like…

Lyndon: You had some good players on that South by East.

Neil: Yes.

Lyndon: I mean…

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Good’s an understatement.

Neil: Yeah. On that record it was Craig, yeah, on bass. So Craig’s… basically the story goes with Craig is that when Craig moved to Australia from Scotland, yeah, we both went to an audition.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And it was out in, I think it was Hydra out in the eastern suburbs, the rehearsal room. Yeah, oh, Hydra. I think I’ve been there. Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: So it was a wedding band. They were doing this thing with auditioning guitar players and bass players.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: Yeah. But they were doing them at the same time. So the bassist, oh yeah, they gave out… that makes… they said, “You’re gonna play these songs. Come in and play these songs for us.” Yeah. And me and Craig were on the same audition.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: And we thought the band was okay, but we weren’t sure. Even the singer who was running the band was already talking about moving back home to New Zealand, and we’re like…

“Why are you auditioning for…” What are we doing here? Yeah. So we went out to the car park and I said, and he goes, “I’m trying to put together this jazz funk group, an instrumental group. Do you wanna come along and… you wanna get on the bus?” basically.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Said, “Yeah, no worries.”

So that was the birthplace of our instrumental funk group, Pickpocket.

Lyndon: Ah.

Neil: And we played for about 10 years on and off. I think it was about two or three EPs, two full length albums. We’re on indefinite hiatus now, ’cause it became a lot of work after COVID. We had an album launch at the Night Cat, and a couple more gigs and we were pretty exhausted.

So Craig, cut a long story short or a short story long, Craig’s kind of been my main musical buddy, yeah, in Melbourne as a bass player.

Lyndon: The musical wingman.

Neil: Yeah. And back and forth. So he played on the South by East record.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Remy Dupree, the drummer, he’s from the Netherlands. And he lives out in the hills, Belgrave way.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And on organ I got Tim Neil from the, yeah…

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: …Paul Williamson Hammond Combo and several other things that Tim gets asked to do.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: James Black from… he plays with the Black Sorrows and RocKwiz. RocKwiz. Yeah. He’s…

Lyndon: Just sensational, that guy.

Neil: Yeah. Incredible.

Lyndon: Incredible, yeah.

Neil: I actually ran into him only recently for the first time in years at a gig.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And he just walks up to me and goes, “Neil, I’ve been meaning to tell you, your horn arrangements on that record are great.” Yeah. I’m like, “Okay. Thanks, man.”

Lyndon: That’s nice.

Neil: Yeah. And the horn…

Lyndon: They are great too.

Neil: …and the horn players, yeah, they are great, yeah, thanks. Actually, there’s a story about that too. I’ve got a story about this. Actually…

Lyndon: You’ve got Tim Evans on there.

Neil: Tim Evans?

Lyndon: Is it Tim Evans? Is he a sax player? No. Is that wrong?

Neil: No. Oh, no. Brett Evans.

Lyndon: Brett Evans, sorry.

Neil: Yeah, so you know Brett?

Lyndon: I think he did some arrangements for me on my EP in 2007 maybe.

Neil: Probably did. Probably did.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah. I reckon.

Neil: Brett’s the quiet achiever in all the bands he plays in. He’s not big on socials and stuff like that. Yeah. And but he’s a great…

He’s also in Off The Leash, the Tower of Power tribute band I just played with over the weekend.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Plays a mean baritone as well. So we’re like a bit of a community between, yeah, the Pickpocket crew, horns, the Tower of Power tribute band Off The Leash, yeah, and then whatever band I’ve got going at the time, yeah, it’s virtually the same players, like circling around. It’s a good crew. We play for each other.

Lyndon: That is cool.

Neil: That’s respect, isn’t it? When I go to record an album, those guys get paid. Yeah. It’s like I’ve gotta put together the budget with the day gig stuff and say, “Hey, there’s an incentive for you to buy into what I’m doing here.”

So that’s kinda like the community that I have around me, which is really nice.

Breallyn: Yeah, that’s…

Lyndon: …awesome. Yeah.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: That’s fantastic.

Neil: The other thing is too, is that SEO, as you know, is the analytical side of it and the research side of it too. If you’ve got that sorta brain for jazz harmony and…

Breallyn: There you go.

Neil: …and stuff like that, there’s a bit of a technical side of it in the digital world that sort of…

Lyndon: That’s a good connection.

Neil: …it triggers, yeah, the same side of the brain.

Breallyn: That’s very interesting, yeah.

Lyndon: Really?

Neil: Yeah. Yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: I go into research land pretty hard when I’m at work, yeah, in an analytical and data land, okay, pretty deeply as well.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: It can be a bit of a comfort zone, okay, yeah, as well. Oh, okay. But of course everyone talks about being a data-driven marketer but you’ve gotta…

Breallyn: Yeah, you’ve…

Neil: …gotta be that if you’re gonna say that as well.

Breallyn: True. Oh, okay. See, I never say that because I’m, as a copywriter, we’re probably on very different ends, ’cause I’m always looking for the storytelling and the human connection and the interesting bits that as a person I wanna personally read.

So that’s what I write.

Neil: Yeah.

Breallyn: And yeah, when it comes to shoehorning the words in, yeah, for the analytics, I’m not into that. So yeah, yeah, it’s tricky.

Neil: I think algorithms are smarter than that now. Yeah. Of course, at the end of the day, I’m gonna be telling my clients, like if they run a lawn mowing business or whatever, make sure you do map out the page of your website that is dedicated to your service with the keyword.

Breallyn: Yeah, yeah. Literally…

Neil: Like…

Breallyn: Make it obvious. Yeah.

Neil: Literally put it in there. What do you do? Who do you do it for? Where are you, yeah, where are you located? Do that stuff.

But now you can still write like a human, yeah, and the algorithm gets it a little bit more, yeah, as well. But at the end of the day, writing like a human is still really important, I think.

Especially for conversion and brand trust as well. Yeah, I will admit, sometimes I will dip into AI about certain subject matters that I can’t be bothered writing about because I’m just like, yeah.

Breallyn: It’s a tool to be used.

Neil: Use it when it’s, yeah, it’s a tool to be used. Yeah. But also it’s a tool to be tweaked, yeah, and massaged into the brand voice that you need on the website as well.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: That’s the…

Breallyn: Yeah, absolutely.

Neil: …that’s the way to approach it from my perspective as well.

Lyndon: Do you think it’s possible to be a musician in this day and age and be unyoked from the internet or from that world?

I was just thinking about if you’ve seen crossover between your two worlds where you were suggesting that one has helped the other.

But I think, yeah, you were, that was more in a very sort of personal way.

Neil: I think AI and the technology in the music space has so many touch points and applications, but every time I see the… And I think it goes a couple of ways. So you’ve got, the music’s amazing. So someone’s music is amazing, it’s gonna go far. So every time I discover a band, which is usually two, three years after everyone else has found out about them…

Lyndon: Same.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Same.

Neil: I go to their socials, 50,000 followers. It’s, hang on, I only found out about this band this week. Yeah. Hang on, they’ve got a following because the music’s great. It’s not the other way around. Yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: There are certain acts who really know how to do digital marketing and how to leverage algorithms and all this kind of stuff and, me personally, I go to listen to the music because I’m hearing the hype, and then in reverse, I go and hear the music and go, “This is not for me. I just, I don’t understand…”

Lyndon: Oh.

Neil: …why everyone’s loving this so much. But the marketing has done it.

Lyndon: Yeah. The marketing…

Neil: …got you…

Lyndon: …there.

Neil: But, yeah, but that’s not for everyone either. I think that’s a rarity as well. There’s that story of Justin Bieber years ago of making his break with a little YouTube video.

But there was more to it than that. There was more capital behind his breakthrough than just the video, but it was pitched as this miraculous viral sensation.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Which it was, but it wasn’t just that. There was more to it as well.

Lyndon: I think Rick Beato did a video recently, talking about artists that actually come from families who are already in the industry.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: And it’s not everyone, but a lot of examples.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Not denying the songs, yeah, or the production or anything like that, but this is where they actually came from. Yeah. This is the money they had behind them. Which kind of in a way now is even giving more weight to how you’ve approached, yeah, to kinda get the money and…

Neil: Except…

Lyndon: …spend it on your art.

Neil: …except I’ve made the money.

Lyndon: You’ve done it all yours, yeah, yeah.

But your dad wasn’t a famous…

Neil: No.

Lyndon: …movie director.

Neil: No, the, yeah, the closest my dad became to being famous is that when I was born, he coached a rugby league team in Wollongong.

And one of the players went on to become a famous player for Balmain.

Breallyn: Oh, wow.

Neil: That was it.

Breallyn: That’s it.

Neil: That was it. Pretty close. But you know what? He went out and did that. He didn’t need social media to do that. Yeah, that’s right. Anyway. That’s right.

But I’m just thinking of an example of a, yeah, Melbourne band who actually got the best of both worlds. Amazing music, but also someone in that network that they have either in the band or within their peers or their greater circle is, yeah, a very good marketer. And that’s Hiatus Kaiyote.

Lyndon: Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Yep.

Neil: And I love them. I’ve got every album physically, in physical format. Yeah. Wow. I listen to them a lot. I think they’re actually, you know…

Lyndon: I haven’t even heard the name for a while.

Neil: Oh, but yeah, that, you know what I mean? Yeah. But if we still had TV shows like Hey It’s Saturday…

Lyndon: Recovery.

Neil: Recovery, In Melbourne Tonight, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, that’s the sort of band that would’ve gotten national exposure via television performance.

Yeah.

Lyndon: Right. Totally.

Neil: Yeah. But no one’s heard of them, and every time someone on socials whinges about, “Oh, there’s no good Australian bands,” I go, “That’s because the algorithm’s put you in a place where you’re not gonna hear Hiatus Kaiyote.”

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Teskey Brothers is not in your orbit.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: I could… There’s probably heaps of other bands that I haven’t heard of that are massive in their specific…

Lyndon: The Paper Kites.

Neil: Yeah. Paper Kites.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Oh, Karnivool. We were talking about Karnivool before.

Lyndon: Yeah, Karnivool.

Neil: The average person who complains on socials that they haven’t heard anything good since Cold Chisel, the algorithm hasn’t served up Karnivool to them. Yeah. But there are examples of like that, of where someone’s got a good marketing head in a good band that makes good music as well. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a whole bunch of factors that are all different from band to band.

A bit like different from client to client when we’re in digital. Yeah. Everyone has different needs, different value. Find their special sauce, yeah. Yeah, different value, different appeal to different people, yeah, as well.

Lyndon: Now, I’m gonna change tack a little bit here. Your better half…

Neil: Yes.

Lyndon: …is also an artist. Yes. A couple of questions, does she approach her artistic life and world the same way you’re approaching yours, or are you very different people?

Neil: Well, her name’s Veronica Lamb.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And her Instagram is Art by Veronica Lamb. But she’s more using that as a personal and artistic output, yeah, channel as well. She was studying visual art when we met all those years ago. But in parallel she’s been a bit like me in the sense where she’s had another vocation that’s actually brought the income, which has been in pattern making for fashion.

Lyndon: Ah, that’s…

Neil: …cool.

So when I was studying music up north, she was at Wollongbar TAFE, studying fashion.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: And a bit like me like finding a specialization in SEO, she found a specialization in pattern making. ‘Cause I think, honestly, she liked the logical technical side of things, yeah, as well.

Lyndon: Yes.

Neil: And now she runs her own business called The Melbourne Pattern Maker.

Lyndon: Okay.

Neil: Now, with a name like that, she ranks number one.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. And…

Lyndon: …and did you have some involvement in…

Neil: …that? I just said, “Look, just make sure you say this somewhere on the page.” But she did it all herself, basically.

Yeah.

Lyndon: So she’s a smart cookie.

Neil: Yeah. So she’s running that freelance full time now. Oh, great. So but she worked for a company in-house for about 16 years that supplied, okay, a couple of brands into David Jones and Myer as well. And when we first moved to Melbourne, she worked for a children’s wear company, okay, down Moorabbin way, run by a guy called Brian Kilby.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: Whose famous daughter hosted Australia’s Funniest Home Video Show, Kim Kilby.

Lyndon: Oh.

Neil: Right. Oh. Yeah.

Breallyn: Oh, what a link. Yeah.

Neil: Yeah, it’s, oh wow, Melbourne’s amazing. It’s funny.

Lyndon: It’s funny watching those videos now too.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: You just go, “It…”

Neil: “…wasn’t that funny.”

It wasn’t that funny. I eventually called it Australia’s Funniest Kick in the Groin Show. ‘Cause that’s pretty much every second video was a kick to the nads, wasn’t it? Yeah.

Lyndon: With a sound effect.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Some nutty sound effect.

Neil: Yeah, but she’s doing quite well in that, and she’s always been really studious and really always professional, but always knew what to do.

Whereas I, to be quite honest, as much as this interview makes it sound like I’ve got my shit together, I do struggle.

Lyndon: Yeah. Oh, good.

Neil: Yeah. Yeah, man. Oh, sorry to not, as we speak right now, I’m currently, quote-unquote, in between jobs, yeah, as well. So…

Breallyn: Which is how we snagged you on a weekday to come…

Neil: …over and exactly. Like it’s…

Breallyn: …sit down here.

Neil: That’s right.

Lyndon: Shh. Don’t say that. This is after hours.

Neil: I would like to say that this can never happen again. Yeah. But yeah, so yeah, she’s been working in that area, and I’m watching her work at home. She’ll bring some clients round to the house sometimes as well, and I’m seeing how she works now. And she’s been working in-house in a way that I’ve never seen before, yeah, and so it’s pretty fascinating.

Breallyn: That’d be nice for you to see that side of her life of, yeah, what she is really into and enjoying professionally.

Neil: Yeah. So cool. And she’s almost a consultant as well because she’s had so much experience as a production manager.

Which is basically the conduit between the Australian company who does the designing and stuff like that, yeah, and the factory in China. So she would have gone over there and said, “This is how our patterns go,” and she knows how to speak to a factory to get the pattern coming back right in the sample as well.

Lyndon: So are these patterns that go on clothing? So…

Neil: It’s literally the pattern for cutting out the fabric to make the clothes.

Lyndon: Oh, the pattern for the cut, not the, not like a floral pattern printed?

Neil: No. No.

Lyndon: Oh, okay. No.

Neil: So it’s literally the architecture of the garment.

Lyndon: So what’s it called? The Melbourne Pattern Company.

Neil: Pattern Maker.

Lyndon: Pattern Maker. Yeah. The Melbourne Pattern Maker.

Neil: Yeah. Oh. So if you Google, Pattern Maker Melbourne…

Lyndon: This is… That’s gotta be more complex than the boxes that we were talking about earlier. ‘Cause the boxes generally don’t have curves and…

Neil: You know what? Like you were talking, yeah. I write for a cardboard box factory. Before we went on air, we were talking about a box factory. Yeah. A bit like on The Simpsons. And the box factory is actually quite a lot more fascinating than you’d think. Yeah. Because the engineering of a box, being able to stay intact without any tape.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: That’s right. It gets even more interesting, there’s the perforated edge when you’re customizing it so that it is a good unboxing experience for your customers, yeah, and you’ve got your product there, and then you also need to package that so it’s good for your shipping.

All the, oh, ask me. Oh.

Lyndon: It’s good. I know. I know, it sounds like… That company should know about Kaizen. We were talking about Kaizen last week. Yeah, they were. They would know… If they don’t know about Kaizen, you need to introduce them to a whole new world.

Neil: But similarly with a garment, depending on how the pattern is structured is how the clothes will sit.

Breallyn: Yes. Absolutely.

Neil: And you’ll see more so in women’s clothes, how it’ll sit on the shoulder. If it sits up, it sits down and all that kind of stuff too. Yeah. So I’m learning this stuff, and I don’t have any use for the knowledge, but it…

Breallyn: If your shirt doesn’t, yeah, go in properly, yeah.

Lyndon: Could Veronica, yeah, could she look at me and know exactly the sort of cut that I would need to make me look slimmer and more distinguished? Except when I’m on stage and I wanna look more rock and roll.

Neil: Yeah. She’d probably tell you as well. Like…

Lyndon: Would she?

Neil: Yeah, she’d probably actually, oh, she’d tell you outright. Yeah. “Don’t wear this.”

Breallyn: “Wear that.” We need to hire her for a…

Lyndon: …shopping…

Breallyn: …expedition.

Lyndon: That’s what I need because I, I… You don’t…

Breallyn: …listen though. I’ve tried.

Lyndon: Sorry, is someone talking to me? I think…

Breallyn: Have you listened to Veronica?

Lyndon: What happens is every few years I go, “You know what? I think I’m just a jeans and T-shirt guy.” And that’s good until you get to your mid to late 40s, whatever, 52…

Neil: You know…

Lyndon: …ish.

Neil: …the good thing is that the hipster tight pants thing of the 2010s is starting to go away now.

Lyndon: Is that good? Is it…

Neil: And I’ve still got them, and I’m still wearing them because I’m…

Lyndon: These are hipster, are they hipster, Bre?

Neil: As in, not, like the hipster, yeah, he needs to Google it, the hipster phenomenon, with the beard and the barbershop and all this kind of stuff. Oh, okay. And you’re going into a microbrewery with steel chairs and, you know.

Lyndon: Oh, is that disappearing, is it?

Neil: Pretty much. So everyone’s sick of the man…

Breallyn: …buns.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: I’ve gotta toss out my leather field bag, do I?

Neil: Yes. Yeah. That’s… I’ve got one out here. But when tastes change, yeah, we’re looking at now, baggy. At the moment you go downstairs…

Breallyn: Everything’s oversized.

Neil: Everything’s oversized. Yeah, I’m doing it now. But you know, I’m finally wearing some baggy pants for the first time since the ’90s. And it’s actually a really good time to be a musician in your 40s because you can wear big clothes and hide everything.

Lyndon: I see the baggy ’cause my son will come home on the weekend and he’s wearing what looks like a couple of tents on his legs.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: And my first thought is, what a waste of material. There’s just so much excess material. Yes. And I think about all those, that’s…

Neil: …two pants.

Lyndon: …sort of documentaries and things we’ve seen on all these clothing that just gets wasted and recycled, a lot of clothing, yeah, and gets sent back on a massive ship, and I’m just like, what happened?

Shouldn’t everything be getting trimmer and slimmer and…

Neil: No. I mean, it’s comfortable.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Like I’m wearing these at home, and I forget that I’ve got daytime pants on. I feel like I’ve got trackies on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s great. I love it. Yeah. But like for a musician, yeah, all my new jeans are the baggies. For a musician getting to a certain age, it’s actually really tough because you wanna wear these clothes again because it covers the physique and it makes you look on trend.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: But there’s a really fine line between being comfortable and looking good and being on trend, and looking like an old guy in a 20-something’s clothing.

Lyndon: Oh, please Lord, let that not be me.

Neil: Yeah. And at the moment, with my band, I’m actually in the middle of recording, oh, and then I’m gonna be thinking about marketing this record.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And it’s gonna get to the point where it’s like, yes, I’m thinking about what Hiatus Kaiyote would do.

I’m not gonna dress up as much as they would, yeah, because that’s a lifetime dedication. Yeah. Nai Palm’s tattoos and their amazing face decorations and stuff like that.

Lyndon: Real tattoos?

Neil: Oh, yeah.

Lyndon: Oh, wow.

Neil: Yeah. I’m like, “I can’t go that far.” But what… I’m actually, that’s your style, legitimately thinking about, I need to find a stylist. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yes.

Neil: Yes. So I can look, so we can look like a band.

Lyndon: I love this.

Neil: But also not, you know that Steve Buscemi thing where he’s got his baseball hat on with the skateboard and he’s, “How do you do, fellow kids?” I don’t wanna look like that guy in the band, ’cause eventually you are gonna be the oldest guy in your band.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: That’s happening. But like…

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: …yeah, that’s right. Yeah. How can you be hip without being tragically hip?

Lyndon: Yeah.

Yeah. So that’s the next thing, too. So I’m asking Veronica about this, too. Yeah. I’m saying… And she’s, “I don’t know.” And it’s like…

Neil: With your… It’s, you’re actually better off asking a third party who’s not your partner…

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: …yeah, about this kind of stuff.

Breallyn: Agree.

Neil: So I’ll probably be going to a consultant to even just get a little bit of advice about what to wear. Yeah.

Lyndon: ‘Cause Veronica doesn’t care.

Breallyn: It’s actually a really good step.

Yeah, you…

Neil: No. I think the thing is she’s probably actually, that says it, spent so many years trying to get me to wear certain things, and I’ve gone, “Nup.”

Lyndon: She’s given up.

Neil: Yeah. And now that I’m asking, she’s, “I’m not telling you anymore.”

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. You won’t listen.

Breallyn: Have to pay for my work now.

Neil: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. This is a consultation. Yep.

Lyndon: Seems to be going around.

Breallyn: Definitely. Yeah. It is, it’s a good point, like in the general scheme of things, too. As artistic people, you kinda hone in and throw everything at this one thing, creating the album or the song, the book, whatever you’re writing, whatever you’re doing.

And then everything around it, like the energy, the time, the research that it takes to get that all together.

Neil: Yeah.

Breallyn: It’s a whole different thing, completely different headspace, almost like new expertise that you’ve gotta try, yeah, to find. So it’s actually quite a good idea to outsource some of that, draw on other people’s experiences and, yeah, get a team behind you to, yeah, to do justice to that project that you’ve, yeah, put your heart and soul into.

Neil: Get a mood board together.

Breallyn: Yes.

Neil: That’s what Veronica’s told me to do this before where, yeah, get your Pinterest on. We actually had our first photo shoot for Hawker Heights about six, six to eight months ago now, which, yeah, which of course, when you pay for a photo shoot, you get as many photos as possible and use them in as many places as possible.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. And I put a mood board together of the bands who are similar to us in style, but also similar to us in age.

Breallyn: Ah.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: I said, “Guys, can you please just find something in your wardrobe for this photo shoot to wear that’s in this ballpark?”

Yeah. And it worked.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: Good idea. But I’ve gotta keep at it, ’cause so when we go to gigs, there was, in the first couple of gigs we did since COVID wrapped up, and we’re not wrapped up, but…

Lyndon: I love that. Yeah. COVID’s wrapped up.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: The measles have wrapped up, I believe. What else has wrapped…

Neil: …up? The band is back and the, polio…

Lyndon: …the plague…

Neil: …that wrapped up. The band is back and now it’s funky. And now we’re funky and about six years older. Yeah. What can we wear? So we’re looking at The Meters and going, okay, The Meters are African Americans who can get away with a certain aesthetic, right?

So there’s only certain things we can wear there.

And then I’m looking at…

Lyndon: That’s true. Yeah.

Neil: …and then I’m looking at current bands like Lettuce, who are a mixed ethnicity band. There’s a few things there we can wear. They just wear nice clean streetwear at the end of the day.

So I’ll be looking at that going, “I don’t wanna be an old man in young man’s clothes,” but at the same time I don’t wanna be an old man in old man’s clothes. Yeah. Because that’s actually worse.

Breallyn: Yeah. That’s right.

Lyndon: If you wait long enough, you can be the latter, I think. You can be an old man in old man’s clothes.

Rockstar Image vs Grunge

Neil: It’s like, oh God. I see some things on socials and it’s…

Lyndon: It’s my dream.

Neil: Before COVID, I actually, with Gumbo Web Advice, my consultancy…

Lyndon: Oh, yes.

Neil: I put out, nice segue, I actually wrote two e-books, yes, yeah, to generate a mailing list as well.

Yeah. And I put out an e-book for small businesses, and of course all my muso mates went, “Can you do one for artists?” And at first I was like, “No, ’cause you won’t be able to pay me for my services.” “You got no money.”

But I did, because I was seeing a lot of content going out there on socials. And what an amazing tool that we have in the internet for actually getting things right.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: But you can get it so wrong. Yes. And that amplifies, yeah, as well. And I was seeing footage of people, like just, doing their promotional video. You could tell that they’d gotten out of their day job, and they still had their day job pants on, and they just changed their shirt.

Lyndon: Oh. Oh. And stuff like that. Like quite literally. Yes.

Neil: Literally. Yeah. And it’s, no, you pack for it the night before. Let’s plan for this. I’m gonna be in work mode from 9:00 to 5:00, and then I’m going to a video shoot for my band’s thing.

Pack the entire outfit.

Yeah. Don’t just go, “Oh, I’ll just swap the shirt over.” Or I was seeing people wearing really too casual, yeah, casual wear for, ’cause people wanna actually buy into the, a bit of a myth that you’re actually an amazingly artistic crew of people. And you’ve gotta present that, yeah, a little bit. You do. No one wants to go and see Kiss, yeah, play in a pair of jeans. Yeah.

Lyndon: And I’ve heard of some producers too, back in the day, wanted the band to come in to the sessions looking like the band. Yeah. Not looking…

Breallyn: …off duty.

Lyndon: Yeah. Not looking off duty.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, because they think it made a difference. And it does make a difference. I put on my nice leather shoes today. And I know I’m in work mode. I’m in podcast mode.

Neil: I’m in my Def Leppard Cons at the moment.

Lyndon: Oh, yeah.

Neil: Something that makes me feel…

Lyndon: Noticed. Brilliant.

Neil: But, yeah, but when you look at those, like when it was a big deal to do documentaries on the making of albums and stuff like that.

Lyndon: Oh, love that. Classic Albums show.

Neil: So, bands from the ’80s, yeah, would also do their own, like, and you would buy the VHS of the, yeah, a year and a half in the life of Metallica, yeah, this kind of stuff.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: They would dress down during recording sessions and stuff like that, but it was still, quote-unquote, on brand for who they were. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. And Ross Halfin, the photographer, could have turned up to any rehearsal and then taken them out for five minutes and taken some amazing photos.

Lyndon: Yes.

Neil: They were always in muso mode as far as the way they dressed as well.

Neil: Like I saw some footage of Skid Row, yeah, rehearsing in the studio before going out on their self-titled debut tour. Which is really fresh.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Skid Row, they’re in a rehearsal room. Yeah. Basically, because they knew there was a camera there, yeah, they were dressed like they were on stage.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: They were dressed like they were on stage. And that was the thing that the grunge movement…

Breallyn: Commitment.

Neil: …wanted to get rid of.

Lyndon: Yes. Yeah.

Neil: But at the same time, you were going to see a show.

Lyndon: A pretense.

Neil: Yeah. You were going to see a show. Yeah. And also, if they had any chance of selling that VHS or that documentary, people wanted a view into a world that they don’t normally get access to. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah, that’s right.

Neil: As well, and escape into it a little bit.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Yeah.

Socials and Curated Realness

Lyndon: Yeah, and I suppose the online world, the socials, has changed that a lot. Like I see behind the scenes stuff with some artists, even the camera angle might not be flattering to them or they’re very much just got…

It’s probably all by design too, yeah, for a lot of it, but it’s very much just the girl next door kind of vibe, or I’ve just got up and I’m just doing this, and you feel like you’re seeing someone’s genuine life, yeah, off camera, even though it’s on camera. Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. There’s still, for the people who do that stuff really well on socials, there’s still a real, there’s a certain degree of curation to their, yeah, spontaneity.

Lyndon: Definitely. Like…

Neil: The spontaneity, yeah, is not straight out of bed.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: No. It’s like there’s something…

Breallyn: I know, get ready first and then pop out of bed.

Neil: Yeah. Exactly.

Lyndon: Okay. Bre, I’m gonna have to delete a whole lot of videos of me. I thought I was just doing, thought it was easy, camera stuff in the morning. Yeah.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: It’s all right. Oh, no. No?

Neil: Some people suit being scruffy, that’s all.

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t. Like I look like I’ve come out of the dumpster if I’m, if I do it sideways. I’ve actually…

Lyndon: Preston dumpster.

Neil: I’ve gotta fix myself up just a little bit, you know.

Lyndon: For the stage.

Neil: For the camera.

Breallyn: And yeah, all those details matter for sure, and you are like selling an image, it’s a cliche of course, but yeah, everything does have to have a consistency about it. If some of those details don’t fit the story that you’re telling people, then people do sense that disconnect. And, yeah, it’s almost now it doesn’t feel genuine and they’ll, the interest just disappears. So, yeah, it is important, all that stuff.

Neil: And I think sometimes people actually falsely think that preparing an image or a brand aesthetic for your band is false.

Lyndon: Like a bit of a wank.

Neil: But you can do it, yeah. You can do it in a way that is you, yeah, as well. Yeah. Like it’s, it’s not actually pretending to be anything but yourself, but you just, you’re kinda drilling down on what makes you.

And find out whatever is in fashion that suits that.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah. What can you genuinely wear and feel right in? Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And…

Band Aesthetics and The Flanno Rule

Lyndon: And then in your case, convince everyone else in the band that, you know, they need to do it too. In fact, it’s a requirement, yeah, otherwise there’s no check.

Neil: The first couple of gigs back after COVID with Hawker Heights, you know, yeah, when we became less of a blues band and more of a funk thing, yeah, the keyboardist, I love him, Joel, he plays in country rock bands, so he turns up in a flanno.

And I said, “If there’s one thing that this band isn’t, it’s a flanno band.”

I said, “That’s, wear that at The Gem or at somewhere in East Brunswick.”

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Yep. But this is not an Allman Brothers situation, yeah, kind of thing.

And he was like, “What?” And I said, “Just have a think.”

Lyndon: Take it off, mate.

Neil: Have a think about it. Just…

Lyndon: Did you actually make him take it off at the rehearsal and just be in his, I don’t know, singlet, wife beaters?

Neil: Oh, I think we actually filmed him. We did our little promo video with him in the flanno, and he turned up for one gig.

Lyndon: Oh, was that for a photo shoot, was it, when he turned up in the flanno?

Neil: Oh, it was a very informal, no, it was a very informal kind of video shoot to get some stuff down for the band.

Lyndon: What’s this guy’s name again? Just so we can…

Neil: Joel Lewis. Joel Lewis. I’m playing with him this Friday night in his Hammond combo, by the way.

And I won’t be wearing a flanno. But it’s just an example of that, yeah, you might bring some style from another band you’re playing in. Yeah. Yeah. And this is what happens, this is what’s happened to me over the years, like every time I look at photos of myself doing gigs, it’s a completely different…

Breallyn: …getup.

Neil: I’m not trying to dress up in costume or, yeah, or try and fake it.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: But it’s more, let’s just find a halfway to them version of what, yeah, I am in this band. I’ve got photos of me in suits, yeah, doing gigs. There’s photos of me in a flanno, yeah, because it’s more of a country blues thing. There’s photos of me in the weirdest shit that I could put together because it’s like, it’s my band and I’m trying to be kooky, a kooky old man about it.

Lyndon: You’re not that old. Come on, you’re not that old.

Neil: No. Yeah.

Lyndon: Getting…

Neil: …up there. Yeah. Born in the ’70s, but, yeah, it’s a funny thing ’cause, like I say before, you’re trying to get your band members to buy into what you’re doing. If you’re the one that’s writing all the music and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Lyndon: Yeah, that’s…

Neil: …right. But the part of the buy-in is also an agreement to aesthetically try a little bit, yeah, as well. Yeah. I do it for others, yeah, so I…

Breallyn: …expect it back. It’s part of the commitment, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yep. That’s fair enough.

Breallyn: What’s coming up for Hawker Heights? What’s the next thing that you’re working on, and where’s it going?

Neil: Yeah. Recording an album, great, at the moment. Yeah. Again, it’s music that I’ve had up my sleeve and in my hard drive for about six or seven years.

Finally getting up the gusto to go and do it. We’ve recorded all the rhythm tracks, including percussion as well at Guffland Studios, which is Mark Lowrie’s studio in Eltham. It’s basically…

Lyndon: Nice.

Neil: …basement of his house.

Lyndon: It’s called Guffland.

Neil: Guffland.

Lyndon: Nice. Cool.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: Great.

Neil: Mark’s a really good engineer, great guitar player and singer from the blues scene as well. And I’m currently literally using my unexpected spare time to work on the vocal parts.

Breallyn: Yeah. Awesome.

Lyndon: Oh, nice.

Neil: To go back and record the vocal parts, great, ’cause I wanna be able to do a really good job to serve the music, ’cause the music’s come up great.

Lyndon: Yeah. What’s the vocal chain? Do you know what the vocal chain is that we’re singing through or?

Neil: No idea.

Lyndon: Okay. No, it’s good to know. No. No one except me wants to know. No. But…

Neil: Just I’m sure if I post this on a social somewhere, Mark will, Mark will tell you, yeah, ’cause he loves to talk about that stuff.

Lyndon: Oh, does he? Yeah. Good, good. Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. But he can pull a great sound with some pretty basic stuff.

Lyndon: I bet.

Neil: It’s amazing, yeah, what he can do. But, yeah, so there’s that, and then, of course, the subsequent album launch and then whatever happens after that, I’m not sure. I’ll probably end up, for live situations, probably get another guitar player in so I could sing and, yeah, still have it funky, because coordinating funk guitar with contradictory vocal rhythms is really hard.

Lyndon: Yeah. Very…

Neil: …hard.

Lyndon: That would be tough.

Neil: Yeah. So that, I don’t know, that’s probably where it’s going, but yeah.

Breallyn: Very cool.

Neil: It’s actually, I’ve actually had real trouble trying to get gigs for that band because, for the Hawker Heights band? Yeah, ’cause in order to relaunch it, I changed the entire repertoire from a blues thing to all New Orleans R&B.

Lyndon: I love the New Orleans stuff. So is there not an appetite for that around here or?

Neil: It’s funny because, like, it doesn’t quite fit the blues scene. No. And it doesn’t quite fit the R&B scene, ’cause the R&B scene is playing ’90s stuff.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Which I’ve done a lot of gigs of that stuff as well. I’ve played The End of the Road, Boyz II Men quite a lot.

Lyndon: Oh, have you?

Neil: I’ve done Chaka Khan and, yeah, the Stevie Wonder, and it doesn’t fit that scene.

Lyndon: No.

Neil: And it doesn’t fit the blues scene. It’s, but it’s all those things.

Lyndon: It’s all those things, but in a very sort of particular, there’s a particular flavor to it, isn’t there?

Neil: Yeah. It’s down-home. Yeah. Like it’s, yeah, it’s really down-home, yeah, version of R&B. Yeah. It’s because it’s literally from the South.

Lyndon: From the, yeah.

Neil: And it really is actually kinda like the central melting pot of the styles that came out of it.

Lyndon: Out of it, yeah.

Neil: Yeah. As well. But is it that I hear in that sort of music, a real, I’ve never actually put this into words. There’s a joyousness, yeah, behind it. About living life in the present, or there’s something about it. I don’t know how to describe it.

Yeah. It’s probably the influence of…

Lyndon: What is it?

Neil: …probably the influence of the city of New Orleans being a party town, yeah, to an extent. Yeah. But also you’ve got probably the attitudes of the people who moved there a long time ago.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: So the French influence and, like, you think about the cliche of the French and food, it’s all about the joy of food, enjoying being together.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: But…

Lyndon: That’s what’s… It’s weird, that comes through, I think, in the music.

Neil: Yeah. And then you mix the gospel culture in with it as well. And then you get a little bit of country in there as well.

Yeah, it’s fun funk.

Lyndon: Absolutely.

Neil: It’s, it’s…

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: …it’s enjoyable. It’s my favorite kind of American music at the end of the day because it does have all the things that I like in it.

There’s a jazz influence as well.

Lyndon: And there’s a looseness to it that I find really appealing. Yeah. It doesn’t mean the music’s not tight. The music’s tight.

Neil: It’s tight.

Lyndon: It’s tight. But there’s a, it’s, there’s just this nice, relaxed looseness, it’s very loose, that you’re not gonna find in that ’90s R&B.

Neil: Definitely not. Yeah. Or in the Tower of Power stuff that I’ve been playing too. Yeah. That’s completely the opposite end of the spectrum as far as production’s concerned.

Yeah. So the New Orleans stuff, we went to 303 in Northcote, yeah, and played the return gig of Hawker Heights to do that to a full room, yeah, which was great.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And I thought, “Oh, this is good. Other venues are gonna want this.” And I went out to all the other blues venues, and I didn’t hear a thing back.

Lyndon: Wow.

Neil: Even after they knew me, I said, “I’ve been in here in other bands.”

Lyndon: That’s crazy.

Neil: “I’ve met you before.” Yeah. And, nah. So it took…

Lyndon: Literally ’cause they thought it was just too far out of…

Neil: …the genre. Yeah. I think it probably, once I get the record out, it’s probably actually gonna sit more in the Melbourne funk scene, ’cause, years ago I used to play, right, in a band called Deep Street Soul.

And, Deep…

Lyndon: What band haven’t you played in?

Neil: Yeah, everyone else’s but my own. But Deep Street Soul was… ‘Cause I was only into really James Brown and Tower of Power and stuff like that when I, yeah, got into Deep Street Soul. And Deep Street Soul was New Orleans influence.

We were playing The Meters, but we were also playing UK funk, okay, New Mastersounds and stuff like that as well. So we were doing all that kind of really what I call street funk.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: Kind of real gritty street funk as well. And the thing that I loved the most about playing for that band is that we always played to a room full of people dancing.

It was great.

Lyndon: Wow. Okay.

What, none of this sort of crossed arms, this…

Neil: Yeah, the Melbourne city of the folded arms. And especially in the blues scene where everyone just sits in a chair and watches, and that’s fine. Wow. Yeah. That’s all right ’cause I love the blues the most.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And I thought, no, Hawker Heights is gonna hone in on this danceable side of things.

Lyndon: Beautiful, yeah.

Neil: Nice. And I’ll probably, once I get the record out, probably actually start hitting up, yeah, some similar bands to double header or support with, yeah, yeah, as well. That’s probably where it’s gonna go. But I think at the end of the day, the recording’s probably gonna dictate where we fit as well.

Yeah. So nobody knows where we fit yet ’cause they haven’t heard it.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: That makes sense.

Lyndon: Oh, looking forward to it.

Neil: Yeah, so am I.

Breallyn: We’ll come and dance for the album launch. When…

Lyndon: And then is the marketing budget, is that a massive consideration or, is it, I got the skills to be as efficient as possible with it. Yeah. So I know how to do the thing…

Neil: …on the socials, but I’ve also taught myself basic video editing and things like that, okay, and how to do a marketing plan and a release plan and, yeah, stuff like that as well, which is fine. But most of the marketing budget will probably just go into physical pressings, okay, as well. Yeah. So I’ve…

Wrapping Up: Neil’s Next Chapter

Lyndon: It’s been fascinating talking to you, Neil. I really, I’m glad that you were able to come in. We’re just able to learn more about your life and just how you’re moving through life as a musician, but also the practical work side that you’ve really embraced. I think that’s, my mind just boggles as to how you’ve done it, and I’m sure other people have…

Breallyn: Yeah, it’s very fascinating how, yeah, how you navigate those two worlds and make a good kinda life within both of them. That’s great.

Lyndon: And I think what I’m gonna hold onto is the statement you made where you said you actually don’t have it all together and you’re collapsing on the inside. So I’m gonna just…

Breallyn: I don’t think you said that.

Lyndon: What?

Neil: No, we are.

No, that, I did say…

Lyndon: That’s my, that’s my takeaway.

Neil: That’s a paraphrased version of it, but yes.

Breallyn: That’s going on a t-shirt.

Neil: But yeah, look, I was just gonna say too, the last thing I ever wanna do is give anyone the impression that mine or anyone else’s life is 100% together in this area, yeah, as well. It’s, at the moment, at the time of this recording, you actually captured me at a time of struggle as well. So I’m in between day jobs for stability.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: There’s been challenges, yeah, in the last couple of day jobs that have put me in this position as well.

Put myself in this position maybe a little bit, too.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: But also as a freelancer looking to rebuild up a consultancy as well, it’s actually much harder now than it was pre-COVID, yeah, for some reason. Yeah. Yep. Because there’s, we’re currently going through an economic climate where small businesses are looking at where to spend their money and where not to spend their money as well. So my value proposition is still building at this point. Yeah. And I’m currently, I’ve got a couple of leads, but not much.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: So all I’m doing now is spending some savings right now, yeah, and using the time to build up the consultancy.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: But also build up some activities and some content that I can do around that consultancy to generate awareness, yeah, as well. I am looking to put on a workshop in Preston very soon at a place called Hazel Bark Patisserie.

Lyndon: Oh, nice. I like the sound of both of those things.

Neil: It’s a patisserie that has a spare dining room to the left-hand side where I can run a workshop, and they’ve agreed to. So that’ll be a free invite to anyone to come in, and I’ll run them through all channels of digital as well.

Breallyn: That’s very cool.

Neil: So that will be the thing I’ll be doing. And of course I’ll be taking their email addresses as well. Yes.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah. Still king, yeah, email addresses. Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. But so I’m in, I guess I’m in community building mode at the moment, yeah, until it gets to the point where it’s like the work has to come to something.

Lyndon: Right.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: And you’ve gotta have…

Breallyn: Gotta convert somewhere.

Neil: …a little bit of faith that it will.

Breallyn: Yeah. It…

Lyndon: …will. Yeah. So yeah, if being a freelancer, you’re still in the hustle.

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: That’s never gonna go away.

Neil: Never.

The one lead I got last night was a really funny one. When I went to Nashville in, I wanna say 2014, I tried to get into a Vince Gill gig over there without pre-booking tickets, ’cause I’m an Aussie, right? So I can just rock up to things, right?

Lyndon: Yeah, obviously.

Neil: Yeah. Nope, it’s sold out, and they’ve got two sessions on in the afternoon.

And everyone’s filing into this venue. It’s in the middle of an industrial estate, so I can’t… I’ve already got a cab here. So I’m standing outside the door going, “Anyone got a spare ticket? Anyone got a spare ticket? Blah, blah, blah.”

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Some Aussies went past, and they said, “Yeah, if they’ve got one inside and we can buy one for you, would you just give us the money? Blah, blah, blah.” And it’s like, “I’m not sure how that’s gonna work, but okay. Thanks, Aussies.”

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: And these American guys come up to me from New York, and they were all from the New York Fire Department.

Lyndon: Oh, yeah.

Neil: They worked in the corporate side of things.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: I said, “Anyone got any spare tickets?”

“Not at the moment,” but they said, “We’ve got a friend who’s notorious for piking out on these things, and he’s back at the hotel room, and we think he’s gonna sleep through this.”

Breallyn: What?

Neil: Right?

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: 15 minutes later, yeah, the band’s already started. 15 minutes later, this guy comes out, and he goes, “Hey, pal. Have you got 20 bucks?” I’m like, “Yeah.” And he goes, “That’s all it’s gonna cost you. Here’s your ticket.” 20 bucks. And I befriended that guy. Yeah. And I’m friends with him on Facebook still.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Wow. And he sent me an inquiry last night to get some help on a website that they’re doing for some sort of fire safety thing in America as well.

Lyndon: Isn’t that mental?

Neil: Yeah. So that’s taken 12 years to eventuate. Wow. But, yeah, there’s a couple little things going on.

Lyndon: Hang on. Were you hustling back then or not really? You’ve just kept…

Neil: That. I put my first LinkedIn post in ages on LinkedIn last night, yeah, saying, “Look, let’s be honest here.

I need work.”

Here’s a photo of me playing guitar, but that only gives me 100 bucks in beer. I need real money.”

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: “Who needs something done?” And he messaged me immediately and said, “Where have you been?”

Breallyn: Wow.

Lyndon: And he’s still in the fire department, is he, or?

Neil: He’s doing stuff in that kind of rescue services industry, kind of thing on the corporate side of things in Ohio.

Lyndon: It’s incredible where your work comes from.

Neil: Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. Isn’t it? You just couldn’t…

Neil: Yeah.

Lyndon: …you couldn’t foresee that.

Neil: Yeah. And I still might have a really quiet time for leads for months now. Yeah. Or there might be five of them come in a week. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: It can be really unpredictable. I literally don’t know.

I find that, yeah, it’s… I hate the, you know, feast and famine thing, but it’s often that all, yeah, all the leads come in at once, and then you’re doing that for a while, and then all of a sudden you go, “I’m about to wrap up all these projects. Where’s the next ones?”

Lyndon: And we’ve almost lived like that.

We’ve been married 30 years this year. Yeah. And that’s pretty much been our life, hasn’t it?

Neil: Congrats.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Pretty much. Yeah. Essentially.

Neil: Yeah.

Breallyn: Thanks. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: That’s huge.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: That is huge.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Sorry, didn’t mean to make it about us.

Breallyn: That’s the way it goes.

Lyndon: But I was just thinking about, like, how long we’ve been in the hustle.

When we’re talking about, you don’t know when the work’s gonna come, and you might be in a time of leads for a while, I find that’s when I sorta go, “I’ve gotta try and, I have chosen a lifestyle industry. So let’s see if we can put a bit of, like,” yeah, “a weekend away or…” Rather than, we don’t really fret about it, but it can get to you at times. Yeah.

Neil: Yep.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Oh.

Breallyn: Neil, just before we wrap up, can you tell us your socials, how do people find you, discover your music, and discover your SEO stuff that, yep, they might be able to engage your services?

Neil: Yeah, so the music side of things is Hawker Heights. H-A-W-K-E-R Heights. That’s on Facebook, Instagram, a very dormant TikTok. And if you wanna look up Pickpocket, even though we’re on a long hiatus, it’s Pickpocket Funk.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: Not Pickpocket, the Norwegian black metal band.

Lyndon: Criminals. Oh, right.

Neil: Which is apparently a thing. There’s also my personal Instagram, which is Who Is This Neil Boland Character? That has information about where all, everything intersects on there. Yep. But it’s mostly about music nerdery.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: As well, we’ve got neilboland.online, which is my resume website, which may not be up forever, I don’t know.

For the digital marketing consultancy, so basically the three main services there are the consultancy side of things, where I literally just do the research and then sit down with the client and say, “This is what your plan is for the next three to six months.”

Breallyn: Yep.

Neil: Okay. To fix yourself online.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: Off the back of that, I may build them a website if they want it.

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: And also I’ll do some SEO auditing and research for what they need to do as well, and that’s at gumbo.online as well. I am very hesitant to say that I’m an SEO agency, because that’s a different business model. An agency usually has you on retainer, and they’re buying backlinks, and they’re trying to do everything they can to get you to rank.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Neil: I can’t promise that.

Lyndon: Right.

Neil: I won’t promise that. Yeah. But I could put you in a position where you’ve got the best chance of doing so, yeah, as well. So it’s more of an education piece where I actually literally sit down and talk to the client about, “This is what it does. This is how it works.”

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: “To get your best chance of being found, you gotta do this, and this.”

See how you go.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. But also if you’re gonna engage with an agency, have this knowledge up your sleeve before they send you the proposition for the retainer, and say…

Breallyn: Yes.

Neil: “Know your shit before you pay that much.”

Lyndon: Yep.

Neil: As well. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. ‘Cause it’s not cheap. Yeah.

Breallyn: It’s so worthwhile for businesses to do that, to really understand the landscape before they, yeah, engage someone ’cause, yeah, otherwise they’ve got no idea what they’re paying for.

Lyndon: And I think too there’d be an overwhelming majority of businesses that wouldn’t even know there’s a step they can take before that.

Neil: In between.

Lyndon: In between. Yeah.

Neil: And that’s kinda like the struggle of how I actually try and get, yeah, my clients, yeah, because I’m solving a problem they don’t know they kinda have. Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: Or I’m providing a service of value that they probably don’t think is out there, yeah, as well. But don’t… Anyway.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Neil: If they want it…

Breallyn: Very cool. Yeah.

Neil: Yeah. www.gumbo.online.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Fantastic.

Lyndon: Yep. Beautiful.

Breallyn: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time today and for joining us. You’re absolutely fascinating to talk to, and yeah, we’ve really enjoyed having you around.

Neil: Thanks. Thanks for letting me talk so much.

Lyndon: Yeah. No, not at all. Thank you. It’s been…

Breallyn: …great. All right.

Lyndon: We are out……ladies and gentlemen. We’re done.

Want more deep dives into the creative process? Our Patreon supporters get exclusive episodes and behind-the-scenes content.