Skeleten interview – “I’ve been mentalized for 20 years.”
Russell Fitzgibbon on album number two
“Yeah, I’m excited,” admits Russell Fitzgibbon, better known as the producer and songwriter Today, Eora/Sydney-based artist Skeleten.
He has good reason to be, even if his ultra-relaxed manner on our Zoom chat with him in Sydney, Australia, doesn’t betray that much of it. Not only is Fitzgibbon’s second album Mentalized about to be released, but his live band have been warming up their considerable skills with a handful of low key free shows around the city.
“We’ve just been rolling out singles,” he tells us, “because it’s nice for individual songs to have a little time in the sun. Then we’ve been doing a free nice, little, free shows in Sydney, with friends in support, which has been nice. Once the album’s out we’ll be doing some ticketed shows and a tour, so it’s good to get some easy chill ones under the belt.”
Considering that he’s already headlined Sydney’s iconic Opera House and supported everyone from The Streets he’s used to playing to some pretty big audiences. In the meantime, though, the chance to air the album’s gently invigorating grooves audience in front of a more intimate, friendly crowd has a definite charm. From the clips that Juno Daily saw, anyway, it felt like like most of the knew each other.
“I really like those kind of environments,” Fitzgibbon says. “We did three of them and basically the crowd was like 50/50 people who knew each other and people who didn’t, which I think is always a great ratio.”
With a background playing in groups followed by a stint “doing pretty straight up electronic music, DJing and playing in a duo,” the Skeleten project combines both elements, while being very much a ‘band’ thing.
“I think I really just enjoyed playing in a band more, having my friends around me, and I think I felt like the music, that would be the best context for the music to be in, with the energy of a band playing them. The music lends itself to that too – the production’s not over the top, there’s always a bit of drums, a bit of bass, and then only a few little synth sounds and samples. So it all translates pretty naturally.”
And, of course, as we point out, dance music didn’t begin with house music and drum machines. As Chic or James Brown could have told you, all you really need to get people dancing is a shit hot drummer.
“It really does help,” he laughs, “and I’m very lucky to say that I do have shit hot drummer. All of my stuff is very drums and bass focused and so that’s always the foundation of what we do. That’s the most fun way to play I think. I find myself, especially on this record even more than the last, being so groove focused. Every song is just a groove and it’s built on top of that.”
While there are definitely elements of both cultures at play here, Fitzgibbon sees the Skeleten material as very much in the song rather than track category. He’s certainly wary of creating something that has a foot in both camps but doesn’t really do either job properly.
“Obviously the Skeleten stuff is built around my love of dance music and club music and my love of that, but I always wanted to do one or the other – if it’s going to be dance music then it should be something a DJ can play, and if it’s going to be a song then it should work as a song.”
The album itself – while not a concept record, he says – does have a common theme, one which he previously summed up as “the feeling of your brain being shaped by all the forces in the world”. Was that his intent from the start, or did it emerge as the record took shape?
“I always just start writing leaving the mystery open and seeing what comes out, and then a thread comes out. I’d done about six demos and I started to realise this is the concept I’m talking from, it’s kind of realising ‘this is something I’m feeling’. It all seemed to come back to this feeling of wanting to get back into my body, feeling pressured and feeling like I wasn’t in touch with my core self. I wanted to remove the noise that we’re constantly bombarded with from the outside world and especially the modern age of attention economy and social media and the capitalist marketing and power structures that are spying on us and selling us everyday. I think that revealed itself, even in the sound of the music – and I think that shaped the lyrics and the way I conceptualised the songs.”
At the same time as he was writing the songs for the album, he tells us, he got into was watching self-styled ‘mentalist’ Derren Brown, and his amazing trickery too had an influence. “The whole mentalist thing, where they’re doing all these mind tricks to persuade people they think something they don’t.”
That’s when the title began to form in his mind. “Originally we were just joking about it – “I feel mentalized, I’ll mentalize you” or whatever. But that is really how I feel when I look at my phone. I’ve been mentalized for 20 years. But it’s incredible that that was happening then and yet we’re still where we are now.
“You see it with self-help books and life coaches, this rising tide in the last ten years. Now on Instagram and Tik Tok you’re bombarded with random people giving you life advice. I got diagnosed with ADHT – like most people in the world – a few years back and I’ve always struggled with it. Even that , though, there’s so much talk about it and so much analysis and so many people telling you ‘this is how you could be feeling, this is how you should be feeling’.
“It’s coming at you from all angles. I felt like it was a similar force where you’re stuck in this loop of protecting your own brain from people trying to influence it. The commodification of your own brain space for people to get clicks and likes and followers. That was the space I was really getting into when I was writing.”
However, there is redemption in store – eventually, anyway. Fitzgibbon says the album was written in pretty much chrnoloigical order, and by time we reach its closing track, ‘Mindreader’ – a lilting love song with plaintive African-style guitar trimmings – it feels like some kind of resolution and equilibrium has been achieved.
“The first half of it is really working through those issues,” he tells us, “while the second half is imaginings and expressions of feeling like that is changing a little bit. In the song ‘Let It Grow’ I’m in my body, I’m surrendering and transcending that noise a bit. Then right at the end of the album, ‘Mindreader’, that was actually the last track I wrote.”
Working he says, very much without an agenda – “it’s only when it’s doen that I reflect and go ‘that’s what it’s about’ – he says making the album has actually helped him work through the initial anxieties his brain threw up and emerge feeling stronger.
“It feels like I actually got somewhere in the process of writing it,” he says. “It’s quite a beautiful thing actually, because if I try too hard to do something it won;t happen. If I was sitting here trying to work through these big questions and these big struggles I’d get nowhere.”
With the album finished – it’s actually out in digital form and the vinyl arrives imminently – it’s time to start the whole creative cycle again. Between finishing the first album (Under Utopia) and it actually coming out, he was already playing around with new stuff and he says he in a similar timeframe now.
“There’s always stuff to do – videos to make, live stuff to get ready – but once you don’t make music for a while, when you’ve been mixing and mastering and playing live and that kind of thing, there’s new stuff there, even though it’s mainly subconscious. So by the time it comes out I’ve already got a bunch of little ideas kind of kicking around.”
There are shows in Australia to be announced shortly, although the Golden Plains festival – alongside PJ Harvey, Fontaines DC and Kneecap – is already on the books. The plan is to come to the UK and Europe in the middle of the year and hopefully do some shows.
He was actually in the UK last July and August, he tells us, on a little trip writing and experimenting with artists, “making some weird stuff and doing that fun process of seeing what comes out” with Harvey Causon, Pangea, Cameo Blush and Ghost Culture, as well as Mona Yim and Tobi Neumann out in Berlin. Naturally, there was a little time to immerse himself in London’s nightlife too. “There seemed to be something good to go to just about every night.”
“I feel attached to the UK now,” he concludes, “so I’ll definitely be back.”
Ben Willmott