Free Spirit: In Conversation with Crime & The City Solution’s Simon Bonney

While many of us Australian’s abroad find common ground with other music fans via the usual exports of Nick Cave and Rowland S Howard, Simon Bonney’s name is often (and criminally) omitted from such discussions.

Thankfully, not in the case of this publication’s co-founder, Banjo, and myself. Not only was Crime & The City Solution a vital link to our friendship, but the band’s influence also led to the eventual conception of Sun 13.

“Now that’s got to be a good thing.” says Bonney, smiling as I recount this story during our conversation over Zoom. “It’s nice when that generational thing comes.”

Bonney is no stranger around these pages (Banjo interviewed him back in 2021), and while perhaps in the shadows of his antipodean counterparts such as Cave, Robert Forster, and Tex Perkins, Bonney’s songs have always been as resonant, potent and permanent.

In many ways, Bonney’s story goes beyond the crowned quartet of Crime & The City Solution’s historical run of form that spawned Room of Lights (1986), Shine (1988), The Bride Ship (1989) and Paradise Discotheque (1990). (Even Bonney’s debut solo album, Forever, will go down as one of the most underrated releases since its release 31 years ago.)

Crime & The City Solution: The Killer

His nomadic tendencies, whilst interlinked with every Crime & The City Solution dispatch, are just as captivating. Having spent years scouring the ends of the earth, Bonney has travelled and lived in cities and towns throughout the Indo-pacific region, Europe and the United States. As far as the Crime & The City Solution story goes, whilst beginning in Sydney then Melbourne before arriving in Berlin and later Detroit, alongside fellow Crime & The City Solution constant and wife Bronwyn Adams, the pair come full circle with the band’s second Berlin manifestation.

Undoubtedly one of the most undervalued artists voices from Australian shores, Crime & The City Solution return with another jewel to be placed in the crown: The Killer.

Alongside a new band featuring Frederic Lyenn (piano, bass, synth), Donald Baldie (guitar), Georgio Valentino (synth, guitar), Chris Hughes (drums, percussion) and Joshua Murphy (piano, guitar), Bonney and Adams unfurl a new shade of darkness with The Killer – one of the year’s hallmark releases, showcasing some of the band’s finest works.

From the bourgeoning blues serenade of the seminal opener Rivers of Blood and the broken balladry of Hurt You, Hurt Me, to the sinister swoon of The River and the gospel-tinged Brave Hearted Woman, swelling with drama and emotion, it all leads into the harrowing finale, Peace In My Time – a song seemingly delivered by an omniscient god.

Omniscient he is not, of course, however through his endless travels and experiences, Bonney’s perspective of this world is far better than most. Our conversation took place last week, as Bonney talked about a variety of issues, including the band’s past, its present, and what has transpired in between.

Sun 13: While many might feel that the band gets together occasionally and records an album then tours, I imagine it’s quite different from your perspective. Is Crime & The City Solution something that’s been in your everyday thinking over the years?

Simon Bonney: “I’ve been thinking about that recently. The way I write is dependent upon… it’s kind of experientially based. In my life, I think I’ve done the things that I needed to do and wanted to do, and sometimes that’s music. I don’t think it means I’m less committed to music, it just means that I will have a set of experiences, and, at some point, I’ll analyse them for music, and then I’ll turn it into a record.

“A lot of the experiences that I’ve had through work will enable me to see the world through other people’s eyes… to the extent that that’s possible. Obviously, it’s still constructed through my worldview and all the limitations on our ability to see through other people’s eyes. You’re an Australian, so I can speak to the Australian experience. I found it a very rich experience working in the remote indigenous communities of the Northern Territory. Everybody in Australia, it would seem, has an opinion on Indigenous Affairs.”

S13: For sure.

SB: “Yet, so few Australians actually know any indigenous people. I don’t claim to know, I just claim to have been to a lot of their communities, and I’ve spoken to a lot of people. It’s complicated…

(Pause)

“I feel privileged for those experiences, and to have shared time with people and spoken to them. I was there for work, but there would be other times when you’re just casually talking to people and it became a personal thing. It became a localised thing, as opposed to a broader political issue, which most people look at it in, because you experience it through the mediation of newspapers or politics.

“For me, the personal experience is much more important. But at the same time, I also feel like it was important to witness those things, because it’s such an often-discussed issue, particularly around the intervention, because that’s when I was there. We were doing oversight of the intervention and taking complaints about it.

“I think it’s important to see those things, and then those things end up in my music in some way or another. They end up in bureaucratic papers, and they end up in art. To me they’re the same things. In the same way that Hunter S. Thompson was about embedding in his environment, and then writing about it. He also was a character in his own observation, so he acknowledged that that was impossible to just be the fly on the wall. It’s difficult now for financial reasons with the investigative journalism; the chances to actually go and spend a year researching your subject is just impossible. But that’s how I write.

“Some people can write in a in a white room, black room, and it’s all in their head, that’s their way of writing. But my way of writing is very dependent upon what’s going on outside and where I am, where I’m located.”

S13: Because The Killer started out as PHD, right?

SB: “It did!”

S13: How far were you into working on it before you realised that this was an album?

SB: “Well, it could still be a PhD. I could go back to it. I was a long way in, 100 pages. It was the pandemic. It was a choice decision more than an artistic decision. Universities, where everybody that put their hand up to supervise, suddenly took redundancy, retired. There was a huge contraction in universities. Virtually everybody, every institution does PhDs, so there are a lot of PhDs out there. It just wasn’t for me. And it was office based – I can’t do the office space thing. I have tried, not all the time, but I need to be outdoors, or at least traveling. I do like living in hotels.”

S13: Listening to Beyond Good and Evil from American Twilight, and what instantly sparked was the influence that David Eugene Edwards had on that song. It got me thinking about how you work with different people and whether that gives you a fresh approach to your own songwriting?

SB: “Oh, yeah. It’s a collective. It was great working with David, he’s a really interesting person. He brings his own very unique perspective to the world.”

S13: It’s interesting, because you’ve both had new albums out within the two weeks of one another.

SB: “Is that right? Oh wow, I’ll have to have a listen to that. David is a unique person. [But] yeah, we’d find a group of people that we’d be interested in collaborating with. We would approach it in many different ways, like American Twilight, the musicians provided the music, and I provided the words. On this one, it was a bit different. I had rudimentary song structures that I’m always completely dependent upon the contribution and the interaction.

“The way that I like to write at the moment is, I’ll have a rudimentary set of chords with a chorus, and then we’ll lay that down. And then people put music over the top of that… and then there’ll be a conversation between the music that’s written and overlaid. Then the lyrics, and so I’ll leave the verses empty. I just have a couple of slivers of ideas… and then the lyrics will build with the music. That’s how I like writing at the moment.”

S13: Having your life partner in the band, how much influence does Bronwyn have on your ideas before you take them to the whole band? Do you bounce ideas off her?

SB: “Oh, yeah. Always. She’s very instrumental in the approach. How to capture the subject. I was interested in the way in which you construct the world. Those really fundamental questions of whether or not my worldview is unique to me, and that I’m completely alone because, actually, there’s no intersubjectivity really, it’s imagined. So therefore I view the world, and it’s my own solo experience (laughs). I talked to her about that. We have great chats. It’s one of the nicest things about our marriage. She’s a very interesting person and she has many, many interests.”

S13: Marriage is hard enough throughout the years, but also being in a band together, there aren’t many couples around from your generation.

SB: “Oh, yeah. Marriage is hard. (laughs) You know, there are some people you’re meant to be with. We went through lots of different phases, but fundamentally we have a very similar… I don’t know if I could put it into words exactly, but there’s some kind of primordial understanding and compatibility that has kept us going.”

S13: The farmer is a recurring character throughout the record, and having listened to Paradise Discotheque and the recurring The Last Dictator, it got me thinking: is there a subconscious link to these two albums?

SB: “Oh, yeah. Not intentionally, but, you know, Dick wanted to control the world and he got all the things that he wanted, and it didn’t end well for him. That’s certainly been my experience. (laughs) That old adage, be careful what you wish for.

“I’m interested in power dynamics, and I’m also interested in the personal versus the geopolitical. It occurred to me quite young that there was a lot of the personal in the political world. It wasn’t this rational calculation, or there were animosities and jealousies… a lot of it was very personal. It was about people’s personal interactions that made quite massive decisions, and I was interested in writing about that. That’s in this one as well. There’s that dimension to it.”

S13: Rivers of Blood is one of the best you’ve written, I think. Was a that a song that came early in the process?

SB: “Thank you! It was the first one ever recorded. It was originally recorded in L.A. with me playing acoustic guitar and singing and Mark Lanegan doing a second vocal. That’s where it began. That’s why we dedicated the record to Mark because it wouldn’t exist but for him and his support. He really brought me back into music. We had great fun making that song.”

S13: Hurt You, Hurt Me has a beautiful depth as well. It feels like a song that a younger Simon Bonney may not have written. Would that be fair to say?

SB: “Yeah. I mean, I was a terrible young person. I was born old, and as soon as I accepted that I was a lot happier. I like writing about this period, this time in life. I think you can relate to that as a younger person, but I am interested in communicating to people of my own generation and about that experience. I never expected to get to be 62, frankly, and did pretty much everything that I could to not get here, so getting here is a surprise in of itself. (laughs) I’m very glad that I’m in my ’60s. It’s an interesting time.

“I’m writing a book that a dear friend commissioned me to write and I appreciated the offer. It occurs to me that I’ve always had questions that I wanted to answer… and I’ve got this construct in my head that you’ve got to answer it before you die… because then you reset and you lose all the information that you had during your life. So, as you get older, there’s a greater urgency to answer that question. I find it a very interesting period in life.”

S13: Talking about locality from your time in the Indigenous communities, Witness is a song to me that has no currency insofar as I think it could have been on any Crime album. It just encompasses what you were saying about songwriting, your perspective, and seeing it through that lens…

SB: “That actually connects to living in L.A. There’s the desert outside of L.A. I was born in Sydney, but I spent a lot of time in Tasmania in the country, which is extremely green and cold. It was hot, too. I never thought I liked the desert, but I came to love the desert after years of accidentally ending up in them. The more I spent time in the desert, the more details I saw, whereas before, it was an arid, hostile environment. And then I started to see all these other elements to it, which I found really engaging.”

S13: In Tasmania, am I correct in saying that you grew up on a farm?

SB: “Partially correct. I was born and grew up in Sydney, but my father’s family came from a farm in Tasmania, so I spent all the school holidays there. I worked there for under a year as a farmer when I was 16.”

S13: Do you think that’s had an influence in your music? I ask this because out of all the bands that came up in that period, The Bad Seeds, The Birthday Party, etc., I always thought that Crime echoed a locality more so than any of those bands…

SB: “I think that’s true. The farm was safe. There was a lot of uncertainty; my parents were quite different. There’s a connection between Bronwyn’s parents and my parents. Not that they knew each other, but they were both bohemians… my parents were very bohemian. They were wealthy bohemians… my father was an academic. It was chaotic. There wasn’t the regularity that you got with a farm. Everything [has] a safety, a routine, and Bronwyn, interestingly, had a very chaotic childhood, too. She had grandparents, which represented stability and one of the things that we shared, this very kind of bohemian, immediate family, and then this very traditional, very safe other life that we would go to.

“I mean, the whole seasons thing on a farm. It would just follow this routine, but at the same time, you had to learn to live with the unpredictability of nature, which I found interesting. Like, if you cut your grass and it rained, then you will just have to set it on fire. Nature was there, you had to live with it… it was stronger than you were. There was this weird coexistence that exists between farmers and nature, which I found very interesting.”

S13: That’s basically what the farmer is fighting against on The Killer, right?

SB: “Yeah!”

S13: Talking about that tension, you’ve got the new band now, and you’ve got a tour that starts soon. Has it been fun?

SB: “It has been fun. It’s been a learning and growing to know each other kind of experience. It’s been very gratifying. One of the limitations of playing with people that are in other bands is not an artistic one. Artistically it’s fine, but there are certain restrictions on how much you can tour, because people have other commitments. So, because I’d like to do this for like… I think there’s three records that I would like to make, which this is the first, so I’ll probably play music for the next 10 years or longer… who knows, depending on if I’m around. (laughs).

“But yeah, I have enough material and enough interest to create three records. I always write in threes. I wanted to have a band that had the possibility of touring a lot, because I don’t think we’ve ever really done that. We’d make a record and then a would tour… and then go into hiatus for 12 months, and then do another one. I wanted to experience what it was like to really do long tours.”

S13: Do you think that feeds into your love for hotels?

SB: “Oh, yes, absolutely! I like to be able to leave anywhere in 15 minutes. My favourite home that I’ve ever had was an apartment in a hotel in Papua New Guinea. It was great, because you flew up there – you could only take two bags. Someone would come in and clean your room every couple of days and it had a kitchen a television and just everything that I needed.”

S13: Speaking of that, you’ve travelled and lived in so many remote places in the world, experiencing things that 90 per cent of people won’t ever see or experience themselves. With a song like Peace In My Time, it’s a very harrowing song, which got me thinking about everything happening in the world now. Do you think that we will ever find a collective peace?

SB: “No. But that’s okay, in the sense that that just is. I look at it in terms of… when I was locked down in the pandemic, I’m sitting in the suburbs of Melbourne, which I frankly found the most alienating experience of my life. People weren’t competing against each other, but people would go out and work, and then they would buy all their trinkets and reward themselves for working – their cars and their houses and their seven bathrooms; naturally, because you compare yourself to the people that you see every day.

“I have found in the places that I’ve been where, by our standards, life is really hard. I had a friend in Papua New Guinea, who was proudly telling me that his daughter was able to tell the children on the bus how to engage with masked men who got on those school buses and stole their money at gunpoint. But he thought that he was better off than we were. He was a Bougainville man, and he knew he was a Bougainvillian, and he had this long set of stories and identity and location that he associated with. And he thought that way because we were immigrant, we didn’t have that connection, so we were untethered.

“So, I don’t know. I’ve seen very happy people who have what we would consider in the West to be very little. And I’ve seen very miserable people in the West that seemingly would have a lot. I’m very grateful that I’ve seen what the vast majority of the world is like. It really does get down to… you want to have security of water and food and shelter, and that doesn’t exist in a lot of places.”

S13: Having been involved with music for so long now, with tech and streaming, do you think people care as much about art as they once did and whether it has the same power of the past?

SB: (Pause) “That’s a good question. I don’t really know the answer. I’m catching up to the way in which things are right now, and it’s changed. When I came back, I thought of making singles and being reviewed in NME or Melody Maker. Those days have gone. (laughs) It’s certainly financially quite the challenge to make a living as a musician. I think there’s a really important place for music at the moment. When the world’s in a very dynamic place, which it is at the moment, I think music has a really important place.

“I really love Tina Fey. I love Lenny Bruce. Humour’s interesting that it can deal with very complex political problems, but in a way that tricks you. It makes it a safe environment to engage with what would normally get people into taking sides. They would become very polemic. But humour is something everyone can relate to and gets you in there. Music can do the same thing. You can deal with things because you’re not dealing with it in a dry, direct, opinionated way.

“Again, musically, I love Lou Reed because, like Hunter Thompson, he’s both a character, but he’s a non-judgmental character in his own song. There’s some ambivalence about it, but he writes Heroin or Waiting for My Man about what’s is like and how other people in that environment view it, or how he sees them viewing it and how he views it himself as being one of the members of that environment. But he does it without a judgement. There’s no ‘this is good, this is bad’. This is. Then you get a view of this world. It’s like an historical document if you want to understand what it was like in the ’60s in a particular group. I think his songs are excellent historical documents of what that time was like. An oral history.”

S13: Yeah, I think Walk On the Wild Side is one of the best songs ever written.

S13: “Absolutely! And that’s how I try to write. I see it as an historical recording. I found it interesting to go out and meet people hear them talk about the way in which they experience life, how they lead their lives, and then to try and somehow document that in a neutral way… so that I’m portraying within the human capacity to convey how their lives are. I did that in The Killer. There are some experiences in there that just come from observation.”

The Killer is out ow via Mute. Purchase from Bandcamp.