As excitement builds for the inaugural Mullum Roots Festival headlined by The Waifs, Seven talked to one third of this iconic Australian act, Vikki Thorn about so many things…
Vikki, it’s been almost eight years since your last album – the celebration of your 25th anniversary in 2017 – what’s been happening for The Waifs since then?
So much – we write songs separately and we’ve all got solo projects going on, and they seem to be our pet projects right now. You know, Josh (Cunningham) and Felicity (Urquhart), who are also performing at the festival at Mullum, are doing an album a year, so they’re always busy with that. So we’ve, we’ve got to find the time to write.
The Waifs have always written songs separately, and then we just bring them to the band, and everybody puts their part to it. The album, which we haven’t written yet, which I think should be our next album – I’m still trying to convince the others of this, is the one we sit down and write together – we haven’t had that discussion yet.
We haven’t written a song together for 30 years, since we used to busk on the beach in Yallingup.
In theory that would be a fairly new process for you?
Yeah, yeah, and not an easy one, because, as we’ve grown older with sort of our interests – on the outside, I think it seems like maybe we don’t love the same sorts of music anymore. But I think there is a commonality there, and we have to go back to our roots to find it. I don’t think it would be difficult for us to do – we’re all songwriters, we’ve done it for a long time, but for some reason, the idea of it seems difficult.
It’s like doing the washing – it’s not so bad once you actually put it in the machine?
Yeah – the idea sits there, and you look at it for a long time, but I feel like that’s what we need to do. So I’ll keep dropping the hints and the seeds, you know … we’re still getting a lot of gigs, which is great, and headlining festivals, and we are performing new songs, and we are also bringing back some of the songs that we’d abandoned over the years because we felt like we’d outgrown them – we felt like they were a bit young, they were too silly. But we recently brought them back in the set, and it was really fun to play.
Who gets which songs?
That raises a question: you’re all songwriters with your own solo projects, and then you’re doing things together. If you start writing a song that’s ‘for The Waifs’, do you ever say, ‘hang on a second, his is a really good one…’
Maybe I’ll keep it for myself? YES!
It sort of does happen depending on what project you’re working on. But also, I definitely write songs that I feel like are Waifs songs, and then I’ll write songs that are definitely not Waifs songs, ones I feel like just wouldn’t suit – how I imagine them to be performed isn’t the same setup. Maybe I want male harmonies, not female harmonies or something like that.
The last song I wrote, I sat down very intentionally to write a Waifs song, and by that I mean, I was going to write something that rhythmically would suit Donna – her guitar playing, and a song that we can all sing in a range that we can all sing in. I’m going to try and put it to a beat of a song that I know we all like already.
So I tried to take elements, and then I wrote it about the Waifs too, I wrote it about the three of us. And it worked because they liked it and they wanted to play it. So I think we can, as writers now, instead of just responding to our environment, be a bit more intentional with what we want to achieve.
We are quite different
Have you been wrong before – in as much as you wrote something for the Waifs and it turned out crap, or you’ve written something for yourself, and it turned out great for the Waifs?
All the time! That comes down to, we are quite different in what we like, so I’ve gotten it wrong plenty of times, where you take a song and they’re like, ‘oh, you know, I’m not really into that so much.’ And so that ends up in your solo project.
What is your current ear worm?
I’m listening to a lot of ‘80s. I’m revisiting when I was 13, revisiting my pre-adolescence. And the reason for that is, I’m 51 – my kids are moving out, and life can feel pretty heavy sometimes, and I’ve gone back to an era where the music was sort of meaningless and just had no weight to it, and it had nothing I needed to think about or consider. It was just a bop. And so that’s where I want to spend my time alone, in positive headspace. It’s not about me wanting to be a teenager!
So you know, George Michael, Wham, Madonna, Cindy Lauper, I was a child of the early ‘80s. So, yeah, that’s where I’m going right now.
What’s inspiring you at the moment? What’s really getting you up and out of bed every morning to write creatively?
That would be, actually my son, who’s 14, and we live half-an-hour out of town, so every day we do this drive, right? Half-an-hour together, and he’s sort of just gone through pre-teen stuff where we couldn’t communicate, and we’re on the other side of that now, and, and he just DJs and plays music. So I’m discovering music through him – and the interesting thing is that he always comes up with these songs that I know from the ‘80s. You know these songs, they come back around …
So that’s really inspiring to me, because I’m getting all these other influences we both have discovered, separately, and recently we love Big Thief, which is a American band. I didn’t introduce it to him, but we both have come to it ourselves and discovered that we love it, and so just that exploration of music is inspiring to me.
Vikki the ‘Golden Child’
Now you guys are ‘grown up’ does Donna still like treat you like the little sister?
No, I mean only in that I’ve got TWO older sisters, right? They always refer to me as the ‘golden child’, and they like to make a point of reminding me that I’ve always had it easier than them. You know that I was always the favourite – in that way. Yeah, but no, Donna and I have been sort of around the wheelhouse enough that, you know, she’s supported me and I’ve supported her, and we’ve driven each other crazy, and we still do things that cycle around, where I think we’ve played different roles for each other at different times …
Are you having enough fun?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah! I committed to that probably two years ago. I was perimenopausal and I just sort of, was getting bogged down with the heaviness and the weight of everything, and I realised that I didn’t have a lot of fun. So every day now I seek it. The fun I have every day driving with my son, and singing those songs together, and my next door neighbour is a fantastic singer, and we get together and sing and walk on the beach every night and swim at night, and that’s heaps of fun. So, yeah, I’m sort of trying to cultivate that because I think it is something you have to cultivate, and dancing, that’s a thing, just dancing in the house, and trying to have fun without any alcohol.
Have you been to Mullum lately?
No, I haven’t been to Mullum for years. Not for maybe 15 years
Is there anything that you’re bringing to the festival that your fans will not have heard before?
Oh, yeah, there’s a couple of new songs, definitely, and we are also toying with this idea of playing these ones that haven’t been in our set for years because they’re fun to play, and just sort of casting off the stigma that, ‘oh, you know, it’s too silly’, or, ‘we’re more mature now,’ and just going, ‘well that represents that time in our lives – let’s put that back in’.
The Waifs will headline the Mullum Roots Festival on both nights.
See mullumrootsfest.com for the full program.
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