1995

New Zealand expatriate Jan Hellriegel, having chosen Melbourne as her new home base after a hugely successful debut album in her home country, now finds herself starting from square one with a new album in a new country. ANTHONY HORAN caught up with Jan to talk about the forthcoming album and the new single from it, Pure Pleasure.

by Anthony Horan

Jan Hellriegel could possibly be a publicist’s worst nightmare - but not for the usual reasons. There’s no pretentious wanna-be star attitude here, no hotel room trashing, no controversial political statements or nasty comments about fellow inhabitants of the musical planet. Jan Hellriegel is a moderately tall person who plays music. She has, she insists, no "image" to speak of. She has, however, come up with a truly stunning album, a dark, twisted, and very melodic collection of songs which goes under the name Tremble. The songs within weave intricate and unconventional pop tunes with spiky lyrics delivered by a voice that sounds like it’s balancing on the edge of sanity. It’s by no means a conventional record, as was signalled by the first single lifted from it earlier this year, the impossibly intense wall of sound that was Manic. In fact, the newly released single Pure Pleasure, with its straightforward structure and euphoric chorus, is likely to give many who hear it the idea that Jan Hellriegel is a nice fluffy pop star. But delve into the tracks on the album - still some months away from release - and you realise that the fluffy exterior is only there to distract you from the knives hiding behind it. It’s a brilliant record, the kind a mere single can’t do a proper job of representing.

"The thing about this album," says Jan, "is that I have done an album before this, but this one’s definitely more me. I love this album. I learnt a lot between the two. So I’ve got this amazing album, but it’s not instantly accessible. If you take a single out from it - like Manic - it’s very hard to understand what the whole album’s about. You have to hear the whole thing. So anyway, we released it in New Zealand, and where the last album had a few hits on it, this one takes a bit of time. But this is how I want to write music, this is me. It’s not as easy as the last one to get out there, but I think in the long run it’ll be a stayer. I’m really proud of it, it’s taken me a long time to get to this point where I can say I really like an album." To handle the task of producing the record, Jan employed the increasingly in-demand Daniel Denholm, who also helmed Max Sharam’s album and ended up with an ARIA nomination in the process. Denholm’s fondness for string sections is much in evidence on Jan’s album, as is his knack for getting to the very essence of a song and making sure the essence stays there right through to the final mix.

"What a national treasure he is!" Jan says enthusiastically of Denholm. "I was really pleased to use someone from Australasia, because if I had gone to America to do it, it would have sounded like everything else that comes from there. It was just a pleasure working with Daniel. I don’t know why everyone always thinks a record’s better if it comes from America, I have no idea. All I know is that I’m glad I haven’t been there yet - I want to go over there one day, but I’m glad I’ve been quite insulated from it, because I haven’t had all these massive influences, people telling me what I should sound like. Consequently I think the album sounds very original, an honest attempt at making a bunch of songs breathe."

Tremble is a darker and stranger creature than much of the material Denholm has recently produced, though, and as a result is his most intriguing production work to date. There are no radio-safe options being taken here, something that didn’t surprise Jan at all.

"What Daniel does is bring out the best in the artist. You can’t blame a producer for making your record sound a certain way - you’ve got to take responsibility for that yourself. All he does is interpret the song in the way you want it done. I don’t know how to push all the buttons, for a start, and he knows how to get the best performance out of people. But he doesn’t write the songs. He’s just really good at picking up on how they’re supposed to sound. When I first did my demos, I did them with a band I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to do an album with them - they were really rockist, and I just felt something was wrong and lost interest. But then, when I met Daniel, he said that he thought I should play the guitar, and take the songs back to how I originally wrote them and build them up from there, rather than base it around the band. And now I’ve got a great band, which made everything really easy. Everyone involved was amazing, from the recording studio people on. I enjoyed making the album here."

Jan’s self-confessed image problem, meanwhile, is going to make getting the new single and the album to the public’s ears more of a challenge than usual. The album is its own best advertisement - Jan speculates that word-of-mouth will do much of the job - but even so, it’s a commendably brave record company that gives an artist complete freedom from interference and lets them make an album their own way.

"What record company," says Jan, "lets you go off for three months and doesn’t even know what’s going to be on the album? I only demoed about half the album - the rest they hadn’t even heard. Manic, for example, was written the day before we went into pre-production. Warner have been really wonderful. And I don’t really know why, because I’ve never made it particularly easy for them. I’ve got no gimmick - I just try to be myself. I don’t want a gimmick at all; I don’t want to dye my hair green, I don’t want to be zany or kooky or a babe-chick rock person. I don’t want to be any of those things. I just want to be me. I think the album speaks for itself - I don’t need to be dressed up seductively on the front cover to sell it."