Some drummers are masters of the instrument, some are great to work with, and still others are successful by being a part of a group of musicians who collectively stamp their mark on the world. Jon Farriss is one drummer who is all of these. As the driving force behind INXS, one of Australia's most successful bands, he has played with, written music for, and toured the world with the band for nearly two decades. He is a masterful rock drummer with a powerful groove and a very individual style, one that incorporates a lot of percussion colours. He has developed this style in relation to the music that INXS plays, which Jon describes as funky rock and roll. He has always been into drums, and has worked very hard to follow his musical dreams. His success and the success of the band didn't just happen, everyone was working towards the same goal even before they got together as a band. And now, with recent tragic events, Jon has to face a future that might not include INXS.
The interview for this article was originally scheduled for before Christmas, but other events took over, and we weren't sure it would even go ahead. In the end, Jon himself felt he needed to make some kind of statement, if only to openly say what he has been thinking. Currently in Phuket in Thailand, he called me up on his mobile, and we carried on a conversation whilst Jon was driving through some magnificant scenic areas in an old classic Alfa Romeo Spider - the same model that Dustin Hoffman drove in the movie 'The Graduate'. He sounded very positive, and was only too happy to be talking about what he loves - drumming (at one point, in a conversation that was interrupted a couple of times through bad reception, Jon was keen to get me to listen to a 30 foot log drum he had come across at an old antique shop - it sounded deep, full of tone, just beautiful). One thing came through most clearly when doing this interview, and that is that Jon sees himself as a drummer, and that will continue in some form no matter what. As he put it himself, he is a survivor, and is just as dedicated to making good music on his chosen instrument as he ever was.
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by: Paul Matcott
PM: As always Jon, I begin with questions about early musical influences; What attracted you to playing drums?
JF: "Just an innate attraction really, from a very early age - 3 or 4. I just had this buzz every time I even saw an image of a drum let alone a real one. It's fair to say that there may be some spiritual aspect to it, in the sense that I seemed predestined to be a drummer. I don't sit around and try to work out the reasons why, but I do feel that there was an innate calling. The first drum I had was a toy drum, which I got around the age of three or four, around the time I first started at kindergarten. I remember my first day at kindergarten, and there was this musical area, sort of a stage, that I immediately went over to and started banging on the drum that was there. So, drumming just feels like something that I was naturally attracted to. I got my first drum kit at about the age of seven and even that was a makeshift sort of arrangement, a couple of steps up from pots and pans that I had used. I just sat around playing along to these marching music records my dad had, featuring old tunes like "Anchors Away" and such. My dad basically built that kit. The snare drum was like a tambourine without the rattles. I was probably the logical choice to do the gig at my primary school playing snare drums as all the kids marched into class. (didn't every primary school in the country have one of those bands at the time?) It was a good first gig because I got to come to class twenty minutes late which was okay by me."
PM: I read somewhere that your father had played some snare drum in his day and taught you some stuff; how did you find that as a foundation for your drumset playing?
JF: "I have to say straight off that I don't see myself as a master of the technique of drumming. I doubt that I could explain successfully in drummers language what I do on the kit. There is no technique in the sense of a learned pattern or a technical foundation that I got from another drummer or a teacher. What I have done is to follow what interests me, syncopated drumming and percussion, and tried to integrate these ideas into whatever song I am playing to the best of my ability. I might be playing a fairly straight sort of drum beat and I will always try to add some inflections to that in much the same way a percussionist would. In terms of my 'technique' that is how I have approached playing the drumset. I started to use the toms, use odd tunings to the drums or even vary the way I hit things, to just add some more colour to the basic drum feel, to create something unusual. I wanted to be unconventional, I didn't want to sound like everyone else, which I think was very helpful in developing my own sense of technique. I wanted to have the balls of John Bonham combined with the extra colours of 'Weather Report' or 'Talking Heads'. That was the intention at least in terms of my style of drumming."
PM: Who were some of you early influences in terms of drummers?
JF: "Ringo Starr from the Beatles was my first love. His simplicity and his sense of what was appropriate for the music was what impressed me most. Clearly, there were others influencing his choices - George Martin as producer, McCartney and Lennon writes - but he was the one who was doing the playing. He helped to define the idea of pop drumming, which is about playing a beat that you can sing, or if you like playing for the music, for the song, INXS was never into drum solos or lengthy guitar solos per se. We have always preferred to go for something melodic, something that people can sing, that they can remember. We are all capable of doing all the other heavy musical stuff but have always thought it was the wrong approach for us. We didn't want to compete with other musicians, we wanted to play something original and unusual, which in it's own way could become a trademark sound, identifiably INXS. I applied that concept of simplicity that I think Ringo epitomises to my drumming, and I would say that the concept of simplicity (for the sake of clarity and communication) has been behind all of our song writing and production."
PM: What about some of your earliest playing experiences, before INXS; you were out working in bands for a few years before INXS was formed.
JF: "I was working 'professionally' if you like (meaning I was getting paid something) by age 14. I was working with a club band as we called it then, doing weddings, parties and such. I was playing with guys who were around their early twenties. Funnily enough I recently found an old tape that band made at the ABC studios in Sydney around 1975, and it was a real surprise - it sounded pretty good! We were playing stuff by 'Chicago', the 'Doors', all the stuff that was current then, mostly in a progressive rock style. It was jazzy, with some fairly technical arrangements and such. At the time that was my bread and butter, but my passion was with the garage band I was rehearsing original material with. My whole upbringing was about playing original music. The guys that I played with or just practised with from my neighbourhood were all very serious about our music. We worked very hard, practising and getting together to work on stuff nearly every day. We were really concentrating on learning how to write songs, not just learning how to play covers. We wanted to know all about arrangements - why did someone put this chord right here, why is the tempo right for this feel, all that kind of learning, not just copying. Andrew and I used to play nearly every day in our garage. He had an organ that he got from the local church and I had my drums and we would just get together and play. Much of the interaction that we have as players goes back to those days. His left hand would be playing the bass and his right hand was going crazy on the melody and I just played whatever fitted with that. To this day he and I can just get together and play, and know that the level of communication is still there."
PM: I have seen INXS live a couple of times in big concert settings, and one of the strongest memories I have is just how tight the band were live.
JF: "We certainly worked at being together as a group, but some of it came from our familiarity with each other as players, that's for sure. Some of it also came from the great Australian tradition of performing in pubs and similar venues. It wasn't just us, bands like the Divinyls, Jimmy Barnes with Cold Chisel were in the same boat; Australian bands had a reputation for being good live performers.
The other thing too was that the members of INXS were all into the same thing musically; when Andrew and I were jamming together we were working on all this funky stuff. We grew up in the time of punk and disco, and the whole thing with INXS was to mix the two, and what came out of that was funky Rock and Roll."
PM: Did you listen to a lot of different musical styles when you were young?
JF: "I grew up with the kind of Latin music that was popular at the time. My parents would listen to Sergio Mendez, Herb Alpert and people like that. Again, it was more in the direction of the songs rather than instrumental music. It had good production, good musical arrangements, and it felt good. Then I got into more jazz oriented stuff such as 'Weather Report', that fusion of jazz and rock, that was exciting, and I have to say that I am a bit of a frustrated jazz player in the sense that I would love to play more of it."
PM: Let's talk a little about how you play. You have been performing on some of the biggest stages in the world for quite a while now, and have for many years used a mix of both acoustic drums and electronic equipment. Tell us a little about what you use and how you use it.
JF: "In terms of technology, it will depend on the song that I'm working on, if any, sequential parts are being used. I always like to use a sequencer when I am recording a track, to act as the click track. I don't like just using a click, so I put something down on a sequence that I can play along with. It will usually be something that is appropriate to the track, like a shaker playing sixteenths or something similar. It makes the playing more enjoyable, and hopefully more relevant to the song. Often, the sequential part I play to use as a click will end up on the track.
In the studio we use computers, running Cuebase or Vision Pro, and we run MIDI chains of Akai 3200's or some other kind of MIDI device and quite often we use some phase sequencing and some cool kind of keyboard pattern. For the songs that I write myself, the drum track will go on a sequencer first, then we will add to that."
PM: What about live? How do you combine the acoustic and electronic elements?
JF: "I went through this whole phase around the time of the Kick and X albums where I was triggering everything. I was playing acoustically, but every tom and drum had a mic on it that went through a triggering device that would then make a sequential imprint in a computer. Then we would offset the MIDI delay of that, and the variations of that, to be precisely recorded in the computer, so that at any time I could mix sounds in with it. That enabled the actual live performance to be kept, but some of the sounds were rearranged. From there, I would record all of that and then sample various effects. I would put these on separate left and right channels, get the acoustic dry sample of whatever drum I am playing and mix them together, on an Akai S1000 trigger all of this live. So each song would have it's own 'studio' effect if required, and I could monitor these effects on stage. I had two Akai S1000's, each loaded with successive songs, so that as I was playing one song, and controlling the sound through one S1000, the other one was already loading the next song ready to use. I was controlling these with an MPC 60 sequencer. What this meant was that I could be in charge of all of these effects live - my sound was mine to play with, and to control. There was a lot of controversy through that 'X' period where we did the 'Live Baby Live' album, where at one point Molly Meldrum on 'Humdrum' held up the album to the audience and proclaimed that 'if INXS are going to do a live album, make it a LIVE album' meaning simply that it sounded too produced to be considered a live album, even though it was in fact a recorded live performance, not a studio production. Such was the state of our performance technology at that time. These days the studio thing is much more simple. Even to the degree that on the last album, 'Elegantly Wasted', I went out and bought an antique Ludwig kit, a blue sparkle kit from around 1967 which was in mint condition, down to the original heads. Garry Beers had given me this book on the Beatles recordings, and it had a lot of detail about their studio setup - where and how they used mics for various effects and such. So I copied a lot of those ideas; I went from using something like 24 mics on the kit, to using four! Half the album was recorded that way - using just four mics on the kit. (the other half was done using the whole system, all 24 mics)"
PM: You aren't going completely acoustic are you?
JF: "Well no, I'm still using four pads to trigger anything from brass stabs to percussion sounds to vocals. I have even sampled my bass drum so as to allow me to play a bass drum sound with my left hand when I want to. I can do a wicked double bass drum thing without actually using my feet!"
PM: I find that whole approach to producing sounds such a fascination - to see someone producing a sound in other than the 'conventional' way, can add so much to the visual side of the performance, because it looks so unconventional.
JF: "Right, people look at it and they don't hear, say, the vocal sound, that you are producing, they tend to 'hear' a drum, because that's what it looks like you are doing - hitting a drum, even though the sound might be nothing like a drum sound. It can add to the performance; you can be a performer in the sense of being a showman, but you can also use this sort of thing to enhance the showmanship aspect of the performance too. There's nothing better that being good at what you do, and then occasionally just adding a little slick little something just for the sake of it; you aren't trying to cover up for some inadequacy or anything, it's just an idea that you might put in for whatever reason."
PM: You often like to play standing up, which allows you to get more into dance mode, which a lot of drummers like to try to do with their playing - make it feel like dancing. Do you think of drumming in these same terms?
JF: "Of course. A beat starts up and people dance. That appeals to me as much as to any drummer I would think - it's such an immediate response to what we do. The irony of that these days is the recent trend in some popular music to record drums from a drum machine, and bass from a keyboard. Now where is the infectious dance feel there? Rhythm and dance are the basis to most cultures around the world - it's a primal thing, and drums of course have that power aspect to them aswell."
PM: I know INXS has kept you pretty busy over the years, but what other work do you do?
JF: "When I get a good period of free time, which hasn't been all that often, I will write all the time and I will collect a barrel of songs that I can then draw on. I have been living in Hong Kong for ten years now and I have been interested in trying to amalgamate some of the local traditions of Canto pop with a more progrssive Western sound, trying to break away from what I saw as a fairly stagnant local sound that is just not progressive. I'm not trying to convert some unique Asian cultural heritage into a Western thing just for the sake of it, but trying to bridge the two areas. Being in the pop world I thought it would be a good thing to try. I wanted to try to bring together elements of music from various Asian countries - Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan - but didn't get to travel as far as I would have liked because other things got in the way unfortunately, so that didn't become, or hasn't yet been a big thing for me.
I did end up producing an artist called Aijing, a singer from mainland China, and that was as far as I got. It worked out pretty good musically, but she was singing about things that were deemed to be controversial by the Chinese Government, so that didn't go too far. So I do a lot of writing when I can, and apart from that I do some playing for friends such as Richard Clapton, Jenny Morris, Jimmy Barnes or Wendy Matthews."
PM: Does that involve just playing or are you doing some producing?
JF: "Generally just playing, and contributing some ideas that may relate to the overall production. Generally speaking however, I haven't been for sale as such - I'm not someone who goes and does sessions for example."
PM: Finally, here comes the hardest question, and I know answering it can't be easy right at the moment, but what about any plans for the future?
JF: "You're right about it not being an easy question, but I do feel as if I owe it myself to try to verbalise my thoughts here. What I can say is this, I am a drummer and I need to play drums. I am a good performer and I need to continue doing all of that in order to progress. There is some area in my future that has to incorporate some live performance, whether it is with INXS or not. Please don't misinterpret me here. I'm not making any statements about the band's future. Clearly there is still too much shock and a lot to go through yet before any 'decisions' can be made. I haven't been in Sydney for two months, and like everyone else in the band, and like most people generally, when this kind of tragedy comes upon you, you tend to retreat into family, into the support networks that they bring you, seeking a degree of comfort. There is still much of that to go through. What I am trying to say is that I want to continue as a drummer, and will do so whatever happens with INXS.
Back at my house in Sydney, I have installed a studio with two drumkits set up with mic lines into the control room. I also have mic lines into the living room, where the grand piano is. So I will, for the first time, be doing my own writing using real drums instead of using loops and such. I will be writing aswell as producing. I hope to do some sound track work aswell. I haven't ever been commissioned to do sound track work before, but I have done a bit on my own, more as a practical exercise in learning how to do it. I have written a lot of instrumental stuff over the years, which I have never published, so now might be the time to revisit some of that. I might even be open to doing more sessions perhaps."
Written by: Paul Matcott
Editor: Simon Higgins
Front Cover Design: Art Issues
Email: m2@netspace.net.au
© Drum Scene Magazine 1998
