Nothing fake about Nathan

TOBY LONGHURST
QNews in Brisbane

The gap between Faker’s debut album, Addicted Romantic, and new offering, Be The Twilight was a watershed for lead singer Nathan Hudson.

The obvious change is the absence of genderless pronouns, the word they now happily substituted with the word he.

Add to that a great set at this year’s Mardi Gras, and an ever-growing popularity on the Australian music scene thanks to the new single This Heart Attack, and we have another superstar band in the making.

Be The Twilight is our second album and is kind of a response to our first record, I guess, in that our first record for me was lyrically quite idealistic or about embracing the idealistic side of my nature, Hudson said.

[It’s] the part of me that gets a bit nostalgic. We wanted to make a record that was more direct, more in the moment.

The result is Be The Twilight, a crisp rock album recorded over three months in Los Angeles last year.

The four of us sublet a house for three months, so it was very unifying, Hudson said.

Talking about wanting to make a record that is in the moment -” LA is really kind of in your face. [It’s] a type of enthusiasm that sometimes I have been quite cynical about, but being in the thick of it was really exciting.

But it was between albums where Hudson made one of the most significant changes to his life -” publicly coming out.

I spent the publicity side of the first record dodging pronouns when talking about relationships and essentially for an album called Addicted Romantic -” it’s kind of a funny place to be, using words like -˜they’ instead of -˜he’ or -˜she’, he said.

This album is about my own relationships. It’s also about the relationships of the other boys in the band -” some of us are straight and some of us are gay.

It felt very important to be allowed to be able to use whatever pronoun you want to use.
First and foremost when talking about my art, I didn’t want that wall or barrier there. Especially when you are doing twenty interviews a day.

The coming out process was, Hudson said, a cathartic one -” and was met with waves of support.
[The public reaction] was all really supportive, lots of emails, and I would meet people at concerts and out in the streets who came up and said thanks, he said.

It’s really hard growing up and being into rock and that kind of music and looking for unambiguous types of role models.

I find it strange to be thought of as a role model, but I’m very happy to talk about who I am.

So what does Hudson do when he is in a club and one of his songs comes on? Does he keep on dancing or walk away and wait for it to finish?

I actually had that happen recently. The DJ started playing a remix of our song while I was dancing, he said.

I couldn’t get down -” I couldn’t not dance. It would have been bad form to walk off in the middle of it. It’s a good feeling when you’re out to hear your music being played.

info: Be The Twilight is out now through EMI Records. Details: www.faker.com.au or www.myspace.com/fakertheband

Photo: Robin Sellick www.robinsellick.com Location: Polo Lounge