FOUR months ago, musician Wally De Backer, known the world over as Gotye, moved from Melbourne to New York. "I felt like I was going through . . . not a rut exactly, but a comfort zone, and to get out of that was a good thing," he says.
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So he left his family, his friends, his studio on the Mornington Peninsula and his collection of rare and interestingly broken instruments.
You could say he left his band, The Basics, but that happened long ago. You could say that he left them, but he never will.
De Backer lives in Fort Greene, in the heart of new Brooklyn, where the 100-year-old brownstones are even more frighteningly expensive than flats in the concrete and glass towers that have sprouted like weeds in recent years. We meet in a coffee shop at the corner of Fulton and Lafayette. The vegan chocolate chip cookies cost $4 each.
"It's been overwhelmingly excellent. I've met some great people in a short period of time," De Backer says.
Come back to me after your first New York winter, I'm thinking, but he seems energised and happy.
Although there's something sick-making about the way Brooklyn has become an internationally recognised hipster brand, it's a cool place to be, if you can afford it.
De Backer has half a brownstone to himself, with bedrooms on one floor and a lounge-cum-studio above. He likes working from home, always has. It's not uncommon for him to spend a day working on a sound or a line on his laptop, only to scrap it.
"People often ask me, 'Why does it take you so long to make a record?' and the answer is, 'I'm trying really hard to make something good'," he says.
On September 26, 2013, The Basics sat down to lunch after a photo shoot in Melbourne's Treasury Gardens to decide whether to record another album.
They had been discussing the possibility of booking Abbey Road studios, but now that there was an opening, the numbers on the page represented real money and the dates on the calendar real time off.
It was a tough call. They had sold almost 5000 copies of their "best of" compilation, Ingredients - a strong showing but hardly enough to retire on. De Backer and fellow founding member Kris Schroeder had enjoyed sifting through their archive to compile Leftovers for dedicated fans. The opening gigs on the comeback tour had been rapturous affairs, but it seemed unlikely that, after a decade of trying, they would suddenly find a new audience.
The indifferent response to their third studio album, Keep Your Friends Close, four years earlier had damaged the band, causing arguments about money.
"When it didn't really take off, it pretty much broke our spirits, and also broke the bank," De Backer told Graham Dodsworth, of the National Film and Sound Archive.
Schroeder signed up for two years of voluntary work in Kenya. Guitarist Tim Heath got a day job and formed another group, Blood Red Bird. Meanwhile, De Backer, as Gotye, had an international mega-hit with Somebody that I Used to Know and won three Grammy awards. Making a new Basics album would be a major investment for all of them, but he had the most to lose.
Listen to the Basics albums in sequence and you'll hear a band mastering and casting off its influences, from the Beatles to Crowded House and later Midnight Oil and Peter Gabriel, becoming a little weirder and more eclectic with each record.
The hooks are so unabashedly pop and the arrangements so well-crafted that it's hard to understand why they didn't get more support from mainstream radio.
Like Drawing Blood, the second Gotye album was an immediate hit when it came out in 2006.
Schroeder told Fairfax Media that at times his creative partnership with De Backer felt "like sticking around with a girlfriend that was openly cheating on you" but while the Basics were also successful, touring internationally and selling the odd song for use in commercials, they managed to find a balance that satisfied everyone.
Somebody that I Used to Know didn't just upset this equilibrium: it broke the scales. The song went to No. 1 in more than 50 countries and the video has been viewed almost 670 million times.
Although many people watched it more than once, that's like sitting everyone in the United States, Brazil and Russia in front of a computer and pressing play.
Schroeder was living in Machakos, two hours south of Nairobi, when the track went viral. He had an inkling it was big when "the white man's station" started playing it and the local ex-pats club added it to the karaoke repertoire.
Maybe it's a blessing that Somebody that I Used to Know isn't a Basics song?
"If I'd done the female vocal, imagine how much of a hit it would have been then," says Schroeder - a flippant answer to a question that's been asked too often. Has Gotye's success caused any friction? "If anything, we're better mates than we were before."
It's eight in the morning in Cairns when I reach Schroeder.
He's groggy, on four hours sleep, after a long night working behind the bar, but it's important to talk to him because he wrote most of the songs on the new Basics album, The Age of Entitlement.
Some are deeply personal, written in the fallout from a broken relationship. Others are political, as the title, lifted from Joe Hockey's infamous speech about welfare reform, would suggest. On Time Poor,Schroeder sings a list of left-wing causes from climate change to migrant rights and De Backer responds in a falsetto "I haven't got time for that". Whatever Happened to the Working Class? makes a rhyming couplet of "politicians sitting on their arse".
"They're songs of political awareness," says Schroeder. "They're about us as Australians and what our priorities are, what we'll turn a blind eye to, what we expect of ourselves and each other."
GIG FACTS
WHO: The Basics
WHERE: Fresh, Launceston.
WHEN: Thursday, October 29, from 7pm.
TICKETS: Available here