INTERVIEW: Hayley Mary releases debut EP 'The Piss, The Perfume': 'There is strength in writing about the personal'

Australia’s Hayley Mary has been an icon of the indie music scene for over ten years as the lead singer and songwriter of the Sydney based band The Jezabels who scored three top 5 albums on the Australian albums chart between 2011 and 2016. Last year, Hayley and her partner relocated to the Scottish capital Edinburgh where she wrote the bulk of her debut EP The Piss, The Perfume which is released today. Fusing classic Australian rock with Americana, touches of folk & Motown plus classically beautiful balladry, Hayley says she told the producer of the EP “I’d always wanted to make a record that sounded like a memory of your parents dancing in the kitchen, but your parents are Cyndi Lauper and Roy Orbison. I think he nailed all that, but also managed to glue five fairly disparate songs together into a cohesive and contemporary whole.” We recently met with Hayley to find out more about the creation of the EP.

Interview: Jett Tattersall

Hi Hayley, How is life treating you these days?
It's great, thank you. Life's treating me well. I'm just keeping my head down and continuing writing and hoping this release goes well.

The Piss, The Perfume is out and you can't toy with it anymore, so you're just getting your head down and writing further
Yeah. I haven't been able to toy with it for a while. It was finished a while ago. You just got to keep going I [especially] now because I’m doing it relatively on my own. I've got help from my label and manager, and my boyfriend helps me demo, but generally I've got to be the driving force behind writing the song. So I am trying to come up with the follow-up really. I’m already one step ahead, but that doesn't mean I’m not excited about this release. I’m very excited, but trying not to be too nervous. 

That's the best thing to do - work through it. Now, you have relocated to the motherland and are living in Edinburgh which is personally one of my favourite cities in the whole entire world and I always think ‘why don't people talk how good this place is?’
I know, well it's not like a hidden gem because it's very touristy but at the same time it’s no one really moves there. Everyone who we spoke to is like ‘why are you here?’ It's not the place people go. I think that's part of its brilliance and I just love the glorious Arthur’s Seat in the middle of the city, that bit of rugged Brontë-esque nature and it's like ‘Wow, I can just go for a walk up a mountain ten minutes from my house.’

It's all just gothic rock and then amazing weird taxidermy. It's awesome. It’s a pretty place to be. 
Just all of the things that are great. I loved it. I’m actually back in Melbourne for recording and releasing music through [record label] I Oh You, it was just a better use of time to be here at this point. But I feel like I could go back to Scotland again, but I'd maybe hit Glasgow because I discovered that my dad's Glaswegian, so I feel like I should one day live there. But also I discovered there is a little bit of the gothic kind of edge to the West End in Glasgow. It's not just an industrial city. I really like the culture in Glasgow. There's a lot more music. There’s a lot more youth culture and young people doing stuff whereas Edinburgh was a little bit stuffy for me. 

You wrote the album predominantly while living in Edinburgh. But I hear it actually started before you left Melbourne. Can you talk me through the origins of this EP?
Yeah, there's a million different stories and it's somewhat postmodern in that I don't really remember the exact order of things. So, I might tell contradicting stories. But who believes in facts anyway?! I'm basically from Sydney - as an adult I lived in Sydney - so a lot of it is about Sydney. I was living with my boyfriend in Sydney and we were living above a pub. I think that's where The Piss, The Perfume comes from and being in this alcohol infused environment with a lot of jam sessions and a lot of jangly rock going about in the place. We did relocate to Melbourne and I was trying to write and I'd almost given up. I guess I didn't know there was the concept of an EP whilst writing ‘The Piss, The Perfume’ in Sydney. But in Melbourne I was doing writing sessions and I was quite disenfranchised by them. I was about to give up music one day. I had a crappy writing session. It felt really contrived. I came home and I was just like ‘maybe I'm just not meant to write music anymore.’ My boyfriend was sitting on the couch and he had a guitar and he was like ‘shut up, that's ridiculous’ and he just started playing me the chords, he was like ‘write a song to this.’ I was like ‘no, no.’ And then he started chasing me around the room going ‘just write a song to it, write a song to it!’ And eventually that was ‘Brat’ which is the more punky, angry song on the EP. 

That makes total sense why you would then write a song called ‘Brat’!
Yeah, I’m a brat! Even though it's not chronologically the first song or even the first concept, it was a decisive moment of ‘no, I am going to keep writing and I do want more out of music and I'm not giving up’ type of thing. So ‘Brat’ was a special moment for me. And then we went to Edinburgh after Melbourne and that's when I really got it together and started putting ideas more solidly down. There was a lot of embryo songs lying around still from Sydney and from Melbourne. In Edinburgh I worked in this café, I stuck to myself. I didn't know anyone. Johnny [her boyfriend] was away on tour a lot and I just really hammered the writing and we had this EP of demos that we were able to send to Johann at I Oh You and he was like ‘I'll sign you.’ But I was really inspired by that UK weatherman. There's a reason so much rock n roll comes out of the misery of the UK weather. You have to create your own warmth, you know. 

I must say, the EP is such a corker. There's that feeling that makes me want to sit up late with a bottle of wine flicking through a box of photographs and old love letters while simultaneously dancing on the sofa and kicking arse to ‘Brat’. The title track ‘The Piss and The Perfume’ leads perfectly into ‘Like a Woman Should’: ‘I wish I was born in the future /See my daughters born into a world where suddenly like I could…walk the street like a woman should.’ This is a stellar social commentary track and I want to know what your desire or your inspiration for this one was?
This is probably the point about which I am most nervous on the releasing of the EP is this talking point. I try quite hard to resist social commentary and political song writing, but I seem to just accidentally do it. To me it's essentially a love song. The last line is kind of the romantic umbrella over the whole thing. I guess what's happening is I'm unable to just be a pure escapist and a pure romantic and I can't help but take in what's going on around me. It gets into the love song because there is no pure simple love that doesn't - you have to go out into the world before you come home to your safety I suppose. You can't ignore the stuff that's been happening around you. I did live in Brunswick where a few women have been violently attacked and killed over the last couple of years and there's no doubt that it was in my subconscious, but I wasn't thinking about it. It was actually an expression of love about my boyfriend, but that feeling of a relationship you can have with a man that's so intensely loving and then the concept of man, which is sometimes intensely fearful. And, maybe I was pondering how much of that fear is real or how much it is theoretical. Honestly that song, how I normally write is in gibberish. I’ll hear a melody and it'll come out in gibberish. I'll make the words what they sound like - and that came out.

Well that's how it should be. Nobody should be forced to write social commentary. 
No, that would be quite crap. And I wanted to resist the social commentary of it. I wanted to not speak about that angle. But I know that I'm going to have to because people have read into it obviously. Things like it being [about] walking the streets at night. I never say at night, but I guess there is a streetlight so… I guess it's night. 

We're just so used to being attacked thanks to pop culture music videos of the 80s, we know what happens to women when they walk the streets at night. They're either called hookers or they’re murdered. 
Yeah, you can’t be in a bubble really.

On that song writing note, do you find it more difficult to write about a personal trauma or a shared one? Writing about heartbreak in comparison to writing about an idea or a global violence, are you more comfortable with one over the other?
It's a really interesting question actually because one of the things that you learn from feminist rhetoric is that personal is political. And so I do feel like I have more strength or credibility if I'm writing personally because then I feel I know about this more than anyone else. I am an authority on this topic, and no one can really take that away. So that's why I do think that there is strength in writing about the personal. But everyone seems to know these days that nothing's apolitical and your personal experience is probably definitely threaded in with wider narratives about what is going on in the world. So if you're writing well about your personal experience then people will relate to it because it's part of the wider story. So I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive even though I try and pick a side. It’s an interesting. Bob Dylan said ‘everything belongs to everyone’. I know people have been crippled by empathy for someone else’s tragedy and it almost becomes their own tragedy. There’s a blurrier line than you think about what’s yours and what’s wider society’s. I always think it’s a little bit to do with that muse idea, that you’re not actually writing. Nothing really belongs to you. Like it comes from the walls or the geniuses in the walls, or the muses. Every culture has that idea that the best songs you write, you don’t feel like you write them, you feel like they are given.

‘Ordinary Me’ is a real heart knock of a song but it also makes me want to pick up a guitar and have a go, which is probably not the best idea. What was that one song that made you go ‘oh my god I want to do that’ when you were growing up?
There was a few. The first song I ever learned was ‘Unchained Melody’, but it wasn’t on guitar. It was singing, my dad had a songbook with it in it and I was like ‘I’m going to learn that song’. And ‘Joey’ by Concrete Blonde, do you remember that song?

Oh my god, Johnette Napolitano. I loved that song.
Yes, so ‘Holly’ on my EP is directly inspired by that song and me trying to create that feeling that I had. I remember being four on a road trip with my parents and that song came on and I remember the moment, it’s like an awakening. You know, you remember certain moments in your childhood when you become aware of certain things. I became aware of empathy because I was really concerned about this Joey guy who was probably like a middle-aged alcoholic from America and I really related to this whole feeling that she had about him and I was like… four. That’s not, a four-year-old girl’s concern!

Because she’s broken hearted and is lying on the floor.
Yeah, and I totally got how she felt through that song and that’s the proof of that interconnectivity. I hate that about pop music that they assume kids are dumb and they need to simplify things and make things shallow as if young people can’t relate to the old people or can’t relate to things in depth. They can.

‘Holly’ does have that external observation where it’s almost like you’re projecting onto someone that you’re seeing.
I definitely still feel a sense of wandering, feeling like you could fall through the cracks at any time. I can definitely personally attest to having felt that but also just seeing it in other people as well.

What is that one track that historically never fails to make you rock out dance?
Ooh, that’s a hard one. I don’t know if I have any that make me rock out dance, but I am a very good dancer when I’m in the mood. Maybe just ‘Dancing Queen. To be honest. Abba’s my favourite band. I really like Abba. I was learning an Abba song this morning actually with my boyfriend.

Oh brilliant. Which one?
’I Am The City.’

Now I’m getting this gorgeous visual. Finally, what is up next for Miss Hayley Mary?
I’m writing for my debut album which will come out after the EP that I’m promoting right now. On February 1st I’m playing a show in Adelaide, I’m doing my part in the fundraising effort that seems to be overtaking the country due to the fires. Hopefully it helps a bit. Just keep on trucking, writing.

The Piss, The Perfume is out now via I Oh You. You can buy on iTunes and stream on Spotify and Apple Music.

To keep up with all things Hayley Mary you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.