When JP Shilo wrote his first record, he was 18 and living with his family in Giannarelli’s funeral parlour. ‘My room was above the freezer,’ Shilo sniffs. ‘I guess it gets you thinking about [Shilo searches for the word] stuff [a long pause]. On the first night, my grandfather, to get me over it, opened up a freezer, pushed me in there and just closed the door behind me [laughs]. I remember that blue, UV light coming on and just being surrounded by corpses.
‘I mean movies are one thing, but when you, when you actually see it, a real live dead body [laughs], it’s um, it’s something completely different. I mean it wasn’t just old people that were there either. There was a young girl, a six-year-old girl that had drowned. That was pretty, uh, confronting. And even stillborn children. You know, people love these, these beings. You’d go in and they’d have teddy bears in there with them.
‘I was helping to deliver bodies to the church. So I’d get dressed up looking like, you know, Pulp Fiction or whatever. I helped take the bodies, lift the bodies, and put them in coffins. And again, because it was Italian, there was so much, oh, so much grieving.’
When Shilo wasn’t delivering bodies, he was playing an assortment of bad seeds on screen: an inmate with Hugh Jackman in the ABC prison drama ‘Corelli’; unhinged thug Luke Darcy in ‘Blue Heelers’ who head-butted PJ, made constant threats on his life, and was ultimately brought back to the show to get an axe in the head.
In between productions, Shilo wandered around Melbourne. ‘One day I came across this doorway in The Causeway off Bourke Street mall,’ Shilo says. ‘It was just a doorway. I could hear Sonic Youth coming from inside. This guy came out, serving coffees to people down the laneway. It was Tim.’
‘I sat down and I ordered an Earl Grey tea. He had this amazing smile, this [pause] very engaging smile. So I came back the next day. I came and sat down and had another pot of tea and this went on for a little while. We got chatting. It’s a vague memory now, but I remember talking about music, about Sonic Youth. And then on one of the other tables was his friend Jazza. I think he was reading On The Road at the time. I noticed his book and we got talking about that.
‘And we decided to play together. We hired this rehearsal space in Brunswick somewhere, and for maybe three or four hours we just made complete noise. Mayhem. Sonic meltdown. Feedback. I’m not sure what it was but by the end we were saying, “This is crap”. It was then that we made this conscious choice to see who could be the quietest, who could be the last person to start playing. There would be times when we would sit there and nobody would be playing anything, when we would sit together for a very long time in silence. And from that position, from that space, it unfolded.’
But what was ‘it’? Not songs, but beautiful, tingling, instrumental movements. An endlessly trembling violin. A beckoning guitar. The echo of a piano accordion, as if played by a little man in the kitchen sink. And all of them coming together, weeping and dancing, conducted by that demented hand that the Addams Family kept in a box, Thing. And they called themselves Hungry Ghosts.
‘We never intended to play live,’ Shilo says. ‘We never even called ourselves a band. It was only to be able to play music together. We were developing our friendship.
‘Tim organised for us to play in Prahran, but this was like an amateur night. It was nicknamed ‘The Losers Club’ because it was a joke. I think we played between a seven-year-old magician and an old guy playing Elton John covers on a synthesiser. So, yeah, that was our support. We made no eye contact at all with any audience members or with each other. It’s funny; we rarely made any eye contact live. In the end, there was a rumour going around that we were telepathic [chuckles]. We seemed to know each other’s moves just so well.’
Watching them, there at The Losers Club, was Lindsay Gravina. Gravina insisted they leave, took them by the hand, led them into Birdland studios, where Rowland S Howard produced their first album. Sonic Youth, equally captivated, invited the Ghosts to New York, to help make a second album, Alone, Alone.
Shows with Sonic Youth in New York led to performances throughout Europe. ‘It was at night time that we got in [to Prague],’ Shilo says. ‘It was a full moon and we stepped onto the Charles Bridge. We sat down to play, to unwind. I don’t think we had a place to stay that night. I think we just planned on playing all night. So we stayed on the bridge, opened our cases and started playing our songs. And, of course, closed our eyes and made no contact with the audience. Well, we didn’t think there would be one. And I think Tim may have motioned to me or tapped me to have a look around. And I looked around and there were all these people. They were kissing and dancing. There was something very universal about this language that we were speaking [pause]. Like, we couldn’t speak Czech but we could speak, you know, Hungry Ghosts [laughs]. And people were listening.’
But the Ghosts were deteriorating. Shilo crawled back to Melbourne, cocooned himself in a tiny room, only a few metres square, and sunk into illness — a condition which ended only with his move into Tara Institute, a cooperative run by Tibetan monks in Brighton. Below the Institute, Shilo found a basement, where, alone, he began creating again.
The album, As Happy As Sad Is Blue, is what happened in that basement. It is an instrumental carnival, like the music of the Ghosts before it. But this carnival is full of Nick Cave’s carnies, hobbling around, wailing, with eyeballs falling out of their heads. And the little man from the kitchen sink plays his accordion as you ride a broken ferris wheel.
JP Shilo’s As Happy As Sad Is Blue is released 9 October, through Smells Like Records.
JP Shilo: www.myspace.com/jpshilo
Hungry Ghosts: www.myspace.com/alonealone