Ben Lee on how Eddie Vedder changed his mind on the Nirvana V Pearl Jam great grunge debate

The clown prince of pop Ben Lee has shared his brushes with celebrity A-listers ahead of his new I’m Fun! album.

Australian pop provocateur Ben Lee cheekily poses a question on his new record I'M FUN! that has inflamed debate among the grunge generation for 30 years.

But it’s no fun at all as he dodges revealing the definitive answer to the Gen X conundrum – Nirvana or Pearl Jam – even though he hints he solved the puzzle for himself on the track Like This or Like That.

The question posed in the lyrics is: “Who was real? Which was better? I thought I knew until one night I went drinking with Eddie Vedder.”

“It was one of those things where you have these conceptual frameworks from which you understand what’s happening in pop culture and back then it was ‘Nirvana are the good guys and Pearl Jam are the cock rock, kind of ‘70s holdovers or whatever,” Lee explains.

“And then I just had this great night partying with Eddie Vedder, this is years ago, and I was like ‘What a cool f--- ing guy.’

“What it highlighted for me was how the rules I had actually prevented me from understanding and appreciating someone that I then came to appreciate.”

Ben Lee knows what it’s like to polarise rock fans and industry gatekeepers. In the ’90s, during Australia’s halcyon alternative rock era, the then-teenager was both celebrated for his prodigious talent and sledged for his brazen confidence and ambition.

The singer songwriter was notoriously branded a “precocious little c---” by then Powderfinger frontman Bernard Fanning – who did later apologise – when Lee declared his 1998 breakthrough record Breathing Tornados the “greatest Australian album ever”.

Ben Lee emains determined to outlive pop’s ageism. Picture: Supplied / Warner Music Australia.

Now Lee is defiantly staring down the pop midlife crisis. For all the cynics who would begrudge his career longevity, the 43-year-old is not only entering his fourth decade as a successful recording and touring artist – he started his punk band Noise Addict at 14 – he is creatively thriving in the digital era.

The pandemic shutdown pushed him to amp up his satirical social media presence, most infamously and amusingly concocting faux beef with O.G. Wiggle and one of the nicest men in music, Murray Cook.

He also recently launched a podcast with wife, actress Ione Skye. Their Weirder Together series about life as married creatives also features a special guest appearance from 12-year-old daughter Goldie.

Lee and Ione Skye doing the red carpet thing in Sydney last year. Picture: Belinda Rolland.

But music was never far from his mind during lockdowns, both in LA and back home in Sydney, where the family relocated for a year, giving Lee the opportunity to perform as the Professor on Masked Singer last year.

When his 2005 songs Catch My Disease and We’re All In This Together became popular on Covid-themed playlists and TikTok videos, Lee imagined his 20th album I'M FUN! could serve as a reintroduction to old fans and a how-to guide for the new followers.

“I wanted to say ‘Hi, I'M FUN!.’ I’ve been having fun like this whole three-decade ride, that miraculously continues. And I’m a very grateful recipient of an unusually buoyant career at this point of my life,” he says.

Ben Lee is mastering TikTok with his hilarious self-deprecating videos. Picture Ryan Osland

I’M FUN! is indeed a quintessential Ben Lee album, chock full of self-deprecating anecdotes, witty, wry observations and his indomitable belief in music’s power to spread love and unity.

The jaunty album opener Born For This Bullshit is an affirmation of his optimistic disposition with its chorus lyric: “Still here, singing my song, Loving everybody in a world gone wrong, yeah.”

He revisits his precocious younger self in Arsehole, which features Camp Cope frontwoman Georgia Maq.

“When I was younger, I was an arsehole, I wanted to be, and I was, Burning down bridges, fighting with strangers, Destroying everything I could, just because,” he sings.

But the part-comedy, part-confessional lyric takes a paternal turn in the final verse when it becomes a love letter to his daughter who shares his “twinkle of mischief”, urging her to pursue her dreams despite the possibility of being considered an arsehole for doing so.

“With the songwriting on the record, I was looking at these artists who I loved as they got older and I realised that they didn’t shy away from their flaws,” Lee says.

“In fact, an honest appraisal of them and even a celebration of them was how you get to have those types of careers where you’re listening to someone who’s actually lived and they’ve got their regrets. All of that comes into what makes an artist like Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits or Lucinda Williams age well.”

Goldie may share her parents’ creative DNA and love of mischief but thanks to her father’s social media savvy – he knows what will get the clicks – she is also getting a history lesson in some truly ridiculous chapters from his youth.

He shared with her – and his social media followers – the video of that time he decided to go punk on live television in the late ’90s via Ten Network show The Panel.

Lee’s grand gesture to jump on the hosts’ desk for his guitar solo turned into a fail when the lead wouldn’t stretch that far and his guitar was unplugged. What made him cringe back then is now hilarious content. And evidence that Lee has never played it safe on stage.

“I’ll tell you what, when it comes to courage at a gig, I did a show at Largo (in Los Angeles) and was just being ridiculous and afterwards, Brad Pitt comes up to me and he goes: ‘You’ve got balls’. And I was like, ‘That’s the only one I need!’ You know what I mean?”

I’M FUN! is out on August 19.

Originally published as Ben Lee on how Eddie Vedder changed his mind on the Nirvana V Pearl Jam great grunge debate