Jebediah’s Kevin Mitchell, aka Bob Evans, to tour with new album

Singer-songwriter and Jebediah frontman Kevin Mitchell has become comfortable with his dual identity.

Kevin Mitchell: ‘I think it must be great not to be hindered by this pseudonym thing.’ Picture: Kristoffer Paulsen

The locals down at the pub in Ocean Grove wouldn’t know whether to call him Bob or Kevin, and he’s quite happy with that. Kevin Mitchell, as he was born, likes the solitude and anonymity of living in a quiet neighbourhood, this one on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula. He keeps himself to himself, or just hangs at home with his wife, Kristen, a teacher at the local school, and their two young daughters. He doesn’t have tickets on himself, or his alter ego. If he were to mention, while we’re ordering a beer in the hotel bar, that he is also Bob Evans, it is unlikely many heads would turn.

Yet here in this sleepy coastal enclave lives a performer who, for the past 20 years, has been making award-winning, chart-placing pop music, initially as frontman with Perth band Jebediah and then, by turns, with them and under his Evans alias, the latter a less frenetic, more country, poppy, folkie outlet for his singing and songwriting talents. It’s in that guise that Mitchell returns to the spotlight next week, with a new album, Car Boot Sale, the fifth under his Bob Evans moniker.

He got the name from a T-shirt he was wearing in 1999, when the idea of writing and playing material that didn’t fit the Jebediah mould required an alias, so fans of the band wouldn’t come along expecting stripped-back versions of their songs. So he got stuck with a name he doesn’t much care for, just like his real one.

“Mitchell is OK,” he says, “but Kevin I have never liked, [but] it would make more sense if I was just Kevin Mitchell. I look at people like [Something for Kate’s] Paul Dempsey and I think it must be great not to be hindered by this pseudonym thing. It hasn’t made things easy. It was perfect to start off with because it did exactly what I wanted it to do: allowed me time to develop it. Thankfully it became successful beyond my expectations and it didn’t trade on Jebediah’s success. That worked out beautifully.”

It’s no hardship either that Mitchell, 38, now has two careers. Since his previous Evans outing, Familiar Stranger (2013), he has toured in that solo mode and sporadically with the band, including a Jebediah 20th anniversary celebration across the country last year. There have been diversions too, such as Basement Birds, the band he formed with Josh Pyke, Eskimo Joe’s Kav Temperley and Steve Parkin.

“Lately, since we put out the last Jebediah record five years ago, I’ve settled into both,” he says of his dual identity. “They feel natural and I can do both. When Jebediah went on hiatus [in 2005] and I did Bob, there was a period when it was a bit awkward. Now I’m comfortable switching from one to the other. When I started with Bob they seemed a lot further apart musically than they are now.”

The new album, Car Boot Sale, much like its predecessors Suburban Kid (2003), Suburban Songbook (2006), Goodnight, Bull Creek! (2009) and Familiar Stranger, is awash with lilting melodies, abundant hooks and romantic storytelling. Produced by Tony Buchen (the Preatures, Montaigne), there are familiar strains of the Beatles, Elliott Smith, Ryan Adams and Lucinda Williams within the grooves of songs such as Don’t Give Up on Yourself, Cold Comfort and Race to the Bottom. There’s also a song named after one of his heroes, Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith. It’s a track with a strong narrative based around a backstage moment when a young fan asked him what he had been listening to.

“On every record I’ve made there has always been one song that’s just a narrative,” he says. “It’s just a very literal writing of an event. Usually when I write those they tend to be not very serious. I was doing a gig in Adelaide and a student saunters in and grabs a beer from my rider. Once we got talking he realised I was actually performing. I’m bad at kicking people out of my band room. We were just chatting and he had this enthusiastic, wide-eyed university thing going on; bit of a hipster. ‘What have you been listening to, man?’ he says.

“As soon as he said it I knew that no matter what I said he was going to be disappointed. I had really been getting off on Ron Sexsmith at the time. I knew he wouldn’t have heard of him, and he hadn’t. But the message of the song is that it doesn’t really matter; I don’t have to be relevant in his world and he doesn’t have to in mine.”

Mitchell’s world might not have involved music at all if he had persevered with his ambition to be a journalist while at university in Perth, but when he was only 18 the up-and-coming Jebediah signed a recording contract with Sony subsidiary Murmur, and never looked back. Albums such as the band’s debut Slightly Odway (1997), Jebediah (2002) and Braxton Hicks (2004) made it one of the most popular touring acts in the country.

“Most Jebediah fans are people who have been with the band for a long, long time,” he says. Those fans will have the opportunity to relive that pivotal period when Jebediah plays A Day on the Green show in November with a line-up of other Australian acts who were big at the time, including You Am I, Something for Kate, Spiderbait and the Meanies.

Before that, however, it’s Evans, not Mitchell, who will be in the driving seat, metaphorically at least, when he sets off around the country later in the year to promote Car Boot Sale. The title, incidentally, harks back to his previous solo tour, which he likened to the lifestyle of the troubled country singer played by Jeff Bridges in the film Crazy Heart.

“I was playing, then selling the merch and talking to every single person,” he says. “You end up feeling like a travelling salesman.”

Not that Mitchell would really be cut out for that sort of thing. Music is his salvation.

“I’ve never had a real job,” he says. “I’ve become institutionalised to this music thing. I have no other skills.

“I’m practically unemployable.”

Car Boot Sale is released through EMI next Friday.