Solo journey from Finger to frontman

GUITARIST Darren Middleton was at a loss when his band Powderfinger broke up in 2010, but now flying solo feels good.

Darren Middleton says recording Translations was like making his first record, 'a little bit daunting but exciting'. Picture: Sam Mooy

GUITARIST Darren Middleton was at a loss when his band Powderfinger broke up in 2010; hardly a surprise since the Brisbane band's members had been working together since 1989, for most of their adult lives.

By the time of its farewell tour, Powderfinger's long reign had run its course. The question was: what would the bandmates, as individuals, do next?

Middleton's answer was to pack his bags and take the family to Europe for eight months, an extended holiday during which he would plot the next phase of his career, most likely as a writer and producer. When he got back to Australia and resettled in Melbourne, however, Middleton, as he puts it, "ran into a brick wall".

"I would take on projects and wasn't able to finish them," he says. "I'd start writing songs and not finish them. I'd pull out of projects. I'd take something on and then at the last minute ring up and say I couldn't do it."

Middleton, it transpired, was suffering from depression and had to seek help for his condition. "I didn't expect it because I'm generally a pretty happy person," he says now.

Fortunately there is a happy ending to this story, cast in the form of Middleton's first solo album, Translations. It bears little resemblance to his output with Powderfinger. While still guitar-based rock music, it has a lighter, poppier and in places electronic strain to it and, importantly, has Middleton's formidable voice to the fore. Although he sang in Powderfinger and his occasional side project Drag, his upfront voice will come as a surprise to many fans. It's a surprise to him.

So uncertain was he about singing that when he came to record the album he enlisted the help of top quality singers from his group of friends, including Clare Bowditch, Powderfinger's Bernard Fanning and Something For Kate's Paul Dempsey.

"I was doubting my ability to sing," he says, "but all of them told me . . . to do it myself. I was getting slapped, but in a good way."

With an album completed and Powderfinger's demise three years distant, Middleton can see more clearly why he hit such a stumbling block when, after his overseas hiatus, he set out on his own. "I hadn't untangled the threads of my former existence," he says. "I hadn't found something to focus on.

"Maybe we (Powderfinger) weren't the best of mates towards the end, but at least we still had a purpose . . . We were still working towards something. When I pulled out of that I was free from things I didn't like there, which wasn't a great deal, but I didn't have that purpose any more. I had to find some motivation."

That motivation came about 18 months ago. He got help from another musician who had found himself in a similar position. Singer and guitarist Nic Cester, whose award-winning and internationally successful Melbourne band Jet broke up in March last year, offered encouragement about flying solo. "We had a lot of dinners and drinks, and realised we had a lot in common at that point," Middleton says.

On Translations Middleton is joined by Bowditch's husband Marty Brown on drums and You Am I's Davey Lane on bass. Perhaps the most significant contribution comes from his co-producer Simon Walbrook, whom he credits with taking the songs in a slightly different direction than if he had produced it by himself.

He never considered whether it would sound like Powderfinger. "I didn't set out with the attitude that it had to be different," Middleton says. "I just let it be what it wanted to be. Simon's take was a lot different to mine . . . more of an electronic feel."

Those touches are apparent on songs such as the mildly funky Let Go and the more ambient pulse of Be With You. The latter, in a previous incarnation, was a Powderfinger song. "I brought that song to Powderfinger," Middleton says. "Bernard completely rewrote the lyrics, the melody and the musical flavour and it became the song Silver Bullet, an additional song on the band's greatest hits record.

"I liked the original, but it was a tough decision to put that song on my album. It's not as if I'm stealing anything, though."

Fanning, who released his second solo album, Departures, earlier this year, is to be found on the ballad Lover's Shoes, sharing the vocals on a song that digs into their shared band's glorious past "walking on stages of gold".

As an aside to his work with Powderfinger, Middleton began to explore other musical options with the band Drag, formed in 2000 with the Finger's sound engineer, drummer Mark McElligott. Along with bassist Sean Hartman and keyboards player Matt Murphy they released an EP, Gas Food Lodging, in 2002 and an album, The Way Out, in 2005, neither of which was commercially successful. Middleton was disappointed, but it gave him a grounding in working as an independent artist rather than as a cog in a well-oiled and consistently successful machine with record company clout behind it.

Being solo, he says, is "hard work, a real learning process. In Powderfinger we'd hand something over and then someone else would take care of everything else. I've had to learn about all of that. It's been good. It's like making my first record. It's a little bit daunting but exciting."

And he has no regrets about the split with his colleagues Fanning, Ian Haug, Jon Coghill and John Collins, who collectively became one of the most successful bands in Australian history.

"The end of any long-term relationship doesn't happen overnight," he says. "It happened over about a five-year period. It was time to start again . . . to do whatever you want. And we were very fortunate financially to be able to take a few years off to work it out."

It was during his European sabbatical, while admiring an old house in northern Tuscany, that he picked up a bit of wisdom from a local that has come to bear on his new project. "He said, 'If you're going to build something, make it beautiful and build it to last.' That infused into what I want my music to be from now on."

Translations is released through MGM today. Middleton plays Sydney on November 22; Melbourne, November 23; and Brisbane, November 28.