interview: the fenn
Let’s face it, a lot of ‘musicians’ these days actually don’t have very good musical knowledge. In fact, you’d probably be more hard pressed to find someone in a band who studied tertiary-level music theory, than you would someone who started tinkling with a piano and writing silly lyrics.
Adelaide band, The Fenn, has got both (as well as a third member who falls somewhere in the middle), and can trace their beginnings to quiz nights for ‘starving children’, as aforementioned piano-tinkler and vocalist, Phillip Kavanagh, eloquently puts it, and a chance meeting at a Darrell Lea store.
‘I’d written a bunch of songs, not really knowing how to write songs at all and had recorded them onto my phone and I played them to Stjepan at one of these Aid for Africa quiz nights,’ recalls Kavanagh. ‘And then Jakub drummed on our very first demo and he was too busy to join the band at the time but then later when we were forming a proper band, he was waiting for someone where Darrell Lea is and I was waiting for someone and so we struck up this awkward conversation by the end of which, he was in our band.’
‘I was doing a jazz degree at the time,’ says drummer and, oddly, keyboardist, Jakub Tengdahl. ‘There was all this crazy music theory going on but it’s all by accident. The tempos are always changing and the time signatures are always changing and I wasn’t completely convinced that Phil knew why they were changing. That put how ridiculous music theory is into context.’
‘I didn’t know what I was doing because I knew how to play very few things so I’d change what I was doing with that all the time,’ adds Kavanagh.
Kavanagh and Tengdahl, along with bassist, Stjepan Harris, have made these boundaries work for them, and created a niche sound.
‘Just having that restriction allows you to be extremely creative within that as opposed to if you had a massive band and all these possibilities and you have to try and restrict that,’ explains Tengdahl. ‘It’s already restricted. Ideas are not going to be too over the top automatically so you can be really imaginative and not stress that you’re going to turn into Muse.’
‘Even if we try doing different things, it still has this similarity of sound that we’re stuck with these restrictions that don’t sound like everyone else,’ says Kavanagh. But despite his lack of musical proficiency, his background in creative writing has served him well in writing lyrics. ‘The songs are so lyrically ridiculous. Now that we write the songs in the band room, I feel the pressure to be funny and to make them laugh while we’re playing so I’ll come up with some sort of ridiculous line that eventually has a full narrative arc.’
With an EP in the works that will be released shortly, the members of The Fenn have happily capitalised on their unique mode of songwriting and storytelling.
‘There tend to be common themes developing, this sort of distorted fairytale thing, they’re all very narrative based, just bizarre short stories I guess,’ says Kavanagh of the recording.
The Fenn will be performing tomorrow, May 5, at the Jade Monkey in Adelaide – click here for more information!
(Image credit: William Morris Photography)
