The algorithm doesn’t favour the brave,” begins Jack Ladder, the perennially underrated Sydney singer-songwriter now holding forth on the fickle, all-too-homogenised world of DSPs (digital streaming providers), the playlisting game and Meta’s diminishing returns. “If you make music like I do, you’re gonna pay the price.”
Jack Ladder, real name (no kidding) Tim Rogers, steps outside the Forest Lodge rental where he has just moved in with his girlfriend and lights a cigarette.
“I’m a structuralist,” he says, exhaling deeply.
The sardonic giant has built a new record, his seventh, titled ‘Tall Pop Syndrome’, and he’s hoping it does better than his 2021 effort ‘Hijack!’. That record featured string-soaked, six-minute songs about characters he met in a rehabilitation facility that he attended for alcoholism.
“‘Hijack!’ didn’t really land anywhere,” Ladder muses. “It’s like I prepared a masterful feast and I invited everyone over and I’d spent a lot of time in the kitchen… and people weren’t that hungry. ‘Hey, sorry, I just had lunch.’ I tried to pick up the pieces.”
“I told Alex Cameron from Endless Recordings that because I spent all his money on ‘Hijack!’ I would write him a ‘hit’ record to ‘win’ it all back,” he quips, a plume of smoke sailing above his quiff.
‘Tall Pop Syndrome’’s journey to completion reflects Ladder’s unpredictable, star-studded narrative. It involves dinner at an Oscar-winner’s house, being reciprocal counsel and concert opener for Weyes Blood at the Sydney Opera House (“She’s so cool and super fussy, she says no to lots of offers”), an unexpected, most-expenses paid trip to Italy with Kirin J Callinan to record an album with a local poet at Roberto Cavalli’s mansion and being handpicked a second time to support The Killers across Australia and New Zealand.
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‘Hurtsville’ is the reason Brandon Flowers is a Ladder lifer. His third album, it’s a downtrodden, romantic noir-folk classic and – let’s not beat around the bush – the reason Jack Ladder is still a musician by trade. The 2011 record was shortlisted for the Australian Music Prize, and the gallows humour and sleazy chug of ‘Cold Feet’ saw it crowned Song of the Year by influential Australian music site Mess & Noise. Ladder and his band The Dreamlanders performed a run of well-attended and glowingly reviewed shows in 2021 to celebrate its 10-year anniversary.
Flowers was introduced to ‘Hurtsville’ by singer and Ladder confidante Alex Cameron (not to be confused with Endless Recordings’ Alex Cameron). “The first time I supported The Killers [in 2018] I heard Brandon backstage listening to ‘Cold Feet’ to get psyched up for the gig,” Ladder recalls.
“I was sent a message from Alex Cameron early last year who asked me if I wanted to jump on The Killers’ tour again. I thought it was weird they’d pick the same supports.”
At first, it seemed his instincts were right. “I didn’t hear back on the Killers thing for nine months; I didn’t think it was gonna happen.”
But the confirmation call came through.
“Apparently they were trying to find a more popular support,” Ladder laughs, “but circled back to me.”
The booking spurred Ladder on “to make a completely different type of music”. ‘Tall Pop Syndrome’ is a more pelvic, percussion- and synth-driven adventure, plonking Ladder in the middle of his loungeroom, dancing alone. “You don’t get long on stage as the opener, you don’t get proper soundcheck,” he explains. “Touring a full band is a bit silly. I wanted to do full guerilla-style show. I thought ‘Maybe I could write a whole new album, one for stadiums, no backline [and] solo’.”
“To reference Bowie in a song feels cheap, but with Prince and Leonard Cohen, Little Richard all together, it felt like more”
Fellow Sydneysider and close buddy Kim Moyes (of The Presets) had already helped him see that less is more. “I thought I’d finished the record and I was gonna mix it myself. I called Kim and explained what I was gonna do with these looong songs. Kim said, ‘That sounds really fucking stupid’.”
The two had worked on a previous album, ‘Playmates’, and neither was that happy with the result. This time the friction undulated into pure alchemy.
“Kim said: ‘How about I just do an edit and see how you like it?’ He sent it back to me and I hated it,” Ladder says. “Then he sent it to me again with the vocals on it and I realised it was actually genius.”
‘Game Over’, ‘Heavyweight Champion’ and ‘In Hell’ are Ladder at his Dystopian Dude best, hard drums punctuating the mise en scene. Moyes had distilled Ladder’s five-minute songs into compact bops. “He didn’t lose any of the information. Once Kim had pulled it all together I knew I had a great record.”
Next, he needed a zesty title. ‘Tall Pop Syndrome’ came to Ladder in the shower. “I had a really good showerhead at my old place. ‘Tall Pop Syndrome’ for me is about cutting to the chase. I can say all I need to in three minutes if I think about it. Kim made it more… pungent,” he says, sending NME to Thesaurus.com to see if that description flies.
‘Heavyweight Champion’ has a Depeche Mode stomp. (“They’re the Beatles of the ’80s.”) In the song, Ladder names the character traits that define his titular hero: “A fighter, self-reflection, self-deception/ A stay up all-nighter!”
“It was an idea that I have about the club of baritone singers,” he explains. “When Leonard Cohen died, Nick Cave filled that space entirely. He’s become a titan in the last 20 years. It’s a very exclusive club. It’s not even something that I was personally going for when I started music. They are the heavyweights, they’re the guys who talk about the heaviest shit and do it with the heaviest voice.”
“I told Alex Cameron from Endless Recordings that because I spent all his money on ‘Hijack!’ I would write him a ‘hit’ record to ‘win’ it all back”
Ladder does his share of the load on ‘Tall Pop Syndrome’’s album opener, ‘Home Alone’, where he namechecks a bunch of his heroes who have died since 2016. Ladder sounds like James Murphy on downers and gives the last rites to Alan Vega, Florian Schneider, Prince, David Bowie and several more.“I wrote that after I had dinner at Russell Crowe’s house with Roy Molloy and Alex [Cameron],” he says.
“I’d thought about all the people that had been dying. David Bowie, Tom Petty, Ric Ocasek. All of these people were so meaningful to me.
“I use their names like descriptive words. It’s onomatopoeic, it takes on this larger meaning. To reference Bowie in a song feels cheap, but with Prince and Leonard Cohen, Little Richard all together, it felt like more.”
He added Amy Winehouse because she forced his hand: “I don’t really listen to her music, but ‘Amy Winehouse in my house’ is too good a phrase.”
In the video for ‘Home Alone’, Ladder does his best David Byrne marionette, staging the solo dance party of the lyrics in a stark-white studio. In his new clip for ‘Game Over’, which NME is premiering here, the boogying continues, but the vibe is more reticent Robert Smith at a fish market. Next, he’ll play “a tramp poisoned by a beautiful woman” in the video for ‘Lombard Street’ (after the one in San Francisco – but also the other one in Sydney).
‘Tall Pop Syndrome’ drops halfway through Ladder’s European tour, where he has a bunch of ride-or-die ‘Hurtsville’ fans and a cult-like following. Despite the jokes about a hit record, whether ‘Tall Pop Syndrome’’s streams of conscience translate to actual streams seems almost unimportant to Ladder. It could be bluster, but feels more like he’s in on a joke for one he keeps getting away with. Ladder is never quite “making it” – but making it into all the right places.
“As you get older these opportunities come up,” he says, stubbing his durry out.
“I’m always lurking.”
Jack Ladder’s ‘Tall Pop Syndrome’ is out today via Endless Recordings. He tours Europe for the rest of July and then Australia in August – more info here