You’re touring your debut solo album Tea & Sympathy to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Is it true that you wrote the most positive song in the world, Wish You Well, when you were very, very hungover?
Yes! I was getting ready to record Tea & Sympathy and I was leaving for the UK soon. I had all the final demos mixed and ready to go and I was excited, so I got drunk. I got wasted. I was living by myself for the first time in my life as well, so I was completely unsupervised. The next morning I made a cup of tea and sat on the couch and that song just fell out in 15 minutes.
I was just describing my situation! “Up so early, feel so bright” – which was a lie. “I didn’t get much sleep last night” – now, that was true. “Freight train rattled through my head” – I was hungover as a donkey. “Whistle blowing, love is dead” – I was in the last stages of a long-term relationship. Two hours after I woke up, the demo was done.
That album was largely about the end of that relationship. What is it like to be playing music from that time, 20 years on?
There’s this kind of myth-making among artists, I think, that every time they perform a song it’s infused with all the meaning they had at the beginning. Sometimes you’re on stage and you’re like, “Fuck, did I leave the iron on?” I can’t even concentrate for an hour and a half on what I am doing, and it’s not like there’s a whole lot of high kicking and pyrotechnics going on at my shows!
The thing about that record that is most satisfying for me is that it meant a lot to people. I primarily do this from a very selfish perspective: I want to write a song that I like. If other people like it as well, that’s just an unreal bonus. And they really, really liked it.
Did you know that greatwalks.com.au ran a piece clarifying that Fanning Dempsey National Park, your band with Paul Dempsey, is not an actual national park?
[laughing] What? That’s hilarious. You know, there’s an actual place in Tassie called National Park – these guys made up a sign to put Fanning Dempsey above it and took us walking out there. It was beautiful! That was great. Paul [Dempsey] and I were giggling like schoolkids when that name came to us.
What is the greatest guitar riff of all time?
Just one? Probably John Lennon’s riff on Day Tripper. It’s got everything. It’s incredibly tuneful and melodic. The sound of the actual recording is just amazing – the people at EMI took that recording to a whole different place.
I recently asked Paul Kelly what his most controversial pop culture opinion was and very quickly he answered, “Imagine by John Lennon is one of the worst songs ever written.” This is good, balanced journalism.
[laughing] I can’t agree with that and Paul’s right about almost everything. This could be a whole new question for the column – is Paul Kelly wrong about Imagine?
I must ask you now – what’s your most controversial pop culture opinion?
First Dates Australia is actually a masterpiece. It’s on at like 11pm, which is great when you are on tour. Sometimes after gigs you just flop into bed and say “Entertain me”. I don’t want anyone talking to me. I was on a big tour and played twentysomething weekends in a row and I kept coming across First Dates Australia. It’s totally contrived, but there was something about it. I know it’s wrong!
What do you do when you can’t sleep?
I can get to sleep no problem, but I wake up really early. I have spent years trying all sorts of things. Recently I got a medical marijuana prescription, which didn’t do much to keep me asleep. I’ve found the best thing is just a lot of exercise. I’m high strung, to be honest. It is a fucking nightmare on tour because the best thing to help your voice recover is sleep. If I wake up, I watch some Premier League, or I read.
Which book, album or film do you always return to and why?
The album I always return to is Cold Fact by Rodriguez. He wasn’t very well-known until they made Searching for Sugar Man. But my brother was a student in the 70s – he was 10 years older than me, so I inherited all of his music. Rodriguez was popular in Australia because students were passing the tapes around. Cold Fact is 55 years old now and all of the stuff that he’s saying on that album is still completely appropriate. It just goes to show how terrible we are at learning from our mistakes and at looking after vulnerable people. That album, more than anything, inspired me to make political commentary in my music.
And the film that I’ve watched the most in my life, and this is the most un-Guardian answer of all time, is Caddyshack. It’s a comic masterpiece. It has the most quotable one-liners of any film. The same goes for This Is Spinal Tap. It really is a documentary.
What is the strangest thing you have in your fridge right now?
My daughter has some kind of rice concoction that she puts on her face as skincare. It looks like regurgitated milk, to be honest.
Do you have a favourite instrument?
It is like having a favourite child, but I do have an acoustic guitar I bought a year or two before Tea & Sympathy. A really nice dreadnought guitar, a thousand times better than any other guitar I’d ever had. They’re expensive but beautifully made – big body and big sound. I don’t want to sound like a patronising prick here, but guitars improve with age. If you look after them, their tone becomes more mellow or more bright, depending on the timber. This guitar is just absolutely beautiful now it’s 20 years old. They should last 100 years if you look after them.
What has been your most cringeworthy run-in with a celebrity?
We [Powderfinger] were on the Big Day Out tour with the Beastie Boys in 2005. They had been talking in the press about how one of them [Adam Yauch] was a Buddhist and how he brings all these Buddhist tendencies to his life. But they were all really fucking rude and extremely unfriendly! So were all the people around them. My partner at the time was a Buddhist, so I had a pretty good understanding of how un-Buddhist the behaviour was. And at the end of the last show in Perth, they were playing after us and we were leaving in the car. And the Buddhist guy came up and did a Buddhist bow to me through the window of the car. And I gave him the finger.
That’s not cringeworthy, that’s great!
[laughing] There you go. That is going to make my reputation with Guardianistas even lower. I know that’ll be the fucking headline – Bernard Fanning hates Buddhists!
Bernard Fanning’s Tea & Sympathy 20th Anniversary Tour is heading around Australia in February and March 2026
