Mark Seymour Talks Gudinski, the White Label And Hunters & Collectors Ever Changing Sound

Mark Seymour made nine Hunters & Collectors albums. He has had 10 outside the band. When Michael Gudinski signed the band to Mushroom for their 1982 debut he create a new record label The White Label to launch them. Mark says that that was unnecessary.

“The mythology is that he launched that label to get us,” Mark Seymour tells Noise11.com. “There is an element of marketing in that. I don’t know that he needed to do that. We had a certain deal that had written in all these artistic control clauses. There were certain things they couldn’t do unless they had our permission. It was very tricky and strange and then in the end as time went by the band just became a mainstream commercial act. The kind of deals we were signing just became more orthodox like everyone else”.

Gudinski create the White Label to sell a perception of independence. “When we first started it was the whole idea that it was completely independent and that we did everything ourselves,” Mark says. “He came up with the label but I’m not sure it was absolutely necessary”.

Mushroom had already released Skyhooks ‘Living In The 70s’ and Split Enz ‘True Colours’ by the time Hunters & Collectors came along. “There was definitely a sense that we were different and had a different attitude,” he says. “I was like the piggy in the middle. I was the lead singer, head down, writing, singing. I really didn’t have a broad sense of what all of that meant.

“I remember watching the ‘True Colours’ album and the Skyhooks album and thinking that that is something we’ll never do. Not because we wouldn’t actively choose to do it. I just never imagined that would happen to Hunters & Collectors, that we’d be that big. Oddly enough it just worked out that way. We didn’t have major commercial success until nine or ten years later. We were just playing and playing and playing, having moderate increases in record sales over a long time and that’s kind of how it worked out. You lie in the bed you make. The idea of actively trying to write commercial songs? Split Enz did. That ‘True Colours’ album was a major turning point for them. That hadn’t had an album anywhere close to that big and you can hear it. I really loved that record back at that time. It was one of my favourite records”.

Mushroom worked for Hunters but it was like they had a choice of who else to sign with. “I think there was one other label. I can’t remember who it was but there was another offer”.

Hunters & Collectors never stayed in one place for very long musically. “I look at it in my own longevity as an artist,” he says. “Whatever had gone down, if the band had stopped in ’86 … Hunters & Collectors changed it spots all the time. We went from being one kind of band to another kind of band. As a songwriter I actually don’t relate that to really well. The decisions the band made were about its survival and for everyone’s benefit. I often think now if the band had stopped in ’87 or ’89 or whatever, for whatever reason, I’d still be doing this. I’d still be doing this interview, have a guitar and still be writing songs. That’s what I was put on the earth to do. I may have had more of less success but I’d still be doing it”.

Mark says Hunters needed the Mushroom philosophy to last. Gudinski was right for them. “Hunters & Collectors needed that kind of deal to survive. The band kept changing direction. Every second of third album we’d just do this switcherooni, go down that pathway, bring in a producer who put loops into the songs. The difference between ‘Cut’ and ‘Demon Flower’ is chalk and cheese. It is almost a completely different production style. When you look at the progress of big rock bands throughout that era. The ones that succeeded had a progressive logical process of gradually changing their sound slowly and getting bigger and more commercial gradually. But Hunters & Collectors got to a certain point and just threw the baby out with the bathwater and went in another direction. It would just because the guys in the room were comfortable doing it and that would be just the direction we’d choose”.

Mark Seymour and the Undertow will perform at Memo Music Hall in St Kilda this Friday and Saturday 2 and 3 April.

Hunters & Collectors will plays some make-up shows for Red Hot Summer in 2022.

Noise11.com