The Brag

Bedroom Philosopher
Meet The Tramily
Steph Harmon

Justin Heazlewood was born at Bernie hospital in Tasmania at 7:33am on June 12 1980, and stopped wetting the bed when he was eight. He wrote his first series of comedy songs when he was 15, and had his first proper relationship the year after. It only lasted a week – the girl cheated on him, before apologising by sticking the lyrics to Roxette’s ‘It Must Have Been Love’ to his locker door.

Too much information? Well, it’s all in his bio: a highly detailed and deeply personal year-by-year bullet-pointed run-down of his life to date. Because that’s just the kind of guy he is. “If you’ve read my bio you’d know that I lost my virginity after a Silverchair concert, and was Christian for ten years,” Justin tells me. “I have no secretions. I mean, secrets.” Since recording his first cassette tape in 1995 (sitting on the toilet in the bathroom, with his walkman microphone Blu-tacked to an indoor clothesline), Heazlewood has turned the comedy-music thing into the largest portion of a multi-faceted career. The Bedroom Philosopher is not only a comedian, musician and performer, but an actor (Race Relations) and also a writer (Frankie Magazine, BMA Magazine. J-Mag and The Big Issue). His latest output is Songs From The 86 Tram, a collection of odes to public transport commuters, from the acerbically dissatisfied Catholic Irish girl (‘Irish Girl’), to the innuendo-laden sleazy tram inspector (‘Tram Inspector’), to the middle aged mum who opens the album in ‘Middle Aged Mum’. “Albums usually have a bangin’ track to begin with,” Justin explains. “I like to rebel and think, ‘what’s the most inappropriate way to begin a music/comedy album? Ah! A piano ballad about a depressive empty-nesting middle-aged mother.’ It took a long time to get the voice right… I think I sound like Antony.”

The leading single is ‘Northcote (So Hungover)’, a searing re-enactment of every hipster-douchebag phonecall you’ve been forced to overhear on public transport. Riding around on the ’86… So hungover… Gonna go down to JB Hi-Fi…. Flick through ‘Indie’….The film clip (featuring cameos from Tim Rogers, Kram, Angie Hart and more) is spot-on – black-rimmed glasses, ridiculous moustaches, horrific fringes and deadpan dialogue, delivered in what Justin refers to as the “nu-Australian” accent. “If I do the voice for too long, it starts to take me over like a virus,” he says. “I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m wearing those jeans, and the moustache from the clip is crawling around on my face.”

We talk for a while about what it means to critique a culture that’s already so cynical; how do you out-Vice Vice? “Someone on YouTube described it as ‘post-ironic core’, which I like,” he replies. “We’ve gone full circle on irony, and now there’s something bafflingly earnest about a track like ‘Northcote’. Life is strange enough, you don’t need to add too much satire. It’s more like a musical journalist presenting the facts; holding a mirror up to society, so that they can do their hair.” But Heazlewood is a Melbourne-based musician, comedian, and writer; he’s got to identify himself as at least partially within the scene that he’s ripping to shreds? “No one is willing to admit that it’s about them,” he tells me. “There’s a lot of ‘I know that guy’, and then you go up to that guy, and he says, ‘Yes, I know that guy’. It’s been called the Kath & Kim for Gen Y. It’s fun judging those who do the judging.”

Turns out more friends of his were alienated by my favourite track from the album, ‘New Media’: I’ve got a short film called ‘Journey’ / it’s an animated montage digital projection of me giving birth to myself / Yeah! Pretty cool, huh?!… Justin tells me that when he first performed that song live, it was met with an icy reception. “I had a few design pals come up to me with these great bewildered expressions saying, ‘Was that song about me? I’ve had my jeans on for six weeks, and I was writing a grant application with ‘cross-platform’ in it..?”

The Bedroom Philosopher has an undeniable ability to nail whole sub-cultures to their stylised crosses with a single pun, sure, but the most impressive thing about this release is the musical talent on show. With each album (and this is his fourth), Justin seems to tread a finer and finer line between comedy and music. He admits he’s written 100-odd serious songs that, as The Bedroom Philosopher, he has nowhere to go with. “It’s like a volcano of song-writing emotion that I’m trying to suppress, and it keeps leaking into Bedroom Philosopher stuff. That’s why my albums are becoming more and more musically dense; the musician in me pins the clown down and insists on putting two minute prog-rock outros on everything.” Take the psychedelic jam-out at the end of the album closer, ‘Old Man At The End’, for instance. “I’m most proud of that song,” Justin says. “It’s like Rodney Rude meets Radiohead. The Great Australian Public Transport Metaphor For Life With 70s Pink Floyd Synth And Reverb Guitar Jam-Out.” According to Justin, this latest album contains just the right music/comedy blend that he needs to stay sane; “but if I don’t get some Neutral Milk Hotel action, the next album will probably be a comedy concept album about schizophrenia and impotence.”

The bio of The Bedroom Philosopher hasn’t been updated since the end of 2009, so I have no idea what’s happened this year – nor what’s coming next. He fills in the blanks for me. “Double album, commercial failure, drug abuse, breakdown, stint hosting childrens’ TV show, tell-all memoir, relocation to Thailand, ad campaign for Maggi Noodles, mildly successful reunion tour, tax problems, random marriage to Megan Washington, gradual death…”

Who: The Bedroom Philosopher & The Awkwardstra
What: Songs From The 86 Tram is out now