One man brand

Matthew Fynes-Clinton
January 19, 2007

BOBBBY Flynn was the Australian Idol contestant whose enigmatic Sunday night performances posed a recurring question at water cooler pow-wows: What next?

But there was always an even bigger riddle: what next? What would he do once Idol was finished with him? (He came seventh in the fourth series of the Network Ten talent program, which ended on November 26.)

Would a major record label snap him up? Would the Flynn juggernaut go trucking through the nation? Would we see shows at concert halls? Appearances at shopping malls? Mass merchandising from Bobby wigs down to Bobby socks? Or not

On the day I meet Flynn, it takes an instant to surmise that he's negotiating any post-Idol sizzle with a bucket of cold water handy.

Wearing jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt bearing a picture of American blues singer/finger-picking guitarist Blind Gary Davis, he is not as tall and a little chunkier than he seemed on television. That intriguing face is remarkably open, his transparent blue eyes more compelling than the celebrated mop of curls.

First of all, Flynn says, he has eschewed the two or three southern management and booking agencies that traditionally act for the bulk of each Idol series' final 12 competitors.

He's appointed his own manager, former law student Nick Cornish, 23, a rugby star at St Joseph's College, Gregory Terrace, where the pair became friends as fellow pupils in the late 1990s.

Across a quiet table at the Brisbane Powerhouse, Flynn says that he's "dubious about large-scale management firms. They are marketplace operators.

They would happily have me at RSL clubs for two and a half grand. I'm not interested in that, or shopping centre appearances. What you need to be working on is what you're giving to the marketplace; how you're evaluating society, whether it's through a meaningful song or whether you're a builder.

"It sure is alluring to hear all these lucrative offers and (hard to) not want to jump on them. But you realise they're short-winded. They're pretty false and they're based on nothing."

Despite discussions with Sony BMG, Flynn, 25, says he has not been offered a recording deal.

The company's three-month option on each finalist officially expires on February 26. While the label has signed series winner Damien Leith, runner-up Jessica Mauboy and heart-throb Dean Geyer, Sony BMG chief executive Denis Handlin, in a pre-Christmas public statement, was cryptic about Flynn. "Bobby certainly hasn't been overlooked," he said, "and is definitely on our radar."

Whatever the outcome, Cornish says Flynn's unique folky flavours have generated plenty of interest from independent record companies and mainstream distribution labels. He anticipates an agreement will be struck with one party or another in the first half of this year.

Meantime, Flynn does not accept he's in a holding pattern. He is working solidly around the country, popping up at music festivals such as Woodford, north of Brisbane, and plying the blues-and-roots haunts of Sydney and Melbourne. In keeping with his unpredictability, he has several guises: playing alone, as a duet with friend Zac Armytage, or backed by an evolving, as-yet unnamed band.

He is on the bill for next Thursday's Australia Day Live concert on the lawns of Canberra's Parliament House.

He is toying with the prospect of simultaneously releasing two albums of original songs - "an honest kind of raw presentation which could be just (vocal and) guitar" and a "more electronic, developed (collaboration) with the band". It sounds wacky. Then you remember who you're talking to.

"But I'm in no rush," he goes on. "It's been massive for me and I just need to reflect on the (Idol) experience and (all) that has happened. I'll continue writing, creating and playing my own game, really. If it suits (a record company), it suits them."

In other words, Flynn's professional future is being charted with the measure he brought to his Idol rendition of Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London; with the subtle defiance he expressed in the David Bowie/Queen hit Under Pressure. He might have been sent to us from Factory Direct but Robert Andrew Flynn is a one-man brand. The only radar that matters is his.

IT WASN'T ALWAYS THAT WAY. IN FACT, FLYNN TOOK a while to commit to his musical calling. His mother Josephine was 42 when she had him, a brother for four-year-old Sarah. His dad Kevin, an accountant, was 52. The children were raised at Coorparoo in Brisbane's east in a middle-class Catholic family with eclectic musical influences: their parents shared a passion for records, from postwar jive to '60s crooners.

But it was Kevin's free thinking that appears to have settled deepest within Flynn. "He was a pretty philosophical guy, a sensitive man," he says. "He'd encourage my sister and I to have a life of experience; explore things how we wanted to explore them. He'd say things to us like, 'You can do anything you want with your life. Anything.'"

It struck Flynn only recently how much he had missed his father's guidance as a young adult. Kevin died from prostate cancer when his son was 15. About six years earlier, Flynn had picked up a guitar - Sarah's Spanish-style nylon stringer - for the first time. "And then, I guess, songs started happening," he says.

"I was nine or ten and I'd go off to my bedroom and vocalise some of these musings. I didn't have lessons."

Among his neighbours were a few 14 and 15-year-old boys with a bent for British post-punk bands such as The Cure, The Clash and Joy Division. He loved these sounds, and was soon inviting the teens to his garage to jam.

"We'd spend the summers playing music," Flynn recounts. "We were trying to recreate what we'd been listening to and we'd make these little albums up, record them on cassette and write out the lyrics. I borrowed a bass from the neighbours and played it, (although) I also had an electric guitar I had bought from a pawnbroker for $75 when I was 11. But my first public performance, at a fair, wasn't until I was 14."

Flynn says he remained "in denial" about his singing ability. The turning point came in Year 10. He fronted an outfit of Terrace rockers called Forgotten Pride, which won the intra-school battle of the bands competition.

"As a result, we were asked to perform in front of the school assembly," he says, "and I got some large-scale kudos out of that. I thought, 'Wow, this is something I can do'."

His tenure at Terrace, an all-boys Catholic GPS college, was "well-rounded", he says. Yet on the inside, he sensed he was different. "I loved hanging out with the jocks, musos and going to the computer lab. I was floating. It was like, 'Where do I fit in?'"

Outside school, "I had a couple of girlfriends but I was shy with women, actually." (For the past two years he has been in a relationship with Jade Borjesson, now 26, a pretty, raven-haired visual artist.) He also had "body image issues".

"I was a chubby boy until about the age of 13. I had curly, uncontrollable hair and I didn't think it was masculine."

These days, Flynn says, he makes a good fist of accepting that "I'm perfect in the state I'm in". Nonetheless, there are still moments. "I was looking in the mirror the other day and I was beginning to think I had an unusual face," he says. "But, well, all of that stuff is just ideas I don't think I'm that odd."

He was a capable rugby union player, packing down at prop for the Terrace 2nd XV, and matriculated with a lower-middle range overall position of 14, enrolling in a Bachelor of Business (Hospitality Management) degree at the University of Queensland.

"Family, peers and high school you were definitely encouraged to pursue a tertiary education," he says. "I remember thinking I loved communicating with people and that running restaurants could be a really great way to have that sense of community. But six months out (from finishing the course) I was not enjoying it, so I dropped out. I had been dancing with life rather than feeling this passionate collision of energy. I felt like a fake and I needed to get out of that situation."

For those two-and-a-half years Flynn had been songwriting at a prolific rate, occasionally playing at Milton's Alley Bar. With a mate, underground performer Rob Warren, he privately experimented with stream-of-consciousness, spoken-word hip hop. "I eventually got disillusioned with that," he says.

But what surprised him about his liberation from university was the way it crystallised fear. Despite the pull of a musical destiny, Flynn says he "still saw performing as a beautiful thing, like a really honourable pursuit and a great pastime. I just didn't understand that you could make a career out of it."

The resultant confusion led him to undertake two significant odysseys. The first was to the Northern Territory, where he worked for six months as a ranger: "Those radical shifts help you if you feel like you're not in control of your life, because your environment changes but how you feel about the outside world doesn't. You see things from a different perspective."

He came home for six months, then took off on a pilgrimage to southern Europe, Scotland, his ancestral seat of Ireland, and Canada. He was away a year, mingling with like-minded musicians and artists. He "listened, was listened to and was inspired".

On his return to Brisbane in September 2004, Flynn decided to stop worrying about whether music was a legitimate profession. "It was like, hold on, there are millions of people in the world who are doing this," he says.

"They're all feeding the kids and paying the bills and (being a full-time, independent singer-songwriter) is totally attainable. It's a lineage, and it supports itself - because it's quite old. It feels like I'm a guy with two stones and I'm just rubbing them together, you know? It's that primitive."

Flynn took waiting, bar and kitchen jobs to supplement his gigs. He convinced a West End cafe where he made sandwiches by day to put him behind the microphone from Friday to Sunday nights at $100 a session. He earned the same sort of money when he played Fortitude Valley's The Troubadour. At some venues, he'd support other acts. He might get paid in beer, or not at all.

Rick Chazan, at 43 a veteran of the local contemporary music scene and a management committee member of Q Music, the state's peak industry body, says that prior to Idol, Flynn didn't necessarily distinguish himself from Brisbane's talented pack of independent musicians. "The first time I saw him, he was just one of myriad singer-songwriters playing (at The Troubadour)," Chazan says. "I thought he was impressive; a very interesting voice. I didn't get that great impact of him being so wildly, individually different." Jo Bell, 35, the owner of music directory website brispop.com, agrees: "I didn't think he really stood out that much from others who were doing similar singer-songwriter kind of things."

Which is exactly why Flynn's foray into otherworldly Idol unravelled to reveal near-genius in its dottiness. Thrust into a vat of homogenised pop, bubble and squeak, Flynn's organic qualities gripped and swam. He was the cream that rose.

OF COURSE, Flynn says, it all could have backfired. "To one side of my mind, there was like, 'This (might) be a complete train wreck for my career. I may never sing again because it's a television (talent) show. I might look like a complete idiot and lose all credibility'."

He had been forcefully opposed to programs of Idol's ilk. "I felt (Idol) didn't represent young people who were really out there working," he says. "I thought it was unmusical and as an imperial(ist), overseas franchise (begun in Britain), represented that globalised or manufactured approach to the industry."

But an associate who had contacts in the bunker of Idol's Australian production company, Grundy Television, urged him to open his mind. It was April 2006; at the time Flynn was deriving a deal of his non-music income from popular Valley venue The Tivoli, where he worked as an usher and barman.

He says: "I think I had the realisation that, hold on, (Idol) is here. Let's give over to the challenge. And let's change it and be part of that change. See what we can do to help it evolve, maybe." At his audition he conveyed the same sentiments to Idol's judging panel. After witnessing Flynn perform his original The Boy Had Trouble, Marcia Hines told him he had all bases covered: it was "one of the greatest songs I've heard inside or outside of Idol".

As the series progressed, his astonishing ability to reduce classic hits to putty, then re-sculpt them with a minimalist hand, drew serious praise. Effectively, he was harvesting the bare beauty of a chart-topper from the indolence that sets in with saturation airplay. People had listened to these songs many times. But in some cases, until Flynn's reworkings, they had never truly heard them.

Respected rock scribe and author Mark Mordue wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald of Flynn's Joe Cocker or Van Morrison-esque "claw-like tremble, as if he's half-holding, half-stirring something inside himself". In his voice, Mordue, 46, was reminded of the "tenderness" of late, legendary English singer-songwriter Nick Drake. "(We) are in the presence of someone great at an early stage of his development," he concluded.

Renowned music journalist and historian Glenn A. Baker says Flynn's performances were "startling". "He blew me away," 54-year-old Baker tells Qweekend. "The man obviously has fairly heightened musical instincts. People were making a lot of interesting comparisons, whether it was to Nick Drake or (fellow Brit folk-rocker) Roy Harper. But I like to think that he probably wasn't interpreting via a particular filter. He was just interpreting these songs as Bobby Flynn. That was the most exciting thing."

Flynn could have been unconsciously aided by the fact that he had rarely performed cover versions. Thus unencumbered, he would research for lyrical story and flow of sound, then do exactly what he does with his own material: cut to the "emotional ribbon". "That's the key to a song," he says. "It's not notes, it's not pitch, it's not harmony. The emotion of the song that's the core."

Yet after one performance, bully-boy judge Kyle Sandilands suggested that Flynn was either a star or a "full mong" (shorthand for mongoloid). Flynn is incredibly forgiving: "(Sandilands) never apologised. And I'm not condoning people who make offensive remarks. What he said was not on. But Kyle is the voice within all of us that is youth-like and uninhibited - which, I think, is a beautiful thing."

Behind the scenes, Flynn's eccentricities also were not entirely well-received. For example, on the night he sang Under Pressure, he elected to wear a slash of dark blue makeup across his eyes. He says his inspiration was not so much REM's Michael Stipe as Annie Lennox's black leather mask era. "I'd seen her do it and for me it represented the mask of performance," he says. "I wanted to explore what that meant and I felt strongly about it."

As Flynn waited to go on stage he saw his stylist collared by a Grundy producer. In rehearsal, there had allegedly been a problem with the interplay between his makeup and the lights. "We've got to take it off," the stylist said. Flynn didn't buy the story for a second. "The mask is staying on," he said.

The next day, in the aftermath of his dazzling arrangement (performed with mask intact), he learned that the producer actually had been concerned about Flynn "dislocating his audience". "(The attitude) was like, well, if that's going to make people think you're a bit of a loon, it might not be best for you to get votes," Flynn says. "And I'd say, 'Well, I don't care. Because I'm here to learn as much as I can. I'm not interested in winning this competition. This is a journey of discovery for me.'"

In the lead-up to the following week's "disco night", he announced to Idol's vocal coach/arranger Erana Clark that he was thinking of doing a bossa nova version of the 1981 funk anthem Super Freak. "She cracked up laughing," Flynn says. The song, as originally delivered by the late Rick James, is manically overcooked. Flynn undressed it and applied a light smoking. It was mouth-watering stuff.

Just one week on, a slightly under-par effort on the Fleetwood Mac standard Rhiannon precipitated his elimination. The Grundy people were right. Ultimately, his point of difference was probably too much hard work for Idol viewers who had never been so displaced from their comfort zone. But Flynn was right, too. He bowed out at the business end, when the last contestants were spearing towards the final prize of commoditisation. For him, there was nothing much left to discover.

A couple of nights later, invited to return to the show to join the six remaining finalists for a special showcasing their original songs, Flynn chose his audition number. "I had come full circle," he says. "I could not have arranged it more majestically."

IN THE WIDER PICTURE, FLYNN IS ALSO BACK WHERE he began, playing quaint 200-patron venues. Only now, all the shows are sell-outs. The type of crowd has changed, too. When I watched him recently in Sydney at The Vanguard, in Newtown, the place was populated by doe-eyed 25 to 35-year-old women who hung on his every utterance.

With Zac Armytage accompanying him on second guitar, the hour-long set featured Super Freak and The Church's Under the Milky Way (another of his Idol pleasers), along with Flynn originals. Admirers were knocked out by his "soul", "heart" and "quirkiness". However, the same fans saw problematic times ahead. "There won't be any huge record deal - it's not his style," said Trudy Ritchie, 27. "He'll be like (English singer-songwriter) Ed Harcourt, who no-one knows but is absolutely amazing."

"The sort of music he's singing at the moment I don't know," opined 24-year-old Steve Lacy. "I think he could make a couple of albums like that but after that he's going to have to reinvent himself."

"He'll be doomed if he stays here (in Australia) because he'll have a very limited market," said Harry Hotz, 51. "But if he went to the States, he could be the next (US poet/musician) Michael Franti, (albeit) a different style."

Flynn will not be diverted. He says his energies are solely with honouring, sustaining and further crafting his gift.

How does he explain what he does? "You know," he says, "all of us have this place that is perfect, untouched like a rainforest. And sometimes, you're fortunate enough to catch a bit of driftwood as it trickles into the city."


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