Music

Gotye calls touring a "load of bullshit," questions his own "careerism"

by Sam Sutherland

As the third studio album from Australia’s Gotye, Making Mirrors, emerges as one of the sleeper hit records of the new year, band braintrust Wally De Backer is visibly struggling with the success that has come with it. On the strength of the single “Somebody That I Used To Know,” De Backer has been thrust from a position of staunch independence to major label-backed Kimmel-performing star of the future. And within moments of our interview in a Toronto hotel room, it becomes apparent that the rapid growth isn’t coming without a price.

“Sometimes I feel like this music just becomes a process, playing it live,” De Backer says. “Sometimes it’s a process that’s really exciting and I’m really proud of what I’m doing, and right now, today, I’m feeling like I’m an idiot. It’s just careerism. It’s just, ‘You should do it, the opportunities are here.’ I just want to make records. I don’t want to tour. It’s a load of bullshit, and there’s a lot of crap that goes around it that’s just not about music for me.”

In the midst of a seven-week North American tour, De Backer is frank about hoping to turn his attitude around, “for the sake of the my band and the other people I’m hanging out with, and the sake of my own sanity.” But his concern obviously runs deeper than the rigours of touring, from his first experience with professional autograph seekers looking to flip signed copies of Gotye records (“vultures,” he calls them), to the nature of his new working relationships.

“I feel conflicted about some of the success. I worked on stuff so independently for so long, and for years, I was like, ‘Should I really be spending hours here making my own CDs and drawing the artwork?’ You’ve got this romantic idea of what it would be like to have a big record label, and be a star, and how it will make things easier for you. And the little spark of creativity that you have can be supported by this whole web of stuff that’s going to bring you to the masses. I feel like maybe the bigger it gets, the more I think I don’t want to be in this world. All the things that come with it, that’s not why I was doing it in the first place.”