Bluetile Lounge
Bluetile Lounge appeared fully formed to me in a vision at the UWA Refectory sometime around mid 1993.
I was a 19 year old stripling in Perth, occasionally waking up in time to attend uni lectures, when this friendly guy from my English Lit class told me he was playing in a Battle Of the Bands at the Ref at lunch.
I went along with no expectations, but then Bluetile Lounge took the stage, playing just two songs in their allotted 20 minutes. They were unassuming in dark flannel shirts and murmured vocals, but possessed a magical twin guitar interplay and performed the most languorous, slowed down country-rock ever heard.
They didn’t win the battle that day – Perth still wasn’t quite ready for their crystalline cosmic country epics, which regularly stretched past the 10 minute point. “I think we got heckled at that show,” recalls guitarist and singer Dan Erickson. “Someone yelled out ‘so dreary’, which became a bit of a standard heckle.”
But for me, it was the beginning of an obsession that has lasted more than 30 years. Bluetile Lounge took musical touchstones that were already dear to me, like Galaxie 500, Low, Codeine and Uncle Tupelo, but meshed them in a way that transcended source to become something untouchable and pure. From the outset I thought, “This band will reach around the world,” then I watched as they released records via Summershine (distributed through Seattle grunge giants Sub Pop) and Smells Like (run by Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley), all while staying firmly put in Perth. (Full disclosure/humble brag: I put out Bluetile Lounge’s first released track in 1994, on a compilation tape on my fledgling label Chapter Music.)
The band formed at UWA when high school friends Dan and bassist Howard Healy ran into drummer Alex Stevens (my English Lit classmate), who knew Dan from skating circles. The lineup was completed when Gabrielle Stokes turned up to Alex’s 18th birthday party and revealed she was teaching guitar part-time at the Fremantle Music School.
“Gab kind of taught me how to play guitar,” says Daniel, only half-joking.
From the band’s perspective, they didn’t appear fully formed at all, struggling through loud, frenetic phases, even toying with the idea of having two sets to offer at gigs, one slow, one fast, and asking the audience to decide which they wanted to hear. Finally they settled on the poised and delicate sound that I heard at the Ref – whole universes collapsing between drum beats, with shimmering, entwined guitars and cryptic vocals, usually building to a cathartic crescendo after eight, nine or 12 blissful minutes.
The band became Perth fixtures with a devoted local following, playing steadily until Gabrielle went overseas in 1998. She was gone for three years and the band played one final show on her return, at the request of visiting Melbourne groups Art Of Fighting and 2 Litre Dolby.
Despite the international releases on feted labels, nothing really solid seemed to come of the albums at the time. “I can barely remember any reception at all,” says Dan. “We might have got some letters from people, but I don’t remember seeing any reviews, except maybe one pretty mediocre review in The Wire.”
In the time since their last show, the band members have lived in Europe and the UK, started families, worked as lawyers, architects and public servants (and for Gabrielle, in an uniquely appropriate job for the guitarist in Australia’s most stately, lugubrious group, as a death doula providing end-of-life care). Getting on with life has taken over and the music retreated to a bittersweet memory.
But on 2 April, Bluetile Lounge will play their first show in a quarter century, and their first ever show outside Perth, at Melbourne’s Brunswick Ballroom. “We haven’t even been in the same room together yet,” says Gabrielle, who now lives in Sydney. “We’re rehearsing in Melbourne for five days before the gig.”
This show is a cautious acknowledgement from a very not-career-minded band of the new audience that has grown around their two albums lowercase (1995) and Half Cut (1998) in the 21st century. Starting with YouTube fan uploads in the early 2010s, which attracted comments like “maybe the most underrated song of all time” and “perhaps the most beautiful sequence in the entirety of post-rock”, an international cult of Bluetile Lounge developed steadily until Adelaide label Hobbledehoy reissued both albums as deluxe double vinyl sets in 2022. The band’s original CDs are now expensive collector’s items, while listeners around the world profess their adoration in purple prose on Reddit threads, and lowercase‘s eight-minute opener “Wriding” has become an unlikely streaming phenomenon.
“Sometimes the reactions of people are a little bit hard to understand, but it’s good that they like it that much,” Dan says modestly. “We just wanted to be like the bands we loved. We might be listening to a band from North Carolina, and they probably weren’t even big in their own home town, but you’re listening to it from across the world. We just wanted something like that for ourselves too.”
These days their music is loved not just across the world but across generations. “My nephew had a friend who was going, ‘I’ve discovered this band, they’re the best band ever, they’re called the Bluetile Lounge,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah that’s my uncle,’” laughs Dan.
It was family members that pressured the band into this one gig, and with Dan in living in Melbourne and Gab in Sydney, Melbourne was decided on as the best place to play their first show in 25 years. There are apparently no more gigs planned, no recording sessions lined up, just an unlikely and magical appearance from one of the most underachieving and magical bands this country has ever produced.
They might be diffident and offhand when it comes to talking about their own music, but it’s clear that Bluetile Lounge still transfigures the lives of the musicians who were part of it.
“I hadn’t listened to our music for years because I found it a bit uncomfortable,” says Gabrielle. “But when the vinyl reissues came out I sat on the couch and listened through a great sound system and thought, ‘Wow that’s actually really beautiful.’ Parts of it, not all of it!”
Bluetile Lounge will perform at Brunswick Ballroom on Thu 2 April with support from Garage Sale. Tickets here.
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