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File: This is BEATRIFUL Sessions.

Host: The Iron Outlaw. SizzleC, how do you turn the heavy, mud-soaked tragedy of an eighteen eighty Australian rebellion into a relentless tech house album?

Sizzle: You start with a man who walked into gunfire wearing a plough. After that, the kick drum is the least strange thing in the room.

Host: Who is he, for anyone who did not grow up with him?

Sizzle: Ned Kelly. A bushranger in the colony of Victoria, the son of an Irish convict. The album covers his last twenty months as a free man, from October eighteen seventy-eight to June eighteen eighty. In that time he and three others killed three policemen, robbed two banks, dictated a letter of about eight thousand words, and beat suits of armour out of farm equipment. Australia has been arguing about him ever since.

Host: Hero or murderer. Which side is your album on?

Sizzle: The songs are told from inside his head. That is not the same as agreeing with him. I have been inside my own head for years and I disagree with it constantly.

Host: And the sound?

Sizzle: Every song opens on the colonial bush. Fiddle, banjo, jaw harp, an anvil. Then it drops into tech house, and the picture changes with it. The past gets about a minute. Then the floor opens.

1 · Stringybark (Point of No Return)

Sizzle: October eighteen seventy-eight, Stringybark Creek. A police party is camped in the ranges, hunting the Kellys, and the Kellys find the camp first. It opens in the bush, on a fiddle, and then the chorus tells you how it ends. Three men down.

[song 01 — 01-stringybark-point-of-no-return-take1-ext1.mp3]

Host: Three policemen were killed that day. You wrote it from the side of the men who shot them.

Sizzle: I wrote it from where he stood, and I put the cost in the chorus so nobody could miss it. The song is called Point of No Return, not Point of Pride. Before that afternoon he was a horse thief with a grievance. After it there was only one way the story could end, and he knew it.

2 · The Outlaw Act

Sizzle: Within weeks the colony passes the Felons' Apprehension Act. It declares the gang outlaws, which in plain words means anyone may shoot them on sight. This one is a banjo at a gallop that turns into hard, driving tech house. It is the only song on the album where running away is the hook.

[song 02 — 02-the-outlaw-act-take2.mp3]

Host: Wanted alive or dead. That must do something to a man.

Sizzle: It simplifies his calendar. You stop making plans for next year. I have had months like that, though in my case it was only a landlord.

3 · The Royal Mail

Sizzle: February eighteen seventy-nine, the town of Jerilderie. The gang locks the local police in their own cells, puts on the uniforms, and holds the town from the Royal Mail Hotel while the bank is emptied. The accounts say he was polite about it, and that there were drinks. So I asked for a house groove with pint glasses in the percussion.

[song 03 — 03-the-royal-mail-take1.mp3]

Host: You make a bank robbery sound like a good night out.

Sizzle: That is the uncomfortable part, and I left it in. He was charming with a pistol in his hand. Half the room was terrified and the other half was laughing, and some of them were the same people. Any decent party has a little of that.

Host: Yours do?

Sizzle: Mine have fewer hostages. Slightly fewer.

4 · Jerilderie (The Dictation)

Sizzle: Same town, a back room. He dictates a letter to one of his gang, about eight thousand words, on what the police and the big landholders had done to families like his. He wanted it printed. I wanted the song to begin with a steel pen scratching, and nothing else.

[song 04 — 04-jerilderie-the-dictation-take2.mp3]

Host: Your chorus says, print the manifesto. Did anyone print it?

Sizzle: No. He handed it over to be published and it was kept back. It did not appear in full until nineteen thirty, fifty years after he was hanged. So the chorus is a demand nobody met while he was alive. He robbed the bank in an afternoon and still could not get published. Every writer I know feels seen.

5 · Ploughshares to Iron

Sizzle: Eighteen eighty, somewhere in the ranges. They take the mouldboards off ploughs, heat them in a bush forge, and beat them into armour. A helmet, a breastplate, a back plate. His suit weighed around ninety-seven pounds. So the song starts at the anvil. A hammer on iron is already a kick drum. I barely had to ask.

[song 05 — 05-ploughshares-to-iron-take2.mp3]

Host: There is an old line about beating swords into ploughshares.

Sizzle: He ran it backwards. That is the whole song. He took the one tool that feeds a family and made it into the thing that got him killed. It is the best idea on the album, and the worst idea he ever had.

6 · Tearing the Tracks

Sizzle: June eighteen eighty, the railway line near Glenrowan. A special train full of police is expected, so the rails are pulled up where the line runs along a steep bank. The plan is a wreck. The song is a train you can hear coming the whole way through.

[song 06 — 06-tearing-the-tracks-take1.mp3]

Host: In the song he is on the tracks with a crowbar. Is that how the history has it?

Sizzle: The history says he made railway workers do the lifting, at gunpoint. I gave him the crowbar because it rhymes better than management. The rails came up either way, and the intent was exactly as ugly as the song says.

7 · The Glenrowan Wait

Sizzle: The gang holds around sixty people in the Glenrowan inn and waits for the train. It is late. And the accounts really do say there was dancing, and a concertina. So the song is slow and a little drunk, with one eye on the window.

[song 07 — 07-the-glenrowan-wait-take2.mp3]

Host: Hostages dancing. You did not make that up?

Sizzle: I could not have. If I had invented it you would have told me it was too much. People will dance to anything if the alternative is thinking about it. I have built a career on that.

8 · The Red Scarf

Sizzle: One of the hostages is the local schoolteacher. He talks his way out of the inn, runs to the line in the dark, and holds a light behind a red scarf to stop the police train before the broken rails. This is the only song on the album where the hero is not the outlaw. And it is the one that goes to full techno.

[song 08 — 08-the-red-scarf-take1.mp3]

Host: So the man who beats Ned Kelly is a teacher with a scarf.

Sizzle: Every time. You can plan for an army. You cannot plan for the one quiet man in the room who has been listening.

9 · The Iron Ghost

Sizzle: Dawn, the twenty-eighth of June eighteen eighty. The inn is surrounded and shot to pieces. And out of the fog, behind the police line, comes a figure in iron, firing a revolver, with bullets ringing off him. Some of the police said afterwards they did not know what they were looking at. The song is the slowest and the heaviest on the album, and I wanted that clang in the drums.

[song 09 — 09-the-iron-ghost-take2-ext1.mp3]

Host: He could have slipped away in that fog. He walked back in.

Sizzle: His brother and his friends were still inside. I do not have to like him to know what that is. It is the one moment on the album I did not want to put a joke near.

10 · Such is Life (The Fall)

Sizzle: The armour had no legs. They shot him there, and he went down. The inn burned, and the other three died in it or before it. He was tried in Melbourne and hanged that November. The last song is the fiddle again, and then a melodic house track that sounds, I hope, like someone finally letting go of something heavy.

[song 10 — 10-such-is-life-the-fall-take1-ext1.mp3]

Host: Such is life. Did he say it?

Sizzle: It was reported at the time that those were his last words on the scaffold, and it has been disputed ever since. I kept it as the title because the country did. A man spends twenty months building a legend, and the part everyone remembers is three words he may not have said. Such is publishing.

Close

Host: Ten songs. After all of it, where did you land? Hero or murderer?

Sizzle: Both, and the album does not let him off either one. He killed three men at a creek. He also wrote eight thousand words about injustice that nobody would print, and some of it was true. If you want a verdict, there was a court for that. I only brought the band.

Host: The Iron Outlaw.

File: The album, the covers, and the videos as they finish, are at beatriful dot com. This has been BEATRIFUL Sessions.