The Tommy Interview

Tommy Benefield, lead singer/songwriter of Tommy, and Tommy and The Fallen Horses, spared a couple of hours on a murky Saturday morning to have a chat with a long time fan about the new album, 'Tomorrow I Might Go', his upcoming tour, and opinions on far too many things to include in one story!

Wellington freelance journalist Charlette Hannah was that fan, and much of that chat appears below. While recording 'Tomorrow I Might Go' at Bethells Beach, Tommy collaborated with filmmaker Stephen Walls to make an album and a documentary at once.

Charlette: So when's the documentary coming out?

Tommy: Well, it's an interesting one actually. C4 initially showed interest but they haven't actually gotten back to us about whether they're going to play it. It's been about two weeks now where they've said 'Yeah we'll talk to you then' and still failed to get back to us. I'm uncertain whether or not they're going to play it. If they're not it's cool, 'cause there's obviously Juice, Alternative TV, and even Inside New Zealand potentially, so there's a lot of places we could shop if C4 aren't interested. I'd be surprised if they're not, not because I think our band is so well known that we were going to merit a huge audience of watching the documentary, but just the quality of the documentary itself. It's quite a unique thing.

I think a lot of the documentaries that I've seen have some sort of similiarities, generic techniques and generic content that people are looking for. To me it's not interesting. I've seen documentaries of great bands and I've just been bored. What (film maker) Stephen Walls has done, instead of focusing on the making of the album, is his interest is in the personalities and the hearts, and the emotions and the thoughts and dreams and creative processes of the musicians themselves.

So the documentary is much less about making an album and more about a group of people coming together to achieve a common goal. So really we could have been painters or we could have been plumbers. It's about a group of people who are working together and have egos and hearts and love and skills and wisdom and all that stuff, and it's all gone into a melting pot to create an album. So it's a much more intimate and personal and multi-dimensional piece of film than most of the rockumentaries I've seen. So to me it seems more interesting, and a really innovative thing for them to play. But they've been kind of apathetic about it. I guess everyone has different opinions.

Charlette: Did you know before making the album that Tommy was going to break up and it was going to be a farewell album?

Tommy: Yeah, to be perfectly candid about it I was at a point where I was thinking maybe Tommy should break up before we made the album. What happened was, I worked so hard on getting the first album done that I was burnt out. Because I hadn't been able to work on it purely from a space of non-attachment and love. I'd gotten into some sort of ego-stories and was identifying with my own mind too much and I was believing what it was telling me which was 'I worked so hard on this and no one helps me and I'm by myself and I'm the one taking all the risk' - these kinds of negative stories. I just thought, you know what I want to do? I want to leave the whole Wellington reggae scene behind and I want to start playing alternative country music and I want to play intimate music and I don't want to be playing with these guys. I was negative about a lot of stuff and positive about only a little bit of stuff.

What happened was I had a great experience on tour where I spent some time with my friend Jesse and had this beautiful night of talking all night and it just re-awoke some things in me, some beautiful things and some deep things in me where I immediately got a new perspective of stuff. And what I thought was, 'Okay instead of just doing one album with the band and then letting it go, why don't we get into the studio again pretty soon, let AJ (Hickling) produce the album the way he wanted to produce the first album, give the band a lot more creative freedom than I have in the past and let them really feel like they've created the album they wanted to create'. So that the last memory of the band doing something together isn't of me feeling totally stressed out and burnt out and controlling the thing, but that everyone's last experience is that we all came together at this beautiful time and we co-created something. I thought that would be a beautiful last thing to do rather than ending it at that point.

So what happened is the band came together and we made that album and it was a beautiful time. We recorded the album nearly two years ago and it's been finished for a year just waiting to be released. In that time both Iain and Paul decided to go overseas, and AJ the drummer has been working on his solo projects, one's called SOS Project and one's called Diwata. I've also gone back into the studio with my other band Tommy and The Fallen Horses and we're halfway through finishing our first album. The band kind of became even further apart after the recording of the album. So we're not even going to be touring the album with the same line-up. There's going to be some gigs that have Iain in it but most gigs it's going to be a whole new line up. Still under the name Tommy and still doing the songs from the albums, doing all that reggae, happy high energy good time stuff. So I didn't know or when the band was going to dissolve but I did know that for me it needed to end, because musically I've been heading in quite a different direction for quite a long time.

Charlette: So it was quite amicable?

Tommy: Absolutely. Me, AJ and Iain just played a gig for the Cosmic Corner party just last weekend. Absolutely, we're all really close and we all love each other a lot and wish each other well in our current journeys, which for two of the boys is travelling round the world and for two of us is pursuing our music in more of a solo capacity.

Charlette: With Bethell's Beach, did you hear about this a while ago and decide to make an album or how did that come about?

Tommy: That came about because we met the filmmaker Stephen Walls when he came to see us play a gig at Lee Sawmill in Auckland. He really loved us and told us how he wanted to film bands at Bethell's Beach. None of us had ever heard of Bethell's Beach before. He wanted to do a series of concerts with great NZ bands and have a series of six one hour specials of having NZ bands play at this beautiful location. He was in the process of trying to make that happen. We said, 'That sounds interesting, we'd be keen to be part of that' and we were really humbled that he thought we were good enough to be part of that line up, I mean, he was only thinking of doing six bands and he just really loved us. So that was a great feeling.