“I find it the least cohesive of our albums, but by the same token, it has some really unbelievable moments,” Tim Freedman tells Apple Music of The Whitlams’ 1999 album, Love This City. That the record was initially conceived as a double album—five songs were eventually trimmed and used as B-sides—is indicative of the ambition that fuelled the group’s fourth full-length, Freedman’s indie singer-songwriter pop embellished with lavish strings and intricate instrumental arrangements. Its grandeur can, in part, be attributed to 1997 predecessor Eternal Nightcap, which yielded the breakout hit “No Aphrodisiac”. That success led to The Whitlams making the leap from independent act to a major label, meaning that when it came to record Love This City, Freedman had a budget that could match his vision. “It was the first time I was making a record for more than $20,000,” says the vocalist, keyboard player and main songwriter, who founded the band in Sydney in 1992. With recording split between Sydney, Gosford and Memphis—ZZ Top producer Joe Hardy helmed the sessions in Memphis, with Rob Taylor (Yothu Yindi) and Daniel Denholm (Midnight Oil, Powderfinger) handling the remainder—the album features a cavalcade of musicians. “I was between bands, so I was putting a lineup together and treating each song as a separate entity,” explains Freedman. “The Memphis stuff sounds different to the Sydney stuff. I suppose its defining feature is that it’s really lavish, because I let the producers and myself do whatever we liked.” The record remains an integral part of Freedman’s, and The Whitlams’, story. “It was tremendously important that it worked. Otherwise, I would have been a one-hit wonder,” he says. “A lot of people thought ‘No Aphrodisiac’ was a classic example of someone who had a bit of luck and then disappeared. This album is important to me because it set the course for me for the next 10 years, in which I released another three albums that all did pretty well. I proved to myself that I could keep it up.” Here, Freedman looks back on Love This City, track by track. “Make the World Safe” “I was falling in love. It’s a pretty pure love song. You can tell that it was written about three or four years before Eternal Nightcap because the protagonist is broke. People have often told me they waltzed to this song at their weddings. It’s completely uncynical.” “Thank You (For Loving Me at My Worst)” “I was a big The Lovin’ Spoonful fan, and this was my Sydney take on that upbeat pop stuff. I like the lyrics because it’s so playful—it’s about a guy going wild and crazy, and that summed up the summer I’d had after Eternal Nightcap went well. I’d gone out and lived large. So, my ambition was to capture a snapshot of untrammelled happiness.” “Chunky Chunky Air Guitar” “I introduced a lot of the members of Machine Gun Fellatio [the Sydney act that wrote this song] to each other, so I’m part of the creation story of that band. And so, I was always hearing their nascent tunes. I liked the absurdity of these lyrics. It became a bit of a lightning rod for the Tall Poppy Syndrome, which is what happens when you have some unexpected success in music. So, it got a bit of ire, but it’s just a song, and I still think it’s fun.” “Pretty As You” “It hasn’t quite grown on me over the years. And it’s the first time on the album where I’m not being buoyant. It’s about an unprincipled cad inveigling his way into a girl’s charms. So, for the first time, we get a little bit conscious of the nasty hunger of the inner city. He’ll say anything because she’s pretty—it doesn’t matter if it’s false or true. It’s really about a stalker. It’s a creepy one.” “You Gotta Love This City” “When the Sydney Olympics were announced in 1993, the early Whitlams—myself, Stevie Plunder and Andy Lewis—had been hired to play at The Lansdowne Hotel in Sydney at the anti-Olympics party. There were 3 million people celebrating, and there were 75 people at the anti-Olympics party. It’s a song where everything goes wrong for this guy, but he can cope with that. What he can’t cope with is another fireworks display in Sydney, so he kills himself. Marcia Hines was available to come in and do backing vocals, and she really lifts those choruses. I thought it was brave to put jazz flute on top. Hadn’t been a lot of jazz flute in the charts.” “God Drinks at the Sando” “An old-school colleague of mine was a poet in Newtown. And he wrote a poem called God Drinks at the Sando and sold it behind the bar [of Newtown’s Sandringham Hotel]. I loved the poem. He wrote all the stuff about God sitting there, and the grainy light, and how we like talking to him, and he’s just one of the old blokes watching. I added the thread about how God only drank there because the bloke up the road changed the pub’s name, which was a little bugbear of mine. The pub at the end of my street had been called The Shakespeare for 60 years, and the new owner changed the name of it. We recorded it live as a trio, so it’s a breath of air in between all the lavish stuff—just a live recording of a Tom Waits-inspired ballad.” “Blow Up the Pokies” “I was upset that three friends were having problems with their gambling, and I sat down and wrote the words very quickly. It was an issue that hadn’t been tackled, but everyone was aware of, and I managed to clothe it in a story as opposed to just pamphleteering and sloganeering. [Radio station] Triple M started playing it, and it became their best-researched song of 2000, because it must have stood out in their rock playlists. So, it was blaring out over work sites and getting heard by the people that really did go to the pubs where there were poker machines. It was great to get a little protest song onto commercial radio.” “400 Miles from Darwin” “I’d written it after the Dili massacre in the mid-’90s, when I marched in Sydney. It’s about the fact that we tend to get very righteous about things that happened 30 years ago and are not so energised by things that might be just as serious that are happening right now. Because I was trying to be very Australian and not shy away from social issues on the album, I managed to emphasise how close East Timor was to us, and if the issue wasn’t our concern, whose was it?” “Time” “It’s about a young man, much younger than I was, having a lingering affair. I’d written the song a long time before 1999, and you can tell, too—it’s pretty undergraduate. The way he expects the girl not to notice the other girl’s things is really quite distasteful!” “Made Me Hard” “A founding member of The Whitlams was Stevie Plunder, and his big brother was Bernie Hayes [who wrote ‘Made Me Hard’]. I got to know Bernie’s repertoire very well and became a fan of it. He’s like the Elvis Costello of the [Sydney] Inner West with his songcraft.” “High Ground” “It’s about grief. It’s about a mother coping with the loss of her child after the funeral and the way she’s suddenly left alone. It’s ambitious in its theme. Ben Fink, who’d been with the band two years, wrote the music, and it was another example of me liking the sound of something and giving myself a project, to write to a theme.” “Unreliable” “Chris [Abrahams, who wrote the song] was always on the outskirts of the band because we were very close friends in the early ’90s, and he played in a few lineups around ’95, when I was experimenting with double keyboards. I knew his repertoire well. It’s a bit like the case with ‘Made Me Hard’—I thought, ‘This is a great song, and I’ll have a go at it.’ The outro’s pretty typical of this record in that just when you think it’s over, a string section comes in or a double-tracked guitar. There’s a cello line that comes in for the last eight seconds!” “Her Floor Is My Ceiling” “He’s disaffected and shy. And he’s in love with the girl upstairs, who he can’t talk to. So, he’s an unreliable narrator. It’s not me, but it comes from my days when I started living in shared accommodation, in 1987 in Surry Hills, and I was hearing people on top of me for the first time. And in this case, it was Sheree, who was a hairdresser, and she’d come home late every night and put on a cassette of Sade’s ‘Smooth Operator’. I heard ‘Smooth Operator’ every night for a year. And so, I wrote this song sort of pretending that I was also in love with Sheree, even though I was just taking on a persona.” “There’s No One” “[The original lineup of The Whitlams] used to go up and down the coast, and the other two fellas in the band would have to stop at every second town and get in the phone booth and continue the arguments with their girlfriends who they’d left in Sydney. And I was comfortably single, and I would sit in the passenger seat of the Kingswood and thank my lucky stars I was not having to answer to anyone. And so, when we got to Byron Bay, there was an upright piano, and I wrote this song in The Railway Friendly Bar on my day off. It’s supposed to be a celebration of independence.”