MARK SEYMOUR & BAND

Mark Seymour wrote his first song in the summer of 1980 about a space invader machine. He was broke at the time, living in a Carlton share house with no power and no running water. 

Shortly after the pop band he was in, ‘The Jetsonnes’, morphed into something slightly more apocalyptic, changed its name to ‘Hunters and Collectors’.. and Seymour went on to compose the dancefloor hell-scape single ‘Talking to a Stranger’ which secured several international record deals.

Three years later, with the departure of Greg Perano on industrial percussion, the demonic groove was lost. Hunters and Collectors morphed again and Seymour wrote the pop ballad ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’..

To say that Seymour’s trajectory has been ‘inconsistent’ would be an understatement! And yet 45 years later, he’ll tell you that the process hasn’t changed that much. The only thing that has is the subject matter. There’s always been an acoustic guitar, a recording device, mumbled words and some vague description of where he was or who he was with, the rooms he’s lived in, roads travelled, either surrounded by musicians or alone in the back shed. 

Many songs have disappeared while others have endured beyond the circumstances that spawned them. For Seymour song writing has been as much about emotional survival as anything else.