It’s All About The Ferguson Rogers Process…

The Ferguson Rogers Process, the new project from Tim Rogers (You Am I) and Lance Ferguson (The Bamboos) have released their debut album, Style And Or Substance.

Style And Or Substance presents that rare chemistry that can only occur when two of Australia’s favourite artists are combined and then heated. The resulting compound charts new territory for both of its protagonists and entices us to a musical space where Disco discovers that it can get dirty, and Rock can find its groove. It’s glamour meeting grit. It’s the movie star meeting the hustler. It’s discovering that there’s glitter in the gutter. It’s the new and revelatory combination of Tim Rogers’ wry lyrics and Lance Ferguson’s innate sense of groove. Lance Ferguson talks to Hi Fi Way about working with Tim Rogers on this awesome album.

Congratulations on their album, it’s an absolute ripper. You’ve got to be really thrilled with how that turned out?
I’m really happy with the way it sounds. It was a fair while coming, so it’s nice to hear it in completion. I got the test pressings in the mail, which was a little late in the peace because if they weren’t good, it would be far too late being so close to the album release. The test pressings just got delayed and almost arrived after the actual proper manufactured album. They sounded really good, so that was a that was a relief. It’s great to actually be able to put the test pressing on the record player, put the needle on it, listen to it and try and forget all the stuff that went into it, just letting it soak into your ears without trying to listen to the fine details which is very difficult for me to do that.

Is the process of unboxing the test processing, does that feel a bit of like Christmas coming early?
It does. I am a vinyl enthusiast, I’ve been doing it for a while now, but anytime some music that I’ve made is committed to the medium of vinyl, it’s always exciting to play it for the first time.

You mentioned that this was a while in the making, is that due to Tim being so busy with many things on the go?
It’s definitely part of it. I mean, Tim might be the hardest working man in show business or certainly one of them. He’s all over the world even. He’s touring with the Hard-Ons. He’s he was in America doing some recording for a solo album. I think he’s making TV shows. He’s this great TV show on the ABC The Headliners. He’s doing You Am I stuff ongoing. So yeah, part of it was pinning him down, part of it was this album, the genesis of it came at the tail end of lock down, which is going back a little way now. I started coming up with these ideas, sketches and little parts of grooves then sending them to Tim. So just the to-and-fro of that took a while and by the time we got into the studio was maybe a year and a half to two years after that initial process had started. So yeah, it was a little bit stretched out, but then it all happened really quickly at the end in terms of recording it and everything and committing to the final thing. Yeah, that’s how it played out.

Is that a bit of a tricky thing as well for Tim going from The Hard-Ons to flicking the switch and grooving with Ferguson Rogers Process?
I guess that’s more of a question for Tim, but from the outside looking in or looking at upon what he does, he seems to be able to turn on a dime and just turn it on. That’s a credit to his versatility and his professionalism. He works so hard and he really puts in and even the studio we spent a long time getting stuff right. He does have a high level of quality control across the whole thing. So yeah, I think he’s very versatile, but also he brings the innate Tim Rogers in quotation marks into everything he does, and that’s special as well, because no matter which project he seems to be doing, he is himself and that’s what any artist could hope for, I think.

Was it a conscious thing this time around to keep The Bamboos as a separate thing and go down the path of the Ferguson Rogers Process?
Yeah it I guess it was a conscious thing. In terms of the musical side of this, as in the instrument mental side of this, I played everything on it except for the drums. So, when I got all these songs together, I had some looped placeholder drum loops in there and then we rerecorded the drums with Graham, who’s from The Bamboos. Everything else I played myself so it fell to maybe a little bit disingenuous to call it The Bamboos in terms of a band thing. Also I think it was definitely something that Tim and I was very much something the two of us had put together. I didn’t want to maybe put it under the name of The Bamboos, but funnily enough, when we came time to put the live incarnation of it together, it’s like eighty five percent of The Bamboos on stage. That just means it has a very solid rhythm section.

Do you see much difference sonically between the two?
I think I think there is. I’m loathed to talk of genre and all that sort of stuff. I try and avoid it, but it is inevitable, especially when we’re sitting down here talking about the record and pulling it apart in this way. This record, I guess it’s DNA is in that beautiful collision of new wave and punk music, but with disco and funk that I feel like it crystallised in the late 70s, early 80s in that New York kind of sound. The DNA of it is in there. But then I also didn’t want this to be a throwback record, so that’s the DNA, the original musical inspiration. I wanted it also to sound like the two of us and to sound like something that is hopefully fresh for 2024, nearly 2025. I feel like it is in that way. It is quite a different sound than The Bamboos which comes out of a more straight up soul and funk kind of thing. The lines are blurred and I’m making the record so there will be a certain sound to it that maybe as has an edge of what I might do and maybe a listener might be able to draw the link with The Bamboos. I’m not sure, not for me to say, but I think there is a distinction between the two things. I mean, Tim and I did do the album, which was Tim Rogers and The Bamboos and “The Rules of Attraction” album in 2016. I think that if you compare that with the Style and or Substance album, it is very different, even though it’s the two of us basically writing the songs and putting it together.

At the end of that tour was there a discussion or you both left the door open to do something else in the future?
Yeah, it was sort of unspoken. I guess it was open ended. We didn’t decide to. It wasn’t like a one and done thing that album, it was just like we’re friends and we’re musical collaborators, we did this thing and who’s to say we might not do it again? There was definitely talk in terms of with management and booking agents of doing another tour together because that was just a lot of fun and people seem to enjoy it. So, it’s open ended. I mean, we may well do another Bamboos and Tim Rogers album because we all get on really well and it seems to fit musically, so I wouldn’t rule that out in the future.

Were there plenty of ideas in the early stages and once you made the decision to do an album did the songs come quickly?
Yeah, coming up with these sketches and grooves and it was right at the end of lock down. I guess there was a feeling in me, like everyone else, I was missing desperately the concept of a bunch of people in a room together, dancing and having a good time in some black box of a room with a PA pounding at 3:00 AM in the morning, which was certainly the complete opposite of what we were experiencing at the time, so I was just thinking about that. I was thinking about music that made people dance and brought people together in a kind of reckless abandon. Just fun and that’s the kind of thing I was coming up with that were definitely of a tempo and of a feeling that would hopefully be conducive to that sort of behaviour. I said to Tim, this is a this is an idea I have and he was really into the idea. Then I just started sending sketches of tunes and whole songs, and eventually there were a whole collection of of fairly fully fleshed out songs. It’s exactly the same way we put the last record together. I’ve sent him these things and he went away and wrote his his lyrics and melodies to that, and then we got together in the studio and and put it down relatively quickly.

How was that dynamic is it in the studio? Was it a really exciting time with all these ideas flowing and seeing these songs start to take shape?
Yeah, maybe it’s potentially more exciting for me because I don’t know what he’s coming in with, whereas he knows he’s heard my contribution and he’s been writing to it. I’m in the dark until he comes into the studio and is in the booth behind the mic. So it’s extra exciting for me because I’m like, hey, this is great and I’m trying to balance the excitement I have of hearing it for this for the first time with more I guess is the nuts and bolts of it, making sure we get the the best take and all that, but Tim’s obviously involved in that part of it as well. Tim is such a skilled and an amazing lyricist and musical storyteller, it was really fun.

Are there a lot of ideas left over you might revisit later on?
Well, there’s always a few more. I read these interviews with people and they’re like we had, you know, two hundred songs for the album and I’m like, I just can’t come up with that many good ones and what I feel are good ideas for a start. I just I don’t have the time to be writing two hundred ideas for an album. We had, maybe, eighteen songs in the end that I thought had legs and we paired that down to whatever it is eleven or twelve. But what happens with me is those things that are left over weren’t quite right for this, I keep them not too far away and when there’s another project coming along, sometimes some of these things end up fitting. Certainly, things like that have happened with The Bamboos where we had extra tracks and they just weren’t quite right. Once you get the whole shape of the album suddenly, certain songs don’t match, even though they might be quite good ideas unto themselves, but you might find that they work once you’ve got a different group of songs together, and it’s the perfect thing. I’ve even grabbed things that were four or five years old and you might rework them a bit to fit in with what you’ve done. That just seems to be a recurring thing with albums I make, there’s always a couple of stragglers that come in from from other places.

Is there likely to be a tour which includes Adelaide?
I’d love to come to Adelaide. I have my father in Adelaide, my family and I love to get there. Any excuse to get there. If we can make it happen, we will definitely make it happen. It’s a tough climate out there for live music. We all know, and sometimes the numbers just don’t add up, but rest assured, if we can get to Adelaide, we absolutely will.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Order Style and or Substance on CD, Vinyl or Cassette HERE…