Within the first few seconds of the opening song on Australian troubadour Peter Bibby’s latest album, we get an unvarnished look at the man behind the music as he observes the late-night scene of a local watering hole with increasingly bleary eyes:
“No one seems to want to talk to me / ‘cuz I’m the arsehole, probably.”
Indeed, that lovable ambivalence is at the heart of Drama King, Bibby’s fourth studio album for Spinning Top Records and arriving 31 May. The project was produced by first-time collaborator Dan Luscombe, whose work with fellow Aussie breakouts The Drones and Amyl and the Sniffers convinced Bibby he’d be in safe hands while recording at Melbourne’s Sound Park studio.
“It was the first time I’d worked with a producer, and I prepared for it knowing that my songs were going to get chopped up and shortened,” Bibby recalls. “I’m glad I did, because for the most part, Dan was like, oh, you’ve already solved every problem I had with these. He was completely underselling himself, because he shaped and sculpted every song on the record into a far more beautiful and articulate thing than I could have on my own. As [drummer] Gus [Agars] said after Dan and I clashed on the arrangement for the song ‘Feels,’ ‘he’s a prick, but he’s usually right.’”
Bibby later traveled to Los Angeles to mix the album with White Denim’s Josh Block, a frequent collaborator with Leon Bridges. While there, he also shot the video for first single “The One,” which finds him embedded amongst numerous familiar Southern California locations.
“Where Dan shaped and sculpted the songs into superior arrangements, Josh made them sound better than I ever thought they could,” Bibby says. “He had this great expression which would grow across his face when he’d hit the sweet spot – this mischievous look of deep satisfaction while he tweaked the knobs and faders and said things like ‘Oh, yeah!’ in his big Texan accent.”
And while the material on Drama King may have come together without major incident, its lyrics reflect Bibby’s evolution from hard-partying prankster to a more enlightened, responsible human who now knows when enough is really enough. Those sentiments are at the forefront of the aforementioned opener “Arsehole,” the wobbly, riff-driven “Feels” and “Fun Guy,” an in-your-face rocker alongside which you can almost picture Bibby doing calisthenics at a furious pace while shouting lyrics such as “these get-togethers don’t do nothing for me / I’ve got better things to do with my energy.”
“I was just really over all the silliness and getting wasted and all dumb behavior that is considered ‘fun,’” admits Bibby, who is recently sober. “A lot of the songs on the album are the result of situations where I was drunk or dealing with the drama that comes from it all. It suggests a period of change, and honing in on the shitty situations which have inspired it.”
Among them are “Baby Squid,” which initially sounds like the last song you’d hear at the pub before it closes, only to jolt back to life at double the speed. “I wrote that after somehow getting mixed up in a big party with my next door neighbor. He and his friends are at least twice my age and they were up to all sorts of weird shit,” says Bibby, who delivers the vocal with just the right touch of Dylan-style grit and gravel. “The loud bit is kind of like pining for a girl I was probably breaking up with in the midst of all this drunken behavior with these old men. I was riffing on feeling like I was a bit of a wash up and that maybe this is what I’m going to become.”
An artist who has been celebrated as inherently working-class and wholeheartedly independent, Bibby comes by this caution honestly, having cut his teeth in the rough-and-tumble underground rock scene centered around Perth’s Hyde Park Hotel. “I’d pay five bucks to go see punk bands every weekend, and that really fired me up,” he says. “I’d already been making music, but that made me want to perform, and that’s where I met people who I did my first recordings with.”
Bibby’s affable personality has gotten him plenty of mileage as a live act. He’s toured the U.S. with Pond and performed at the infamous open mic night at Pappy and Harriet’s in the California desert. He’s also taken the stage at international festivals such as Laneway, Falls, All Points East, South by Southwest and South Africa’s Rocking the Daisies while notching his fair share of rowdy headlining shows.
A fall 2023 Australian tour gave him the chance to work out the kinks of alcohol-free performance, and proved to him that he was “still able to embody that chaotic vibe and deliver the shows in the same kind of way as before. The only difference was that I didn’t have a hangover the next day, which was great.”
That said, the daily challenges of life remain – a truism Bibby nods to with his choice of album name. “Everyone uses the term ‘drama queen,’ even regardless of gender,” he says. “I was thinking it’s a bit unfair to the queens to always be called ‘drama queens.’” He adds with a big smile, “I consider Drama King to be a woke title.”
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