Jamie Hutchings is not the sort of person that you necessarily associate with being a surf junkie. The Bluebottle Kiss frontman has, for the last decade plus, fronted one of the great Australian bands, and has made grimy pubs and clubs around the nation shake with his fury, quiver with his tenderness, and wow at his lyrical prowess. But surfer?

“It can be quite meditative,” he comments. “You can go over ideas in your mind, and I’m sure that I’ve gone over songs and melodies when I’m out there. I’m not sure if it’s actually going surfing or just being by the ocean, and it’s good for your mind to wander a bit more. Sometimes I can sit in my flat and I might have some spare time to finish off a song and I just can’t do it – it’s like you need a change of scenery.”

References to the sea have often been heard in Jamie’s lyrics, while the very name of the band itself – Bluebottle Kiss – portrays the influence. “I got that name when I was walking along the beach on a surfing trip, a long, long time ago,” Jamie explains. “Someone had written ‘Bluebottle Graves’ on the beach of Frazer Park at Munmorah National Park, and the kids had buried all these bluebottles. I got the name sort of from that.”

The ocean is one of those strong images that works well in songs, and it’s cropped up frequently in Bluebottle Kiss’ oeuvre. “When I was a teenager I’d go for road trips and go for long walks to find really remote locations, and you get really strong images from parts of Australia that most people wouldn’t see.”

For their sixth album, Bluebottle Kiss have unleashed a beauty – a double album of epic scope, purpose, and delivered with panache. Amazingly, it was always intended to be so. “It was just this thing of being defiant and making something really courageous and bold,” he says. “I guess you can go two ways once you’ve been making records for a decade – you can try and make a hit record and try and do everything you can to make it as successful as you can, like a band like Magic Dirt has probably sort of done, or you can make something really, really bold, and really, really strong, and really, really ambitious.”

For Bluebottle Kiss that just seemed to come naturally. “To do it in one disc would seem like a flirtation with the idea and been pretty half-arsed,” Jamie comments. “It wasn’t a matter of us having too many songs and thinking ‘let’s just record them all; oh boy there’s lots of good songs, let’s make it into a double’ but it was definitely thought out more than that.”

He explains that the best format for the material was to do it over two succinct discs rather thank make it one big sprawling disc, or have a disc that was shorter – that would have been a flirtation with the idea of having a comprehensive look of what influences the band. Mostly recorded in separate sessions – with a couple of crossovers – Jamie believes that each disc is quite separate, but interconnected.

The second disc is recorded a little cleaner, but starts off with three of the most aggressive songs – the opener “Dream Audit” is like the Stooges meets Sonic Youth. In a sense, this was always the aim of Doubt Seeds – the album is representative of what Jamie grew up listening to, and being inspired by.

“I wanted to cover everything about the length and breadth of Bluebottle Kiss that represents everything we love about music. To a degree we did on Fear of Girls,” he says in reference to the band’s 1996 sophomore set, released on murmur/Sony, “but we wanted to do it better, and to be even more adventurous and branch out. The idea was that you could go from a tangent and kind of run with it as far as it would take you and not be afraid of doing that as far as the album being really cohesive.

“After we made Fear of Girls I was really paranoid about not making cohesive records, because I felt that record was too all over the place, so the next three after that had a certain bent that they were on, and that was it. I felt that made for really strong records, but feel that this album was more like a Wowee Zowee by Pavement or one of those records that was all over the place, and really colourful, but wanting to do it in a format that people could take it in. We were exploring all the musical possibilities, and all the influences and all the genres that we were interested in, and our slant on it.”

In some ways Bluebottle Kiss are an old-fashioned band – they’re one that doesn’t necessarily benefit from technology and ProTools and the like, but is instead at their best when assembling things traditionally. “We like to push the envelope as much as we can,” he says. “I think limitations are good in knowing that you’re going to work in a certain area. I think Tom Waits is a good example of that – he’s still experimental but working within a certain organic framework. He’s been making records for forty years and it’s never like he’s making the same record over and over; he’s pushed things as far as he can, and that’s what we’re interested in.”

Doubt Seeds is essentially a ‘live’ record, all recorded straight to tape with drums, guitar and bass all together. But then there’s a range of backing singing on it, as well as a swathe or horns on several numbers, as well as second drum kits played by Jamie’s brother Scott. Elsewhere sister Sophie, long-term album contributor, plays piano once more.

The band itself is a completely different line-up to what it was three years ago, and are firing on all cylinders. Jamie’s songwriting has continued along in the stunning form he’s touched on since the incredible 2001 release Revenge is Slow. “Every time we make a record I wonder how I’m going to write another one, but we always seem to,” he bluffs, knowing full well just what an incredibly talented gentleman he is. “I get worried, and I’ll be writing songs, but once it’s all put together and the band starts playing it then it all comes together and you’re surprised how much you’ve come up with. With this being a double album there was a lot of material and there’s almost another album put together, with about seven songs that didn’t make it. We’re going to put them out and release them on our site and at live shows.”

Bluebottle Kiss will be performing one-off specials at the Gaelic Theatre in Sydney and at the Spanish Club in Melbourne in mid-to-late August that will represent it live, with the extra musicians along for the ride, where the whole record will be done from start to finish. Dates:
Friday 18 August - Gaelic Theatre, Sydney
Friday 25 August - Spanish Club, Melbourne