A week ago, The Ferguson Rogers Process unveiled their debut album, Style And Or Substance. The project is the brainchild of two of Australia’s most treasured musicians, Lance Ferguson* of The Bamboos and Tim Rogers, best known for being the frontman of You Am I, although limiting them to mentions of just those two bands is doing them a disservice. They have been widely prolific across a wide number of genres and other projects.
They first recorded together in 2012 when Tim guested on The Bamboos track “I Got Burned”, and they followed that up with the full collaboration album The Rules of Attraction in 2015. It was well and truly time to revisit the spark between the two when Lance contacted Tim with the plan to create a dance record – the outcome being Style And Or Substance from The Ferguson Rogers Process. I caught up with Lance to talk about the album, recording with Tim again, the influence of Donnie Sutherland’s Sounds and much more.
You will be able to catch The Ferguson Rogers Process live on New Years Eve at Footscray Park in Melbourne – what better way to see a New Year in.
* ok – Lance is a Kiwi, but we call him one of our own!
Hey Lance, many congratulations on Style And Or Substance – it’s a dance record hey – dance baby dance! ….
It is indeed. That was a conscious choice. We went in there going that is the underpinning of it, so I’m glad that came across.
100% – so what came first – getting Tim on board, or wanting to do the dancy disco record ?
Well – no one wants to talk about lockdown anymore. There’s a collective amnesia going on. It was a tough time, but at the end of the lockdowns in Melbourne, I was sitting around and missing that feeling – not that I’m hitting the club every weekend these days at my age – but I was missing the feeling, or the idea and visceral aspect of a bunch of people in a room together dancing and being up close with each other, and music pumping out of a PA. I was thinking about people dancing, and re-evaluating what I did as a musician and my role in that, and it seemed for the past 30 years or so, most of the music I made was engineered for people to dance to, and I was just thinking about all those things in the absence of it. And live gigs and live music and the experience of that.
Tim and I worked together back in 2012 when we did “I Got Burned” with The Bamboos, and we did another album. It had been a few years since we had done anything together. I was literally sitting in my chair thinking of this stuff. I had a few rough sketches of some grooves that weren’t in The Bamboos world, but were dance-fuelled stuff. I sent Tim a text after a few G&T’s and said I’ve got an idea to make a record, and you’re the person to do it with me. I said ‘are you up for it’ – he responded almost instantly and was really into it. It was after that I went forth and tried to fill out a whole album worth of stuff to give to him.
It worked so well. I thought that when he was on The Bamboos album – The Rules of Attraction – that his falsetto worked really well – it was a great match.
I guess there are many songs – I’m trying to think of You Am I ones – his falsetto is a known quantity – but I think that in the setting we were in, it brought it to the fore – and people were ‘oh yeah’ – it took people back in a good way. I think it’s great what he does.
Who else did you have from The Bamboos on the record?
I put these grooves together. Initially, I had placeholder drum loops and programmed drums, but I basically played everything on the record except for the drums. I did get Graeme Pogson from The Bamboos to record the final drum parts. Everything else, I sat there and did myself. Apart from that, I should shout out to Kate Ferguson and Rita Satch, who came in and did backing vocals right at the end. Tim felt like he wanted to fill that part of it out a bit.
It was a case of me just sitting here in this room and making these grooves up and putting basslines, guitar parts, and synth parts up. I feel like I had a personal epiphany during that process. Most of the time, I grab a bass and throw something in, assuming that it’s a scratch part, a placeholder, and I’ll do something proper lately. I realised that when I started to come back to do things properly that they really sucked, so I was just going to leave for the most part, the raw takes, especially the guitar solos. I felt like I played looser and freer, as I didn’t think it was the album take. Then I just had to get my head around the idea that sometimes these on-the-fly parts and takes are the good ones, so I’m going to leave them on. I can have a perfectionist mindset at times, so it was good to let go of that for a bit. It was liberating to know that these kind of rough looser takes sound better for what we are doing, and I’m going to leave them there.
The trick is making sure that you are getting them down properly. Sometimes, I wasn’t concerned with getting levels right, so things went in a little hot, but no one was going to notice.
It all sounds pretty great to me. What sort of sonic references did you have in mind when you started it.
Well – I guess – I try and avoid talking about genre. But it’s in the disco/funk early 1980’s New York vibe. I always aim for the very top, and even if I get an infinitesimal way towards that, I’m happy. I want records, the mixes, to sound as good as a Chic Nile Rodgers production, or a Quincy Jones production. I’m never going to achieve that because of everything, but I aim for the mixes to get to that point. A full, warm, wide-range sounding mix. John Castle, my long-time collaborator ended up mastering it. It was really good.
Tim’s lyrics – a stream of consciousness to much of it. It feels like he has a never-ending supply of couplets to throw into his songs …
He does – and I basically got all this musical side together and just gave it to him – because lyrically, I didn’t want to interfere with his flow and concept, which is great.
It’s so full of good humour. It’s very vulnerable and personal, too. He has a beautiful way of putting deeply personal, vulnerable, open-hearted lyrics in there, but then they have that incredible thing in there, this universal aspect. I thought one of the songs was about John and me, and it was way off. It had nothing to do with us. He has the great balance of making it personal to him, but anyone who listens to it can superimpose it onto their life experience, and I think that’s the real trick to being a great songwriter, and a great lyricist.
I ‘m expecting you are looking forward to playing these songs live?
We’ve done two live gigs so far, and they were on the same day. The first gig we did as a band was on radio at the ABC. We played on an afternoon show with Brian Nankervis, and it was at the Recital Centre in Melbourne. I thought it would be a little radio show. But when we got in there, the place was filled with people. Even though it was a thing for radio, it was a slight baptism by fire. It went off well. And then later that night, we did a gig at The Night Cat which is always going to feel comfortable for me. I had the best intentions of doing something a bit different with the lineup, but Graeme (Pogson) who plays drums for The Bamboos came in, and then it ended up being 90% members of The Bamboos. We don’t have the horn sections though.
A luxury for me ,though, was Gilly, aka Kurt Rainbow, an incredible guitarist came in for the live shows. Having two guitarists is really fun from my side.
I take it you will be touring this sometime next year?
Yeah – we had some dates – but it’s been moved. I think it will be in the first third of the year. I’m looking forward to that.
If we look at other disco artists of the time that inspired you – who would be amongst your favourites?
The aforementioned Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic. They are a big influence. But when I think about this record I think one of the original inspirations was a memory, or perhaps a slightly false memory as memories tend to be, almost a dream like memory of watching Donnie Sutherland Sounds on Saturday morning as a youngster. Not sure if you’re of the same vintage as me here.
I have memories! (laughs)
I would get up and watch Sounds when I was 9 or 10, and it was the time when video clips were coming into their own. I remember watching “Once in a Lifetime” clip with David Byrne floating on his back. Musical Youth and Tom Tom Club and all that music of that time was really exciting for me as a youngster, and historically it’s a very exciting time,. You have the burnout of disco and the beginnings of hip hop and post-punk and new wave. All of that melding together, especially in places like New York and London, and then the tropical influence coming. There was a really culture clash, global village happening that was really exciting – so I was referencing that sort of vibe with this record. Not so much literally, but I was thinking of the fusion of, the feeling of these genres coming together. I wanted to make sure it feels like it came from 2024 though, which comes down to mixing etc. I think Donnie Sutherland had more of an impact on me that I had given him credit for.
For the guitar nerds out there – I read that you used the Fender Thinline Telecaster on the record – why that one?
I discovered the Thinline Tele through John Castle, as he had one in the studio. And I picked it up and asked him about it. I’ve got a normal Telecaster with a lipstick pickup and the standard Tele twang. It sounds a little bit less like a standard Tele or Strat. It’s a little more vague – you don’t listen to it and go ‘it’s a strat’. It has a bit more of an anonymous tone that feels like you can more of yourself into it. It’s a really fun guitar. We were in fact going to call the band “Thinline”, that was the working title, but then we thought that would be like calling your band Stratocaster, so we had to find something else.
Hence The Ferguson Rogers Process.. Thanks for your time, and best of luck with the album.
Style And Or Substance from The Ferguson Rogers Process is out now. You can grab a copy on vinyl, CD or cassette, as well as t-shirts and special merch bundles HERE.
