Ian Kenny has been in isolation on a number of occasions over the past three years. His latest episode of social distancing, in the West Australian coastal town of Dunsborough, sounds easily the most idyllic. “It wasn’t planned that way,” he says, chuckling. “Myself and my partner were down here on a holiday and over the past few weeks as [COVID-19] has developed we’ve decided to stay for a bit.”
In early 2017, he was practising social distancing of an entirely different nature. An acrimonious split with his wife and partner of seven years had turned the Birds of Tokyo frontman’s world upside down. He left his adopted home of Melbourne and returned to Perth, where he was raised, to be near family and friends. Instead he spent a considerable amount of time in his own company.
Birds of Tokyo, (from left) Adam Spark, Adam Weston, Ian Kenny, Glenn Sarangapany and Ian Berney, channel frontman Ian Kenny’s break-up in new album Human Design.Credit:Cybele Malinowski
“I just shut down and went into a bit of self-protection, self-healing mode,” he says. “I didn’t want people to see where I was at emotionally; I was having trouble keeping my shit together. I was drinking pretty heavily at the time, trying to kill the pain with a shitload of booze and whatever else I could get my hands on.”
Kenny – and it’s usually ‘Kenny’, rarely Ian; people have been calling him by his surname since high school – addresses this period of his life with breathtaking honesty on Birds of Tokyo’s sixth album, Human Design. The video for one of its early singles, Good Lord, features the vocalist delivering the song to camera, his face becoming increasingly bloodied and bruised as he sings lines such as “Nobody loved you like I did/Thought you’d be mother to my kid/But it all changed when I saw you with someone else.”
“There was a lot to it,” he says of the reasons for the break-up. “To answer it in full I’d have to tell you what the bigger picture is.”
Though stopping short of doing so, he concedes, “I just found out a lot about this person that I didn’t know, but unfortunately I had some pretty hard truths that were in very plain sight. I had to remove myself from that [relationship] even though I didn’t want to.”
Bassist Ian Berney recalls being concerned for his bandmate’s mental health. “It wasn’t easy watching Kenny get through that stuff,” he says, speaking from his Sydney home. “In fact it was heartbreaking because he’s such a good mate. You can get stuck in a loop that you can’t get out of sometimes. So I was worried.”
Adds guitarist Adam Spark, also speaking from his Sydney home: “Kenny’s a pretty private guy, so he would let us in as far as he was comfortable letting us in. But all you can really do is be there for your buddy and not offer unsolicited advice.”
Part-way through 2017, the band convened to start working on the songs that would comprise Human Design, the follow-up to 2016’s LP Brace. At that point, though, there was no talk of them being ready for a new album; they were just creating for the sake of it. “Kenny was calling for us to get together and write, ’cause I know he was a fountain of misery and he needed music to expunge those feelings,” says Berney.
The singer knew the material would be a vehicle for catharsis. “I had so much belief in the future with [my ex-wife], I had so much invested in it,” he says. “I felt like I had done my part committing to a future, and to have it completely blown up or thrown back in your face was just too hard to ignore or try to bury and say it didn’t happen, that it didn’t affect me – I’m fine, I’m OK. Bullshit. I wasn’t OK and I had to say my piece.”
It was with that mindset that Kenny wrote the lyrics to Good Lord. Charting such emotional territory so openly and honestly took the singer so far out of his comfort zone he may well have forgotten where it is. “I don’t really give too much away unless it’s to the people closest to me,” he says. “With some of these songs I literally had to put them down because I was just too shit-scared of exposing myself too much to the public. It’s not something I’m used to.”
There’s little room for metaphor in Human Design, with songs such as The Greatest Mistakes dealing in plainspoken lyrics such as “It was 13 months ago/When I went through hell alone”. The record’s most “exposed moment”, says Kenny, is string-laden ballad Designed, in which he addresses the devastating impact the break-up had on his self-confidence, singing “I wish you could have loved me the way that I’m designed/I wish you could have seen how hard I had to try/To be somebody else in somebody else’s eyes”.
The vocalist credits his bandmates, and in particular guitarist Spark, with helping him gain the confidence to lay bare his personal trauma for public consumption. It was Spark who founded Birds of Tokyo with Kenny in 2004, the duo gathering in the guitarist’s bedroom to jam after being introduced via Spark’s then-girlfriend.
“He came over one day and I played him a couple of little sketches and he started singing and I was like, ‘Oh cool, I’ll just record this’,” recalls Spark. “I was literally sitting in front of my old computer and little tape machine going, ‘I don’t know what this is but… [excitedly] wait till the world gets a load of me!” He explodes with laughter. “What an idiot!”
At that point Spark was building a name around Perth as a producer – largely of heavy metal bands – but he had to give up his studio in 2008 as Birds of Tokyo’s career began to take off. When he met up with Kenny in 2017 to start writing new material, Spark soon found the vocalist’s lyrics resonating more strongly than he could have expected.
“Now I’m going through a pretty hard, painful break-up and divorce,” he says. “When we started playing Good Lord I was right in the thick of it. It was incredibly painful to play.”
The recording of the album also had its raw moments, particularly when it came to the vocals. “I’m never that self-conscious in the studio, it’s my playground, my safe space,” says Kenny. “But it was a little different this time around. I felt quite vulnerable a lot of the time and pretty exposed, which was weird. I’m super comfortable with the guys we work with, but there were definitely moments where I felt like, 'Oh f—, they’re all watching me do this thing. I don’t know if I can do this.'”
Given the circumstances around its creation, Human Design is a remarkably stirring album, bursting with singalong moments and bountiful pop-rock hooks. It charts Kenny’s journey out of the darkness and into the light, with the frontman processing the various stages of grief around his break-up before finding peace with his current partner and their 13-month-old boy, as detailed in songs such as Two Of Us and My Darling My Son.
“I think the point came when I felt like I had exorcised enough of the heartbreak, and that came two-thirds of the way through the record,” he says. “My life was changing as I was writing this record … and I couldn’t help but start to feel the need to talk about what’s becoming good.
“It’s funny when you think about being so beaten up about a future you had plans for. The future … doesn’t actually exist until you’re there. So I got so hung up on something I didn’t even know was going to be what I wanted. But looking at where I’m at now, I have what I wanted – a family – and I consider myself very lucky.”
Birds of Tokyo arrive at the 33rd Annual ARIA Music Awards in Sydney in November 2019. Credit:AAP
Having just turned 40, Kenny has spent the past 16 years of his life fronting Birds of Tokyo (and even longer singing for Perth prog-metal outfit Karnivool). During that time they’ve quietly become one of Australia’s most enduring acts, releasing a string of top five albums while garnering multiple APRA, WAMI and ARIA Awards. Good Lord, meanwhile, has also just been nominated for two APRA awards − Most Performed Australian Work and Most Performed Alternative Work. It’s a career, says Kenny, in which they’ve experienced “some all-time highs” and “crushing defeats of things not working out, losing money, everything”.
“Those highs and lows,” he says, “they test people, and we’ve learnt a lot about each other. I think only in recent years have we actually figured each other out. We understand each other a lot better these days than we did when we were fairly hot-headed, younger, passionate men. [Laughs] It’s different these days.”
“What a privilege it is to still be here,” says Spark. “Back [when we started] it was like, ‘F— yeah, we’re going to be the biggest thing in the world!’ But as time moves on, a bit of gravitas kicks in and you think, actually it’s a real honour and privilege and genuine joy to be able to do this and share these works and ideas with people.”
In Kenny’s eyes, the making of Human Design has brought the group closer together, the singer acknowledging that “there is empathy and a lot of love and support for any of us these days around trying to get through something”.
“Anybody who was working on this record at some point got sucked into the gravity of what it was, only because we work so closely together,” he says. “I think it affected everyone, and everyone carried that weight and that pain as much as they could until we got to the end. And now we can all breathe a bit.”
Berney says: “It was an incredibly emotional record to be a part of, to see your friends going through hardship. But then seeing your friends getting past it, that’s really lovely too. Seeing them recover through music or creativity, that’s probably the best part of music, that it’s therapeutic.”
With Kenny now in a more settled and positive place than he was at the start of the songwriting process, one can’t help but wonder how this most private of men reflects on the finished album, and the act of opening up his personal wounds to the world.
“It sits with me a little bigger than I thought it would now that it’s compiled onto a record and there’s the story,” he says. “But overall I’m very glad it’s here. The whole thing makes sense, and it’s something to look back on in a good way. I’ve become so much more now, I understand so much more, and I feel like I’m a better equipped human being and person. For me it’s only moving forward now.”
Human Design is released on April 24. For touring updates, go to birdsoftokyo.com
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