The Tea Party

By Eddie Chan, DBMagazine, Australia

"Well, we're going to go do what's absolutely necessary every time we go to Adelaide, and that is go tour some wineries," says Jeff Martin, dryly, before exploding with a chuckle. "I gotta stock up again, so it's been a while. Got to go hit Henschke, and Penfold's and Rockford's. I love the little one, the Rockford one, it's so real. I'm a big fan of the Rockford Basket Press Shiraz."

I'm asking the lead singer of The Tea Party about what they are going to do on their impending eleventh tour of our country. It seems that right now, chilly Toronto just isn't cutting it. "I just want to see sun again," says Martin. "It's very bleak here right now in Canada, it's heading into winter. We spent some time in Hawaii when making this record. Bob Rock produced three songs. I just really fell in love there with the spirituality of the ocean, and the sun. I was never like that before, because all the homes that I'd had in various parts had always been very gothic, very dark, and just lit by candles and stuff like that. But I find them changing now, and I'm getting really depressed if I don't see sunshine and if I don't see the ocean."

And it's not just his home that's being opened up to the world. "I think it is true that my heart is opening up too," he admits. "You hope that as you get older you drop some of your insecurities. And I find that I'm very comfortable where I am at in my life, I'm not complacent. But I am comfortable and in a very positive place. So I find my attitudes are shifting and it's much healthier for me."

One result of his attitudinal shift was a willingness to allow someone else to produce The Tea Party's music. Before the recording of the newest album, Martin had always been at the helm. For 'Seven Circles' though, The Tea Party decided to enlist long time Metallica producer Bob Rock. "Yeah, it was different for a few things," says Martin of the experience. "It was different for him, and it was different for me. Bob is used to working with bands that he has to baby-sit. Like Metallica, or whoever else, that's what Bob get hired for. When we go into a studio situation, my band is very professional; we know what we want and what we're going to do. And so all we wanted was for Bob to interpret the music we make. And so what was hard for me from the onset was letting go of the reins of control. But it was my decision to do it. At the same time it's still scary, because The Tea Party is my creation, you know? But the reason I wanted to work with Bob was that I spent two years writing 'Seven Circles' and I felt that if I was to put the hat on of producer right away I was in danger of not having enough objectivity for the sake of the music."

The moniker for The Tea Party's latest release has an obvious literal meaning. "Well it's our seventh studio record, that's part of it," says Martin. "But you can take it as deep as you want. That would be the superficial explanation - this is our seventh record, we've come full circle. But then it gets into different things that I've been studying over the course of a few years, the seven Chakras, dealing with Yogic practices, and whatever. And the seven stages of man. Also Pythagoras, when he was coming up with his theories on music, he looked up at the stars. The only thing he could see was the seven heavenly bodies: obviously they didn't know about Neptune, Uranus and Pluto at that time, so, he believed that those seven planets emanated harmonic vibrations that basically became the basis for the western scale of music. There's a lot of sevens in this whole thing."

And what does Martin have to say for fans that prefer the older records, which featured exotic instruments and/or electronic sounds, rather than the stripped back rock which has appeared on the latest two albums? "I would say that I'm disappointed in them, because I expect Tea Party fans to be able to come along for the ride with us. For the time being we have to go to place, as musicians, where we're coming from, and that has to be a place of honesty. We weren't impassioned by doing another record that would sound like 'The Edges Of Twilight,' or using all the world music influences that we have. It's not where we wanted to go with this record. I personally believe that this is the strongest record that we've put out, because it is to the point, it is stripped back. But I'm proud of everything we've done in the past. It's just that we've got to evolve, and we can't be caught stealing from our own past."

While he's unsure of a future direction for the band's sound, Martin is looking forward to navigating the course. "I enjoy the environments of the studio," he continues. "I've gotten very good at using the recording studio as a musical instrument as well. So I'd love to make another record like 'Transmission' or whatever, but it would just have to be updated. But that might be somewhere where we might go next."

Speaking of future plans, I ask if Martin would like to try his hand at producing other bands some day. After all, he's had over a decade's experience of production behind him. "I've been offered a lot of gigs, but the one thing I want to do is, my wife and I are planning to have a home in Australia in the New Year. She's a Perth girl."

So he would be looking to buy a home in Perth? "We don't know yet, but it'll be somewhere," replies Martin, before continuing on with his idea. "So I plan on spending a lot more time there. And what I'd like to do is, because I love the revival of rock music that's coming out of Australia with Jet and all of that stuff happening, I was thinking that the one thing that I do well, is I can make big sounding rock and roll records. And I would love to start producing some Australian bands, young bands, and see what happens."