Welcome to The House of Holy

Cool, quirky and stylish Aussie indie pop duo CLIENT LIAISON takes us through their new album Divine Intervention, track by track…

Divine Intervention
This was the final piece of the puzzle which we made to set the tone for everything to come and draw the listener in for “Club Called Heaven”.
Club Called Heaven
In 2018 we had the privilege to play the notorious Heaven nightclub in Charing Cross London. The crowd took us to another level and it ended up being a very special show. A few days after the show we were partying in London when someone asked, “Where did you play?” and we replied, “A club called Heaven”. They said, “That sounds like a song title” and so the idea for this song was born. We wrote the lyrics and melody with Edwin White and Joel Quartermain over zoom during lockdown then reworked an instrumental from a session with Xavier Dunn in Sydney as the backing.
Strictly Business
Written and recorded in Byron Bay, with Dann Hume, we reused an old programmed beat of Harvey’s and Dann laid down some epic guitar which instantly gave us a Who Framed Roger Rabbit? meets Huey Lewis and the News vibe. A few months later in Melbourne we wrote the rap and added endless amounts of overdubs to the intro and instrumental section as a nod to Trevor Horn.
Cold To Touch
We set up a small studio at Monte’s family’s place at Mt Buller. Instead of running and swimming along the beach we used skiing as our early morning exercise before attempting to write and produce a song a day. No doubt being surrounded by all the white snow influenced the title and direction of this song.
Champagne Affection
We would often come up with song titles while on our morning beach run in Byron Bay. In this instance, we took a line from our first song “Groove The Physical” and turned it into a chorus over one of Harvey’s world music-esque beats. This was our attempt to soak up the Sydney set meets Byron Bay lifestyle that we found both fantastic and amusing while working in Bryon.
The Real Thing
We were rushing to finish this song so we could get to the airport in time for a show. Unfortunately, Dann got a bad batch of mung bean soup for lunch so we were left to write the chorus without him. We decided to reconvene a few weeks later where we reworked the lyrics, chords and production.
Unloaded
Using a verse we’d written earlier with Dann’s brother Pete Hume, Harvey gave the brief for this song saying, “We need something for the four stackers”. A four stacker is your classic festival punter who enthusiastically charges to the stage with four stacked cans of liquor lusting after the Stop, Drop & Wobble of an Aussie banger.
Eulogy For The Living
The slow burning emotional centerpiece for the album. We wanted to write something heartfelt with a super poppy lyric and a slight nod to the divine. This song went through so many iterations with so many people, including working over zoom with Dann Hume in Wales and recording a children’s choir in Sydney. It would often feel like the lyric “We keep searching for a meaning, just to find, just to find we don’t believe it” represented the journey of producing and finishing the song itself.
Prisoner Of The High Life
This song started many years ago on Harvey’s old PC. We recorded the vocals, including the Barry Gibb style whispered harmonies with our mixer Francois Tetaz in Melbourne. Once we heard how epic these sounded we decided to change course on the production and go for a Quiet Storm meets The Art Of Noise vibe. Best enjoyed on repeat with headphones.
Intervention
This song started with Harvey and his friend Tim Metcalfe in Sorrento. Monte then tweaked the vocals with Cyrus Villanueva and Ned Houston to give the lyric a more positive spin. Cyrus’s R&B style approach to the vocal also opened up the vibe of the song. We ended up recording half the vocals down a tone, increasingly messing with the formant as the song progresses to give it an out-of-this-world/UFO feel.
Elevator Up
This was a gruelling writing session with Nick Littlemore in Sydney, who has so many techniques to quieten the mind and come up with fresh subconscious ideas. Out of this came a peculiar repetitive hook which Harvey built chords and a deep dance groove around. A few weeks later we flew to Sunset Sound in L.A. where we let Nick go wild with production and overdubs, including getting the in-house engineer, Nate Haessly on trumpet for the chorus.
House Of Holy
Written at Sunset Sound in L.A., one evening the studio manager gave us a tour of the abandoned motel above Prince’s favourite studio there, Studio 3. He was telling us a bunch of ghost stories and the vibe was really creepy. After feeling a cold chill rush over us and hearing unexplained vocal noises we decided to get the hell out of there. Running off this vibe we wrote this song over a beat Nick had produced with some great L.A. session musicians, but only ended up using the vocal, reproducing the music underneath. This song was important, conceptually, in kick-starting the divine/holy theme of the album.
The Beat Supreme
This song was written during our week at Mt Buller with Dann Hume as an ode to our Australian musical heroes of the ’80s and ’90s. The ‘second coming’ which kicks off the first verse describes the glorious destiny of a new wave of great Australian music happening today.
Witness
The first song written for this album while we were on tour in Europe. On the last day we worked with German producer Mattias Dierkes and string extraordinaire Jonathan Dreyfus. After we added some chords to one of Harvey’s drum beats, Jonathan laid down a visceral bassline using his electric cello running through an octave pedal. He then layered up strings using his electric violin before Monte laid down most of the guide vocal in one go. ■