We fully understand that it's all relative and subjective, but you know when you hear people say that so-and-so really doesn't look like a pop star? Well, Josef Salvat really, really, really doesn't look like a pop star. When The Ticket is introduced to Salvat last December at Dingle's Other Voices , we're tempted to surreptitiously glance around the room for someone else who looks, you know, hip and happening and hungry for stardom. But no, there's only a smartly attired, petite young man who looks suspiciously like pictures we've seen of Josef Salvat.
Of course, a few minutes into the chat and we’re won over; Australia’s oddest pop export is, as Enid Blyton once so memorably wrote, a corker – talkative, sensible, amusing and witty. Definitely our kind of pop star.
Now signed to Sony, and working on his album with producers that don’t come cheap, he is about to stick his head above the parapet. Which would be fine, except people still don’t know that much about him.
With such an air of ambiguity surrounding him (there isn’t too much about him on Ye Olde Internet, either), we wonder about the levels of expectation of him to instantly deliver the Josef Salvat “package”. We also wonder whether people who don’t get it feel either disappointed or frustrated. Salvat is having none of that lark, however, having discovered throughout most of last year that trying to fulfill people’s expectations was a fruitless exercise.
“You can’t be everything to everybody, first of all, and I don’t have a mandate,” he says, “but I do have a clear enough vision to the extent that I write music, I want to perform it, I want to sing it, and I want to get it out there. That was the extent of the vision. Oh, and that what I do is pop music.”
Salvat admits that he’s a typical example of the single child who has been behaviorally and creatively fussed over from year dot. Interestingly, however, he was not the kind who sat back and waited for success – or anything else, for that matter – to come his way. He has been writing songs from his early teens, forging a particular kind of creative identity, while simultaneously making sure that there is always a focused contingency plan in the background. In what must surely be a rare failsafe for ambitious pop stars, Salvat diligently finished his Law degree a few years ago. You know, just in case. How remarkably sensible (a parent writes).
“If I hadn’t finished it,” he explains, “then the idea of doing it in the first place would have been utterly pointless, and I would have wasted, quite literally, three years. After my first year I got glandular fever and so dropped out for several months. But then I got back in, and although my music was uppermost in my mind, I wanted the degree as a back-up plan. It was nothing other than a back-up plan – and, quite frankly, what’s the point of having a back-up plan if you actually don’t have a back-up plan? If you’ve done something that has achieved nothing, then you’ve wasted time, money and resources. The type of person I am is that I couldn’t have squandered three years and not have had something to show for it.”
Sensible and pragmatic, there was method in Salvat’s career modus operandi. “I feel I wouldn’t have been ready to jump into music at the age of 17 or 18; I think I would have been completely steamrolled by the entire process and then got lost.
“Also, I was brought up with the ethos of having a few strings to my bow because one of them may break, so I was focused on creating stability for myself.”
Salvat is currently at the point where – notwithstanding being erroneously described, if not defined, as the rather unlikely offspring of Lana Del Rey and Morrissey – his levels of stability have been shaken somewhat by being viewed, prodded and poked at by various music industry types. He is, he justifiably maintains, open to change.
“One thing that has been tricky,” he accedes, “is the translation of who and what I am into an image. That’s been difficult, but I’m getting there. It’s important to point out that a record label hasn’t developed me, and that I didn’t come at this with an identity. It’s just me, I’m still a work in progress, and always will be, more than likely.”
There’s even more pragmatism to come – Salvat has said that he consciously tries to write songs that appeal to people. Such an admission seems the height of innocence compared to the raft of righteous songwriters who claim to write songs only for themselves, and if other people like them, then that’s a Brucie bonus. Salvat is, once more, having none of this carry-on.
“Anyone that makes music that gets into the pop charts, if they’re honest about it, will say that they deliberately thought about placing hooks in their songs. And why? Because people will sing it and like it. Does anyone make music just to sit in a room and admire it all on their own? I’m sure some people do precisely that, and there’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but one of the great aspects of creating music is sharing it. Performing, on the other hand, really scares me.”
Really? You wouldn’t think it looking at Salvat a few hours later on stage at St James’s Church; still compact, despite the empowering stage and the set design, he nonetheless snags the attention with a short set of truly snappy pop songs. Yet here’s the really interesting thing: lyrically, the songs have dragging undertows of true melancholia. They are the kind of pop songs that we reckon Michael Harding, of this parish, might sing to himself as he stares wistfully at even more lakes.
“Because of the music of mine that people have heard,” advises Salvat, “there’s a perception that I’m quite a moody, melancholic character, and, to be honest, that isn’t unwarranted, considering those songs. Yet I choose to write from that perspective because that’s what interests me about the experience of life. When I’m really happy and having a great time the last thing I want to do is to write a song about it.”
So let’s hear it one more time for the lonely and the lost and the lovelorn – is that what you’re saying?
“What I find really easy to tap back into,” Salvat emphasises, “are those occasions when there is a stillness, a reflection, of being very aware of the moment. Those times of being on a happiness rollercoaster, or of being somewhat wasted? Those are incredibly difficult to recapture or accurately label later on.”
Josef Salvat will feature on
Other Voices
, broadcast on RTÉ2 in April
