Meet Sad King Billy: Local guitarist releases debut solo album

“It’s kind of like a good name for band. Actually, maybe I’ll do that.” Julian Peet, the highly respected guitarist from The Southern River Band and Old Blood, is on the cusp of releasing his self-titled debut solo album under the name Sad King Billy. BOB GORDON spoke to Julian Peet about stepping out into the singer/songwriter spotlight.

You’re best known in the WA music scene for your time in The Southern River Band and your ongoing work in Old Blood. Given what you’ve done with those bands what did you want to convey of yourself on a solo album?

First and foremost, more of my own personal stories and more of myself as a songwriter. I think in Southern River Band and Old Blood I’d always been a songwriter, but more of a co-writer, and I think more trying to write into those characters and those channels. Whereas this is more of an honest experience for me and probably as well moving away from the guitar stuff a little bit more. I mean, there’s plenty of guitar on this record, but trying to showcase a little bit more of my songwriting and my voice and kind of like getting used to exercising that muscle a little bit and getting more comfortable with it. So it was definitely a good motivator to throw myself into the deep end of that one.

Given your pedigree with those two bands in particular, people could be forgiven for expecting something more blues or blues/rock-based, which you’ve alluded to there in saying you angled away from the guitar a bit…

Well, that’s right. I’m not quite sure what people expected when I put my first single out a couple of years ago, but it definitely wouldn’t have been what I put out. I felt like some of the stuff that I’m writing now that will probably go on to the next record is me being a little bit more back in the blues vein. I think I had to stretch out a little bit to find where the middle ground was.

So it’s not so much that I had been avoidant of the blues or the rock thing, but it is probably more embracing of the alt-folk and country influences that I’ve been listening to. I think the blues will always shine through in my guitar playing, particularly if I’m doing slide stuff. There’s a bit of that on the record, but as you probably know from listening, it’s a pretty mixed bag to a certain extent.

It’s good not to be pigeonholed. I guess any artist is their own genre…

Yeah, I think that’s right. Especially these days with the catalogue you have access to and the way most people study and are engaged with music from an early age, they’re just absorbing so much at all times. You don’t often see people that are traditionalists in one particular pigeonhole, or scene or genre, it’s all pretty mixed.

And it’s like that as well in the live scene. It’s like Old Blood is a blues band, but we’ll be doing shows with rock acts and pop acts and country acts. It’s like everybody’s mixing together, there’s not a lot of segregation in that way. So it kind of makes sense to me.

You’re releasing the music under the name Sad King Billy. Firstly, what prompted your decision to do that? And secondly, does it change the point of view of songs that you write or their intent when there’s sort of a character in front of it?

There’s a few different stories but where the name actually comes from, Sad King Billy is a character from an ‘80s science fiction book called Hyperion. While my dad was having a lot of records laying around from the ‘70s and ‘80s the other main influence around the house was reading science fiction from that era as well. I don’t know if you’ve read it. It’s by Dan Simmons, it’s an amazing book. Sad King Billy is this king that gets exiled to a planet called Hyperion where he basically starts a city full of artists and poets and musicians and that kind of thing.

I one day said to a drummer friend of mine – because we’d been reading the book at the same time – ‘It’s kind of like a good name for band. Actually, maybe I’ll do that.’ And then I did end up doing it.

I think maybe the only other motivation behind it in adopting another character was that initially wanting to kind of add in some more of those elements of the surreal and the fantasy. I think now it’s levelled out a little bit more back to the honest stories, kind of thing. But was a way for me to distance myself a little bit from what I had previously done, because I was maybe a little bit worried about, ‘will people be expecting more of a blues guitar thing?’

Because a long time ago before I sort of started playing in other bands, I had a trio called the Jules Peet Trio and I was doing that blues guitar power trio thing, and I think I wanted to maybe distance myself a little bit from the work I’ve done with Old Blood and SRB and some of my trio stuff. So it was a way of kind of making it new and different.

I don’t know if I’d make that choice again now, because it’s helpful to say, ‘hey, I’m Jules, this is the thing that I’m doing.’ I think everybody’s cottoned on to it now that it’s me, obviously, but that was the rough idea. Now, it’s just a name that’s sort of lost all meaning, but as they tend to do, but that’s kind of where it comes from and what I was at least thinking all the time.

I take it that in the early part, you were writing songs because you’re expressing yourself and then at some point you decide you’re going to do an album. I’m wondering if that when you make the decision, ‘I’m going to do an album,’ does that change the nature of the songwriting a bit?

Well it’s good motivator, for sure. I think maybe there was some sort of general presumption upon myself that when I started doing it, it would always be to make an album because that’s the thing that I wanted to have. It was the thing I’d always wanted to have. Whereas now I think having done this and putting this out, I might approach it a little bit differently.

The album format is definitely not something that is as needed in the music industry now, or expected, or the done thing. But when I decided that’s what I was doing and then once I got approved for a grant, I had probably like a bank of about 25 songs, demos that I’d done myself at home on a program called Ableton and a lot of this was during COVID, getting all those demos together. Actually, learning how to use the software and record in that way helped me finish the songs and get them into a package that I could present to Dan (Carroll).

Then we sort of sat down with the 25 and picked 10. So there were a lot of things that didn’t make it that are still in the bank. I don’t know whether or not I will resurrect them, but it was definitely a good motivator to create a lot, and then come back through with the knife and sort of edit and cut and pick what we thought was the best or at least the most cohesive connection. There were definitely other tunes on there that maybe didn’t work as well as a package. I think now if I picked songs for a record, I’d be less concerned about ‘does this feel like it can fit together in a package?’ but at the time that was one of the motivators, for sure.

You recorded it at Rada Studios, and it was co-produced by Dan Carroll who took over guitar duties from you in The Southern River Band. What’s it like to be able to work with someone who must be very likeminded with you?

Yeah, Dan and I have always been very close. When I first started playing live I was probably about 18 and Dan had a trio called the Sneaky Weasel Gang, and I did a big tour up north with them for six weeks. Dan and I have always been close mates, but I’ve always seen him as a mentor as well in a way.

The connection of taste is very important and after being in a lot of sort of open band democracies and knowing how that dynamic works, I’d always wanted to work just one-on-one with Dan and have the time and money to do that. And because it was during COVID we actually did the majority of it in his living room at his house in Maylands, because they didn’t have access to the full studio space at the time. It actually made it feel more right I think that was kind of the right way to do it. It just felt like a very creative hangout. Low pressure, lots of time to try weird things and no real ego in the room or anything like that.

It was a wonderful time for me, creatively. I really will always look back at that fondly. Some of my other experiences making records there was more pressure involved, more of a clash of egos, that kind of thing. Whereas this was just kind of like two mates hanging out making stuff (laughs).

There’s no real plans to make this a live project really is there?

It’s a question I get asked often because it is often the done route that people will start gigging for quite a while, build up a bit of a local following, and then the local following will sort of get excited about the band maybe putting out a record. Which is kind of what happened with Old Blood – we put out one record and there’s still people coming to the shows and there’s still people asking for new music or a new record.

I think what’s happening a little bit with Sad King Billy now is that I’m releasing music and putting a record out and now there are people asking for shows. I’m totally open to it. I think all the work that goes into doing a solo project and particularly releasing an album on your own and online and with the live videos that I’m creating and everything else that goes on behind the scenes, it’s kind of the boring stuff that has to be done. I just know that putting shows on top of it at the moment is maybe a little bit too much, but I’m open to the idea.

Julian Peet’s Sad King Billy solo album is released on all streaming platforms on Friday, July 28, 2023.

Photo by Emelia Peet