THERE ARE NO SHARP EDGES anywhere at Ragamuffin House. Desks, stairs, shelves: all have been carved into elegant, sweeping curves. Sunlight pours in not through windows but through port holes; crisp white walls glowing with natural light. On the top floor, in a tiny studio muffled by chunks of grey soundproofing foam sprouting from the walls, Euan Gray fluffs up a drooping bean bag.
This impossibly tall, soft-spoken Australian has taken up residence in Ragamuffin’s impossibly Zen space dedicated to creative arts therapy. Here, among the many instruments, sheets of music and seats from which it’s almost impossible to get up once you’ve sat down, the saxophonist is creating a place where people can come to heal. “I have a lifelong commitment to the spirit of music therapy,” he practically whispers. “The Ragamuffin Lighthouse Studio will be many things to many different people. There will be two main streams: a professional recording studio for musicians, plus a therapy space for healing through music for anyone from us, who get healing just from playing and recording music, to kids with trauma.”
Introduced to Ragamuffin House by the Khmer-Australian girlfriend he moved to Cambodia in pursuit of last year and is marrying on May 4, Euan is better known in his native Brisbane as frontman for The Rooftops – here for the wedding and playing at The Village the day after. Drawing heavily on soul, jazz, reggae and pop, The Rooftops – four-year residents at The Bowery in Brisbane, where Euan first met his fiancée – are synonymous with the sort of uplifting dancing-barefoot-in-the-streets sound only those who grew up on sun-drenched coastlines can create.
The grooves are feet-friendly, the storytelling soulful – some of it inspired by Euan’s long-term love affair with Cambodia – and the vibe is reflected right here in his blossoming studio. “What I was always trying to get at through the band is that feeling of unlocking ourselves and the audience into new experiences, new release and positive vibes. Coming here and taking it right back to basic stuff – getting up the courage to perform – you realise that unlocking is actually much simpler than doing a big gig and having a famous band and getting a hit record. That’s actually quite far removed from the heart of what that process is.
“My whole experience of recording, almost, is committing to spending a lot of money and a lot of stress and a lot of rushing around. Going to the studio and knowing you’re paying $500, $800 a day. The whole point of you being there – to express yourself and to give the best possible version of your song – is sort of put to one side and you’re just going through the ropes.
“A Hundred Different Lives was recorded in a big studio and had that pressure always around it. That was also the one Darren Percival produced. He’s now famous in Australia because he came second in The Voice. He’s truly amazing and I really felt like he foregrounded the meaning of each song: ‘Let’s get into this space. What does it mean? Let’s get into the emotion before the technicalities.’ That was a bit of an eye opener, but it was still in this context of stress and money and time, so we recorded our last album, Everything to Everyone, in our little home studio in Brisbane and it was so much better – more relaxed, because it was our time and our agenda in our space. That’s the kind of philosophy I want to replicate here at Ragamuffin House.”
From shrill horns emulating the trumpeting of a lumbering pachyderm on the upbeat reggae of Monkeys And Elephants to the haunting melancholy of In The Morning, The Rooftops’ most Cambodia-centric songs form the core of their set list for The Village, with a smattering of other material, new and old. “In previous albums I’ve tried to approach bigger issues that aren’t my issues, including stuff about Cambodia. Big things, like war. Everything to Everyone was definitely more personal: relationships; self-realisation.”
WHO: The Rooftops
WHAT: The grooves are feet-friendly, the storytelling soulful
WHERE: The Village, #1 Street 360
WHEN: 7pm May 5
WHY: The sort of uplifting dancing-barefoot-in-the-streets sound only those who grew up on sun-drenched coastlines can create
Lest We Forget
Clean Dirt
We built it in the jungle
So if we go the jungle will grow
If they come searching
Only we will know
We’ll wait a thousand seasons
When the trouble’s gone maybe we’ll forget
To remember
Maybe that’s the best the gods can get
“It’s about leaving Angkor Wat to the jungle; about trying to understand what it would have been like as a worker building this thing. Why are they building it? It’s not for the gods. It’s reducing it to a single lifetime: they built it and then they had to flee when the Thais were coming and the capital was moved. You know what? It’s better to leave it to the jungle. ‘We built it for our own reasons: not for the king, not for national sovereignty. We built it out of a sense of devotion to our own gods and our own families. And you know what? It’s better in the jungle; better than having all these tourists crawling over it.’
“It’s one of those things: you try to understand what it was like for people you don’t know and it ends up being a song about yourself. My personal Angkor Wat is the structures you build around yourself thinking that’s what you want and need, but what you really need is no structure, no walls; something that’s about being yourself and valuing the people around you. You don’t need a big temple to prove you’re devoted to God or whatever. I just need a small structure. This studio on the top floor of Ragamuffin House is my Angkor Wat and look, the trees are already reclaiming it!” [Laughs and points to plants engulfing balcony]
History of Beating Hearts
Clean Dirt
If looks can kill, then it can’t hurt
To wear a simple T-shirt
A golden star on a background of red
Sold with her tourist smile
Another one gone from the pile
In a past this colourful
It’s just one thread
But she’s old enough to know
Revolutions come and go
So the irony is on my chest for all to see
“I wrote this while I was in Laos but it just seems to be the story of this region. It’s basically the commoditisation of a culture, like when they sell a T-shirt with a gold star on it and people walk around wearing a Communist star on their chests like an idiot, not knowing what it means. That’s interesting but what does the woman who sold it to you think about it? What does she know about it? That’s not the real history here – we just sold it to you. The real history is the history of beating hearts: history is created by interactions between people, not this surface ideology stuff.”
Rice
A Hundred Different Lives
In your dreams you see machines
That clean away our ways of living
They take the place of working hands
And the land is warm and willing
But of your mechanic wonderland
We see only two
The speaker blasting out your lies
And the car that will get rid of you
Still we can sit for hours
Powerless in the sun
We’ll rise and shout what you tell us to
But will not be overcome
“I’ve been so fascinated with recent Cambodian history. I’ve read all the books the kids sell. Living here it seems to be such a background thing, but as a tourist and thinking about Cambodia from afar, I was just so captivated by the stories. Rice is the story of an actor in The Killing Fields who went through the same experience everyone did, even though he was playing someone else in history. It’s the story of his starvation and struggles. The constant theme in all these books is people just wanting rice, just wanting to be fed; this idea of remembering the times when you used to eat rice together. That’s where the title of that album comes from: a hundred different lives flashing before his eyes as he’s being tortured. But after all these things, all he really wants in life is some rice. It’s a large story: unpacking all those things into one desire that’s not met.”
Rain Gamblers
Everything To Everyone
Swear I saw them yesterday
Same the day before
Silhouettes of ghostly men
Maybe twenty, maybe more
Standing still as weathervanes
Searching in the sky
Counting minutes, counting clouds
Silent statues, empty eyes
Swear I heard one whispering
But it could have been the breeze
Spreading like a rumour
The colours changing in the trees
At the distant sound of thunder
I thought I saw one grin
The first drops of the season
Falling like money down on him
“Someone sent me an article on the rain gambling that goes on in Battambang and I found it so evocative: these people standing around on rooftops with their CB radios. I don’t know anyone who gambles on rain, but I have known people who have problem gamblers in their family and the trouble that creates. So this evocative image turned into an exploration of how problem gambling can manifest through generations, which is really what I’m interested in: the heart of everything; how these things end up manifesting.”
Monkeys and Elephants
Everything To Everyone
They say that an elephant never forgets
But if mine’s in the room I would happily bet
That you would never even know that he is there
He breathes like a rock in the weathering sun
Moves like a river that has already run
He’s the mountain, I’m the mountain air
If it’s true he can carry anything that I know
I would happily pack it up and happily go
If I knew it wouldn’t tumble down on me
And with an elephant benevolently helping to show
The strength that I need to shoulder my load
I know I’ll be alright
“Monkeys and elephants are the guardian angels of a Cambodian person I know and they have led a life just as hard as anyone. I could list the number of times they’ve nearly died but they haven’t because of their guardian angels, monkeys and elephants. This is a guy whose English is excellent; who knows about business and science and reads Western papers every day. He knows what it means to say you have guardian angels in the West, but he still believes it.”
In The Morning
A Hundred Different Lives
In the ocean of crimes
I’ve saved but a handful
And to look into the past is to die
So all that I ask
Cos you sure can’t forgive me
Is to leave me in the hope
That you might
“I started to write a song about Duch [Kaing Guek Eav, head of Khmer Rouge interrogation centre S21, convicted in 2011 of crimes against humanity, murder and torture] because I’d read some of the things he said during the trial. I quote him in the song: ‘All that I ask, because you sure can’t forgive me, is to leave me in the hope that you might.’ I thought that was huge so I wrote the song and it turned out sounding like a forgiveness-in-a-relationship story. I just put the word ‘Baby’ in and all of a sudden… you know? It’s exploring the idea of forgiveness: how do you forgive the unforgiveable? How do you forgive yourself? How do you forgive your partner? What is forgiveness? In some ways it’s much more obvious in a trial because there’s a guilty person and that’s it, it’s done, but when there are no lawyers, no judge…”
Everything To Everyone is available on totherooftops.com
Storm Season, Clean Dirt, and A Hundred Different Lives are on iTunes