Louis Tillet always seemed to be sailing somewhere. His songs, his voice, the sound of his keyboards manifesting a sea journey at night: sometimes stormy, sometimes wild, sometimes dream-like.
Funnily enough his name was only one letter away from ‘tiller’ (the helmsman of a boat). As his career developed you definitely felt he had kinship with Charon, the ferryman who took souls across the waters to Hades. Death’s antiquity. Charon meaning “keen gaze”, a spirit guide to the underworld. With Charon’s help, some who went below even got to come back and be immortal. In those times and tales it was not always such a bad thing to meet death and deal with it.
From the garage rock storm of ‘C’mon’ to singing about Greece in ‘An Ancient Song’ to his love of Beethoven and Allen Toussaint, you could say Louis Tillett was a boatman for many of us passing through Sydney’s inner city music scene from the early 1980s through to the present day.
It was a dark time, it was a good time, it was the best and worst of times as the novelists sometimes put it. So vale Louis Rohan Tillett for having us aboard your life boat across those years.
I have this enduring image of him, in the high noon of a very hot Australian summer. I can see Louis from a mile off. Coming towards me, climbing Crown Street, crossing Oxford like he is wading through the rippling air. We meet on the corner by the Commonwealth Bank. Despite the temperature he is wearing a long black, fur trench coat and matching black hat with a slim band of snakeskin around it.
I can see beads of perspiration on his forehead and a friendly, if faraway look in his eyes, his smile warm in greeting, bordering on innocent. Moments like these, Louis could seem almost childlike. Like he’d never got old and somehow never would.
Given his bulk and presence on this hot day, I was nonetheless reminded of something rather more powerful: a weird hybrid of his hero Beethoven and a dark, desperate polar bear completely out of tune with the environment he finds himself in, moving through it like the great creature he was, tragic and comical all at once.
In his hand Louis is carrying the rustiest jerry can I have ever seen in my life. I imagine someone somewhere might be willing to pay a collector’s fortune for it at a local vintage store, but here on the street I guess he has actually just run out of petrol down below in Darlinghurst and is moving on up the street to find fuel.
For some reason we never mention the rusty jerry can in his hand. We talk about music, ego, prayers, dreams, a lost amplifier, Athens, jazz. After a while it feels like the jerry can could in fact be full, not empty and, in the heat of this sun that is wearing me down, it might just explode. When I start to get uneasy, Louis takes off his hat. He is pale, sweaty, his breathing heavy, his hair matted. He looks terrible. Then he puts his hat back on and bids me good day.
Encounters like this with Louis will stay with me forever. Weirdly sweet and friendly, heavy and troubling all at once.
Later on, I will do a story on him for a magazine called Australian Style, a gallery of full-page iconic photos with mostly minimal captions that are meant to poetically suggest their rock ‘n’ roll subjects lives and art. We titled the 20-page feature ‘Lost in Music’. Louis’ text involves a paradoxical joke he tells me about paranoia. As I am the editor of the magazine, I then invite him to do an interview with the actor Noah Taylor, who is in a new film called The Atomic Kid. For some reason they will end up doing the interview in bed together in a hotel, mostly because Taylor has trouble waking up and moving far from where he is. Photos of the pair are in gritty black-and-white, printed again full page as part of a feature story. I think it’s cover material. The publishers think I am crazy.
Tonight, with news of Louis’ death, I will be struck by how many people love and grieve for him and the outpourings of affection and loss online. And I will be drawn particularly towards blues guitarist Jeff Lang’s startling description of being on the same performing bill with Louis, the intensity of his vocals “like he was scaring wolves out of the room”.
Other memories come to me in no clear order. Like the very first time I ever saw Louis, singing for Wet Taxis at the Britannia Hotel in Chippendale. They played on the floor in the front bar, crowded into a corner, Cleveland Street traffic passing by. There was maybe enough room for three people to perform comfortably, but the band appeared to be composed of about a dozen people, though maybe I exaggerate.
They have this storming, psychedelic garage rock sound and their rhythm guitarist Penny Ikinger wears so much make up her eyes looked like electrical sockets, with the music itself matching her eyes, some mix of drone and feedback and punk blues. Louis seems to almost smoulder before them, making use of two old microphones that look like the ones you might have seen Frank Sinatra using in old photos of his best radio years. Louis is singing into both of them at the same time, his voice typically deep and fierce and soaked in static. The weirdest thing is the way Louis is dressed, a hooded outfit like some medieval priest or punk Druid. Oh man, they sound damn good.
My chronology gets mixed up across the next few decades. Let’s face it, if you look back at the 1980s and 1990s they blur into one long weekend, a full-on Friday and Saturday night with a Sunday come-down and a lazy Monday reboot thrown in.
I know for sure that Louis started to make a string of great solo albums defined by his circular, pulsing keyboard and a sound reminiscent of The Doors and Nico combined, that deep voice of his calling up Jim Morrison and Ray Charles, devil and preacher, hopeless hope, bad love and romance, and a few genuinely Shakespearean musical tempests. On a good night he was not just a musician, he was a downright warlock.
Louis had another group happening called Paris Green, who had a residency at the Sandringham Hotel that seemed to last from the Stone Age through to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. I do mean forever. They were a loose jamming aggregation with Louis at their centre, drawing in some of the country’s top jazz musicians and a constellation of maniacs, alcoholics and drug addicts considered almost unusable by anybody who was half-sane. The audience they pulled in was made of much the same qualities, a mix of the demented and the musically refined, among them one Tim Freedman who’d steal the drummer Louis Burdett (I think) for his own group The Whitlams and write a song about him to boot.
Paris Green kept rolling, musicians attaching themselves to Louis’ residencies like glue, playing everything from John Coltrane to Mose Allison to epic jams that sent people mad and joyous. Now and again, Louis was just plain drunk and the whole thing slid into a mess. After a good show, sitting outside the Sando in the gutter with a beer and a cigarette, he was the Night Buddha of King Street. After a bad one he made you feel lonesome and worried watching him.
As times marched on, a myth inevitably grew: this notion that Louis Tillett was a terrifically talented, one-man musical apocalypse and self-destruction machine.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he would somehow make his way into the loving arms of manager Greg Sawers, whose enthusiasm and skills at talking underwater were only matched by a tolerance for the insufferable and a compassion drilled into him from a wild life of his own. In an erratic divorcing-and-remarrying fashion that went on for years, Greg would manage both Louis Tillett and Ian Rilen at once. I will do my best here to not digress into saying too much about Rilen, beyond his key role in Rose Tattoo and founding X. Rilen’s girlfriend, the superbly powerful X drummer Cathy Green, made the ultimate comment on his personality via the morning she placed his bass guitar on a gas stove and lit up the burners.
People tend to get over genius, you see, when you have to share a house or be in a relationship with someone. Being in a band is sometimes a mix of both. In any case, these two individual ‘personalities’, Louis the Bear and Ian the Reptile, found a friend for their parallel careers in manager Greg Sawers. On the odd occasion when their paths would all cross, Greg would make them his legendary breakfasts. They were always hungry and needing it (once food was made apparent to them). Where most people nailed their doors shut to the likes of these, Greg offered the two most unmanageable men in Australian rock music all the support he could give them.
It was through Greg that I somehow got involved with making a documentary on Louis down at Sydney’s prestige late-night jazz venue, The Basement. The word was being spread around that Louis had a killer new band, that he was working on a new album – and that he was not drinking.
If you’re wondering what not drinking for Louis meant, look no further than his bizarre success in Greece, which Louis had always regarded as a spiritual homeland before ever visiting. Reasonable sales had seen him fly into Athens on a European tour back at the start of the 1990s, where he promptly derailed himself with a 24-hour bender, after which no one could find him. A break-in to his hotel room revealed Louis was still there, comatose on the floor, beside his bed in his underwear. Forced into a shower and dressed by helpers, he was marched off to a severely delayed press conference where Louis rambled and digressed in a manner befitting his condition. All thought this was the end to a completely disastrous Greek leg to his tour. Until a national newspaper arrived the next day, with Louis on the front cover, declaring him a magus-like wit and cosmic genius of the first musical order. The shows sold out, album sales went through the roof, and Louis felt his attachments to Greece entirely vindicated. At last, a country that understood him.
Many were the triumphs, tragedies and career disappearances in between, before and after. Or as they say in Latin, ‘Et cetera’.
Anyway, back to Greg Sawers again, The Basement shows and the band Greg had rallied around Louis – including his old Wet Taxis comrade Penny Ikinger and fellow legendary guitarist Charlie Owen, as well as Cold Chisel songwriter and keyboardist Don Walker. It made for an event of some anticipation, an all-star two-night residency. In the immortal words of Greg Sawers “fucking unbelievable. Louis is really good at the moment. You’ve got no idea. You have to come down.”
In the space of four days – and with ‘Greg-power’ in our sails – that’s how I found myself working with director Lisa Nicol, cinematographer Carolyn Constantine and editor Anna Craney, serving as the interviewer and narrator for an absolutely no-budget documentary about Louis filmed over that the weekend at the Basement.
One thing that came as a big surprise was Louis revealing, on camera, that after these two shows he was committing himself to a mental institution. The care and love that meanwhile emanated over those two nights from his friends and fellow musicians was something to behold, in both conversation and in performance.
A few weeks later, the cinematographer Carolyn Constantine and I would set off with Louis on his small sailing boat at dusk. We’d had to explain our purpose and go get Louis from the institution where he was being treated. It was deemed of therapeutic value and he was let out for a few hours. As Carolyn filmed a relaxed and surprisingly commanding Louis at the tiller, sharply taking a sweeping turn on the Harbour to avoid us being run down by a Sydney Ferry, she almost toppled overboard. Her strong back, and a firm grip on her legs by me, saved the day and the camera. Louis looked calm against the glowing Harbour lights of the early evening.
The documentary, appropriately, was called A Night At Sea with Louis Tillett and screened by the ABC. Guerrilla filmmaking at its best. Looking back at snippets, Louis’ song ‘Sailor’s Dream’ still goes right into me…
“Hey hey hey what do you see
I’m going down to sail on an empty sea
Hey hey hey what do you know
I’m gonna cross that empty ocean to the other shore…”
Every few years afterwards, Greg Sawers would call trying to convince me to pull together another documentary on Louis. Or a story. Or a big review. “Louis is great, he….”
After one particular call summoning me urgently, I’d end up seeing Greg again in hospital not too long before he died. Rather than discuss his illness, Greg was keen as ever to promote his beloved roster of musicians, which had expanded with Ian Rilen and Louis Tillett now complimented by a third presence, Steve Balbi. Greg gave me the drum on all of them, enthusiastic as ever. He also adamantly offered to help me to move house even though he could barely walk himself. “We’ll be fine, Mark.”
What inspires that kind of wild kindness? That degree of loyalty? I guess some people inspire love and others are simply bound to give it.
Greg would pass away, but I’d continue to get odd messages now and again, or notice of various things on social media about Louis and what he was up to. His partner Rachael picking up the baton and making sure Louis and his work were taken care of.
Things seemed to get scrambled again… Louis was playing and he was suddenly not playing; then he was in a crisis. I’d been having a few years’ worth of problems of my own and did not pay these messages any great mind. My sense of Louis was of his life always being lived inside one great emergency or just beyond it. Yet his friends continuously offered great support and creative interactions. When I think of his performances, solo or with a group, there was always a sense of ‘gathering’ and oneness to the room. Everything big and close at the same time.
I had no idea he had been semi-homeless by 2012 and living in a van around Enmore. Don Walker would help him out of that downward spiral by offering Louis a national tour as his support act.
Only two years ago, I’d see that he or his partner Rachael had tried to ‘Friend’ me directly on Facebook and that I did not notice or reply. This latter message is a late discovery for me tonight when I go searching for what had been happening to Louis, the years or moments I had missed before his death.
I had seen publicly that he was on yet another return musical journey not so long ago, with gigs advertised featuring him, Ken Gormly (Cruel Sea) on bass and Jeffrey Wegener (Laughing Clowns) on drums. A gun unit if ever there was one. For some reason I did not see the trio play. Busy, stupid, forgetful, who knows why. I really regret missing them.
There were public appeals being made online for Louis a year or two ago too. Kidney failure, lungs full of liquid, suffocation, drowning in himself. He was battling to breathe. He needed money, help. These notes were sent out during the pandemic days and immediately after, though Louis’ health problems were long-running, not era-specific.
News of his death arrives now like some form of delayed or accumulated heartbreak. The gentle giant, the suffering bear, battling mental illness, hearing voices in his head, drinking way too much, self-medicating, then going down, deep, into his piano, playing a small group of songs obsessively, over and again…. ‘Sailor’s Dream’, ‘An Ancient Song’, ‘Midnight Rain’, ‘Trip to Kalu-ki-Bar’, ‘From Me to You’, ‘Swimming in the Mirror’….
The latter composition was the source of barbed amusement between us whenever we did catch up. Louis always enjoyed reminding me that I gave him the worst review of his life in relation to it. I’d been to see a loose collaborative project that combined him with Brett Myers of Died Pretty and Damien Lovelock of Celibate Rifles. Calling themselves No Dance, the threesome had produced an absolutely exceptional EP. But live in Kings Cross at their first show they were a car-wreck. My response was lacerating, nationally published, relentlessly abusive. Sometimes hating something is just too enjoyable to be fair or wise, let alone true – even if it’s vaguely accurate. To his credit (and Damien’s too) Louis could laugh about it with me, forgiven if not quite forgotten. Louis reckoned he kept the review in his wallet for amusement till it fell it to pieces. I still have the No Dance EP. If you ever see a copy you really should get it.
As I reflect on a lifetime of meandering connections with Louis, I see that I am not at all close to capturing the power of him live, the way he could carry you away in his music. Two of my favourite albums lately are The Ugly Truth and Life@the Basement. But that could change. There are no bad Louis Tillett albums and many wonderful ones. Even if the track listings can seem repetitive, the treatments of the songs shift and grow. Together with names of his songs, his album titles probably say as much as anything else about Louis’ truths and interior struggles: Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell, Letters to a Dream, Midnight Rain, The Hanged Man, Soliloquy.
I certainly don’t like to portray Louis as the mere victim of his demons, a big old troubled-and-sad softie with mental health issues and alcohol problems. That’s way too blunt a summary. He was a major artist, as fans like Ed Kuepper, Don Walker, Nick Cave and many others will attest. Louis’ old musical compatriot, Ken Gormly, wrote the most beautiful tribute to him that is well worth tracking down if you can find it online. When I acknowledged his memorial as such, Ken made a side-comment to me in a conversational thread that I felt was worth saving and important to repeat here: “Louis seems so uniquely definable, but he’s actually a complete mystery.”
Truth be told, Louis could scare me a little, his sweetness and gloom extending into a surprising ferocity or volcanic suggestions beneath a mostly gentle surface. This combination manifested itself at its best in his music: hot and liberating, stormy, tormented, released.
I remember this disturbing softness in him as a key quality; the tremors in his hands and lips; his wan smile; the days when his presence worried me for where he might end up; the happy surprises when he’d reemerge, still around and somehow back in action and as good as ever; his mighty, room-shaking laugh; and, of course, a dark shining music that was completely and only his, instantly recognisable the moment he sat down and touched a piano and started singing, holding a room in his oceanic grip. One hell of a musical captain in this mad world. Moving on, as he always was, to another shore.
Note: All images were sourced from public posts on social media. Where possible, I have tried to include photographer credits. Please contact me for any changes or corrections, or where copyright may be an issue.