‘I was a bit like the weird guy’: Why it’s time we got to know Ben Lee (again)

Could it be that Australia finally gets Ben Lee?

Not in an “Oh, hiiiim?” kind of way, but an “Oh, him!” kind of way. You know, the weird cousin who once joined three cults and licked drugs off a supermodel’s wrist but who now wears green knitted jumpers, has a 12-year-old daughter and a successful career in music. Oh, he also has a podcast. About marriage.

“It took 30 years for people to kind of understand what my attitude is, you know, and it just sort of clicked,” says Lee, who is picking from a fruit box in a sofa-stuffed room at Warner Music’s Sydney offices.

He’s jet-lagged after a flight from Los Angeles and a bit ragged from a bout of COVID-19 a couple of weeks ago. Ahead of him is his Parents Get High tour and then the release of his new album, I’m Fun!, on August 19. Today the 43-year-old is on media duties, racing through our photo shoot in about 20 minutes – 30 years of practice paying off – and pondering who made the first move in his detente with Australia.

This was, after all, the country that could never quite get a grip on him. He was too hippy, too quirky, too full of himself and even too successful. One online commentator described him as having a “punchable face”, while Powderfinger singer Bernard Fanning’s remark – that Lee was a “precocious little c---” – is rated as one of the greatest insults in Australian music.

Even his family struggled with his unpopularity a bit. “I do remember at one point my dad going to me, ‘Why would you want people to dislike you?’ ” says Lee. “And I was like, I’m never gonna be able to explain this to you. I come from a different set of influences. Where I come from artistically, having an impact is more important than being liked.”

To Lee, though, it’s still all like water off a duck’s back.

“It’s like a dance, you know?” he says. “Because my concern was never really with how the mainstream perceived me, it was with having the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do, make the projects I wanted to make. So where there’s love, I would return love, but I never courted it.

I was a bit like the weird guy who did things his way ... If you didn’t understand it, it was just annoying and perplexing.

Ben Lee

“[Then] I suddenly became aware of a lot of love coming towards me. Whereas before, I’d felt animosity or indifference or confusion. I didn’t make it such a big part of my identity, like, ‘What does everyone think of me? What does everything mean?’ I just was like, ‘What can I do? That’s interesting.’

“And then suddenly, you go, ‘Wow, people seem to be saying really nice things, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, after 30 years of trying to get them to understand what I’m about.’ ”

The pandemic, weirdly, helped. His songs Catch My Disease and We’re All in This Together proved, alternately, catchy and comforting. He also moved back to Sydney with his wife Ione Skye, their daughter Goldie and his stepdaughter Kate. They have since moved back to LA, so Goldie could finish primary school with her friends but while they were here, Lee became Mr Everywhere. Competing on The Masked Singer, clashing with Kyle Sandilands and Guy Sebastian over vaccine mandates, hosting variety nights with Skye and popping up on podcasts, where his celebrity-soaked youth proved entertaining fodder.

“It’s all anecdotes in my head,” he says of his wilder days. “Which is good because, in a way, you can embellish them more, you know?”

So he didn’t lick MDMA off Kate Moss’ wrist at a party?

“No, no, I did.”

For all his swagger and sincerity, it pays to remember Lee has been at this since he was 14, when his band Noise Addict signed a record deal in 1993 and was then thrust into the spotlight in the US after being singled out by Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys. He’s been in the public eye for a very long time, good and bad, so it’s amazing he hasn’t had some type of meltdown.

“I think all my chasing cults [he marketed essential oils and has dabbled in various religions], that was my type of self-destructiveness,” he says. “And the reason I say it was self-destructive was it took me off course. There were parts of my life where I actually should have been more productive.”

Community and family got him back on track, especially having a teenager in the house.

“A lot of these things I explored were quite selfish, in the sense that I felt nourished by them, but no one else did,” he says. “So that is like cognitive dissonance. My stepdaughter, who was a teenager through all of that exploration for me, she was just like, ‘For f---’s sake.’ Because she’s going through a period of wanting adult role models who were stable, so she could be the one going through the experimentation.”

His new album I’m Fun! is part of that reconnection and stitches together his 18-album career. It even includes a song called Arsehole, which starts with the line: “When I was younger, I was an arsehole … burning down bridges, fighting with strangers, destroying everything.”

I wanted to talk about bigger philosophical ideas. I don’t say this to say I was ahead of my time, I just think my interests were more niche.

Ben Lee

“The thing about having had such a long public career is that it’s all public record anyway,” says Lee of his candid self-assessment. “So instead of saying it’s scary, I look at it as here’s my chance to contextualise, because I realised with his record, whether I blew it or not, there would be a chance to reassert my narrative and let me tell you one more time who I am.

“And that’s why, I think, calling it I’m Fun! was really important. Because I wanted people to be able to look back at this whole f---ing wild journey, and go, ‘What’s the thread? Oh, it’s that he was having fun the whole time.’ ”

Why does he think people didn’t like him?

“I meet a lot of younger artists now, like Mallrat and Georgia Maq, and they always understood, because I was a bit like the weird guy who did things his way. And if you understood it, you knew it was the coolest shit ever. But if you didn’t understand it, it was just annoying and perplexing.

“It’s hard for people to understand what the Australian music scene was like pre-internet. Even though when I started, it was like, right at the beginning of the internet. The insularity meant that the Australian music scene existed in a very separate way to the rest of the world.

“And the conversation you’d be involved in on a domestic level was here, whereas now, when an artist says something, it’s within a larger internet context, it’s an international conversation.

“And I wanted to have that type of dialogue in a time before technology was there to serve it. I wanted to talk about bigger philosophical ideas. I don’t say this to say I was ahead of my time, I just think my interests were more niche.”

Lee isn’t the only one who has been looking back. Goldie has been showing a keen interest in Noise Addict, too.

“She’s going through a little fascination with my band because she’s turning 13,” he says. “So often, when her friends are in the car, she says, ‘Play I Wish I Was Him [Lee’s 1994 tribute to Evan Dando] for them.’ So I think she’s very intrigued.

“And she said to me the other day, ‘Do you think we would have been friends [as teenagers]?’ And I said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’ And she’s like, ‘I would have been scared of you.’ And I was like, ‘Why?’ And she said: ‘Because you would have been the musician guy who only likes cool things.’ ”

He cackles away. “I thought that was pretty funny.”

Would he let Goldie take off at 14, touring the US with her band, being introduced by Winona Ryder to all the cool kids, like he was?

“I don’t know,” he says. “What I try and impart to her is that life is a process of getting trained while you’re on the battlefield. There’s no rules to it. There are general principles. But I can’t tell you anything that will work, or won’t work, to have a happy life.

“The ability to think on your toes and to weigh up decisions as they present themselves to you, with a firm grounding in a knowledge of who you are, and what you like and what you don’t like and what your strengths and weaknesses are, is where the answer is.

“I don’t know if I can honestly say what I would or wouldn’t let her do, it would depend on who she is. But I would definitely promise to have an open mind. And to face those crossroads with her as they come up.”

We have been talking for nearly an hour and while a conversation with Lee can be quite, well, enlightening (a simple question as to what makes a good Lee party is met with a quote from Buddha. A playlist would have sufficed), he is engaging and full of ideas.

Does he ever have down time?

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“I’m deeply involved in Love Island UK, season three.”

What?

“I like the psychology. You can look at reality shows and say they’re all fake, but to me, they’re human beings under extraordinary pressures making decisions. I just find it fascinating.”

How does he think he would have gone on reality TV in his 20s? Would he have been the villain?

“Yeah, not good, not good,” he says, laughing. “Abbie [Chatfield] was the great Australian villain [on The Bachelor] but she played the role beautifully. Spoilsports aren’t good on reality TV and I would have been a spoilsport. To win, or to be a villain, you’ve gotta dance. You gotta kiss the monkey. And I just don’t think I would have been capable at that time.”

So, last question: is Ben Lee fun?

“Our house is definitely the fun house that people come to,” he says. “And Goldie and her friends, if I’m not in a good mood, they’re really let down because sometimes you’re just grumpy, you know? The kids come over and I hear her friends go, ‘Oh, Ben’s in a bad mood today.’”

You’ve got to be fun dad – it says so on the album cover now.

“Exactly,” he says, laughing.

Ben Lee’s album I’m Fun! is released on August 19. He plays the Hotel Esplanade, St Kilda, on June 17; the Night Cat, Melbourne, on June 18; and the Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst, on June 23. For full tour dates go to ben-lee.com

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