The truism of our recent lives – say the last 20 months – is that time has seemed to stand still while everything has changed; yet some things have suddenly snapped back to a welcome (if new) normal.  This month brought one more piece of normality back to Phnom Penh in the shape of Ernie Buck, who has been in a sort of financial stabilisation exile in the UK for a time that coincidentally coincided with the beginning of the pandemic and its apparent retreat.

“It was overwhelming, the first day getting out of quarantine,” says Ernie over a quiet beer at the LengPleng office on the pavement at Golden Home.  “A few quiet hours with my wife, and then I’m walking up the stairs at Oscar’s for an Uncomfortably White Brothers set, seeing a succession of nearest and dearest Phnom Penh family for the first time again.  And then knowing I had to get up on the stage and start singing.  I could have passed out with a mixture of excitement and anxiety, I didn’t know what to say to people.  It was just so good.”

It’s been something of a journey for our hero, captured in song, recorded, and as of today released on Bandcamp in the form of an album entitled Self Portrait with Moustache.  “In the time I spent away I was doing a lot of reading of things like the Tao Te Ching, Buddhism, Marcus Aurelius and his Stoicism, and thinking yes, best to just go with what’s actually happening, rather than thinking I wish I could do this or that.  Just do what you do.  And what I do is very ragged and lo-fi.”

The songs themselves come from fertile philosophical and songwriting territory, reflecting a gradual recovery from facing down the darkness to the hope and redemption of reuniting with his wife and son.  “I kept reminding myself every time I woke up at 4.30 am to start driving a truck, looking at a picture of my son Rady’s face on my phone, of why I was doing it. And it more than lived up to every hope and dream I had for being back.

“The album includes a song that is about four years old, another about five years old, and the other three were written within the last 20 months, and recorded within days of being written.  They all seemed to fit a pattern that I hadn’t seen emerging, basically chronicling the time from when I first went into exile until I knew that I was getting out and getting home. It starts at a point of trying to fight against the urge to nihilism and winds up in a place of embracing the absurd.

“The time in quarantine was really where things coalesced.  So you’ve had all this time away, what have you actually got?  Is there a body of work or not?  And I have maybe 30 new songs that I think are usable from this out of say 160 attempts, most of which are absolute garbage.  I went through all of my hard drive of recordings and these few came together.

“I’ve never produced a cohesive album like this before.  I did one EP almost 20 years ago, that had three songs on it.  Since then it’s been a handful of singles.  I was thinking that I would do these as individual singles, and there was another five or six on the long list.  Then I thought no – which points in the storyline do these songs hit?  I can see the beginning, the middle and the end.  I’m excited to now put that out as a whole thing, so that people can listen from start to finish and hear that whole 20 months in one sitting.

Is there a favourite?  “I’d say the very last song, Almond Eyes.  I wrote it when Rady was about a month old.  I’d been wanting to record it for ages and had never had the opportunity.  When I was in a studio in the UK I wasn’t planning to record it, but we had some extra time and I thought why not?  Just a guide track, might use it later.  And then when I heard it I thought it actually doesn’t need anything else, just the American Standard Telecaster, clean, a tiny bit of reverb.  Finished.  I didn’t realise.  I’m very proud of that song.

“During the exile I’ve been in touch with my son through almost daily video calls.  Daddy’s in the phone the same way Baby Shark is in the phone.  The phone’s always got something of interest to him.  At first he wouldn’t sit still and he didn’t really care, but by the end, every time the phone rang he would be saying is papa calling?  Just seeing him in person and realising how tall and how eloquent he had become in both English and Khmer, it’s been astounding.”

With all this talk of the surreal nature of the exile, and surreal sense of return, the title Self-portrait of self with moustache brings Salvador Dali to mind.  “That was exactly my thought.  I’m a frustrated artist.  I always wanted to be a painter, maybe a sculptor.  My parents were very, very adamant that when it came time to choosing GCSE options, I’d already chosen Music, I wanted to do Art, and they said you can’t do two waste of time subjects.  I still get a lot of inspiration for songwriting from painters, trying to distil whatever it is that wants to come out of me into the simplest form possible.

“That’s why I love punk and garage rock and soul music – if you only need two chords then don’t bother with the third.  If you only need a three piece band then don’t elaborate.  I love Francis Bacon’s work, where you don’t have to see every facial feature to know the emotion that is being expressed.

“After about three or four weeks back in the UK I was circling the urge to just collapse into nihilism, despairing about when I will see my family and friends play music again, I was looking a bit gaunt.  I saw myself in the shaving mirror as I was trimming a moustache out of boredom, and I thought I’ll take a picture of that because I look kind of weird. The expression in the photo completely sums up the whole feeling of the record.  It’s not a happy face, it’s not a sad face, it’s a somewhat strange and pained expression.”

So tell us some more about the album.  “The first single, Brakelights, was recorded in three locations.  The drums were recorded in Phnom Penh at LF Social Club with Jesse Ricketson.  The entire room, from the drum kit to the bar, was full of microphones.  We turned off the fridges and everything and created a whole live room for the drums.  Bass was done by Greg Beshers at Jesse’s Woodhouse Studio, and the vocals and guitar recorded at Echo Zoo Studios in Eastbourne, run by the great Dave Izumi, who just did Billy Bragg’s album.  I emailed him and he said here are some dates, charged a standard studio engineer rate of about $40 an hour.  I was beyond honoured, and he worked me like a dog.  We recorded three of the songs, guitar and vocals.

“Tracks two and four were recorded in Portable Farm Studios, which was my bedroom, the box room in my parents’ house in Hailsham in Sussex, just acoustic guitar with only five rusty strings.  I did a bit of EQing, and because the string were dead it sounded really percussive.  The songs require space in them anyway, they’re not fast, there’s a lot of space between strums.  I listened to them alongside the others, and they blend, accidentally seem to work together.

Photo credit: David Flack

Caught a little monkey is more of a blues song, I was trying to do some horror blues, ripping off an R.L. Burnside song with a great guitar strumming thing going on, although when I listened back to the song my memory of it was different.  Again, it was a fight against the urge to be nihilistic about everything – that monkey of leaning too heavily on the beers and so on.  A little tale of learning: I guess we have to learn to get along.

What about plans to take it all live again with the Cham Ticks?  “I’m toying with the idea of forcing myself to be the only guitar player in the band, just go out as a three piece.  I’ve never considered myself a lead player, but in the spirit of going with the flow, being like water, I’m thinking don’t wish for the availability of another player.  What have you got?  Use what you’ve got.  With the style that I write in and the way I play we might just get away with it.  Noisy grunge rock.  I have some new toys and a little bit of confidence and a very small amount of ability.

 

“One of my guitar heroes is a guitar anti-hero, Kurt Cobain – he did more without playing a proper solo than a lot of people do in a couple of minutes of noodling.  And if in doubt, don’t do a solo, put in a bridge.  Make some noise and carry on.  Nothing should be longer than two and a half minutes anyway.  Good enough for Buddy Holly, good enough for Roy Orbison.

 

“There’s nothing in the pipeline because I still want to focus on recording, setting up the studio down on the family farm in Takeo, and playing with the local family and neighbours, letting them have a try.  A lot of them are interested in trying out my guitars and so on.  If the gigs happen, fine.”

 

While you wait for the gigs to happen, the new album by Ernie Buck & the Cham Ticks, Self Portrait with Moustache, is now available on Bandcamp.