Marcus Whale Is Hungry For The Impossible
Desire, vampirism, horror, blood - Marcus Whale's 'The Hunger' goes where few dare to tread.
Marcus Whale’s upcoming album The Hunger is pathetic, impatient, and partially inspired, he tells me, by True Blood. Across its nine tracks unfolds a narrative of a vampire and his familiar, desperate to be made immortal — Whale’s voice, rich and vulnerable, pleads for transformation across skittish anxious electronica and piano-backed ballads, belting through the cold, empty air.
While Whale has been a fixture of Sydney’s music scene for more than a decade, he is currently at his most prolific, as The Hunger is his third album in three years. In 2019, he and Travis Cook reignited electronic-pop duo Collarbones for their fourth album Futurity, before Whale released his second solo album Lucifer last July, a dense, jagged work about the fallen angel, impurity and ritual obsession.
Last year, he also collaborated with Rainbow Chan and artist Eugene Choi to stage a 20th-anniversary musical adaptation of Wong Kar-Wai’s classic film In The Mood For Love, about an undeniable, indescribable romance, as part of the Sydney Opera House’s digital programming. In-between, there have been poetry books, one-off performance pieces, and a weekly concept-exploring FBi radio show (which, as a disclosure, I co-hosted with him between 2017-2020). For Whale, they’re all linked by one thing.
“I’ve started to realise that a lot of what I do across music and other things — writing and whatever — is pretty much about the same thing, which is longing,” Whale, 31, says. “But I think what changed is that now I’m interested in impossibility and longing, [how] desire is present even when I know that it’s impossible to really truly know or combine with the insides of another person.”
While Futurity and Lucifer were slow to realise and release, The Hunger came quick. During the early days of 2020’s lockdown, he and friend, filmmaker Kane Gaundar, watched Tony Scott’s 1983 erotic-goth cult classic film The Hunger, about a love triangle between a vampire couple (Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie) and a mortal (Susan Sarandon). Whale cites a scene where Deneuve’s character cries, knowing she’s dooming Sarandon’s character to the life of a freak, neither human nor immortal: Sarandon, at home far away from Deneuve, finds herself also crying without volition, confused but enthralled by the psychic transformation underway. For Whale, it was the perfect metaphor.
“It’s a lot easier for me to sing from the perspective of wanting more,” he says. “For the vampire, it’s happened. It’s a curse that has to be dealt with, being undead. Whereas for the familiar, it’s more about feeling that it’s not enough to be human, needing to be transformed. It’s about submissiveness in that way, finding power in sacrificing control to a more powerful being.”
Soon after, he wrote what became the album’s two lead releases and titular track, which he realised were all about vampires: ‘Two Holes’, ‘The Hunger’, and ‘Impossible’ — the last out today with a music video directed by Gaundar, below.
“It’s a lot easier for me to sing from the perspective of wanting more.”
“The video is shot as a found-footage horror, which I’ve watched a bunch of with Kane,” Whale says. “We based it a little on this undead figure from Chinese folklore, the Jiangshi, who traditionally feed on the life force of the living. I was interested in the pathetic hunger of that figure, thinking of them as really tortured by their need.”
“I thought it would be interesting to have these shocking, horror images attached to a very tender song, because tenderness can cut both ways. It can be pathetic or it can be beautiful.”
Find the video below, as well as a Q&A with Whale on The Hunger, out Sept 3 via Dero Arcade.
Music Junkee: What is your first memory of encountering the vampire figure in culture as a child?
Marcus Whale: Like with all kids, the campy signifier of Dracula was my first understanding of vampires. It wasn’t a [specific] TV show or movie, it’s the costume and the idea of it. I can’t even remember the first vampire media that really had an impact on me.
I was definitely really disdainful of Twilight. I studied Gothic horror in year 11, and I thought it was cool, but I didn’t have anywhere near the interest in vampire lore then as I do now, because I was too pretentious.
[But] what I’ve learned is that schlock and camp and genres like horror and fantasy are filled with more possibility and imagination than I used to think. I’m so much more interested in what we can learn from the illusory and the excessive, [and] I find the vampire genre so rich with possibility. It’s sexy. [Laughs] It’s about the fear of death and blood.
MJ: Re; blood, you’re currently wearing a t-shirt with a quote from [queer artist and AIDS activist] David Wojnarowicz on it. Is that something you’re drawn to, the queer parallels within this fear of blood and disease?
MW: There’s a massive crossover with blood in vampire lore and also the fear of blood from the HIV epidemic. This isn’t really my field, but I also see a really clear parallel with the idea of queer people as filthy in not just in a conceptual way, but also in a somatic, bodily way.
“Genres like horror and fantasy are filled with more possibility and imagination than I used to think.”
That’s not mine to necessarily use because I’m not HIV positive, but this is just one of the many ways that vampires can be used to represent how certain people are designated as filthy in society.
MJ: I mean, True Blood does that pretty ineloquently.
MW: ‘God hates fangs’ [Laughs]. I liked True Blood, there’s definitely an influence from True Blood on this album. I think the problem with it is that the least interesting relationship in that universe [Sookie and Bill] is the central one to me.
MJ: Previously, you’ve played with other archetypes, like cowboys [as in The Hunger‘s lead video for ‘Two Holes’] and Lucifer. What’s the difference between using that in your solo material, vs. Collarbones, where you’re more ‘yourself’?
MW: The Collarbones stuff is definitely from a character that is close to my experience, and I’ve come to use these archetypes, often horror-based figures, in my solo work, [which is] closer to what I naturally want to do.
[I] want to create a fantasy that the album can be unified by, so that when you listen, you’re immersed in a universe that can tell you more through immersion than I can tell you literally with my words. The role-play of it is more honest than if I were to tell you exactly what’s on my mind. And it also opens up way more interpretive possibilities, which I think is exciting.
MJ: While you can’t really perform live any time soon, your solo shows have gotten much more choreographed and involved, often including costumes and collaborative elements with artists Athena Thebus and Chloe Corkran. You’re also often wearing a jockstrap on stage and play with revealing your body — is there a vulnerability there, or a sense of gaze you’re playing with? Or is it just showing off being hot?
MW: This is almost a therapy question. There’s definitely an element — and I would say this goes for a lot of queer aesthetics, especially at the moment — of wanting to create an image that is eye-catching and makes people turn and watch.
One of the ways in which I know I can make that work is if there’s a reveal because it’s an easy way to create some drama. I think a lot of the choices that I make with live performances are tied to spending years and years of playing shows and support slots where I had to try and get people’s attention. Over time, the music, especially my solo stuff, has become designed to arrest people’s attention and make it difficult for them to look away.
There’s definitely an element there about being luring and seductive. That also goes for the story of the music also, which is about wanting to be wanted a lot of the time. [In June], I did a theatre show of The Hunger, which involved a lot of stripping or doing ‘sexy dances’: behind everything is wanting to feel valued. And that’s the story of the familiar in the album as well.
Being wanted by a vampire, serving them [with blood]: it’s an awesome proof of your value to another person, a supernaturally powerful person. To pathologize for a second, I think the desire to be desired is so addictive and makes us grotesque in a way.
MJ: You released a poetry collection in 2019 with Subbed In called Wheeze, and the first poem is called “I Want To Be A Goth”. So many lines relate to The Hunger, like “being a goth means I can be excessive”. Have you always been attracted to the melodramatic?
MW: My use of horror more generally is something that’s happened in the last five years of my life, where I’ve gone back and started delving into the music I was into when I was a teenager…The attraction is that being a goth allows me to be excessive and melodramatic. And being excessive and melodramatic allows for the possibility to be beyond myself and bigger than myself.
“The attraction is that being a goth allows me to be excessive and melodramatic.”
I need that to express myself with — the tools of realism aren’t enough for me, or aren’t interesting enough for me. And horror and goth aesthetics endlessly deliver to me, [as their] idea of the body is so twisted and exaggerated. [It asks] ‘what if a human was beyond?’, and ‘what if being monstrous actually makes available the possibility of something much more and better than our present?”.
MJ: A slight change of pace: Is the song ‘Perfume’ named after the Britney Spears track? I know it’s one of your favourites.
MW: [Laughs] This is the first time I’ve actually linked them and it’s one of my favourite songs. I decided it was called ‘Perfume’ before I’d finished making the song or writing lyrics. There’s something seductive about the idea of perfume to me — I mean, that’s how it’s [literally] sold. And that song’s about this sensual power of an encounter with a vampire.
MJ: That’s interesting because vampires are traditionally cold-blooded. They don’t have a smell, they don’t have a trace. It’s almost that lack or void that people are attracted to.
MW: Yeah, and so when you have nothing to work with, you create the illusion of something. So often the bodily experience of desire is something that happens inside yourself. All those sensual experiences are conjured by your own desire.
Marcus Whale’s The Hunger is out September 3 via Dero Arcade.
Jared Richards is a critic writing on Gadigal land who writes for NME, The Guardian, The Big Issue and more. He’s also Junkee’s Drag Race recapper. He’s on Twitter @jrdjms.