Shoot Out The Cameras actually has more in common with his longstanding Americana influences like Iris DeMent – whom Sharkey cites as “top one or two of all time” for him – and Willie Nelson than with Clockcleaner’s harsher touchstones of Flipper and Big Black. Inspired partly by a one-off cover song performed on stage with his old Philadelphia mate Kurt Vile, and developed in collaboration with Nick Craft from Sidewinder and Zillions, Sharkey’s solo output makes the absolute most of his deep, shadowy voice, which has always set his bands apart right from the outset.

The album’s themes follow suit, unspooling from the real-life one-two punch of bushfires and pandemic to curate a feral vision of his adopted Canberra as a lawless wasteland where one might take great joy in gunning down the ubiquitous speed cameras and other forms of surveillance. Sharkey sings about pain and death at length, but that innate heaviness is offset by the lightness of his acoustic guitar and some quieter comic turns. Guest spots from fellow Philly native Mary Lattimore on harp and Canberra producer Duncan Lowe on Hammond organ introduce some welcome moments of levity too.

Released in Australia via Mistletone and in the US by Matador Records co-founder Gerard Cosloy’s 12XU label, Shoot Out The Cameras has got Sharkey making music in this country for the first time since moving back here permanently in 2018 – following a Melbourne stint a decade earlier that saw him work at underground rock intuition The Tote and form Puerto Rico Flowers on the back of Clockcleaner’s dissolution. Now back in Canberra, the hometown of his partner Yasmin Hassan, and firmly entrenched in family life, Sharkey has become as well known for his intense love of the rugby league’s Canberra Raiders (cue his repeated podcast appearances) as for his assorted music.

He’s also a mellower presence these days. In contrast to the first time I interviewed him, during the day at a Philly dive bar in 2007, he’s cheerful and self-deprecating rather than guarded or prickly. Walking around his quiet patch of Canberra after his kids’ bedtime, Sharkey is only too happy to open up to another Pennsylvania transplant about his long-gestating solo debut.

DW: Did you start the record before the bushfires and pandemic?

JSIII: The seeds of it were sown a little bit before. The record itself is like before and after: side A is before [the pandemic] and side B is an afterthought, like me expounding on a society that didn’t regain its feet and lost its way [instead]. I loathe to use the term “post-apocalyptic,” but side B is a vision of society breaking down a bit.

Pre-pandemic, the idea of me recording a [solo] record hadn’t even popped into my head, but my head fills up with banks of songs and I eventually have to do something with them. I don’t sit down and write with a guitar generally, [though] I’ve started to do that a little bit more. Usually they just happen while I’m walking around and I have to do something with them. I became a lot more motivated after the pandemic started, because I was either gonna have a nervous breakdown or funnel all of that energy into this project. (Laughs)

What music were you doing before that?

Nothing really here in Canberra. I played with feedtime. in Sydney because I got this random email. This woman said, “It’s my 40th birthday and I love your music. I was wondering if you’d play a solo set.” I had never really even pondered it.

It’s funny that you hadn’t done solo stuff, because your voice is such a natural fit for it.

I know, it’s weird. I kinda viewed every band I ever did as a solo project, honestly, because I’ve written everything. Not to sound egotistical, but it’s all autobiographical. They’re not that far-flung, even though they’re different mediums.

So I’ve always lived in this pseudo-solo-artist world with my good friends helping. Dark Blue was the most amazing setup: I had Mike Sneeringer [from Purling Hiss], the sickest drummer, and then Andy Nelson [from Paint It Black and Ceremony], an unreal bassist and musical brain, helping me make these records. [Both also played in the US incarnation of Puerto Rico Flowers.]

[That] ended when I moved here. I flew back, like a lunatic, for one record release show, but that was the last record we’ll probably do for a long time.

How long have you been back in Australia permanently?

It’ll be three years in July, so 2018. We left [Melbourne] in 2013 to go back to Philadelphia for a few years, and then we saw the writing on the wall [with Trump etc.]. I hate to speak of gut feelings, but I was like, “Y’know, I think some bad things are gonna happen here very soon.”

Knowing you, I would have thought you’d just start bands right away after moving back here.

I’m surprised it took this long. All my friends are musicians here, aside from my football friends. And Puerto Rico Flowers did start here, technically. The first iteration of the band played one show: it was me with DX and Zephyr [both from Total Control]. So I wrote all those early songs here. It was good but then I moved home.

That was part of the hindrance: I was flipflopping back and forth between Philadelphia and Australia, so I was never really settled enough to pick people to play with. I tried to start a band here in Canberra, but there’s not many people my age. All the New Age Group guys are like 10 years younger. Those dudes rule, but it’s a little hard to get in sync schedule-wise with people that much younger than you. They don’t have kids. Now I’m working with Nick Craft, and we’re very much on a similar wavelength in terms of familial duties and responsibilities. We’re weekend warriors again. (Laughs)

How did you meet Nick?

We met at a kid’s birthday party, oddly enough. We just stared each other down, like, “This guy looks cool. Who the fuck does he think he is?”. We talked for a little bit. Then, like a month later, Kurt Vile played here and I did a song with him on stage that night. [Nick] was like, “I fuckin’ know that guy!”.

That was the Highwaymen song?

Yeah, we did ‘Silver Stallion’ together. I emailed Kurt and [suggested it]. We locked ourselves in a storage closet, rehearsed it a couple times and banged it out.

How many people were at the show?

About a thousand. It was in an ANU venue. I was shocked how many people came out.

Was that the first time you’d sung that way live?

Totally. I don’t even know why. I was just listening to that Highwaymen tape a lot in the car, and I got a thought that me and Kurt could do it really well. [It turns out] he also had been listening to The Highwaymen a lot. We synced up. Again, two men in the same stage of our lives: we’re the same age, both have kids the same age, and were both feeling this weird, cosmic Americana pull.

So Nick saw you with Kurt and saw potential there?

Yeah, he reached out about playing together and it just took off from there.

Your voice has such a naturally dark, brooding element. Has it always been like that?

I remember the second I started doing. You know the scene in the NWA movie where Eazy-E is real shitty in the studio but then he puts his sunglasses on? Like “Fuck this, I can rap.” (Laughs) Sort of like that.

I was in the studio doing demos for the Babylon Rules record for Clockcleaner. We’d put out one record before that was kind of all over the place and not really focused. It was me just trying to throw all the things that I like onto a record at one time. Which I do most times anyway, but I’ve [since] figured out how to make it sound more like myself. But the first time I just sang instead of screamed was ‘Vomiting Mirrors’, which was like the Clockcleaner hit. Everyone fuckin’ loved that song.

It wasn’t working, [even though] the music was so good. So I went down a whole octave, and it came out bellow-y. It sounded good, so I just did every other song on the record like that and never looked back. It was like a total guess.

You came from a scene where everyone screamed, which was a good delivery service for that kind of music.

That’s the thing: it was not heard of for someone in a band that sounded like Clockcleaner to just sing and be tuneful. Y’know, I grew up listening to The Housemartins and The Smiths.

How have the solo shows been so far?

Usually it’s me and Nick. I’ll probably do a couple shows alone … that’s how the songs were written. The songs have more flourishes on the record, but I think they naturally lend themselves to just me and the guitar.

Are you feeling confident so far, not having anything to hide behind?

Every time I get up there, I learn something new. Because I’ve never done this before. The first live stream we did, which was the first gig we did together, I totally forgot a lyric. And I just tried to mumble it. I was like, “Oh shit, I can’t just mumble a lyric, because there’s no drums or bass or amps to cover this up.” I can’t just waver away from the mic. I have to remember every lyric and I have to hit every note. It really pissed me off that I fucked it up, so I was like, “I’m never doing that again.” So I just drilled lyrics into my head and practiced till my goddamned fingers bled.

Every time I get on stage I fuck something else up, but I learn what not to do and I get more comfortable with it every time. Also, talking to crowds between these songs is a lot different than how it used to be. I realised that I have to, in this era, break the ice a bit. Because people have had a full year of misery, and if I just stay in character in between songs and don’t crack a joke or make somebody feel at home, it’s just gonna be a miserable night for them. (Laughs)

Especially if you’re singing lyrics like “Death is all around me.”

Exactly. This material doesn’t lend itself to a hoedown Saturday night, so I have to kind of coax it out of everybody. I’m learning how to do that too.

“Here’s a seven-minute song called ‘Pain Dance’.”

(Laughs) “Here’s a song about my childhood visions of burning down the Catholic church in my town, that I’ve somehow presupposed onto post-apocalyptic Canberra.”

Let’s talk about some of themes on the record: we’ve got surveillance, death, fire…

Yeah, ‘Shooting Out The Speed Cameras’ is specifically about society eroding after the fires: smoke in the sky, birds falling from the sky, a red-orange haze. It’s like an outlaw vision of what Canberra could be after society has crumbled.

How long was Canberra impacted by bushfires?

For a long time: from early December. Canberra was cloaked in smoke for weeks. It would blow in [from elsewhere] and stay for days, then go away. Then more would roll in from the South Coast. It was inescapable. I’d drive the kids an hour south to the Snowy Mountains just for a little bit of a respite. We went to Queensland for a week or two.

Then the Orroral Valley fires started. Dark Blue was actually meant to fly to Los Angeles that week, but there was a tsunami of flames 15km behind my house the night before I was meant to fly out, so I couldn’t leave my family. The whole city was in this weird, tense gridlock – emotional gridlock. You’d drive over a hill and just see plumes of smoke, like the cover of the movie Fright Night. Insane.

Then we had maybe five minutes and the pandemic hit. It was the greatest hits. It was like seeing the Ramones: one hit after another.

Also, just regionally, Canberra lends itself to music that is driven towards country or folk music. It’s very pastoral. You can be in the city and drive five minutes and you’re in a cow pasture, with horses everywhere. So I just made my own version of that.

I’m interested in how your surroundings come into the songs, because the Puerto Rico Flowers record from 2011 mentions the Eureka Tower [in Melbourne]. And you sing about “missing the violence” of your country.

Yeah, ironically missing the violence of America. Every record is [at least] mildly autobiographical, unless I’m singing about something that’s clearly ridiculous. Like a lot of the Clockcleaner stuff were inspired by Phillip K Dick novels and Orson Welles films. I was really into The Lady From Shanghai and Touch of Evil, that noir stuff.

But the other songs you can tell are more personal, because it’s like a timeline. And they’re always affected by where I am. Clockcleaner is a very city-sounding band: dirty, gritty, confrontational and snarky, which is the best way to describe Philadelphia. And Puerto Rico Flowers was a transitional band: it’s me in transit as a person, literally moving back and forth between Melbourne and Canberra and Philadelphia. Dark Blue was like, “I’m back in Philadelphia, baby.”

So my environment incredibly informs the way the music is written and the way I approach things.

I imagine the album’s recurring theme of cameras is just part of living in a government town. The seat of power.

That’s exactly what it is. You can’t escape the cameras. I was like, “Man, Willie Nelson would have written a song about shooting out speed cameras. Or Waylon Jennings.” That’s a cool idea, just going around town and shotgunning these things that are such pests and moneymakers. Revenue-churning, soul-sucking pieces of shit that are perched at every corner.

It’s also very much the current state of the world, where all of your data is being tracked. Every click you do on the internet is sold to another company to try to sell you shoes or Tupperware. You can’t escape.

But I somehow still live in this isolated rural setting. It’s so bizarre to me. I still live a mile away from the fucking mountains, but I couldn’t be any further on the grid. It’s a dichotomy that still haunts me.

Did you grow up in the suburbs?

Not the suburbs, but just outside of Southwest Philadelphia. So I grew up in a row home. It’s considered Delaware County, but I went to an urban school. So I didn’t have the niceties that Canberra offers now, which is another part of the allure of it. People ask why I like Canberra so much, and I’m like, “I grew up in Philadelphia!”

Canberra gets its meat hooks into you. I totally hated it at first, because I didn’t get it. Then I was craving it: I couldn’t wait to get back.

Have you written many more songs since these?

Well, yeah, I have basically written a second record already. I was in that mode, and so inspired and motivated, that it just kept coming for a while. I hit a wall where I was like, “No, no more. I have enough for this and another one.” I have to blank it out of my mind. So it’s a similar vein to this record, but it will be executed a little differently. There will be some sparse drums.

But yes, I’m continuing to explore the musical themes that I like about country and folk music and old American music. Even like The Inkspots, or the American songbook songs that Willie Nelson used to do on Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Stardust. Those things I find interesting: what you can do with an acoustic guitar. It doesn’t have to sound like Johnny Paycheck. Even Patsy Cline doesn’t sound like country music: it sounds like Americana.

So I’m diving a bit more into that. I mean, I’m sure it’s still not gonna be a cheery affair. (Laughs) It’s not gonna be buttercups and daisies.