MILAN BORICH of PLUTO: Switching Off All The Noise
An interview by Tim Gruar. Feature Image by Alexander Hallag.
PLUTO are back, sort of, dropping their new ‘album’ single by single. They are in no hurry, though, preferring the song writer’s country lane route to the pop juggernaut autobahn of their earlier career.
The last time I talked to Milan Borich it was two days before Aotearoa went into a full-blown level 4 lockdown. His band had big plans to release music and tour. Like many other bands and live acts those big plans all dissolved in less than the time it takes to conduct a one o’clock briefing.
The day we talk again is the day we move to the new traffic light system. Those in Tamaki Makaurau are allowed to leave the house again. Borich is a brown belt jiu jitsu instructor and was stoked to get back into the gym again. He works with tamariki and rangatahi including his own 13 year old daughter. Until today they’ve been training at home under lockdown.
I ask him how his involvement with martial arts contributes to his mahi as a musician. He says that while there’s no direct influence on the song writing it definitely helps with breathing and technique, making him a better performer.
The members of PLUTO have not all been sitting on their hands, with all this extra time off. Just before lockdowns Borich joined ‘The Soundtrack’ performing music from ‘Baz Lurhman’s Romeo and Juliet’ alongside Gin Wigmore, Jon Toogood and Laughton Kora. Earlier this year he teamed up with Kora again, along with Booga from Head Like A Hole and Tammy Neilson performing the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs soundtracks. “A super fun time to do all these well known songs. Very supportive. These tracks have been around for ever!”
He finds performing covers easier than the band’s own material because its still new, feeling their way. “The thing about writing your own song is that it hasn’t been around for that long. People don’t know it. So to make it sound like it’s been around, it’s hard. Especially live.”
Matthias Jordan was also busy “doing the Elton John thing (Come Together’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’), with Jon Toogood. They were to do a (Rolling Stones) ‘Sticky Fingers’ show, too. But Covid got that one.”
Michael Franklin-Browne (drums) has continued teaching music, Mike Hall (bass, vocals) is down in Whanganui and still working with Head Like A Hole, and Tim Arnold has been blasting out various projects. So, we’ve all been busy playing and making music”.
Borich tells me that the band have had plenty of time to write over the two lockdowns. Haven’t we all? He likes the process of sharing files backwards and forwards, honing tracks as they go. But he’s not convinced that all that mahi should be wrapped up into an ‘album’ – at least not in the conventional sense.
Instead, the band want to ‘drip feed’ singles every couple of months until the get enough to put together a collection. That concept, I tell him, has been around for decades. It was a trick music shops did way back in the earliest days of the gramophone. He agrees. The original ‘album’ was in fact a book to store your favourite discs (a bit like a photo album). These were the 78” shellac variety. That tradition goes right back to the earliest days of recorded music. He likes that idea. Getting a song and savouring it, waiting in anticipation for the next release. Storing it in the meantime. Perhaps getting a whole album is just too much these days. With streaming services, we don’t really listen to everything, pick and choose, make our own ‘albums’ (playlists, mixtapes, etc.)
The first single out of the block is ironically named ‘After Winter’, given it dropped on the day most of the country was caught up in two days of chaotic anti-cyclones and heavy rain (6 December). This infectiously catchy first track is part of a series of three standalone singles. It’s also PLUTO’s first music to be released following their 2019 album ‘IV’. This harmonic, hook-laden slice of summertime Brit pop is an anthem that shuns detractors and shows distaste for social media trolls and other bitter modern-day experiences, Borich tells me. “The song is about switching off all the noise. Un-asking the question as a kind of meditation.”
It came from humble beginnings, as a two-finger chord exercise he created to teach his teenage daughter on guitar. “We played it for a little while, but then she got bored and went off to play piano in her room. I kept mucking around with it and I thought ‘I’ve got something here.’ I wrote up the rest in about 45 minutes and we finished it in a group writing session. (Guitarist) Tim Arnold added some 60s psychdelica guitar chords, and Matthias Jordan put on some really punchy keyboards. Mike Hall added in bass, and Michael Franklin-Browne laid down the drums. Then, to capture the moment the band headed to North Western Studios with producer Nick Abbott to record the track.”
Pluto began at the end of the 20th century as a duo between Milan Borich and Tim Arnold in London, and has now morphed into a fully fledged five piece. Their first proper gig as a full band nearly didn’t happen – an opener for Neil Finn in 2001. Arnold got a call from Finn’s tour manager asking if they could open for him at the Hastings Opera house gig. “I turned them down,” he recalls in the band’s publicity “as we had a tiny little gig in Auckland booked already. I called Milan to tell him the bad news and he gently asked me “what the fuck did you do that for?” I called back and we took the gig. Mike Hall had just joined a few days prior. The band was complete. We were on our way!”
Fans wanting to reacquaint themselves with the band should dive into their back catalogue. The band first came to our attention back in 2001 with their debut ‘Red Light Syndrome’, followed by their even more accessible album ‘Pipeline Under the Ocean’ (and the huge floor filler ‘06 Tui award winner ‘Long White Cross’), and then 2007’s ‘Sunken Water’.
In 2007, the Borich did a cover of the Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ which was used in Tourism New Zealand’s ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ campaign which claimed Aotearoa was the ‘youngest country.’
2009 was an ‘interesting time. First, they put out the single ‘Snake Charmer’ and were gearing up to record a new album. Then they broke up…
Fast forward almost 10 years and PLUTO is back. Sort of. Inspired by the discovery of a back-up session of that unfinished fourth album, the band picked up where they left off, dropping ‘IV’ in late 2019, following the first single ‘Oh My Lonely’ on their own record label company, 5 Moon Entertainment.
The band are planning another single sometime over summer and another in the autumn. But they are keeping those plans under wraps for now. They like to sneak things out these days, build a little tension and anticipation. So, for now we have ‘After Winter’. Enjoy.
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