Broadside has shown Ollie Baxxter so much that he wouldn’t have been otherwise. It has also pushed him to his limit more times than he cares to admit.

Over the last decade, he has put so much of himself into his band, both on stage and in the studio, that there was very little left in the tank to deal with everything else that life would throw at him.

But with their fifth full-length album, ‘Nowhere, At Last’, a balance has been struck. Musically, it is varied, vibrant, and very fucking catchy, the quartet firing on all cylinders to create music that is as harmonious as it is heavy. And emotionally, it has allowed Ollie to disconnect a little bit. To expel some different frustrations without bleeding out every single time. The result is as sensational as it is shimmering, a reminder of what it means to enjoy being in the inbetween for a little while.

To dive into the details, Rock Sound sat down with Ollie and found out how life-changing, in more ways than one, the last few years have been.

Rock Sound: The last decade of Broadside has been a journey, to say the least. But there is something about right now, with these songs, where you are at your most comfortable, musically as well as personally. Would that be a fair assessment of where you are right now?

Ollie: I think that’s the craziest thing about it all. Looking back on every record at this point, it just kind of gives me a timestamp of what I felt that I wanted to talk about, or what I wanted to be at that time. And I was looking back on where we were at the beginning and thinking about how the stride and the push forward have just never stopped. It’s been a never-ending train of seeing really cool shit, seeing really awful and having the occasional passenger get off. And that may sound bleak, but it’s really interesting. The thing that time alone has given me is this sense of self. That’s even bigger than being a performer and an entertainer, but as the man behind the flesh. The sense of self of what actually brings me fulfilment. Of helping me realise what I really give a shit about in performing and making music in general? So when I look back on who I was, especially around the third record, it definitely feels like a stranger now.

Well, it feels like 2023’s ‘Hotel Bleu’ offered up the first bit of real stability you had had for a long time. How did you personally deal with that, this sense of contentment that had never really been there before? Plus, you also had a lot of things going on away from the band as well, real life-altering things, so how did all of these different strands affect your mindset and approach as you moved forward to where we are now?

Ollie: It’s crazy because ‘Hotel Bleu’ was the first album we made to recoup in the first year of its release. Four albums in, this is the first time we are seeing money, and the reality is that, coming out of COVID and going from the third album to the fourth and beyond, we realised how we had been stepping forward so blindly. I was scared because I didn’t have any other skill sets that I know how to navigate fully, so it’s always been a bit of a sense of wondering when the right time to jump off, because I don’t want to be in the band. That was my mindset before this record. I didn’t want to be leaving all of this one day as an old man, God willing, and go, ‘Oh, I complained so much the whole time’.

But as we were speculating about the process of what we wanted to do, I lost my Nana whilst we were on the road, and then my fiancé was diagnosed with breast cancer. So I was battling touring, chemo treatments, and me just being a miserable person. And that’s when I started to think, ‘The people like us, but they don’t want us’, so I was having to start figuring out how I was going to exist outside of this. Because eventually, getting a good laugh for 30 minutes and getting people to sing half the set isn’t going to justify the means to whatever this art I’m trying to put out is. I started to feel like this sense of shame was embracing me because of my inability to play bigger rooms or whatever my ego was making me feel.

But then all of the cancer stuff really humanised everything for me. It really put into perspective what making an album for the sake of making an album would feel like, as opposed to having to do well and impress people. For the first time, I felt like I didn’t need to starve myself or dye my hair blue to get attention. Instead, I just wrote an album with my boys.

I’ve become so comfortable with the uncertainty of rocking the boat. Every time something really good happens, I’m bracing for the pain and being that miserable person who lets their thoughts consume them. Before, I would always self-destruct, but this was the first process where that didn’t happen.

RS: To question yourself in that way and pick up on those things rather than letting them take over again is such an important aspect. But it also allows you to recentre and realise that if you’re going to do this, you’re not going to do something that feels alright because it’s what you think you should be doing. You’re making a Broadside album because you want to make the best Broadside album you can.

Ollie: Yeah, if it just feels fine, then you’re already failing yourself. You’re already wasting time, and I don’t want to waste anybody’s time, be that the people I’m working with or the people who are listening. If we’re going to do this, then let’s do this. And the thing is that we wrote a whole album and scrapped it. So this is the second time around. And because we took a year and a half to write it, in big studios, small studios, backyards, everywhere, we had the liberty to do that. Every single one was written like it was a single. It felt like a weight had been lifted.

RS: Much of that comes through with the title as well. The idea of being nowhere would be terrifying to so many people, but you’re approaching it with a sense of relief. It’s all about the black and white, but there’s something special about just existing and thriving in the grey. There’s a sense of peace to just being in the static rather than worrying about what’s on either side of it.

Ollie: That’s a great analysis of it. It was a sense of nowhere being bliss. To be nowhere and to need to be nowhere is the highest state of bliss you can reach. To accept nothing, to not be needed. Sometimes you want to go out and be around other people, but sometimes that plan gets cancelled, and you feel this elation. That’s where I found myself, and I hadn’t felt like it for so long. I thought that the way things were was just the way it was supposed to be.

RS: It’s also a case of realising that the only person who knows every single in and out of your journey is you. So many new eyes have fallen on Broadside over the last few years that only know where you are now, and they love you for that. But also, it must help you when you realise you don’t owe anything to anybody. You don’t need to bleed yourself dry for your art every time.

Ollie: I had that with our song ‘Bleu’ from the last album, which was written about my now wife, Sarah. I had to go and write this sentiment, and heal from it, or not, and then express it, then convince my band and everyone else around us that it was of value. Then to be able to translate that to someone else listening to it and make someone else feel what you’re saying, it’s such a ‘Holy shit, like you’re giving me more than a song’ moment. You’re giving me a way to cope and maybe understand my own share of the world’s weight. And I think that’s a beautiful gift.

But here is the reality of the situation. We have a song on that same album called ‘Dazed and Confused’. And yeah, it’s a sexy and cool song, but it all of a sudden pops off. It’s not even a single, but it was killing it. Every show is going off. You say something like, ‘This next song is about fucking’ when playing it, and everybody goes crazy. They love it. But then you have a single like ‘Bleu’ that underperforms. Everything that means everything to mean becomes a moment that could be skipped.

It’s taught me a valuable lesson about ever putting myself out there again. I think I’ve done it for my entire career with how I’ve talked about my dad beating me or being poor in the past. But this record, it isn’t about me. There’s one song, the very last song called ‘Is This It?’ that questions the sentiment of the human experience, which I say is pulled from my own heartstrings. But the rest is just references to torment or things I have experienced. I no longer want to give myself away like that because I’ve already done it, and sometimes it’s taken off, and sometimes it hasn’t. It’s just ironic that I had a first date with a girl and I wrote ‘Coffee Talk’ about her, and then I wrote a song about almost losing her and being drunk and fucked up all the time. But that’s when I realise that the people listening weren’t there with me, and I can dial it back. Once I had the human back inside me, I also realised that there is the performer and the man, and they don’t always have to be the same. My sadness is not everybody’s sadness.

RS: But to be able to question yourself in those ways still, to push and pull at what is expected of you and actually to do what is better for you, that’s why you’re still here. That’s why you’re still making music. Because there are so many people, friends, peers, who aren’t. With that in mind, what does it mean for Broadside still managing to be such a cornerstone of your life?

Ollie: It gave me a sense of purpose in the world. Growing up in my life, people just lived until they died. And I think all my life I have wanted to feel powerful, but there have been moments when that’s happened, and it hasn’t made me feel good about it. It was just the sentiment of wanting to be respected and heard. I’ve aligned myself in a job where people position themselves to be very nice to me when they meet me. You don’t have many people coming up to you and saying, ‘Fuck you, I hate you’. It’s more, ‘Good show’ or ‘Love your band’. I couldn’t even get respect from my own father, but I have grown men in Australia saying, ‘Good set, mate’. It’s made me feel less alone in that regard.