Donny Benet's modern twist on the past

Donny Benet is no stranger to unusual requests. There was that time, for example, when an email dropped into his inbox inviting him to Russia to perform at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre. (It didn’t pan out.) So when in late 2017 he received an enquiry as to whether he’d like to play a festival in Slovakia, he passed it on to his booking agent and thought nothing more of it. Only this time, the offer was legit.

“I had no idea why these people wanted me to come and play, and the fee they put up was great,” recalls the 39-year-old Sydney songwriter who, alongside peers such as Kirin J. Callinan and Geoffrey O’Connor, spearheaded an early 2010s wave of Australian artists mining the music and irony of the ’80s for inspiration. “So I thought, ‘I’ll base a European tour around this'. I found a promoter who booked 21 shows in 23 days, and it was crazy.”

So well received was his slot on a side stage at the Slovakian festival that he was asked back the following night to perform on the main stage. “I was playing in front of 10 to 15,000 people and was like, 'This is it, you’ve got to really dig deep',” he says. “I was playing solo and I worked that stage.”

Benet’s subsequent forays into Europe have been so successful they almost derailed his latest album, Mr Experience, the follow-up to 2018’s The Don. Locked in a cycle of travelling back and forth, he struggled to focus on writing new material. Then when he found the time, he became stuck creating songs tailored specifically for the European summer festival market.

He was struck by a realisation: “Wow, these are terrible.” “They were me trying to write to a target, and that’s always the worst thing you can do. But it was a really good mistake to make early on in the writing period.”

Benet’s songwriting focus was recalibrated when a friend referred to him as “the Robert Palmer of Australia”. “I was like, that’s a really good starting point to approach writing a new album.”

He began diving into the discography of artists such as Palmer, Bryan Ferry and Peter Gabriel, specifically their catalogues as they approached their 40s. He imagined the audience for Ferry’s 1987 Bête Noire album being an “Upper East Side New York dinner party” and, with that crowd in mind, set about penning his new material.

Those who’ve fallen in love with Benet’s lavish ’80s synths, propulsive bass lines and knowingly tongue-in-cheek, sexualised lyrics need not fear, those elements remain intact on Mr Experience. (“I went bald when I was 21, I’ve had to have a sense of humour,” he quips.)

But Mr Experience is also framed by the perspective afforded by age; a track such as You Don’t Need Love tackles the pressure of being expected to tick all the boxes in life – marriage, kids, big house – while realising you don’t need a partner to validate your happiness.

A seasoned jazz musician whose musical CV includes stints with Sarah Blasko and Jack Ladder, Benet was recently cited by The Weeknd as an influence. It’s that musicality that enables him to pull off his arch trick: making his inappropriately Lothario-like image and ’80s musical approach entirely appropriate.

“Donny is a character, it’s somebody who shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing,” he says. “But I feel that with the musicality I have I can push it to those boundaries with a degree of quality.”

Mr Experience is out now.