"I haven't talked about this much before, because there was a kind of horror at the idea that this would be the thing that would be singled out." The roar of an aeroplane crescendoes overhead and I lose the rest of Dan Pash's sentence. We're sitting in my backyard in Sydney's inner west on a humid night. Mosquitoes play chicken with the flames of three citronella candles.
, due to be released on May 24. He also wants to discuss how, because of a genetic degenerative condition, his hearing is vanishing faster than the process of making an album allows. Faced with the knowledge he would lose his hearing at a rapid rate, he retreated from playing music almost completely, despite it being "the one thing that ever gave him a voice".
At that time, Pash says he didn't feel the verdict "was all that dramatic"; he was prescribed specially made earplugs to minimise noise damage while playing in the school orchestra and told to "keep an eye on it". There wasn't much more they could say. He continued playing music, moving from school to the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide, where he studied the clarinet, and threw himself into gigs with increasing abandon.
In 2008, when he toured with his feted indie band Leader Cheetah while already facing trials with his hearing.Specialists began to impress the scale of the loss upon Pash. "Even though they didn't really know what was going on, that's when they started counselling me to stop playing loud music," he recalls. "There were never any guarantees, it was always just: '[Loud music] is potentially a factor, so you should consider mitigating that factor.
At this time, Pash started dating film lawyer Eve Foreman. They'd been circling each other in the night haunts of Adelaide for a while – she'd seen him play in Bad Girls of the Bible, and remembered him jumping off stacks and tables. At turns she thought he was arrogant, enthralling, emotionally insecure, smart, and sharp. Foreman was obsessed with underground post-punk and new wave. Pash's taste in music seemed "more dorky" to her, but she came around.