Over the years the boys from Powderfinger have said some pritty funny stuff. They have also said alot of crap and that's what this page is about. The very best to come out of Powderfinger, so to speak.

If you know of anything that you think should be up here let us know.

What do they say?

Bern	Ian	Dz	Cogsy	JC
On Fame, fortune and other things
On why they are percieved as "DOUR, SELF-ABSORBED AND TOO SERIOUS"

BERNARD SAYS

"It always seems to come from a natural, organic progression. No one says, 'Hey we should be doing this'. Because everything was written over such a long time, there is no real theme to the album, except for making sure it had...space"
Bernard Fanning on the writing of Internationalist

"I don't really listen to the record very often, maybe every few months I might hear it, mostly by accident at friend's houses. In that situation you don't really sit down and analyse what the songs are doing."
Bernard Fanning asked about whether his persepctive on Internationalist has evolved since the studio.

"Oh mate, I can't remember because it was just such a blur of alcohol and chicks...Actually it was sitting around in disbelief and watching the three Tiddas girls standing around the microphone for an hour and there not being one millisecond of a gap without conversation or something going on. You can hear them on "Hindley Street", laughing and talking their way through it. Oh, and there's always the psycho attacks everyone has....Cogsy tends to have the most. He just lets them go."
Bernard Fanning on strange moments while recording Internationalist

"I used to worry about people knowing what I was singing about, which is probably why the first album only makes sense to me. I realised you can use your own emotional experience and put it into a song without categorising it down to you and your girlfriend."
Bernard Fanning on lyrics

"I don't carried away with the romance of songwriting. I don't think I'm really gifted at it. I have to work really hard at it and that goes for the rest of the band as well, we try to craft our songs."
Bernard Fanning

"That was where the idea came from (for Take Me In), of somebody trying to enforce one sort of philosophy and breaking it at the same time, and realising that they were full of shit and they needed to be swept away basically, from what they outwardly stand for, because they don't stand for it in reality."
Bernard Fanning 

"They're not going to be happy. I won it a couple of years ago and I got a massive head. If the band challenged me on anything, I'd just go 'You do know I'm the best male vocalist?'"
Bernard Fanning on winning Best Male Vocalist

"There's a constant battle between Cogsy and I as to who's the biggest psycho in the band."
Bernard Fanning

"Powderfinger operates on an egalitarian basis. Basically who shouts the loudest wins."
Bernard Fanning

"He will try and light a match under everyone's arse every day. That's the way Cogsy is. He likes to antagonise people, and I don't mean that in a mean way. For example, if he was here now and I said that couch is really ugly, he'd be like 'No it's not, I quite like that couch'.You'd have an argument about it just to continue the conversation and really get to the bottom of why I think the couch is ugly. It makes me want to smash him sometimes. That's fine. They all want to smash me at times. Except for Darren. He's a hippie."
Bernard Fanning

"I never made a point of being into Australian music, I just liked music that I liked and I didn't care where it came from."
Bernard Fanning

"I was never really into performing and I'm still not that into it, it was just about writing songs for me."
Bernard Fanning

"My career highlight would be going off the dole, being able to earn a living."
Bernard Fanning

"It's not about cashing up too much, even that doesn't worry me - making shitloads of money [laughs]. I'm not embarrassed about saying that."
Bernard Fanning

DARREN SAYS

"On a sound level and on a song level, [Internationalist] is heaps different."
Darren Middleton

"Funnily enough I didn't have to push as hard as I thought I would. It was just one of those little songs that a couple of us liked, so I recorded it straight to tape...[Bernard] was a little stressed out about it, but he went into therapy for a couple of weeks and I think he's alright with it now."
Darren Middleton on "Over My Head" and Bernie's reaction to the temporary shift of the limelight.

"Well, my parents used to play alot of The Beatles, Gene Pitney and Barry White, Air Supply and stuff like that. I didn't really like it that much, although The Beatles have always been a favourite. Then I used to listen to more AC/DC, lots of 80's stuff, mainly compilations, the Strabglers, Van Halen, and a few bad glam bands...uueegghh. Then just anything, taught myself guitar, and here I am."
Darren Middleton on his musical past.

"Around 1990 I was in this other band, Pirate, where I had a wireless lead on my guitar so I could run around. My introduction to Powderfinger was a gig we played with them. I don't know what I was on, but I was playing on tables, going into the tables. It was bad news. I actually took a little bit of Pirate with me, so early Powderfinger recordings have some fingertapping on the guitar and two-handed stylings. Luckily you can't get your hands on that stuff anymore."
Darren Middleton

"Jon (Coghill) likes movies with explosions in them."
Darren Middleton

"We know each other so well. We've been living out of each others pockets for six or seven years so we know when to give each other space and when to take space of our own which is very important, which is a big part of why we're still together, I think."
Darren Middleton

IAN SAYS

"It's a coherent album that seems to flow pretty well."
Ian Haug on Internationalist

"Our previous album seems really complicated to us and really jarring."
Ian Haug on Internationalist

"We just stopped being a musician's band. The music of a musician's band isn't that enjoyable to listen to."
Ian Haug on their change in music style

COGSY SAYS

"I'm a bit of a super-hero...ever since I saw Star Wars I wanted to be an X-Wing Fighter, a hero to the nation. And I thought doing music was just like being a hero."
Jon Coghill

"When I was a kid I used to dream about being a star like Michael Jackson. This dream was driven by the fact that a school mate and I used to take breakdancing lessons at the Nambour pinball arcade with a guy who was the coolest celebrity in town (Nambour didn't have many). This guy used to wear the sparkly glove and the cut short slacks that Michael wore in his Thriller days and used to moonwalk like nothing I had ever seen. He was amazing. My dream invlolved myself out the front of the band dressed in a wicked MJ outfit with my back to the audience. The lightls would blare on me. Sadly to say thought this dream lasted more than a year and although my little sister listened to Thriller about four times a day my attention was taken by the new Fame soundtrack - which may have inspired me to play drums - I'm not sure. Oh well, if only I'd stuck with those MJ fantasies."
Jon Coghill, it kind of speaks for itself, don't you think...

"Do you reckon that Boyz II Men and bands like that try to base their look on P.E. teachers. I wanna be, like, in one of those R n B bands...clean cut....do you ever find yourself in the mirror trying to dress like one of those guys?"
Jon Coghill (to Merrick and Rosso)

JOHN COLLINS SAYS

"A lot of people have said to me, 'I wasn't a fan, I couldn't understand all the commotion about Double Allergic, but I like this one.' I think it is a better record ultimately."
John Collins on Internationalist

"...We're trying to be honest with ourselves and who we are. We know what our strengths are."
John Collins

"We're like anyone, we have our tiffs - stupid things, really, just us ribbing each other - but they always get resolved, and the way we work together has changed over the years. We've cemented our relationship with each other, and how we deal with the music, too."
John Collins

ON WHY THEY ARE PERCEIVED AS "DOUR, SELF-ABSORBED AND TOO SERIOUS"

"We don't burst out smiling in photo shoots. We're not dour at all, we see the humour in everything. It's our photo shoots."
Darren Middleton

"We never smile in photo shoots because we fuckin' hate 'em so much."
Bernard Fanning

We're a pretty happy bunch, really. We just don't smile in our photos."
Ian Haug

"It's because we hate having our picture taken. We never look happy in them."
John Collins

"It's the photos."
Jon Coghill

"I would rather drive 15 hours straight from Cairns to Adelaide than have my picture taken."
John Collins

ON FAME, FORTUNE AND OTHER THINGS:

"I'm grateful people like our music and the more people who hear it the better."
Ian Haug

"A lot of people hate what they do...I love what I do and I get paid for it, and that's a real rarity in the workforce. I plat just about every day (at home), but the average person who goes to work at a shop or in a band or whatever can't go and pay their rent at 11am that can sometimes interfere, but the beauty if it is that I don't need to stop at 5pm. I can start and finish when I want, pretty much, but if there's nothing happening there's no point just sitting there playing away. I can sit and practise and do scales, but I don't really know any."
Bernard Fanning

"I've just bought a piano and have been trying to learn how to play it, so I've bought some Nat King Cole records. Might as well start right at the top."
Bernard Fanning

"You don't want people to get sick of you. But maybe I'm panicking because I'm paranoid. We're a paranoid bunch of people. It's a defence mechanism."
John Collins

"I'd been hoping to stage the rock & roll ashes when we toured with Swervedriver a while back, but they weren't really the sporting types. More the drunken/art-rock types, really."
Bernard Fanning

"Ideally we'd love to do gigs where we play just before dinner, about 7pm. You could play a gig, have a great time and go and have food afterwards. Go to bed at, oh 11. It'd be great."
Darren Middleton

"If you're a tourist it's not real exciting. But the lifestyle is great, there's a lot of space and it's really cheap. I live in a 3-bedroom house with trees and a deck and it costs $250 a week. Of course that includes security guys and a helicopter too."
Bernard Fanning on Brisbane

"Freud should've been shot the day he was born, he was an idiot."
Ian Haug

"None of us had ever been to Texas before (the band rocked the SXSW convention), and Austin just pumped. We had to lug our own gear, which was great, getting back to the garage. We also played in New York at CBGB's, but the place ws a hole. My strongest memory is that the toilet didn't have a door."
Bernard Fanning

"I went to the wedding of a really old friend last week and the bridal waltz was Lemon Sunrise, which is the last song on the album. He didn't tell me, so it was pretty weird. There was the usual - of course - five of my mates saying, "what is this shit, get it off" (laughs), si U sat through that chorus first and then I got the hell out and went and got another drink."
Bernard Fanning

"It's great to be able to make a living from music. I don't think we'd be able to come up with the sort of material we do if we had to wash dishes aswell."
Ian Haug

"I'm right behind (Senator Brian) Harradine. The GST isn't right. He's kind of a lone rider, Harradine, which is pretty noble, even though his moral code is a bit rigid."
Bernard Fanning

"All bands hate their lead singers and want to kill them so we put it on film (on the Living Type clip). Because the rest of the hate my guts, cos I get all the money, and all the glory, all the chicks, it's amazing. So they killed me, that's the story."
Bernard Fanning

"We can write the music that we want these days, where as we used to just write music. Now we know what we are looking for, we know what music we like, what we enjoy listening to, and we know how to make our music sound like that."
Jon Coghill

"When we first played in LA last year it was pretty weird. We felt conspicuously Australian because Russell Crowe was there. I mean, Rusty Crowe!!"
Bernard Fanning

"Someone's on top for a few months and then the next three months someone else is going to make hay while the sun shines. It's just the nature of the beast I suppose, that's just how it is."
Bernard Fanning

"Well firstly, you've got to have shades like Bernie, wear green like Haug - he's our rock star, so you should ask him - the rest of us are normal...the other rock star thing is to deny being a rock star, that's what we do."
John Collins on what makes a rock star.

"I have no fucking idea"
Darren Middleton when asked what he thinks the secret to Powderfinger's success is.

"Hungry"
Bernard Fanning's response when asked how he felt about the band's ARIA scoop.

"It's good that we won, I reckon. I don't really know. I just felt…ambivalence. It didn't really affect me too much. I was like, 'Oh cool.' No, I was actually bloody, bloody surprised. I'll be very Australian and say 'bloody surprised'. I thought they might've done the rock category just so that they could've given us an award to shut us up because we'd been nominated so much."
John Collins on their ARIA success

"We think we're the biggest losers in ARIA history."
Bernard Fanning

"We are writing the next album now, and are happy with our position in life - how couldn't we be - so hopefully it will be a better version of our work to date."
Darren Middleton on what the future has in store for the band.

"You have to have some pretty inane moments on tour and those sorts of things, like gossiping, to help pass the time."
Bernard Fanning when asked about how the boys stay sane on the road.

"When we were back in Grade 10, my mate and I used to say, 'God, I can't wait till we turn 23 because when you're 23 you'll have a job and a girlfriend, and you know what you're doing.' We also wanted to be 23 because all the sexy girls were going out with guys who were 23."
Bernard Fanning on growing up.

"I don't want to be in a band and for it to be shit house. I suppose I am a bit of an ego maniac because I am the singer. That means, in effect, I have control of what is said. Maybe on our next tour I'll come out in a g-string with stars painted over my nipples."
Bernard Fanning

"I wanted to be a pilot. Except I found out that I was half colour blind. I wanted to fly in the Air Force."
Darren Middleton on early career aspirations.

"I thought they were big pot heads and big drinkers and I thought that I should join in. They pretty much inspired me."
Darren Middleton's first impressions of Powderfinger

"Bernie would be the big brother, the one you would confide in, or talk to. JC is super nice…most of the time. Haug is really open minded, he's the, 'Give everyone a chance, everyone a go,' sorta guy. Don't judge 'em too hard. Cogsy? His way or no way [laughs]. You can put that as long as you put 'I'm just joking.'"
Darren Middleton when asked about the defining characteristics of the other Powdy boys.

"Maybe it's a self-centered approach, but I would love to have written a song that touched a million people. And not because I've written it, but that I had been a part of something that I considered being really great. I feel really proud of where we've been."
Darren Middleton's ideal for the band

"Something that I do very rarely, but love doing, would be head to the beach, stripping off and going for a swim. Once I was with friends and we'd been playing frisbee, we were all really hot and I didn't have any swimming gear, so I just stripped off and went into the water. The flagged area was about 100m away, and there's no way anyone could've seen anything. This lifesaver walks all the way up, and I'm just standing there with my hands on my hips, totally nude. He's going, 'Look, you can't do that around here. The people are complaining.' And I'm going, 'What! What can they see?' We had an argument for a good five, ten minutes, and he's totally avoiding eye contact. It was funny. This skinny white guy with no clothes on talking to this big bronzed lifesaver."
Darren Middleton

"[Laughing] A song called "Log Down a River". The other guys in the band will know this one. [Sings] "Time drifts by like a log down the river…." It was terrible. It comes up occasionally. It's always a stirring point for me."
The first song that Darren Middleton ever wrote

"One of the best things about being in the band is that we don't give a fuck about anything else other than having a good time, if people think we're rockstars then so be it, fucking great. Don't analyse things too much - it's not that serious, it's just fucking music."
Jon Coghill

"We were rehearsing once with our old drummer when Cogsy came into the band room and started slam dancing, it was pretty funny. In his Living Colour T-shirt. Then around two years later, when we were auditioning drummers, I was like, "I know this guy!" Bern and I met at uni, we were both doing economics subjects and were bored shitless, not because we couldn't understand what the guy was saying but because we didn't care. We just talked about what songs we wanted to cover. Cause I used to sing in the band at that stage. It was a big thing to convince the others that we needed a singer. They were like, "You're OK," and I was like, "No I'm not. We can do better than that." [laughs]
Ian Haug on his first impressions of the rest of the band