Weirder Together with Ben Lee and Ione Skye

We’re back from Japan in full, and we’ve got a lot to catch up on.

We hadn’t told you about Ghibli Park yet — Ione became a “soft girl” walking through the sets of Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki’s house, and Ben has thoughts on why Disneyland feels punishing while Ghibli felt nourishing. We saw Shonen Knife live in Tokyo (Ione is still not over it), played a show in Osaka at Flake Records, made a music video with Mophing People, and had a sushi meal in Kyoto where the waitress thought Ione was Nicole Kidman.

Back in Sydney, we’ve officially said goodbye to our LA house — a space that held so much more than just our family. That chapter’s closed.

On the culture front: we’ve been deep in the Golden Life (the original Real Housewives of New York cast in Palm Beach — a gift), obsessed with Kate Berlant’s HBO special, and playing the Spike Fuck album “Evidence” on repeat, which feels like it could have been made in any decade and will always be good.

We also get into Kubrick’s Lolita, the art of letting disturbing stories be disturbing, and Ben’s upcoming Inner West Ale Trail — four gigs at four breweries in one afternoon.

We’re back in Sydney from Japan (still mourning the bidets) and we have a special guest in town from LA — our friend Franki Chan, founder of IHEARTCOMIX.

Franki started IHEARTCOMIX in 2003 throwing parties with Steve Aoki in the indie sleaze era, with the Cobra Snake taking photos and MySpace making it global. Within a year of that first party, Franki went from living in his car to being a global DJ. He and Steve Aoki had a very public and very competitive split — Cinespace Tuesdays vs. Check Your Ponytail, same night, same scene — “there’s a limited series in it” — but the competition helped make LA one of the most important music scenes of the 2000s.

Now 22 years later, IHEARTCOMIX is a creative marketing agency behind campaigns for Marvel, Olivia Rodrigo and Johnny Depp. Franki literally built a park — trees, grass, the whole thing — for Olivia Rodrigo’s album campaign. He’s producing the first US premiere Toho has ever done for Godzilla in 65 years. And he came up on a political DIY punk scene, which is what makes his arc so interesting: the guy who wouldn’t sell out is now working at the biggest scale in entertainment. His take: “As the internet happened, we won. Why are we fighting the old fights?”

We also talk about the philosophy of nightlife, how every major relationship Franki has ever made he met by being out, including the time he randomly sat next to a stranger at a South by Southwest after-party who turned out to write all the modern Spider-Man films. Plus: Franki gives us his honest advice on where Weirder Together goes from here — and why being based in Sydney is a bigger advantage than we might think.

We're recording from the Sequence Hotel in Miyashita Park, Shibuya. First time back in Tokyo in over two decades — Ione's mom and our teenager are both along for the trip.

Ben wraps the Two Most Annoying People You Love tour with Georgia Maq: why this tour was harder to sell than Awake Is In Your Sleep but a true creative victory, and why he ended the last night in Canberra saying there are only three artists in his career he's ever felt truly safe sharing a stage with for two hours.

He also saw Digger in IMAX on the final day of the tour, called Ione afterwards slightly shaken, and is now firmly in the camp that it is a bomb because it's difficult — not because it's bad.

Plus: the vintage band shirt economy in Tokyo (Minutemen tees, $400 a pop), Ione's mom being captivated by a radio show broadcast from a Shibuya window, Rick Rubin doing prayer beads at Fred Siegel during Ione's first nausea-free meal of her pregnancy, and why Australian artists should stop chasing LA and start building in Asia.

Up next: Ghibli Park in Nagoya, an in-store at Flake Records in Osaka with the Shonen Knife ladies, and a gig with Mophing People.

No guest this week — just Ben and Ione, back from half the Australian leg of the Two Most Annoying People You Love Tour with Georgia Maq.

Ben recaps a Melbourne show that stopped the room: Georgia singing "Rearranging Chairs on the Titanic" in front of her family for the first time, breaking down mid-song, her sister calling out from the crowd. Ben describes playing through it like a "Werner Herzog director" — wanting to preserve the moment while also quietly directing traffic.

Also this week: Kate gave Ben a signed early edition of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which sent him down a rabbit hole back to a night at Sean Lennon's house and a poem that became one of his songs. Ben and Ione unpack the viral lesbian bar mask mandate story — and why it might actually be the left's most useful mirror in years. Plus: Sylvester Stallone's surprising New York Times interview, a Bukowski side nobody saw coming, and why going to the MoMA every day when you're broke and lost might be the best advice anyone's ever given.

Next episode: coming to you from Tokyo.

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This week we're joined by Daine — and if you don't know her yet, you will soon. She's the Australian artist who's the darling of the pop underground, and her album drops November 6th.

We talk about being 16 and sitting across from a major label exec who told her she was going to be bigger than Billie Eilish. It didn't happen. She's grateful. We talk about what she calls her three-tier music success pyramid — quality at the bottom, tolerance for failure in the middle, and the thing most people won't admit at the top. She explains it better than we could, and we all believe in the best Martin Scorsese quote you've heard in a while.

We also get into the album itself, which was made when she and her producer were deeply in love, and is being rolled out now that they're exes. "It's like a child of divorce," she says. "And it's this really pure, beautiful thing."

Plus: the nepo baby allegations she cannot shake (her parents are, in her words, "radical Marxist academics"), why being conventionally attractive works against you in indie music, what it was like watching Nina go from first-show friend to Coachella, and Ben's encounter with Russell Crowe at a New York restaurant urinal that changed his life.

This week: the first-ever returning guest on Weirder Together; Georgia Maq is officially in the Two Timers Club.

Three years into LA, Georgia talks about why Melbourne’s cool music scene made her feel like a loser with an acoustic guitar, and why a city with no healthcare turns out to produce the most intense friendships. She reads Kelly’s book for the first time, sitting in our house, and finds herself as a central character. Her verdict on the band dynamic: “Camp Cope was an airplane with one pilot seat. Me and Thommo were both fighting to be the pilot. Kelly was in the back taking a Valium and drinking red wine.”

Georgia’s dad was the lead singer of Redgum. She talks about the guitar he gave her at 15, the cancer he hid, and how estrogen during treatment turned him into the person she’d always wanted him to be. The guitar she plays today is the one she was ungrateful for at 15.

Also: why she’s going all black after rewatching Walk the Line, her plan to play a youth detention centre on this Australian tour, Camp Cope’s Tiny Desk story (they had no idea what Tiny Desk was), and why AI gives us four years and what to do with borrowed time.

https://weirdertogether.substack.com

This week: Sydney weather as business class: once you’ve had it, going back to coach is brutal….and the ethics of putting your dog to sleep, covered in the first four minutes.

We went to Cybele Malinowski’s photography show “Deep Fake”, portraits of Las Vegas celebrity impersonators, including the story of one MJ impersonator who took a homeless man under his wing and taught him the craft. Plus our Vegas stories: Ione at the Hard Rock Hotel opening in the early 90s with Sofia Coppola, Stephen Dorff and Zoe Cassavetes (the politics of free chips for famous people), and Ben waking up at Lollapalooza 93 to what may be the worst smell in human history.

We hung with Fruit Bats’ Eric D. Johnson: his song is going viral on TikTok across American college campuses, and he shared a piece of songwriting wisdom we can’t stop thinking about. Ben is processing his hair transplant fork in the road. We fell down an Etsy witches rabbit hole.

And we had a full psychic moment playing Rummy Tiles. Weirder Together is officially calling it: collective Joan Armatrading rediscovery moment incoming.

Hit us up with your questions

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This week: nostalgia for Moviefone and Rob Brezny's Dial-a-Horoscope, the Jungian idea that your unconscious is trying to help you, and the one Timothy Leary quote Ben has actually carried with him his whole life — "the goal of life is calm and compassionate gameplay."

We saw Greg Araki's new film with Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman (co-written by Slutever's Karly Scortino) — a genuinely sexy movie that also makes you think, which is rarer than it should be. Plus: bumping into Peking Duk outside the Ritz in Randwick on the night their album went to #1 in Australia, ARIA plaques and all. (Randwick: possibly the least rock and roll suburb in Sydney.)

A full Australian Traitors deep dive — how secretly Machiavellian Australians are, Dicko's voting block strategy, and the question the show keeps raising: is emotional gameplay still manipulation if the emotion is real?

We saw the Bondi Boys at Hollywood Hotel (neon mic stand, expanded set, Gen X energy), Ben smells beer and thinks about his entire touring life, Ione smells Carmex and thinks about Paris 1987, and we're making a fanzine with Kate Dunn (@moonfurhat on Instagram) as merch for the Australia and Japan tour.

We end with a challenge: Ione proves she's a better liar than Ben by closing the podcast with a lie. We'll let you decide if she pulled it off.

Hit us up with your questions

[email protected]