Rhythms November December 2021

FREE SUBSCRIBER MUSIC DOWNLOAD CARD

Adia Victoria Emma Donovan Emmylou Harris Georgia State Line Greta Ziller Kim Cheshire Los Lobos Richard Pleasance Nathaniel Rateliff Sam Teskey Swedish Magazines Tex Perkins War On Drugs PLUS: Russell Morris & Rick Springfield Matt Sweeney on The Velvet Underground

$12.95 inc GST NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 ISSUE: 308

HISTORY Greg Sheehan David McComb Suburban Songbook

THE NEW ALBUM FROM UK SINGER, SONGWRITER, AUTHOR AND ACTIVIST

A V A I L A B L E O N L P, C D & A L L S T R E A M I N G P L A T F O R M S TOURING AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND JAN/FEB 2022

PESO IN MY POCKET THE NEW ALBUM FROM COUNTRY SUPERSTAR TOBY KEITH AVAILABLE ON LP, CD & ALL STREAMING PLATFORMS

Volume No. 308 November/December 2021

FEATURES

JOY OF TEX 22 THE A storied career and a fine new album. Tex Perkins is enjoying his place in the sun. By Jeff Jenkins.

34 LOOKING FOR JACK

Russell Morris and Rick Springfield have created a compelling album about life and death. By Jeff Jenkins.

UPFRONT

09 The Word. By Brian Wise.

Sampler #15 Our Download Card!

10 Rhythms Only available to subscribers!

Moving On: 13 R.I.P Warren Storm, Dr Lonnie Smith, Don Everly, Byron Berline.

18 Nashville Skyline By Anne McCue. 19 Vale Charlie Watts

COVER STORY

IN A MILLION! 46 ONE Musician, activist author and good bloke, Billy Bragg has a topical new album and is headed our way in the New Year. By Brian Wise.

PROFILES

PROOF 38 LIVING War On Drugs spent lockdown in pursuit of the perfect rock song.

By Martin Jones.

42 FORTUNATE SONS

Steve Berlin talks about the new Los Lobos homage to city of Los Angeles. By Brian Wise.

SOUNDS 44 HEAVENLY Making his latest album rekindled some important relationships for Kim Cheshire. By Martin Jones.

HISTORY

IN NEW YORK 52 SPRINGTIME The Bootleg Series Volume 16 is out and our resident Dylan expert waxes lyrical. By Michael Goldberg.

OF THE TRIFFID 54 DAY Jonathan Alley talks about his acclaimed film on The Triffid’s David McComb. By Jeff Jenkins.

56 SUBURBAN SONGBOOK

An extract from Clinton Walker’s new book which offers a different view of Australian music history.

HE BEAT GOES ON 60 TLegendary THE LINE 20 OVER percussionist Greg Sheehan talks about his new memoir Georgia Delves debut album draws from the contemporary country well.

By Sam Fell.

LESSONS AND LOVE 21 LIFE, Emma Donovan and The Putbacks mine the soul vault for something special. By Annaliese Redlich.

CYCLE 25 LIFE Sam Teskey surprises with a solo album, Cycles, inspired by Pink Floyd’s Meddle. By Sam Fell.

26 THE QUEEN OF BOOMTOWN

Greta Ziller explores new territory on Judas Tree. By Meg Crawford.

TAKES TWO 27 IT Sarah Humphreys and Kristen Lee Morris make a life and music together.

By Denise Hylands.

28 SOUL MAN

Nathaniel Rateliff is back with The Night Sweats for The Future.

By Stuart Coupe.

GOTHIC 30 SOUTHERN Adia Victoria is another of the important new voices emerging from Nashville. By Brian Wise.

32 THE HEAT IS ON

Country and Americana were always where singer-songwriter Natalie Henry was headed. By Michael Smith.

MUSIC 33 NEWGRASS Billy Strings is an incredibly impressive guitar player and part of the new generation of bluegrass. By Denise Hylands.

AGAIN 36 BVan(J)ORN and Cal Walker’s Swedish Magazines are back together with a Best Of and a new studio album on the way. By Chris Lambie.

RIVER IS WIDE 37 THE Richard Pleasance has gone from the pop charts to screen and now has a surprising new album. By Jeff Jenkins.

40 DREAM TIME

Halfway join forces with Bobby Weatherall and William Barton.

By Steve Bell.

SURPRISE PACKAGE 41

T.Wilds is Tania Bowers who is back making music. By Stuart Coupe.

about his music. By Ian McFarlane.

WANDER AGAIN 66 BOOTHEELS Luther Russell recalls his brief time in a band that included Jakob Dylan.

By Brian Wise.

COLUMNS

68 Musician: Jack Nolan, By Michael Smith 69 33 1/3 Revelations: The Upsetter. By Martin Jones 70 Classic Album: Karen Dalton’s In My Own Time. By Billy Pinnell.

71 Lost In The Shuffle: Tim Rose’s debut solo album. By Keith Glass 72 Underwater Is Where The Action Is. By Christopher Hollow 73 You Won’t Hear This On Radio: By Trevor J. Leeden 74 Waitin’ Around To Die: Neil Young’s Archives. By Chris Familton 75 Twang! Americana Roundup. By Denise Hylands.

REVIEWS

ALBUM REVIEWS: Eric Bibb, Kurt Elling, Matt 76 FEATURE Sweeney, Emmylou Harris, Hard Ons, Even, Madi Diaz, Angus Gill, T Wilds.

88 GENERAL ALBUMS 91 Blues: By Al Hensley 92 World Music & Folk: By Tony Hillier 93 Jazz 1: By Tony Hillier 94 Jazz 2: By Des Cowley 95 Vinyl: By Steve Bell.

96 Books 1.. By Des Cowley.

97 Books Too! New across the desk. By Stuart Coupe 99 Film. Russell Mael talks about the Sparks documentary.

By Annaliese Redlich.

100 Hello & Goodbye: By Sue Barrett.

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CREDITS Managing Editor: Brian Wise Senior Contributor: Martin Jones Senior Contributors: Michael Goldberg / Stuart Coupe Design & Layout: Sally Syle - Sally’s Studio Accounts: Alicia Wise Website/Online Management: Robert Wise Proofreading: Gerald McNamara

CONTRIBUTORS Sue Barrett Steve Bell Nick Charles John Cornell Des Cowley Stuart Coupe Meg Crawford Brett Leigh Dicks Chris Familton Samuel J. Fell Keith Glass Megan Gnad Michael Goldberg (San Francisco) Al Hensley

Tony Hillier Christopher Hollow Denise Hylands Jeff Jenkins Martin Jones Chris Lambie Trevor J. Leeden Warwick McFadyen Ian McFarlane Anne McCue (Nashville) Billy Pinnell Jo Roberts Michael Smith Bernard Zuel

CONTACTS Advertising: admin@rhythms.com.au Festival Coverage Contact: denisetwang@hotmail.com Rates/Specs/Deadlines: bookings@rhythms.com.au Subscription Enquiries: subscriber@rhythms.com.au General Enquiries: admin@rhythms.com.au

SOCIALS Facebook: facebook.com/rhythms.magazine Twitter: twitter.com/rhythmsmag Instagram: instagram.com/rhythmsmagazine

PUBLISHER RHYTHMS MAGAZINE PTY LTD PO BOX 5060 HUGHESDALE VIC 3166 Printing: Spotpress Pty Ltd Distribution: Fairfax Media 6

FREEDOM C

Together we’ve grown up over 30 joyous years of sharing the best music, arts and dance.

Come and celebrate our party in the park!

11–14 March 2022

Botanic Park /Tainmuntilla Adelaide womadelaide.com.au

harles Bukowski’s poem, ‘The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills,’ seems an appropriate theme for the past eighteen months. Since March last year I have compiled a list of things I wanted to do: transfer old interviews from reel-to-reel tape, cassette, DAT, and minidisc to digital files, plan the Rhythms 30th anniversary edition, learn Spanish, get out my guitar and practise every day, rebuild the 1962 Falcon sitting accusingly in the driveway.

Needless to say, I have done none of these things. I did manage to buy a new battery for the car and get it started. I have purchased and read more books this year than at any time since I left university and have spent more time watching crime series on TV than I ever imagined I would. I have also purchased and listened to more music than ever and never realised how many albums are released every week.

But as the new year approaches, I realise that most of my time has been spent keeping the magazine going. This seems to have been a major achievement as newsagents close or reduce their magazine stock, publications fold and almost all the music publications now are from overseas. The lockdown has afforded me the time that I otherwise might not have had to spend on the magazine and its administration!

The continued existence of Rhythms is directly thanks to our subscriber base which has been steadily growing over the past year and to our advertisers who have stuck with us and been incredibly supportive.

In addition, I must heartily thank our writers who have given us some amazing material. One of the pleasures of editing the magazine is that I get to discover a whole range of music that I otherwise would not know about. I get the same comments from you when you email.

It is hard to come up with a list of highlights when you have spent most of the year in lockdown. I look back on Womadelaide in the first week of March as the last festival I attended and one of the few music events I have been able to go to this year. Two days in Byron Bay in April were very pleasant and we were looking forward to Bluesfest until it was suddenly cancelled a day out. That was a lowlight – as was the cancellation of the rescheduled event in October – but we are looking forward to Port Fairy, Womadelaide and Bluesfest in 2022! The great benefit will accrue to all the Australian musicians who will fill the line-ups.

I hope you have been enjoying the magazine over the past year and that you will continue to support it. If you picked this up at a newsagent or music store, then you need to subscribe to guarantee that you will receive every issue and that you get our exclusive download card. In the next few months, we will have some very special issues coinciding with festivals and with our 30th anniversary that we hope you can celebrate with us.

I am facing the year ahead on an optimistic note – and why shouldn’t I? Bob Dylan has announced a world tour for 2021-2024, which I would have thought was the height of optimism for an 80-year-old musician!

He goes out on tour as the Rolling Stones complete their 2021 No Filter US tour. It is amazing to recall that the very first concert I saw was the Rolling Stones at The Palais and I am hoping the band tours here next year to celebrate their 60th anniversary. Maybe we can share that with my recently arrived grandson! Wishful thinking?

I was delighted that Anne McCue was able to go and see the Stones in Nashville and bring you her review in this edition. It is always nice to see your favourite band through new eyes, with new emotions and enthusiasm. I had the pleasure to talk to Billy Bragg for this month’s cover story. I believe that I was the first Australian to interview him for radio back in 1983! He is still as friendly and loquacious as ever.

On the other side of the legends roster is Greg Sheehan who is profiled

by Ian McFarlane. You probably remember Greg from his time in MacKenzie Theory and his career since then has been constantly creative. Whenever I have been able to visit the Woodford Festival Greg has been a notable presence. Then we have Russell Morris, Rick Springfield, Emmylou Harris to add to the roster. But, in the usual Rhythms fashion, we bring you plenty of more recent musicians as well and it is always exciting to be able to help you discover new and emerging talent.

I hope you have a great festive season and New Year. Don’t forget to vote in the Rhythms Readers’ Poll online.

Until next time…enjoy the music.

Brian Wise I Editor I admin@rhythms.com.au 9

Welcome to our Rhythms Sampler #15 guaranteed to cheer you up after a long, long lockdown! Here’s our summer season sampler with 32 tracks of brilliant music! That’s over 100 minutes of great music just for your listening pleasure.

This download is available to all print plus print & digital subscribers ONLY. You can add the songs to your library, or you can also create your own CDs with the tracks (email us if you don’t know how).

If you are not a member of the Rhythms family, then you need to join to get a fabulous sampler each issue. Please go to rhythms.com.au/subscribe and join us.

BOX FOR: Thank you to all the musicians and record companies that have donated songs. Thank you also to all the subscribers who have made this possible.

ANOTHER GREAT RHYTHMS SAMPLER! EXCLUSIVELY FOR RHYTHMS SUBSCRIBERS:

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 RHYTHMS SAMPLER #15

Carson McHone, Ash Grunwald, Warumpi Band, Seasick Steve, T. Wilds, Alex Hamilton, Melissa Carper, Mylee Grace, Swedish Magazines, The Hard-Ons, Cahill Kelly, Chequerboard Lounge, Don McGlashan, Strange Tenants, The Weeping Willows, Matt Joe Gow, Eagle & The Wolf, Justin Bernasconi, Asleep At The Wheel, Richard Madden, Dave Wright & The Midnight Electric, The Cartwheels, Geoff Gates, Rich Davies & The Low Road, Toria Richings, Colin Lillee, No Promises, The Resignators.

Subscribe to Rhythms Print or Print & Digital today and we’ll send you our EXCLUSIVE SAMPLER FULL OF GREAT MUSIC ....AVAILABLE ONLY TO SUBSCRIBERS GO TO: rhythms.com.au/subscribe

FREE SUBSCRIBER MUSIC DOWNLOAD CARD

.

My checque/money order for $

Adia Victoria Emma Donovan Emmylou Harris Georgia State Line Greta Ziller Kim Chesire Los Lobos Richard Pleasance Nathaniel Rateliff Sam Teskey Swedish Magazines Tex Perkins War On Drugs

is enclosed.

PLUS: Russell Morris & Rick Springfield Matt Sweeney on The Velvet Underground

$12.95 inc GST NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 ISSUE: 308

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HISTORY Greg Sheehan David McComb Suburban Songbook

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Palace of Magnificent Experiences at 267 Swan Street, Richmond is a live music, multi-arts exhibition, performance and arts retail space, with cocktail, wine, beer and food selections. POME presents live music 5 days per week – from blues, jazz, world music and everything in between – burlesque, visual & performing arts and life drawing. With cinematic experiences to come.

POME provides Q&A sessions with all artists during their exhibitions – all explaining the history, meanings and unique processes of their art. Head to the POME webpage for all upcoming events plus online art store.

pome.bernzerk

There is no place like POME!

www.bernzerk-pome.com.au

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S

THE HARD-ONS

I’M SORRY SIR, THAT RIFF’S BEEN TAKEN AN INSTANT AUSTRALIAN ROCK AND PUNK CLASSIC #4 ARIA ALBUM CHART #1 AUSTRALIAN ALBUM CHART #1 VINYL CHART

DISTRIBUTED BY MAGNETIC SOUTH FIND CHEERSQUAD ON BANDCAMP OR VISIT OUR WEBSITE WWW.CHEERSQUAD.COM.AU

ome years ago, I wrote about the passing of Phil Everly and in particular his sublime harmony in that unique sound of The Everly Brothers. Now, sadly, brother Don has gone, but their phenomenal career and legacy lives on.

Don, the older brother was born in 1937 rural Kentucky into a vibrant musical environment.

Their father Ike was a “thumbpicker” in the style of Merle Travis, or Mose Rager from that region and his musical influence was profound. As soon as the brothers were old enough, they performed in the family band, touring the south and appearing regularly on those classic sponsored radio shows of the era. In their early days, the brothers followed the pure country path forged by the likes of The Louvin Brothers and the Delmore Brothers, but their sound developed in the mid- 50s as they began recording, and under the tutelage of Chet Atkins, they began the cross to rock and roll and pop, but always with that unmistakable country harmony. Their career took off when they were teamed with the brilliant husband and wife songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant who wrote ‘Bye Bye Love’, ‘Wake up Little Susie’, ‘All I Have to Do is Dream’ and many more- between 1957 and 1962 they had fifteen top ten hits and more than thirty top one hundred hits around the world.

Don and Phil were also fine writers, Don contributing ‘Cathy’s Clown’, ‘So Sad to Watch True Love Go Bad’, ‘‘Til I Kissed You’ and others, all hits. Don’s first writing success (when he was only 17) was ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ written for Kitty Wells in 1955 and a top fifteen hit.

A big part of their signature sound was Don’s powerful acoustic rhythm (usually on his Gibson Everly Brothers model). Legend has it that he quizzed Chet about the power and sound of Bo Diddley and Chet showed him the open G tuning (DGDGBD low to high) that propelled ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ and ‘Bye Bye Love’. This helped the sonic transition from the light country rhythm to a more RnB texture, another link in their bridge to commercial success. Keith Richards has been quoted as saying “Don was one of the best rhythm players I ever heard”. Don’s rich baritone voice and Phil’s shimmering tenor harmony became a blueprint for most close harmony singing – The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel notably. McCartney once said that when John and he began writing songs “I was Phil, and he was Don!” The close vocal harmony was in stark contrast to the friction in their relationship culminating in a decade long separation.

I attended their concert in Melbourne in 1985 as part of their comeback EB84 tour.

That night at the old Olympic Pool, Don played and sang a sublime solo rendition of Sam Cooke’s ‘You Send Me’. It was one of the most riveting performances I’ve ever witnessed. During their ten-year break Don released three solo albums Don Everly, Sunset Towers and Brother Jukebox to limited commercial success. The 1984 comeback did, however, rekindle public awareness of their place in popular music and the three subsequent albums EB84, Born Yesterday and Some Hearts were well received on the back of several world tours with a brilliant band that included Albert Lee and song contributions by Dylan, McCartney, Jeff Lynne and Mark Knopfler. Dave Edmunds produced EB84 and Born Yesterday. Check out the clip of the Everlys singing Knopfler’s ‘Why Worry’ with Mark, Chet and a super band- absolutely beautiful. Their first albums on the Cadence label- The Everly Brothers and Songs Our Daddy Taught Us will give you the best cross section of their music and for Rhythms readers the second album features wonderfully pure versions of their influences and roots.

The recent release of the triple CD set Down in the Bottom- The Country Rock Sessions 1966-1968 highlights their underappreciated place in the development of country rock.

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STUART COUPE PRESENTS

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was standing in the audience at the Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival in 2017 when the announcer said, “ladies and gentlemen the only fiddler to have played with The Rolling Stones and Bill Monroe, Byron Berline”! That’s diversity.

His list of credited sessions and wonderful fiddle contributions encompasses an extraordinary range of roots music stars including Dylan, The Band, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill including an influential stint with one of my favourite bluegrass crossover bands, The Dillards. They were a prime mover in the emergence of the country rock movement of the late 60s.

He drew from a vast eclectic range of influences from the hillbilly jazz era of Bob Wills to the old time Appalachian tunesmiths so integral in bluegrass. In a similar way to one of the other dominant fiddlers Vassar Clements, he distinctively weaved magically in and around the songs creating counterpoint and themes endlessly, much in the same way as New Orleans trad musicians. One of his earliest influences was fellow Texan Eck Robertson, the first oldtime fiddler to appear on record (1922) and the prime recorded source for the standard bluegrass repertoire- tunes that Berline played and recorded many times such as Sallie Gooden, Forked Dear and Arkansas Traveller. At the age of ten he won his first fiddle competition apparently outplaying his father.

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One of his early co-writes was the iconic piece Gold Rush written during his tenure with Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys and it’s that magical weaving and soloing that Monroe famously acquired from trad jazz interplay.

On my first US tour in 2002 I hopped off the bus in Guthrie, Oklahoma right in front of a music store called The Double Stop.

There was a sign on the door that said “Closed, Gone Fiddlin’”. Coincidentally, that was Byron’s famous store which tragically burned down a couple of years ago. He just managed to save a few treasured items such as his priceless Lloyd Loar Gibson mandolinconsidered the Stradivarius of mandolins.

That traumatic event must surely have had a profound effect.

In 1997, Byron founded the Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival in Guthrie OK, and it quickly became a pivotal event on the acoustic music calendar. Although it favoured a great deal of traditional bluegrass, old time and early country music the line-up was surprisingly eclectic. It was a wonderful event to be a part of, the quality of performers being inspirational, including Vince Gill, Willie Nelson and Earl Scruggs.

Tommy Emmanuel appeared there a few times and wrote a wonderful instrumental called Tall Fiddler dedicated to Berline. It’s a unique and humbling experience sitting opposite and jamming with an absolute virtuoso. I had a similar sensation meeting

and playing with David Grisman. You walk away a better musician….with lots of work to do! Byron welcomed wholeheartedly all the performers, famous or unknowns and encouraged the jam sessions. In the American bluegrass and acoustic scene annual competitions are a significant and pivotal part of the movement. They raise every player’s playing standards and regularly launch careers.

Byron was a three- time winner of the prestigious National Old Time Fiddlers Contest, considered the benchmark competition. Of course, his playing on the Stones’ ‘Country Honk’ (Let it Bleed) gave his career an obvious boost and led to many other iconic sessions. He played with The Flying Burrito Brothers from 1971 to 1973.

He formed California (with guitar great Dan Crary, banjo maestro John Hickman and John Moore on mandolin) which won the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Association’s Instrumental Group of the Year three times, along the way receiving Grammy nominations. After moving to Guthrie in 1995 he also formed The Byron Berline Band, highly acclaimed and influential. Other notable recorded performances include his soundtrack work on the Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, Northern Exposure, The Rose and even Star Trek! Interestingly he also claimed he sang backing vocals (uncredited) on ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’. I suggest it’s a discography worth a deep investigation.

ASLEEP AT THE REEL Following up from their acclaimed 2019 debut, The Emerald Dream, Asleep at the Reel deliver their second – Time and Tide. Powered by the deft songwriting of Mark Cryle, the band has produced another outstanding and diverse collection which joins the dots between Celtic music and contemporary Australian song – a ‘wonderful melding of Celtic influences and Australian stories’ as one reviewer noted. Time and Tide shows the band nailing its Australian take on Celtic colours to the mast, while plotting a musical course somewhere between The Band and 1970s Fairport Convention. Rich in historical narrative and masterfully produced

by Michael Fix, Time and Tide sees Asleep at the Reel taking its influences and stylings from their roots in the peat-smoked pubs of Ireland and Scotland, from the kitchen, the hearth, the veranda and the shearing shed, while they throw in a little backbeat just for the fun of it. asleepatthewheel.com

RICHARD MADDEN In late August 2010, Richard and band (Curtis DeVille on drums and Mark Deayton on bass), headed up to Fletchers Farmhouse in the Southern Highlands to record what would become the album, ‘Second Nature’.

Recorded in three days with Syd Green engineering, the band made the most of their short time together. Additional overdubs including harmonica from David Blight and a horn section were laid down in the following months shortly thereafter. Consisting of mainly of Richard’s guitar driven original songs, the album is peppered with some fantastic cover versions. It wasn’t until early 2020, some 10 years later, that the unmixed tracks were reassembled and mixed with the assistance of Ben Worsey. Additional piano parts were recorded by Lachy Doley in June 2020, and the album mastered by Cefe Flynn 2021. ‘Listening back to it now, Second Nature is something that I’m immensely proud of. I’m so glad I lived to tell the tale!’ richmadden.com.au

STEVE TYSON & THE TRAIN REX Byron Bay-based songwriter Steve Tyson has released three critically acclaimed records in the past decade, and together with his touring band, this month releases the new album “Banjo’s Last Ride”, a set of bluesinfused tunes, intimate story-telling one minute, swaggering alt.country the next.

Tales gleaned from extensive travels are told with a decidedly Australian perspective, and delivered with soul and passion by The Train Rex. Steve’s previous work has scored reviews such as these .. “…a master song craftsman with a nuanced lyrical touch and strong melodies. These are songs that are built to last” (Noel Mengel, Loudmouth) “Tyson lets his ruined voice and lucid guitars do the talking” (Phil Stafford, Courier Mail). “...telling tales of home and family, of travel and politics, wrapped in a dark sense of humour that sets him apart from the myriad others plying a similar trade” (Sam Fell, Rhythms). www.stevetyson.com.au

COREY LEGGE Wollongong-based singer-songwriter Corey Legge releases his brand new single ‘Love You & Leave You’ on Friday 12th November 2021, via Good Stem Records (MGM). Recorded at Love Hz Studios in Sydney NSW with award-winning country producer Matt Fell, this 2nd single from Corey’s forthcoming 3rd album is an upbeat bitter-sweet alt-country ballad which is sure to be stuck in your head for days. With its catchy vocal melodies, swirling pedal steel and smooth guitar licks reminiscent of the Eagles and John Mayer, this song will strike a chord with anyone who has had to leave a loved one to work away from home. Corey Legge will embark on a 9-date single launch tour in December 2021 across regional and metropolitan NSW, with a mix of solo acoustic and full band shows.

Corey’s merchandise, previous two albums, and show tickets are on sale now via www.coreylegge.com.

TEX PERKINS & THE FAT RUBBER BAND Tex Perkins and The Fat Rubber Band’s debut album is a gumbo of country funk folk rock tongue and groove. Primarily a collaboration between greatly respected blues artist Matt Walker and Perkins, it is a spellbinding and constantly unfolding journey through roots and blues. It is equal parts down home philosophy, apocalyptic existentialism, and carefree abandon. “It’s like old times meets end times” says Perkins, “it’s the record I’ve always wanted to make” says Walker.

Initially inspired by their mutual love of Link Wray’s Beans and Fatback album, The Fat Rubber Band sound as if they have absorbed everything from Captain Beefheart and Tony Joe White to Lynard Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. It’s beautiful guitars, exotic percussion, 5-part harmonies, barely controlled electric fuzz and dark humour lyrics make it sound like many things and like nothing else. This is some good shit! texperkins.com

DAVE WRIGHT & THE MIDNIGHT ELECTRIC On Lost Inside A Dream, Dave Wright & the Midnight Electric stare down the grief, confess the sins and eviscerate 18 months of ennui like gunslingers armed with nine tracks of shimmering, raw bravado. The Melbourne-based band’s third LP finds Wright modernising DWME’s sound by returning to the synths and keyboards of his days as a sideman, not as an homage to youth or nostalgia but in service to songs written during a loss-filled 2019. Much like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a potent – if unrelated – elixir to post-9/11 anxiety, Lost Inside a Dream is a necessary tonic as we collectively lick our wounds and reclaim our fate. First single ‘Tennessee’ drifts in with alt-country élan before Wright’s Cash/ Strummer/Cave vox tear into a soaring, pounding chorus. ‘I die a little bit more every night’, he sings. ‘Just hoping I make it out all right’. With this stunning, cathartic album as accompaniment, we all will. davewright.bandcamp.com.au 17

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BY ANNE MCCUE SET LIST: Street Fighting Man Let’s Spend the Night Together Tumbling Dice 19th Nervous Breakdown Troubles a’ Comin’ Dead Flowers You Can’t Always Get What You Want Living in a Ghost Town Start Me Up Honky Tonk Women Connection (Keef) Slipping Away (Keef) Miss You Midnight Rambler Paint It Black Sympathy for the Devil Jumpin’ Jack Flash Encore: Gimme Shelter, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

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STONED FOR THE FIRST TIME

stopped going to stadium rock shows back in the ‘80s. The last one I remember was Joe Jackson at the Sydney Entertainment Centre and he was saying ‘if you can’t clap in time don’t fuckin’ clap!’ I thought that was pretty rude and I haven’t really listened to him since.

In recent years, I have made a couple of exceptions ELO and Paul Simon both played in hockey stadiums.

And they were great!!

So last Saturday, when I heard that The Rolling Stones were playing that night at Nissan Stadium - a football stadium, so much bigger - and there were tickets available, I decided to go. It was a whim. I had never seen the Stones before because they were always sold out or were too expensive and to be honest I had never even tried to get tickets.

It was quite exciting to be going somewhere anywhere, really. We milled through the massive crowd - the first big crowd I’ve been in for a long time.

Unfortunately, Tennessee has decided en masse that there is no longer a need to wear masks, so we felt like freaks but in a ‘safe’ way.

We were seated up in the top tier of the stadium.

There were 4 large rectangular screens set up behind the stage bearing the Jagger mouth logo. When I was 7 years old, I silk screened that design onto my yellow t-shirt for a school project, much to my mother’s horror.

They opened with a video tribute for Charlie which was lovely and made us all misty-eyed. I do regret never seeing him play as he’s my favourite person in the band. There was a row of young boys behind us on their third or fourth round of Bud and they called out ‘Charlie!’

The band burst onto the stage (metaphorically) with Street Fighting Man. And I admit my eyes did tear up again and I got the goosebumps because it’s my favourite recording of theirs. Everyone got to their feet which seemed a bit dangerous seeing as we were thousands of feet up and at a sharp angle - almost in the beautifully clear sky - and looking down could give you vertigo. Thankfully, the sound was perfect.

The band was so far away that Mick Jagger was half the size of the top section of my little finger. And speaking of pinkie, Keef was wearing a pink woolly beanie not unlike those worn at the Women’s March.

Tick √ I had paid a bit extra because I didn’t want to buy one of the ‘obstructed view’ seats but there was a very tall lighting tower that blocked off the exact place where the tiny band was. Luckily, Mick made use of the catwalk quite a lot. We also had a mishap with the binoculars, the lenses came off and rolled down into the next row of drunk people. So, we really were just watching the show on telly kind of thing. But each screen had a different close-up and overall, the video effects were really cool. Keef came out on the catwalk a bit later and so did Ron. Breaking out with Street Fighting Man + Let’s Spend The Night Together + 19th Nervous Breakdown (this

one means a lot to me because I feel like I’ve had my 19th nervous breakdown several times) filled my cup somewhat right at the start. It couldn’t get much better!

In person - albeit several thousand feet away - Mick Jagger is very likeable. A consummate professional, as they used to say. The word ‘classy’ - not a word I would usually attach to The Stones - does come to mind. It’s got to be hard to connect with 30,000 people - what kind of effort does that take? It was kind of fun and funny to see that young man who in the 60s and 70s had made those slinky dance moves was now a guy in his 70s (78!) making the same kinds of moves. But wow, has that guy looked after himself! His voice is as good as ever, not one chink in his vocal armour. And what about Ron Wood? (74) - I was entirely impressed.

His arms are muscly! And his playing is still top notch.

Pot was always his drug of choice - according to the random Stones bios I have read - and it seems to have worked for him. His fingers are nimble, and his soul still comes through every note. He really held it down and kept it Stonesy.

Keef took a turn as leading man with a couple of songs and said, ‘it’s great to be anywhere, really.’ You get the feeling that Charlie’s death may have hit him the hardest. He was both soft and fragile, but his voice was lovely and Slipping Away had a cool, jammy groove to it.

The young drunk behind me liked to spill his drink on the person in front of him and then apologise profusely, leaning right into their (masked) face. And people looked at us like, oh they are from that strain of the human species who wears masks and gets vaccinated. Well at least they didn’t get nasty about it. They just looked with their vacuous stare, nothing much going on behind the eyes but a Budweiser buzz and a sugar glazed cornea. People’s shenanigans do distract at a show - I had forgotten that.

The highlight for me was Gimme Shelter - just an incredible song and powerful performance by Mick and background vocalist Sasha Allen.

After the show, my partner in crime said, “there was some ‘unusual’ guitar in there.” Keef was a little loose even with the Robert Johnson and the Satisfaction riffs and this gets you thinking that maybe this really will be the last one. That’s got to be hard. Living a long life is hard in itself because the wheels slowly fall off the cart (if you’re lucky.) Mick and Ron seemed young, muscly, fit, alive, present, alert. Keef was a little more delicate.

And it was sad at the end that it was just the three of them - without Charlie - who came out for the bow. I’m tearing up now at the thought of it.

Going to a show is different now. When you go to a concert in Tennessee you are putting your life in other people’s hands (and in America, your life savings because there is no healthcare just health insurance.)

So, there can be an underlying anxiety there. Yesterday I checked my oxygen levels. 99%. So those pains in the chest are probably just anxiety rather than pneumonia.

Those sudden and overwhelming rises in temperature are probably just symptoms of being alive rather than a fever. Perhaps a further retreat into my reclusive state is in order. We will get through this - apart!

But I’m glad I escaped for a few hours and got to see The Stones!

C

harlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer for nearly 60 years, died aged 80, on Tuesday, August 24 in London.

Watts’ London publicist, Bernard Doherty, issued a statement that said: “It is with immense sadness that we announce the death of our beloved Charlie Watts.

He passed away peacefully in a London hospital earlier today surrounded by his family. Charlie was a cherished husband, father and grandfather and also, as a member of the Rolling Stones, one of the greatest drummers of his generation.”

Earlier in August, it was announced that Watts was to miss the band’s forthcoming US tour as he recovered from an unspecified medical procedure that was reported to have been successful. (Watts’ seat on the tour was taken, with his approval, by Steve Jordan who had played with Keith Richards in the X-Pensive Winos).

Watts was born on June2, 1941, in London and raised in Wembley, north-west London, and later Kingsbury. Watts became a jazz fan early in his life and got his first jazz kit as a teenager. He attended art school, became a graphic designer, and played in a variety of jazz and blues bands, joining Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated in 1962, playing next to Jack Bruce. Watts met Brian Jones and later Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, leading to the formation of the Rolling Stones with Watts joining in 1963 and living with them in a flat. He later admitted that he thought the band would only last a week!

Watts became renowned for his rock solid, unembellished style that enabled the band to transition from clubs and theatres to arenas and stadiums and become the world’s biggest band. He famously said, on the 25th anniversary of the group that he “had worked for five years and spent 20 years hanging around.”

Watts also pursued his love of jazz and recorded a series of albums from 1986 with the Charlie Watts Orchestra, Quintet and Tentet. Watts also recorded an album with fellow drummer Jim Keltner and The

ABC & D of Boogie Woogie with piano player Ben Waters.

Many high-profile musicians paid tribute to Watts. Ringo Starr wrote: “God bless Charlie Watts we’re going to miss you man peace and love to the family.” Paul McCartney said: “He was a lovely guy. I knew he was ill, but I didn’t know he was this ill … Charlie was a rock, and a fantastic drummer … Love you Charlie, I’ve always loved you – a beautiful man.” Elton John wrote: “A very sad day. Charlie Watts was the ultimate drummer. The most stylish of men, and such brilliant company.”

Mike Kappus, head of the Rosebud Agency that represented Watts in his jazz projects posted: “Shocked and truly saddened by the passing of Charlie Watts today. He was the epitome of class and taste. Arguably the quietest of The Rolling Stones yet, in concert with The Stones, Charlie typically got one of the loudest and warmest crowd responses when introduced. Charlie went through his difficult years like all the rest, but he came through with great dignity and humility.

“Even Charlie’s drum kit was appropriate to his nature.

Driving one of music history’s greatest Rock & Roll bands, whose sound filled stadiums mightily, he used the most minimal drum kit possible – a kit more likely seen with jazz rather than Rock & Roll bands – like Charlie, no need to be ostentatious – just do the job well.”

At a private warm up show on September 21 that the Rolling Stones did opening the rescheduled No Filter tour at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, Mick Jagger told the audience: “It’s the first show of our 2021 tour, this is it, this is a try out. I must say though at this point, it’s a bit of a poignant night for us and it’s our first tour we’ve done in 59 years that we’ve done without our lovely Charlie Watts, and we all miss Charlie so much. We miss him as a band, we miss him as friends on and off the stage and we’ve got so many memories of Charlie and I’m sure some of you that have have seen us before have got memories of Charlie as well and I hope you will remember him as we do.”

In 2002, Jim Keltner spoke to Rhythms Editor Brian Wise about the album he and Charlie recorded together.

“He’s maintained that all these years,” said Keltner of Watt’s love of jazz, “and he’s never been afraid to talk about it either.

He’s always cracked me up in his rock and roll interviews where he says that he doesn’t give a damn about rock and roll, he loves jazz.

“He’s got a great imagination and he’s very instrumental in a lot of the designing, for instance, of the stages for The Rolling Stones tours. He’s very instrumental in a lot of the creative aspects of The Rolling Stones stuff. I’ve known that for years. I used to see he and Mick sit around and discuss things and talk things over and draw things out and stuff. I used to see that for years. Plus, if you’ve ever been around him for any length of time - the way he dresses - he’s a man of impeccable taste in every area of life just about.”

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LIFE, LESSONS AND LOVE WITHOUT LIMIT

Emma Donovan and the Putbacks mine the vault and emerge with something very special on their new album Under These Streets.

G

eorgia Delves, otherwise known as Georgia State Line, doesn’t subscribe to the notion of being any one type of artist, of playing predominantly within any one genre. To her, a good song is a good song, regardless of whether others among us want to label it as country, pop, rock ‘n’ roll or anywhere in between. Americana is as close as she comes to pinning her sound down, and given how that sound presents, this is a fair assessment.

Her debut full-length record, In Colour, released in late September, is indeed an Americana album then, taking in a decent swathe of that which it could adequately describe. “If you label yourself country, then people who believe in the real traditional bluegrass sound, will listen to you and say, that’s not what it is,” she says.

“And if you say you’re something else, people will say you’re too whatever,” she laughs. “So, I think that Americana term gives you a bit more flexibility in terms of where you sit… genre is a bit of a weird one.”

In Colour, thanks in large part to the excellent pedal steel playing of Tom Brooks (who also contributes, across the record, all manner of guitars along with organ, piano, mandolin and a bit of bass), does read very much like a country album.

It’s quite obvious, though, from the opening chords of ‘Every Time’, along with tracks like ‘From Down Here’, with its more muscular motif, that the country Delves is drawing from is very much in the contemporary vein, as she’s quick to acknowledge. “[Initially, yeah], I was really inspired by people coming up through the Nashville scene at [the time, four or five years ago], that was really inspiring for me,” she explains. “It wasn’t so much that I was thinking, I want to write a song like Emmylou Harris or something – I’d done that research already, and so I was more inspired by contemporary artists that were gaining their following quite recently.”

Delves comes from a classical background, having played violin for many years and sung in church choirs as she grew up. Her sound is, to an extent, informed by that ‘60s and ‘70s American country music style as well (thanks to her grandparents, to whom this album is dedicated), but indeed overshadowed by a more 20

contemporary bent; she cites Brandi Carlisle and the Dixie Chicks as making it all come together for her. “Yeah, I think that was a pivotal turning point, when I had those references and that blended the two worlds,” she concurs.

What needs to truly be heard to be believed, is Delves’ voice. She released an EP, Heaven Knows, back in 2017, and since then has honed her live chops as much as possible (not so much in the past couple of years, obviously) – this, along with the fact she’s always sung, has worked her voice into a potent instrument in its own right. It’s this voice too, and the way in which she uses it on In Colour, that further pushes the album into ‘country’ territory – on tracks like ‘Bluebird’, for example, as Delves vocal turns playfully with the slow and thoughtful instrumentation, one can’t help but be transported to some hallowed stage somewhere in the south of the US, where this music was born; it’s emotive, powerful, vulnerable and sharp all at once, and it marks Delves as a young talent to watch.

The band – Brooks, along with percussionist Patrick Wilson; Laura Baxter (bass, banjo); and Kat Mear (fiddle) – all bring to the table a very comprehensive understanding of how this music works: ‘Lessons’ is a country waltz; ‘One Of The Boys’ somewhat of a lament; the title track, a light-hearted and upbeat number with which to close out the record. The band play tight together, a unit, and it all unfolds naturally behind Delves and her voice, her acoustic guitar, as you’d think it should.

While loathe to pigeonhole her own music, with In Colour, Georgia Delves has produced one of the more exquisite country records of recent times. And not so much country in its sonic signature (although, of course, it does carry a great number of the hallmarks one would associate with the genre, whether you’re a traditionalist or not), but country in its honest songwriting, in its beautiful execution, by its very nature.

Call it what you will, but In Colour is, at its heart, a very fine record.

In Colour is available now through Cheatin’ Hearts Records.

By Annaliese Redlich

G

reat artists provide expression for the inexplicable. They bring solace in tough times, offering us a lens to find the gold in a rather mundane and trying daily landscape. As is such with ‘Under These Streets’ the new album from Emma Donovan & The Putbacks. The record is the third offering combining the velvet force that is Emma Donovan, with The Putbacks timeless tone and groove, and provides compelling evidence that they are amongst this country’s finest.

Good things can come through the tyranny of distance, and after a stint living in Sydney, Emma Donovan returned with her daughters to Melbourne to discover The Putbacks had been storing stuff away in “the vault”.

“A lot of the tunes that you hear were really beautiful ideas and beats from The Putbacks’ vault. I keep yarning about this vault that they had because we couldn’t see each other. These mob had lots of ideas, like their little diary, and I was just trying to connect to what they were playing. They’ve got songs for days and it’s made me write a lot!”

Writing is a sacred space for Emma Donovan and something she carves time out for amongst the trials of lockdown home schooling and family filled houses. Lyrically the album is testament to her strong connection to family and the wisdoms passed down. ‘Out The Door’ is an ode to the inspirational chalkboard in her Auntie’s home, a daily reminder to be ready to seize the moment in whatever form it may present. The heart-achingly tender album closer, ‘Love Without Limit’ draws on enduring words from her late mother Agnes.

“My mum, bless her, had all these old sayings and if anyone used to tick me off, or there was anything I couldn’t get through, she’d say,

“Oh my daughter…put your head up and you just got to keep moving on, when mob treat you horrible, you can’t be like that in return. You just got to keep giving and kill them with kindness.” I think of all of these morals and sayings that really helped me to write music, but they’ve also helped me become the person that I want to be and teach my daughters.”

Singing since childhood in the church and with her renowned musical family The Donovans, Emma’s first and enduring love is of country music.

“I listen to heaps of Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. When I think about their lyrics, they were pretty powerful, strong women back in their day.”

‘No Woman Left Behind’ is an ode to the same strong women that have surrounded Emma her whole life.

“I’m really proud of that song because I always yarn up and talk up women of my family. Being raised by a single mother and beautiful grandmother and now I have my daughters. When I was young and I first started singing, we were doing lots of gigs for NAIDOC and then there’d be all these other beautiful women, these sisters up in Redfern. They’re dancing still today and they got their granddaughters and their daughters with them. Some of the oldest singers like Marlene Cummings, like Aunty Rhonda Dixon and Nadeena Dixon, I just wanted to sing up and think about all of the beautiful Aboriginal women I’ve been inspired by in my community.”

Throughout the album The Putbacks slink with metronymic ease through compositions at home alongside the foundational funky soul of The MGs and The Meters, the big studio cinematic elegance of David Axelrod, plus kaleidoscopic contemporary peers Khruangbin.

Being immersed in the band’s sublime syrup merges the precision of a well-oiled machine, imprinted with an indelible sense of humanity.

It is this ease, skill and authenticity that firmly places them amongst the finest soul and funk combos Australia has delivered. The album was produced by sometimes member of The Putbacks, Henry Jenkins, and released through Heavy Machinery Records as part the City of Melbourne’s Flash Forward program. A project seeking to rehabilitate the catastrophic damage done to the music industry during the pandemic and lengthy lockdowns with Melbourne (at the time of writing) taking out the unenviable gong of the most locked down city in the world.

Under These Streets reminds us to make the most of the moment, however it presents. It’s also a love note to those who may be far away, but on whose shoulders we stand. A soundtrack fitting to these times, but one with a contribution that shall be enduring.

Under These Streets is available now via Bandcamp.

21

THE JOY OF TEX

A storied career and a fine new album … Tex Perkins is enjoying his place in the sun.

By Jeff Jenkins

W

hen Tex Perkins was working on his new album, his songwriting collaborator Matt Walker sent him the bones of a new song.

Walker had a great bluesy riff and a title – “I Ain’t Got No Place In The Sun” and he asked, “Can you add some lyrics?”

Tex immediately dug the tune, though he had an issue with the title.

As he sat listening to the demo on the deck of his property in northern NSW, he surveyed the scene. “I do have a place in the sun,” the singer concluded as he sat in his shorts under the sun-drenched sky.

“I realised that I was living the great Australian dream and I couldn’t honestly write a song where I was complaining.”

The song, now on the self-titled album by Tex Perkins & The Fat Rubber Band, was retitled ‘Place In The Sun’.

Tex Perkins has a reputation for being a difficult interview, an “interview villain” as he calls himself in the book he wrote with Rhythms’ senior contributor Stuart Coupe. “I’ve heard that people are intimidated about coming to interview me,” he starts one chapter entitled ‘You Call That A Question?’ “Good,” he jokes. “Be afraid, be very afraid.”

But Tex is thoughtful and expansive as he chats with Rhythms. Indeed, he seems to be that rare beast – the rock star happy with his place in the world. He enjoyed just the right amount of fame – he can now do regular gigs for 200 to 300 people – but it didn’t consume him. On the album, he sings simply, “I been a lucky man all my life.”

And he has fun with the fickle nature of fame in ‘Outta Our Hands’.

“You used to be so in demand, your name was in lights, now it’s in the can.”

Tex laughs when he recounts the questions he’s most often asked when people encounter him on the street: “You’re Tex Perkins, aren’t ya? You still play music?”

“These are people who bought The Honeymoon Is Over or saw us with the Stones. The other one is: ‘Is that ya real name?’”

Tex has been a rock star pretty much since the day he walked out of his Brisbane high school as Gregory Perkins. “I did not need university to get my place in the sun,” he sings. And it’s hard to imagine him as anything other than a rock star. “A life in music was absolutely perfect for me, I feel blessed. Looking back at that incredible life we all had, I’m realising now how precious it was.”

In the ’90s, The Cruel Sea sold a lot of records. “Not that I was ever in it for the money,” Tex reflects, “but 30 years ago, you could make a shitload of money if you sold a shitload of records. It was a golden age. The making of albums these days has gone back to whether you want to make a piece of art. You’re not going to make any money out of it, it’s whether you want to create something beautiful. That’s the motivation.”

The genesis of The Fat Rubber Band was Tex and Matt Walker’s love of Link Wray. When Tex’s partner, Kristyna, bought a copy of Link Wray’s Beans and Fatback album, Tex sent a photo to Matt: “Look what I’ve got!” >>>

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>>> “Cool,” Matt replied, “let’s make an album like that.”

The album starts, “You don’t know where you’re goin’, you sure don’t know what ya gonna do.” But Tex says the Link Wray album was “definitely a touchstone and a reference point”. They loved the rural vibe – Wray recorded at an old chicken shack – and the mix of instruments. “It’s got fuzz guitar, but it’s also got mandolins and banjos and honky-tonk piano. That tension between very traditional instruments and the fuzz guitar was something we wanted to explore.

“We also wanted to maintain the use of percussion. When we eventually went out as a band, we had a drummer and a percussion player (Evan Richards). We learned this from a lot of the records we loved from the ’50s and ’60s – the percussion is right there next to the vocal.”

The Fat Rubber Band also features Steve “Never Play Badly” Hadley on bass and Roger Bergodaz on drums.

As for the name, “because of the initial inspiration, we kept referring to the project as ‘Fatback’. But there was a disco band from the ’70s called the Fatback Band.

“Then I thought ‘Rubber Band’, and remarkably, miraculously, nobody’s ever used that one – there’s been no Rubber Band. The closest I found was ‘The Rubberband Man’, a funk disco song from the ’70s. So we took the ‘Fat’ from Fatback and joined it up with the Rubber – Fat Rubber Band. It’s such an obvious gag of a name and it almost has a surreal Beefheartish feel to it, which also fitted our musical philosophy.”

The record actually includes a song called ‘My Philosophy’. “I don’t know where this restlessness is taking me,” Tex sings. “Whatever will be is the only words in my philosophy.”

“There was always going to be a price to pay for a career as musically all over the place as mine was,” Tex wrote in his book. From the Beasts of Bourbon to The Cruel Sea, Tex, Don and Charlie and now The Fat Rubber Band … who knows what’s coming next?

There’s one line on the new album that always makes me smile. At the end of the record, Tex declares: “I’ve been out there in the sticks, I’m sorry to say city people give me the shits.”

“I do miss St Kilda,” Tex points out. “I love going to the city because I don’t live there. I see people, do stuff and then I get the fuck out of there. I feel very lucky.”

Enjoying his place in the sun.

Tex Perkins & The Fat Rubber Band is out now on Source Music.

TEXT BY TEX: 10 GREAT TEX QUOTES: “A lot of life is showing up.”

“People go on about Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the police state but if you ask me, Bjelke-Petersen was a product of Queensland. Not the other way around. Queensland got what it deserved.”

“I’m a Catholic. I look for suffering. It’s what defines me.”

“Writing songs can also be like writing jokes. I love a good punchline or one-liner.”

“Using drugs can lead to crazed desperate behaviour, manic delusions and an inflated belief in one’s own abilities. But there’s also a downside.”

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Under lockdown, Sam Teskey finds time to ground himself, as well as step out on his own via a debut solo release, Cycles, writes Samuel J. Fell

BECAUSE I LOVE YOU Rhythms’ chat with Tex Perkins coincided with the news that his old buddy Tim Rogers had become the new lead singer of the Hard-Ons. So, if Tex could become the lead singer of any Australian band – now, or in history – who would it be?

“The Masters Apprentices. I’m a very big fan of their early work. The garage rock stuff – ‘Undecided’ and ‘Buried and Dead’ – was incredible. Then a psychedelic period with ‘Living In A Child’s Dream’, then the prog rock period, which I loved. And, of course, ‘Turn Up Your Radio’.”

VOTE 1 TEX Would you vote for this man?

At the Victorian state election in 2014, Tex Perkins actually ran for the seat of Albert Park, against Labor’s Martin Foley, who is now Victoria’s Health Minister.

And like Cleaver Greene in Rake, Tex’s pitch was: Don’t Vote For Me. Tex’s brief political foray was the brainchild of St Kilda councillor and rock photographer Serge Thomann.

They had only one policy – Save The Palais. But when the Labor Party pledged to preserve the historic venue, Tex’s candidacy was redundant. “I kept campaigning right up until the election, telling people NOT to vote for me and they’d say, ‘What a unique, refreshing approach, I’m voting for you.’ It was a total Catch-22. For a little while I was sweating with the idea that I might actually win.”

Tex voted for the Greens. But he ended up receiving 1614 votes, 4.41 per cent of the count – more than the Family First and Sex Party candidates.

Tex was compared to Peter Garrett and Bono – “I gotta admit that hurt”. So is his political career now over? “I played that card,” he says. “It was once and only.”

But then he adds, mischievously, “But you never know, I could be back.”

“A wise man once said, ‘There’s a difference between scratching your arse and ripping it to shreds.’ This could be applied to many things, but it’s especially true of fame.”

“The top of the mountain is weird and uncomfortable for me.”

“Of course, some people think any kind of tribute show is uncool and being involved in one compromises one’s credibility. Fuck ’em.

At the end of the day, this is entertainment, I’m an entertainer, and I’m only too happy to enter-fucking-tain you.”

“When you’re old, you gotta have a few crazy stories to tell about yourself. The trick is remembering them.”

“You know what? When ‘Hotel California’ comes on the radio, I SING ALONG … oh, and I also like Coldplay.”

From Tex by Tex Perkins with Stuart Coupe.

E L C Y C E

LIF F

or the first time in a long time, Sam Teskey feels grounded. Not since around 2016, he recalls with a laugh, has he had this much time at home. Home is east of Melbourne, out in the country, almost right on the boundary, as he notes with a wry smile, of metro and regional Victoria. Just on the metro side. Lockdown territory.

But lockdown, for some, plays in favour, at least for a while. Teskey, one quarter of breakout blues/soul group The Teskey Brothers, has relished the various stay at home orders, using the time to reconnect with his young family, with himself, with the land and with music in general. For it’s been busy – the band, over the course of its relatively short life, has lived long; two albums, ARIA wins, touring and touring and touring. They’ve established themselves, endeared themselves to many, and so time off has been rare.

“It has been a long few years on the road,” Teskey acknowledges, “and for me, I was very ready to [find] an excuse not to go touring.

And I do love touring, but it can become a lot, especially when you have a young family. You don’t notice how unsettling it is, until you feel a sense of being settled again.”

Given the Bros haven’t toured since early 2020 then, Teskey has had time to become grounded again, to be settled. And it’s paid dividends, the time and sense of place providing a platform for his new project,

his debut solo record, Cycles. It’s a project that’s been on his mind for some time, an experimental record of sorts, one birthed from similar styles that inform the music of the band, but rooted far more in the British psychedelia of the 1960s and ‘70s; Cycles is lush and complex, hazy and dissonant, it rolls and rumbles, takes you on a journey.

This sort of music has always been a favourite of Teskey’s (think Pink Floyd’s Meddle) and was always going to find its way out; away from the band then, the timing was perfect. “I’ve always been interested in the idea of doing things [off] my own creative drive, not having to work and be collaborative, in a creative sense, with other people,” he explains on where this sonic well springs from.

“To be able to zone in and just do exactly what I wanted, was something that I think I needed to do outside of The Teskey Brothers, so that I could then be better and more collaborative in The Teskey Brothers; it gave me that freedom and that sense of outlet, that meant I wasn’t trying to push for a 22 minute psychedelic track on the b-side of the last Teskey Brothers album,” he laughs.

Sam Teskey is a prolific songwriter, and so the seven tracks that make up Cycles (many of them with their own intro and outro tracks, plus the odd reprise) were already in his demo pile. What was required then, was a good deal of re-working, trimming, editing

(‘If The Dove Is Sold’ / ‘Our World Goes Cold’ was cut down from a previous hour-long jam), in order to bring together the album as he had imagined it. The results speak for themselves; the album is solid, Teskey has an innate understanding of how this sort of music should work, and to his credit, he’s put his own stamp on it, not just recreated his favourite Floyd record.

To that end, right in the middle of the record, Teskey has placed what is essentially a diamond in the rough – an acoustic, bluegrass-tinged track among the rolling electric psych. ‘Til The River Takes Us Home’ is obviously a deeply personal song for Teskey, and while it is a beautiful song, one wonders why it makes an appearance halfway through an album like Cycles, as opposed to on a Teskey Brothers’ record, where perhaps it’d fit more naturally.

It is, however, all part of Sam Teskey’s plan.

“My original thought of putting it right there in the middle of the album, was this feeling that it was the heart of the album,” he says.

“The album to me is one big cycle… you can start it anywhere, and it flows in a circle, and so that song for me, was the core, the heart.

[Plus, I love] the contrast… the dissonance between a big psychedelic rock-out, then dropping down to this little country ditty; that extreme contrast was something that was really important to me.”

Cycles is available now via Ivy League.

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THE

QUEEN OF BOOMTOWN IS BACK

Without abandoning her country-songwriter roots, Ziller explores grittier territory with her sophomore outing, Judas Tree

By Meg Crawford

IT TAKES TWO

H

ere’s a short lesson in botany and myth.

There’s a small, super pretty tree that sports a deep-pink proliferation of flowers every spring called the Cercis Siliquastrum.

Colloquially, it’s known as the Judas Tree – ie. the tree from which Iscariot hung himself after betraying Jesus. Such a fetching package for a sinister backstory. But that’s the undercurrent for Gretta Ziller’s second album Judas Tree, and its swamp-stomping title track.

“The spark of inspiration came from a tree, obviously, the Judas Tree, that was out the back of a pub in Warracknabeal in the middle of Victoria,” says Ziller. “I was supporting Adam Brand or someone like that. And out the back, in this beautiful area where we were doing the show, there was this stunning tree. I thought it was a Jacaranda. Then I found out that it was the Judas Tree, and that struck home for me.

“I ended up taking the idea and a bit of a song to America when I was over there doing some songwriting. I wrote the song with Thomm Jutz. We were having a conversation about how there’s so many people with influence who got away with a lot. But it’s coming back to bite them at the moment. So, ‘Judas Tree’ is about karma and accountability. That’s something that in the past couple of years has been hitting home – you’ve got to be accountable for all of your actions.”

Not that the album’s grim throughout, but it does set the tone. Interestingly, Ziller wasn’t feeling the slightest bit heavy following its release. Unlike her previous output, with Judas Tree she wasn’t beset by worry. Why was that? “I feel like the past 18 months have been like a really good mental reset for me,” Ziller muses. “You know when you’ve lost your income and your way of sustaining yourself, both financially and spiritually – playing music is the thing that makes my heart the happiest – it makes you reset. Well, it made me reset my values. I’ve been fairly open about the fact that I had some negative influences in my life in terms of the people around me. I feel that last time I released, I was really focused on how well I looked on

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Forged on love. Sarah Humphreys and Kristen Lee Morris met and decided to make a life and music together as Eagle & The Wolf. By Denise Hylands

I

paper. And this time, I’m like, ‘well, there are no papers’.”

When embarking on this album, Ziller used ‘Whiskey Shivers’ from her fêted debut Queen Boomtown as the jumping-off point.

You can hear a through line from that song to Judas Tree. In fact, the whole shebang is grittier, with a lot more drum and bass à la Bishop Briggs or Rag’n’Bone Man. Of that evolution, Ziller is determined never to do the same thing twice. “I think it’s really important as creatives to keep evolving and changing,” she explains. “Imagine if Bruce Springsteen – PS. I’m not comparing myself to Bruce Springsteen – but imagine if he did Nebraska twice. I mean it still would have been so good, but it would be repeating. We’ve got a creative mind and a creative heart, so why not challenge and stretch that?”

Like many other artists, Ziller had the album in the can in 2019, but the pandemic put a halt to its release. However, in the lead up, Ziller had been working with producer Paul Ruske again (he worked with her on Queen of Boomtown), and the album unfolded differently to the first. “I still had the same producer and a lot of the same players on the album, but I was a lot freer with the

songwriting and the songs,” Ziller notes.

“I think I trusted Paul a little more so I just created a folder and sent what I had, whether it was a half finished song or complete song or something that I was like, ‘this is awful, but I’m putting it in here anyway’. We sifted through all those songs and Paul put his critical eye on them and sent the ones that I needed to work on back to me. When I sent ‘Stockholm’ to him, it was nothing. It was a verse and a chorus – hardly anything.

We worked on that one together, and then it became what it is. We were a lot more collaborative in in this album. It was a great way to write.”

Although Covid-19 has forced Ziller’s hand in terms of cancelling shows for the rest of the year, she’s been as active as hell in the background. Among other things, she’s started a small batch band merch company with a pal (Small Time Big Time), and she’s in preproduction for her third album. Following her recipe, she expects there’ll be a song bridging Judas Tree to the next album and hints at what’s in store.

“I don’t know what that song will be as yet, but I do know I want the third album to be as light as Judas Tree is dark.”

ndividually, Sarah Humphreys is known for her country-tinged indie folk and Kristen Lee Morris for his hillbilly blues but when they come together as Eagle & The Wolf it’s something special. Two Lovers is their second collaborative album, following their debut in 2016.

“The first album was like a breeze, and it was magic,” recalls Kris. “We were getting loads of shows and we were touring around the place.

And it was just an amazing little whirlwind of a time. And then five years later, here we are. It took us a bit to get to the second one, but that’s life, isn’t it?

He adds that there’s something that is magic about the two of them singing together, and creating music.

“It’s like we’ve both been making music for a long time and then when we got together with Eagle & The Wolf, there’s something about it which just connects with people,” he explains, “which makes us excited, that brings the best out in us. There’s just a secret sauce. I can’t put my finger on it and on paper maybe it shouldn’t work, like a grumpy blues guy with a beautiful folk goddess. It shouldn’t really work, but it just does. There’s something about it. So, we’re super lucky.

“There are many explanations for the time in-between Eagle & The Wolf releases. A planned baby, relentless touring, a surprise baby and a hard pregnancy, arguments, creative differences, raising children, being parents and stepparents, getting married, mental health struggles, lack of sleep, health struggles, moving to the Blue Mountains, home-schooling adventures, two solo records, and that’s a lot to have happened between albums.

Yeah, that tells you why there’s been a bit of a delay.”

As well as a pandemic!

“That’s true,” agrees Kris. “It was the reset we needed too. I would basically be playing all of the time. So, just to go, ‘You know what? I’m home a lot more. Sarah and I have a chance to come back into Eagle & The Wolf and make that a priority, and get back into the songwriting, and getting a project going together.’ And that was really great. I don’t think it was hard for me to make that conscious decision. So, it had to be made and yeah, we have made the most of it. We’re so excited about this record. And people are really loving it. And we had fun making it together. We made it in a different way than we’ve made records in the past. So, it’s been great.”

Both being solo artists and coming together for this duo project and writing songs how do they separate what they would do as a solo performer as to what you would do with Eagle & The Wolf?

“That is tricky actually,” responds Kris. “There’s different ways that it happens. Some of this record, the start of this record happened in Tamworth a couple of years back, late night writing. We have a few versions of how the songs come to us and how we work on the song.

One of them is we’ll get together and we say, ‘Let’s write together from a blank slate.’ And then the other one is Sarah starts writing, and either starts and finishes the song, and brings it to me, and then we arrange it together, or the flip of that, or we can bring ideas to each other.

“And I think usually it’s pretty clear if one of us writes independently.

If it’s going to be a song for my solo thing, we’ll both feel that, or get a sense of that. Sometimes we have little arguments about it.”

Moving to the mountains and changing their environment must have been an incredible influence on making music?

“Yeah, I think it’s really important,” he agrees. “We felt like the mountains were great because there are beautiful, creative people and obviously, a naturally very beautiful place. We were just looking for a bit more space. It gives you a bit of creative freedom. You can make a bit more noise. We have our little studio behind the house. We don’t have neighbours that are going to give us a hard time and stuff like that. We’re pretty happy.”

“We basically started making it with a producer,” explains Kris when I ask if they recorded the album at home. “And then with the restrictions, it was tricky. We also just felt a bit weird, like we weren’t feeling the vibe. We’ve never produced our own stuff at home, so we just started and we were feeling like, ‘Oh, this is what we’re missing.’

We’re feeling really in control of what we were doing, really free to experiment with different sounds and different things. We just really loved the process.”

Home recordings would usually offer more time to record but most of the songs on Two Lovers were first or second takes, not taking up a lot of time aiming for perfection.

“We’ve just worked that way for a long time now,” says Kris. “That’s the type of music that we do. It’s about the song and about an honest performance of the song. I think if you press record and sing your little heart out, it can really connect with the song more so than if you get bogged down in the layers of production. I think nearly all of the songs are pretty raw and live like that. So, there’s little rough bits here and there, but it all adds to the feeling.”

Two Lovers is available now at eagleandthewolf.bandcamp.com 27

After last year’s solo project Nathaniel Rateliff is back with The Night Sweats for a new album full of social commentary.

By Stuart Coupe

T

here was a time. It seems like decades ago now, but you recall those days when international artists were constantly appearing at our doorsteps. Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats were one such outfit. They’ve been to Australia a few times and established a reputation as a formidable live band – and not half bad on record either.

Let us go back to the year of 2020. Rateliff had released an exception solo album – which despite being called that – featured a bunch of the Night Sweats. And he was due to come back to Australia for a tour that was mooted to include the 2020 Out On The Weekend festival and a whole array of side shows. A thing called COVID put paid to that.

Emotionally it was a tough time for musicians around the world who – like everyone else – had not seen this coming and were amongst those most impacted upon in terms of their livelihood.

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“In the beginning I was certainly discouraged,” Rateliff tells me. “I tried to be positive about it given how much it affected a lot of people, but yeah, we were planning on a world tour for my solo record, and I was naturally excited about being able to do that, for it was just getting some attention.

But we played ten shows and it was all put on hiatus.

“So, some of that was definitely discouraging but somehow we made it through all that and I ended up writing another record – and we managed to make it on to Saturday Night Live so a lot of good things also happened. But there was definitely a time in there where I started to think that I was done as a live performer, and you definitely start to wonder what your role is in everything.”

It’s easy to get confused between Rateliff’s work as a solo artist and what he does with The Night Sweats – especially as many of the band members are involved in both projects. He’d begun his career as what

has been described as a ‘confessional folk singer’ and made a number of acoustic records before emerging as the powerful singer with The Night Sweats, a band who carried on the great tradition of soul music released on the Stax record label – one which is also home to him and the band.

Since they emerged in 2015 Rateliff and The Night Sweats became known for their blazing and powerful soul songs and performances but at a certain point Rateliff became worried that he was becoming pigeonholed as a denim clad latter day white version of an amalgam of Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and James Brown. He pulled back and recorded the And It’s Still Alright solo album.

Is Rateliff frustrated that he didn’t get to do more shows to promote that record – and that it maybe didn’t reach the ears of as many people as he’d have liked – or now that there’s a new album with The Night Sweats out entitled The Future will he incorporate songs from the solo album into

the shows the band do to promote their new album?

“I’m still kind of keeping the two projects separate,” he says. “I’m playing the song ‘Redemption’ which I did for a film soundtrack in The Night Sweats set, but as we’re moving into new material with The Night Sweats we start to have a pretty big catalogue so I haven’t really been singing any of those other songs of mine.

“The hope is still to do some more touring for that solo record or put out another one in the next couple of years so people will need to wait I guess.”

According to Rateliff there was never any intention The Night Sweats were over for good. The solo record had been something he had planned with musician and producer Richard Swift, with whom he had worked closely and with whom he had a very strong relationship.

“The solo record was more of a break from the Night Sweats and I never had

an intention of us being over,” he says.

“During the process of making the second Night Sweats record Richard Swift and I decided to make a record together with songs that weren’t really going to fit in The Night Sweats catalogue, and then he (Swift) passed away. And of course, left us without a producer – and also the loss of a friend. So, I just wanted to fulfill my commitment to him, so I went back to his studio to work on my solo record. That was really the primary reason for doing that. And then after that a whole lot more songs came out that seemed more appropriate for a solo record than they did a Night Sweats record.”

This all gets rather confusing given the cross pollination with many of the members of The Night Sweats who play on both the band records and Rateliff’s solo material.

How does he even decide what’s a Nathaniel Rateliff solo record song and what’s one for The Night Sweats?

“Well, I used to think I had some sort of formula for it, but of late I felt pretty lost, so for this record I leant into (producer) Bradley

Cook who helped us finish the record in terms of what songs should be on it.”

“And as you say it does get pretty confusing because most of the guys in The Night Sweats were in that solo project as well.

So, I think that had an influence on the way that we played together in that I hoped it would help us pay more attention to the subtleties rather than the bombastic nature of The Night Sweats. I wanted it to be a little more refined and I think that happened even though we only got to play ten shows originally. But since then we’ve played some more. And it’s been really nice the way we listen to each other more now.”

One can only hope that it’s not too long before we see Nathaniel Rateliff – with or without The Night Sweats but hopefully with - back in Australia. As the new album title suggests says, we look forward on many levels to The Future.

The Future is available now through Stax Records.

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Adia Victoria

The music that I’m playing, it’s blues, it’s roots music, and that was founded in the American South primarily by black Southerners of which that’s my legacy.

is another of

the important new voices emerging from Nashville and addressing current events.

By Brian Wise

A

dia Victoria is a daughter of the South. Being a born and bred South Carolinian and now living in Nashville, Tennessee, she is also one of the increasing number of important black voices being heard in that city.

that girls that look like me are gazing back on this world, that we have our own perspective, we have our own point of view and we have our own humanity that has been polluted by the mores that have been established in America.”

A Southern Gothic, the title of Adia’s third and latest album, reflects her history and her concerns – issue that have been resonating in America for years and drawn into sharp focus since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter and MeToo movements.

“Sometimes you just need to get out from under the baggage of your known demon,” says Victoria when I ask her about the album’s genesis in Paris. “It’s like why people - when they become adults - they leave home and they flee because you just need new air to breathe. But for me, France has always been a place where I’ve been able to distance myself from the familiar enough that I’m able to make the familiar strange again, and in that way, make the familiar put in to create art from.”

Victoria began the process of writing the new album in Paris, listening to Alan Lomax’s old field recordings, before she and her creative partner Mason Hickman recorded and produced the album (with a little help from executive producer T Bone Burnett).

“I’m excited to be here with my sisters just playing this music,” replies Adia when I suggest that there seems to be a really important community of black women that has really developed in Nashville over the past few years.

“Well, I can’t take for granted that things take a long time to change,” adds Adia, who was on a panel discussing Black Equity at the Americana Conference and last year released the single ‘South’s Gotta Change.’ “So, I’ve just been screaming through the keyhole and knocking on doors and not letting people reduce me to the shadows. We’ve been here, the music that we’re playing, that I’m playing. It’s blues, it’s roots music, and that was founded in the American South primarily by black Southerners of which that’s my legacy. My family goes back 400 years in South Carolina.

So, as far as the pace and the timing of Americana, I can’t speak to that, but I do know that I can’t take it for granted that the scene looks the way that it does, that was by design. I’ve been living this subject for 35 years.”

A Southern Gothic seems a very appropriate and literary title and I put one of the questions back to Adia that she has asked: What would a black girl from South Carolina who grew up in the white Christian church perceive as Gothic “For me, studying the literary genre of the Gothic – it’s a manifestation of fear. I think for me, a lot of this record is reclaiming my power by queering them by …….letting folks know

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Alan Lomax’s field recordings - made when he travelled through America and abroad from the 1930’s onwards – were also an important inspiration for Victoria prior to making her new album “I still needed to feel connected to the blues in that way,” explains Adia, who notes that she first heard the recordings when she was at high school. “So, I got a lot of my percussive foundation from listening to those recordings and I would lay in bed and I would tap on my body while listening to the music and then I would go out for walks around Paris, just like all day walks and then just like write the lyrics being built on those internal rhythms. So that’s how Alan Lomax, those recordings, were the kind of the heartbeat of this record, literally.”

‘Mean-Hearted Woman,’ one of the standout songs on A Southern Gothic, is a classic blues title, usually sung by a man.

“Yes, I thought that it was important and quite radical to hear the woman’s side of that story,” says Adia, “because so often, like you said, those are men that are telling the story, like taking the mic from the women and telling their side. The black women who these songs were inspired by……..we haven’t had a chance to humanise ourselves through the art of storytelling. I love those writers like Robert Johnson and Skip James with ‘Devil’s Got My Woman’. I wanted to know if this woman is crazy, if this woman has got a mean black heart, like what made her this way.”

A Southern Gothic is available now through Canvasback/Warner Music.

SOUTHERN GOTHIC

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THE HEAT IS ON Country and Americana were always where singer-songwriter Natalie Henry was headed. By Michael Smith would have been able to start that early because I was having such a wild time. I didn’t see myself as doing much other than partying.”

‘Leaving” is another song that talks about her crazy life growing up in San Remo.

“I hated country when I was in my late teens and early twenties. My dad died when I was twenty-one, I found country again and have loved it ever since. I think I was born to be a country musician. I just didn’t find it until much later in life because I didn’t really know myself back then.”

The quality of and craft evident in her songwriting belies the fact that Henry has only really been writing for a mere six years. “I guess being a forty-year-old woman gives you a little bit more of an insight into your self-worth and being, and I guess that shows in your songwriting when you first start out,” she chuckles self-effacingly. “If you’ve got a little experience in life in general, you know how to tell it, don’t you?

“Songwriting for me is more an event,” she chuckles self-consciously.

“It’s not something I sit down to do or practise as such. I would love to be better at practising but really for me it’s always something happens, and I’m deeply affected by that something and I need to get that out. It’s always truth. It’s never a story, really. I mean they’re all stories but it’s never a made-up thing for me. It’s always something that’s present in my life at that time. So, it’s kind of like my therapy session, on paper.

S

he might have gone through her rebellious punk and girl rock bands phase in her late teens and early twenties, but country and Americana was always going to be the direction singer-songwriter Natalie Henry would take.

“My dad was a single parent, he was a truck driver, I grew up in the back of a sleeper cab listening to the Highwaymen, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, all the country things you can imagine. I remember I was a massive Loretta Lynn fan, so growing up I heard this older man saying, ‘Just listen to that lyric, listen to this word,’ or ‘How does he write such a beautiful song?’ So, I think my dad being so in touch with music – he wasn’t a musician himself but music being the thing that got him through each drive, I guess that rubbed off eventually.

While her debut album, 2018 Apple & Pride, saw Henry coming to terms with the breakdown of her marriage and coming to terms with her sexuality and its accompanying feelings of emotional renewal, her new album, as well reflecting her experiences in the intervening years, looks further to her childhood and teens. “The title ‘White Heat’ is my Australian version of white trash. I grew up in a little town called San Remo on the Central Coast. If you went outside in the morning and your car wasn’t missing, then it was a good day. I went to high school there and there was barbed wire all around the centres and it was a rough little town. I think, just that upbringing, I would never have been ready to start this at twenty, say, or sixteen. I don’t think I

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“I did all the drinking, the lovin’ and the leavin’ – it’s something that I’ve lived. I didn’t plan on White Heat being an album like this. It just sort of happened that way but luckily it all came together just beautifully and even they’re very sad songs, there’s so much joy when you listen to this album. I feel like it brings you up rather than down even though the songs are about heartbreak. It gives people hope.”

Catherine Britt and Michael Muchow coproduced the album, which is released on Britt’s Beverly Hillbilly Records – she also cowrote ‘Weed, Wine and Women’ and ‘More Than a Woman’ with Henry – and it turns out Henry and Britt share more than just their music.

“I’ve worked with Catherine and Michael before,” Henry explains, “and Catherine is one of my closest friends. We both live in Newcastle and we both went through our breakups together,” she laughs. “So, we were spending a lot of time together. Catherine actually came over the night that we wrote ‘Weed, Wine and Women’ and I was having a hard time and we were talking about what got us through the night. To be honest it was sleeping pills and whiskey – it wasn’t weed, wine and women! But it sounded better when we were singing that. That song just came out of nowhere.”

Britt included another song cowritten with Henry, ‘Original Sin’, on her own 2020 album, Home Truths. Henry has also been opening for Britt on her COVID-interrupted Bush Pubs Tour, which takes them to Tasmania in November. “I’ve also got my own shows and Catherine is part of my band too.”

White Heat is available now at nataliehenry.com.au

B

illy Strings is an incredibly impressive guitar player and part of the new generation of bluegrass. Taught and encouraged by his father from a young age, he was learning songs and chords by the time he was 5. At 29, he’s just released his 3rd album, Revival, a reflection of his diverse musical influences, reaching beyond bluegrass.

“Music in my family was never like a job or a career opportunity, it was just a lifestyle,” says Strings on the phone from America. “It was just like breathing air. It’s just what we did. I came from a small town, and it just seemed unrealistic to be able to make a living playing music, you know?”

“A lot of Doc Watson, he’s the best,” he continues when I ask about the music that his father was sharing and teaching him to play.

“Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, The Stanley Brothers, Larry Sparks, Jimmy Martin, The Osborne Brothers, stuff like that.”

Strings has just released his third album, Renewal, but his second album, Home, won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass album 2020. Does that blow his mind?

“It does blow my mind, yes,” he agrees. “I don’t even know how to explain it. I’m just grateful

for the feedback that that album got. I mean, making that record was kind of therapeutic for me in a way, and I’m glad that it resonated with people.”

“We made the record actually in January of this year,” says Strings when asked whether the new album was made during the pandemic.

“Testing every day and wearing masks in the studio, it was very much a pandemic record, yes. But it’s not necessarily about that.

Some of the songs from Renewal, I started even before Home. It’s like, ‘Oh, well, there’s that one song that we never got around to recording, but it wasn’t finished, so let’s finish it.’ Stuff like that.”

Strings enlisted Jonathan Wilson as producer.

Usually based in Los Angeles, Wilson has his own impressive solo recording career and recorded his latest album, Dixie Blur, in Nashville. (He also played guitar in Roger Waters’ touring band).

“Well, a lot of stuff. Just going out to his studio in California, where he’s got all of his toys and instruments and stuff to play with,” replies Strings when asked what Wilson brought to the record. “We made the bulk of the record in Nashville at Sound Emporium. So, it’s like we

NEWGRASS

Billy Strings is an incredibly impressive guitar player and part of the new generation of bluegrass.

By Denise Hylands

made the Christmas tree in Nashville, and then I went out to California to put the ornaments on and the little star on top.

“I was playing with synthesizers and playing triangle and singing overdubs, and just playing whatever instruments I could find. That’s where I think winning that Grammy gave me a little bit of confidence in the studio to do stuff like that, to say, ‘No, I’m looking for this sound. I need this sound to be a little bit more, I don’t know, a spazz when it comes to that kind of stuff.’ So yeah, he’s in a way almost like a fly on the wall, but he just helps you get what’s in your head out. It very much felt like I was still in control making the record, but he was just making my dreams come true.”

Strings is very much a part of the newer generation of bluegrass artists pushing the boundaries and adding a lot more to the traditions of the genre.

“I think us kids that were born in like the nineties, we grew up watching fricking SpongeBob SquarePants and stuff,” says Strings. “But you know what I mean? It’s like my daddy wasn’t a coal miner, you know what I mean? I’m not a cowboy, you know? I grew up listening to all sorts of different stuff. My early childhood was really surrounded by a lot of bluegrass music until I was about nine or 10 years old, when I started getting into Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and a little bit more classic rock stuff. And that led to electric guitar, which led to heavy metal. Yeah.

All of us kids, we like all sorts of stuff.

“Music’s supposed to grow, I think, and to change. And I think that’s what Bill Monroe did in the first place, is make his own sound, and try to figure out his own thing. Music to me is boundary-less. I’ve played classic rock and bluegrass and the blues, and I listen to all sorts of stuff. When I go to write music, I think there’s this musical goulash in my brain, and there’s only so many notes, words, rhythms and sounds. And I feel like no matter what I write, it’s all some sort of regurgitated version of something that I’ve heard before.”

“It’s wild. I’ve seen a couple kids, like teenagers, that are playing guitar and doing my licks and stuff,” he responds when it is suggested that he might influence others in future, “and it’s just so awesome, because I used to be that kid, trying to play Bryan Sutton’s licks.”

“Music is a living, breathing thing. It evolves.

So just hearing that kind of stuff, well, that’s awesome. So, Del McCoury is a huge deal,” says Strings, admitting that playing with McCoury and his band has been one of the highlights of his career so far. “When I met David Grisman, it was a huge deal. He’s become a friend, and I love him dearly, a huge idol.

Working on Bela Fleck’s most recent record “My Bluegrass Heart”, that was a big deal for me. Because I just don’t really consider myself in that league. I don’t consider myself in the league with Chris Thile, Bela Fleck, Stuart Duncan and Jerry Douglas, but Bela did. It was very validating and it seriously meant a lot to me.”

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LOOKING FOR JACK Lifelong friends Russell Morris and Rick Springfield have created a compelling album about life and death.

By Jeff Jenkins

I

n 1969, as ‘The Real Thing’ ascended to the top of the charts, Russell Morris was on tour in Queensland, where he caught up with Go-Set journalist Michelle O’Driscoll, who wanted to take him out on the town. “I want you to come and see this guitar player,” she said. “He’s working with a band called Wickedy Wak.” Morris wasn’t too sure about the name, but he dug the guitarist. “I thought, ‘This guy’s fantastic’ and we hit it off right away. Not long after, Mitch also took Darryl Cotton to see him and he said, ‘We want this guy for Zoot.’”

“Mitch was a big champion of mine,” Rick Springfield recalls. “Five or six people really gave me a leg up, made me believe in myself, and Mitch was definitely one of them. She focused on me and said, ‘You could really do something.’”

Springfield joined Cotton, Beeb Birtles and Rick Brewer in Zoot and also played on Morris’ debut album, 1971’s Bloodstone, before relocating to the US. Morris and Springfield stayed in touch and Morris enjoyed watching his friend’s “meteoric rise to fame” in the US, with 17 Top 40 hits – including the chart-topping ‘Jessie’s Girl’ – and a Grammy Award. And Springfield kept an eye on Morris’ career, particularly enjoying his Aussie blues trilogy, which started with 2012’s Sharkmouth.

“I love that Russ is always trying new things and exploring new ideas,” Springfield tells Rhythms. “We’re both of the same mind where we’re not happy just sitting back and playing the old hits. We always want to have new music to play live, it just gives you a lot more energy.”

Springfield actually played on Morris’ second blues album, Van Diemen’s Land. He liked it so much, he did his own blues record, The Snake King, and the title track included a nod to Morris: “I am the real thing,” Springfield sang.

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Now, 50 years after they first recorded together, Morris and Springfield have made an album together – Jack Chrome and The Darkness Waltz, credited to The Morris Springfield Project.

The album celebrates Día de los Muertos – Day of the Dead.

“I’ve always loved the concept of Day of the Dead,” says Morris of the Mexican holiday, where people gather to remember and pray for family and friends who have died. “After losing parents and grandparents, I love the idea of celebrating life and bringing those spirits back.

I tried to write these songs from the point of view of the dead and the joy they feel coming back onto the Earth and being with their loved ones.”

Zoot’s manager, Bruce Hutchins, sent Springfield the video Morris made for the first song he wrote for the record, ‘Carmelita’s Dance’, with Morris almost unrecognisable in Day of the Dead make-up. Springfield was blown away. “Wow, this is Russ?” he said.

“I thought it was really clever, so I stole the idea and did one of my own for ‘Godforsaken World’. I poured all my darkness into the song.

It talks a bit about the plague we’ve been through. I look at all the shit that’s going on in the world and I wonder, ‘Where’s God?’ I see where evil is, but where’s God?” Springfield then suggested to Morris, “Why don’t we make an album together?”

“The general theme gave us a lot of imagery to work with,” Springfield says. “It gave us the chance to do something different, and lockdown gave us the time. And I love the bluesy approach.”

The record is a delightfully dark detour that will surprise fans of both artists.

“Follow me down,” Morris invites the listener

in the opening cut, ‘I Am Jack Chrome’, an invitation that Springfield repeats in ‘Godforsaken World’.

Springfield even sings some Spanish on the album, to fit in with the Hispanic theme. “I speak a little Spanish,” he reveals, “but not fluently. But I have a really great housekeeper who speaks Spanish and English, so she helped me. I wrote the lines and worked with her on the pronunciation, which was really important to me. I didn’t want it to come out as ‘the dragonfly wears my horse’ or something weird like that.”

Springfield, 72, and Morris, 73, also address their own mortality. “I think we’re the only creatures who know there is a limit,” Springfield says when chatting about ‘Death Drives A Cadillac’. “We know the engine’s running and the gas is not going to last forever.

Death is in the rear-view mirror and you can see it. It’s an awakening. My son just went through it and it freaked him out – the realisation that, holy shit, I’m going to die. I remember having that realisation, too.”

“Time is so short,” Morris sings in ‘Dancing Bones’. “I’ve been makin’ up for lost time before I have to move on … And we’ll spend the night under the spell of the magic songs.”

Morris calls the album’s sound “macabre romantic”. “Some people might think it’s ghoulish, but I wanted it to just sound otherworldly.”

“Russ is the happy one,” Springfield smiles.

“He brought a lot of the positive songs to the project, whereas mine get pretty dark.”

Morris created the character of Jack Chrome, and they initially planned to release the album under that name. “It was just a name that popped into my head. He’s the narrator, telling the story. Rick also sings on this song [‘I Am Jack Chrome’], so we are both Jack Chrome.

“Rick loved the mystery of it, that it was an unknown person. And away we went.”

They both revelled in playing a character. “It frees you,” Springfield says.

“To me, being a singer is being an actor,” Morris adds. “A lot of people just sing, but I like to create a character and try to be someone I’m not, particularly when I’m writing about subjects that aren’t about me.

“My true love when I first started was acting – I wanted to be Peter Lorre or Vincent Price. I’ve always loved acting, but I never got the chance.

The only thing I ever got offered was musicals.

I was typecast, but I always wanted to play a serious role.”

Springfield – who’s done his fair share of acting – loved stretching out and playing guitar on the record. “The guitar solo doesn’t exist on radio anymore, unless you listen to the oldies stations, so I got to unwind a little on this, which was fun. And I got to play a bunch of different styles.”

There’s no doubt that Morris is getting better as he gets older. When Rhythms suggests that Springfield has also been doing his finest work (if you get a chance, also check out his recent Beatlesque record credited to The Red Locusts), he says: “I’ve always been pretty adventurous. The music industry is like, ‘That

CHROME PLATED I AM JACK CHROME RM: It was just a name that popped into my head. He’s the narrator, telling the story.

HEART OF GOD (CORAZÓN DE DIOS) RS: I believe when we die we all go back to a collective spirit and leave our identities behind on Earth.

DEATH DRIVES A CADILLAC RS: I thought that death must have a pretty groovy ride!

CARMELITA’S DANCE RM: It’s about a woman who was a conduit – she would dance at the head of the parade every year and the spirits would come through her.

WE ARE THE DEAD RS: I used to think Day of the Dead was a little morbid until I realised what it was – a celebration of life.

TONIGHT WE’LL BE KINGS RM: The spirits are assembling and coming back to life and being with the people they love. It’s such a joyous occasion.

LA CALAVERA CATRINA RS: I wanted to write about my favourite Mexican artist, Diego Rivera. He led a great life.

LONE RIDER RM: It’s about loneliness – someone’s waiting to be taken somewhere.

DANCING BONES RM: The joy of being back on Earth again, being back in the real world.

GODFORSAKEN WORLD RS: I look at all the shit that’s going on in the world and I wonder, “Where’s God?” 50mg OF HOPE RS: As humans, we go towards the negative much more than we go to the positive and we don’t realise how beautiful we all are.

THE DARKNESS WALTZ RM: It’s about the waltz of life and death and how they’re intertwined.

CROW WITH A CRIPPLED FOOT RS: Crows and ravens are often linked to scary things – black birds have a slight horror vibe. So I just wrote a song around that.

GHOST IN YOUR HEART RM: Someone carries in their heart a love for somebody and they’ve returned – and Carmelita is leading them back.

one was a hit, so you better write one pretty close to that’, and I’ve always gone outside that view.”

He pauses. “I guess I’m getting bolder. I don’t know if I’m getting better, but I’m getting bolder.”

Ultimately, the Jack Chrome album is a lifeaffirming collection of songs that celebrates five decades of friendship.

Springfield says he wrote ‘50mg of Hope’ for another friend who is always “woe is me”. “It’s a very dark response, but it’s also telling him that he really is beautiful. As humans, we go towards the negative much more than we go to the positive and we don’t realise how beautiful we all are.”

“As it begins,” Springfield declares on the album, “forgive our sins.”

“Tonight,” Morris sings, “we celebrate of love, life and of death.”

Jack Chrome and The Darkness Waltz is out now on Ambition.

Russell Morris is playing at Bluesfest 2022.

35

B(J)ORN AGAIN

THE RIVER IS WIDE

From the pop charts to the screen and now Richard Pleasance delivers a surprising new album.

Van and Cal Walker’s Swedish Magazines are back together with a Best Of out and a new studio album on the way.

By Chris Lambie

W

hile 2020 was the year of wardrobe de-cluttering and jigsaw puzzling, 2021 feels less mindful and genteel. No-one’s homebaking sourdough anymore. What better antidote to weariness and frustration that to summon your inner headbanger? It’s time to get harmlessly wild and shout-y. A retrospective compilation by Melbourne yahoos of the 2000s, Swedish Magazines, is just what the doctor ordered. Taking their name from Iggy Pop’s ‘Five Foot One’, they put out two albums. I Wish Life Could Be packs the best of both into one glorious release. Getting the band back together, brothers Van and Cal Walker found the steel-capped punk force is still with them.

“Rubber [Records] was keen to put this out. A Sort of ‘Introducing’ to build the audience,” says Van. “We’re also recording a new album, Backing Up Again. We wanted to see if we could still do it. To rock out as hard. It turns out, we can! We started rehearsing with the original band at a Footscray pub then lockdown hit. But we managed to do a few days recording in between. My main concern was my voice. With the Swedes, I scream my lungs out. But you pay a price. If you sing like that all the time it causes extreme trauma to [vocal cords]. But, taking years off doing other things, it’s rested and it comes back.”

Other projects kept the Walkers busy since the last Swedes outing.

Groups including Tyrannamen, Heartbrokers and The Livingstone Daisies drew devoted fans, flexing other strings to their bows from folk and blues to garage rock. “It’s like, you can’t eat the same thing all the time,” Walker adds.

Van Walker is a celebrated wordsmith as evidenced on his 2020 solo album Ghosting. Lyrics may seem extraneous to Swedish Magazines songs. High octane performances of low-rent titles (eg. ‘Ballbag Boogie’) could be sung in Swedish - or Klingon for that matter – and 36

still whip crowds into a frenzy. A closer listen reveals Walker’s poetic bent on ‘Waves of Bering Strait’, inspired by Annie Proulx novel The Shipping News.

“It’s based on the character Quoyle. In the chorus he says, ‘I’m not a lonely man. I’m a man apart / Never came from a broken home, never did have a broken heart. / But I was a stranger there even in the town I was born / So much so that when I disappeared, no-one realised I was gone.’ A character so inconsequential. But many people would like to be able to leave where they are - just pack up and go, but for their ‘success’ in life.”

With Anton Ruddick on lead guitar, Swedish Magazines was the first band the Walkers formed after moving from Tasmania to Melbourne in 2000. An extensive search for drummers led to Tim Durkin, then Johnny Gibson who coincidentally both also hail from NW Tassie. The workings of the band’s ‘engine room’ were tuned according to each drummer. “There’s the swing you hear behind the beat in rock’n’roll [Vale Charlie Watts]. With the faster punk stuff like the Swedes, you’re playing in front of the beat. It’s the same with the bass and guitars.”

[Bass by Cal on Eat, Lachlan Rimes on Havoc.]

Previous albums Eat More Baby and Wino Havoc were released a decade apart. From Havoc comes the ode to pub life, single ‘Bottles & Barstools’. The video is a cracker. (Cue ‘Drink Responsibly’ advice). Like the band it’s hectic, raw, inappropriately hilarious and hard to look away from.

“Me and Anton lived close to The Tote which we frequented a few times a week. The Swedes played a lot of gigs there with Cosmic Psychos, The Dacios and other bands we really look up to. The Powder Monkeys had that aggressive attitude, even to the audience. But it’s a form of energy. Fun antagonism.”

Walker can’t wait to perform live again to sweaty punters. “It’s a social and physical ritualistic expression through music. But also spiritual in the way people have always gathered together for ceremonies. Even if you’re not the one playing, you’re still affecting the room, making the show.”

I Wish Life Could Be….The Best Of by Swedish Magazines is out now on Cheersquad Records.

By Jeff Jenkins “A good river,” wrote American novelist Mark Helprin, “is nature’s life work in song.”

Thirty years ago, Richard Pleasance’s world was crumbling around him. Though he was a key member of Boom Crash Opera, who’d enjoyed two hit albums, and he’d just released an acclaimed solo album, Galleon, which was nominated for five ARIA Awards, his mental health was in decline as he was struck down by tinnitus, afflicted with an incessant ringing in his left ear.

It was a dark time. “It was so horrible,” Pleasance recalls. “And I think I blamed the band for it, even if I didn’t say it.”

A desperate Pleasance went to see an audiologist, Myriam Westcott, in Heidelberg.

“She was unbelievable. She taught me not to panic and not to listen to it and, after a while, I stopped noticing it.”

The artist rebuilt his life, retreating from live gigs and relocating to the country, near Daylesford in Central Victoria. He produced records for Deborah Conway, Archie Roach and Augie March and embarked on a new career as a film and TV composer, doing the music for SeaChange, Kenny and then all nine seasons of the prison drama Wentworth.

Pleasance is like a mad scientist in his home studio. For Wentworth, he experimented with sampling old electric fans, slowing them down to capture the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in a prison cell.

“The modern musician has access to so many sounds. You can buy a plug-in that emulates

anything – put it in your computer and away you go. But if you can make your own sounds or come up with some new sounds, it just makes your music a little fresher.”

Pleasance has now released his first solo album in 26 years, Crooked River. But unlike his first two solo records – 1991’s Galleon and 1995’s Colourblind, which were traditional singer-songwriter records – this is an instrumental album, a wonderfully evocative collection that relies on Pleasance’s eclectic array of instruments to tell the story.

“Because there are no lyrics and you don’t have all the normal tricks in your toolbox, you’re dependent on melodies and moods,” Pleasance explains. “I love listening to instrumental music. Without the lyrics, I reckon you can drift off a bit more, and I like that feeling.”

Pleasance stresses that the album is still a pop record. “I guess because I’ve been writing film/score music for so long, I wanted to bridge the world of pop music and film music.

There’s elements of pop music in these little instrumentals – they’ve got catchy bits and they’re all roughly about four minutes long; it’s not like I’m writing some sort of Wagnerian opera.”

Crooked River is the first release for Strange Loops, a new label showcasing Australian composers, set up by industry veteran Norman Parkhill, who was a member of ’80s band Martha’s Vineyard and later managed The Badloves, Leonardo’s Bride and Frente.

The release is very much a family affair.

Pleasance’s son, Alfie, provides some drums and sax. His wife, Michelle, did the captivating cover art. Their daughter, Bronte, took the photos. And another son, Willy, made a video for the title track, featuring his brother, Rufus, as a scarecrow. Without giving the storyline away, it’s one of 2021’s most moving clips, gripping the viewer from start to finish. The story of two scarecrows, the video struck a chord with people who were separated from their loved ones during lockdown. “Willy storyboarded it so well, it almost had me in tears,” Pleasance says.

Pleasance says it’s a joy collaborating with his loved ones, “but we’re definitely not the Partridge Family. Alfie and I don’t play together much at all, and I always get a bit scared that he isn’t going to like my music.

You know what it’s like when you’re 20 years old, you don’t really like what your dad does.

But he was very encouraging.”

Richard and Michelle – who release music under the name Pleasantville – are also working on a murder ballads record. And Pleasance intends to make more singersongwriter records. “I’m doing that all the time at home,” he says. “I just haven’t put them out. But we’ll get there.”

As A. A. Milne wrote in The House at Pooh Corner, “Rivers know this: there is no hurry.

We shall get there some day.”

Crooked River is out now on Strange Loops.

37

T

he War On Drugs have earned a reputation for extended, unhurried musical explorations, exemplified in the 12-minute version of their signature song, ‘Under The Pressure’, presented on last year’s Live Drugs album.

But the band is hoping to shift that with the new album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore. It’s still a long way from Please Please Me, but the majority of the new album’s songs clock in at under five minutes, and there were even some three-minute gems that didn’t quite make it onto the record according to singersongwriter Adam Granduciel.

Adam and the band spent an extra year of studio time, accorded to them via COVID disruptions, to strip and hone their original concepts, resulting in their most melody-driven recordings yet. At their most structured, some of these songs unashamedly reference ‘80s radio hits with huge synths and choruses.

“Yeah, we literally had a whole extra year,” Adam describes the unplanned bonus studio time. “We didn’t do anything new; we didn’t add any new songs in that year. But some of the songs went through such dramatic

changes in that year, just reimagining some of the arrangements. We were supposed to turn something in in March 2020, and I don’t know what that would have been. Because everything went through so many changes.

But yeah, we were fortunate… I mean it was unfortunate to have that time but the music benefitted from it for sure.”

The band began working on I Don’t Live Here Anymore in 2018, band members Anthony LaMarca and Dave Hartley joining Adam in the first of what would be multiple sessions across multiple studios. With the album release delayed, the band put together the epic Live Drugs album (a feat in itself, splicing recordings from multiple recent live shows) and let the seeds for I Don’t Live Here Anymore germinate.

“Early on when we were writing and demoing and collaborating, there was just no rules,” Adam recalls. “If we had an idea in the studio, there was like a heirarchy of ideas and I try to surround myself with people that write their own music and understand how it works and that you gotta put the ego at the door.

You gotta check it. And everyone got to collaborate. It was a lot of fun to make.”

LIVING

While the Wilco-esque opening song ‘Living Proof’ was born from the entire live band playing together in the studio, the rest of the album was sculpted from various studio sessions and collaborations, producer Shawn Everett sitting alongside Adam for most of it.

“I think you just trust your ear,” Adam responds when asked if he has any Eno-like studio guidelines. “I had a rule very early on because I heard bands have rules sometimes and I was like, we won’t use delay on anything. But that lasted about two weeks...

There’s no rules really, the only rule is there’s no wrong decision. Like if you’ve been working on a song for two years and your best friend in the whole world played the drums on it, and you want to hear it without the drums… then it doesn’t matter if your friend played on it you just have to commit to hearing it without the drums. And sometimes making those big decisions, if it was the arrangement or how you imagine this fictional band in a room performing these songs, is how a song would grow. I guess our thing is if we’re going to make decisions, just commit to it and go with it.”

It’s evident that one commitment Adam pursued was to more structured vocal melodies. The album crescendos with two of the band’s most melodic compostions in ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait’ and ‘Victim’, bound to add climactic energy to their live sets (whenever they may resume).

“Yeah cool, I learned a lot more about harmonising on this,” Adam responds. “Like it’s something I’ve always wanted to do more of, but I’ve never had the songs to do it. Not really the [lack of] confidence, but I didn’t really know how to have the vocal dictate the songs and on this record some of the choruses were bigger, so I learned that if you wanna make the chorus explode you don’t have to put more guitars on, the singer has to sing it. And when I would start pushing the vocal more I was like hearing a high harmony or another high part and it was fun for me to do that and learn more about, not so much Brian Wilson style harmonies, but just layering it. You know, I like some of the harmonies that Springsteen does on The River, he’s more singing along with himself. It’s not like a perfect harmony, it’s

like doubling himself and going off on little tangents.”

Though his harmonic skills are evolving, Adam knows when to call in the pros. The shimmering backing vocals on the title track are like nothing the band has released before.

“Oh, that was those girls Lucius, Jess and Holly,” Adam reveals. “They work with Shawn too so it’s this thing where if I have an idea for background vocals it’s easy to get the girls in. They sing on the last record and I got them to come in and I had one idea, I hadn’t even done my vocals yet, and I thought that maybe I would sing these two lines. So, I got them just singing those two lines and we ended up keeping that and I obviously did my vocal part later and I think it added such a cool element to that song. And it’s something that doesn’t sound so much like this band, it’s really cool to add that flavour.”

“I like some of these songs more than any other songs we’ve had because they’re more economical,” Adam says of the more structured elements of the album. “They’re shorter and they’re more concise and from the point of view from someone who tries to

write a decent song it’s like, ‘Oh wow these are getting closer to like a classic four-minute tight concise classic song’. I mean it’s cool to have a 12-minute song and we kind of grew into those and now we’re growing into another part of our catalogue.”

Ah, the four-minute pop song – not as easy as it looks.

“Fuckin hey, man.”

While the band is working up live versions of the songs, with no firm plans to tour until 2021, Adams reveals that a lyrical thread is beginning to reveal itself to him.

“I’m still kind of learning too because I don’t go into it, but I think it’s like as things try to push you down – as you grow and maybe you get older, things are always going to be pushing you down and it’s basically up to you to perservere and stay true to what you need to stay true to to move grief and move gracefully to another stage of life. Evolution and getting older but also just growth and growing into yourself. It’s never too late to grow into the person that you wanna be.”

I Don’t Live Here Anymore is available through Atlantic/Warner.

PROOF

The War On Drugs spend lockdown in pursuit of the perfect rock song.

By Martin Jones

38

39

SURPRISE

PACKAGE With her new album Ten Songs, the artist known as T. Wilds provides one of the delightful surprises of 2021.

By Stuart Coupe

T

DREAMTIME

The best part of a decade in the making, stunning new project Restless Dream finds Brisbane-based alt-country outfit Halfway joining forces with Kamilaroi elder Bobby Weatherall and Kalkadunga artist William Barton to craft a powerful suite of songs documenting the repatriation of Indigenous Australian remains from institutions both far-flung and on our own doorstep.

By Steve Bell

A

gainst Halfway’s subtly lush accompaniment and Barton’s flourishes of authenticity, Weatherall’s spoken-word treatises cut directly to the heart of his people’s pain and discontent around this issue - his own decades of experience fighting this particular injustice dripping from every syllable - while the undeniable conviction behind each and every utterance speaks volumes about the sanctitude that his tribal laws and traditions still carry to this day.

“I’ve known the Halfway boys for a long, long time just from the traps around Brisbane and we’ve worked together a lot of the years so it seemed like a natural fit”, Weatherall offers.

“It came together quite easily, although there was a lot of work involved in it. My wife Robyn played a big role - she was a co-writer - and I couldn’t have done it without her, although I couldn’t have done anything without her for the last 40 years. She’s always been there and contributed all the time.

“I think it’s a history that has to be told about the unforgotten wars, and that is what it’s really all about. So there’s that part, but it’s also about mending our own circles and basically trying to bring that all together as a holistic approach.

Our people should be recognised as the landlords and we basically believe that them old people need to come back home. There should be no more of this barbaric experiments, they never left a will or anything like that and people came in and just started stealing.

“I guess it starts to tell the history of the country. How did they get there? Why are we seen to be on the lowest rung of the economical, social, cultural and political ladder 40

in this country? There’s particular attitudes within the community - systemic racism and those sort of things - and we now know who created it, and it wasn’t God I’m sure. Man had to be the one who’s done this, and he has to correct that and mend the circle in the community. We’re talking about in Australia and other countries who’ve been collectors of ancestral remains, not just skeletal but body parts: soft tissues, hearts, lungs, brains, kidneys, uteruses, foetuses of all different sizes, penises and what have you.

“So they were pretty thorough in cutting up Aboriginal people and carrying out their experiments and they come kicking and screaming to the table - the museums and the universities and the bio-science people - and they sort of seem to think that we’re taking something away from them that they’ve worked for all their life, but they’ve never had our consent to carry out these barbaric acts.

“I think we need to start looking at these disciplines and their attitudes towards peoples throughout the world - they are the people who were giving mixed messages, and people will never get to understand the real balance that we have to find within society that’s a mature one.”

Sadly, Weatherall has discovered during his decades of activism surrounding repatriation that even when remains are returned to country it’s sometimes not enough to bring closure.

“When you bring some people home you might only be bringing the skull or a mandible or some finger bones or vertebrae, and then the community says ‘Where’s the rest of his body?

How can we bury him? How can we lay him to rest?’ Those old people are deeply connected and their ceremonies and their rituals - their traditions and belief systems - have been the ones that have guided them ever since Baiame the great spirit gave us those laws to live in harmony with all living things. So our job is basically to hang on to that knowledge and pass that knowledge on and hopefully people will be able to live with each other.”

And according to Halfway member John Wilsteed - the Brisbane scene stalwart whose resume includes The Go-Betweens amongst other fine bands - their role was simply to facilitate Weatherall’s evocative storytelling.

“I think the whole point of us getting together was about taking the opportunity to spread the story wider, that’s what it’s all about,” he explains. “Bobby could have written a book or he could have gotten somebody to make a movie or documentary, but we already had this great preexisting relationship so it just seemed to be the perfect combination.

“And let’s get this straight, it’s Halfway - it’s not like we have the biggest audience in the world, he probably would have been better off doing something with Kanye West as far as spread goes - but we kinda already had that relationship and when Bob brought his story to the band it just seemed the perfect fit with our skill set of telling stories that we’ve always done, so each party really brought something to the table. But it’s his story in his words, that’s the crux of Restless Dream”.

Restless Dream by Halfway & Bob Weatherall with William Barton is available now through ABC Music.

en Songs, the new album by the artist known as T. Wilds is one of the delightful surprises of 2021, a beautiful, understated, spirited collection that’s just, well, alluring and endearing – and hard to stop listening to if you love folk tinged countrified singing and song writing.

And don’t we all?

T. Wilds is in fact Tania Bowers who released a bunch of impressive records back in that decade known as the 1990s before moving to Chicago and continuing to record and perform under the moniker Via Tania. Then she stopped making music. Totally and completely. But now, instead of becoming a cult figure for music nerds hanging in dusty record shops holding expensive second-hand copies of Via Tania stuff and speculating about what happened to the artist, she’s back.

But there was – for many years – a chance that Bowers would not make music again.

“It’s been a long time, a REALLY long time,” she laughs from her home these days in the Blue Mountains, a couple of hours outside Sydney.

“I moved back to Australia about ten years ago and didn’t really make any music in that time. I had a kid and I moved to the Blue Mountains and was trying to do other things that I was interested in. Then I decided to get back into it – but slowly. I didn’t know how seriously I was going to take it but I quickly realised that I had this muscle memory about it all – so it was just a case of remembering that you start writing songs and when you get enough of them you record them and then you put a record out. But really, for quite a while, I really never thought beyond maybe playing in the local bar near where I live on a Friday night every so often.”

An obvious question is why did Bowers stop? Was it a case of writer’s block or some other mysterious reason that prompted almost a decade of musical silence?

“I’d been living in Chicago since I was 22,” she explains. “I’d done a lot of music over there and worked with a bunch of different and interesting musicians. I tried music from all different angles. It was experimentation and I just got to the point where I was trying to be logical about everything and I thought, ‘oh man, I’m really good at lots of things but music however doesn’t pay any of my bills’. And I thought that I just needed to take things in my life seriously – other things. I wanted a house and a family and things that you needed money for, so I decided to give other things a go – other things that I’ve always loved like working with textiles, and I did a lot of hair and makeup work, a lot of it in movies and TV when I was over these are well as here.

“Once you’re doing music it tends to quickly become the most important thing and take over everything else. And to be honest I was probably a little heartbroken that I couldn’t be a full-time musician. I didn’t make music that was either mainstream enough, or hip enough, or culty enough. I just couldn’t work out how to make music work out as a career. So, I decided to take a break knowing that if I ever came back to it, I would really have to love it.”

And that could have been the end of Tania Bowers – songwriter and singer. She says that in the last eight years she picked up a guitar maybe five times. It was a complete break. And then a tiny spark.

“I wrote one song about four years into it. One day is just came out of me. I recorded a demo of it and thought that was it. That song is actually on the record – it’s called June and a lot of people seem to really like it. That was like a weird island in the middle of these two four-year periods.”

And when the desire to write and sing again was it easy or like pulling teeth? This time was obviously the right time. It became a large collection of islands.

“It was like an outpouring,” Bowers says. “I wrote a couple of songs, and then it was just songs and sings and songs. Really it was like the way I used to write.”

And then Bowers decided to demo those songs – and the process of creating Ten Songs was well under way.

“When I came back to it, I decided I was going to do it differently and enjoy playing these songs with my friend Matt (Matthew Toohey who recorded and co-produced the album) who lives around the corner – and who just happens to have a little studio. He suggested recording the songs and I couldn’t help myself when it came to taking it seriously again. I’d thought maybe I could just play every now and then for my own satisfaction, but it didn’t take long for me to be thinking that it was sounding really good, and I really started getting into it. But I was lacking a bit of confidence and I wasn’t sure if it was good or if I was just imagining it.”

T.Wilds/aka Tania Bowers wasn’t imagining it. Ten Songs is really really great. A gem.

41

Los Lobos create a splendid homage to their home city of Los Angeles. By Brian Wise

T

he Lifetime Achievement Award to Los Lobos at the 2015 Americana Honors & Awards ceremony could have hardly gone to more worthy recipients. (Well, maybe apart from Bob Dylan, who has never won an Americana Award!). Over the past 48 years the group has encapsulated the very essence of Americana with its mix of rock, country, R&B, soul, Americana and blues mixed up with the Mexican influences including cumbia and mariachi.

With the 50th anniversary of the formation of the band looming in 2023 it is hard to think of another outfit that has not only maintained such consistent quality in their recordings but also managed to keep such a stable membership. The line-up that went into the studio back in 1977 to record the first album, in Spanish, consisted of David Hidalgo (vocals, guitars), Louie Pérez Jr. (vocals, guitars), Cesar Rosas (vocals, guitars, bass, Hammond B3 organ) and Conrad Lozano (vocals, bass).

It has only been added to by Steve Berlin (saxes, midi sax, keyboards) who left The Blasters to join prior to the band’s second album, and major label debut, How Will the Wolf Survive? in 1984.

With 20 albums, including four live recordings, Los Lobos decided to record an homage to their native city with a collection of songs that reflected the culture from which they emerged and the musicians they were listening to during the formative years of the band members.

Of course, cover versions have been important, if not pivotal, in Los Lobos’ musical history. In 1987 the band’s cover of Richie Valens’ ‘La Bamba,’ which appeared on the soundtrack of the movie, was a worldwide No.1 hit. Despite external pressure they decided to follow it up with La Pistola Y El Corazon, an album dedicated to Tejano/mariachi folk music. It was a bold statement of the band’s principles. (Or commercial suicide, as they have since joked). Since then, they have recorded an album of Disney covers, an album of traditional songs with Lalo Guerrero, the excellent Ride This … The Covers EP, and they have always included some great interpretations in their live sets.

But deprived of touring over the past year, and with limited time to spend in any studio, Los Lobos decided to pay tribute to their musical heritage and took to Nest Recorders in East L.A. to record versions of some of the band members’ favourite songs The sole original is the title track which sets the scene by delineating their love of the city. ‘No matter where I lay my head/No matter how far I run/ I dream about the day you’ll take me back/I’m your native son,” sings David Hidalgo.

The title song certainly holds its head alongside the classics, some of which come from bands that were incredibly important to the Mexican community in East Los Angeles. There is ‘Love Special Delivery’ by Thee Midniters, an East L.A. garage band and one of the first Chicano rock groups to ever score a major hit in the U.S. There is also an epic version of War’s ‘The World is a Ghetto’ (the lyrics of which still resonate). There is a superb reading of the Jaguars’ instrumental ‘Where Lovers Go’ from 1965 which makes you wonder why the tune wasn’t an international hit in the vein of the similarly dreamy ‘Sleepwalk’ by Santo & Johnny. There’s also Lalo Guerrero’s ‘Los Chucos Suaves’ and Willie Bobo’s ‘Dichoso’ and ‘Farmer John,’ a hit for Mexican-American group The Premiers in 1964.

The net is then cast a little wider into the LA community with striking renditions of Jackson Browne’s ‘Jamaica Say You Will’ (from Browne’s debut album celebrating its 50th birthday next month), the Beach Boys’ ‘Sail On Sailor’ (from Holland) and a medley of The Buffalo Springfield’s songs ‘Bluebird’ and ‘For What It’s Worth.’ Other selections include The Blasters’ ripping ‘Flat Top Joint,’ ‘Misery’ by Barrett Strong (who was a Motown artist but came to LA when the label moved), and Percy Mayfield’s ‘Never No More.’

42

“At this point in our lives and our careers, it’s hard to think of something that we haven’t done.”

“At this point in our lives and our careers, it’s hard to think of something that we haven’t done,” says Steve Berlin when we catch up for Zoom chat. Berlin is now based in Washington, near Portland, Oregon.

“As much as we enjoy making non-covered records - and I’m sure we’ll make another one, it’s hard work at this point. The writers - it’s a lot harder for them to get their mojo and their engines up and running.

Not that we wouldn’t have done it under normal circumstances, but when we got offered this record deal, we really didn’t have the time in our schedule. Normally we’ll take two months to make a record.

This time around, we didn’t have two months, we would have had to cancel shows somewhere to make it work. We didn’t really know what 2020 was going to hold for any of us. Thinking about that and thinking about what we kind of wanted to say at this point, we thought, a record might not be a bad idea, especially if it was about something.

“That’s where the idea for making it about Los Angeles came from, because we just kind of felt like it’d be an interesting idea and an opportunity to highlight some of the people in bands and music that made us us. Take apart our DNA a little bit. That’s kind of where it started, but we didn’t know when we started out making it, the initial idea was, let’s just see how far we can get with it.

“Once we got the ball rolling, it actually became kind of fun. It actually took on a life of its own. I think the guys got into the concept a little more and then it was like really kind of easy. It got easier as it went.”

“My only actual regret about this record is that we kind of timed out,” explains Berlin when we talk about the incredibly fertile scene from which Los Lobos emerged and the bands that they were playing with.

He is working on the next solo album from John Doe, from X and I ask if they considered one of that band’s songs. “We never found the right song. We did a Blasters song. I was really, really pushing to do an X

song, or actually a Long Ryders song - something that spoke to that early Eighties thing that we came out of. Because it was literally the growth medium for us. If anything, that was like the most important moment of the band, which emerged from the proverbial cocoon there. It’s funny. I looked high and low, like obscurities, big songs that were really popular. I just couldn’t find anything that really, in one song, would’ve said, this encapsulates those first five, six years that we were all kind of figuring our shit out.”

“The guys always said that they were like the Beatles when they were growing up,” says Berlin of Thee Midniters, “because they were on TV all the time, but they were guys in the neighborhood. They would run into them at the guitar store or whatever. But at the same time, they were on American Bandstand in the early to mid-60’s. They were a big deal. We’ve become close friends with Willie G. He sings on the record; he sits in with us quite a bit. Just a wonderful human being and great guy. Thee Midniters, the Blasters, War and Lalo Guerrero were the four there was no way around. We were definitely going to do a song with those four, whether or not it was going to be an LA record. We just had to say thank you to those guys one way or another.”

“Again, that was sort of not necessarily the music of my youth,” says Berlin who was raised in Philadelphia, “but definitely the music of the guys growing up, and kind of the stuff that was on the radio all the time when they were learning their craft and deciding to be musicians.

It was all around more or less.”

“The actual time we were recording it in the run-up to the election year, made them all the more trenchant to say the least,” he responds when I mention that ‘The World Is a Ghetto’ and ‘For What It’s Worth’ are still relevant. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. We didn’t know if we’re going to be able to get rid of this monster that was in the White House. It was definitely on our minds, and it was a

terrifying time. It’s still a terrifying time, but a little bit less now that he’s on the sidelines.”

How does a Mexican American band like this keep going for 50 years and remain successful? What’s the secret?

“It’s almost unfathomable,” laughs Berlin. “Well, I would say there are not really any secrets. Number one, we like what we do. Nobody tells us what to do. We don’t have to listen to anybody else. I don’t think we ever really have, but certainly for the last 30 plus years we’ve basically not solicited anybody’s advice about anything, for better or worse. I can’t say that’s a guaranteed winning strategy, but for us, we kind of learned the hard way that not everybody has what we want in mind, when they give us advice. That’s a big part of it.

“Then I think equally there’s two other things that I would say that that’s how we do it. We’ve never toured longer than like three weeks.

We’ve had like one or two over the 40 years, more than threeweek long tours. The guys had families when we started, they were already dads from the very beginning. Even if you get in a beef with somebody, you don’t want to actually look at or talk to them, in a couple of weeks you’re going home, and then time heals everything.

We learned a long time ago not to hold grudges or just give people space.

“I think the one other thing that was really important in that regard is that those first seven years or so before anybody knew anything about Los Lobos…. in some sense is like The Beatles Hamburg years when they were doing stuff more or less in secret. The guys in Los Lobos, it was a solid seven years there where they got to do that: the 10,000 hours. They put their time in before the world started paying attention to them. That helped a lot too.”

Native Sons by Los Lobos is available through New West Records.

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HEAVENLY SOUNDS

The making of his latest album helped rekindle some very important relationships for Kim Cheshire.

By Martin Jones

E

very time I speak with Kim Cheshire he reveals a little more of his vast musical history. You don’t just fluke an album as good as Looks Like Heaven. These songs and this voice are the result of years of experience – though Cheshire will attest that the album was the easiest he’s yet made. They are also the result of a minor epiphany – a decisive emancipation from the tenuous hope for fame and fortune via music.

“I’d virtually given up,” Cheshire admits. “I thought, ‘Oh no, it was fun, it was great, I had a really good time, but it’s not gonna happen for you Kim, just let it go mate… So, I’d kind of resigned myself and this album feels like a real gift in a way. Because it’s forced me back into doing something that I really love and that I’d walked away from for reasons other than music.”

Though in Australia Cheshire’s best-known for his musical adventures with alt country pioneers The Danglin’ Brothers and The Wheel, he spent over a decade playing and performing music in the UK prior to that where his band’s hopes of becoming the next CS&N were only dashed by the onslaught of punk. When we catch up, he recalls touring with Thin Lizzy in the ‘70s and a particular story about assailing his friend Phil Lynott with his newfound infatuation with Jackson Browne.

“He’s patiently listening to me,” Cheshire recalls, “and I’m being really effusive and over the top and he says to me afterwards, ‘Yeah that’s great Kim, but I’d still rather hear Van Morrison say, ‘And the gloves to love to love the gloves’. I had no idea what the fuck he meant. And of course, I know now. Yeah, Phil you were right all along.”

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There’s a poise and maturity to Looks Like Heaven that can only come from such firsthand experience. It’s in the writing. It’s in the arrangements. And it’s in Cheshire’s singing voice which, though youthfully strong and agile, glides with nothing-left-to-prove conviction.

It’s all there in the album opening title track, the most uplifting take on mortality you’re ever likely to encounter. With Andy Leftwitch’s fiddle dancing like an angel around Cheshire’s melodic sagacity, you can’t help but feel that maybe everything will be alright after all. The entire album is rich with such wisdom and peace and while you’d be tempted to attribute that to the maturity of a writer of six decades’ experience, the astonishing thing is that most of these songs were written by a much younger Kim Cheshire twenty to thirty years ago.

“Maybe I didn’t do them myself because they weren’t ready to be sung by me and they needed to be left for me at this age,” Cheshire says of the unreleased material he gathered for Looks Like Heaven. “I don’t know. It’s honestly as much a mystery to me as it is to you. But that’s the great joy of it; you’re watching your own mysterious life unfold.

And to create a joyful track like ‘Looks Like Heaven’, something so joyful even to me, at a time when the world is so lacking in joy… man, the world needs as much joy as it can get. Maybe this is my realm; I’m supposed to be here at this time doing some uplifting things.”

The making of the album, which was at least partially prompted by the death of Cheshire’s mother, rekindled some very important relationships for Cheshire. Returning to England to visit relatives at the

time of his mother’s passing, he discovered that his estranged father’s family was rich with musical heritage in Ireland. But the most crucial reconnection was to old band-mate Rod McCormack.

“It was very emotional for me to be working with Rod,” Cheshire confirms. “We’d been in two bands together, we’d spent twenty years or more hanging out, talking, playing, touring, writing, recording the music we both loved with a passion, and I’d forgotten how musically connected we were and it was a surprise and a delight to discover it again together. He’s a master musician, producer and even with all our ups and downs over the years I realised that he’s a beautiful man and I also love him dearly. I found myself so deeply immersed in my vocal performances I started crying during singing ‘Stoneage Romeo’ and had to stop, in retrospect I think it was actually less to do with the song and more the joy of reconnecting with Rod musically and personally after so many years a little estranged from each other, it was incredibly special and I can hear it in the end result.”

Cheshire is not overstating McCormack’s role on Looks Like Heaven. Rod plays all the guitars, Dobro, bass, organ and percussion. His guitar playing, in particular, is a revelation – check out the banjo-to-Dobro solo on the funky ‘Have Mercy’ (with the heavenly voices of the McCrary sisters lifting the whole thing skywards). Or the ageless grace of the instrumental ‘Uncle Jim’. Or the sublime instrumental break in the celebration of Mickey Newbury’s ‘How I Love Them Old Songs’.

Though judiciously sprinkled with guest collaborators, Looks Like Heaven is an affecting record of the intimate connection between two men and their boundless respect for each other.

And this results in recordings focused only on delivering the heart and soul of the songs.

Cheshire is delighted by the overwhelmingly positive response to the record. “My friends are like, ‘Wow, you’ve made another album Kim and it’s better than all your others!’ Even Kevin Bennet [who co-wrote four of the album’s songs] said to me, ‘I love everything you’ve done Kim, but fucking hell man this is a really great album. What happened?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, man’.

“I honestly think it was just the reconnection with Rod and the realisation that I’d walked away from something that is incredibly important to me. I think that’s the big realisation. I’d walked away from it for reasons that weren’t musical. That were more practical. So, to go back to it and find it in this time when the world is going through such a shit time, is a kind of magical thing. It just kinda happened. And when I went into the studio to do it, I was so relaxed and so comfortable, I said to Rod, ‘Yeah I don’t think I’m going to be able to sing that well.’ And when I started singing, I listened back and thought, ‘Fuck me, what were you thinking? Did you just think that if you knocked it on the head that you can’t sing anymore? You’d have to relearn it?’

And it reminded me that whatever it is that I do have to offer is kind of innate.”

Though Cheshire admits that for a brief and distant moment he might have harboured ambitions for rock ‘n’ roll fuelled fame and fortune, his only reason for persisting these days is for the love of making music with those he loves and respects. Now, having had a ten-year break since his last album, Dead Man’s Shoes, and even the faintest of hopes for “success” abandoned, Cheshire is facing his most successful recording yet!

“I think there’s an element of truth in that,” he laughs. “That ten years allowed me to really let go of it and I think you might have hit on something that is the crux of it. With me letting go of it.

And allowing this experience to happen. And for me to be that cool about it, that relaxed about it. Because that’s what I hear in my voice. The only difference I hear in my voice from this to the other records is that lack of angst. The angst is gone!”

Looks Like Heaven by Kim Cheshire is available now.

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Billy Bragg’s new album, The Million Things That Never Happened, is said to be ‘the first pandemic blues album of our times but also a heartfelt paean to human resilience.’ By Brian Wise

I

t occurs to me that I first spoke to Billy Bragg back in the early ‘80s after the release of his first EP or album. It couldn’t have been later than 1984 and in those days, without the internet, contact involved long distance phone calls at great expense to the record label in London. The interview, which I did for a radio show I was presenting, involved holding a microphone from a cassette recorder (which I still have) over a speaker phone.

A lot of things have changed since then but the one thing that has remained constant is Billy Bragg’s friendly, spirited and loquacious nature. I have spoken to Bragg numerous times since that first interview and now he is a sought after guest on radio and television but his good-natured manner remains, his opinions remain firmly expressed (but maybe moderated a little) and his spirit remains undaunted. In fact, in 2016 he was the first foreign recipient of the Spirit of Americana Free Speech in Music Award at the Americana Honors & Awards.

Billy Bragg has also added best-selling author/musicologist to his list of accomplishments with the success of his acclaimed 2017 book Roots, Radicals & Rockers – How Skiffle Changed The World (an excellent history) and The Three Dimensions of Freedom, an extended essay arguing that liberty must be tempered with a commitment to accountability.

As you would expect, there is plenty of social commentary inspired by the pandemic on the new Bragg album: ‘Mid-Century Modern’, ‘Freedom Doesn’t Come For Free’, ‘Good Days and Bad Days’, ‘The Buck Doesn’t Stop here No More,’ the jaunty ‘Ten Mysterious Photos That Can’t Be Explained’ (co-written by Billy’s son Jack Valero), and, of course, the title track. Then there are those that can be interpreted as being more personal reflections: ‘Lonesome Ocean’, ‘I Should Have Seen It Coming’, ‘Reflections on The Mirth of Creativity’ and two of his finest ever ballads ‘Pass It On’ and ‘I Will Be Your Shield’.

The album was recorded in the coastal town of Brighton and was produced by Romeo Stodart and Dave Izumi at Echo Zoo studio in Eastbourne. The band includes Romeo Stodart on guitar and Michele Stodart on bass along with drummer Darren Beckett, Nick Pynn on lap steel and violin Jack Valero on guitar on his cowrite.

When I catch up with Bragg by the ubiquitous Zoom he is sitting at his home in Eastbourne on a beautiful early autumn day here. He is about to set out on his first tour for over a year that will take him around the UK and then to Australia early next year for a series of special concerts.

“I haven’t done any gigs at all,” he explains. ‘I’ve been very careful. My partner is immuno-compromised so I have to be a bit careful, I’ve been shielding her. And although our mask mandate has ended here, you go to the supermarket most people are still wearing masks. So, we’re all being a bit careful hoping that we might be able to get this thing under control this winter and not have the same winter we had last time.”

Bragg says that he is “incredibly frustrated” about having to cancel his Australian dates early this year. There are to be three concerts in each capital city highlighting his first six albums over

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two nights and then a career spanning set for the third. No doubt there will be a fair swag of songs from the latest album.

You’ve said that you filled that first lockdown with various clips and playlists and you were looking for something else to focus on, which did indeed lead to this album. You were able to get into a studio to record it?

I wasn’t able to get into a studio, which made it even more interesting. I always intended to make an album in 2021, but I had expected to be able to spend 2020 on the road trying out songs because that’s how I write these days. I’m not, like I used to be in my twenties, writing all the time. It’s something that I tune into when I need to. That’s what I do in soundchecks. I have scraps of ideas and I work them up. Might throw a song into the set. But none of that happened.

So, hadn’t really thought about making the album until the second lockdown. I thought, I really should try and get on top of this, otherwise all this time’s going to pass and I’ve done nothing.

So, I got in touch with Romeo Stodart from The Magic Numbers who’s been doing some production and I really like what he does.

He works with a guy named David Izumi and together they’re known for their arrangements. I really wanted to work with someone, or a team, that was going to arrange my songs for me.

Because when I send them a demo of a song, it’s just me and a guitar and that’s it really. I haven’t really thought it through until we get to the recording process. So, I needed someone who was going to expand that.

So, I ended up sending them my demos and they would send me back realised backing tracks, which was brilliant because that was exactly what I wanted them to do. They expanded on my ideas, they arranged my ideas, they added to my ideas and I really liked what they sent back. So, it wasn’t until Springtime when I was able to go to the studio to do the vocals and by then most of the album was recorded. It was brilliant.

They put a studio band together. On a lot of the tracks it was just the two of them because Romeo plays a lot of the instruments.

Dave is pretty good on keyboards and he has an original Mellotron in the studio, which is an old 1960s instrument. I saw it there and I thought, ‘Oh, I hope he uses a bit of that.’ He used it on the first song and I told him how much I liked it and he said, ‘Trouble is no one lets me use it anymore.’ It has quite a woozy sound - it’s that sound of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ kind of sound - and it seemed that woozy sound, that strange, dreamlike sound to me was very reminiscent of that feeling of being in the lockdown and not knowing what was going to happen next, that ambiguous feeling.

So, I said to Dave, ‘Look, use it where you feel it.’ It’s on quite a bit of the record and I really like it.

Particularly when you’re predominantly a solo performer like me, dynamics and texture become really, really important. But more than that, I think there’s always a subconscious fear, or rather a straightforward fear that you might subconsciously repeat yourself.

After making records for as long as I have, I sometimes find myself getting into an interesting chord sequence and I think, ‘Well yeah, that’s ‘Must I Paint You a Picture,’ that’s why I like it so much, I’ve already written this song. Chuck it out. >>>

“It’s a form of therapy and I’m trying to make sense of the way these things have made me feel.”

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Billy Bragg and son, Jack. Photo by James Green

>>> I know Joe Henry likes to use unusual instruments and you’ve worked with him a lot. They do add something to a record, don’t they?

You’re always trying to get outside of the way that you think and the way that you write, and the most comfortable shapes that you make with your fingers, the chords. Working with someone like Joe helped me do that, but more so with Romeo and Dave because they had complete control in the studio and I wasn’t there. So, I couldn’t sit behind them raising an arched eyebrow when they put the third layer of Mellotron onto something. They just went and did it and, as I say, I thought it sounded great.

Production-wise it does sound terrific. You must be really happy with it. Dave and Romeo, have done a terrific job on it.

They have. It was great fun to do as well. Normally when I’m in the studio we’re mostly playing live, bringing musicians together and playing live in the room and we did have a live day where we finished a couple of songs off that I’d written. When I’m in the studio, it makes me write more songs - or finish more songs would be the honest part of it - because I’ve always got ideas knocking around. So, I had some songs I wanted to finish off. We had a couple of live days in the studio and that was great fun as well.

I know your son Jack is on the last track. Is he on any other songs on the album as well?

He is. He came down for the live day. He lives up the road in Brighton. We were in Eastbourne. I said he could come down and play on the track that we co-wrote together, ‘Ten Mysterious Photos That Can’t Be Explained’ and because it was live, he just stuck around. I think he plays on ‘Pass It On’ and I think he also plays on ‘Mid-Century Modern’.

Now, that must be great to have him involved in your music, which he has been for a little while.

It is, yes. It is great in the aspect of we’ve found something that we both love, that we enjoy doing. I was once driving with him when he was younger and still learning about music. We were talking about The Rolling Stones, listening to ‘Moonlight Mile’ from Sticky Fingers.

I said to him, ‘Check out this bit here where Keith plays this guitar riff at the end here’ and the orchestra falls in with him - just the strings at first and then gradually the entire orchestra is following Keith. We sat in silence for a while and we listened to it. When it ended I said to him, ‘You know Jack, I never had this conversation with my dad,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great isn’t it?’

I thought it’s a good thing that we found something that we both like. It could have been anything. It could have been football. It could have been whitewater rafting or something. But the fact that it’s music is great because I know that he has a means to deal with the day. When he used to come home from school, if he’d had a rotten day, he’d go upstairs, plug in his electric guitar and I’d hear him bashing out Ramones songs and I’d think, ‘Okay, well he’s getting it out of his system.’ Music is a form of therapy for those of us who play an instrument. It has a very therapeutic reaction to us because for a moment it helps you to transcend your surroundings.

The album’s titled The Million Things That Never Happened and you’ve said that it’s not quite about the pandemic, although some of the songs could be related to it. It’s a subject that’s almost impossible to escape if you’re making an album during it, isn’t it?

It is really. My albums have always been a reflection of where I am at that given time. Usually though, I’m trying to get the audience to come and pay attention to something I feel concerned about, whether it’s emotional or political, whatever. But obviously with the pandemic it’s a universal experience.

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“I thought it’s a good thing that we found something that we both like….the fact that it’s music is great…”

So, I’ve tried to write in a much broader way so that people can bring their own experience of the pandemic, or of anything really to it.

[The song] ‘Good Days and Bad Days’ works like that.

The opening track, ‘Should Have Seen It Coming’, could be about anything that knocks you sideways. ‘I Will Be Your Shield’, although it obviously has its roots in the notion of shielding during the pandemic, it’s the idea of being not just a physical shield but an emotional shield for someone that you care about, a support in many ways. I think that’s a universal idea. So, there’s a lot of that broader, universality in the songs than perhaps normally would be on a Billy Bragg album.

One of the press releases says that the album is the first pandemic blues album of our times, which I hadn’t really thought about that until I read that particular quote. I’m pretty certain you didn’t write it.

No, I didn’t, no. But that’s the way that people have reacted to it.

So, I think that obviously it’s touching a few nerves where it should.

It’s not all about the pandemic. The pandemic is the backdrop to it, but so’s Trump. Trump’s the backdrop to it. Also, if you listen closely, rumbling away in the distance what sounds like thunder, that’s Brexit going down. That’s happening as well. All these kind of things and trying to make sense of them. I mean, that’s what I’ve always done with music. As I mentioned before, it’s a form of therapy and I’m trying to make sense of the way these things have made me feel.

And if you’re looking for that as well then this record is for you. I mean, I do think that the creative arts have a role to play in helping us make sense of the world, and particularly in this time now, this time of this universal experience of the pandemic.

There’s nothing in our lifetimes that we’ve had that’s been like this.

I suppose you’d have to have lived through the Second World War

to have been in a time where it was a universal experience. So, this is not a place we’ve been before. And I think when we come out the other end of it, we will be changed.

We’ll have a different perspective on society, on ourselves, on our fellow citizens, but most of all I think we’ll have a sense of loss, those things that we hoped to do, we wanted to do, we felt we should do.

It’ll be everything from the trivial, meeting mates up the pub, to the traumatic experience of not being able to be present when someone you love passed away. I think that’s going to be something that stays with a lot of people for a long time. That sense of loss is what I’m really referring to in the title track, ‘The Million Things That Never Happened.’

Well, that’s very true because you could think of so many instances where people have not been able to do what they wanted to do.

I think most of the time, individual freedom we lean more towards that, and rightly so. People should be able to do, broadly speaking, what they want to do, provided they don’t harm anybody else. But in the times that we’re living in I think we have to lean more towards the idea of the common good and recognise that in order to get through this we have to do things that we might not normally want to do, whether that’s wearing a mask in the supermarket or getting vaccinated or whatever.

Because those people out demonstrating at the weekend against vaccination, against the mask mandate, I want the pandemic to end as much as they do. But I think in the end the only way we’re really going to get through it in a way that is not really about individual liberty but is about compassion towards people who are immuno-compromised.

The people who are vaccine hesitant, who are afraid what might happen with the vaccine: I have some sympathy for those because I’m an anxious flyer and no amount of you rationally telling me how safe airplanes are - and I know because I’ve been going on airplanes all my life so I know how rationally safe they are – will make me less anxious. I know how rationally safe they are. But those people who say it’s all about their personal liberty, I’m afraid I really don’t have much time for those. The stick I get about it online is just ridiculous.

Now, you mentioned the song ‘Should Have Seen It Coming’, which is the lead-off track, which could have even been inspired by something that Woody Guthrie did. You can think of it as a comment on the pandemic, or as you mentioned, much more widely. But it seems to sum up the dilemma we’re going through.

Well, once you’re in it, it’s suddenly everywhere isn’t it? You start seeing resonances about it, around it. A lot of the resonances early on for us in the first lockdown was the Second World War and the blitz.

It was both used to encourage us to do what we do, but also to make people think, ‘Well, we have been through tough times before and perhaps we can get through these tough times again by working together.’

So, I think it’s helpful to have a reflection, whether it’s from fiction or whether it’s from folk memory, to realise that we have faced up to these things before. But the debates around it, I mean, you’ve got to think to yourself what would lockdown have been like without the internet? It would have been dreadful. But by the same token, it’s allowed the most ridiculous theories and complaints to get the oxygen of publicity. You do have to wonder sometimes what people are thinking, if they’re de-worming themselves with horse drugs. It’s like, “What is going on here?”

You mentioned the song ‘Pass It On’, which is really about ancestry and heritage and things like that in a way. But that is just one of several beautiful ballads on the album, which I guess is sometimes overlooked in your work. >>> 49

>>> There are some beautiful songs here including ‘I Believe in You’. Those songs really stand out to me.

Well, I’ve always had a feel for ballads. I listened to a lot of singer songwriters in my youth and was a great admirer of songwriters like Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, those kind of guys who wrote great ballads. So, I do find that you don’t have to be angry all the time. And if you’re going to try and put across a compassionate idea, it works better if you ease people into it a little less stringently. So, yeah, I love those songs. And to me, the greatest single of all time is The ‘Tracks of My Tears’ by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. The greatest three-chord trick everybody ever played. So, that’s where I’m coming from. That’s as much me as ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, and ‘To Have and To Have Not’.

I should have also mentioned ‘I Will Be Your Shield’, which is certainly a song for the times. You can really take that as a personal song, can’t you?

On a number of levels I think, yes. I mean, it was very interesting. I wrote that towards the end of the process. When I sent it to Dave and Romeo they were like, ‘Well, what are we supposed to do with this, Bill? You’ve written a bloody torch ballad here, a power ballad. How we going to do this?’ I was like, ‘Let’s just go in the studio and Romeo, you play on the piano, and I’ll sing it and we’ll see what happens.’ That’s me and Romeo doing it live. We ran through it a couple of times and it made the hairs on the back of our necks stand up.

‘Mid-Century Modern’ is a terrific song about what’s going on - or what has been going on over recent years. It’s a terrific summation of how things have changed. One of the lines in it is, ‘It’s so hard to get your bearings.’ Some of those things that we’re brought up on, maybe men in particular, they’re hard to break out of, aren’t they?

They are, they are. Really, that’s what the song is about. ‘MidCentury Modern’, it’s a style of interior design. But when I heard that term I thought, ‘Well, that’s me and my generation. We’re kind of mid-century modern.’ And we really need to be in a head space where we’re able to update our worldview away from the politics that we learned - in my case in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher’s dead so you can’t ask her what she thought of your portrayal of her in The Crown anymore. As a result of that, I really have to think about where politics are today and they have changed incredibly, I think.

The idea of the ideological politics that were prevalent when I was learning left and right, that’s certainly passed on. But I also think that as the modern right have developed this obsession with individual liberty, so the young generation coming through have realised that really that is nothing more than an excuse for license to be able to say whatever they want to say. And actually, young people are more interested now I think in accountability. I say that, ‘Positions I took long ago feel comfy as an old armchair, but the kids that tear the statues down, they challenge me to see the gap between the man I am and the man I want to be.’

What happened last year with Black Lives Matter: the woman who filmed the clip of George Floyd being murdered was only 17 years old. She was smart enough to think, ‘If I record this, people will be held to account for this, because people won’t believe this happened.’ She was absolutely right because people do want accountability.

Finally, Billy, let me ask you about the closing track, ‘Ten Mysterious Photographs That Can’t Be Explained’, which features your son Jack [who also helped to write the song]. As you said,

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Photo by Jill Furmanovsky

“There’s a lot of that broader, universality in the songs than perhaps normally would be on a Billy Bragg album.” it’s a stomper and you like to finish an album with a stomper and it’s a beauty.

I tend to, yeah. Well, ‘Ten Mysterious Photos That Can’t Be Explained’ was a website, the name of a webpage that kept popping up at the bottom of my screen every time I was on YouTube all through the lockdown. I never did look at it because I knew that probably I could explain them and probably it wouldn’t just be 10 photos, it’d also be 15 adverts as well. But it was there all the time niggling away.

For someone like myself who is an autodidact and really, really curious, to go down that wormhole for me is really, really dangerous. So, I wanted to try and write a song about that because I don’t think the internet is a bad thing, but I do think it reflects humanity. It’s who we are. Anything good or bad in there is us reflected. It’s not the medium, it’s us that’s the problem.

The Million Things That Never Happened is now available on Cooking Vinyl.

With Springtime in New York, we discover that Dylan did record great tracks in the ’80s, they just mostly didn’t make it onto his albums

- By Michael Goldberg

T

he 80’s were bad years for fans of Bob Dylan. Things started to go south even before that decade began with 1978’s Street-Legal, and then Dylan found Jesus, and that resulted in 1979’s Slow Train Coming, 1980’s Saved and 1981’s Shot of Love. What a bummer. And the little I remember about the four albums that followed is that each was a big disappointment.

In the ’60s Dylan recorded a string of great albums beginning with his debut, Bob Dylan, and peaking with two of the greatest rock albums ever made: Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. Sadly, by the end of the ’70s it looked like it was all over for Bob Dylan; it seemed he had lost his way, something he confirmed in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One. I had always considered myself Dylan’s biggest fan, but I stopped caring. Many of us wrote him off, only realizing our mistake with 1989’s Daniel Lanois produced Oh Mercy. In the decades that have followed, Dylan recorded many musically solid, lyrically deep albums, culminating in the masterpiece, 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. These days, I again look forward to each new Dylan album.

Still, my distaste for his ’80s recordings had not softened. So, I had some trepidation when, months ago, I read about the 16th volume of Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Springtime in New York, five CDs of material Dylan recorded in the late ’70s and first five years of the ’80s. I should know by now, after the revelation of the Another Self Portrait bootleg set, that no matter what ends up on Dylan’s official albums, plenty of great music ends up in the vaults. Such is the case with Springtime in New York, which turns out to be a Dylan goldmine.

With the first track, an alternative slowed-down take of ‘Señor (Tales of Yankee Power),’ a song from Street-Legal, recorded at Dylan’s rehearsal space, Rundown Studios, it’s established that Dylan fans are in for some great listening. Though most of Street-Legal was disappointing, I always dug ‘Señor.’ But this version is so much better. Not only do I prefer Dylan’s man-of-mystery vocal, but there’s a ghostly quality to the music, and even the background singers—one of many reasons I had trouble with the Street-Legal album—make sense here.

I’ve always loved this opening verse: “Señor, señor “Can you tell me where we’re headin’?

“Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?

“Seems like I been down this way before “Is there any truth in that, señor?”

‘Señor’ combines the South of the Border musical vibe of Dylan’s soundtrack for the Sam Peckinpah film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, with the surreal imagery of his mid-to-late ’60s writing.

Across the five CDs are exquisite covers—a loose ‘Mystery Train’ with blistering guitar from Fred Tackett, a heartbreaking ‘Let It Be Me,’ and a lovely ‘Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,’ with terrific guitar from Mark Knopfler and Mick Taylor are three favorites—alternative takes or official album versions stripped of the original superfluous instrumentation, and Dylan originals that were shelved until now.

An absolute masterpiece is a Dylan original, ‘Too Late’ recorded during the Infidels sessions. It’s presented here in two versions: an acoustic take with Dylan and Mark Knopfler on guitars and Sly Dunbar providing lowkey percussion and a full band version that adds Mick Taylor on guitar, Dire Straits’ Alan Clark on keyboards and Dunbar’s partner, bassist Robbie Shakespeare. Dylan, who plays harp on the outro of the full band

version, is in great mid-‘60s voice, the melody and arrangement are perfect, and he delivers many striking lines. There’s a great chorus too, which works when Dylan sings it: “But it’s too late to bring him back “Too late, too late, too late, too late, too late to bring him back” I read the following lyrics from the fourth verse as indicting corporate corruption; I can’t not laugh when Dylan sings that fourth verse-ending line: “From the stage they’ll be doing the bumps and the grinds “A whore will pass the hat, collect a hundred grand and say thanks “They like to take all this money from sin and build big universities to study in “And sing ‘Amazing Grace’ all the way to the Swiss Bank” And ending the next verse: “They don’t believe in mercy “And judgment on them is something you’ll never see “They can put your face on a postage stamp “Turn your home into an armed camp anyway they want you “That’s the way you’ll be” And this one-liner: “In these times of compassion where conformity’s a fashion” Dylan spent a lot of time during the two-month Infidels sessions working on this song. There were 47 takes, and according to Damien Love’s excellent liner notes, he was “constantly rewriting” the lyrics. Dylan eventually turned ‘Too Late’ into ‘Foot of Pride,’ but in the end he left the song off Infidels. There was a late (in the sessions) version of ‘Foot of Pride’ on the Bootleg Series Vols 1-3. Here a tougher electric version with Mick Taylor’s slide guitar is included. But for me, it’s that early acoustic take of ‘Too Late’ that I keep coming back to. Dylan begins with one of his classic it’s-all-up-in-the-air opening lines, “Well whether there was a murder, I can’t say, I wasn’t there/ I was visiting a friend in jail…,” which seems to be, once you’ve heard the whole song, possibly beside the point given that the song, in this particular incarnation, seems to be an indictment of those with money and power.

Another highlight is a band version of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ with Dylan’s harp and Mick Taylor’s slide guitar doing a dance. Ever since we heard the moving guitar/piano version on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3, this song has been praised as one of Dylan’s best. While the acoustic version is my favorite, you need to hear this one too.

I love the bluesy ‘Fur Slippers,’ an absurd song of lost love that I keep returning to. Dylan sings about how he feels so alone, doesn’t have a girlfriend anymore, how she was here yesterday, but she’s gone today and she even took his fur slippers. While Steve Ripley and Fred Tackett deliver raw blues guitar, Dylan delivers the perfect chorus, “Whoa, ain’t got no fur slippers now.”

Other keepers: the first take of a beautiful ballad, ‘Angelina,’ a wonderfully ragged ‘Cold, Cold Heart,’ an intimate early version of ‘Sweetheart Like You,’ an intense ‘I and I,’ with Mark Knopfler and Mick Taylor and Dylan on guitars, and you just might find yourself digging the totally rockin’ ‘Jesus Met the Woman at the Well.’ There are so many more wonderful tracks here.

The 11 minute, 52 second ‘New Danville Girl,’ slightly rewritten as ‘Brownsville Girl’ and included on the unremarkable ‘Knocked Out Loaded’ album, is brilliant. Dylan’s voice sounds great and, as Greil Marcus has noted, he sounds “interested” in what he’s singing, he cares.

For nearly 12 minutes we’re right there with Dylan, and because he cares, we care.

The last song on the fifth CD, ‘Dark Eyes’, is a solo performance by Dylan playing guitar, blowing harp, and singing. I don’t know if it’s better than that great version that ends the otherwise forgettable Empire Burlesque, but this one is so good too. And following ‘New Danville Girl,’ this superb set ends in a most satisfying way.

Michael Goldberg, a former Rolling Stone Senior Writer and founder of the original Addicted To Noise online magazine, is author of three rock & roll novels including 2016’s “Untitled.”

G N OU Y NEIL BE denied WON’T >> The lyrics tell a version of Young’s story. Growing up in Canada, his father leaving when he was a young boy, beat up at school, dreams of stardom, leaving Canada for Hollywood, courted by “business men” who came to hear “the golden sound.” The key verse is the fifth one, especially coming as it did after the success of Harvest. Neil Young writing to himself, writing to his dead friend, writing to every wannabe rock star.

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“Well, all that glitters isn’t gold/ I guess you’ve heard the story told/ But I’m a pauper in a naked disguise/ A millionaire through a business man’s eyes/ Oh friend of mine/ Don’t be denied.”

And the chorus, which at times during the tour he would scream: “Don’t be denied/ Don’t be denied/ Don’t be denied /No no, don’t be denied.”

On this version however, he reprieves the fourth verse, the one about business men coming to hear the “golden sound.”

On a tour where Young was challenging his audience with an album’s worth of new material, perhaps with this song he was insisting one has to follow their vision, no matter the cost.

Certainly, he was saying there’s more to life than money – something he certainly knew by then. “‘Don’t Be Denied’ has a lot to do with Danny, I think,” Young told McDonough. “…I think that’s the first major life-and-death event that really affected me in what I was trying to do… you kinda reassess yourself as to what you’re doing – because you realize that life is so impermanent. So, you wanna do the best you can while you’re here, to say whatever the fuck it is you wanna say. Express yourself.”

Michael Goldberg, a former Rolling Stone Senior Writer and founder of the original Addicted To Noise online magazine, is author of three rock & roll novels including 2016’s Untitled.

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DAY OF THE TRIFFID

The Triffids, 1987.

sadly never happened as the singer’s health failed).

Five years later, McComb was gone. And nearly a decade later, Alley started work on a documentary about his life, Love in Bright Landscapes.

David McComb, 1987. Photo

by Andrew Catlin.

It’s taken 13 years to make it to the big screen, but Jonathan Alley’s David McComb documentary is worth the wait. - By Jeff Jenkins 54

J

onathan Alley will never forget the first time he was exposed to the work of David McComb. He was 16 and living in Wellington, New Zealand. It was a Sunday night, he was watching the music show Radio with Pictures, and they played the video for The Triffids’ ‘Bury Me Deep In Love’. “They had this richness to them, this innate sense of melody, and it felt very European,” Alley recalls. “I was quite surprised to find out they were Australian.”

Seven years later, Alley found himself in Melbourne, interviewing David McComb at Triple R about his first solo album, Love of Will. It didn’t go well. McComb was 45 minutes late and Alley had yet to hear the album – the record company had failed to deliver a copy. Thrown, Alley fumbled his way through the interview. They ended up chatting about Al Green and hip hop and McComb gave him the scoop that he was putting the band back together (a tour that

McComb’s life had all the ingredients for a ripping rock doco – international record deals, drug and alcohol abuse, a heart transplant, mysterious friends, a car accident and an untimely death (McComb died in 1999, aged 36). But Alley eschews the Behind The Music shock/horror approach, preferring to capture McComb’s art and beauty while also maintaining the mystery.

The result is a music documentary masterpiece.

Love in Bright Landscapes plays like a Triffids album. Sure, there are direct pop moments that hit you right in the heart, but Alley also allows the work to breathe, with the story gently washing over the viewer.

After considering “Save What You Can” and “Lonely Stretch”, the documentary takes its title from The Triffids’ first compilation, though the title of their second, Australian Melodrama, might also have been appropriate, as it took Alley a long time – 13 years, in fact – to realise his vision.

He knew what he didn’t want – “a by-thenumbers rock doc, with talking heads and chin-stroking musicians sitting behind a mixing desk, before we cut to Bono and his 2 cents”.

Instead, he has brought McComb’s work to life, via home movies, interviews with his late parents, as well as McComb’s lyrics, poetry and letters, read by Man Booker Prizewinning novelist DBC Pierre (who says, “the music of The Triffids haunts me”).

“I wanted to elevate the emotive elements of his story, beyond the music world’s dusty broom closet of yesterday’s stories,” Alley explained following the world premiere in McComb’s hometown of Perth. “I wanted to make him present again.”

For Alley, McComb’s music is timeless and “ever-evolving”, affecting the listener in different ways at different stages in their life, like the work of Dylan and Leonard Cohen.

As Paul Kelly notes, McComb’s songs leave a lasting impression. “You can see them, feel them and smell them.”

Devoting so much of his life to this project has clearly affected Alley. “I literally hear his voice every day.” But it’s been a labour of love. “There is a lot of goodwill and generosity in the wider Triffids family. They are really decent people, which speaks volumes about David.”

Alley is excited that people might discover McComb’s work via the documentary.

Though acclaimed in the UK – appearing twice on the cover of NME – The Triffids never became household names, like Chisel or INXS. As the documentary notes, they might have been too Australian for the rest of the world and too worldly for Australia.

In some ways it’s a tragic tale. “I discovered that someone who was so driven and so determined actually ended up getting quite lost. And he didn’t really have the tools to deal with that, which is quite saddening.”

“Endings, even sudden deaths, are never as final as they seem,” wrote the late Niall Lucy – who is featured in the documentary – in Vagabond Holes, the 2009 book about McComb and The Triffids. “When something intrigues us – a life, a work of art – it goes on intriguing us.”

Alley ponders what David McComb would be doing today: definitely making music, maybe writing screenplays and novels. “There were so many things he could have done. And that’s another element of the tragedy.”

Love in Bright Landscapes screens at Brisbane International Film Festival 2021, then Palace Cinemas Brisbane (James St) and Palace Nova Adelaide (Eastend) from November 4.

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SUBURBAN SONGBOOK An extract from the chapter on ‘The Dismissal,’ which looks at the end of the era of Australian music’s coming-of-age in the mid-70s.

By Clinton Walker

T

he stumbling block for songwriters was still albums. In the early 70s, many a folkie, many an act, might have had one great song in them, maybe a couple, and they were now able to push through with those songs, but few of them had a great album in them, and fewer still a string of albums, a real body of work. So many one-hit-wonders, still. How good, for instance, is 1971’s ‘Golden Miles’, by Healing Force? But this was a band that couldn’t hold a line-up together for more than six months, didn’t last longer than a year or so, let alone produce a decent single album. Like Blackfeather and so many of the folkies.

How good is Blackfeather’s ‘Seasons of Change’? So good it sustained another popular version, by Fraternity, at the same time in 1971! But the parent album it propelled into the Top 10, At the Mountains of Madness, was patchy, and by the time Blackfeather came to follow it up in 1972, songwriter/ guitarist John Robinson had left the band and it had a new line-up and a totally new (piano-driven) sound, and had so run out of songwriting ideas that it put out a version of Jerry Lee Lewis’s old rock’n’roll standard ‘Boppin’ the Blues’ – and it went to Number One! Festival resorted to that old cheapskate fallback, a live album, and as almost bizarre as it sounded (meant as a compliment), it lacked the songs.

The La De Das suffered similarly. ‘Gonna See My Baby Tonight’ was a terrific song which hit just outside the Top 10 in ’71, but the band struggled to follow it up. Their next biggest hit, in 1974, was a Chuck Berry cover, ‘Too Pooped to Pop’. It was a great version, but still it was a Chuck Berry song. In 1974!

It’s really only the heavy-hitter albums from the early 70s that still stand up, I think – Chain’s Toward the Blues, the first couple of Daddy Cool albums, Company Caine’s Product of a Broken Reality, The Masters Apprentices’ matching pair from Abbey Road, Choice Cuts and Toast to Panama Red, the first two Spectrum albums, certainly Country Radio Live, and the surf film soundtracks Morning of the Earth and Sea of Joy, even Stone. Jeannie Lewis’s Free Fall through Featherless Flight. But beyond those, it’s thin running. I retain a great fondness for Digby Richards’ Harlequin, and it’s a pretty good album.

Age of Mouse was great at best, but it suffered for stretching too far into a double album, and for an awful cover and an awful title. I have other personal favorites I still enjoy, like Band of Light’s Total Union, or MacKenzie Theory’s Out of the Blue, the La De Das’ Rock’n’Roll Sandwich, but I wonder if that’s nostalgia as much as anything.

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You had to be there, and I was, but the real reason I still enjoy those albums is because they sound so great. Even when the material sometimes palls, the sound and the groove cuts through.

“It was [Mushroom founder Michael] Gudinksi’s great grace,” Lobby Loyde told me in 2000, “that he formed a label to record Chain, and then had the guts to record MacKenzie Theory and people like that.

That’s what the industry needed, nobody was doing it, someone had to, and Phil Jacobsen too, he was the reason that Spectrum and guys like that got recorded, because he pushed and pushed and EMI kind of saw the light, eventually. But it was a bit late in many ways for the industry, because it had missed years of great albums. But I guess it’s an evolving scene. I mean... we were slow to evolve in this country.”

And then of course there’s Lobby himself. The Coloured Balls were without doubt the missing link between the Aztecs and AC/DC, and Lobby, who founded the band after leaving the Aztecs, is rightfully revered as the GODfather of guitar-grunge in this country. But as sacrilegious as it may be to say, I think Ball Power, the band’s 1973 debut album, is overrated. I know, I know, it was marking a return to stripped-back, basic, ummm, ballsy rock’n’roll at a time when so many other bands were crawling up their arses; and I know it might be seen as something of a precursor to punk, in other words, Ball Power as our Raw Power. But the mitigating factors are too many, for

me. I think the real parallel for the Coloured Balls isn’t pre-punk but the contemporaneous cosmic boogie of British bands like Hawkwind and The Pink Fairies from the Notting Hill/free festival scene. I think Ball Power suffers for a lack of good songs, and a surfeit of what’s too much like 12-bar bluesy boogie – and if punk did away with anything, it was rock’s last vestiges of the boogie-blues. No blues licks, as was always one of Lou Reed’s few rules. And just sonically: Toward the Blues, Rock’n’Roll Sandwich and Total Union are all about the boogie, but a) no-one’s claiming punk prescience for them, and b) they had a crunching dynamic range that Ball Power doesn’t.

“I had the songs racing through my mind,” Lobby told me in 2000, “when I tried to convince the Aztecs to play harder, faster, edgy shorter songs. But it wasn’t their thing because they were progressing further and further into the pub scene. I just had a head full of songs and I had to do something with them.” But my personal carping makes no difference to the fact that the Coloured Balls, in a way, were connected directly to a quite particular zeitgeist. Lobby always demurred about them being a “sharpie band”, but there was something about their attack – and that word is deliberately chosen and meant in terms of both sound and vision – that the sharpie gangs in Melbourne responded to, to the extent that they adopted the band as their own.

Sharpies, of course, were the most distinct and unique Australian youth sub-culture, or street gang/s, since the bodgies and widgies in the 50s. Excluded suburban boys – and girls – who hated hippies as much as they hated the establishment, the cops, their jobs and their parents, the sharpies of Melbourne (for they were almost exclusively a Melbourne phenomenon) were a symptom of shifting mores in Australian social life in the mid-70s. The 1974 oil crisis forced a contraction of the global economy for virtually the first time since World War II, and there was a change of mood in Australia and around the world. The optimism of the previous, admittedly turbulent, two years of Gough Whitlam’s government was fading, and the last year of Labor rule was riven by such scandal, mismanagement, unemployment and industrial unrest that it led almost inevitably to Whitlam’s sacking in November 1975. For virtually the first time since World War II, young Australians faced an uncertain future.

But Lobby, I think, was disingenuous in his demurral of a direct link between his band and these disaffected kids. The Balls didn’t have to sport the exact same haircuts, did they? The sharps loved Slade, The Sweet, Suzi Quatro and David Bowie when he wasn’t being too poofy, and they loved Thorpie but even more than Thorpie they loved Lobby and his Balls: the volume, the aggression, the songs like ‘Flash’ and ‘Devil’s Disciple’ that gave voice to a violence that was ultimately, of course, impotent.

But then for every reading of a socio-economic phenomenon there is a flipside; for every sharpie there were dozens of hippies. In 1973, the famous first Aquarius festival was held in the lush northern rivers rainforests around Nimbin, around the same time the sharpies were all chanting “Suck more piss” to the tune of the Aztecs at Sunbury – so maybe do these two subcultural moments cancel each other out?

But for me, and here I admit again to personal prejudices, it was like a variation on that old question, Why does the devil have all the good music? Moronic thugs the sharpies may have been, but their taste in music and clobber left the bedraggled hippies sitting cross-legged in the dirt listening to some interminable guitar solo or moaning folkie.

The sharpies loved AC/DC and Skyhooks too when they came along, but the sharps were like the dinosaurs in the way they seemed so abruptly extinct by about 1977; either dead, gone straight or gone to jail, or morphed into skinheads or punks.

As for Lobby and the Balls, the non-hit single ‘Flash’ has the magic, the perfect soundtrack to blast out of an 8-Track tape machine in a speeding Chrysler Valiant Charger muscle car on a highway to hell or nirvana, whichever comes first… But then it’s perhaps too often forgotten that Lobby’s magnum opus ‘GOD’ was always in and out of the Balls’ live set, and the band’s version of it from Sunbury 1973, on the album Summer Jam, is probably the definitive recording of a song performed and recorded often…>>> 57

>>> ‘GOD’ was an epic, improvised instrumental – its title an acronym for either Guitar Overdose or Guitar Overdrive – like the Atlantics’ ‘Bombora’ on acid and launched into the stratosphere. Like an answer to the question ‘The Real Thing’ posed, it was the unreal thing, and an object illustration of how sometimes a wordless song can say so much more than any amount of lyrics. Sprawling and quicksilver, ‘GOD’ was a song you could never quite put your finger on and that was its beauty. That was Lobby’s beauty too – that he never did find god, apart from always striving for the godhead of musical transcendence.

To use that worst of all possible clichés, ‘GOD’ was a journey rather than the destination – an electric power-surge into the uncertain tomorrow.

Max Merritt and the Meteors had signaled their intentions as far back as 1971 when they cut a cover of the song ‘Hello LA, Goodbye Birmingham’: They were by that time based in the UK, but increasingly setting their sights on the American market. In 1975, when they finally scored their biggest ever hit, ‘Slipping Away’, after having signed to new American label Arista and tailored a much smoother country-soul sound, it went to #2 in Australia, and in doing so at around the same time as Whitlam’s dismissal, it seemed to capture something of the national mood.

The Vietnam War was over, more or less – at least for Australia – but Whitlam’s sacking felt like a real end of hope. Former Easybeat Stevie Wright’s epic ‘Evie (Parts 1, 2 & 3)’ from 1974 had a similarly elegiac quality as ‘Slipping Away’. Three songs in one, as the title suggests, ‘Evie’ was an indication of the overabundance of talent in the Vanda/ Young team that wrote and produced it for the wayward Wright.

Most other artists would have spread it out for maximum yield over three releases. But ‘Evie’ rolled it all into a single eleven-minute opus, a monumental triptych, and again, like ‘The Real Thing’, it was an indication of its inexorability that it got any airplay at all on radio that was fast becoming strictly formatted. But it did, and it became a Number One. Almost never again would commercial radio in Australia allow such a transgression. The song faded on the refrain “Before I know it I’m losing you, losing you...”

Stevie Wright went on to release another fairly respectable solo album – Black-Eyed Bruiser, which yielded two strong singles, the title track and ‘Hard Road’ (a song that Rod Stewart would cover) – but then he descended deeper into heroin-addiction hell. His lot got even worse, as is well-documented, when he underwent deep sleep therapy at the Chelmsford clinic that became so controversial. He was one of Australian music’s saddest losses.

The story behind ‘Slipping Away’ is not just the proverbial anatomy of a hit, it also plots the odyssey of a man and a band who were enacting their own song’s sentiment and slipping away at the very moment they were finally about to grasp the prize, after a near two-decade campaign that had claimed too many casualties. There are almost no overnight sensations even among one-hit-wonders. When I spoke to Merritt at length in 2001, he amiably shrugged off the one-hit tag because, he told me, one is better than none, and #2 is better than #3!

It takes a lot of hard-won wisdom to be able to do that.

The Mighty Max Merritt got that title because he was always one of, if not THE most soulful vocalist on the Australian scene in the 1960s.

When Max and Billy Thorpe were both having hits with covers of the same American R&B songs, Max had the voice. Even after suffering a terrible car accident in 1967 that cost him his right eye, Max and band bounced back to release a blistering and very successful Memphis soul-style self-titled third album in 1970, which spawned the hit single – yet another cover – ‘Western Union Man’. It was big.

But Max wanted to hit with a song of his own. His writing was going in a softer direction, away from the sound of the “Memphis Meteors” and towards country-soul, or blue-eyed soul, pre- yacht rock. He 58

moved to London. He would have been better off in LA. “I didn’t actually want to go to the UK,” he told me. “I would have preferred to go to the States because I thought the music we were doing was more, you know, suited to the States.” It was the same syndrome that Brian Cadd complained he suffered for. “But we were told at the time that it was too hard to get in.”

The band couldn’t get arrested in the UK. But Max had this demo.

It was for ‘Slipping Away’. He’d sat on it at first because he didn’t he didn’t think it suited the hard-edged Memphis Meteors. But as the band’s fortunes waned from bad to worse – including their manager deserting them and with all the money – it was this demo that won Max a deal through the new London office of American record man Clive Davis’s new label Arista. ‘Slipping Away’ was a haunting song, that fired off the unlikely source, as Max has always been ready to admit, the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’.

When it was lifted as the second single off the album A Little Easier, it started racing up the charts in Australia and New Zealand. Its call-andresponse vocal part had an eeriness that verged on the paranoid, a not

uncommon emotion of the era, and the track got its hooks in and the listener was dust. Max initially had no idea that all this action was going on back in his home territory, too busy as the Meteors got caught up in even more industry crossfire that left them, again, out in the cold.

Eventually Max made it to America, and there, in LA in the late 70s, he was reunited in the “gumnut mafia” with old mates like Billy Thorpe and Brian Cadd, and he recorded a couple of solo albums for Polydor.

Yet even as ‘Slipping Away’ entrenched itself as a timeless classic, Max, again, in the here-and-now of showbusiness, couldn’t get arrested, and again went back to slinging cement.

“When I came back [to Australia] a little later, you had Skyhooks and all those other people, and that was very different from what was going on in England, you know. What had happened in the meantime was that Australia had started to get a sense of itself, was getting its own thing going, you know. It was no longer copying Americans or English people.”

But ultimately it’s those A-Sides and B-Sides isn’t it? Like sharpies and hippies. For every song like ‘Slipping Away’ that seems to capture

something of the zeitgeist, another pops up to contradict it. For every spin of ‘Slipping Away’ or other endings-songs like ‘Evie’, or Chain’s super-funky ‘Gonna Miss You, Babe’, or the Angels’ ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again?’ (however much, as a song, it takes from Status Quo’s ‘Lonely Night’, and it takes practically everything), there was a song like Renee Geyer’s quiet-storm standard ‘Heading in the Right Direction’ (written by Mark Punch), or Billy Thorpe’s ‘It’s Almost Summer’, itself a proto yacht-rock anthem, even AC/DC’s ‘Jailbreak’, or Lobby Loyde’s ‘GOD’. These songs, obviously, encapsulate an optimistic view of the immediate future; but it was a future in which, perhaps, private lives and public policy would be the twain which do not meet. In the Australia of the second half of the 70s, life wasn’t meant to be easy (and it wasn’t) – but then there was always Countdown waiting in the wings with its glam stars and their catchy odes to the suburban teenage wastelands. Now they were the ones who seemed to offer some sort of salve or escape valve.

Suburban Songbook is available at clintonwalker.com.au 59

By Ian McFarlane

BEAT OF THE STREET

In The Rhythm Diaries – Celebrated Australian percussionist Greg Sheehan has compiled his visionary rhythmic systems, artworks, and life stories into a unique handbook for creatives.

T

he rhythm – The beat – The pulse – The tempo – The measure – The accent – The swing... All life is about rhythm, finding a pattern in nature, the way you walk, a train traversing a crossing. It can be energetic or calming, complex or simple, repetitive or improvisational, hypnotic or spiritual. Indeed, most of music wouldn’t exist without a foundation in rhythm.

Drummer / teacher / performer Greg Sheehan has been immersed in rhythm his whole life. As with all drummers, it’s his raison d’être. Sheehan began working professionally as a teenager, going back to early ’70s bands such as Blackfeather and MacKenzie Theory. His resume extends to working with the likes of Richard Clapton, composer Nigel Westlake, Billy Cobham, Kev Carmody, The Black Arm Band (with Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter), Emma Donovan, Mamadou Diabaté, Alex Acuna, Paul Kelly, Ollie McGill and Harry James Angus from The Cat Empire and dozens more.

He has now taken his work and obsession to a logical place by writing a book on the subject, The Rhythm Diaries. Rather than reinvent the dialogue, I’ll take some of the promotional material to describe what’s on offer. His biography states: “Greg Sheehan, one of Australia’s most beloved and innovative percussionists, has dedicated a lifetime to performing, teaching and passionately exploring diverse musical forms. Over several decades, he has developed his own distinct rhythmic language, which has been enthusiastically embraced by a growing legion of musicians, artists and educators alike. Greg uses numbers and a distinctive graphic style as key tools for creation, practice, and

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translation between different styles and traditions. Centred around rhythm, his expertise branches into areas such as composition, melodic sequencing, and development of phrasing and special techniques that can be easily adapted to any instrument. His methods are equally brilliant as a fun way to engage children in high-level learning through social, mathematic and musical play, and has also been integrated as a choreographic device by professional dancers in several countries.”

The Rhythm Diaries of Greg Sheehan: • Containing over 300 pages filled with original graphic music charts, techniques, games, and adaptive templates The Rhythm Diaries is an invaluable resource for fun and learning – Decades of performance and education experience are presented in a format that offers as much to seasoned professionals as to kids, beginners, and hobbyists.

• “The Rhythm Diaries serves as a reference and an invaluable tool for musicians and practitioners of music from all disciplines.” – Nigel Westlake (Hon) D Mus, Composer, Conductor.

• “If your curiosity is a boat, then the numbers are like the ocean. The numbers aren’t just numbers— beneath them lies the music which pulses and endlessly regenerates itself into the patterns of nature.

— Harry James Angus, Composer, Singer, Multi-instrumentalist, The Cat Empire.

As well as a number of key contributors, he’s been assisted along the way predominantly

by Editor and co-compiler Naomi Jean. I hadn’t known anything about Jean but her career is likewise significant: “Naomi Jean is a nomadic polymath, who sings, plays multiple instruments, composes, teaches, and, in certain very special cases, edits books. She has played in folk duos, jazz ensembles, ambient, alt-rock, electronic, experimental pop and avant-garde bands; built and composed for a microtonal instrumentarium in a French circus, sung with a traditional Bulgarian women’s choir, joined a gamelan orchestra, and many other wonderful projects throughout Australia, Europe, UK, U.S.A., and India. She is proud to have been a member of Melbourne’s ‘genre-fluid’ Twelve Tone Diamonds. In her band, Alice Orchestra, Naomi gathers musicians to play layered, semi-improvised music. She also works with dance companies and installations focusing on immersive experiences and public participation.”

Equally, The Rhythm Diaries is immersive reading. Sheehan’s patterns and use of rhythms are challenging but ultimately satisfying for the dedicated percussionist.

I settled in for a lengthy discussion with Sheehan about his work and new book.

Congratulations on the book Greg, it’s a great achievement. Before we get onto that, I wanted to ask you about your career. Your first major band was Blackfeather, can you tell me about that?

I joined Blackfeather in 1972, when I was 17.

They asked me to audition for them, so I did a gig with them in Sydney as the audition with no rehearsal. >>> 61

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>>> After that they said would you like to join the band because we are moving to Melbourne the next day. So, with no notice, I moved to Melbourne. Then they had the hit ‘Boppin’ The Blues’. The famous and wonderful guitar player John Robinson wasn’t in the band by then, so it was singer Neale Johns, Paul ‘Dog’ Wylde, he played the famous piano riff on that song, Warren Ward on bass and myself on drums. That single was #1 on the charts for 11 weeks which was fantastic. I toured with them for a year but then Neale decided to get a whole new band together.

You toured with Mackenzie Theory; Aztec Records have recently reissued the album Bon Voyage (1974) on CD. Yes, it was incredible touring with MacKenzie Theory. Rob MacKenzie (guitar) and Cleis Pearce (electric viola) were amazing people to work with. Rob was very eccentric; I learned a lot from him about music.

I see you worked with Lene Lovich in the UK. After Rob and Cleis broke up the band in 1974, they moved to London. I joined them a year later. We auditioned bass players, but we couldn’t find anybody to match our style, we hadn’t realised it was so Australian. But during that time we literally auditioned 80 bass players and we got to know everyone on the scene in London, lots of really good players. Through one of these bass players I was introduced to Lene. I did one tour with her which was enormous fun. She had hits in the New Wave era but I wasn’t on any of that, I’d come back to Australia by that stage.

She was quite an eccentric performer, a great lass. Lene and Les Chappell, the guitarist/ songwriter, were a couple. They were really nice people, really lovely to work with.

Back in Australia you worked with Richard Clapton. You and Cleis played on his Goodbye Tiger album, an absolute classic album. What was it like to tour with Richard? He was really hitting his stride.

I think it’s Richard’s best album. People just loved the group. It was great to have Cleis in the band too, because we’d had that history of playing. He’s an amazing song writer so it was really lovely to play those songs. I only did one tour before I moved onto other stuff.

Also, with Cleis you had the Magic Puddin’ Trio, what was that about?

That was with Nigel Westlake, who’s gone on to be a very highly regarded Australian composer (Ed note: perhaps best known for his award-winning soundtrack score for the film Babe). He saw Cleis and I playing in a band and at that stage he was only in his late teens, and he just loved the energy and style of playing so he formed The Magic Puddin’ Band. That had about five classical musicians, young classical players and then five rock and jazz musicians. So, the trio was just a smaller version that was easy to tour with. I’ve kept in touch with Nigel all these years and he wrote the Foreword to my book.

I have the Cathie O’Sullivan album Summerhaze (1987) that you and Cleis play on.

Isn’t it a beautiful album. Cathie has this unique way of finding poems and putting them to music. That was a fantastic band. We had the wonderful bass player Steve Elphick.

He ended up playing in a lot of great jazz bands over the years in Sydney. That was a beautiful line up. We had a percussionist as well.

Getting to the book, I like the Visual notation you’ve come up with. If we think of traditional Western notation with the staves, bars etc, what do you have to offer here? You write “You’ll discover a tapestry of ideas and approaches and techniques”.

What does that mean?

Basically, I was never taught to read Western notation, and I’ve gotten by as a session drummer because often you have to read notation. Through developing this system, which is basically combinations of numbers, I then went further with that and thought if you’ve got a chart of numbers then these numbers could be represented by symbols.

So, it’s literally graphic design. I’d been looking at alternative ways of writing music and with the numbers it’s not like algebra, it can be very simple. Back in the late ’70s I’d asked a student of Indian music how they would approach rhythm. He told me about the number system they use and I took that number seed of his answer and ran with that and eventually developed my own system.

It’s got a very Western logic about it. I’ve played with a lot of great Indian musicians and they actually say my number system is clearly different from the way Indian musicians approach it, but the thing we have in common is numbers.

You could say I have an obsession with numbers, I see numbers everywhere. When I first started to teach way back in the ’70s, I thought ‘well, what do we have in common in this multi-cultural country?’ and I thought ‘number’ is a great thing. We know what time of day, how many people, how much money, phone numbers, how many flower petals etc. I literally started out working with numbers with my students and they seemed to get it really well. Even if I am teaching little kids at school using very simple numbers, sometimes that will be represented with pieces of fruit and they can even get into polyrhythms. This book can be for kids or it could be for some of the best musicians in the world, it offers that kind of broad spectrum.

What do you see as the advantages of your numbers system?

Before I got into looking at rhythms through number combinations, I maybe had a rhythmical alphabet of 26 but now with numbers my alphabet has increased 10,000fold. You can have one series of numbers, say 16 numbers with four of the same, four of the same, four of the same, four of the same and

then there can literally be hundreds of layers or combinations for those numbers.

As a practice tool it really improved my technique. It’s really helped a lot of the students I’ve had over the years. It can also be a compositional tool. If a band leader says, ‘I’ve got a song in 7/8’, I can offer probably 400 different ways of playing that 7/8 through just practising and looking at the number combinations.

You’re not advocating your system to take over the traditional notation, are you?

Musicians are still going to use that?

For sure. It’s just an alternative method, you could say in some ways it doesn’t have the articulation that Western notation has. In saying that you can have a graphic design, and I’ve come up with my Diamond design which is our band chart. You just have to know what the graphics represent in numbers and to know which way to go through the designs. That’s one of the beauties of it. We can have one design or one series of numbers on a page and that can be representative of a piece that might go for 20 minutes.

In the chapter called Playing With Numbers, I can see that the phrasing and pulses are still there so that’s always going to be the defining thing, isn’t it?

Yes, of course. A lot of the great rhythms, like Cuban rhythms for example, even though they don’t use numbers generally from a technical point in their music, all of those rhythms can be broken down into ratios of numbers. A classic Cuban rhythm, which is 4/4 in 16 beats, is the beautiful ratio of seven and nine (Greg demonstrates the rhythm vocally). The Clavé, the Afro 12/8, for example is another perfect ratio of five and seven or seven and five, so it’s in a lot of traditional music if you look at it that way. One of the benefits for me, I can understand African music through my own way of looking at the number combinations.

I’ve actually had some great jams with African musicians and they can see how I’ve understood their music. How it’s put together and I can meet them from my own cultural point of view and that’s from me understanding their rhythm through numbers.

You mentioned the Clavé which in rock terms is basically known as the ‘Bo Diddley beat’ (‘Shave and a haircut - two bits!’).

Yeah, that’s right.

The story is that Bo Diddley always said if he had have been able to copyright that beat he would have been a multimillionaire, but you can’t copyright a beat or a rhythm can you?

No, I don’t think so. That was a fantastic beat. He got that more from the New Orleans street bands.

So, nothing against Bo, because he was a great character, musician, player and song

writer, but I wonder if he understood he didn’t come up with the actual rhythm. A million songs have been built around that beat. (Bo has been quoted as saying: “I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob.”)

As you were speaking, I’ve just written out the numbers for that, 3-3-4 – 2-4 and that goes for 16 beats. It won’t transfer for the

magazine but I’ll show you what it sounds like with numbers (demonstrates the beat vocally) da-da-da – da-da. That just gives you an idea how simple it is to put the numbers into the rhythm.

With your Number Diamonds - Reading and Playing with Diamonds (Page 23) there’s the 5-5-6, 5-6-5, 6-5-5 rhythm and you’ve got that in diagonals, horizontals and verticals. How does that work? >>> 63

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>>> Right, that is just showing different Diamonds. It can be a matter of adjustment.

125mm ways you can go through the Diamonds. In A lot of the musicians who have grown up that Diamond there are three lines of music on Western notation will get a Diamond idea and each line is 16 beats, which you can then write it out in Western notation which SOME OF YOUR say is 4/4 but there’s actually 84 different I think is a great way of doing it. Ollie and I permutations through each of those had done some duets at festivals where I’m diamonds. Each diagonal is showing two playing percussion and he’s playing acoustic ways you can read it. It’s just showing there piano. We’d write a composition and one of all time interpreted brilliantly by are 84 different ways of playing that rhythm. of his is in the book. There are about 30 some of your favourite musicians different musicians who have added things.

It can be simple but you do get into more 250mm complex rhythms, involving triangle, I think it’s completely open to whatever way square and circle patterns. you want to present it. People who get the book will be versed in Western notation so What I do with the students or people I seeing something like Ollie’s piece may lead mentor, the first thing I say is just get used them into discovering the Diamonds and to phrasing and playing odd numbers and from there just work with numbers. The aim even numbers. A lot of the time we know is to encourage people. how to play a four and a six, but you can also play fives and sevens and nines. Once they When The Cat Empire were just starting to 125mm get that idea of being able to easily play the hit it big, they came to Byron Bay and were five beat or the seven or the nine, then they introduced to me. I was living up there at can actually understand how to play the the time so every time they came to Byron Diamonds. we’d go down to the beach and practice Later on, in the book you talk about because they wanted to learn the system. composing with percussion and you talk Eventually it came into their music in various about body percussion as one way. ways. Harry James Angus, he’s got a piece in there which is a horn part they used in one Body percussion is one way of learning about of their songs, based on a Diamond. So, it’s odd timings. Way back when I started using wonderful to hear these bands who are a numbers, I thought where do we start and I different generation from me, bringing the thought let’s start without instruments. I was teaching drama groups so we’d start with Diamonds into their music.

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The Rythm Diaries - Going Bananas: A Fruity Diamond

A notable short-lived four-piece band from Los Angeles in 1988 is remembered in an archival release. By Brian Wise

S

uccess in rock ‘n’ roll is often about being in the right place at the right time and for a brief while in Los Angeles back in 1988 that could have been true for a teenage Luther Russell and his friends, who included Jakob Dylan, Tobi Miller and Aaron Brooks in their band The Bootheels. (Get the Bob Dylan reference?).

In retrospect you might think that the outfit was destined for something big. But the short-lived band, which was to be more of an incubator, played just a couple of gigs and recorded some demo tapes before breaking up.

In fact, all the members went on to greater things. Front man, songwriter and bassist Russell would form The Freewheelers, who signed to Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, become a producer and later work with Jody Stephens in Those Pretty Wrongs (who visited Australia a few years back). Jakob Dylan headed off to art school in New York before returning to form The Wallflowers with Miller, who became its guitarist.

Drummer Brooks would go on to work with Moby, Lana Del Rey, and others.

Luckily, Russell had the technical nous, even in his teenage years, to be able to get 66

a reasonable quality cassette recording from a garage session that the band did.

Those recordings are now available on the compilation, 1988: The Original Demos (released on Omnivore).

After leaving school Russell decided to avoid going to college and set off from northern California with a cousin to visit Los Angeles where his grandmother lived. He had had a car accident and a friend had been killed in a motorcycle crash so he decided that he needed a change of scenery for a while. It was when he visited a music shop to buy a guitar string that he bumped into Tobi Miller.

“He said, ‘Do you like The Replacements?,” recalls Russell of his first meeting with Miller.

“I said, ‘Yeah.’ That was a little strange. I was just in utter shock that anyone even asked me that. We exchanged numbers and we got together before I was to go back up and when we did actually get together while I was visiting my old hometown, he said, ‘Do you mind if we stop by the airport? I’ve got to pick up a friend’.”

“I’d literally just met this guy, the first time I’d hung out with him,” continues Russell. “On the way there he said, ‘My friend, just full disclosure, is Bob Dylan’s son.’ I said, ‘Okay,

that’s interesting.’ We picked him up, we took him back to his place and kind of messed around. I played one of his guitars and it was all kind of heady.”

Russell determined that he would move to LA permanently with Miller helping him to move. Then Luther discovered that one of his mother’s old school friends had a garage there that he could rent for $100 a month.

It also just so happened that the son of the owner was Aaron Brooks, who played drums.

“So, Tobi and Aaron and I started jamming,” explains Russell. “Jake kind of sniffed around, wanted to join, and the next thing you knew, the four of us were playing. We clicked pretty instantly. Anyone who likes The Replacements is instantly going to click with other people. You know how it works.”

This was LA, in the late ‘80s with the glam metal and alternative scenes in full swing.

Jakob Dylan recently spoke to Rhythms about how much he admired many of the bands of that era: the Blasters, X and Los Lobos and others.

“I moved there in the end of ‘87, I suppose all that was going on,” recalls Russell. “I was, unfortunately, a little too young to be able to go check out anything, but it was certainly

happening. You’d see the advertisements.

I mean, The Gun Club would be playing in Chinatown.

“At the time It didn’t even dawn on me that I could even go see them. I ended up playing in a couple of these clubs at the same time that they were playing, alternating with bands like that. I got to know some of these folks, but the glam scene was in full flower at that point. I mean, on a Friday or Saturday night if you drove down Sunset Boulevard in front of The Roxy there would just be swarms of kids in spandex and teased hair. It was so wild. All those clubs were, what we call, pay-to-play. They gave you a finite amount of tickets and you had to sell them in advance of the show. It was a bit of scam. It felt like you couldn’t give them away.”

The Bootheels ended up playing just two gigs during their shortlived existence, including the legendary Troubadour.

“We played the Troubadour,” agrees Russell. “We played Madame Wong’s West. (Now, there’s a Madame Wong’s East).

It was a legendary punk club. I ended up playing that club a lot more with my subsequent band, The 45s, which I formed with Tobi after The Bootheels.

“But those were the only two gigs that we did. What we primarily did was rehearse and they were open rehearsals that we would invite our friends to and all their school friends, because Tobi and Jake were still in high school. What ended up happening was it got out of hand and the cops would have to come all the time. So, we had loads of fans but practically none of them could get into the clubs which were 18 and over.”

The band’s rehearsals took place at Miller’s parents’ house in Beverly Hills with Russell setting up his four-track cassette recorder to document some of the jams.

“What you’re hearing is really the recording I made when I was 17 of the band,” he explains of the now-released demo recordings, “which holds up not that badly, in the sense of I didn’t really know what I was doing. I don’t even recall quite how I was able to do it but I’m fairly certain we cut the band live and then I figured out a way of mixing it down and overdubbing the vocals and a few guitar solos.”

I guess it’s appropriate that the band didn’t achieve success having invoked The Replacements - one of the greatest bands of all time never to have achieved wider success - as an inspiration.

“I saw The Replacements,” says Russell. “I’d actually seen a couple shows before I moved

down - I saw The Replacements, I saw R.E.M. I had an idea of what kind of places they were filling or not filling. I saw them in a little club in San Francisco. I was 16, 17. I saw Tom Waits. So, I’d kind of gauged what these audiences were. The Replacements didn’t appear, to me, to have a huge audience, so it wasn’t like aiming for the stars.”

“I saw them two other times, I think in ‘89 and then ‘91,” he continues on The

“It was my first real studio experience, but it blew my mind.

I was like, ‘We sound that good’?”

“We didn’t have time to be angry at the band,” laughs Russell.

“What basically happened was we made those recordings, we did have an ill-fated trip to the studio, which actually turned out to be Gold Star. Kind of a very rundown Gold Star.

But the session didn’t work out, there were technical problems, it was sounding amazing, but there were technical problems, and that was the last time we played together. Jake did go off to art school. Tobi and I licked our wounds and formed another band, and Aaron ended up joining with Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses. Aaron was a bit older than us and he immediately got gigs, because he was just such a good drummer. That three or four months though, in my mind, feels sort of elongated.”

There’s a song on the demo sessions called ‘The Deal’ but were they ever offered any sort of a record deal?

“I was reminded of a lot of things that I’d completely forgot,” says Russell, mentioning the oral history that accompanies the demos sessions release, “one of which was that, apparently, Elektra was sniffing around, somehow, through a friend of a friend.

Maybe that’s what spurred us to do the tape. I think the tape was meant to be a proper demo to give to record companies. But it was not to be because the tape had issues. It was a shame, because it was definitely the first time, we did do the demos, but it was the first time we could hear our sound in a proper studio coming back. I just remember being flabbergasted. Number One, it was my first real studio experience, but it blew my mind. I was like, ‘We sound that good’?”

Replacements. “And I did see the reunion show at the Palladium and they’d never sounded better than the reunion shows - to me. I mean, they were great when I saw them live. They were a little off kilter, but I couldn’t believe how good Paul Westerberg sounded on these reunion shows. I remember turning to my friend and saying, ‘He literally sounds 18.’ Usually guys my age and older, I mean, what are the chances that you would keep your set of pipes? It doesn’t make sense. He smoked cigars. His voice sounded incredible when I saw them and it was awesome seeing them as a kid, too. It was really inspiring.”

Unlike their idols The Replacements, The Bootheels, didn’t break up in a blaze of acrimony on stage in front of its largest ever crowd. Rather, the Bootheels went their own ways when other options came up.

1988: The Original Demos is available through Omnivore.

67

JACK POT

By Martin Jones

How does an independent Sydney-based singer-songwriter come to record his fifth album, Daniel, in a recording studio in Nashville intriguingly named Welcome to 1979 backed by some of that city’s crack session players?

Jack Nolan tells all to Michael Smith.

“I’d been to Nashville to finish my previous record, Our Waverley Star, which I’d begun in Sydney at Electric Avenue,” Nolan explains. “It had been a suggestion from a producer friend of mine to go to the States and I’d loved the whole idea of America and finishing records there. As much as I love Australia and all my musician friends, the studios here, once I’d been there and saw how that town worked, I knew that I wanted to go back.

“Travis New, who’s Australian but is married to an American, was living in Nashville and trying his hardest to work there – it’s very difficult, so many musicians there – but he moved back with his family and we’d been doing some gigs and I mentioned to him that I was definitely going to go back to Nashville and do another record mentioned Justin Weaver, who’s the guitar player with The Dixie Chicks among other things. Justin and I hit of particularly at that level of all those great sonic albums I loved that had been recorded on tape and next thing you know we were doing a record together. Discussing studios and the options, as soon as I heard that name…! That said they’re set up perfectly for digital too, so we got the best of both worlds capturing the sound of the room on the tape and then used ProTools where required. Welcome to 1979 is a great studio and great people.”

Travis New is currently playing in Andrew Farriss’ new country-oriented band. While in an ideal world with recording budgets to match, Nolan would have loved to have used his Sydney band, busy as individual members are on their own projects, the players called in to record Daniel over his two weeks in Nashville – producer Weaver on additional guitars, slide and backing vocals, Phil Towns on keyboards, Chris Autry on bass and Jimmy Paxson on drums, with Terry Lynn Weaver and Siobhan Maher Kennedy on backing vocals – proved perfect for the job, subtle, sympathetic and thoroughly professional.

“Those guys were such hot players,” Nolan enthuses. “The boys all just dialed in. Musically I was determined to leave as much room as possible.

Ten years ago, I’d started fingerpicking and that exercise alone, for me, just opened up so more space in terms of my part, my guitar. Justin and I are going to do another record and my next one is going to be even more spacious.”

As for the album itself, “I’d like to think the songs fall under the Americana genre, which I don’t think that I’ve earned. In my case I’d rather call it ‘Darlinghurst country’ genre. ‘The Hopeless Son’ was written on a 68

Resonator guitar and just that finger-picking sound alone sometimes has that magical, almost Wizard of Oz sound.”

Genres aside there’s plenty of diversity of sound and mood across Daniel, ranging across its ten songs from brooding and evocative to jaunty, lyrical to the menace of ‘The Hopeless Son’.

“They’re all very personal,” Nolan admits. “‘Tomorrow Came’, I guess that’s a song is about how quickly everything happens and how quickly everything’s behind me! It’s really about a girl I met back in the ‘80s who I’m still with and we just look at each other and wonder where’s it all gone?

As wonderful as life is, it’s dawned on me in my fifties the impermanence of it all. So, guess there are those themes throughout the record really.

‘Faster than the Speed of Change’ is similar to that story in so far as beautiful things grow over time.

There’s a sort of swaggering Faces feel to the title track. “I recorded ‘Daniel’ acoustically a few years ago at Damien Gerard’s, put a bit of tambourine on it myself, some electric guitar and all the harmonies myself and everybody I played it to said it was a killer song and I took it to Nashville on my first trip thinking we could polish it up and add stuff to it, but it was a demo. I gave it to Justin and told him we really had to do the song properly and his whole approach was that we recreate the demo. So, my part had to be exactly what I played. It’s the only song of the ten on the album that has been around for a while. Chris Autry on the bass – that bass line really is almost like a pedal through the song, while Jimmy’s literally playing one of those old stainless steel garbage bins upside down. We caught all that kind of stuff on it.”

The song itself is literally based on a road trip out of LA Nolan took some years ago through Death Valley. “It’s a trip. It’s a really weird, peculiar place anyway and I was in a weird, peculiar place myself. Just all the people that we met along the way including this really interesting – I’m not even sure what gender – but guy or girl called Gabriel, who was really sweet to me momentarily and was kind of angelic. That was basically the song.

“The way we worked it was Justin and I having long conversations, but he insisted on my only sending him Voice Mails. I’ve got a little ProTools setup at home and wanted to send him demos, but his thing was just send me the voice demo, so I was literally recording on my iPhone and sending him that.”

Gabriel is released October 8 on Quay Records, distributed through MGM.

THE

UPSETTER Trojan Records

Y

ou can tell things are starting to get rotten around here when the enlightened amongst us are checking out. Since the last issue, three giants Charlie Watts, Don Everly and Lee Scratch Perry all left us to fend for ourselves. And while the music of the former two were far more intrinsic to my personal education, somehow Perry’s departure was the most affecting. Maybe because his output was the least synopsisable (might have made that one up) – though possibly the most sizable.

A couple of weeks before Perry passed, an original mono pressing of his debut album The Upsetter turned up in my shop. Neither his most innovative nor best-known album, it’s where it all began. And a fascinating snapshot of a transition between employed singer/ producer and independent innovator, cloaked in the era’s skinhead dancehall tempos.

After working for two Jamaican legends Coxsone Dodd and Joe Gibbs, Perry formed his own label, Upsetter Records, in 1968 and quickly released a jab at Gibbs in the single ‘People Funny Boy’. Though that single didn’t make it onto the original pressing of The Upsetter.

Instead, we got an album of recordings from The Upsetters, a moniker that ended up encompassing a variety of line-ups from Gladdy Anderson’s All-Stars, to the Harry J Allstars to The Hippy Boys to The Wailers.

In a 1975 interview for Black Music, Perry revealed that the Hippy Boys line-up, featuring Aston “Family Man” Barrett, Ronnie Bop, Glen Adams and Winston Wright, was assembled for a live UK tour.

“The group I brought over [ to the UK] really wasn’t The Upsetters,” Perry revealed. “Most of my hits were made by Gladdy’s band: Winston Wright (keyboards), Hux Brown (guitar), Jackie Jackson (bass), Hugh Malcolm (drums) and Gladdy (Gladstone Anderson, keyboards).”

With Perry also “banging” on the piano and keyboards, it’s not surprising that keyboards dominate The Upsetter. And though there are familiar elements, there’s just enough disregard for convention to render it unsettling. It certainly leaves one foot on traditional ground, with vocal arrangements of the Bee Gees’ ‘To Love Somebody’ and

‘Crying About You’ with singer Busty Brown; and Brook Benton’s ‘Kiddy-O’ with The Muskyteers (aka The Silvertones).

From there, Perry’s inspiration broadens. The jaunty instrumental ‘Heat Proof’ makes such obvious homage to ‘Hard to Handle’ it is credited to Otis Redding. Elsewhere Perry begins to explore his trademark diversions into popular culture. The opening track, ‘Tidal Wave’, credited to “Allison/Allison, Campbell Connelly) – is it a reggae/ organ take on the ‘60s surf instrumental? It wouldn’t sound out of place on Endless Summer. Spy, Western and even Kung-Fu movies provided frequent inspiration for Perry and The Upsetter features the ‘Man From M.I.5’ with a reverb drenched Perry spoken word introduction, “The dangerous man from M.I.5” pioneering a technique he’d use in future dub recordings, particularly on his Kung Fu Meets The Dragon album. The Upsetter closer ‘Thunderball’ would have made a great alternative theme to the classic James Bond (M.I.6, not M.I.5) movie that had been filmed in the Bahamas only a few years prior.

Perry even contemplated a medical series: “The thing with ‘Night Doctor’ is, it started as a series where I was basing the music on, like, a hospital theme. I planned to write that the night doctor give a live injection and perform a medical operation.” Though credited only to Perry, it seems Ansel Collins had a hand in ‘Night Doctor’ (and released it himself at a later date with sexy voiceover from Maisha).

‘Thunderball’ is pretty much a mash up of ‘Night Doctor’ reworked with sax and new organ parts – the future of dub indeed!

“There was a boss album that I put out,” Perry told Black Music, “a strong one... The Upsetter, a firm album. That was a champion album...

‘Man From MI5’, ‘Night Doctor’, ‘Soulful I’ (laughs)... that was a bad album.”

Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.

69

KAREN DALTON

IN MY OWN TIME

Billy Pinnell

Light In The Attic

70

I

n his memoir Chronicles, Bob Dylan was quoted thus: “Karen Dalton was my favourite singer in the place (Greenwich Village) in the early 60’s. Karen had a voice like Billie Holliday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed.”

Fred Neil said of Karen, “She’s been my favourite singer as well as a heavy influence on my own style since the early Sixties, her voice is so unique to describe it would take a poet.” Nick Cave was quoted as saying, “I’d just never heard a voice like it, she’s a blues singer to me, full of idiosyncrasies that you can’t repeat.”

Not much is actually known about this extraordinary singer whose haunting, peculiar voice will remind many of Billie Holliday. What we do know is that her mother was a full Cherokee and that she made her way to New York from Oklahoma. She never pursued management or a recording deal preferring to play in coffee houses for the small monetary rewards folkies received when fans contributed to the night’s entertainment by ‘passing the basket’.

Karen was not a writer but like Billie Holliday and Nina Simone, two singers she shared a tonal connection with, her ability to take a song she fancied and make it her own, be it folk, country, soul, blues, gospel, or contemporary pop, made her a legend. Though she was often referred to as the folk scene’s greatest talent by its established stars, the era had run its race by the time she recorded her first album in 1969.

It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best was recorded in one night with no overdubs, no second takes, after a Fred Neil session. Karen had accompanied Neil - who’d championed her for many years - to the studio not suspecting she would be invited to record some of her favourites that included songs by Tim Hardin, Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton and Neil, (‘ A Little Bit Of Rain’, ‘Blues On The Ceiling’).

Released by Capitol Records the album sold poorly but the uniqueness of this little-known singer, only spoken about before, was now on record.

Someone who’d heard of Karen was Michael Lang, coproducer and talent booker of the Woodstock Festival who now resided in the town of Woodstock where he’d launched his own label Just Sunshine Records.

One of Lang’s first signings was local band The Fabulous Rhinestones led by producer/musician Harvey Brooks. An accomplished and versatile bass guitarist, Brooks had played on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew; and he was in Michael Bloomfield’s Electric Flag and had backed Bloomfield and Al Kooper on their Super Sessions album. He had also played bass on Karen’s debut and was delighted when Lang asked him to produce her first ‘real’ album.

The two must have hit it off enough for Karen to agree for the first time to share her music with a world beyond her devoted fans in Greenwich Village. Recorded over a six-month period in 1970/71 at Bearsville Studios, In My Own Time would turn out to be Karen’s only fully planned and realised studio album.

Brooks carefully chose experienced, flexible musicians to work with the strong-willed reticent singer who came to the session in poor health. Richard Bell and Ken Pearson from Janis Joplin’s Full Tilt Boogie Band provided piano and organ, guitarists included John Hall later to form Orleans and Amos Garrett whose solo was so special on Maria Muldaur’s ‘Midnight At The Oasis’. Denny Siewell, an original member of Paul McCartney’s Wings was on drums, The Band’s producer John Simon played piano, Bill Keith added steel guitar, Bobby Notkoff, an early member of Crazy Horse when they were The Rockets and occasional Neil Young sideman was on violin. Books played bass while Karen accompanied herself on twelve string guitar and a 27 fret long necked banjo made from a bedpost. Horns were overdubbed in San Francisco during post-production.

Because Dalton didn’t write, choosing the songs was of paramount importance. Considering her folk background, the final selection was full of surprises.

The moody opening track, Dino Valenti’s ‘Something On Your Mind’ provides an unforgettable listening experience. “Karen was truly unique,” said Brooks, “her voice had a range, but she wasn’t afraid to reach beyond it, to let her voice crack.”

Notkoff’s plaintive violin is perfectly placed on this song and on the traditional folk tune ‘Katie Cruel,’ playing in duet with Karen’s banjo. Said Nick Cave: “’Katie Cruel’ had an enormous influence over a song of ours called ‘When I First Came To Town’ (from his 1992 album Henry’s Dream).

The Percy Sledge hit ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ and Marvin Gaye’s million seller ‘How Sweet It Is’ sit comfortably amongst George Jones’ ‘Take Me’, Paul Butterfield’s ‘In My Own Dream’ and Richard Manuel’s ‘In A Station’ (recorded

by The Band on Music From Big Pink). The song ‘Katie’s Been Gone’ recorded by Bob Dylan and The Band on The Basement Tapes is believed to have been inspired by Karen. The album’s closer ‘Ae You Leaving For The Country’ written by her former singing partner Richard Tucker turned out to be an ironic choice.

While the album received warm reviews and her Percy Sledge cover got some airplay, it was not a commercial success.

Another album of original material was discussed but it never happened.

“Her life took her in another direction,” rued Brooks, “she never came back to it.”

News of what became of Karen in the ensuing years was sketchy until the documentary, Karen Dalton: In My Own Time, that premiered in 2020, revealed that she died from a long-term illness in 1993 at the age of 55. Because of the dedication of documentary film makers Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz, this extraordinary singer will be spoken about and appreciated once again.

BY KEITH GLASS TIM ROSE

TIM ROSE

Columbia CL/S 2777 (USA, 1967)

In the 60’s/70’s/80’s major record labels worldwide maintained a massive album release schedule. Only a comparatively few artists scored a hit, others became ‘cult’ classics. Beyond that exists an underbelly of almost totally ignored work, (much never reissued) that time has been kind to. This is a page for the crate diggers.

As a journey-man folkie, guitar player and group singer I’m sure Tim Rose never set out to create an ongoing controversy as a ‘song stealer’ but, unfortunately, that is what he is mainly remembered for. Did he write any part of the great song ‘Morning Dew’, originally accredited solo to Bonnie Dobson? Most likely not, but he did take it to a new stratosphere in the astonishing version performed here and cheekily added his name as justification. Kama wise perhaps a bad move as it came to haunt him the rest of his career.

This first Rose solo album, after his stretch with Scott McKenzie and John Phillips in ‘The Journeymen’ plus a promising sole album effort with Mama Cass and James

Hendrix as the ‘Big Three’ delivered much but unfortunately to little result as far as sales were concerned. However, sales are not everything and, in fact, the main reason it still resonates is the astonishing version of ‘Hey Joe’ that provided a template for Jimi Hendrix (no relation) shortly afterwards. Prior to his own London relocation Hendrix heard Rose perform the song live in New York - he and manager Chas Chandler marked it down to record. The descending riffs and gruff attitude were all here for Jimi to expand upon and score his first hit.

Rose’s producer (and liner note writer) David Rubinson was an experienced New York practitioner who assembled some outstanding musicians for the project including Felix Pappalardi on bass and Hugh McCracken guitar. But the truly outstanding presence was the amazing Bernard Purdie on drums. Placed high in the mix, Purdie’s busy style perfectly suited the strong wailing vocals of Rose and overcame any idea (once heard) this album was yet another conformist folkie outlet.

Rose’s composition ‘I Got Loneliness’ gets the album off to a solid start followed by the Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil comp ‘I Gotta Be Strong’ but in truth things only start to cook around the end of side one with ‘Hey Joe’ a song now firmly credited to Billy Roberts who, along with Tim, was a part of the Greenwich Village folk scene. The Leaves, Love and The Byrds all recorded it around the

same time but as an upbeat pop song – Tim’s was slower and more menacing and became the template for Jimi’s definitive reading.

Flipping the album’s second side, Rose defined the Bonnie Dobson folkie song ‘Morning Dew’ with a swagger that just may have earned him the co-composer credit he claimed. The original pales in comparison and all further versions follow Tim’s. Dobson has with good reason, railed against his composer credit over the years but without his version it’s doubtful the song would be the near standard it is today.

The trifecta of outstanding songs concludes with the second to last composition on the album ‘Long Time Man’ - this one is all Tim’s.

The wild Purdie percussion breaks and Rose’s near hysterical vocals make this a standout with a tribute version by Nick Cave a few years later providing the icing on the cake as Rose’s career composition highlight.

Rose moved to England, in latter years sharing the stage with Cave but despite a few more albums never reached the heights of this one again. My friend Jeff ‘Stick’ Davis, bassist for The Amazing Rhythm Aces caught what was possibly one of his last live performances opening for the final shows of Procol Harum in May 2002 – the report was not good. At least the English lads knew what had been and what could have been.

It’s all here in the first Tim Rose solo album – an amazing powerful performance of some iconic songs from a one of a kind folk rocker.

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By Trevor J. Leeden

By Christopher Hollow TELE NOVELLA

Merlynn Belle Kill Rock Stars

I’ve had this record from Texas duo (singer Natalie Ribbons and instrumentalist Jason Chronis) in my pile for months and finally got around to listening. A friend had been persistent. ‘Noone writes melodies like Tele Novella right now,’ they said. I think I was leery of the Medieval clown artwork and the honkytonk artiness. But that said more about me than the music, which, as my friend asserted, shifts in fabulously smart, melodic, and unpredictable ways. First song that made sense was ‘Desiree’, which is like a Shakespearian sonnet set to a Ray Davies tune.

‘When you are young you think the world falls at your feet,’ Ribbons sings. ‘And so, it does.’

Another number which lives up to the band’s clever ‘coinoperated Medieval pop songs through a 50s western lens’ pitch is ‘Technicolor Town’, with its cute coyote yodel while ‘Never’ could easily be the album’s highlight with a melody that gently mutates from Demis Roussos’ ‘Forever and Ever’ into something altogether unreal.

‘I’m not selling out, I’m cashing in,’ sings Dean Wareham and who would begrudge him?

Despite the off-hand album title, the 58-year-old still has plenty to say and pinnacles to scale.

Wareham came to prominence with Galaxie 500 and Luna in the late 80s/early 90s when selling out was the greatest crime against music. Now, it’s different. Making money has never been more difficult. ‘I can’t follow anymore,’ he says. ‘So, I’m running up the score’. Haha, good for him. Wareham’s tinder dry sense of humour is apparent throughout. Lines that leap off the turntable include ‘hot under the collar tonight’ (‘In the Corridors of Power’), ‘every fuck was a flying fuck’ (‘Cashing In’), ‘I’m living on greenies and Aperol spritz’ (‘Robin & Richard’) and ‘Why are we in Echo Park?!’.

This from the incredible closer, ‘Why Are We in Vietnam’, which raises questions about America’s various foreign affairs. All bon mots that would grab attention in any conversation. Wareham also adds a couple fab covers – Scott Walker’s ‘Duchess’ and a rare 60s nugget, ‘Under Skys’, by obscure Boston band, Lazy Smoke. I’ll say this loud: great record.

was always: Billy Idol’s ‘Eyes Without a Face’. Olsen proves it’s a ripping song. But the EP’s focal point is ‘Safety Dance’, a glassy glacial version of the 1982 hit from Canadian band, Men Without Hats (check out the original video set in a medieval wonderland where some wag has said: this is how Game of Thrones should’ve ended). It works, especially the killer line: ‘Your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance, they ain’t no friends of mine’. I never felt anything, guilty or otherwise, for Laura Branigan’s ‘Gloria’ and it doesn’t move me here either.

We do know, however, that Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ is a song that works in whatever setting.

ANGEL OLSEN

JEFFREY ALEXANDER AND THE HEAVY LIDDERS

Jagjaguwar

Arrowhawk

Aisles

Carousel of Flowers

CHICK COREA AKOUSTIC BAND

MATTHEW FOWLER

TINTERN ABBEY

Concord Jazz/Planet

Signature Sounds/Planet

Grapefruit/Planet

The untimely passing of the keyboard virtuoso after a long illness has understandably seen a proliferation of posthumous releases, including this very fine album. Featuring long-time collaborators John Patitucci (bass) and drummer Dave Weckl, this 2018 performance was the acclaimed trio’s first appearance in acoustic format in two decades, reprising numerous tunes from their late 80’s origins. The interplay is exhilarating throughout, played with “the vitality and joie de vivre of three kids in a sandbox”. Valé Chick Corea.

There is a lot of Ray LaMontagne in Fowler, and that can only be a good thing. There are wisps of folk permeating his introspective vignettes, his rasping tenor underscored by ethereal background harmonies and robust arrangements. Singing songs that express the pitfalls of youth – the naivety and heartbreak, the unbridled joy, the hope for the future – Fowler’s crisp guitar and baroque folk backing instrumentation combine to flag a career of considerable promise. La Montagne would be impressed.

VINEGAR JOE

STEPPENWOLF

In what qualifies as a genuine “if you remember the Sixties then you weren’t there” moment, this 2-disc set of previously unreleased vintage British psychedelia is the definitive statement on one of Swinging London’s genuine curiosities. The painstaking restoration of acetates, demos and reel-to-reel recordings lifts the lid on the legendary quartet whose only single – Beeside/ Vacuum Cleaner – remains a highly collectible treasure. One can only wonder what would have happened if a young David Gilmour hadn’t failed his audition to join the band, only to join up with some Cambridge friends a few days later!

Esoteric/Planet

Cherry Red/Planet

HECTOR ANCHONDO

LIVE

FINER THINGS: THE ISLAND RECORDINGS

THE GRIEF WE GAVE OUR MOTHER

MAGIC CARPET RIDE: THE DUNHILL/ABC YEARS

BEESIDE: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS

LET LOOSE THOSE CHAINS

VizzTone/Planet

Two Years

Maple Death

I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A. Double Feature

Whitney K is the pseudonym for Canadian Konner Whitney (of the Yukon, more specifically).

It’s easy to love the thin wild mercury sound of ‘TransCanada Oil Boom Blues’, and it’s easy to imagine live versions that would stretch out, just on the joy and bounciness of this

MIKE HURST IN MY TIME

Cherry Red/Planet

It’s fair to say that the name ‘Mike Hurst’ has largely flown under the radar, and yet during the period 1962-1985 (the era covered in this 4-disc anthology) his fingerprints were all over UK music. As a singer/songwriter he was part of the hitmaking folk/pop trio The Springfields before forming the ill-fated The Methods (featuring Jimmy Page and Albert Lee). A slew of single and solo albums followed before finding his niche as a producer. Hurst produced major recordings by Cat Stevens, The Move, Spencer Davis Group, Cilla Black, Colin Blunstone, Marc Bolan, The Four Tops, rock’n’roll revivalists Showaddywaddy, and even ex-pat Aussies New World; all are included in this tribute to an unsung legend.

BRENT DOWE & THE MELODIANS

BUILD ME UP/PRE-MEDITATION

WHITNEY K

DEAN WAREHAM

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chomping, leg-jittering rhythm.

It’s the type of song that you’d lean on to gel an audience.

There’s deadpan humour all through the record. “Tell me, who do you love?” Whitney K sings over yearning slide guitar.

“Me or the party?” Even if the person answering thinks twice, it’s the party, definitely the party. ‘Cowboy City Rockers’ is the type of title that could go pear-shaped in the wrong hands.

Here it’s one of the highlights.

My favourite number, though, is ‘Maryland’. I’ve never been to Maryland and the likelihood that I will ever get there seems very remote, but I’d be happy for that song to soundtrack my time in Maryland. It sounds like America in miniature. Well, the kind of America that I love.

“I’m not crazy…I’ve just been in a very bad mood for 40 years.”

So says Shirley MacLaine’s character in the 1989 film, Steel Magnolias. It could sum up my view on the 80s. But I must say, I’m more ready for this 80s covers EP now than I’ve ever been. As I get older, the 80s, which I lived through as a teenager, are becoming a lot more palatable to me. Millennial musician, Angel Olsen, didn’t live through the 80s and can dress up in heavy new wave makeup, enjoy a mathematical haircut, and have fun with these songs without the vivid emotional baggage that I have attached to them. Back in the day, when having to come clean about a musical guilty pleasure was a real thing, my answer

Putting the cosmic back into Americana music are Philadelphia’s Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders. And, on Carousel of Flowers, this lank-haired outfit hang their freak flag between two giants of the genre: covers of The Grateful Dead’s ‘Black Peter’ (from Workingman’s Dead) and ‘Strength of Strings’ off Gene Clark’s 1974 masterpiece, No Other. The Heavy Lidders strip the songs but retain the sparkle. It must be said, the band moniker gives key clues to the Mogadon pace contained; nothing over 100 bpm but there’s good, jammy workouts best heard on 7-minute opener, ‘Beowulf’s Trip’.

Cherry Red/Planet

During the halcyon days of UK rock, Vinegar Joe boasted a formidable live reputation. Their ranks featured guitarist/producer Pete Gage and the vocal talents of not one but two much celebrated lead singers who would ultimately go on to global solo stardom, Elkie Brooks and the late, great Robert Palmer. Along with nonalbum singles, their three studio albums from 1972-73 are included in this lavish box set, and whilst incendiary live performances failed to translate to commercial success, each album bristles with the energy and dynamism peculiar to British bands of the era.

Despite a raft of singles that are universally recognised, it’s somewhat surprising that Steppenwolf never made the upper reaches of the Australian charts. Within four years, John Kay, Goldie McJohn, Michael Monarch, Jerry Edmonton and Rushton Moreve released eight albums that helped define San Francisco rock music. Rare singles and mono mixes are included, all remastered from original master tapes, and a timely reminder of a band that, courtesy of the Easy Rider movie soundtrack, would leave an indelible mark on the Summer Of Love generation.

For well over two decades Anchondo has immersed himself in the blues, culminating in this very fine acoustic blues album.

The influence of Keb Mo and Taj Mahal inform the dozen originals, a showcase for his songwriting craft, emotive vocals and fine acoustic fingerpicking. Anchondo’s talents have been acknowledged courtesy of the International Blues Challenge where he took home the Best Solo/Duo Guitarist award.

The chops that propelled him to that accolade are displayed in abundance on this acoustic blues gem.

The Melodians (featuring Brent Dowe) are justly considered one of the very finest Jamaican vocal groups during the golden era of reggae. Long out of print (since the 1970’s) this fabulous 2-disc set combines Dowe’s 1973 superb Trojan solo album with The Melodian’s 1978 opus, enhanced by a further 24 tracks of shuffling, three-part close harmony heaven produced for High Note by the iconic Sonia Pottinger, reggae’s first female producer.

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By Chris Familton

By Denise Hylands

W

ell, 2021 didn’t really pan out to be the year we were all expecting. Dreaming of making up for lost time, getting out and seeing lots of live music, attending festivals and maybe even travelling overseas too.

Fortunately, the music kept coming and the year seems to be ending with a great batch of new releases and new music heading our way in the new year.

Firstly, it saddens me to have farewelled a good friend recently. Dave Heard was a champion of country music here in Melbourne and beyond. He presented the radio program Acid Country and was part of radio 3PBS for over 40 years. Well-known and loved for his gentlemanly nature and good humour. Dave loved country music and supported so many artists local and international over the years. He will be missed by many. Rest in country music bliss my good friend.

JOURNEY THROUGH THE PAST: I

EXPLORING THE NEIL YOUNG ARCHIVES

n the ever-changing world of digital advances, the question and viability of how to preserve, enhance and share one’s music continues to be a conundrum for artists. From box-sets to anniversary concerts, documentaries to reissues, everyone is looking to find new ways to monetise their back catalogues. In recent years, the Neil Young Archives website has become an online gold standard.

Neil Young has long been a proponent of both technological advancements – in train sets, his brief mid-80s foray into electronically generated sounds (Trans), his PONO digital music player and his Bluray enhanced physical Archives box sets. At the core of it all he prizes and promotes the sonic quality of the music he records – both on vinyl and as high resolution digital files. At some point he and a team of web experts tackled the challenge of merging high quality music with a comprehensive, user-friendly web interface that covered all corners of his career, both musically and visually. The result is his hugely impressive Neil Young Archives website.

In the mid 2000s Young began releasing his Performance Series of live concerts from the 1960s and 1970s, before the first massive box set The Archives Vol. 1 1963–1972 was released in 2009. Those releases set Young’s restless, forward-thinking mind in motion. The digital release of his music in high resolution and the desire to find an alternative to the MP3 and online streaming spurred on the development and release of his PONO player in 2014. It was a piece of hardware which was maligned by some but also celebrated by many audiophiles and hardcore NY fans. It had a short-lived life after the company that was running the store, Omnifone, was purchased by Apple in 2016. As he always does, Young saw that the future was online and pivoted to the development of the NYA site, which undertook a BETA test in 2018 before its official launch.

When you first arrive at the site, it quickly becomes clear how comprehensive the experience is to the user. For the casual fan, they can 74

stream their favourite songs via the Timeline or Cabinet - a virtual filing cabinet in keeping with Young’s love of vintage music gear, cars and his homespun aesthetic. Find an album, listen to its songs, read the credits and peruse historical documents and photos relating to the release. It’s a one-stop record store, library and museum. The near 60 year back catalogue covers his early band The Squires as well as Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, the legacy of Crazy Horse, various collaborations and of course his many solo releases.

Now featuring different subscriber tiers, the site has expanded to include documentary and concert films, pandemic home performances, features on his LincVolt electric car project and much more. The granular detail and the way NYA is so successful at connecting visitors directly to Young is best exemplified by his NYA Times-Contrarian section. A virtual newspaper, it publishes Letters To The Editor with replies from Young himself; many of these letters have contributed to the development of the site, leading to the inclusion of unreleased live performances and Young’s new Official Bootleg series. There are deep dives into albums, concert memories from Young and his producers and engineers, sub-sections on science, BLM, tech, religion, art and more. It’s become a living, breathing digital ecosystem and by accounts NYA is the biggest archival site dedicated to and operated by any major recording artist.

Young has expressed hope that other major artists will take his lead, and even use the same technology to construct their own wide-ranging online library, record store and newspaper where the control of how their music is presented is firmly in their own hands. As artists from the golden age of the 1960s and 70s reach their twilight years, the future and legacy of their music is more than ever at a critical stage. Neil Young has created an artist-driven, best-practice template that benefits the artist and their fans and one suspects he isn’t finished yet.

Watching from a distance, it seemed exciting that Americanafest actually happened in Nashville in September. If anything, it gives us some hope that we’ll be able to take part next year…fingers crossed. The current Queen of Americana, Brandi Carlile is riding high right now, after taking out the award of Artist of The Year, as well as the chart success and rave reviews for her new album “In These Silent Days”. Sturgill Simpson was award Album of The Year for one of his two recent bluegrass albums “Cuttin’ Grass - Vol. 1 (The Butcher Shoppe Sessions). Song of the year went to John Prine for one of the last songs he recorded, “I Remember Everything”. Duo/ Group of the Year was Black Pumas, Instrumentalist of the Year Kristin Weber and Emerging Act of the year went to the one and only Charley Crockett.

John Prine would have turned 75 on the 10th October. With so many of the celebratory events that were planned rescheduled to next year, the release of the tribute album “Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows Vol. 2: Songs of John Prine” did happen. The follow up to Volume 1 back in 2010. Featuring many good friends of Prine’s including Iris Dement, Emmylou Harris, Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson, Brandi Carlile, John Paul White, Bonnie Raitt, Valerie June, Amanda Shires and Nathaniel Rateliff.

Great artists, excellent songs.

I feel like I mention Willie Nelson every issue, but he seems to always be doing something.

He’s set to release his second album for

the year titled “The Willie Nelson Family” featuring, you guessed it, a whole lot of his family including his sister Bobbi, sons Lukas and Micah and his daughters Amy and Paula.

The record will feature George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass”, Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me” and The Carter Family’s “Keep On The Sunnyside”.

Love Police have started a record label. It’s called LOVE POLICE RECORDS & TAPES. They’ll make vinyl, CDs and yes, cassettes for the right acts. It’s a creative partnership between BT, who you’ll probably know from Love Police touring (Gillian Welch, Justin Townes Earle, Black Keys, John Prine, Tony Joe White etc), its festivals (Boogie, Out On The Weekend) and merch worlds, and Dave Laing. You maybe know Dave from Dave Laing Publicity, Warner (and Warner’s revival of Festival), Shock Records, Dog Meat Records, for putting together tours

by PP Arnold and Alejandro Escovedo and more. They have four releases to begin with from Warumpi Band, Melissa Carper, Alex Hamilton and Mylee Grace.

Some new releases worth a mention.

Noel McKay has just released an excellent album “Blue, Blue, Blue”. Musical partner of Brennen Leigh and solo artist in his own right. McKay was discovered back in 1993

by Guy Clark when he was playing with his brother as The McKay Brothers. Clark became somewhat of a mentor and the two collaborated. This new album is brilliantly written and outstanding played.

Riddy Arman has just released her self-titled debut album on La Honda records. From her home in Montana, Arman proves to be much more than a cowboy singing her lonely songs. There’s the fierce honesty in her voice that commands attention and her songs capture the rural landscape and her deeply personal stories. Sharing so much in common with label mate Colter Wall.

While mentioning Wall, one of my favourite albums this year is from Texan Summer Dean who released her debut full length album “Bad Romantic” featuring a duet and cowrite with Wall on “You’re Lucky She’s Lonely”.

This is real deal true Texan country music.

So much music…I hope you discover something new amongst my suggestions of new and upcoming releases and if so enjoy…

Take care. I hope y’all have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year…here’s to 2022…

David Heard & Denise Hylands

NEW AND UPCOMING RELEASES Georgia State Line - In Colour Eagle & The Wolf - Two Lovers T. Wilds - 10 Songs Noel McKay - Blue, Blue, Blue Riddy Arman – Self-titled Billy Strings - Renewal Strand Of Oaks - In Heaven Willie Nelson - The Willie Nelson Family Joshua Ray Walker - See You Next Time Neil Young - Barn Jason Isbell - Georgia Blue Pokey LaFarge In The Blossom of Their Shade Lilly Hiatt - Lately Norman Blake - Day By Day My Morning Jacket – Self-titled Hayes Carol - You Get It All Nathaniel Ratliff & The Night Sweats - The Future Robert Plant & Alison Krauss Raise The Roof Erin Rae - Modern Woman (2/22) Andy Golledge Strength of a Queen (3/22) 75

By Tony Hillier

Master jazz singer’s funky turn

Ashley Naylor Matthew Cotter

KURT ELLING

SUPERBLUE EDITION

Wally Kempton

W

New Double Album

REVERSE LIGHT YEARS 17 Tracks 2CD | 2 LP | Digital

OUT NOW even.com.au elrenomusic.com.au

hile his unparalleled prowess as a jazz singer is widely acknowledged, it’s somewhat surprising and indeed anomalous that Kurt Elling doesn’t attract the same acclamation for his pioneering spirit as a recording artist.

A résumé that encompasses a dozen Grammy nominations and two gongs and 14 consecutive Down Beat magazine critics’ polls tells only part of the story. Delve into his discography and you’ll discover that the American jazz superstar has challenged himself stylistically throughout a serpentine 30-year recording career.

Since 2015 alone, this tireless adventurer has made an album of global love songs, turned the Christmas tradition on its head, recorded a live duets set with Aussie ace James Morrison, engaged in an avant-garde Latin-inspired project with pianist Danilo Perez and collaborated with sax supremo Branford Marsalis and his quartet. Over the years, jazz’s pre-eminent singer-songwriter has also penned words to jazz classics and staked out 1960s-70s rock ‘n’ roll.

Elling is as renowned for his storytelling and poetic way with words as he is for his warm and rich baritone, four-octave range and improvisatory flair. Small wonder that the New York Times hailed him “the standout male vocalist of our time” and The Guardian newspaper tagged him as “a kind of Sinatra with superpowers”.

The artist’s ability to combine authenticity with originality and an unquenchable thirst for exploration is perfectly exemplified by SuperBlue, an album that consolidates the bond between poetry and jazz music, with Elling’s snappy wordplay harking back to the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs et al) and such quirky and clever American jazz singer-songwriters as Mose Allison, Gil ScottHeron and Ben Sidran.

While Elling’s past projects have explored the musical worlds of bebop, progressive jazz, traditional pop and neo-soul, SuperBlue marks his first foray into full-on funk. And make no mistake, his 16th album as a bandleader is seriously funky.

Elling’s collaboration (within the confines of lockdown) with coproducer Charlie Hunter, the latter employing hybrid guitar — an instrument that facilitates simultaneous playing of bass lines, chords and melodies — and two stars of the hip-hop generation in drummer Corey Fonville and keyboardist DJ Harrison, both of the genre-hopping band Butcher Brown, hits a groove befitting the bizarre pandemicriven times we currently live in.

Largely eschewing solos, SuperBlue is rhythmically taut and terrific, creating launch pads for some of the most vivacious tracks of Elling’s stellar career. The arrangements extend the singer’s already remarkable range and expand his narratives, whether he’s conveying hipster humour or soul-shattering pathos.

Like all great funk albums, SuperBlue burns from the get-go, Elling’s serpentine lyrics combining beautifully with a bluesy vibe in the

opening titular cover of a late-1970s Freddie Hubbard tune. On the slinky ‘Sassy’ that follows, a skewed organ and frantic drum figure combine with the singer’s urgent delivery to transform the Manhattan Transfer’s 1991 tribute to Sarah Vaughan.

On the ultra-soulful ‘Manic Panic Epiphanic’, which contains a BeeGees-like refrain, the catchline of spiritual standard ‘He’s Got The Whole World in His Hands’ becomes the de facto chorus between topical verses like, “You know that we’ve been walking a dangerous line/ while all the world’s been spinning on a dime”.

At the opposite end of the set, Elling renders a dynamic new spoken word reading of ‘Circus’, a typically quirky Tom Waits number that’s perfect for current times.

Following that is a contrastingly sumptuous reprise of the Carla Bley ballad ‘Endless Lawns’, with added poetry.

There’s plenty to take the ear on contrasting in-between tracks. On the sassy ‘Dharma Bums’ the singer intones saucy lines such as: “I’ve got a vintage Ford Falcon that’s hungry for the road” and “Two on the road is always better than one, son”.

‘Where To Find Love’, another of the set’s less frenetic numbers, is built on a solid base of mallet-hit drums and ostinato bass as Elling turns Wayne Shorter’s upbeat ‘Aung San Suu Kyi’ into a meditation via a haunting poem. The following ‘Can’t Make It With Your Brain’, which castigates the spread of conspiracy disinformation, is more akin to a dance-club groove.

The part played by Kurt Elling’s partners in SuperBlue cannot be underestimated. That it crackles with the creative energy of 21st century jazz-funk fusion is in no small part due to Charlie Hunter, who has made ground-breaking albums with the likes of D’Angelo and A Tribe Called Quest. The guitarist provides a perfect bridge between the 54-year-old singer and the “gifted young cats” Corey Fonville and DJ Harrison. From the rhythm tracks that Hunter produced with them, Elling was able to determine whether the songs called for new melodic narratives or were better suited to existing compositions.

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By Samuel J. Fell

By Jeff Jenkins

Eric Bibb’s new album is a love letter to America.

Nearly 30 years after they formed, Even release their most ambitious album yet.

ERIC BIBB

DEAR AMERICA Provogue / Mascot Label Group

EVEN

REVERSE LIGHT YEARS

B

orn in New York City in 1951, Eric Bibb has been around music his entire life; he was, via his father, immersed from an early age. As a young boy, he knew Bob Dylan. His godfather is actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson. He was given his first guitar at age seven. He’s hardly put it down since.

Bibb is, as he passes his 70th birthday, one of America’s foremost purveyors of folk blues music. He’s released scores of albums, been nominated for, and won, a slew of awards. His simple yet deep style of writing has endeared him to people all over the globe, from all walks of life, of all cultures and backgrounds. He is, indeed, the personification of this deeply American form of art. So who better then, to write a letter to his country, a country which has fallen so far, and yet is a country still so dear to Bibb’s heart.

“It’s a love letter,” Bibb explains on the concept of Dear America, “because America, for all its associations with pain and its bloody history, has always been a place of incredible hope and optimism.”

Dear America, Bibb’s twenty-third studio release, brims with hope and optimism. And, as you would expect in this particular day and age, it acknowledges rifts and imperfections, of which there are many. It’s hard to deny though, that this is a country that has given so much, not least of all the music which Bibb joyously lays bare on this album.

For it’s all about the music. Lyrically, Bibb deals with a number of issues on Dear America, but wrapped around and under, through the middle of and over the top, he brings this music – the blues, in his hands, has never been so joyous. The folk elements are simple and yet never lazy. Bits of soul, of Louisiana back porch, of gospel – this is the music that Eric Bibb loves, and he treats it with the respect it deserves, which is what truly makes this record so special.

A prime example – ‘Whole World’s Got The Blues’ deals with the fact that, these days, everywhere, times are hard. But, and this is a true beauty of the blues itself, unfurling around this rather morbid commentary, is music that throbs with power and joy. Eric Gales, who as Bibb says is perhaps the most powerful electric blues player right now, adds his own six-string flavour to this track; it booms and bounces, powerful and hopeful, despite the subject matter.

‘Talkin’ ‘Bout A Train, Pt 1’, which features the expert harmonica work of Billy Branch, and ‘Talkin’ ‘Bout A Train, Pt 2’ are similar – two blues tunes that could have been written in the early 1900s, and yet so relevant to now, such is the relatability of blues music. Part 1 begins with Bibb’s vocal almost in the background, it has the feel of a field recording, before it then booms into your speakers, Branch’s harmonica work perfect.

As well as Gales and Branch, Bibb enlists the help of a few others to help pen this missive to his native country – jazz double bass legend Ron Carter gets on board for opener ‘Whole Lotta Lovin’’, a paean to the music Bibb loves, as well as ‘Emmett’s Ghost’ which revisits the lynching of Emmett Till, which sparked the whole civil rights movement. Shaneeka Simon adds vocals to ‘Born Of A Woman’; Chuck Campbell lays down some scintillating pedal steel on ‘Different Picture’; Tommy Sims adds bass with Glen Scott on ‘Love’s Kingdom’

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El Reno Records

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while Lisa Scott sings on closer ‘’One-ness Of Love’. They all bring something special to an album that’s already so, purely because Eric Bibb knows exactly what he’s doing.

Dear America ebbs and flows, occasionally slowing down and looking inward, at other times stepping forward with arms thrown wide. It would have been hard for Bibb to write, to order the tracks – here’s this country, one which has given so much, but concurrently, one that has run so far astray. Ultimately though, to Eric Bibb, it’s given him this music, these experiences which he can share with us all. Dear America is a love letter, but it’s also a showcase of the music that the country birthed, in the hands of a true master.

Eric Bibb will be appearing at the Port Fairy Folk Festival in 2022.

ecently, I polled about 200 “industry people” about Australian music in the ’90s. One of the aims of the survey was to assemble the ultimate ’90s band. Coming in at number one on the list as best guitarist?

Ashley Naylor. As Klinger’s Ben Birchall said, “I remember standing in front of him at Even shows, watching his hands and knowing I’d never be able to play like that.”

If you need any proof of Naylor’s guitar genius, all you have to do is listen to Even’s new album, Reverse Light Years.

Peter Capaldi, the Scottish Doctor Who, once remarked, “I’m sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be playing classic guitar solos on YouTube.”

I thought of that quote while listening to this record, Even’s eighth studio album, which comes 27 years after they formed. Naylor is like the Shakespeare of the guitar. A big call?

Sure. But he is an extraordinary entertainer, “the human jukebox”, capable of playing anything.

Naylor has always celebrated his influences.

“We love both kinds of music,” he once said, “’60s and ’70s.” And when Even released their sixth album, the aptly titled In Another Time,

he said, “If it sounds somewhere between The Kinks and The Smiths we will have succeeded.”

On this record, Naylor revisits his childhood obsession with Jimi Hendrix. He sounds wild and free. But he’s no tribute act. There are numerous musical and lyrical nods on the album – “So watch me roll away like a stone,” Naylor sings in ‘Silver Rain’ – and he certainly pays homage to his heroes, but then he takes us on his own trip, ably assisted by bass player Wally Kempton and drummer Matt Cotter.

Reverse Light Years is a big album – Even’s first double album. Seventeen tracks, and three of them are longer than seven minutes.

“I don’t worry,” Naylor sings, “because I am in no hurry.”

Ironically, lockdown led to freedom for Naylor. Stuck in his home studio, he found himself freed up “to explore and indulge”.

The result is a wonderfully excessive record, but not a single note sounds out of place.

Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins had this to say about guitar solos: “I don’t like guitar solos that are like, ‘Look at me, look at me!’, I like guitar solos that are little songs within the songs.” And that’s exactly what Naylor achieves here. Check out ‘Miracle Drum’, where Naylor appropriately sings, “This is metaphysical.” It’s the third song on the album and it’s like an album in itself. It’s so thrilling, so complete, that you almost need to take a breather before launching into the rest of the record.

I once asked Naylor what advice he’d give a young band just starting out. He replied simply: “Write great songs.” This album is that advice in action.

While listening to the record, my mind flashed back to a party, before the pandemic, where Ash Naylor was playing with his good mate Steve Pinkerton. The crowd reaction was split. One half said, “I can’t believe Ash Naylor is playing at the party – he’s

incredible.” Whereas the other half asked, “Who is this guy – he’s incredible.”

And that sums up the Ash Naylor conundrum.

It’s not as if he could work any harder – as well as fronting Even, he’s a member of The Church, The Stems, The Ronson Hangup and the RocKwiz Orkestra and plays with Paul Kelly and Vika & Linda – but for some reason, he’s not quite a household name.

Inexplicably, Even never reached the heights that were tipped for them when they were touted as the “Next Big Thing” in Melbourne in the mid-’90s. They’ve enjoyed just one Top 50 album (2001’s A Different High, which reached number 48) and one Top 100 single (‘Black Umbrella’, which spent one week at number 85 at the start of 1999).

This album probably won’t change any of that, though it should. “I don’t know what to think about you,” Naylor sings in ‘Dandy Stomp’. “You don’t know what to think about me.” But if you haven’t discovered Even by now, you probably never will. It’s your loss.

So far into their career, it’s astonishing that a band can release an album this deep and this exciting.

The album includes a track titled ‘Too Dumb To Quit’. Long may they continue to be so.

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By Brian Wise

“That first record really it blew my mind.”

The Velvet Underground & Nico was one of the most influential albums of all time, despite its lack of commercial success. Now an homage coincides with Todd Haynes documentary about the album.

VARIOUS ARTISTS I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR Verve/Virgin

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ccording to legend it was Brian Eno who declared of the Velvet Underground & Nico album, released in March 1967, that it ‘only sold 30,000 copies in its first five years but everyone who bought one of those copies formed a band.” That assessment has not only become part of the rock ‘n’ roll folklore but also has been an inspiration to up and coming and struggling musicians.

Despite its relative lack of commercial success, the album remains one of the most influential recordings of all time with songs such as ‘I’m Waiting For The Man,’ ‘Heroin,’ ‘Femme Fatale’, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and more. With Lou Reed providing most of the compositions, along with John Cale chipping in, and the charismatic Nico singing lead vocals on three tracks, the album has become a touchstone of its era and a reflection of the New York society from which it emerged.

Now fifty-four years after its initial release, the album is paid further homage with “I’ll Be Your Mirror’ which was executive produced by the late Hal Willner, who was Reed’s close friend and producer. The release also coincides with Todd Haynes acclaimed documentary on The Velvet Underground which is available via Apple TV. I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground & Nico - a trackby-track tribute to the original debut album - features contributions from Michael Stipe (‘Sunday Morning’), Courtney Barnett (the title track), Matt Berninger of The national (‘I’m Waiting For The Man’),, Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen (‘Femme Fatale’), Andrew Bird & Lucius (‘Venus In Furs’), Kurt Vile & The Violators (‘Run Run Run), St. Vincent & Thomas Bartlett (‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’), Thurston Moore and Bobby Gillespie (‘Heroin’), King Princess (‘There She Goes Again’) and Fontaines D.C. (‘The Black Angels Death Song’).

The album also features the irrepressible and seemingly ageless Iggy Pop along with Sweeney, on the longest song: the wild, epic ‘European Sun.’ Sweeney who is currently playing guitar with Superwolves and who has an eclectic list of playing and production credits that range from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy to Tinariwen.

When I catch up with Sweeney by Zoom to talk about I’ll Be Your Mirror he enthuses about his love of Lobby Loyde and The Coloured Balls.

That should tell you everything you need to know about Sweeney’s guitar playing!

“The Velvet Underground are my favourite rock group,” says Sweeney, who explains that Jamie Krents “who is a cool guy” and the head of Verve Records as well as a bass player and fan of Velvet Underground, asked him to get involved in the tribute project.

“It’s incredible,” replies Sweeney when I ask about Todd Haynes’ documentary. “It’s clear that he [Haynes] loves this band. It’s clear that he spent as much time as anyone could spend on doing his take on that group, particularly the group around the time of the first record,

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especially. It seems like he had a lot of access to Warhol footage that people haven’t seen. But it’s fantastic. It’s beautiful. It’s mind-blowing.

It’s haunting. It does justice to the group, and it also very much has Todd Haynes’ point of view. And anybody who’s seen his movies knows that this is a guy who really has an appreciation for a rock and roll music.

“It’s incredible. It’s hypnotic and beautiful. Also, you’ll hear versions of songs that you know really well, that will blow your mind.”

As for the original album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, with its famous banana cover, it was released in 1967 – a couple of years before Sweeney was born. So, how did he first get into it?

“I guess what’s cool about it is that I have as much in common with The Velvet Underground as anybody who would be approaching them now for the first time,” he explains. “But they were a band that you heard about. I liked REM when I was about 13 years old in the early ‘80s and so, they would talk about The Velvet Underground. I think I heard them do a song called ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, and I thought, ‘That song’s great’. Then I really liked every Lou Reed song I’d hear on the radio.

Then it became this thing of trying to get The Velvet Underground. The first record was impossible to find. It wasn’t in print. You couldn’t buy it at a record store, and nobody ever sold their copies. You really had to know somebody, and I didn’t know anybody.

“But again, they’re this kind of [holy] grail of a band. White Light White Heat was the first record that I was able to get my hands on. This would be in 1986. So, this was when bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain had already come out. Bands that people had said sounded like The Velvet Underground I’d already been listening to.

“But that first record really it blew my mind, but it still took forever to get to that record. I had White Light White Heat, which is a really abrasive, super nasty-sounding record and that changed the way that I heard music - rock music at least. I could go on and on.

I suggest to Sweeney that he is the perfect example of fans of that first The Velvet Underground album and why it became so influential: they say everybody who bought a copy went and formed a band.

“I guess that’s what people say,” he replies, “but I mean, it’s one of those things, where all you got to do is listen to the record. Because Andy Warhol is attached and because I think people like to say the words Velvet Underground, and they like to talk about it. I feel that a lot of times nobody actually gets around to listening to it. All you got to do is listen to it. That’s the main thing. So, by hook or by crook and by tribute. Anything to get people’s ears on the source - that is why I’m talking to you.”

Sweeney debunks the notion that musicians were attracted to the album because the songs sounded simple to play and emulate.

“I would actually say totally, no,” he explains. “It’s incredibly difficult to sound like them and I think that’s a curious sort of thing. Actually, The Velvet Underground have a ton of chord changes, but still, some of their famous songs have not a lot of chord changes. Rhythmically, it’s so sophisticated. It’s incredible. ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’, the way that he says, the first word, ‘I’m’, is as rhythmic as you could possibly be. It’s as sophisticated as James Brown or something like that.

“It’s a real challenge to sound that way, but it’s so damn good that you want to. They really are an open door for people who are willing to go inside of it and to try to make music. I think they’re inspiring that way.

I think the music’s really sophisticated, especially rhythmically. It’s so syncopated and hypnotising.”

Lyrically too, I suggest, the album was unlike anything else being released at the time - March 1967.

“I wasn’t there,” laughs Sweeney. “For me it was this cool music. I was already listening to hardcore and all sorts of other cool subcultures and stuff. Velvet Underground were a band that had long ago, faded away, obscure band, when I first heard about them. So, it’s really the power of these records. That’s why people keep doing tribute records to The Velvet Underground. There’s some really incredible power that no matter where you are or what’s going in your life, they’re standalone albums.

“If you like rock and roll, or if you like narrative music, or if you have a sense of adventure, or if you’re fucking cool, you’re going to like these records. That’s what I think about The Velvet Underground.”

Sweeney and Iggy Pop are featured on the tribute album’s longest track, ‘European Sun’ – a song that would have sounded absolutely bizarre to most people in its original incarnation.

“I don’t if it’s any more or less experimental than the original version,” says Sweeney, “but I was excited to have the opportunity to stick to the nasty, extreme and exciting, sonically adventurous side of The Velvet Underground. At this point, we know that they were great or that they recorded great songs and performed songs really beautifully.

I was excited to have the opportunity to also point out that they had an understanding of the rhythmic potential of electric guitars, and I wanted to stay true to that track, which doesn’t have any drums on it.

“The original track doesn’t have any drums on it, and I never even noticed that, I think, for because it’s such a nasty, driving track, that for some reason, you just think that there must be drums, but there aren’t. The Velvets were constantly doing all these very cool, smart things like that. There was this kind of avant-garde awareness of the power of repetition and harsh noise and all these things that a stupid electric guitar could accomplish. And on that track in particular, ‘European Son’, that’s on full display.”

“He was fully prepared and knocked out the vocal,” says Sweeney of Iggy Pop. “I did a free thing, where I was just playing noise guitar and he was doing free vocalising. His voice is a mile wide, and he’s a real singer. Then he did a track of free guitar, which was fucking insane to watch. So, it was such a thrill to be able to work on a song by such an important band. Nobody gets the Velvets, like Iggy’s going to get the Velvets.”

“It was like a dream,” says Sweeney of working with Pop. “It was the fucking coolest thing I’ll ever do.”

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By Ian McFarlane

By Meg Crawford

Alternative Rock heroes The Hard-Ons and Tim Rogers make harmonious music together

THE HARD-ONS

Diaz’s stripped-down look back at a former relationship might be as cathartic for you as it was for her

I’M SORRY SIR, THAT RIFF’S BEEN TAKEN Cheersquad

It’s been hailed as a match made in Alternative Rock heaven. You Am I singer / guitarist / song writer Tim Rogers joins forces with one of his favourite bands, The Hard-Ons, and endless possibilities are unveiled.

Initially they had to keep a lid on things. Rogers had been preoccupied with You Am I matters, touring behind the release of their album The Lives Of Others. He squeezed in rehearsal and recording sessions with his new band comrades and the result has been revelatory.

The Hard-Ons original tenure spanned 1982 to 1993 and encompassed six studio albums, numerous singles and EPs and countless tours.

Since their revival in 2000 they’ve continued to record, issuing another seven studio albums that have generally flown under the commercial radar. The new album, with the sly title of I’m Sorry Sir, That Riff’s Been Taken, might well be their best to date. The Hard-Ons’ DNA is still in place – that berserk, punk metal hybrid combined with surf pop melodies – but Rogers has lifted the vocal melodies to new heights. As with his main band, Rogers’ vocals can get swamped in the mix, but the melodies are always engaging.

Rogers has joined founder members Peter ‘Blackie’ Black (guitars) and Ray Ahn (bass) plus drummer Murray Ruse who’s been in the band since 2011. Original drummer / singer Keish de Silva departed some time ago and Blackie had been carrying the vocal weight.

“When we were preparing for the new album,” Ray Ahn explained, “Blackie said he didn’t want to be the lead singer anymore, we’ll get someone else. I said, ‘leave it to me’. I rang Tim Rogers and said, ‘we need a singer, would you like to join the band?’ and straight away he said ‘yes!’. Tim has always been a big fan; he understands the DNA of the band. We’ve toured together, so he has an inside knowledge of the processes of the band, the song writing and recording.

“All of the new songs have managed to capture the best of the band, the intensely great melody craft. The thing about Tim’s vocals is that he’s 100% convincing. With this band, our blueprint is that sonic supercharged rhino in a china shop. The attitude of the first Saints album, the first Damned album, the first Ramones album. They were our first loves. Especially the way Dave Vanian and Joey Ramone would double track their vocals, that’s a punk rock blueprint right there. The downside of that is it becomes too impersonal. We also loved that sense of someone singing direct to you, just single tracked like a soul singer. We’ve never had that; we’ve always had the punk rock rampage, double tracked attitude. Now, Tim is a soulful singer so we thought if we could just harness that soulful, incredibly personal, melodic singing and graft it on to our rampage, then we’d have a winner.”

The first two singles, ‘Hold Tight’ and ‘Lite As A Feather’, are the most immediately accessible tracks, guitar riffs piled high matched by tough beats and soaring harmonies. ‘Lite As A Feather’ in particular sports a dextrous Blackie riff that might have come straight off an Iron Maiden album. On top of that, the other ten tracks have their measure.

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MADI DIAZ

HISTORY OF FEELING ANTI- Records

Whether it’s the pop punk of ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Needles And Pins (sic)’ with sweet harmonies, the wild hardcore bludgeoning of ‘Humiliated Humiliator’ and ‘The Laws Of Gossip’ or the X (Ian RilenSteve Lucas) mixed with Motörhead drive of ‘Frequencies’ and ‘Shoot Me In The Back’, it’s a riotous ride the whole way.

“We had most of the songs fully written,” Ahn continues. “Blackie had the riffs, the chords, the lyrics and the melodies in place for ten tracks, which left two that were just riffs and chords but no lyrics or vocal melodies. We gave Tim the demos so he had the raw material of the music to work with. He came up with the lyrics and vocals melodies for those two heavily riff driven songs, ‘The Laws Of Gossip’ and ‘Frequencies’.”

Rogers says: “Once Ray had asked me to join, Blackie sent me the demos and I just fell in love with the songs. He also sent the lyrics he’d written and to have those in front of me, I never wanted anything so badly in my life. Blackie has a very idiosyncratic way of writing.

His lyrics can be romantic and perceptive, or occasionally really angry, but they’re kind of like diary entries. I drove up to Sydney and listened to the demos for 11 hours so when I got into rehearsal and then the studio I was ready. I wrote the lyrics to two songs. We spoke a lot about harmonies in the studio. We’d make references to that ‘Killing Joke bit there’, or that ‘Hollies harmony here’. With the song ‘Frequencies’, I threw in a Queen harmony, which no one else got until Davey Lane picked up on it. Then Blackie went, ‘ah, that’s from Sheer Heart Attack’.

“The whole thing has given me a new lease on life. From making the last You Am I record and then the shows to the new Hard-Ons album.

Being in a room with those guys, I was thinking ‘yeah, I’m enjoying living (laughs) and being a good person’. It’s hard work because you’ve gotta be fit to do it all but there’s a no-brainer aspect to it as well. I just wanted to do the best I could; not to impress them, just not waste their time.”

If anything, 34 minutes over a 12-track album might seem like shortchanging the listener but that’d just be nit-picking. There are no delusions of expanded consciousness, subtlety or consonancy with this album – it ain’t no symphony and I guess why would one expect that in a Hard-Ons record anyway? Yet there are multiply, engaging layers on offer. If your perception of the band in the past has been coloured by that punk rage – or even if that’s what you crave most – then listen to this album and prepare to be amazed.

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ff the back of her latest album, History of Feeling, some pundits unfairly labelled Nashville-based Madi Diaz an overnight success.

But they’re way off base. For starters, this is Diaz’s fifth full-length album, and she’s been a songwriting gun-for-hire for the last decade and a half. Plus, there’s that none too small thing of Kesha recording a version of her single ‘Resentment’ – which now features on History of Feeling – with Brian Wilson and Sturgill Simpson. “I’m trying to spin it in a positive way,” Diaz says. “Like, ‘wow – I didn’t know that you could be like so new at something for 15 years. I make it look so fresh, every time’.”

That said, Diaz is happy to pitch History of Feeling as a soft relaunch.

Which makes sense, because prior to her work on this album it’d been six years since she put pen to paper on a song for herself. ‘The Man in Me’ was the first song to break that drought. “I’d been writing, recording and playing in other bands, but I hadn’t really felt like I had found anything that felt like me,” Diaz reflects. “I was spending a lot of time searching for the right first step to take. And then at some point you just got to start. You have to start somewhere.”

Thank god she did, because just prior to knuckling down on it, Diaz was considering her options. “I knew I wanted to make a record, but I didn’t really know what that was gonna look like,” she recalls. “I had a bartending job and was low-key researching equine massage therapy and looking at what else was out there, just because I didn’t know if music was gonna keep catching me. Which is that funny joke a lot of musicians like play on themselves over and over again.”

But once she’d cracked the seal, Diaz was on, writing in the vicinity of 100 songs in the next two years. Some may yet find it to other homes, but Diaz is keeping a few in the bag for herself and anticipating their future relevance.“I love rediscovering songs and realising that you’ve kind of written your accidental future in some sort of weird way,” she explains. “I guess, on some level, the songs that made it onto the record are there because they’re just so present to what’s going on.”

Following the painful demise of a long-term relationship, the songs of which she speaks are revealing, brutally honest, and as refreshing as hell. Take for example ‘Rage’, where she sings, with a voice rivalling Joni Mitchell’s clarity, “Forgive and forget/Fuck you, fuck that”. You can identify. How does it feel now that she’s said it out loud for the rest of the world to hear? From Diaz’s perspective, better out than in. “You know, it’s like anytime you are holding on to some big truths that you eventually say out loud – it’s kind of relieving, you know?”

she ponders. “It’s not something that I have to just keep on my own anymore. I’ve shared it, so now I get to see how long the resonance of that carries or echoes out.”

In order to get the ball rolling again, it helped that Diaz moved back to her spiritual home, Nashville. Originally from Pennsylvania, Diaz moved to Nashville with some mates in her formative years after ditching music at Berklee College. From there, she upped sticks for LA following love, before returning to Nashville in love’s wake. “There’s something in the water there, where people show up as themselves and everyone just loves playing music. It’s just like everyone in Nashville is super grateful to exist on this planet together and do this weird thing that we do. I haven’t really found that anywhere else.

Maybe it’s the humidity or something. There’s like a weight to the city.”

Of course, after Diaz kickstarted the process, the pandemic juggernaut started to roll, and she found herself in the invidious position of being without a publishing deal. Happily, the cards fell in her favour. “The songs really started to do their work, and my manager is a magician,” Diaz notes. “I felt really lucky to be caught, especially at that point in time – it was pretty wild you know. I think we were a month into quarantine, when I was able to sign a publishing deal, which made it so that I wasn’t gasping for air.”

PS. the alternate career is still on Diaz’s radar.

“I know I’m going to end up with horses at some point in the decade or so, and I know that I want land. I want to adopt retired police horses and give them back massages, and whether that makes me an equine massage therapist? You know, maybe…”

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By Michael Smith

By Ian McFarlane suggested changing a few arrangements and he’d say we should bring in such and such to play on that – his creative input was just enormous so I thought I couldn’t have him bringing in all this input without cutting him in as coproducer.”

Angus Gill releases one of the most authentic sounding bluegrass albums ever recorded in Australia.

ANGUS GILL

THE SCRAPBOOK Rivershack Records/MGM

“So, I started to track the album in early January and most of the parts were down by the end of February. I wrote a few more songs to round out the album – there were a few feels that we needed that we didn’t have and a few ideas not just for my own projects but for other people’s projects. Anyway, we had a flood up here in March and my studio was half-flooded and lost a certain amount of gear, but luckily it was all insured, so I was taking a bit of a break from this bluegrass project – I also wrote and produced a comedy album with my favourite comedians Hughesy and Akbar and all different people so I had to finish all that off, which isn’t out as an Angus Gill album but as by Uncle Nev and Aunty Bev – and so I was able to finish off the album in April.

I’m four albums in and I think I can confidently say on this album I’m proud of every element of it.”

Melbourne singer / songwriter Brigitte Bardini recently released her debut album, a lush, ethereal, atmospheric work entitled Stellar Lights.

The Scrapbook” is released on Rivershack Records/MGM Distribution.

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ngus Gill’s latest album, The Scrapbook has to be one of the most authentic sounding bluegrass albums ever recorded in Australia, and that’s just what he was aiming for when got down to recording it early in the year. It turns out he owes his love of bluegrass to one of the most Australian of singer-songwriters, as he admitted to Michael Smith, on the line from his home in Port Macquarie.

“I’d actually come across bluegrass through Paul Kelly’s Smoke album, which is very authentic but done in an Aussie kind of style. Then I went back to the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe and kind of moved my way forward to Ricky Scaggs and Alison Krauss and so forth.”

Not that Gill was thinking about cutting a bluegrass album when he started looking to record his fourth album. “It started out, I got together with Jim Lauderdale when I was in Nashville last, which would have been November of 2019. We wrote over a couple of days, a song which he cut for a project of his own and the next day a song that I recorded with him called ‘Whittling Away’ and I was kind of taking stock of my songs last year and that song really struck a chord with me so I started doing a bit of pre-production on it and emailed Jim to say I was thinking of cutting this song of ours, particularly in light of COVID and everything that was happening, it resonated with me probably even more than it did when we wrote it.

“It was written in a broken narrative structure and I said, ‘Look, I think it might be a duet. Would you be keen to sing it with me?’ And he shot straight back to me saying he’d love to do it. So, he sent his part through in a week and I built the track up and all of a sudden, we had this bluegrass track sitting out all on its own.

“Shortly after that I was working on another song called ‘Samson’, which I’d written for an old country project and as I kept playing it over and over it really screamed bluegrass. So, I started building up that track as well and realised, ‘Hey, I’m doing a bluegrass album an authentic bluegrass album as a kind of homage.’”

Gill began the process of recording the album and then called in one of his favourite American bluegrass musicians, Strawberry, Arkansas multi-instrumentalist Tim Crouch. “I’ve been working with Tim for probably five years. I’ve had him play on a lot of things I’ve produced.

He’s a brilliant fiddle and mandolin player and all-round great player – he can play everything – and when I was deciding I was going to do a bluegrass album, originally it was going to be just him and I playing all the instruments. He can overdub things and make them sound like five different people playing in the same room. He knows bluegrass like the back of his hand. He played on an Alan Jackson album about ten years ago that I just loved. So, I was playing all these tracks and he 84

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n the very morning I was setting up to interview Brigitte Bardini, Victoria was rocked by an earthquake which registered magnitude 5.9 on the Richter scale. It was the state’s biggest earthquake of the modern era.

I guess you can find irony in any situation but to be talking about such a delicate, soothing album, just after a massive seismic disruption, is a surreal irony. Bardini might sense the irony but it’s time to focus on other things. “What does feel surreal to me is that I’ve been building up to something for so long and finally the day came when the album was released into the world. You have to ride that wave afterwards. It feels strange but very exciting,” she explains.

The 21-year-old multi-instrumentalist has been playing piano since she was a child but didn’t think about approaching song writing, or even pick up a guitar, until she was 18.

It became an imperative to express herself emotionally in song. I asked her where she positions herself when it comes to genre?

“Hmm, when I’m writing I try not to focus on genres but I guess the overarching genre I work in is Dream Pop. I like to experiment with genres when I’m recording, so I might explore funk or folk. But I’m comfortable with Dream Pop.” Her music does incorporate elements of Dream Pop, Ambient Pop, Electronica,

singer-songwriter folk etc. They are all styles of music I love and descriptive adjectives such as dream-like, spacious, warm, melodic, sensual and summary readily come to mind.

I suggest my made-up genre designation of Ambient Folk Rock might also be appropriate, to which she adds an affirmative “Oh, that sounds nice”.

As to her direct inspirations she lists the likes of Jeff Buckley, Thom Yorke, French duo AIR, P.J. Harvey, Alison Goldfrapp and Scritti Politti. “I grew up on those artists. Alison Goldfrapp in particular is someone who I see as having pushed the boundaries.”

I mention some of my favourite artists from that whole stylist approach: Cocteau Twins, David Sylvian, Eno, Empire Of The Sun and Scribble (aka Johanna Piggott). “For sure the Cocteau Twins, and I love ‘Walking On A Dream’ by Empire Of The Sun but I’ve never heard of Scribble. I’ll have to investigate her music.”

To bring the album to life, the process involved writing and recording in her home studio, Toyland Studios. She sang, played keyboards, piano, guitar and bass, using a mix of acoustic and electronic instrumentation. With COVID-19 hitting last year she could rely on her own production skills, to polish a recorded track as much as possible before taking it to a professional engineer. “I took six of the songs to Adam Calaizis and he co-produced them,” Bardini says. “I did two tracks with my father, Alex.

He’s given me such incredible support; he was the one who really pushed me to get the album done. I did want to produce it initially by myself, to look back and know that I had the freedom to achieve it. I feel I have multiply identities but I don’t mind working with other people at all. I just wanted to have control with this album, my entry into the world of music.”

As to the compositions, tracks such as ‘Heartbreaker’, ‘Wild Ride’, ‘Breathe’ and ‘Feel My Love’ inform the whole: upheavals on an emotional scale, love and heartbreak, taking chances, offering succour. I ask her if ‘Breathe’ is a suggestion or a command?

She laughs and replies, “Breathe’ was really about a moment in time, reflecting on experiences with a friend. Just living in that moment. I wrote it to be purely descriptive and put those thoughts into a time capsule.

Anyone who listens might be able to glimpse into that experience and to hear all the emotions involved. Then ‘Wild Ride’ was about deciding to enter into music, to make it my sole focus. It was a note-to-self, a diary entry to understand that’s what I needed to do. It’s that contradiction of feeling like you’re being steered in one direction but you have to make an instinctive decision, take control and be happy about it.”

I draw her attention to ‘Made Of Gold’ and suggest that she might be an old soul in a young body because the keyboard melody is redolent of a 13th century Gregorian Chant.

“That’s an interesting description!” the singer exclaims. “I’ve never heard it described that way before. I work intuitively in how I create songs so that must have come from some deep place.”

The album consists of nine tracks, to which the CD version adds five Bonus Tracks.

They’re all very strong in their own right.

‘Could Have Been’, for example, begins with a calliope styled intro after which the melody blossoms into something that could have come from a Beach Boys album circa the early ’70s. “That’s a compliment, considering how totally legendary the Beach Boys are. That’s a fun story actually: I found an abandoned organ on a hard rubbish collection one day. I took it home and played around with it and that whole song came out, a spur of the moment, spontaneous thing.”

The meditative piano instrumental ‘Stellar Lights’ closes out the Bonus Tracks. Even though it’s not on the album proper it’s an essential part of the equation. “I feel that ‘Stellar Lights’ is definitely a Dream Pop track. It has all those sparkly elements, the Cocteau Twins inspiration. It encapsulates that otherworldly sense I was aiming for. It felt natural to name the album Stellar Lights and to connect that track with the whole body.”

Stellar Lights is out now on Ruby Valley Records.

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By Brian Wise “There was a little bit of massaging it just to make sure that the bass was loud enough and the balance,” continues Harris. “Of course, there’s a certain charm to the Ryman album because we had never performed them before. So, the album was being born as people were listening to it. With the Ramble in Music City, we knew those songs in our sleep. I mean, the band was almost at their peak, coming off the road like that. So, there is a different kind of energy. They’re both good energies, but they’re different.”

A forgotten concert recording from 1990 is unearthed and proves to be a treasure.

“We had to leave some things off,” says Harris, when I mention that the album features an hour and a quarter from the show which was probably a lot longer. “But they weren’t left off because they didn’t rise to the standard of the other performances but just because we couldn’t get them all on there. Also, a couple of songs were left off intentionally because they were songs associated with Gram and there’s songs that I’m hoping to include on another record at another time.”

EMMYLOU HARRIS & THE NASH RAMLBERS

RAMBLE IN MUSIC CITY Nonesuch

E

mmylou Harris says that her latest album “was a surprise to everyone because we didn’t remember it being recorded!”

We are talking about the recording of a 1990 concert at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, Harris’s first performance in Nashville with her new outfit the Nash Ramblers, somewhat of a bluegrass ‘supergroup’.

The tape emerged while Harris was doing some research for a completely different project.

Now released as Ramble In Music City: The Lost Concert 1990, the performance took place months prior to the famous Ryman concert that went onto to win a Grammy Award and featured a completely different set list. After years working with the Hot band, which included Rodney Crowell, Harris assembled an amazing outfit that included Sam Bush on fiddle, mandolin and vocals and Roy Huskey Jr. on bass. Larry Atamanuik was on drums and as Harris explains, “it wasn’t a big full drum kit, it’s mainly brushes.” Then there was Al Perkins on dobro and banjo and Jon Randall Stewart, who Harris calls a “young phenom”, on acoustic lead guitar, mandolin and vocals.

The tapes for the 1990 concert were shelved in the wake of the Ryman show and its subsequent success. A few years later Harris went on to to work with Daniel Lanois and his team on the brilliant Wrecking Ball and the tapes faded into the background. Until last year.

“It’s just one of those things that I guess would have stayed there if [producer] James Austin hadn’t been digging around, looking for some material for another project that I’m thinking about doing,” explains Harris who adds that Austin was searching for “basically live versions of songs that I either did with Gram [Parsons], or he had recorded material associated with Gram and my time with Gram. So, in looking for that, he found this complete concert and, believe me, it was a surprise to everyone because we didn’t remember it being recorded.”

After spending almost 15 years with The Hot Band what led Harris to assemble this new outfit?

“I think a lot of it was being on the road for that long and singing over a band that wasn’t terribly loud,” replies Harris, “but in an era before the in-ear monitors it was having an effect on my voice, I think. I had gotten to a place where I guess I needed a change, even though I was working with brilliant musicians. I’ve always been lucky enough to have great bands. It was my friend, John Starling, from the Seldom Scene bluegrass band in Washington, DC who suggested that perhaps I might just put together an acoustic band. It would be easier to hear.”

How long did it take her to get used to playing with this new band after being with The Hot Band for so long?

“I don’t remember it being difficult,” she recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘I wonder how my audience is going to take it if there’s no pedal steel?’

Because I associated so much of my sound with that wonderful electric guitar playing that had started with James Burton and I had Albert Lee and then Frank Reckard. Pedal steel had been such an important part too.

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There are several legendary writers on Ramble In Music City who are keystones in country music: AP Carter and The Louvin Brothers, to name just two of them.

“They say that those Bristol sessions with the Carter family and Jimmie Rogers are sort of the beginnings of country music,” explains Harris. “Of course, for me as a folk singer, when I started falling in love with music, I became aware of the Carter family because they were not country, but like folk or old-timey country music - that’s like Americana, it kind of bleeds together. I love ‘Hello, Stranger’. I mean, who knows what the heck they’re talking about in that song, but there’s just something about it that I found so charming. I actually took it straight off the Hazel and Alice record [Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard].”

Is that project of songs related to Gram Parsons likely to emerge in the next year or so?

While the last studio album from Harris was her collaboration with Rodney Crowell, The Traveling Kind in 2015, she has been busy over the past two years, completing a memoir, putting together the new album focused on Gram Parsons and her annual Woofstock concert to raise funds for a rescue dog shelter. She has also been able to do some concerts and festivals over the past few months.

“We’ll see,” replies Harris. “We’ve got a lot of stuff. I mean, there’s so many versions of those songs with my different bands. We’ll see if I am able to put the time and energy into it, but at least the tracks are recorded.”

“I know it’s been terribly tough,” says Harris as we finish our conversation. “I’ve been pretty lucky. But my heart bleeds for my fellow musicians, not just because of making a living, but it’s kind of like the air we breathe, really.”

I wondered if the audience would not like it. But the first show I believe was at Wembley Stadium on a music festival and maybe one of the biggest audiences I’d ever played to, and they seemed fine with it.

So, I figured, okay, I guess it’s working for me. At first, I thought I would miss the sound of the pedal steel and the sound of the electric guitar, but the songs were still the great songs, and the musicians were fabulous. So, really after maybe a moment of trepidation, I just stepped right into it, and it fit perfectly.”

Ramble In Music City is an absolutely superb 23-song, 75-minute document of that historic night on September 28, 1990, that includes ‘If I Could Only Win Your Love,’ ‘Roses in the Snow,’ Townes Van Zandt’s ‘If I Needed You,’ Paul Simon’s ‘The Boxer,’ ‘Delbert McClinton’s ‘Two More Bottles of Wine,’ the country classic ‘Hello Stranger’ and a stunning ‘Boulder To Birmingham.’

“I’m a little hazy on a lot of the things,” explains Harris about the concert that took place 31 years ago. “But coming back after playing a lot overseas and around the country, we were all happy to be home.

You’re just so well-oiled when you’ve been out there playing and it’s a celebration. Looking back on it now, I think it was just a real celebration of that year.”

It’s interesting that the concert at the Ryman, which took place only about six months later, I guess, had a completely different set list. It was a completely different type of set. I mean, this one at the Ramble in Music City was much more, I guess, traditional country, wasn’t it?

How did that change come about?

“When it came time to actually do a new recording, I wanted to work up songs that I had never recorded before but then record them for the first time,” says Harris when I ask her why the set changed completely for the Ryman show which took place just six months later.

“Because I’ve always felt that the first time you play a song that you just worked up in front of an audience, you’ll never get that back. It might not be the best performance, but there’s something very, very special about that moment that will never come again.”

“But once again, like Ramble in Music City, there were no overdubs.

We didn’t fix anything. These are totally live off the floor. Both those records.”

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ALBUMS: General DAVE BREWER LONG ROAD BACK HOME Sundown Records

The Mighty Reapers and beyond, a legacy reimagined, refashioned and revivified to perfection on Long Road Back Home.

MICHAEL SMITH THE CARTWHEELS THE CARTWHEELS Independent

Koondrook fishin’.) Further recording took place closer to home at Richard Pleasance’s Elevated Brains Studio.

Don’t be fooled by the kitsch front cover image of crocheted squares.

Sometimes less indicates more. Ten lovingly crafted songs are brought to life by players – family and guests – who are clearly ‘at home’ together.

This is Antipodean Country, plain and true.

CHRIS LAMBIE

Laid back, cruising grooves are what it’s all about for veteran Fremantle, WA singer, guitarist and songwriter Dave Brewer, whose CV includes such seminal bands as The Elks, The Dynamic Hepnotics, The Mighty Reapers and The catholics and who currently plays alongside Lucky Oceans as well as The DooDaddies. Here he’s called in the album’s producer Elliot Smith to cover the drumming and Hammond organist Clayton Doley, who positively shimmers across ‘Lonely Part of Town’, one of two songs Brewer revisits from earlier recordings on this album, as the core musicians. The other is the album’s final cut, ‘Night Walkin’’.

Brewer’s old catholics double bassist Jonathan Zwartz features on ‘Many a Fool Will Understand’, while his Nashville-based Wurlitzer piano-playing player nephew Ryan Brewer adds his own unique texture to ‘Harder To Let You Go’ and ‘Here Comes That Hurt Again’. Also on hand are percussionist Fabian Hevia, while pianist Harry Mitchell, double bassist Ben Franz and saxophonist Jeremy Trezona chime in on ‘Hard to Say Goodbye to Your Best Friend’, which was written in tribute to late Mighty Reapers bass player Vito Portolesi. For all the fire power on hand, their collective contributions are tastefully spare and subtle, much like Brewer’s guitar style. Also chipping in is Brewer’s son Riley, who cowrote the soulful tune ‘Make Everything Alright’. It all sounds so effortless and a pure auditory pleasure, a supple, chilled collection of slow-groove delights, songs that sound like they’ve been a part of the landscape forever yet still fresh and engaging. You can hear Brewer’s own musical journey over his 30-odd years, from the blues of The Elks to the sensuous soul grooves of

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CHARM OF FINCHES WONDERFUL OBLIVION AntiFragile Music/Footstomp Music

ALBUMS: General the pair combine their respective cello and violin parts, with the addition of Indyana Kippin’s viola, to create the most languid of chamber trios behind ‘Goodnight’ as “every piece of me is aching for that touch…”. Even their descriptions of illness and decay in ‘Pockets of Stone’ sound unutterably sensuous!

There are moments, just moments, in ‘Concentrate on Breathing’, ‘Miranda’ (a sort of murder ballad if you will) and ‘Treading Water’, when the way a melody flows, a line is repeated or the harmonies fall that, at least to my ears, recalls the early Simon & Garfunkel – and that’s no bad thing. Allow this Charm of Finches to take you away once more.

MICHAEL SMITH The Cartwheels live in the sticks, sing of love gone wrong and hang out with players of fiddle, accordion, banjo and pedal steel guitar. It’s a decidedly grass roots rhinestonefree Country zone. The band kicked off in 2004 with singer-songwriter Wendy Phypers on acoustic guitar, her partner Dave Patterson (upright and electric bass) and their son Charley Phypers on drums. Dave was a member of The Happening Thang before he joined Wendy to form Golden Guitar winning band The Sparnetts. The Cartwheels self-titled fifth studio album is yet another jewel in their dusty Akubra crown. Frontwoman Phypers’ down-to-earth charm would win hearts in a front bar, on a festival stage or a CWA cook up. Her songs epitomise Country melody and sentiment. Track titles like ‘Two Fools’ and ‘I Miss My Baby’ point to classic themes of the genre. Single ‘Is She The Only One’ could have been written for Patsy Cline. ‘I Wish’ is an invitation to dance, bringing Loretta to mind. Sometimes simply celebrating the Everyday, Phypers’ tunes quickly get in your head. The sing along urge is irresistible.

Recorded in Victoria and Nashville, there’s an added hint of Americana from the latter. With producer Stu Hibberd (Sierra Ferrell) on board, the album features local Grammy winners The Time Jumpers. Fiddler Joe Spivey brings a bucketload of Western swing to the party.

The lively ‘Kookaburra Calling’ reminds us that the band isn’t Tennessee-bred. (‘Gunna pack my ute with campin’ gear and I’m off to

THE DAPTONE SOUL REVUE LIVE! AT THE APOLLO Daptone/Planet

occupy the air as he draws on the melancholy of Richmond Fontaine and the melodic alt-country of Wilco.

‘Do You Want Me To Forget’ sounds like a lost classic, complete with a blossoming Clemons-style sax solo.

‘Play With Me’ leans into countrified power-pop and closer ‘The Land’ is an epic roll down a wide open road as he sings of ‘the land that we adore’. Mitch’s piano is as much a feature as his guitar playing, right across the this impressive release - another landmark of Australian alt-country music.

For anyone with the remotest interest in soul music, standing inside an empty auditorium of the Apollo Theater in Harlem is a ‘hairs standing up on the back of the neck’ experience; it is to soul afficionados what The Cavern is to Beatles fans.

Over three nights in December 2014, the mighty Daptone label’s roster of artists performed to sell-out crowds; those electric shows have finally been released in celebration of Daptone’s two decades of soul excellence. Right from the introduction by Binky Griptite, it is one high voltage performance after another; with the awesome DapKings acting as the house band, how could it not be so. On a stage that has delivered some of the greatest live albums in soul music (think James Brown and Donny Hathaway, to name but two), the Dap-Kings urge on a phalanx of 21st century retro soul testifiers including Saun & Starr, The Extraordinaires, Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens, the Como Mamas, Antibalas and

of the freewheeling poeticism in Felice’s wordplay – is quite mesmerising. There’s a stream of consciousness quality but it’s clearly considered and curated with real skill and artistry. That combo of the band’s range and masterful lyrics confirms The Felice Brothers as one of the finest bands of our time.

CHRIS FAMILTON TITO JACKSON UNDER YOUR SPELL Hillside Global/Planet

writing legends Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and featuring legendary O’Jays singer Eddie Levert. Better late than never for the largely overlooked Jackson, Under Your Spell is a thoroughly uplifting listening experience.

TREVOR J. LEEDEN JULIAN JAMES & THE MOONSHINE STATE DEVIL TOWN Independent

CHRIS FAMILTON THE FELICE BROTHERS FROM DREAMS TO DUST Yep Roc Records

TREVOR J. LEEDEN MITCH DILLON’S COMPULSIVE RAMBLERS MITCH DILLON’S COMPULSIVE RAMBLERS Ragged Gum Records

The harmonies are as achingly

beautiful as ever but this time around there’s even a little playfulness here and there when the Windred-Wornes sisters allow themselves not to be too overwhelmed by the pathos, loss or sadness inherent in some of the stories they tell and those telling little details – “three thousand paper cranes” (‘Goodnight’) – recalled within them. On Wonderful Oblivion they present their first self-confessed “fears about the environmental crisis”song, ‘Heavy’ – “ten years on will we wonder what we ever thought we were doing”. Musically, Charm of Finches really are the most extraordinarily mellifluous musical alchemists, effortlessly conjuring up the innocence of childhood they ponder in ‘As a Child’ – “to hold that wonder again” – right across the album. This time around the multi-instrumentalists called on Halifax, Nova Scotia-based producer Daniel Ledwell, himself a multi-instrumentalist who contributed some of the subtlest drums, percussion, bass, electric guitar, piano, harp, flugelhorn and trombone flourishes you’ll ever hear, complimenting perfectly Mabel and Ivy’s own musical embellishments, always deftly low-key, even when

the Sugarman 3. Instrumental interludes come courtesy of the Dap-Kings, the heavily funkified Budos Band, and Tommy Brenneck’s magnificent Menahan Street Band.

Cream on the cake is provided by Daptone’s greatest discoveries, both now sadly departed. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings lift the roof off the theatre with their unbridled power, and then there’s the Screaming Eagle Of Soul, the one and only Charles Bradley.

Having forged a career as a James Brown impersonator, it is entirely appropriate that the night should belong to him as he channels past icons, his guttural shout shaking the foundations. To have seen both Bradley and Jones perform was a ‘where were you’ event; this wonderful release is a timely and poignant reminder of how truly great they were. Damn, this is one helluva record.

Melbourne musician Mitch Dillon has been around the local scene for a while now, backing up other artists and fronting Attractor Beams, a much-missed band who wore obvious influences such as The Replacements on their sleeves.

Now stepping out on his own with backing band the Compulsive Ramblers, Roger Bergodaz (Lost Ragas) being the desk and Van Walker in the producer chair, Dillon displays a remarkable maturity of writing and singing on this debut solo album. The Replacements still haunt the walls of these songs but now they reside more in the shadows as Dillon’s songs take on wider influences, greater depth and more nuanced tones and textures.

Heartache and heartbreak still

The upstate New York group, based around the brothers Ian and James Felice, have been consistently evolving their sound for 15 years now, across a brace of increasingly diverse albums that showcase the progression of main songwriter Ian’s songs, from early folk facsimiles to wildly impressionistic cosmic Americana tales.

From Dreams To Dust is a clear contender for their best album to date. The influence of Dylan and The Band are still at the core of their sound yet here they show how much they’ve built on that, from injecting ragged, electrically charged guitar solos and heavily processed vocal samples to gothic slowcore moods and a maximalist 80s drum sounds.

The way they blend a kind of backwoods gospel choir through some of the songs draws a line to latter day Nick Cave and his use of soulful soundscapes.

Ian Felice’s lyrics are the real star of the show. His ability to reference John Wayne, Jean-Claude Van Damme, AC/DC and Kurt Cobain, a cornucopia of insects, the autobahn and styrofoam – a mere snippet

The name rings a bell! As the second oldest member (and the one holding a guitar although never allowed to play on their records) of the Jackson 5, Tito’s contribution to sibling quintet was somewhat overshadowed by all his brothers.

Unlike the others, Tito did not pursue a solo recording career, something he finally addressed in 2016 with his pop/R&B debut Tito Time. Now for his sophomore outing, he has delved back to the genesis of his love for music, the blues (who knew!). Under Your Spell is a funk, soul and R&B fuelled blues belter of an album with a stellar roster of contributors that gives proceedings a feel good “rhythm’n’blues review” feel; this is music for the feet. Pulsating horns kick off ‘Wheels Keep Turning’, a song that harks back to his sibling Motown days, before Stevie Wonder’s immediately identifiable harmonica introduces the thunderous ‘Love One Another’, Tito sharing vocals with brother Marlon, Kenny Neal and Bobby Rush. The title track features a cracking vocal/ guitar performance from Tito; why has it taken him so long to do this?

Joe Bonamassa adds further bluesy licks to the fire, before George Benson and Claudette King step up to help out on a tasty cover of the B.B. King classic ‘Rock Me Baby’. The guests keep coming on the funky ‘All In The Family Blues’, a tune penned for Jackson by Philly soul song-

Melbournian Julian James knows his way around a tune. He’s a man with a musical plan, a swag of lyrical ideas in his back pocket and a fondness for the music of the American south imbued within his very being; he’s comfortable fingerpicking some blues, lamenting over soaring fiddle, keeping it simple, keeping it loose.

Devil Town is his third record (after 2017 debut Whiskey & The Devil and 2019’s Silver Spade), and it presents as an exploration within the Americana genre, a truly wide umbrella term that unfurls far enough so as to include all manner of styles. To James’ credit however, he doesn’t overreach here – he displays myriad styles over the ten tracks on Devil Town, for sure, but he’s very present on each track, each song put together with a laconic aplomb.

And laconic encapsulates the record – whether a slow country-style waltz (‘Home Is All I See’, ‘Tennessee Waltz’); jaunty blues (‘Little Lady’, ‘Mushroom Clouds’); and more soul-oriented numbers where his vocal takes centre stage (‘Soul Man’), James presents it all calmly.

Laconically. And, truth be told, that’s what makes this a good record – this music is supposed to be laidback, and with Devil Town, James has done exactly that – a fine mixture of Australian-tinged Americana.

SAMUEL J. FELL 89

ALBUMS: Blues

ALBUMS: General

BY AL HENSLEY DON MCGLASHAN BRIGHT NOVEMBER MORNING MGM

JAMES MCMURTRY THE HORSES AND THE HOUNDS New West Records

RABBIT TOO MUCH ROCK’N’ROLL Bad Reputation

The time for Australia to hear more of McGlashan is long overdue. He’s a legend across the ditch, as a member of ‘80s duo The Front Lawn and seminal ‘90s band The Mutton Birds. He’s also collaborated with Neil Finn on stage and in the studio. One of my favourite 2015 albums was Lucky Stars by the composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist. This, his fourth solo release is equally impressive. McGlashan’s lyricism is both artful and accessible. His rich and soothing vocal timbre is reminiscent of Michael Stipe or John Martyn. Sonically, several of the new tracks lean into a slightly edgier space this time.

There’s the sweeping, slightly unnerving ‘Shackleton’ inspired

by McGlashan’s experience of the Antarctic landscape a few years back. Likely from his years spent in London, there’s a certain ‘90s indie feel in other places.

Standout track ‘Sunscreen’ is a dreamy wistful narrative. ‘Now’s The Place’ (co-written with Harry Sinclair) talks of the power of living in the moment – pretty much all we can do right now. It features an anthemic hypnotic and spacious wall-of-sound backing.

Bright November Morning was recorded in Aotearoa and Vancouver with band The Others.

McGlashan writes the kind of songs you can’t imagine not having in your life and I’m so glad to have a whole new batch to relish.

CHRIS LAMBIE 90

It’s been a long wait for McMurtry fans since his excellent Complicated Game came out six years ago but there was never any doubt that it’d be worth the wait.

McMurtry, like a fine wine, seems to just get better and better with age.

The Horses and the Hounds hits the ground running with ‘Canola Fields’ and McMurtry casting a descriptive eye back to people and places – from Southern Alberta to Santa Cruz and Brooklyn. He has that special ability to sing about America, filtered through the eyes of characters and acute observational details of their circumstances, from burnt toast to stained rugs and rusty cedar. ’Operation Never Minds’ examines media and modern apathy, numerous bad decisions are documented, the hardships of ageing rockers are laid bare and facing up to past mistakes and missteps inhabit a number of songs.

McMurtry knows the power of music in giving atmosphere to his stories. Delivered with only an acoustic guitar they’d still stand tall as sublime compositions but with the full band treatment they sway in the wind and thunder down desert highways, heartache is amplified and damaged souls are conveyed with weight and depth. It’s essentially heartland rock of the Petty and Springsteen kind but rendered with economy and aplomb.

McMurtry has rewarded the listener with another masterclass in songwriting.

CHRIS FAMILTON

Rising out of the NSW industrial city of Newcastle in 1973, Rabbit was a hard rocking trio - Mark Tinson (guitar), Jim Porteus (bass) and Phil Screen (drums) - hell bent on world domination, but in need of a singer. In what must rank as one of the greatest “what if” tales in Oz music history, lead singer Dave Evans left a then unknown AC/DC and entered the Rabbit burrow. With a permanently unbuttoned silk shirt exposing his shark tooth adorned torso, Evans brought his “rampant heterosexuality” with him and the metamorphosis from hard rock to Glam was consecrated. Spandex leggings, stack-heeled boots, bare chests and silk blouses became the ultimate accessories for their salacious braggadocio, and they quickly became the country’s pre-eminent bad boys of glam (despite stiff competition from Ted Mulry Gang and Hush). By 1976, ex-Marshall Brothers/Highway guitarist Dave Hinds arrived and acclaimed producer Peter Dawkins took the band into Albert Studios to record their second album.

Housed in a cover that screamed out to mothers everywhere to “lock up your daughters”, Dawkins succeeded in capturing the raw power of the band’s high energy live performances. Footnote: It has taken many years to secure a release of the master tapes for this album, sadly this is not an isolated case. Many artists from the seventies have been consistently denied the opportunity to reissue albums that are part of the fabric of Oz rock music’s golden age.

TREVOR J. LEEDEN

STEVE TYSON & THE TRAIN REX BANJO’S LAST RIDE Red Music/MGM

CHRISTONE ‘KINGFISH’ INGRAM

662 Alligator/Only Blues Music

Northern Rivers journeyman Steve Tyson’s gravelly voice leads the charge on his latest release, Banjo’s Last Ride, a collection of rootsy tunes inspired by all manner of things, from Tyson’s various travels, love and loss, and Banjo, his “temple dog, no longer my little shadow in the studio, but always with me in spirit.”

Mandolin trills, flurries of piano, a plethora of guitars, sliding and strumming, simple yet effective percussion define this album, a songwriters album to be sure (it’s all about the songs), framed with Tyson’s rough yet wellhewn vocal, combining to create a nice showcase of what he’s capable of, which is plenty.

While specialising in what is essentially American music, Banjo’s Last Ride carries a very Australian bent to it, courtesy of Tyson’s songwriting style; the songs are small stories set to song, as opposed to small poems, for want of a better descriptive phrase, set in red dust and the salt air that defines this place. And even though a few are set overseas (Berlin and Paris, for example), most of them paint pictures of uniquely Australian life – solid effort from one who knows the score.

SAMUEL J. FELL

Since the release of his 2019 debut album Kingfish, guitarist/ singer/songwriter Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram’s career has soared to dizzying heights.

The widely acclaimed CD has seen the young musician from Clarksdale, Mississippi touring throughout the US and Europe and garnering no less than five Blues Music Awards. Ingram returns with 662, its title coming from his hometown’s telephone area code. The music reflects Ingram’s growth as an artist incorporating a fair smattering of soul and rockinfused material co-written with hard-hitting drummer/producer Tom Hambridge. Ingram’s Delta roots are discernible, albeit filtered through a slick band of Nashville session players.

While Hambridge favours an emphasis on a weighty bottomend sound, it doesn’t cloud Ingram’s searing guitar tones and expressive vocals displaying the confidence of a wellseasoned performer. Ingram’s 14 original compositions are deeply personal, offering an insight into the soul of the man. Songs of love, life on the road, and life in general culminate in the bonus track ‘Rock & Roll’. Recorded at Royal Studios in Memphis

by Boo Mitchell, the ballad is a poignant tribute to Ingram’s recently departed mother. Could be it points the direction in which this much-lauded artist is headed next.

EDDIE 9V

EDDIE C. CAMPBELL

DAN HOPKINS

LITTLE BLACK FLIES

DIFFERENT ECONOMY

Ruf/Only Blues Music

BADDEST CAT ON THE BLOCK

A native of Atlanta, Georgia, singer/guitarist Brooks Mason Kelly was born in 1996 and grew up digging the catalogues of blues greats like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Freddy King.

Carving out a musical career of his own since around 2013, Kelly’s pivotal moment came in 2019 when he adopted the moniker of Eddie 9V (9-Volt) and recorded one of 2020’s breakout debut releases Left My Soul In Memphis. The inspiration for this follow-up title came as a result of being cooped up at home without any gigs due to the pandemic. The artist assembled a line-up of Atlanta’s finest blues players, packed them into the studio and led them through a bunch of new originals and covers of material by Albert King, Sonny Thompson and Jimmy Reed. Eschewing modern production techniques in favour of a live in-the-moment retro sound, Eddie 9V’s blues are strictly old-school. Channelling Eddie Hinton, 9V reboots the soul blues genre launching into the opening title song. ‘She Got Some Money’ pays respect to Elmore James, ‘Dog Me Around’ evokes Howlin’ Wolf, and the slow burning ‘Back On My Feet’ echoes the sound of John Lee Hooker.

Eddie C. Campbell was a proud standard-bearer for the Chicago West Side single string blues guitar playing style. The Mississippi-born musician who grew up in the Windy City honed his skills as a sideman for Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed and others and ran for a time with the revered Magic Sam Maghett. While playing in Willie Dixon’s Chicago Blues All-Stars in 1977 Campbell’s considerable talent was realised through the release of his debut album King Of The Jungle. In 1985, a year after he relocated to Europe for a 10-year stint, Campbell cut this LP for JSP Records in the UK with a posse of top-notch British blues musicians that included highly regarded drummer John Dummer. Now, three years after Campbell passed away aged 79, these recordings have been remastered in a powerful new mix and reissued with four bonus tracks recorded at a Belgian blues festival in 1992. A masterful guitar stylist, Campbell’s limber vocals reveal his admiration for Muddy Waters. He puts his own stamp on selections from Waters, Dixon, Magic Sam, Percy Mayfield and Albert King and delivers a solid batch of derivative but nuanced originals.

JSP/Planet Co.

Independent

Based on the NSW mid-north coast, Dan Hopkins is a dynamic finger-style and slide guitar playing singer/songwriter who has been entertaining audiences for over a decade with his eclectic blend of blues and roots music. The eight original songs on Hopkins’ new release express his shift away from the city to live a quieter life off the grid. Supplementing those are stripped-back country blues readings of Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ and Robert Johnson’s ‘Come On In My Kitchen’. While his mellifluous vocal tones caress a few semi-acoustic folksy ballads, Hopkins’ ensemble driven electric blues are reminiscent of early Canned Heat, particularly on ‘Back To The Smoke’, ‘Strangeland’ and ‘Sun Never Sets In The East’. Making a significant contribution among the supporting cast of musicians are lead guitarist Bernard Smith, bass player Christian Gardner and drummer Peter Harris Jr. Hopkins recorded the sessions in his self-built solar powered shipping container studio The Blues Den. The set reaches a crescendo on ‘Old Man & The Devil’ which builds from a laid-back swampy groove into a ‘60s-era psychedelic showpiece, Hopkins doubling on bass jamming with slide guitar shredding session guest Lecia Louise.

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ALBUMS: World Music Folk

ALBUMS: Jazz 1

BY TONY HILLIER

BY TONY HILLIER

SHUJAAT HUSAIN KHAN, KATAYOUN GOUDARZI, SHAHO ANDALIBI & SHARIQ MUSTAFA

THIS PALE

Lycopod Records

Two pairs of superlative Indian and Iranian musicians combine with a legendary 13th century Persian poet and philosopher to provide badly needed balm at the end of a truly tempestuous year. It matters not a jot that Iranian-American singer Katayoun Goudarzi delivers Rumi’s words in a tongue that will be foreign to most listeners — her celestial voice conveys the Sufi master’s messages of love and tolerance by osmosis. Although This Pale comprises a mere six tracks, the album actually runs for over an hour. Time stands still as an exquisitely musical conversation between the three virtuoso instrumentalists and singer unfolds and mesmerises.

The dialogue between Goudarzi and Indian sitar master and composer Shujaat Husain Khan, whose ‘gayaki ang’ style aims to imitate the human voice, is simply wondrous. Their expertise is matched by the brilliance of Iranian ney (end-blown flute) player Shaho Andalibi and the rhythmic precision of Hindustani tabla drum maestro Shariq Mustafa as the music ebbs and flows between peaceful valleys and powerful peaks, light and shade. This diverse ensemble has impressively defied cultural differences and pandemic lockdown to bring a fresh and timely urgency to Rumi’s centuries-old words of wisdom.

NAMGAR

NAYAN NAVAA

ARC Music The stunning voice of the titular singer is the icing on a spectacular 92

debut international release from an exotic and eclectic Moscowbased band of the same name, in which Namgar Lhasaranova and a compatriot from the little-known Republic of Buryatia (located on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia) head a collective that has three Russians, a Norwegian and a Canadian in support roles.

Utilising indigenous Mongolian instruments such as the yataga (13-stringed plucked zither), chanza (3-stringed, fretted & plucked lute) and the khomus (metal jew’s harp) in tandem with electric guitars and bass, electronica and drums, Namgar skilfully sculpt folk, pop, rock and jazz elements into a compelling soundscape.

fields. On a lighter note, ‘Midnight in Montreal’ shines a light on French-Canada, with shades of Van Morrison swing. Cryle’s guitar work is again augmented by the slick lead playing of Michael Fix and other gun instrumentalists, while Mick Nolan alternates lead vocal duties with aplomb.

As a consequence, the multi Grammy Award-winning artist’s songs, which focus on issues such as racial inequity and the climate crisis, play second fiddle to bludgeoning electronic beats in all but a brief opening track. Mother Nature, which features hip young African and American acts alongside La Kidjo, is sadly indicative of the direction of 2020s’ Afro-pop and, one suspects, the dictates of a commercial record label.

TIME AND TIDE Independent

ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO

MOTHER NATURE

Universal While Angélique Kidjo’s voice is still strong and soulful as she sashays into her 60s, and her songs as meaningful and pertinent as ever, Africa’s first lady of funk — misguidedly in this reviewer’s opinion — opts for an unnecessarily heavy-handed approach to her 18th album.

SONGS FROM MY FATHER Whaling City Sound

SARAH McQUAID

ASLEEP AT THE REEL

Lhasaranova’s crystalline singing is particularly well suited by the album’s more glacial songs. In heavier rock mode, she comes across as a Mongolian Björk.

Several tracks evoke memories of the memorable theme song to that popular SBS TV serial Vikings.

An unaccompanied duet involving the principals is given a crackly retro vinyl veneer. A set based on epic heroes, sturdy horses and ancient legends is further enhanced by the use of otherworldly throat singing.

GERRY GIBBS

To a degree, Time and Tide takes up where Brisbane band Asleep At The Reel’s entertaining 2019 debut album The Emerald Dream left off, offering another set of well-crafted originals from the pen of master songsmith Mark Cryle, some of which also tip a weather beaten flat cap to the therapeutic value of British and Irish folk standards.

Hoary ballads such as ‘Raglan Road’, ‘Athenry’ and ‘From Clare To Here’ are referenced in ‘Whiskey Songs’ and ‘Celtic Castaway’ and elsewhere. Other tracks, however, tackle more serious subject matter, like the hell of Aussie bushfires or growing up in the war-zone that was Belfast, or the brutality of the colonisation process and the 19th century exploitation of Melanesians in Queensland’s cane

THE ST BURYAN SESSIONS Independent

The wisdom of singer-songwriter Sarah McQuaid’s decision to cut her crowd-funded sixth solo album live in a medieval church in Cornwall, deep in England’s West Country, is endorsed by the stunning sonic quality of The St Buryan Sessions. The ambience of that ancient environment, allied to the skill of a sensitive sound engineer and the crystalline nature of the artist’s singing, is for the most part captivating.

Spanning her 24-year recording career, from a late-90s debut release to her most recent studio album, the set covers a gamut of emotions, presaged and reflected in the title of the unaccompanied opener ‘Sweetness and Pain’. Elsewhere, McQuaid accompanies herself mostly on simply picked or lightly strummed acoustic guitar. She utilises electric guitar and rudimentary piano on a couple of songs apiece. McQuaid has a warm and engaging voice and her words are meaningful and often emotive.

On the debit side, too many of her songs share similar structure and tempo. An instrumental break here and there would have been welcome additions. While most of her songs are short, the sole cover ‘Autumn Leaves’ — sung partly in French — is a tad too long.

Songs From My Father was conceived by drummer Gerry Gibbs as a tribute to his nonagenarian pater, the legendary be-bop vibraphone player and composer Terry Gibbs, who wrote more than 300 pieces, recorded 65 albums and worked with jazz giants such as Charlie Parker, Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie during his active career.

By a singularly unfortunate twist of fate, an album that features 18 of his father’s timeless compositions doubles as a valedictory wave to another jazz titan, Chick Corea, who passed away unexpectedly in February after contributing four tracks to what has become a double album. Fortuitously, the numbers in question now stand as Corea’s final recordings. Marking the irony, a tune written by Terry Gibbs 60 years ago and renamed ‘Hey Chick’ in honour of the prolific and prodigious pianist, closes CD1, while CD2 concludes with Corea’s specially written tribute to Gibbs senior, ‘Tango For Terry’.

Accompanied by Gibbs junior and the renowned bassist Ron Carter, Chick Corea’s tracks (most notably the hard swinging ‘Bopstacle Course’) represent the picks of both sets. Gerry Gibbs also drums in three other stellar trio settings — with pianist Kenny Baron and bassist Buster Williams, with pianist Patrice Rushen and Hammond B3 organist Larry Goldings, and with pianist Jeff Keeser and bass ace Christian McBride, making his brainchild one of the most monumental jazz creations of 2021.

shows he’s anything but onedimensional. The industrious Joey DeFrancesco, who has cut the best part of 40 albums as a bandleader in a three-decade recording career and nearly as many as a sideman, demonstrates stunning versatility as he augments his virtuosity on organ with classy contributions on trumpet, piano, vocals and, for the first time on record, saxophone. His ability as a composer is endorsed via 10 new originals that encompass a range of jazz styling. More Music also sees this prolific musician debuting a new trio, with fellow Philadelphia organist/guitarist Lucas Brown and drummer Michael Ode.

DeFrancesco’s previously revealed flair as a trumpeter features on a few tracks, most notably in the perky opener ‘Free’. His sax playing hugs the melody lovingly in ‘Lady G’, a sultry paean to his wife.

Polished piano work bookends another ballad, ‘In Times Of Reflection’, in which his trumpet also solos. The set ends with DeFrancesco back on his swampy B3 in the bluesy bopper ‘Soul Dancing’. Several tracks before, he croons Mario Romano’s ‘And If You Please’ — in between playing figures on a cherished 1925 tenor sax inherited from his grandfather.

DANIEL GARCIA TRIO

VÍA DE LA PLATA

Via de la Plata is a valuable addition to the catalogue of flamenco/jazz fusion albums. In an outstanding opening rendition of Manuel de Falla’s ‘Cancin del Fuego Fatuo’, for example, the subtle artistry of guest Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf exudes shades of Sketches of Spain — Miles Davis’s shape-shifting 1959 classic.

Accompanied by atmospheric palmas (hand-clapping), ‘Calle Compaia’ is attuned to more recent explorations of the nexus between flamenco and jazz, featuring scintillating solos from the Spanish compatriots, guitar and piano maestros Gerardo Núñez and Daniel Garcia, before equally stunning exchanges between the pair. ‘Volar’, written by the legendary Paco de Lucía, features palos in a deeper jazz setting, with the bass and drums of Garcia’s Cuban connection, bassist Reinier Elizarde and drummer Michael Olivera, accenting the complex flamenco rhythms with aplomb. Elsewhere, the trio’s leader shows his awareness of other Iberian folk music forms, along with an appreciation of modern jazz. The title track, for instance, morphs from an opening march beat into fragments of a Salamancan peasant dance and into a mainstream jazz groove, with Israeli Anat Cohen’s crystalline clarinet playing in the vanguard with piano. ‘Calima’ explodes from a quiet keyboard intro to a carnivalesque romp with guitar leading and ends with some impressive jazz improvisation.

KENNY GARRETT

SOUNDS FROM THE ANCESTORS Mack Avenue

ACT/Planet

JOEY DeFRANCESCO

MORE MUSIC Mack Avenue With More Music, American jazz’s premier Hammond B3 player

Kenny Garrett paid his dues as a young man in such revered

ensembles as the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and as a sideman in one of Miles Davis’s many bands. Following a five-year hiatus, the Grammy awardwinning saxophonist and flautist returns with his 17th album as a leader — a recording that proves he retains 21stcentury cred and zest for exploration. Garrett sets out, with a groove-laden battery of polyrhythmic drummers and percussionists, to show the role West African juju and Yoruban rhythms played in the development of jazz, gospel, soul, hip-hop and other genres. The bandleader’s Detroit-informed post-bop sax playing remains cutting edge. Garrett also doubles up on piano and even contributes some vocals to what stands as a bold and arguably groundbreaking set.

ALEX LEFAIVRE QUARTET

NAUFRAGÉS Arté Boréa

Montreal composer and bandleader Alex Lefaivre colours his jazz canvas from an impressively broad palette.

Eclectic and cinematic, his five originals and three covers radiate (mostly) subtle echoes of film noir, heavy metal, punk, disco and reggae, lending the music a relatively raw and yet, paradoxically, sophisticated aesthetic. Lefaivre, who plays acoustic and electric bass, and drummer Alain Bourgeois generate a fiery engine room platform, over which alto saxophonist Erik Hove and guitarist Nicolas Ferron, who share a similarly good rapport, send sparks flying. The closing rendition of Led Zep’s ‘Immigrant Song’ is alone worth the price of admission.

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ALBUMS: Jazz 2

ALBUMS: Vinyl

BY DES COWLEY

BY STEVE BELL

NICK GARBETT & MIKE MAJKOWSKI

The Glider

Independent, vinyl and digital release

closely aligned to the wizardry of the late Jon Hassell, whose Fourth World music successfully melded hypnotic grooves, world beats and electronic soundscapes.

THEN THIS

Then This

Independent, digital release

as much Weill as Monk in this music, a reflection of Schäuble’s European roots. Throughout, he relishes his role as ringmaster, keeping a tight percussive rein on things, while at the same time facilitating the quartet’s wildly eccentric rhythmic approach.

PETER KNIGHT & AUSTRALIAN ART ORCHESTRA

Ambitious in scope, Crossed & Recrossed successfully melds Knight’s musical vision with the fabricated landscapes and cities imagined by Murnane and Calvino.

BOBBY WEATHERALL & HALFWAY

HEARTLESS BASTARDS

RESTLESS DREAM

A BEAUTIFUL LIFE

PAUL KELLY, JAMES LEDGER, ALICE KEATH & SERAPHIM TRIO

Plus One Records

Thirty Tigers

THIRTEEN WAYS TO LOOK AT BIRDS

“Wungali walaaybah nahma maran This is the story about the Kamilaroi About brining our ancestors back home” The mission statement of Restless Dream is laid out in the opening verse of epic opening track ‘Water Horse’. The rest of the tract outlines Kamilaroi elder Bobby Weatherall’s familial connection to country and his quest to return the remains of his ancestors home from far-flung museums and institutions so that they may find peace in accordance with tribal laws and customs.

He distressfully recounts the cavalcade of injustices which have befallen his people since cultures clashed irrevocably centuries ago (“This was an age of Darwinian horror”), his spoken-word delivery powerful and evocative, given perfectly subtle, slightly cinematic accompaniment by his Brisbane alt-country cohorts Halfway. The title track is sung instead of spoken but equally as poignant, while ‘The Dawn’ finds Weatherall speaking directly to the spirits he’s striving to return home, building in anger and intensity until the chilling climax. ‘We Are Gone’ is a traditional Halfway arrangement building on the theme of home, ‘Smoke’ is a moody instrumental piece featuring wonderful didgeridoo flourishes courtesy Kalkadunga artist William Barton, while ‘Bloodlines No 2’ builds on the beautiful essence of WeatherallHalfway co-write ‘Bloodlines’ (from Halfway’s excellent 2016 effort The Golden Halfway Album) allowing Weatherall to provide an element of closure and reflection. While undeniably confronting, this tale is conveyed in a way that ultimately invites empathy and understanding, making Restless Dream both a unifying voice and an incredibly powerful piece of Australian storytelling.

Since Heartless Bastards dropped their fifth album Restless Ones in 2015 frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom struck out solo with her debut album Sweet Unknown (2018) and it seemed like new 2-LP offering A Beautiful Life might go down that same path until a change of heart found Wennerstrom getting the band back together. Well, a version of the Austin-based rockers anyway, one including long-term bassist Jesse Ebaugh but now joined by a host of new faces from bands such as Okkervil River, My Morning Jacket, White Denim, Midlake, Mercury Rev and more. Over the years Heartless Bastards have been versatile enough to tour with artists as diverse as Drive-By Truckers and Lucinda Williams but this collection fits more in the latter camp, shedding any punk-garage tendencies to let the country and roots elements shine through, the songs more restrained and reflective but no less compelling. There’s an overt socio-political bent to Wennerstrom’s lyrics, a mixture of world-weary resignation at how bad things are right now and a steadfast refusal to abandon positivity. Songs like opener ‘Revolution’, ‘Went Around The World’ and the affirming ‘How Low’ offer hope on the horizon, driven home by album closer ‘The Thinker’ and it’s notion that “the only thing I want to rule is myself”. Elsewhere ‘You Never Know’ and ‘Doesn’t Matter Now’ deal directly with love - both of them achingly honest and heart-on-sleeve - and the quietly gorgeous ‘Dust’ allows Wennerstrom’s amazing voice to shine (as well as featuring Andrew Bird on violin), while the the gently-psychy ‘Photograph’ proposes that we should “build an army and fight fear with love”, a rallying cry for the ages.

Recently Australia’s greatest living songwriter Paul Kelly has left no stone unturned following his unique creative muse, taking us on detours through putting poetry to music (2013’s Conversations With Ghosts alongside classical composer James Ledger), soul collaborations (2014’s The Merri Soul Sessions), Shakespearean poetry (2016’s Seven Sonnets & A Song) and even funeral songs (2016’s Death’s Dateless Night with Charlie Owen). Then in 2019 following a couple of more conventional albums, both of which moseyed to the top of the Aussie album charts - he returned full circle, re-teaming with Ledger as well as Alice Keath (of Sweet Jean fame) and contemporary chamber outfit Seraphim Trio to assemble Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds, 14 interpretations of bird-inspired poems (by an array of artists including John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson and Judith Wright) and a couple of instrumentals. The album won the ARIA for Best Classical Album in 2019, and has only just now made the transition to vinyl as a beautifully-packaged 2-LP collection (expanded to 17 tracks). As you’d expect it’s a fairly civilised affair in terms of instrumentation and lyrical content, but on tracks like ‘The Darkling Thrush’, Barn Owl’, Thornbills’, ‘The Windhover’ and ‘The Magpies’ Kelly’s innate pop sensibilities shine through in the mix of folk and chamber sensibilities (although spoken-word war vista ‘The Fly’ proves mildly disconcerting).

Keath does a deft job providing harmonies (and strong lead on ‘Proud Songsters’) and there’s a welcome emotive range in the arrangements throughout, flitting from quiet and fragile to soaring and robust to convey a sense of ethereal beauty which works equally well in the background or under close scrutiny.

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Decca Records

BARNEY MCALL

Transitive Cycles HEVMAC009, vinyl and digital release

Crossed & Recrossed Hospital Hill, CD and digital release

Trumpeter Nick Garbett is best-known for his work with Sydney quartet The Vampires.

His new recording The Glider, however, is of an entirely different order, reflecting as it does his adventurous collaboration with Polish Australian bassist Mike Majkowski, currently based in Berlin where the album was recorded. Featuring a bedrock of pulsing percussion by a trio of drummers – Steve Heather, Finn Ryan and Tony Buck – along with the minimalist insertions of German saxophonist Johannes Schleiermacher, it’s a heady brew, both otherworldly and ethereal.

Opening track ‘Ariel’ sets the tone, a brooding electronic throb over which Garbett dreamily floats, his trumpet fed through synths to generate a multi-layered effect.

On ‘Mid Mountains’, Majkowski’s repetitive bass vamp opens the terrain for Garbett’s multi-tracked trumpet, fusing the glass-like fragility of his harmon mute with a bristling wide-open sound.

Throughout, Garbett’s trumpet radiates a piercing and searching quality, conjuring the stark beauty of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain.

‘Headless’ dabbles in drum n’ bass, eastern scales, and a variety of electronic chirps, while the album’s title track manifests a steady groove, fabricated out of sparse percussion, serpentine trumpet, and a raft of subliminal effects and echo. Overall, The Glider exemplifies the minimalist ethos of Garbett and Majkowski, as they conjure beauty out of ambient textures, electronic pulses and drones. While it draws upon a range of influences, from Eno to improvisation, it is perhaps most 94

Then This is a new quartet comprising some of Melbourne’s finest musicians: drummer Niko Schäuble, saxophonists Mirko Guerrini and Tony Hicks, and guitarist Steve Magnusson. While it’s been conceived as a democratic unit, a four-way musical exchange, the band’s chief raison d’etre is as a vehicle for the playful and spiky compositions of Schäuble, who contributed all eight tracks to this, their debut recording. The Germanborn drummer is no stranger to writing for jazz ensembles, having fronted Tibetan Dixie, as well as having produced numerous scores for film and television. The album’s opener ‘Step Two’ kicks off with a metronomic drum beat, before Guerrini and Hicks jauntily flounce in, exploring the tune’s angular melody. The piece conjures Monk’s irregular stylings, pronged and pointy, bristling with skittish runs.

‘What Now’ opens with a gentle sax duet, a forerunner to the main theme, which evokes a film noir soundtrack, full of romance and foreboding. ‘Blue Wrap’ finds Hicks on flute, his light and airy runs underpinned by Magnusson’s emphatic guitar hooks, forming a backdrop to Guerrini’s shredding sax. ‘So Here’ recalls the unorthodox bluesy swing of Ornette Coleman’s classic Quartet, squalling saxes unleashed over a solid back beat. Schäuble proves himself a master-of-economy, his compositions tightly knit sorties, with few stretching beyond the five-minute mark. With its sheer eclecticism, it’s possible to discern

Peter Knight’s new recording with the AAO has been a long time coming. The album’s two extended pieces, The Plains and Diomira, both draw inspiration from literary writers: Gerald Murnane and Italo Calvino respectively. The genesis of The Plains goes back some 25-years, to when Knight first encountered Murnane’s novel, and found himself mesmerised by its poetic vision of the Australian landscape. His composition begins with Andrea Keller’s circular and repetitive piano, which produces a shimmering effect, the aural equivalent of viewing a mirage on a distant horizon. This gradually gives way to voice, brass, violin, the deep rumblings of Aviva Andean’s bass clarinet, soaring trumpet, a swelling reverb and echo. These surging waves resonate with deep yearning, as if echoing the novel’s narrator as he seeks, in the landscape of the plains, ‘some elaborate meaning behind appearances.’ Over its twenty-minute duration, Knight’s composition ever-so-slowly morphs, weaving Murnane’s words into a hypnotic tapestry of ambient soundscapes. The results are ravishing, deserving of comparison with Steve Reich’s pulse-driven pieces, as Knight reconfigures Murnane’s landscapes into patterns of rhythmic texture and colour.

This live recording of Barney McAll’s monster composition ‘Federation Bells’ was recorded at the Federation Bells, Birrarung Marr, on 20 June 2018 as part of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival. I clearly remember blowing the performance off, choosing to stay at home, thinking: how much jazz can you get out of a bunch of bells? Well, the answer is: a truckload. Do I regret missing it? Having digested this sonic tour de force, that’s an almighty yes. Aside from playing the 39 electronically tuned bells, McAll doubles on keyboards, and his self-made instrument ‘Chucky’, a weird amalgam of music boxes, glockenspiel, and electronics. He rounds out his arsenal with Julien Wilson on tenor sax, Adrian Sherriff on trombone and shakuhachi flute, Steve Magnusson on moog guitar, Jordan Tarento on bass and Leigh Fisher on drums. McAll has long been one of our most maverick and restless musicians, genre-hopping between jazz, electronica, gospel, soul, and blues.

Omnivorously roaming across jazz, fusion, prog, electronica, the music consistently builds, eddies, and swirls, its myriad themes emerging and vanishing just as quickly.

Throughout, the upturned bells, ever-present, form an otherworldly backdrop, giving the performance an almost spiritual dimension, evoking the wind, the ancient Yarra River, the very spirit of the place on which it was recorded.

By Des Cowley

Tapestry

By Loren Glass (Bloomsbury, p/b) The 33 1/3 series was launched back in 2003 with Warren’s Zane’s little book on Dusty in Memphis.

Nevertheless, it comes as a surprise to realise that Loren Glass’s new book on Carole King’s 1971 album Tapestry – celebrating its 50th anniversary this year – is the 153rd publication in the series. That’s some commitment on the part of publisher Bloomsbury. The idea behind the series is simple but effective: allocate writers around 100pp to riff on an album of their choice, emphasizing a no-holds-barred approach.

Between Dusty and Tapestry, the series has singled out milestones like Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, Floyd’s Piper, the Kink’s Village Green, as well as more left of field fare, such as albums by Liz Phair, LCD Soundsystem, and Fugazi. Slated for future publication are Nick Veal’s take on Band of Gypsys, and Colin Fleming’s investigation of Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963.

Loren Glass begins his account on a personal note: in 1970, his mother left his father and joined the women’s liberation movement, moving from New York to California. One of his earliest memories is of his mother’s consciousness raising group, seated in a circle, chanting: ‘She Who’. Predictably, Glass’s childhood was lived to a soundtrack of Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, and, of course, Carole King.

Glass reminds us of King’s roots in New York’s Brill Building, churning out hits with first husband Gerry Goffin for Bobby Vee, the Drifters, the Monkees, Aretha Franklin and others. Her move to Los Angeles in 1968, however, signalled an abrupt shift in career, as she reinvented herself as a singer-songwriter, joining the ranks of Laurel Canyon alumni such as Joni, CS&N, James Taylor, the Mamas & Papas. Despite her first album Writer failing to set the charts alight, her follow-up Tapestry – a ‘musical portrait of the artist as a grown woman’ – kicked it out of the ballpark, going on to sell more than 25 million copies. Sporting a cover shot of ‘the calmly confident and casually barefoot singer songwriter’, it foreshadowed what Rolling Stone magazine called ‘an album of surpassing personal intimacy and musical accomplishment and a work infused with a sense of artistic purpose’.

How to account for such a phenomenon? As Glass argues, Tapestry rode the wave of the burgeoning women’s movement: ‘it legitimated women as creative subjects and economic agents in the popular music industry’. Glass recalls that, during his childhood, ‘Tapestry was in heavy rotation. It was in the air and on the turntables all over the Bay area. It pervaded both public and private space. Everyone heard it and sang it and bought it’. His little book, a love-letter of sorts, reminds us that few albums, before or since, have ‘been able to speak so intimately to so many for so long’.

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By Stuart Coupe

BAD BOY BOOGIE:

The true story of AC/ DC legend Bon Scott

By Jeff Apter (Allen & Unwin, p/b) After having written books on George, Angus, and Malcolm Young, it was surely only a matter of time before Jeff Apter turned his gaze toward AC/DC lead singer Bon Scott.

The brief, eventful life of Bon Scott has proved fertile soil for music writers, and Apter’s new book inevitably leans heavily on those who have gone before him: Clinton Walker’s Highway to Hell, Mark Evans’ Dirty Deeds (which Apter ghost-wrote), Michael Browning’s Dog Eat Dog, along with memoirs by former wife Irene Thornton and former girlfriend Mary Renshaw (though Apter makes a point of cold-shouldering Jesse Fink’s 2018 book). That all adds up to a lot of words written about a man whose views on life were fairly uncomplicated: maximum rock n’ roll, booze, and women.

While Scott’s tenure with AC/DC is firmly fixed in our nation’s collective consciousness, it remains salutary to comprehend the grind and slog that went into getting there. For Bon, it genuinely was a long way to the top, whether co-fronting bubblegum band the Valentines with Vince Lovegrove, or re-inventing himself as the long-haired, bearded, recorder-playing hippie with alt-rock band Fraternity. This was the era of Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds, and Bon showed himself capable of doing whatever it took. At an age when others were washed up, he secured a lifeline when novice band AC/DC passed through Adelaide, supporting Lou Reed. As luck would have it, the band had just sacked singer Dave Evans. The year was 1974. Enter Bon Scott, at the ripe age of 28. The rest, as they say, is history.

AC/DC possessed several built-in advantages, not least of which was familial access to the production and song-writing partnership of Vanda and Young, and the solid support of Albert Productions (who, not for nothing, are known as the House of Hits). That said, they proved themselves a hard-working unit, building a fan base one gig at a time. Once they’d conquered Australia, they set their sights on the UK, starting the process from scratch, eventually taking on Europe and finally America. By the time of Bon’s death in 1980, world domination was within reach. It remains one of the great ironies of Bon’s story that the album they were embarked upon when he died, Back in Black, went on to sell fifty million copies, the second highest selling album in music history.

John Ford’s classic western ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence’ ends with the line: ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’. Jeff Apter shows himself a clear adopter of this philosophy. His book plays up the Bon Scott legend, rarely allowing the truth to stand in the way of a good story. He delivers, in racy prose that is long on narrative and short on analysis, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get Bon, larrikin to the core, all smirk and grin. A larger-than-life character, Bon today lives on, beloved in this country. Apter’s final description of the fortieth anniversary celebrations of his death in Perth in 2020, involving an air guitar competition with ‘some 3722 wannabe Anguses’, is testimony to Bon’s on-going legendary status.

M

emoirs. Musicians – some famous, others less so – telling their stories. They’re a big thing at the moment. The old adage is that everyone has a book in them. That may be true, but can we read them all? Do we want or need to read them? Which ones tell us things we didn’t know before? Which ones give us insights into people, places, concerts and music that we thought we knew well? Which ones – and this really is my main criteria with any music memoir or book – make us revisit things with renewed understanding and appreciation? I often judge a musical memoir by how much it costs me in extraneous records, CDs, downloads etc that I absolutely need to hear NOW whilst reading them.

As someone who has a longstanding fascination that often borders on love with the music of the Incredible String Band, I was fascinated to hear that Rose Simpson had penned a memoir – Muse Odalisque Handmaiden – A Girl’s Life In The Incredible String Band (Strange Attractor Press). A couple of overseas commentaries had been very favourable, so I tracked down a copy.

It may not be the easiest book to find but for starters it’s beautifully written and profusely illustrated.

Let’s clear one thing up first – and I feel bad about this having read Simpson’s book – but I always thought of the Incredible String Band as being pretty much Mike Heron and Robin Williamson.

The two blokes. That’s as bad and incorrect as thinking The Go Betweens were Robert Foster and Grant McLennan. Completely wrong.

Simpson lived with Mike Heron and performed (along with Licorice McKechnie who was also involved with Williamson) as a quarter of the Incredible String Band from 1967 through till 1971.

She was with them on all the records and tours with them during that period. Hey, who knew that the four Incredible String Banders performed (by their own admission a terrible show) at Woodstock? I didn’t.

This is a marvellous and evocative book. It’s about being young, a hippie, and creative in these amazing times. It’s living in rural isolation in share households. It’s lentils for dinner – most nights – and lots of

pot and LSD with a little hashish and more cocaine than I expected in that era – thrown in. It’s about being part of Swinging London in the 1960s, hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel in New York with Warhol’s entourage. It’s about being ignored because you’re ‘just a girl’ hanging around with these two deep and introspective semi-genius guys (“seers and prophets” if you will), despite performing and recording as part of the band.

I totally raced through this book – loving every bit of it. Really – it’s a superior piece of memoir writing. I was particularly fascinating by the varying degrees that all of the band embraced Scientology and the impact it had on them as individuals and the way the band developed and operated.

And of course, at the end I was incredibly fascinated by the disappearance of Licorice McKechnie who has not been seen since 1987 when he was known to have been hitchhiking across the Arizona desert. Is she dead?

Was Scientology involved in her disappearance? Is she living in a commune?

Muse Odalisque Handmaiden is a book about the times, a book about music, a book about lifestyle, a book about creativity – and a fairly strident critique of sexism in the era. It works on every level and the experience is enhanced by the myriad of grainy photos dotted through the text. I mean, when I heard about this I did wonder, do I really want to read an entire book – 256 pages, smallish print) book about a member of the Incredible String Band but I was only a couple of pages in before I knew I was committed to the whole journey.

For her part Simpson move away from the ISB and has done all sorts of amazing things – working on building sites, at art galleries, in the kiosk of an amusement arcade, home schooling gifted children and in the Probation Service. She was – for a year – Mayoress of Aberystwyth in 1994, and since retiring she returned to Aberystwyth University where she completed another degree and a PhD in 2017.

In between Simpson wrote this superlative, way above average memoir that covers less than five years. Search it out.

97

STUART COUPE PRESENTS

ALLISON FORBES With ‘Pieces Of Silver’ Allison Forbes may have created a new genre: Punkgrass. This thrashing and energetic new release from 4-time 2021 CMAA Golden Guitar finalist Allison Forbes is the third single from her forthcoming album Dead Men Tell No Tales. “It’s my favourite song of mine that I’ve ever recorded - and I’ve recorded a few now,” enthuses Allison Forbes of her new song. This is a beautiful song of hope and aspiration, built around a musical melange that seems to come from another time and place. The feel of distant locations and musical textures combine in a musical performance that’s part Appalachian mountains, part remote Irish countryside and part backroads Australia. And then there are the words. Despite everything the world throws at us we’re all looking at the same stars that every generation has gazed at - and hoping for the same things.

THE CARTWHEELS The Cartwheels are Golden Guitar winners Wendy Phypers and Dave Patterson.

Dave was bassist in The Happening Thang and both Wendy and Dave were members of the Golden Guitar winning band The Sparnetts. Along with their drummer son, Charley Phypers, The Cartwheels recorded their fifth studio album The Cartwheels in Victoria and Nashville. The album was produced by Stu Hibberd (co producer of the Sierra Ferrell album Long Time Coming). Also playing on the album are members of the Nashville super group The Time Jumpers. The result is an album of original traditional country music that is heavily influenced by the golden era of country music that included the likes of Loretta and Patsy. The album has a classic traditional country sound while still staying true to their Australian roots with songs like ‘Kookaburra Calling’ and ‘Off We Go Again’, an ode travelling around outback Queensland. All the songs on the album were written by Wendy. thecartwheelks1.bandcamp.com 98

DAVE GRANEY & CLARE MOORE A wild and willful yet very focused set of songs. All instruments played by Dave Graney and Clare Moore. Produced by Dave Graney and Clare Moore. “I don’t need a pandemical lockdown to happen to write some songs.

Same way I never read any war poets. If they need a war to write something it’s not really worth it!” says Dave Graney. Though there was a pandemic and there was a long lockdown in Melbourne and of course it seeped into the music. They had planned two albums for 2021, a rock album with their band the mistLY and then something like this one – something more unbuttoned and freaky. Then a second long lockdown happened and it was impossible to rehearse let alone record with the band so the two changed tack and got freaky in their own studio with keyboards and drums and new guitar tunings and time signatures and here we are with Everything Was Funny. davegraney.com

GEOFF GATES Geoff Gates’ ‘Melancholy Party’ brings together a collection of unique songs that together tell a story with wistful themes but ultimately with a sense of hope. In the first track, ‘Arriving’, the storyteller returns home after a year overseas, with the chorus refrain, ‘I’m glad that I’ve arrived / But is it me? What have I left behind?’

Initial songs about youthful yearning move on to more profound reflections on ‘Side B’. In the song ‘Requiem’, for example, the question of love is replaced by a mystical restlessness: ‘At night I feel the stars /Breathing down, Breathing down on me / Inside the children sleep – now in their beds/Where I myself should be.’ Geoff Gates is a natural storyteller in the singer-songwriter tradition. He is joined by Gareth Richards on drums (Copperline) and Robbie Renu on bass (Mysterious Universe).

These are melodic, moving songs – a strong debut album. gatesymusic.wixsite.com

FROCK N’ TROLL From their forthcoming album of the same title Frock n Troll’s new single ‘Red Dirt Country’ was penned by Sherri Olding while they travelled through outback South Australia through to Uluru and Alice Springs with fellow country musicians Graham Rodger, Matt Scullion and Laurel Calvert.

Coloured with Gus Olding’s signature fiddle sound ‘Red Dirt Country’ tells a tale of longing to go back out on the road and return to the outback. Deep into recording their third album, Gus and Sherri write about roads. ‘Little Dirt Road’ will follow as the next release from this collection of songs and sums up how it feels to travel the road home after a holiday or even just at the end of a day. There are travel songs, traditional songs and a true love feast written by Gus that will surprise and delight gastronomists everywhere.

Frockntroll.com

THE RESIGNATORS The Resignators are a seven piece horn driven band that explores ska, reggae, soul and punk with an energetic live show. Festival favouritesaround the world, they have been making people dance and smile for 12 years! ‘Talisman’ is the new single from their upcoming full-length “Rabbithole” and was inspired by Shakespeare and Steinbeck. It tells the story of love lost through the turning of the seasons. Like Richard III in his Shakespearian soliloquy, we feel our human frailty despite our victories in life, and like Ethan Hawley, the protagonist in Steinbeck’s novel ‘Winter of My Discontent’, we are saved by the mystical “Talisman”. On 7” Vinyl and all streaming platforms by Care Factor Records, “Talisman” includes a B Side dub remix by Latin Grammy award winning Victor Rice (Easy Star All-Stars). “One of the most intriguing bands of the ska genre.” (Dying Scene Magazine) theresignators.bandcamp.com

By Annaliese Redlich

50 years, 25 albums and 345 songs! A conversation with Russell Mael, frontman and one half of the iconic sibling duo about the new documentary The Sparks Brothers.

THE SPARKS BROTHERS Directed by Edgar Wright.

Universal Pictures Either you are coming to this article as an obsessive, or you have never heard of them, it seems there is no middle ground when it comes to Sparks. Because there’s something about this iconoclastic duo that shrouds them in almost criminal obscurity, while simultaneously inspiring life long fanaticism and a tremendous (and famous) fanbase across their 5 decade long genre shapeshifting career.

“We always feel like we’re a little bit outside of the norm in pop music. That we’re on the edge of things, despite the times when Sparks has had big commercial success.

It’s always been on our own terms. It’s that it’s kind of being able to do things that are provocative, but also that are also accessible at the same time.”

Useful as a sales pitch or compartmentalisation, genre definitions have always sat somewhat uncomfortably with me. Why? Because the music biz and listening pubic put too much stock in them.

Since their beginnings in 1967 Sparks have twisted with Olympic precision at the vanguard of pop, glam, art-pop, synth-pop and electronic music seemingly without regard to expectation. This has meant that their impact on creators and musicians has been prolific. Ever watched the videoclip for Wings’ 1980 banger “Coming Up” and wondered who that po-faced guy with the Hitler moustache that Paul McCartney is impersonating? Why it’s Ron Mael of Sparks of course!

A roll-call of the faithful line up in the new documentary The Sparks Brothers, by acclaimed director Edgar Wright (himself a fanatic), and are not limited to Beck, Björk, Mike Myers, Steve Jones (Sex Pistols), Stephen Morris (Joy Division).

Running at 2 hours and 15 mins the documentary is a good place to begin with Sparks, and a comprehensive chronological look at their releases and creative spurs, yet somehow only just scratches the surface of the complex DNA of this enigmatic brotherhood.

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 50s and 60’s, the Mael brothers loathed the local Laurel Canyon scene, instead getting their kicks from French New-Wave cinema and British bands like The Kinks, the Who and The Move cementing their Anglophillia early on.

“That perception still does exist about us being a British band. There’s a certain sensibility to what we do with our music, the image of the band, album covers and the live performances that wasn’t so typically American, at least at the time when we were starting, and initially resonated more with British audiences.

The typical Laurel Canyon sound that was part of Los Angeles when we were growing up, we felt kind of alienated from that. We really had an affinity towards British bands.

We felt that their use of... being larger than life, being theatrical on stage wasn’t a liability, that it was an asset.”

With each phase and shift across their 25 album career, the band has both self produced and worked with production

icons Muff Winwood, Tony Visconti, Giorgio Moroder, Reinhold Mack and Todd Rundgren.

“Todd Rundgren produced the very first album we had. If it hadn’t been for him there may not have been a Sparks. Every record label passed on the band and he said, “There’s something with these guys”.

He was really intrigued and so much so that he signed us to his label that he co-ran and co-owned with Albert Grossman, who was Bob Dylan’s manager at the time. We were so thrilled that somebody like him wanted to stick his reputation on the band. He really welcomed all the eccentricities of the band, and pushed us to be the way we’ve always been to, “Go your own path and that hopefully, if all goes well, things will come your way. People will be attracted to you because of what you are and what makes you unique.”

2021 has also seen the release of the film “Annette” written by Ron and Russell, a long held and oft thwarted goal of theirs since the beginning. One can’t help but be utterly refreshed and inspired by the resilience and creative ethic of the Maels, in this time of stalling currents and crumbling absolutes, the brothers are an enduring force in an uncertain world.

“I think Sparks fans cherish that they’re in their own kind of club, that it’s them against the world. We feel that way ourselves. That we’re kind of insular, and we’re working in our own world. And anyone that wants to join in that club, they can come along, but they have to learn what the rules are going to be.”

99

Courtney Granger

Eastern Arrernte Band

Kim Yang

Mike Finnigan

Ringlefinch

Sarah Harding

COMPILED BY SUE BARRETT

Among the Australian musicians affected by COVID-19 disruptions are Kim Yang (Brave) and Bec Taylor (Adrift), who both had a new recording ready for release when Delta hit Canberra. During lockdown, Kim and Bec shared time with Rhythms.

Kim Yang: I’ve been singing since I was a child in Taiwan. During car trips with my family, we’d sing along to cassettes of Taiwanese folk songs. In high school and university, I made singing videos on YouTube and began collaborating with other musicians. I came to Australia in 2012, started writing music and busking in 2017, and have been a fulltime musician since December 2020! One impact of COVID-19 is that I’ve had a lot of performances cancelled in the last year. Fortunately, I have a couple of music students I can teach online. I am also using my downtime to do training in music production so I can produce and release music directly from home to make my career sustainable. The Brave EP is full of emotions and messages that need to be told in our modern world. I use my music to tell people that being different, being vulnerable, being courageous and being loving is okay. Life is short, we should be honest and we should look after ourselves. I released a music video for the song ‘Fantasy’ in October on my YouTube channel. And the Brave EP launch will be at The Street Theatre, Canberra on Friday 17 December with a full band (the support is Evan Buckley of Burley Griffin).

Bec Taylor: From a very young age, music seemed to be the only thing that made sense to me – my safe happy place. I had three loud, boisterous younger brothers to compete with and playing the piano became my solace – the only thing that was just for me. We’ve been pretty lucky in Canberra during the pandemic, but our luck ran out nine days before the launch of Adrift. While we persevered with an online launch, our album tour was cancelled. I spent 2020 working on Adrift with just a producer (Louis Montgomery) to create my newest project: Bec Taylor and the Lyrebirds. Louis and I ripped apart my singer / songwriter drafts and stuck them back together to create a fully-produced alt-pop / folk album. Until then, I thought I liked the performing side of being a musician the most, but now I think I like recording and production more! Around the time this issue of Rhythms is published, I’m due to give birth to my first child. My partner and I would love to do some interstate folk festivals or afternoon gig tours in other cities and bring the baby with us. After so long of not being able to travel, I’m excited about figuring out how to play gigs and travel with my baby!

The SoundGirls Virtual Conference (early Dec) has sessions from audio industry experts on many topics (e.g. recording acoustic instruments, physics of microphones, virtual live audio production, podcasting). www.soundgirls.org/event/soundgirls-virtual-conference New releases include: Kim Yang, Brave; Bec Taylor and the Lyrebirds, Adrift; Eastern Arrernte Band, Reggae Dancer; Matt Ward, If I Was in Dallas Tonight; Mike McClellan, Behind Every Mask; Baker Boy, Gela; Maisie Peters, You Signed up for This; Laura Love, Uppity; Cosy Sheridan, A Beautiful Sound; John McCutcheon, Bucket List; Gordie Tentrees, Mean Old World; Katie Toupin, Little Heart; Billy Bragg, The Million Things that Never Happened; Hawthorne Heights, The Rain Just Follows Me; Ringlefinch, Tall Tales; Jaz Paterson, Lonely for More; HOYA (Margaret Bradford, Gwyn Cleeves, Ian Knight, Sonya Bradford, Marcus Holden), Inspirational Women.

100

Paul Cotton (78), American singer/songwriter, died Oregon, USA (July) Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Nanci Griffith (68), whose songs included ‘Trouble in the Fields’ and ‘It’s a Hard Life’, died Tennessee, USA (Aug) Brian Travers (62), saxophonist with British band UB40, died in August American singer/songwriter Tom T Hall (85), who wrote ‘Harper Valley PTA’ and ‘Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine’, died Tennessee, USA (Aug) Charlie Watts (80), drummer for The Rolling Stones, died England (Aug) American country musician Razzy Bailey (82), died Tennessee, USA (Aug) Nobesuthu Mbadu (76), singer with Mahotella Queens, died South Africa (Aug) Jamaican-born reggae musician Jo Jo Bennett (81), died Canada (Aug) Don Everly (84), of The Everly Brothers, died Tennessee, USA (Aug) Keyboardist Fritz McIntyre (62), of English band Simply Red, died in August Bill Emerson (83), American banjo player, died Virginia, USA (Aug) Grammy-winning Jamaican singer and producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (85), died Jamaica (Aug) Kenny Malone (83), American drummer, died Tennessee, USA (Aug) Musician Mike Finnigan (76), who attended University of Kansas on a basketball scholarship, died California, USA (Aug) Allan Blazek (71), record producer and engineer, died Indiana, USA (Aug) Greek composer and political activist Mikis Theodorakis (96), died Greece (Sept) Courtney Granger (39), singer and Grammy-nominated fiddler, died Louisiana, USA (Sept) English singer Sarah Harding (39), whose memoir Hear Me Out has just been released, died in September Les Gough, bassist with Australian bands Somebody’s Image and Atlas, died in September American singer Sue Thompson (96), whose songs included ‘Norman’, ‘Sad Movies’ and ‘James (Hold the Ladder Steady)’, died Nevada, USA (Sept) Michael Chapman (80), English singer/songwriter, died in September American singer Sarah Dash (76), of Labelle, died in September Peter Hood (72), drummer with The Atlantics, died QLD, Australia (Sept) Status Quo bassist Alan Lancaster (72), who moved to Australia in the 1980s, died NSW, Australia (Sept) Barry Ryan (72), whose #1 hit ‘Eloise’ was written by twin brother Paul, died in September American musician George Frayne (aka Commander Cody) (77), died New York State, USA (Sept) 101

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