4 minute read
TRUMPETING A RETURN
Reg Mombassa and Peter O'Doherty are back with a new Dog Trumpet album.
By Bernard Zuel
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It was the worst of times, it was not so bad a time.
The last time Dog Trumpet released another slice of pop/folk/ country pleasure April 2020’s Great South Road, the world shut down. Perhaps surprisingly for the brothers, musicians who also are two of Australia’s most loved visual artists, who each in their own way tap into the ordinary and the very odd of the landscape, streetscape, fauna and psyche of Australia and New Zealand, the resulting two years of playing to screens, huddling in their homes, didn’t shut them off from stimuli. “I get most of my stimulation from television,” says Reg Mombassa, with a wry grin. “So I don’t have to go outside.” And though there’s a wistful song of his called ‘No More Travelling’ on their new record, Shadowland (“There’s no more travelling/No more festivals too … I don’t have a meaning/I don’t need a name”) Peter O’Doherty declares that, “for me, I enjoyed it” when the world shut down and “I didn’t feel like I had to be anywhere but home.” Indeed, they got a lot of work done, writing a pack of songs, making art, and digging into the back catalogue of both Dog Trumpet and its predecessor, Mental As Anything. But then that is what Dog Trumpet do: paint, write, exhibit, perform. Not putting their album out in 2020, or holding on in 2022 to see if the music industry genuinely has turned around before releasing its successor, would have made no intrinsic sense, irrespective of any practical or commercial sense. Not that the brothers are impervious to the 21st century of course. ‘Fucking Idiots’ (“Wake up humans/You fucking idiots”), sums up the way many of us have felt over the past few years watching our socalled leaders and betters royally foul their nests and fuck up the world. Has Mombassa been sitting at home quietly compiling a list of these fucking idiots? Or would that be like knitting an endless scarf? “I did write it relatively recently,” he points out, before reminding us that it’s not his first political rodeo, though this is the first time he has “put that word” into a song. “I wrote a song called ‘Troop Movements In The Ukraine’ about 40 years ago, on a Mental’s album, and that was an anti-war song, anti-nuclear war song. ‘Fucking Idiots’ is another anti-war song … I’ve always hated militarism and patriotism and nationalism, they are really poisonous concepts and they seem to be ramping up again.” It’s not all shades of existential gloom though as the record also dives headlong into reminiscence. O’Doherty begins side two of the album with ‘The Ballad Of Clayton Looby’ (“The first job I ever had/Was pumping petrol afternoons and nights”) and in the song ‘Nina Simone’ (“It’s been a long time/Since Eunice Kathleen Waymon’s patience/Was put to the test”) he explains the role of the great singer, songwriter and pianist, whose real name was Eunice Kathleen Waymon, in a pivotal moment in the young O’Doherty’s life. “It’s also the story, my personal story of going to London,” he says. “I had a friend from Sydney living there, she was on a working holiday for a year, so I rang her up when I was in London and we went out to the markets, and I bought her a Nina Simone record, the first record she released in 1958 [‘Little Girl Blue’]. It was such a great record and a time that I will never forget, because I’m still married to that girl.” I reckon Eunice Kathleen Waymon, her patience tested by audiences and the industry, her early ambitions as a classical pianist thwarted, her tolerance of the music business and its inbuilt racism and sexism barely there to start with and long gone by the latter stages of her career, would have well understood some of the righteous anger behind ‘Fucking Idiots’. “Righteous anger can also be completely wrong,” says Mombassa, happily self-critical, maybe even typically so. In truth, for 40-odd years, while skating across moments of righteous anger and maybe occasional bursts of bitterness, the brothers could be said to have maintained a pretty impressive equilibrium. In their art and in their music. Maybe because of their art and their music. “That’s part of what art is, isn’t it?” says Mombassa. “It’s expressing your own anxieties and fears in your own joys and positive feelings to other people and reflecting what other people are feeling. And maybe the art and the music makes it better.” O'Doherty says: “We come at it from different angles, though we have a lot of common ground, but making work is good therapy. Just doing it keeps me much more balanced, and if I’m not touring either art or music, I can very quickly fall into a big hole. And perhaps we don’t really ever understand ourselves: that’s why in a way you keep doing it, to try and find something else, to dig something out of yourself.”
