Harry Manx – 2016 Australian Tour | Overheard Productions

harrymanx-header — *Image courtesy of Harry Manx*

To tell the story of Harry Manx would take several lifetimes, and hopefully a progression of life-form hierarchies over those lives to tell the story, because the story is so mesmerising and complex that we would not be very present and in the moment of most of those lives, and that could put the telling of the tale at risk as we would not be making gradual and continuous improvement as…

Moving on…

Harry Manx performs at the 2012 National Folk Festival

Harry Manx has already begun his 2016 Australian tour which will take him from Sydney down to Victoria (where he is on stage tonight, Friday 23 September in Frankston) then around to Queensland, South Australia, Perth and up to Broome and Darwin, ending in the beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, I-may-be-a-little-hereditarily-biased New South Wales locales of Katoomba.

Ah, Katoomba. If there’s a more intimate, special venue than Clarendon Guest House, I want it stuffed, mounted, and hung above my fireplace – or I at least want an invite to your venue if it can go close to kicking the Clarendon into a cocked hat. Or any poultry millinery for that matter.

And finally wrapping it all up at Club Saffire in Merimbula.

So it’s a very eclectic path Harry treads, and look, I’d draw you a picture if I had a free hand, but imagine a much-twisted paper clip that’s been sitting on your desk all day on a slow Friday when you’ve been watching the clock since 9:36am – now you’re in the ballpark.

OR picture a moose that somehow wandered into your yard, found your sippin’ liquor in the shed, and is now making a bedraggled, loquacious, and somewhat winding stagger back to the forest by a circuitous route, two-thirds of it sideways.

You got it!

I’d spoken with Harry twice in 2012 in completely different settings: one as we sat on plastic chairs out back of the National Folk Festival, and later that year on the phone, with me staying back after work in a very staid conservative wage slave job in Canberra.

Just for the tape and the relevant authorities, this article is this morning:

being put together on a laptop so old that it expresses currency in pounds, shillings and pence,
is sitting on top of eight paperbacks, including some Stieg Larsson, M.J. Arlidge, S.J. Bolton, and I’ll have to update the others later as the spines are facing inwards and I daren’t dislodge them for fear of sending my coffee with Worcestershire Sauce all over the Axminster.

Correction: it’s an American Staffordshire.

Oh, and the whole shebang is sitting on top of the ironing board.

Apart from a mourning suit (no, not a wedding, a real one for real mourning last month – RIP mum), this is as much action as the ironing board is getting in my six week residency in very sunny Capalaba, SE Queensland.

Ironing: It’s only for formal wear and your Reg Grundys if you’re fully expecting a special friend over for a sleepover.

Well, this is fun, however, I feel we’re forgetting something.

Harry Manx. Oops!

Yesterday I spoke with Harry as he reclined in Melbourne and I was much further north in Capalaba, Qld.

Lean in at the start, dear listener, because we have a little technical issue with Harry’s microphone just to start with. I have a lovely man in Essex (not that way; he’s devilishly handsome but his wife is more qualified to say that, and either way, I don’t swing that side of the boundary rope – not that there’s anything wrong with that).

My lovely friend in radio in Essex is helping me out with sound compression physics and wave harmonics, and we will replace the sound file when time and currency fluctuations and phases of the moon permit.

Gwenevieve! Roll tape!!