On Friday 9 September 2016, at approximately 23:40, officers of the Queensland Flying Peleton Brigade boarded the train to Cleveland (which had been held at Lota station) and removed Bill Quinn.
Mr Quinn is current head of logistics for the Overheard Group, including big cheese of Overheard Productions and Tawp Dawg at Bill The Housesitter.
Mr Quinn was spotted later that night in the comfy chair at #36.
Right now he’s talking Braille, so please check back at 11pm on Sunday 11 September (London time), 8am Monday 12 September (Brisbane time) or call +61-555-000-000 (for a good time).
Bill Quinn
Overheard Productions
Capalaba, Redlands Council District, Queensland, Australia
Based in Lexington, Kentucky and the brain child of Michael Johnathon, singer-songwriter, performer, producer, tour organiser, and 36 other roles, it’s spreading its tendrils across the USA and the world.
I’ll not steal any WFPA thunder by block copying and pasting here, but please follow the links and your rewards shall be many and bountiful.
The Cliff Notes, as MJ would say: it’s a cheap-as-chips member association which opens everyone up to a world of musical information, resources and networking, opens its arms, and invites the world of art and artists in to share, share, share.
On Friday 23 and Saturday 24 September 2016, the WFPA is holding its second annual Gathering in Shaker Village, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky – see main picture for all the salient details of the ‘wheres’ and ‘whens’.
It’s the ‘how much’ that’s the real news story here. And it’s a good, good news story at a time when good news stories are pretty gosh-darned thin on the ground.
Choose your preference: click on a hyperlink or click on the audio file link below, and listen in as Michael explains WFPA and the Gathering in his signature succinct, clear, resonantly-voiced vocal stylings (even over the tech equivalent of two cans and a 9063 mile piece of string).
*** Audio file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
*** Audio file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
Some basic notes for the interview… which I never referred to.
Risk: half or more of the audience stay stuck in traffic at the time the concert starts, throughout the concert, after the concert, and as late as up to 4am the next morning.
Likelihood: high.
Severity/outcome: parody songs are written in the event’s honour.
Melissa Deaton-Johnathon. Image courtesy of Rick Deaton.
And so it transpired.
Cut forward a few days later and the parody song (that Melissa Deaton-Johnathon wrote in her head in the car and then committed to Youtube posterity) was starting to go viral.
In stepped Lex-18 again, and the face and voice that launched several dozen Woodsongs Old Time Music Hour episodes was moving up to the majors.
Very early one morning in Sydney, and later in the day only it was yesterday the day before in Lexington Kentucky (paging Dr Who to the TARDIS, Dr Who) Melissa spoke with Bill Quinn about the whole shooting match:
*** Audio file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
*** Audio file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
Interview with Craig Coombes of Naked Tuesday dot me
Image courtesy of Naked Tuesday
This is an interview I did with Craig Coombes in 2013 at his home in Melbourne for a book I’ve been very slowly putting together on grief.
I’ll include the background of the interview and the book at the end, but since that conclusion will no doubt waffle on for quite a bit (much like the author), let’s dispense with that for now and first get to the subject matter and the man himself.
Craig Coombes received a terminal diagnosis of throat cancer in 2012. Instead of feeling sorry for himself and hiding away from the world, Craig chose a fairly unconventional way of expressing himself and what he was going through.
It’s an approach that’s resonated with thousands of others around the world via social media, and literally millions through his television appearances.
And happily, Craig is witnessing this as he continues to defy the medicos, batting on way past the initial prognosis of his existence.
I started by asking Craig where he was up to at that point, in August 2013.
It started with a diagnosis of laryngitis (as you can tell with this wonderful voice of mine!) Through not improving, and tests, tests, tests, it became, “Sorry, cancer”.
You hear that word, it does change your life completely.
The old thing is that ‘Cancer is a word, not a sentence’. Did they give you hope?
That day they pretty much said it’s a tumour on my vocal chord. And thyroid cancer.
So we’ll do the operation, you’ll have some treatment, and everything will be fine.
A shorter version of this article appeared on Timber and Steel on 14 September 2015. This article appeared in full in the September edition of Trad and Now magazine.
To tell the full tale of this article would be to sing you a mournful ballad of disappearing Facebook event shares and a 12 minute interview, ambitiously recorded on a Nokia dumb-phone so old it needs hand-cranking.
Suffice to say that the audio of that chat between the artist (in Katoomba, NSW) and the interviewer (in Nelson Bay, NSW) is available now on eBay on a listing called ‘Marcel Marceau’s Greatest Hits’.
Technology is a fickle mistress, sharing pain and pleasure in equal measure, and my thanks to Paddy Connor from Lime and Steel for his assistance and good humour.
Blue Mountains-based folk band Lime and Steel have hit the road, making sacrificial offerings to the gods of automobile reliability and ‘keepgoingability’ from Melbourne’s CBD up the east coast to Brisbane (with a stop-off in the nation’s capital).
Lime and Steel began as a rootsy folk duo of Paddy Connor and Ben Scott, but over the years their composition has changed, and indeed, their compositions have changed. Continue reading →
Image courtesy of Ann Vriend. Photo by Brad Gibbons.
Ann Vriend is always a popular visitor to Australia at about this time every year.
The contrasts between frozen Alberta, Canada and sizzling Australia are rarely more stark than in January/February. So Ann can hopefully leave the tissues and cough syrup behind, and look forward to sandy beaches, dazzling coral reefs, and the inside of a string of popular Australian venues on her ‘For The People In The Mean Time’ tour.
On an afternoon when frying eggs on the pavement in rural Queensland was definitely an option, Bill Quinn spoke with Ann from her sick bed in Edmonton, as she was putting the final touches on her tour, and readying to hop on a plane the following week.
It was a baking hot day in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland, and the only place to get a half-decent phone signal was from the front deck at Maleny Hotel, battling the sound spill from rumbling trucks and other traffic on the main road through town.
*** Audio file will be removed be the end of March 2020 ***
*** Audio file will be removed be the end of March 2020 ***
Andrew Clermont is a hard man to miss or lose in a crowd. So when Bill Quinn was tip-toeing around the outskirts of the musos’ precincts at Woodford Folk Festival, it wasn’t hard to spot the towering fiddle-player from Tamworth.
Andrew, like many folkies, wears many hats (some of them at the same time) and at Woodford he’s virtually juggling them. His supper club has two showings at Bill’s Bar every day, and Totally Gourdgeous are launching their new live DVD. Also, in the background, Andrew’s Blu Guru fusion band has found a surprising niche.
Bill caught up with Andrew under slightly trying circumstances in the media centre, with a couple of locals providing some sound spill to give that really authentic festival feel.
(Luckily you can’t hear the sound of me throwing books of post-it notes at one individual as Andrew was talking about what he’s been up to.)
One of our roving Timber and Steel reporters, Bill Quinn, has 36 000 rules and observations for festivals. An important one this time of year is that if you sit in one place for the whole festival, then eventually the whole festival passes you by.
And so it was on Boxing Day that one of these myriad chance happenings happened.
Sitting in the cool of the Tokyo Bar at Woodford Folk Festival, sipping cool ginger beer on ice, the lovely Chanel Lucas turned to say g’day, and how are you going, and whatcha doing? “I’m becoming a Queenslander for four months, and you?” I’m about to perform a song in a themed concert called The Soldier’s Wife.
(For porpoises of clarification, Bill is the new temporary Queenslander and Chanel is performing in The Soldier’s Wife.)
This led to a meeting with the just as lovely Deborah Suckling, the brains and organisational brawn behind The Soldier’s Wife. Currently an irregularly performed concert, matching female singer-songwriters with “..the partners of Australian servicemen – both past and present – and putting the experience, emotions and lives of those women into song”.
Overheard Productions 