Regular visitors to Australia, The Beez, will be having one last hurrah at the Mount Beauty Music Festival this weekend in Victoria then wending their way back for a fly out to home later this week.
So take one last chance in Victoria or join them in cyberspace and buy up all their albums:
* ‘Look What They’ve Done To My Song’ is a fresh take on other people’s stuff, and
* ‘Freishcwhimmer’ is all there own — that spelling may be dodgy — can’t find a reference right now and my battery’s about to go kaput!
Some days the universe gives you lemons, and you can either make lemonade or a whisky sour — then tip out the sour and chug down the whisky.
Tonight, necessity was the mother of invention, and later on tonight, I’ll post a picture that will explain why this otherwise lovely interview sounds like poor old Justin is at the end of a very long string, talking into a rather large tin can.
Resonance we don’t got; noise modulation we do; and a modicum of normalisation and balancing. But you can’t overdo these things.
Who cares? The Go Set are coming to Canberra on Friday 20 April:
The Merry Muse (Turner Bowlo, Canberra Southern Cross Club)
54 McCaughey Street
Turner ACT
Doors 7.15pm
Support: Chloe Hall and Silas Palmer
$17 full/$14 concessions/$12 Monaro Folk Society members
16yo and less are free if accompanied
And here be the interview:
*** THE AUDIO OF THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN DELETED FROM SOUNDCLOUD DUE TO SPACE LIMITATIONS ***
*** THE AUDIO OF THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN DELETED FROM SOUNDCLOUD DUE TO SPACE LIMITATIONS ***
The Go Set interview with Justin Keenan for Artsound FM and Overheard Productions
And if you listen to the interview here, or you heard it on Friday morning on Artsound FM, you may have detected two things:
1. Some pretty average sound quality, and
2. A camera click.
Due to some technical challenges and the fact that I really had to get the interview done there and then, I took the shortest distance between two points: a straight line.
Neccesity is the mother of invention — recording the interview with Justin in Studio Two at Artsound FM with a bog standard speaker phone and my iRiver
Waiting in a cold studio in Canberra, unable to make contact with my planned interviewee, feeling pretty low and de-energised, but still noodling on Facebook (mostly trying to find contact details for aforementioned interviewee), a concept was born: guerilla interviews.
In front of me were 450+ Facebook ‘friends’. Most of these are musicians or in some way related to the industry.
Surely someone out there must have something to plug and be yearning for some exposure.
I put the call out to two, and one put their hand up.
Pete Akhurst of Canberra.
He’s on at The Front on Thursday 18 April 2012 with Marshall Okell.
Click here and enjoy. Note: all the usual cutting, pasting and snipping and trimming and balancing and equalising are not to be had. This is interviewing in the raw:
*** THE AUDIO OF THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN DELETED FROM SOUNDCLOUD DUE TO SPACE LIMITATIONS ***
Canberra, it’s your chance to see the unusual pairing of The Go Set headlining with Chloe Hall and Silas Palmer as support.
Hear the ‘Tax Office Love Song’ love and other tales of love, stuff, and love and then we’ll kick the chairs to one side and The Go Set will turn the dance floor into sawdust. For more details:
I suspect that ‘National Folk Festival’ may indeed be Old Norse for ‘’.
I started that sentence over two hours ago and got no further. Maybe it was the late-ish/actually not very late night the night before, or the fact the laptop battery was running down, or trying to construct barely intelligible English while half-listening to a bush poet’s doggerel, but the snappy gag I’d thought of early that morning would not leap back to mind.
Take II.
I suspect that ‘National Folk Festival’ may indeed be Old Norse for ‘permanent, insane grin’.
That’s not the original version, but it will do for now. Blogs, unlike magazine articles, are beautifully editable at a later, more inspired date.
Friday, Friday, Friday – what a wonderful day in the land of the National.
I did mean to mention the unseasonal weather. I’ve been at Nationals where the days have been baking, but as Queensland singer Lonnie Martin observed today, she’d be stood outside the Session Bar at 2am today, listening to a wonderful Irish session and having to remind herself, as she stood there in short sleeves that this was the National and yes, this was Canberra in mid-Autumn.
I never let adverse weather dampen my spirits (boom boom) at festivals, but fine, sunny weather does levitate the general mood and for the organisers, it does bring those half-inclined punters out of their warm Canberra homes at a time where they be more inclined to snuggle up to their Turbo 10s, and crack open the hot cross buns and truckloads of chocolate.
Being something of an early waker (if not always an early riser), I’m taking the opportunity to put these golden* hours to good use and get a head start on recording my observations of the 2012 National Folk Festival.
* Actually, at roughly 6.30am on Good Friday, golden is something of a misnomer. It’s brilliant pinks and reds as the sun bursts into life. My only regret is that the floor to ceiling glass panoramic view of the old Volunteer’s Kitchen is all looked up – this year it’s a workshop and singing space again, which is lovely for the work-shoppers and singers, but sad to not have it available at dawn. It felt to be a volunteer in the past couple of years when you could start your day like that.
Yesterday was yet another new experience on settling into a festival. The plan had been to set up on site on Wednesday night then contaminate the start of the festival with a day’s work for the country off-site, but plans changed and I ended up racing in at 7am on Holy Thursday, bussing into town and bussing back in the mid-afternoon.
The change to the site in just those seven or so hours was palpable. Un-built or half-built structures were up. Scant green spaces were now a mess of tents and campers. And of course, the social media feeds were a-buzz with more and more arrivals from far-flung places like Brisbane, Melbourne and West Belconnen. Continue reading →
Rosie McDonald and her "beautiful men". Illawarra Folk Festival 2012
A Punter’s Perspective
Random observations on the wide, weird world of folk from the side of the stage
#31 Watching the passing parade at Illawarra
First published in Trad and Now magazine, January 2012
There’s an old saying that goes, ‘If you sit in one spot at a festival, eventually the whole festival will pass you by’.
This is especially handy for making unplanned musical discoveries and for finding lost friends if (heaven forbid) you can’t hunt them down by mobile phone.
(I’m still working on a device that turns everyone’s mobile phone off or to silent as soon as they’re within 100m of a festival. Patent pending.)
As I found at my sixth Illawarra Folk Festival (their 27th), sitting in one place is also a great source of inspiration when you want to get material for an article. Continue reading →
Randall Sinnamon and friends, Kangaroo Valley Folk Festival, 2011
A Punter’s Perspective
Random observations on the wide, weird world of folk from the side of the stage
#30 Overheard at Kangaroo Valley Folk Festival 2011 First published in Trad and Now magazine, November 2011
There’s something deeply satisfying about dragging yourself out of a festival precinct in the early hours of a Monday morning, feeling tired, happy, slightly unsteady on one’s legs, buzzing with a head full of pleasant memories, and with CDs spilling out of the glove-box.
So it was in October, as Kangaroo Valley put the lid back on a very fine vintage. Well, not so much ‘vintage’. It’s not so much a matured taste, but more a cheeky, young and slightly adventurous drop.
At the risk of repeating this column from 12 months ago, KVFF just keeps getting better and better.
Wheeze and Suck Band. Tired and shagged out after a long squawk.
Overheard Productions 