Random observations on the wide, weird world of folk from the side of the stage
#43 Overheard at the 2013 National Folk Festival
First published in Trad and Now magazine, April 2013
I usually stop short of epithets like ‘the best’, ‘the greatest’ or such like. But in a relatively short experience of the National Folk Festival (my ninth of a possible 47), this year’s was definitely the most anticipated Nash I’ve personally known of.
A number of variables made the lead up to this one a little tantalising.
The organisers made no bones about the fact that it’s been testing times for the National. Some may shudder at words they’ve used like ‘consolidation’, ‘challenge’ and ‘sustainable’, but I’m actually a bit of a fan.
If there are threats to a festival’s viability, you can either fix a smile and adopt a ‘Move on, nothing to see here, all is well’ approach. Or squat on your heels, furrow brows, chew bits of bark and declare we’ll all be rooned.
Or you can call a spade a spade (not a manual earth-moving device) and accept there are indeed challenges and forge ahead.
Disclaimer: I’m observing all of this from some distance, and am NOT privy to any of the National’s internal machinations. Continue reading →
Wheeze and Suck Band have since wound up, and a cut-down version of the band perform as Traditional Graffiti. Tony Pyrzakowski performs with Butch Hooper as Hooper and O’Toole.
As I’ve said many a time on stage and in print, I don’t even try to have a veneer of objectivity when it comes to some bands.
They’re just my favourites, and I adore their music and I’ll hunt them down at every festival and sing along, and sometimes dance along, and that’s just the way it is and ever shall be, Wheezer World without end, amen.
If you think age shall weary them, just click on the video link below and suspend disbelief. It says so much with music and dance in this shaky clip I took at St Albans Folk Festival from a couple of years ago (usually held on an Anzac Day weekend — put it in your calendar now; thank me later) is the range of ages the Wheezers appeal to.
What child could resist jumping around to a bunch of men in funny hats and cloaks? And that’s for the young at heart and the young in the head.
And the young in age.
It’s enough to even make you groan with empathy (and maybe a little sympathy) to John ‘Red Tips’ Milce’s jokes, trotted out at irregular intervals in pure Lancashire-ish.
Fiddler-player Tony Pyzarkowski is one third of a regular trio along with Butch Hooper and Kevin ‘Bodhranworld dot com‘ Kelly who form “Kelly’s Heroes” and bash out three hours of stuff you probably know, stuff you may know and stuff you may not have heard of in PJ O’Brien’s pub in Sydney every Sunday night from 6-9pm. (No chance on Easter Sunday — that’s National Folk Festival central.)
After last Sunday’s session, Tony had a bit of a chat about what’s going on with the Wheezers and looked forward to the National Folk Festival starting this Thursday 28 March 2013 in Canberra.
Interviewing Andrew Cronshaw is a bit like watching Waragamba Dam in flood.
There’s a mighty capacity, but the volume contained therein and the urge for it to surge out means there’s a fair old splashing and cascading over the spillway.
(This is a musical knowledge thing, not early-onset incontinence — just did want to clarify that one.)
Andrew Cronshaw (and the relatively more calm, still waters of Ian Blake) have been comrades in music of the world for many a year, and delighted audiences at the National Folk Festival in 2010.
A very salient memory is a packed performance in the Coorong on the Saturday evening when the MC (me) had been directed erroneously to the Budawang and ended up sprinting twixt venues, doing a slide into home base staying upright to collect a microphone and bounce on to stage to give a slightly breathy but knowledgeable intro courtesy of having seen them both at the National Library of Australia mid-week.
Andrew Cronshaw and Ian Blake were performing at a fantastic afternoon on Aspen Island, literally in the shadows of Canberra’s Carillon, on a balmy Monday afternoon in mid-March as Canberra celebrated a day before turning 100 years young. I grabbed a few minutes with Andrew and Ian as the zephyrs zephyred and the dragon boats came in and the sound guys eventually started to test the drums on stage.
*** 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 ***
Andrew and Ian will be performing with the new collective badged SANS:
Fun Machine at Canberra Centenary Celebrations. Photo courtesy of Martin Ollman.
You don’t have to go back too far ago to a time when Fun Machine were an energetic three-piece band making underground waves in Canberra’s lively, teeming independent music scene.
But in a couple of short years (as opposed to the long ones which sadly died out in the late 1800s), Fun Machine’s star has been rising, thanks in no small part to some solid support from the Canberra Musicians Club.
And the amazing advocacy provided by 666ABC (AM Radio) Canberra for all things Canberra indie, but specifically Fun Machine. I may be wrong, but I believe that breakfast announcer Ross Solly may want to adopt them all, which is no mean feat as over this time, the band has doubled in size.
At Canberra’s ‘One Very Big Day’ this week to celebrate the city’s centenary, Fun Machine played to a heaving, sweaty mess of young and old beautiful people, as the last of the fireworks fell away (some into the crowd, allegedly!) as they put a fairly massive stamp on their cross-genre and cross-market universal appeal.
Gigging around Canberra in various formats and bands, the members will rejoin as Fun Machine at this year’s National Folk Festival at EPIC in Canberra over the Easter Long Weekend.
If I were you, I’d… wonder whether those red pumps go with that skirt.
No, if I were giving you a serving suggestion for your Nash experience, I’d be taking a very brightly-coloured Spandex highlighter and putting a golden ring around Fun Machine in your programs.
On Tuesday last, as Canberra celebrated 100 years young with a mass of parties at the shops, I caught up with Bec Taylor and Chris Endrey from the band. Bec starts us off and that would be Chris you can hear crunching his way through the first of Canberra’s autumn leaves as we stood in salubrious surroundings outside the gents at O’Connor Shops. Bec and Chris had just done a stripped-back, rootsy, acoustic set under their duo moniker ‘Yes/No’.
Image by Knight Photography
BQ: I’m at O’Connor Shops, it’s Canberra’s Birthday – 100 years of Canberra. I’m standing here with someone who’s just performed. Now, in the world of folk, we love it when young people take traditional instruments, and write songs in traditional formats that are hundreds of years old…
And then we’ve got Fun Machine – who take a rather different approach. Bec Taylor, hello.
Bec Taylor: Hello! How are you going?
BQ: Very good. Now, I grew up in the era of glam rock. Did that period influence Fun Machine and how you arrived at your presence?
BT: I actually think that glam rock hasn’t influenced us.
Our philosophies for our performances come from how we think about pop and rock music, and trying to do something unique in that sphere that’s not really self-conscious of itself. So people have described us as ‘anti-cool’, that we’re trying really hard not to be cool.
BQ: That’s interesting.
BT: Which is an interesting way to think of us, because we dress up and are really flamboyant and sparkly, and it’s kind of the opposite of what a lot of bands are doing.
BQ: I saw you guys perform at the ANU Bar, and [given the tightness of the outfits], Chris and Ramsey I could not only work out their gender but also have a guess at your religion. It’s a look, isn’t it?
Chris Endrey (joining us mid-sentence): Yes, it’s definitely sexually threatening. That’s what you’re asking?
Bands when they play, and put on their flannies and tight jeans as though they’re not wearing a uniform. It’s a conscious decision, and we’re being a bit more active in ours. We’re there to abandon all the bullshit pressures to be something else. To say no to fear and just enjoy ourselves.
Image courtesy of Fun Machine
BQ: Moving from the style to the substance, there is a lot of substance in the music, like ‘Alchemist’ – the single that came out before the album – that’s just an amazing song.
BT: Aw, thanks. The song was penned by Chris here. It has quite an uplifting message.
We worked a lot with our new producer Sam King on that song, and he’s producing our album which we’re finishing tomorrow.
And we just had a lot of fun writing all the stuff for it. And I feel it’s a positive message, and we try to have positive role models in our band, and try to be a positive group of people. We’re not yelling negative things or anything; we try to be a positive band for people, and I think that song embodies that. It’s about being glittery and gold, having no reservations and having fun.
BQ: Speaking of the band, last time I saw you perform it was a trio. Last night, did you have room on the stage for everybody?
CE: Yeah, well we hope that by growing in size, we’re growing in quality. We’ve doubled in size to six. We have two drummers, which is just the best thing in the world to have in a band. It gives us the versatility to do more stupid things on stage; we can dance around and not having to worry about nailing all of the lines all of the time because we’re free.
Initially with the band all bands, I’m hesitant to have more people in a band, more than you need, because normally you see bands have like five people, and you see three people on guitar just looking at their guitars and not performing or anything. We had an apprenticeship by fire of three of us having more instruments than we could physically play at once, so now we’re definitely ready to put on a show with more people.
BQ: With extra instrumentation comes an extra bit of diversity, you’ve got Emma [Kelly] up there with the fiddle, so it gives it an extra dimension, doesn’t it?
BT: Yeah, it’s great having a violinist who plays an amazing diversity of styles. So she’s not playing folk violin, she’s not playing rock, she’s playing what suits us. And we’ve got Sam [King] playing guitar and singing – he’s a really great character to have in the band, not only for performance, but for adding different textures because he’s such a creative guy.
Then we’ve got Nick [Peddle], who not only plays the drum immaculately but is also an incredible performer on stage. So I feel like we couldn’t have gotten three better musicians. It pushes us to really be better musicians, and to try harder in our performance. It’s really fun.
Image courtesy of Fun Machine
BQ: For a bit of contrast this afternoon, we’ve seen you as ‘Yes/No’ which is more of a stripped-back, rootsy arrangement.
CE: This started when our original third member moved to Germany for a while. We got bored and wanted to play a lot of gigs. We started experimenting with just the two of us, not thinking too much about shows before going into them.
So today out in the beautiful sunshine in the park, we play nice folky, acoustic songs, but when we play the Phoenix at 10pm, we’re a very loud punk band! So the variety keeps it fun for us as well.
BQ: Do we expect to see both at the National Folk Festival?
Coming together at the National Folk Festival in 2012, they’re back together to perform at three folk festivals including a return to the National in 2013.
I spoke with the three girls after an informal performance at The Artists’ Shed in Queanbeyan on Sunday 13 January 2013.
The audio file is below and the text that appeared on the Timber and Steel nu-folk blog is duplicated here:
The Miss Chiefs is the serendipitous musical union of three young women whose massed ages don’t stretch too much past the half-century. Laura Zarb (Blue Mountains), Amelia Gibson (Canberra) and Vendulka Wichta (Cooma) have not been performing for long, however, they grabbed the attention of many immediately and they’re about to play three east coast festivals.
After a week locked away together, creating and rehearsing, The Miss Chiefs played a set in front of an appreciative crowd in Queanbeyan last Sunday, and Bill Quinn (Overheard Productions) caught up with them afterwards.
Bill Quinn: We’re here at The Artists’ Shed in Queanbeyan and have just seen a – was it a performance or a rehearsal…?
Laura Zarb: Awwwww, a bit of both!
BQ: … of The Miss Chiefs – Amelia, Vendulka and Laura. Laura, you’re the mother of the troupe; you’re the eldest.
LZ: It would seem so, yes!
[Laura is an elderly 25.]
BQ: So, I’m going to ask you about the genesis of the group.
LZ: The genesis. Well, it was at the National Folk Festival…
[Insert audible groan of indecision mixed with ‘Oh well, why the hell not’-ness.]
I realise that ‘Year in Review’ blogs and lists can seem as passé as flash mobs and….. other things that are passé.
Like saying that things are ‘passé’.
But as per the opening sentence, ‘Why not?’.
As with many things that I’ve written since age 14, this may provide a mixture of utility for others (especially if I’m reduxing your interview or news event) and utility for me. It’s a natural progression from the Year in Review emails and Farcebook notes I’ve written in years gone by.
This 2012 version was prompted by that nonsensical Farcebook function that purports to consolidate your 20 biggest moments of 2012, using an algorithm that was obviously created by a very finitenumber of monkeys on a finite number of very old typewriters.
Radio
My glittering pseudo-career on community radio took an extended break in May when I hung up my boots from Artsound FM.
I love presenting radio programs. I’ve discovered so much good music, so many talented performers and met so many good people through it. But it’s nice to have a little more breathing room and leisure time.
I tend to throw myself in to things like this, boots and all, somtimes at the cost of sensible balance with other things, so I have enjoyed putting my energies into other areas.
The Acca Daiquris. Image courtesy of The Acca Daiquiris.
When you break down the name of some bands, they really do tell you exactly what you need to know. In this case, it’s taking hard driving rock numbers and serving them up in the cocktail bar (at Lounge Lizard O’Clock) with a smooth finish.
I had heard the name The Acca Daiquiris before through friends in high and low places associated with Thursday nights at the National Press Club and other jazz-related venues, but gun to my head, I’d struggle to pick them out of a line-up.
So when bass player Geoff Rosenberg contacted me via social networking last week, I had little to go on. But true to my congenital affliction (chronic interviewitis), come 7pm on Friday night we were conversing o’er the telecom lines, and I started by pointing out to Geoff that I was breaking some very new ground with this interview.
Bill Quinn: Now Geoff, this is the first time I’ve done an interview with a covers band so please be gentle with me.
Geoff Rosenberg: Yeah, I suppose we are a covers band, but we don’t always see ourselves as such. We do do covers, but we do original arrangements.
BQ: Just on that point, do you find there’s any snobbery on that? “We do originals and you do covers?” Continue reading →
Getting this interview was in some ways a 25 year odyssey, in other ways a two-year process, and in yet another, a 17 day exchange of emails.
More of that elsewhere because as I expected, Billy Bragg was his charming, effusive, generous, articulate and engaging self for 21 minutes. We’d still be chatting had we not gotten the wind-up.
But on a clear, crisp early Spring Friday night in Canberra, and god knows where Billy was – I never did find out – two Bills had a chat about music, assumptions (grr!), death, life, the moon, first words, and giving the punters what they want.
Now if reading great swathes of text is not your thang, do here undereth clicketh:
Bill Quinn: He’s coming to Australia in a couple of months’ time but we have him here telephonically; it’s hello and welcome, Billy Bragg.
Billy Bragg: ‘ey, Bill. ‘ow are you?
[I’ll eschew the phonetics from here on, but even just these five words made me smile.]
BQ: Billy, I’m going to start and finish with a slightly clichéd question, and in between, we’ll see where we go.
Your signature song is “Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards” which is a bit like a snowflake, never the same thing twice, always evolving and grabbing the zeitgeist. In 2012, are you just a little bit spoilt for choice with subject matter for that song?
BB: Heh! Unfortunately I am, yeah.
That’s the problem with being a topical songwriter; sometimes things just keep popping up, y’know? I’ve got a week or so in New Zealand before I get to Australia. I hope I’ll be able to zone in a little on what’s happening in Australia. And see if I can shape some of the lyrics of “Great Leap Forwards”.
I mean, some of the verses are universal, but one or two of them are specifically about the UK. Maybe I might just be able to Australianise them if possible.
I’ll see what I can do!
Billy Bragg, Melbourne Recital Hall, Melbourne. 20 October 2012.
My very first live to air radio interview was with The BordererS — an Adelaide band based around Jim Paterson and his wife, Alex. The BordererS play a blend of music that’s hard to defind — actually, it’s easy to find (see link above), it’s a tad difficult to define, but once you’ve found it, you won’t want to de-find it. Aren’t typos fun?
Where were we? If you put folk, Celtic, world and dance into a blender, it may come out sounding pretty much like this combo.
Ever since that first inexpert interview, stabbing at buttons and sliding of faders, I’ve had the great pleasure to interview Jim and Alex several times, both in and out of the studio. This weekend they’re heading to Canberra to do two quite different gigs, and when I asked Jim how he’d be placed on Wednesday night for an interview, he said he’d be placed in a comfy chair in his lounge room in Adelaide.
Which is where I caught up with him, telephonically.
Bill Quinn: Jim, I’ve spoken to you many times before, but for others who are just catching up, tell us a bit about The BordererS.
Jim Paterson: Well, I’m six foot five and look very similar to Brad Pitt.
BQ: That’s my recollection.
JP: Ehm, and my wife… she’s kind of like a midget.
No, we’ve been going for nearly 19 years now, and I was just talking with someone today — Gabi, she’s our backing vocalist — and I said that after 19 years, we should be doing the reunion tour now, rather than still going!
I’m Scottish and my wife [Alex] is Irish. And we play around the country and into Europe. And America next year; we’re going to go to America next September.
Billy Bragg — on tour in Australia from 19 October 2012. Photo credit and copyright: Anthony Saint James.
Billy Bragg interview: the audio
On a mild Canberra evening, I interviewed Billy Bragg down the line from the UK. While I hammered the text out fairly quickly and it appeared in Timber and Steel a week or so later, and in Trad and Now not long after that, I dragged my heels a little to get the audio edited down.
Luckily, my new multi-channel recording device comes with a handy bit of sound-editing software, and while I’m hardly a master of it, it’s done. Even if Soundcloud is taking forever to load the audio file.
But that’s my problem not yours…… 36% uploaded……
Enjoy.
Full details of where Billy’s playing are in the Timber and Steel article — see above for link.
Overheard Productions 