Posting this one up just a little bit late in the piece, so hopefully late is better than never.
I had the pleasure of talking with a number of interesting locals and visitors to Australia at the 2013 Illawarra Folk Festival back in January, and Rick Nestler was one of those.
It was a classic piece of going in cold as I knew little more about Rick than his name and how to pick him out of a line-up. However, as is often the case, the interviewee was interesting, obliging, funny and articulate.
Hear Rick talk about skiffle, jug bands, and yes, we talked about ukuleles.
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.
Rory McLeod is coming very soon to you (Sydney on Tuesday night, Katoomba on Wednesday, Canberra on Thursday) and all points south and west thereafter.
Unfortunately I underestimated how much sound spill we ha to contend with a 1am or whatever time it was under the grandstand at Illawarra Folk Festival, but you get the general idea:
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And this is a little clearer: the crowd gives Rory a timely send-off on Sunday afternoon:
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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…
Sarah from the WooHoo Revue, appearing at the 2013 Illawarra Folk Festival
On Sunday 6 January 2012, I mooched into the Illawarra and managed to pinch 2’56” of artistic director David de Santi’s valuable time as the countdown to the Illawarra Folk Festival ticks inexorably down.
Note: after a two-hour session at Dicey Riley’s Hotel in Wollongong, the constabulary were testing patrons’ ability to say or spell ‘inexorably’ in order to test levels of sobriety.
The session was one of a series held at Dicey Riley’s Irish pub in Crown Street to get punters in the mood for the merriment to come at Slacky Flat, Bulli from Thursday 17 to Sunday 20 January 2013.
So here’s that brief interview, and the text is available at the Timber and Steel blog.
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And here’s the very fine TV ad for this year’s festival:
Without waxing too lyrical, I was rather taken by a little gig in Sydney last Friday night at The Basement featuring Folk Uke (Amy Nelson and Cathy Guthrie), supported by Jodi Martin.
That line-up would have been a worthy night out on its own, however, Folk Uke had met two Canadians at Woodford Folk Festival — Andy Brown and Dave Gunning, invited them to come and play at their gig on Friday night, and mercifully the word had gone out over the jungle drums (i.e. social media) alerting the punters to get there early.
We walked in a little ways into Andy Brown’s set, but what we saw was awesome. Then Dave Gunning came on and totally blew us away — and the main part of the night was still to come.
Ever the compulsive interviewer, I managed to catch a couple of minutes of Andy Brown’s time as he manned the merch desk for the others, and he spoke a little of the East Coast Canadian showcases coming up in Sydney and Melbourne. You’ll have to be like a seagull onto a chip with these, as the first one is Tuesday 8 January at Notes Live in Newtown, and the second and last is Friday 11 January at Caravan Music Club in Melbourne.
(But he’s about to do a week or so of solo stuff so make sure you read to the end!)
Tracking back even further through my backlog of recorded material, back a fair few weeks ago now, Bruce Watson was on the road with three of his Victorian compadres (I could have said Mexican, but didn’t) for the Unsung Heroes shows in a few venues. Sadly, this article didn’t get to see the light of day in time for those shows, but as you’ll read, the project has quite the life that will see it around for some time to come. Here Bruce talks about how the concept came about and what the future plans are for the project.
And then, you can start scribbling dates in your diary as Bruce prepares to have a mini-assault on ACT and the southern highlands/Illawarra hinterland/central coast and Hunter region over the next ten days.
Bill Quinn: Tell me about the Unsung Heroes project.
Bruce Watson: It’s a collection of four singer-songwriters – which is sort of unusual for singer-songwriters to all get together. But we all met at a thing called the Darebin Songwriters Guild which is based in our local area in the northern suburbs of Melbourne.
And we got together to do that, and the actual idea for the project came from Moira Tyers, and she was just basically talking to people about it. She formed a band with Wendy [Ealey] and Neil [Robertson]. And I heard about the project and said, ‘This is really good. I’ve got some songs that would fit into that idea, and I’d love to be involved in some way’.
So I was invited into the project.
We actually started with about ten people. And gave the initial concert with a whole lot of local songwriters that did songs on the theme of ‘Unsung Heroes’.
Then we gradually filed it down to a manageable number of people, and to more of a thematic approach, with the organising principle being: time. It’s chronological, going from settlement (and a little bit of a flash-back to pre-settlement Australia) and it goes right through to a few contemporary people – a few people who are still alive and doing amazing things.
So that’s how the show started, and it’s turned into a show that’s got a narrative and a set of songs and the visuals are really important. It’s got a slide show component that’s quite important. Continue reading →
As Jenny Spear and I sat down to have lunch and a chat about her new album (‘Black is a Colour’) at Digress Restaurant and Lounge in Canberra City, I proved once again that while I do like my humour and observations laced with irony and straight-facing, I can be just as thick and literal as they come.
‘You know, this album will work well across a couple of genres because there’s an old traditional folk song called, “Black is THE Colour”.
To her credit, Jenny was very polite as she shot me a look that registered the comment, but she let me come to my own learning as sometime later a question revealed, “Yeah, well, that’ll be Track Three then”.
Jenny had contacted me many months ago out of the blue, at a rather crazy time as I was bouncing around New South Wales and ACT, and we made vague plans to catch up somewhere sometime somehow.
Then one night as I stopped off at the monthly music blackboard at the Royal Hotel in Bungendore, Canberra singer-songwriter-author Chris Johnson announced Jenny Spear as the woman sitting next to him, pumping out a fair slab of Neil Young’s back catalogue with him.
In late August, Jenny and I finally caught up over some wonderful Indian pizza at Digress. We didn’t realise it at the time, but Jenny was to soon perform there as the Merry Muse club took an unusual and welcome diversion to another venue for one night.
Liz Frencham is one of the hardest working women in folk.
Liz’s collaborations, bands and projects are legendary. If you laid out her records end to end, including her solo, band, contribution and bit part playing thereon CDs… my, it would take a long time to pick them all up again.
Liz spent part of winter cocooned away in rural Victoria, but in recent times she’s been on the road with her bluegrass outfit Jimmy the Fish, and with the inspired pairing with Fred Smith as Frencham/Smith.
Sometime in the late 1980s, or so it seems, Liz had an interview with Bill Quinn which included one landline, one mobile phone as conduit, and another mobile phone as recording device. Liz was in picturesque southern Trentham, and Bill by the banks of the Moruya River on the beautiful Eurobodalla Nature Coast in rural, coastal New South Wales.
As Liz prepares to strike out on a tour with US singer-songwriter Gregory Page, I started by asking Liz where her preference for solo or band performing lay.
Liz Frencham: I wouldn’t call it a preference. It’s exactly the same, say, as playing playing with Jimmy the Fish and playing with Fred.
Playing solo is “different” and it requires different skills. Probably one thing it has in its favour at the moment is that it still completely terrifies me.
It’s not something that I’ve mastered. It’s exciting and I haven’t settled into a comfortable groove, which makes the possibilities seem more endless. I wouldn’t say it would be a preference, per se.
I am a bass player, and when you’re fitting into your role the most is when you’re accompanying somebody else.
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:
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Overheard Productions 