Billy Bragg’s Australian Tooth and Nail tour, March 2014. Image courtesy of Billy Bragg.
Interview audio version first posted in Timber and Steel in September 2013. Interview text version first published in January 2014 edition of Trad and Now magazine.
Recorded in the studios of community radio station 2XX-FM, Canberra.
Thanks as always to these three venerable institutions for the very fine work they do in supporting folk and independent music in Australia.
In March 2014, Billy Bragg will be touring Australia with band on his ‘Tooth and Nail’ tour, part of a worldwide expo of his latest studio album. Last year, I interviewed Billy as he made a whirlwind promotional tour to Australia. We revisited some old themes and looked forward to this year’s tour.
[For the time poor, the full audio file of this interview (including outtakes featuring gratuitous underwear references) is at: Timber and Steel.]
Not too many summers go by in Australia these days without a tour by Canadian singer-songwriter-keyboardian Ann Vriend.
2014 continues that rich tradition.
Ann has already started this year’s tour on the Gold Coast and she’s heading south to Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales before winding things up in Brisbane later this month.
In between dips in the pool on a Saturday afternoon (and no doubt a stack of photos on social media back home to envious and shivering Albertans), Ann talked to Bill Quinn about this year’s Australian tour.
Bill Quinn: Ann, from memory this is your ninth tour of Australia. Does it get easier, or harder or different?
Ann Vriend: I definitely think it’s getting easier. I have more and more people coming on board to help me out, and the fan base is slowly growing. And also different because I’m getting more and more used to being here!
Every tour I have different shows and different itineraries, so it doesn’t get boring.
I first saw Johnny Huckle playing in Woden in the late 1980s or early 1990s. My girlfriend/fiancée at the time was working at ATSIC (née Department of Aboriginal Affairs), and more than the odd Friday afternoon would have us plonked at the Aboriginal Club or the Contented Soul watching Johnny belt out a blend of covers and originals.
His rendition of ‘Do The Hucklebuck’ was always a crowd-pleaser.
Fast forward twenty years or more, and I only manage to run into Johnny at festivals. As was the case earlier this year in Illawarra where we finally made some time to gather around the MP3 recorder and have a chat.
Hopefully you can decipher most of the conversation despite the cacophony of competing sound spillage.
Johnny Huckle performing Spiritman:
Johnny jamming with Canberra music and recording legend Trev Dunham:
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.
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 →
It’s been an irregular destination for six years, but what a place to end up at?
Whether you’re coming from the north or the south, the approaches through gently rolling green hills and valleys are captivating. Despite having familial ties in the Eurobodalla Shire slightly to the north, it was only on way to my first Cobargo that I drove past Lake Corunna, and nearly ran off the road as I sucked all the oxygen from the surrounding atmosphere.
It’s a stunning part of the world.
And the festival site looks like it was placed there by an inspired land surveyor/geo-spatial technician/landscape art historian. I will never tire of simply drifting around the site from top to bottom, over the ridge and back again, finding some new perspective, some new aspect, some new way the light has hit the trees or crept through a cloud outside the venue, at just the right time and just the right angle.
Berlin folk pop band The Beez have been frequent visitors to Australia in recent years with their latest tour taking place at the start of 2012. The band is now taking a short break at the start of 2013, however, band members Rob and Deta Rayner will be coming to Australia very shortly with a new show: Don’t Mention The Wall! – songs and stories from the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond.
On a variously muggy mid-summer’s Australian morning or frosty Berlin midnight hour, depending on your hemispherical perspective, I spoke with Rob Rayner on the line from Berlin about the show.
Bill Quinn: The Beez left our shores back in April, was it?
Rob Rayner: It was May. It was the epic tour of four months. We never thought we’d get through four months but we did. AND the amazing thing is that we’re still talking to each other! Continue reading →
Chris ‘Griff’ Griffiths is one third of the membership of Sydney band Grimick and one half of its name.
Confused? Never fear. (Small band member joke there; we move on.) Yes, never fear because Griff has a black belt in algebra, and is not afraid to use it.
Grimick are Griff, Mick (join the naming dots there) and Dr Fear.
I first encountered Grimick at Kangaroo Valley Folk Festival several years ago and was quite mesmerised by their songs and music. Later, listening to their wonderful album ‘Dazzle’, I was even more enchanted. Firstly, for the stunning production values and warm, rich sound, and secondly for the fact that Grimick have this tendency to give their music away.
Griff explains more about this giving-away ethos in the interview, both giving away CDs at gigs and giving you the ability to download the whole shooting match at their website.
I interviewed Griff at Punchbowl Boys’ High School in Sydney’s south-west earlier this week and we spent a bit of time talking about the benefits to be had from inter-meshing music and education.
And by and by, we did discuss music, and Grimick’s first foray to the National Folk Festival this weekend.
Highly recommended. See them if you can.
*** Audio file will be removed at end of February 2020 ***
Image courtesy of Grimick
Bill Quinn: 2013 is a year for doing interviews in new and interesting places. Already I’ve done one in a harness racing kitchenette, and now we’re at the Punchbowl Boys High School. I’m talking to Griff from the wonderful band Grimick. Hello, Griff.
Chris Griffiths: How’re you going? Thanks for making your way out to sunny Punchbowl on this Monday morning.
On a stinking hot day (that’s an Australian term for ‘mighty hot day’ for our North American friends) at the Illawarra Folk Festival in Bulli, George and I found a cool spot and George told me more about the planned tour.
*** 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 ***
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:
Overheard Productions 