On Sunsets It’s been a year of pretty sunsets, spread across a hundred different places. I’d love to say I make a habit of taking time to watch the sun set, pausing as it dips below the horizon, but the reality is that the only times I catch it in the act are when someone else points it out to me. Too often my attention is drawn towards the humdrum daily thoughts that flood my mind as I’m lost within the confines of human habitation. The sunsets that have stood out this year have been enjoyed in the company of others and have spanned the entire year, starting in late January performing on the South Island of New Zealand at Luminate Festival with Hello Tut Tut. The festival was a booze-free, meat-free affair, six whole days spent in luxurious presentness (mostly deep within a book if I have to be honest) and embracing heavy beats whilst meeting musicians from as far afield as Denmark, the US and Brunswick. I observed the sunset from a luxury yurt in the artist’s camp and then wandered to the site office to ask for a spare sleeping bag to weather the five degree night. By the third night I’d reconnoitred four spare sleeping bags and was sleeping in a veritable pile of duck down. These sunsets were spent on a vast plain in the midst of a state park, thousands of eyes turned North West to salute the sun as it disappears into the forest above the doof stage. I went to Wilson’s Prom in November with a group of ex-housemates who excitedly plan hiking trips a couple of times a year and then complain their way through the actual days of walking. The celebrations start when the trekking finishes and we line up at the pub for a hearty meal and a beer. Then we talk about how much we enjoy hiking and how we can’t wait to do it again. When hiking, the sunset signals the end of activity, for we rely on light to function and to fight our fears (on a side note, a wombat ate a hole in our tent this trip). We eat slimy packages of dehydrated food in the dusk-light as the bushland fades to peace and retire to bed by eight pm. I spent a particularly pretty sunset with my partner in Queenstown, New Zealand. It was the midst of winter and the towering mountains that surround the town caught the sun high up in the air as it set in giant shadows across the opposing mountainsides. It took several hours for the darkness to descend on the town and we wandered through the crisp clear air with a flurry of tourists and night shopping. The local ice-cream shop was a surprise hit, a trendy establishment with a line of almost a hundred patrons spiralling out the door and around the corner. A flock of ski-jacketed youngsters blow warm air into their gloves, waiting for scoops of rum and raisin while an enterprising busker attempts to pull the change from the wallets with pre-prepared dance moves against a pre-prepared beat. There was the sunset that I drove into for almost two hours on my journey home from my Spring tour. I’d made the dubious choice of leaving Yamba in NSW at eight am and attempting to drive as far as home as I could before stopping. I drove for fourteen hours and paused in Canberra for dinner, then decided to push on for the last six hours. By this point it was just past six o’clock and the sun was a hand-span above the horizon and I assumed it’d be gone soon. Instead it floated in my vision till almost eight, burning small glowing holes in my retinas and leaving a sunburnt strip between where my sunglasses end and my moustache begins. … My sixth grade science teacher told me that sunsets are more magnificent when the air is polluted, but of course it has to be some sort of sliding scale. Too much air pollution (ala Beijing, or Sydney circa December 2019) and the sun disappears completely, replaced by the orange wash of smog. Too little pollution and the sun is a perfect ball, slowly being lowered from its zenith to the encroaching horizon. Shades of The Cyrkle’s Red Rubber Ball abound, a song that had always felt wildly familiar, something about the cadence of the words just tickles a certain itch. Of course I found out recently it was written by Paul Simon, which makes total sense. … In some inane attempt to get in touch with my childhood I’ve been reading Wilfred Thesiger’s book ‘Arabian Sands’, a meandering memoir of his time spent exploring Rub Al Khali (The Empty Quarter, a massive desert that covers parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and The Emirates) in the 1940s. While many parts of the book feel problematic, I’m attempting to view it through a lens of the time period (remnants of European Colonialism, Capitalism and WWII conspire in an uneasy mix). One particular passage stood out: “When moved, Arabs break easily into poetry. I have heard a lad spontaneously describe in verse some grazing which he had just found: he was giving natural expression to his feelings. But while they are very sensible of the beauty of their language, they are curiously blind to natural beauty. The colour of the sands, a sunset, the moon reflected in the sea: such things leave them unmoved. They are not even noticed. When we returned from Mughshin the year before, and had come out from the void of the desert on to the crest of the Qarra range and looked again on green trees and grass and the loveliness of the mountains, I turned to one of them and said, ‘Isn’t that beautiful!’ He looked, and looked again, and then said uncomprehending, ‘no – it is rotten bad grazing.’ ” I wonder at this reality, for I feel I often do the same, albeit from a viewpoint of heedless distraction rather than a pragmatic sensibility. But isn’t that always the way? We live in the shadow of the moment, relying on occasionally being shaken out of comfort zone to notice the beauty that lies around us.
On Life Balance The year pulls into its last couple of stops with a screech and a scream of brakes. I’ve felt a build up of pressure, beginning somewhere around March and building building building non-stop till now. It’s been a frantic year of juggling a million commitments and a billion other things that I’ve wanted to do instead. The balance has been totally off, I’ve neglected most of the important things in favour of whatever has wandered into my vision and I’m excited to now finally have the space and time and energy to put towards the things that need it. I’ve been dwelling on the idea of ‘holding space’. The term has been popping up a lot recently, first in a therapy context where one person commits their full attention/energy/consciousness to another’s needs. It has also popped up around various hippie festivals and, more recently, jazz gigs. I’ve been examining the idea of holding space for yourself and wondering what that looks like to me on a daily basis. An interesting aspect of growing older is slowly getting more in touch with myself, recognising both aspects of my own psyche that I’ve probably always known but never physically acknowledged and things that I haven’t realised about myself that are slowly bubbling to the surface. I recognise that I’m highly driven, very self-motivated and excited about being included in other people’s projects, and that this means I often over commit. So to hold space for myself I need to first create space in my life and then attempt to inhabit it. This is good in theory but so so hard in practice as the loudest parts of my personality are firing “go go go, got to be involved, got to be acknowledged”, whilst somewhere in the background the introvert me is whispering “hey, why don’t you take a year off and disappear into a book”. The healthiest option is obviously to combine these two aspects and live a fulfilling life of moderation but instead I veer wildly between the two. Every year around this time I disappear into a ‘book coma’, where I pull about twenty books off the bookshelf and lie in bed for a week, refusing to engage with the world. Notable book comas in my life include my teenage years where I read all seven Harry Potter books in seven days and last year where I read three notoriously dark books (Eggshell Skull, Normal People and No Friend But The Mountain) in a yurt on the South Island of New Zealand and then collapsed in a heap of despair. This all ties back into my childhood where I used to practice a form of escapism by reading and re-reading three of Enid Blyton’s kids mystery thrillers and imagine rolling green hills and doorsteps of bread covered in lashings of butter while peering out the window at the warm dusty streets of Yemen. Suffice it to say, once I start reading a book I find it very hard to stop until the book is complete and I compensate by speed reading and neglecting the outside world. If I allow myself to read when something important is occurring in life, the important thing gets ignored. But if I don’t let myself read I get sucked into an introvert’s nightmare of constant outward attention and no introspection. Turns out the human existence is complex hey? My most recent idea is to replace social media with book reading, so every time I think about checking Facebook or Instagram I instead read a page of Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (which I got to via Eric Hansen’s Motoring with Mohammed, the next book I’m interested in is Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I’m slowly making my way back through a particular examination of the world’s largest expanse of sand, Rub’ Al Khali from the white European point of view). The idea is good in practice but I tend to check social media first thing in the morning and this week I skipped both breakfast and my morning shower and was almost late to the last day of school because I was attempting to finish David Byrne’s brilliant book ‘How Music Works’. Not sure if the balance is right yet. Luckily, after tonight’s gig I have zero commitments until the end of Jan (other than a couple of thousand emails), so I can feel a book coma coming on, and it’s going to be a big one! I’ll tackle the life balance thing later.
On Tour Stories (part 2) I’ve been thinking a bit more on stories I’ve gathered from the road. There’s been a lot of them. I’ve been touring seriously since around 2014, across a heap of different bands. I generally play around a hundred shows a year, some years more, some years less, but nearly every show has some sort of meaningful interaction that I take with me when I leave. The problem is remembering them, as my journaling is truly sporadic, verging between extremes of writing in my diary twice a day to a nine month period where I didn’t write at all. … There was the night in Katoomba where the pub was cleared by a man who excitedly leaned across the bar to order the next round of drinks. Accidently dipping his hair into a candle there was a flash of light, then an acrid cloud of smoke floating up towards the ceiling. The bar staff flicked up the house lights to see if he was ok and then the smell hit us in a wave. Literally one of the strongest things I’ve smelled, you could see the crowd on the dance floor lifting their heads and wrinkling their noses in disgust. In a mass exodus, the entire bar emptied out as everyone retreated to the smokers area outside for some fresh air. That was night over for us, the bar manager called last drinks and we got to pack out early. … There was the metalhead who heard one of our songs on the radio and excitedly decided to come out and see us play. ‘Yeah boys, really excited to hear you play, can you do that song about dying?’ So we played the song about dying as our first number and he sung along the whole way through then disappeared towards the back of the room. He reappeared one song later with a pint in each hand and yelled out ‘Yeah, play the one about dying again’. Dealing with hecklers is a fine art, and the finest part of it is often strategically ignoring people in the hope that they’ll go away, but old mate was one of about four people there and he stood solidly in front of stage and asked us to re-play that song literally after single song we played. We got off stage and I was in a bit of a grumpy mood, so I strategically disappeared to the toilet. When I come back he is happily singing our song to the rest of the band. They were in a happier mood because he’d bought a round for the band, so we finished up and loaded our gear out and left him excitedly telling random punters that they missed a great show. We thought this was the end of it, until we arrive back in that city about a year later, and he’s back. This time though he’s brought his entire extended family (a girlfriend, his brother, his brother’s partner, two random friends and his mum). They’d obviously been drinking for a while at that stage, but he makes a strong effort to introduce everyone to the band and tell us that he likes the new single, but he ‘really wants to hear that song about dying again’. Luckily we showed some foresight, so instead of blowing the one crowd favourite as the first song, we decide to keep it till later in the set. Cue him again, up front with a pint in each hand, enthusiastically yelling at us to play the song he knows. After about thirty minutes of this, the bouncers decide to cut him off and sit him on a park bench out the front of the venue. We play the song about dying to his mum, who gives us a thumbs up and then we load out the back door to avoid him. … There was northern NSW and sleeping in my car, down a back road twenty minutes out of town. The local petrol station has taken the initiative and flattened a square patch of ground behind the bowsers as a ‘free camping ground’. It’s basic, possibly even elemental, to the point where its actually just an open field with nothing in it. I wander into the petrol station to ask about using their toilet, an open bowl with no seat inside a wooden box with no taps, no lights and a spider literally the size of my face that doesn’t scurry away when I walk in by the light of my phone, but sits placidly on the back of the door and watches me do my business. I walk back into the petrol station and strike up a conversation with the attendant. Anything to fill the time between a seven pm sundown and an honest bedtime, and lying in the back of my car reading books by the light of my phone gets pretty old pretty quickly on the road. We scamper in quick succession through small town life, his childhood, my childhood, my music, local town industry, the local footy team, breakfast options and finally stumble into a point of agreement with the latest season of Game of Thrones, swapping fan theories, dismissing directors and eyeing off the future of the story line. He excitedly tells me he’s just pirated the latest episode which I haven’t yet seen and asks if I want to watch it. At this point I’m well tired of conversation, so I agree and he disconnects the security camera from the in-store TV and plugs in his USB and we have a spontaneous GOT party, gathered around a little TV behind the counter in a petrol station out the back of nowhere. … There was supporting a high-profile female act at Port Fairy Folk Festival. She’s had a baby in the last year and is a little scattered as she’s in the midst of a national tour to release a new album as well as dealing with a new born baby and lack of sleep and breast-feeding at regular intervals. She’s high-profile, but not quite high-profile enough to hire a nanny on the road, so her partner/manager tours with her to mind the baby while she performs and mind the business the rest of the time. Of course the baby experiences extreme separation anxiety when mum puts her down and walks on stage, and the backstage green room is filled with screams and a crowd of worried stagehands and musicians attempting to placate this little sobbing ball. Finally the manager takes the baby and walks to the side of stage, holding her out Lion King style towards her singing mum. The baby quiets and stares in wonder at the massive crowd before her. Later I see the mum signing CDs at the merch tent, baby held in one hand, sharpie in the other. … I’ve been slowly dawdling my way back through five years of diaries, pulling out stories that I’d forgotten. It’s funny how fickle the memory is. Things that are massive deals in my life today slowly get their edges worn down over time and disappear into the bucket that is the past. Sometimes when I see old friends I get the chance to pull some old memories out of the bucket and twist and tease them back into shape, gnaw on them like buried bones, dissect how they made me feel and how they’ve impacted my life. I’ve always been pretty ‘forward-thinking’, more interested in the future than the past, often to the point that I ignore the present completely in favour of thinking about whats next. While I guess that’s a little more healthy than being consumed by where I came from, there’s definitely a fine balance and I’m probably weighted a little too heavily in one direction. One day I’ll probably look back on this post in the same way…
On Tour Stories It’s day three of this two week solo tour and everything starts to gain clarity. It’s been a hectic start to the tour with three shows and around fifteen hours of driving. I’m feeling great emotionally, just tired and its starting to show in my daily routine, where every activity includes a little time for a power nap. So far I’ve napped before every show, napped roughly every three hours on the freeway, napped post-lunch, napped outside the library in Wagga (where I fell asleep in shade from the hot sun and woke to find bucketing hail). I’m getting remarkably good at closing my eyes, ticking off ten minutes and waking to a sense of peace. Think meditation but with a deeper dive than originally expected and occasional surfacing to find kids staring through the windows as I dribble down the steering wheel. I wonder if this insistent napping is a sign of something below the surface, maybe a general life exhaustion borne not from burning the candle at both ends but from tossing the entire thing into the bonfire of running a small business and playing music and teaching part-time and also trying to be a creative being. But no, that couldn’t be it and introspection is for introverts, and I’m touring solo so I push all introspective tendencies to the background. In normal life I don’t normally nap, although I often feel the urge. Tour life just allows me the freedom to succumb to it. Throw this into the mix of being an adult I guess. … I’ve come to realise that there’s a lot about touring that I love. Playing music is the main joy. Spreading music and practicing my live craft and experimenting with my songs in front of people. Sometimes it works and sometimes it fails, but even on the worst gigs I’m generally getting joy from it, even if it’s a post-show wry chuckle at what went wrong. Other touring loves include: exploring new places, eating out most nights of the week, delving into Australia’s thriving craft beer subculture (I’ve been tempted for a long time to do a ‘beers I’ve tasted’ list), listening to endless streams of driving music, and finding park benches to devour books and nap. But more than anything, it’s the people that I enjoy. I’ve got a small but growing network of people I have itinerant relationships with. People whose lives I dip into, borrow some anecdotes and important facts from and then disappear into the night. Over time these chance encounters re-emerge, the ‘emotional neural pathways’ (yes, I’ve been reading ‘Incognito’) get revisited and the bonds get stronger. There are people who I met ten years ago in some band that no longer exists who see I’m coming to town and shoot me a message to catch up. There are people who hang around after the gig and offer me a place to stay and music recommendations. There are people who send me messages weeks after I’ve been to town to carry on conversations we never completed. There are many people who I meet in once off encounters and may never see again, but the stories stick with me. Here’s a couple of anecdotes, borrowed from the ether. I’ve changed some details to save some reputations and possible make the stories more compelling, but at the heart of each is a kernel of truth spurred by a late night conversation. … “My parents only had me cause they didn’t want my sister to grow up alone.” A mumble from the bar amidst a literal pile of beer glasses. It’s closing time and the bar staff have piled all the empties in one long sopping line along the edge of the bar in an attempt to make him see that they want to close and go home, but he sits with a well-nursed pint clasped between both hands and eyes off the couple of stragglers who totter out the front door as I roll the last of my cables and throw them into my Bunnings bag. I hesitate to dive headfirst into a conversation which I assume will be a) laborious at this time of night when all I want to do is pack up, drive five minutes out of town and have a deep sleep in the nearby caravan park and b) rambling as his tongue is well greased by the copious beer I’ve seen him consuming throughout the night. But I’m a glutton for punishment and it’s been a quiet night and I haven’t talked to anyone beside bar staff and service station attendants in almost three days. So I pull up a bar stool, armed with the knowledge I can call the bar staff to attention if I want to bail on the conversation. You develop conversation deflection tools when you spend your life amidst people who either don’t take social cues or are just so excited by new conversational fodder that they’ll chew the ear off anything. It’s worse than I expect, a winding backroad ramble through some sixty years of life experience, beginning somewhere in the early 90s with a dubious career as a festival promoter (“I brought Nirvana to Australia man, that first Big Day Out was all my idea”) then wandering backwards to birth in Malta and a long boat ride at age three to Australia. Everything is tinged with a vague sense of sadness, and I wonder if it’s retrospect that’s making him sad or if he’s carried self-worth issues through from an early age. His opening comments make me suspect deep-seated worries inflicted upon him by external forces, and I understand it because worries bloom in the fertile fields of man’s mind. Without the capacity to pull the electric pulses from another’s brain and turn them into language, we rely entirely on what the other tells us through word and body language to determine what they think. It’s a flawed system, for who truly says what they’re thinking? Surely every thought is encircled in a ring of protective language, the edges sanded down and smoothed out before it is thrown into the world and allowed to take root in the soil of someone else’s expectations. At best, we almost express what we honestly believe and then rely on the person to take it at face value. At worst we obfuscate our thoughts, and the recipient confuses them again in their interpretation and we disappear into an ontological blackhole where all participants nod in agreement and walk away confused. We never actually discussed his relationship with his parents and his sister, but I start to see my ‘on tour’ role as less of an entertainer and more as an itinerant therapist (sure I’ll take your emotional baggage) and handyman (sure I’ll help you move the living room table). … She is an olive farmer. An award-winning olive farmer. I ask her, tongue in cheek, if she eats olives for every meal, and it turns out that yes, yes she does, and her recipe for Mediterranean scrambled eggs (think fluffy eggs interspersed with creamy fetta, halved cherry tomatoes and garlic olives on a floating bed of olive sourdough) is a neighbourhood hit. Her farm produces some six hundred thousand jars of olives a year and I imagine some modern day ‘Plain of Jars’ scenario where down a back road in rural Victoria there exists vast fields covered in glass jars and the local village kids run barefoot, slipping in streams of olive oil and sneaking handfuls of puckered, salted olives into their mouths between replenishing the nation’s stock of stone fruit. The reality is much more sanitary, an in-house bottling plant where all surface are sanitised multiple times a day and most of the process is automated. Imagine conveyor belts and hissing steam and vast quantities of freshly washed olives floating down stream to the olive pipping machine that gently punches each olive in the gut once, flicking the stone into an alternate life path where it leaves its fleshy covering to be soaked in brine and devoured amongst its own kind. The olive stones disappear into bins and are then crushed and tilled back into the earth to create fodder for the next generation, but recently new experiments with olive stones abound, from potential use as car fuel, a replacement material for plastic and as a cleansing agent amongst industrial machines. Man’s ingenuity abounds and where once we discarded piled olive pits we now delight in second use cases, waste reduction and further chances to monetize our industries. … “I put Don Burrows in a mine” he claims proudly, assuming we have a knowledge of who Don Burrows is, and why we’d want him underground. At first I assume it’s some word play on ‘burrow’ and ‘mine’ and underground semantics and maybe he’s functioning at some level of understanding much deeper than my own. But it turns out that Don Burrows is actually a renowned Australian jazz musician, and the mine was the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Company. As part of the mine’s centenary celebrations back in 1994, Don Burrows and his band Moment’s Notice (assumably named after the Coltrane album) were dropped two kilometers down a mine shaft to perform a show. The show was turned into a subsequent live concert which can be ordered via your local library’s VHS rental service. Unfortunately all this information came to light months later via some internet sleuthing. In this current conversation he proclaims disbelief that we don’t know who Don Burrows is, and that we don’t know why he thought to put him down the mine in the first place. “How can you be an Australian musician and not know who Don Burrows is? If you don’t know your history how can you look to the future?” Relevant questions, but I’m a folk musician, and examining the careers of Australia’s mid-90s jazz clarinetists is not a current concern. Standing on the shoulders of giants, yes. Attempting to balance atop a revolving cast of the millions of musicians who have come before, not so much. He storms off in a huff, muttering about youngsters who don’t know their heritage and I’m touched by the depth of human existence. For this man, one of the cornerstones of his life’s achievement is that time he put a jazz band down a coal mine, and I get it. It’s a beautiful concept. It’s newsworthy. It’s a memory that a select group of people will carry throughout their entire lives. It’s the kind of ludicrous idea that I’d probably put together myself and I imagine myself, fifty years in the future, beleaguering the next generation of young musicians who don’t understand their history and don’t appreciate the ludicrousity that is man’s imagination. … I gather these stories like blind mice gather grain. Haphazardly. Unplannedly. Totally-without-meaningfully. Some days the pickings are slim and some days I’m hickory dickory docking my way into fertile food stores and delighting in the flood of stories that I coat my body and mind in. I’ve started to journal the stories I’m told on the road for while the human imagination is a wild and wonderful thing, the human memory is remarkably suspect and I tend to forget more beautiful anecdotes than I remember. I use these stories to springboard my own creativity: as song fodder, or anecdotal evidence, or even just as creative gristle to mentally chew over as I drive.
On Mist I wake to an early morning mist. It’s Melbourne winter, and the mist is within my bedroom, rising from my lungs and dissipating in a cloud across the room. A house that has stood for sixty years lives with its foibles, and these particular foibles are finger-width cracks around the window frames, plywood walls that flap when the wind blows, and a gaping hole where someone leant a little too hard and the plywood cracked and disappeared in chunks into the wall itself. Combine these to find a house that holds no warmth and hides no sound, allowing the outside to permeate the deepest depths of its interior. We combat the cold with a massive gas-heater, the central point of the house. The house is built around the remnants of an actual wood oven, but this was removed in the 70s and replaced with a gas heater that still blows bright. It takes ten minutes to cough to life and then burns burns burns, turning imperceptible gas into invisible warmth. You lean against the heater at the beginning, a cup of tea grasped in hands to help the heat sink in, but after a couple of minutes you pull a chair a meter out to soak up the heat. Another twenty minutes finds the entire household gathered in the farthest extremities of the room, fighting against the searing warmth. That’s the perks of a gas heater designed with no temperature gauge but only a simple on and off switch. Unfortunately, the cold still subdues the rest of the house and we brave bed only when we’ve exhausted the ability to maintain conversation. My twenties were a round of cold sharehouses, bundling into three jumpers and a beanie to practice drums in gaping garages. My thirties ease the trend: moving to a centrally heated house, an almost airtight shed that quickly warms with the glow of a space heater that warps the wrap on my vintage drum shell and sizzles moisture against the windows. I step out from an early afternoon practice session to find fingers of mist flaking in the backyard before the house. … I have a love of mist, and today it hits me that this love is hardwired, tied somewhere into my genetic makeup as a remnant from my ancestry. Two generations back was Northern Ireland and I delve into my own wistful remembrances of visiting the Cliffs of Moher (not Northern Ireland, but my closest experience). Scattered groups of tourists clicking their way through the fog, trying to get an iconic photo of sea swept shorelines between the mist and the crowds. Buses crowd the anteroom road that skirts the cliff-face and I stand rosy-faced and raincoat-clad amidst a place I’ve never identified with, but which clearly identifies me in language and skin colour and woolen jumper heritage. I missed the chance to talk through childhood with my Grandpa but the romantic in me ties history into fantasy and Belfast sticks in my memory as a place to live and love and leave. I follow the fault lines back farther through supposed Celtic history and tribes who scattered through rain soaked hills and eked out a living amidst the peat. All of human history has been pushing for new horizons from the earliest of man, and my particular tribe has done its share of chasing new vistas (interesting how the word ‘tribe’ has re-emerged amongst the 21st century internet zeitgeist). This mist has permeated all of my memories. … I feel an ache when the mists roll in, driving me to walk home from the bar down the road. In summer this walk is languid, slow steps unslurried by a desire to arrive home, for the thirty degree Australian summer turns this sixty-year-old house into a heat-box. Why is it that the one time our homes trap the heat is when we sweat and stir beneath sticky sheets and long for sleep? But this is winter, and the mist cloaks the street in both directions. We walk briskly, bundled against the cold, clutching each other for warmth and stability. Little did she realise my late night plans included a twenty minute walk, so she wore the cute heels that buoy her body to an almost tenable height but are completely unsuited to carrying her from one place to another. … I’ve stumbled home amidst the mist in countries all across the world. The mist of Yemen’s highlands, sweeping in across terraced coffee plantations. This is the purest coffee in the world, built from hardy plants that relish the cold mountain air. Farmers who have lived generation by generation in the same little village in the same little tribe for the last two thousand years, have farmed the same coffee plants on the same terraces built by their great great great grandparents. The idea of ‘eking’ out a living in its purest form resides here amongst these people. We set-up camp along one of the larger terraces, a group of scattered white expats in pitied plastic tents while the locals live in stone houses built in Roman times and maintained by hand ever since. Late night downpours emanate from above and we flee the tents to shelter in a stone-circled goat shed among the local livestock. The mist of Kenya’s Rift Valley where the year’s two seasons (wet and dry) alternate with frightening regularity. Over night the shift comes and you wake to torrential rain: weeks and weeks of torrential rain where the red soil slips and slides and swells into a red river that slowly washes down stream. Everything is caked in the mud of my youth, and we return to the dorm to find nineteen pairs of shoes under the porch overhang. This is the time of year to play rugby (the grass grows better in the wet), and the Junior team traipse out to the bus twice a week, riding to other towns to foe other teams of boys who fight dirty. They arrive home with black eyes and stomach scratches and talk of fields turned into swimming pools, and holes near goal lines where one boy was held under water for almost a minute by members of the rival scrum. When the rains finally stop, the mist settles in and with it comes hordes of flying termites. Tiny ant-sized bodies with four long wings, they flap and flutter their way in through the window my room-mate left open and we arrive home to find several thousand infesting the hallway. A simple solution from a boy born here, he pulls tennis rackets from beneath his bed and we spend a half hour smacking the termites out of the air to ground below. When hit, the wings come dislodged and fall featherlike, while the termite scurries for a shady crack in the wall. The joy continues, as the same boy sweeps handfuls of crawling termites into a dustpan and runs them to the kitchen at the end of the hall. He pours them into a frying pan coated in ghee and they sizzle and snap and taste a little like crispy chunks of bacon. The mist of Tasmania’s Forth, a town of four hundred people. We leave the pub and wander, mandolin in hand, towards the top of the hill. Ahead is darkest forest, behind are scattered street lights, so we turn and eye off what should be a beautiful view of Tasmania’s old growth, but is instead a sea of white. Walk in step through town looking for some entertainment, and finally stumble head-long into the misty lights of a hotel and realise it’s the same pub we’ve been playing at for the last three hours. And other mists remembered: Years spent living in Sunbury’s abandoned Insane Asylum. Early morning city mist in Yemen where the city sits eerily silent and government workers spray clouds of chemicals into the mist in an effort to defeat an oncoming scourge of mosquitoes. Glasgow mists and couch-surfing with uni students who take me to the fish and chip shop to sample a deep-fried Mars Bar. … sonder, noun: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”
On Worry Two nights ago I woke at 2 am. It’s a fairly regular occurrence, and normally I toss and turn for a couple minutes then drift back to sleep. Sometimes I get up and wander the house before returning to bed. Occasionally I dip into my latest book for half an hour until sleep slides through the back of mind and tugs my eyelids downwards. We have a new couch in our spare room, liberated from a lady in Preston who ‘wanted it to go to a good home rather than land fill’. It’s not particularly new (it came replete with stains reminiscent of a well-loved life, the wrinkles we gather through a life well lived), its not particularly comfortable (‘hard as a rock’ was one quote), but it was free and we’re saving the planet, one uncomfortable stained couch at a time. It also creaks slightly when you shift your weight. So imagine me: sleepless, wrapped in a sleeping bag, sideways on a slightly creaking couch, reading a book on copyright reform. After mindlessly flipping the same three pages for twenty minutes, I close my book and allow my mind to drift. I’ve become aware over the last several weeks that there are some issues I keep coming back to, and rather than resolving them, I’ve pushed them down into that back part of my mind, the part that only works when I’m incredibly bored or asleep. I’ll admit that I don’t think I’ve been bored since around 2008 (symptoms of a busy life, and the smart phone revolution), so my mind doesn’t get much time to work through the issues I choose to ignore. It’s somewhat similar to the computer at my old workplace that no-one turned off for seven years (actually), and when someone accidently plugged the toaster in to the same power socket as a hair dyer, the building’s fuse flipped. When we flipped it back on, the computer attempted to restart itself, but being four versions of an operating system out of date, and having never had a security update it attempted to download 600 gigabytes of data to a 100 gig hard drive. We left it chugging away for two weeks and finally put it out of its misery, sending it to the repair guy who gutted it and put a brand new computer into the old metal box. Same old body, brand new mind, some slight foibles. The main negative was we lost some seven years worth of scanned documents (it was ostensibly my job to re-scan all these documents, but I quit shortly after to begin a career as a jazz drummer). … So what am I dwelling on, and how do I protect myself from allowing it to overload me? Where’s the reset button for the human mind? Are there effective ways to regain healthy sleep patterns? I find my biggest sense of solace in a little diary that sits by my bedside. I’ve perfected the art of picking it up, scrambling for the pen that always finds its way to the floor below and shuffling in darkness out the door and down the hall to the spare room in silence. Flip the lights and begin to write. It takes pages of fluff to get to the crux of the issue. And the issue is never the same. But as I flip in daylight through my night-time journal I find the same issues re-appearing, re-creating themselves in different guises, sliding themselves from the hidden cracks in the back of my mind and through my head to my eyelids where they force themselves into consciousness and force my eyelids open and force my awareness to engage with them. Writing them down helps. My conscious mind knows I can engage with them later if they physically exist in the world. Writing them down also gives me scope to scoff at past Nathan’s worries. Like the worry I had in 2011 that I’d pissed off a friend who wasn’t returning my calls (turns out he’d dropped his phone into a toilet and spent two weeks living on vegemite sandwiches to save up the $200 needed to buy a third hand iPhone 3). Or the worry that I can’t play drums (turns out that I can play drums, but comparing yourself to others is a quick trip to an unsatisfied destination). Or years of worry that I might occasionally suffer from insomnia. You know, just casual stuff. Drinking wine with friends helps. There’s a beautiful space, generally one or two wines in where you gain the ability to download your worries on to other people. Sort of like the Matrix, without the technology or karate. Heck, you can probably do it without the wine at all, it’s the friends bit that’s truly effective, but man is good at making tools to suit every occasion, and wine suits this scenario. Exercise absolutely helps. It’s probably the most effective method of dealing with worries, but hardest of all to implement, because it requires putting on running shoes and that’s often a bridge too far. If only putting on shoes was as easy as opening a new Google Chrome tab to watch Youtube. … In the end I wrote down three big ideas that had been worrying me for the last couple of weeks. I woke up today and one of them had silently resolved itself. No input from me, it just untangled its knots and appeared in my inbox. Not sure if there’s a lesson here. … And heeeere’s some Bjork. Ps. If anyone needs a couch to crash on, we have one. 😉
On How To Fill a Life I see the same small group of elderly Italian men every time I go to the shops. They gather mid-morning at the terrible café in the heart of Northcote plaza and sit, clustered around a wobbly table with laughably small cups of coffee. I’m unsure whether the size of the cup is an attempt to squeeze more orders out of them, or whether the coffee is so remarkably strong that one thimble sized shot is enough to keep the conversation rolling. One of the men is noticeably older than the others. Happily tucked into a wheelchair, he slumps back, head rolling as people pass. The other men do little to include him in the conversation, but he is there every day, so someone must be making the daily effort to roll him out of bed, slip him into an oversize jacket and wheel him into the middle of Northcote plaza. Some days I see two of these men, walking the street out the front of my house. They stroll nonchalantly, hands clasped behind their backs, beginning at the final house on the block, where I often find one of the men sitting on the trampoline nestled in the front yard. They step step step down the street, no conversation, just small steps beside each other. They reach the end of the street and turn and walk back. I stand by the letterbox, sorting a pile of glossy junk mail, election pamphlets and letters addressed to previous tenants. The elderly men stride pass in silence with a brief nod. Is this what old age has to offer? … I’m in a lull. A little period in between when I was last very busy (last week) and will again be very busy (July). It’s an odd experience. I’ve been frantically pushing pushing pushing for what feels like the last fifteen years of my life. There’s been periods of intense ardour, Sisyphusian struggle up-hill against a million rocks of my own making, and there’s been slightly less intense times: days where the need to achieve rumbles quietly in the background as I attempt to laze away with re-runs of Seinfeld and an over-percolated strong black. I find it so hard to give myself down time. Even on my down days I write a to-do list, the little note-book on my desk leers over me with scrawled reminders of things I thought important when I woke (washing, email, invoice, gtr) and things I failed to achieve yesterday. My to-do list becomes predictable, the same set of five to seven things appearing every day, so I mark them into columns and switch the orders daily, convincing myself that putting ‘reading’ below ‘drumming’ will bring order to my day. Invariably it all falls in a heap and I binge watch Seinfeld while half-heartedly reading a book on copyright reform. The next six weeks are remarkably quiet. I generally book myself out three months in advance (as I write this I’m planning my August-September tour), so for me to have some down-time means I slacked off three months ago and didn’t book any shows. But that’s ok. I generally schedule my down time around my up time, and a ‘day off to read a book’ usually means I’m catching a flight interstate for a show and I can’t actually achieve anything in the air. The fact that I’ve got two whole weekends coming up with no actual plans is remarkable. Somewhere in the vicinity of man discovering the earth revolves around the sun. So what do I do with down time? How do I fill the precious remnants of my time on earth? … When I was at uni I obsessed over music. I had an expanding selection of CDs, bought new from JB, bought second-hand from eBay, borrowed from friends, inherited from ex-housemates. I could listen to jazz and identify modern drummers based on drum sound (Bill Stewart’s ride cymbal click from the way he chokes his thumb high up on the stick, Jorge Rossy’s laziness, more straight quarters than a ding-a-ding feel, Antonio Sanchez’s swing eighths that border on straight, presumably borrowed from a love of latin music). I’ve successfully extinguished at least two romantic relationships due to extended hours spent in the practice room. … When it was last week I obsessed over politics. I had tabs saved across multiple devices. Opinion pieces harking to a sure left wing. Stats and opinion polls pointing to the amount of money the far right spent on scare campaigns, and indeed an open tab dedicated to the bookies and their thoughts on the upcoming election. Every conversation in the near past verged on political and it plied its sneaky ways into my world through advertising slogans, shareable online content and oversized yellow billboards placed surreptitiously in green heartland. … Today I went for a walk around the block. … Final thought from Geneen Roth via Anne Lamott’s beautiful book ‘Bird by Bird’: “Awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.”
On Books I’ve Read (Dec 2018 – Jan 2019) I’ve been on tour across Australia/New Zealand for the last six weeks. During this time I read a lot. Here’s some thoughts. … I consume ridiculous amounts of information. Life is a constant stream of stuff coming in: emails, social media, websites I frequent, books, music, conversations. Everything constantly streams in and I find myself, sitting here in a muddied lake of my own making, trying to sift out the important threads. In an effort to reduce the amount of useless information I consume, I’ve installed a little Chrome app on my computer that eliminates my Facebook feed (and replaces it with an inspirational quote, some of which are good, most of which are bad). I’ve also stopped checking my notifications. I still browse Facebook everyday, its just nowhere near as interesting as it used to be. Here’s roughly what the experience looks like: Anyway. I find I consume information in the same way that I achieve most things in life. In bulk and as fast as possible. I’m always the first person finished with a meal (something I attribute to growing up at boarding school. The first person to finish could get up for seconds and Tuesday lunch was burgers with a limit of two per person, so we’d madly finish our meals and scramble back to the end of the line in the hope that we could get another two). I tackle projects voraciously, knowing that the more I can finish in one big session, the less I have to do later. My initial attack is always massive bites. The follow-up is little nibbles as I lose interest, slowly petering to nothing. I really need a ‘finisher’, someone who’ll take everything I do and edit the final form so it makes sense. This could apply to my songwriting, cooking meals, work-out routines, general conversations etc. I read in the same way that I eat. Compulsively consume as fast as possible. Don’t reflect, don’t react, just consume. Which means I get through books ridiculously fast, but also means I often don’t get as much out of it as I could (like comparing a five-minute burger and chips with five courses of dabbed olive oil and single anchovies on a plate I guess). To counteract this, I’ve started making notes on the books I read, mainly so I can reflect on the information I’m taking in, but also so I can remember what I’ve read in years to come (I occasionally find myself thinking plot points feel familiar, then realizing I’ve already read the book). Over the last six weeks I read ten books. Here’s my thoughts on some of my favourites. Also if you don’t like having plots ruined, don’t read this post, but watch Tim Minchin instead.. … The Lesser Bohemians (Eimear McBride) Seriously amazing. Mcbride writes with a sort of broken prose. 75% of the book is written in this heavy stream of consciousness, words left out, sentences not resolving sort of style that starts out as a slog to read (I found myself actually dwelling on each sentence as it goes past). Then about two thirds of the way through the book the main male character does a 60-page monologue in straight hard-hitting sentences, full grammar, syntax complete. It’s a brutally heavy book, the plot has some amazing twists and I careened through the whole book in less than 24 hours in a field on top of a mountain in New Zealand. I fluctuated wildly between heady optimism for the characters followed by immediate dense depression and despair. This is the kind of book that feels like it was written about real people, but real people on the edge of my friendship group. These are the ‘others’ I hear friends talk about and vaguely know but never have a strong relationship with. At the heart of it, this book does a great job of reflecting the fragility and sheer trauma of romantic relationships. With a little shock value and a heart-rending story to boot. Do The Work (Steven Pressfield) I loved aspects of this. Basically Pressfield got asked to write a book on how to beat all the things that trouble ‘creatives’ (procrastination, self-doubt etc), and he came out with this. Its kind of an off-shoot of his other book ‘The War of Art’ which I haven’t read but is on my list for the future. I hate the ‘self-help’ style of writing. Its very ‘do this, do that, have a good life’ kind of writing. but some of the ideas really stick out. He suggests trying to condense an entire work (song, novel, screenplay) into a single page as a way to map things out. If it doesn’t fit on one page, its too much (which is fine for a song but tough for a long form work right?). It makes you stick to just the bare bones. One thing I don’t often do is sketch out songs prior to writing them, so it might be an interesting exercise to go ‘this song is THIS thing, here’s where it starts, here’s what I’m trying to portray etc’ and see how that feels as a creative activity. He also talks about trying to explain your work/project to someone in thirty seconds (think elevator pitch) which is something I and most musicians I know struggle with… ‘So what sort of music do you play?’ Gah. A lot of this book is based around how to get off your arse and get started which I don’t often have a problem with, but I’ve pulled ideas out that I’ll come back to in the future and if you find yourself struggling creatively it might help. Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl) So I read a lot through an app on my phone. The particular app I have been using (Kobo) has this terrible bug where every so often it resets and you lose everything: all your books, the saved progress section and worst of all the saved notes. As I read I highlight sections and put notes to myself so I can quickly refresh what a book or section was about. Anyway, my damned app reset just after I read this book and all my meaningful quotes and notes are kaput. That said, here’s a couple of takeaways. Frankl lived through WWII in Auschwitz, and through that experience formulated a strong personal theory on what gives humans meaning. There’s three aspects (creating something, experiencing something and the attitude we take towards what happens to us). He goes on to say that the third is probably the most important as its something no-one else can take away from us. This vaguely ties in with some of the readings I’ve been doing on Stoicism (thanks Seneca). Some of his stories about Auschwitz resonated heavily with Behrouz Boochani’s book (No Friend But The Mountain), which I read last year. Some devastatingly interesting parallels arise, with Frankl talking about how the concentration camps were designed to break human spirit: names are stripped away and all prisoners are given numbers, something which happened also on Manus Island. Boochani’s book dwells on a ‘kyriarchal system’ used on Manus to oppress and dehumanise prisoners, I wonder if anyone has done a comparison with Frankl’s work? The second half of the book is a dive into Frankl’s ideas on Psychotherapy (which he formalizes as ‘Logotherapy). I took scattered ideas from it, but I feel like some of it had aged poorly (for a book on the workings of the mind written some seventy years ago that’s fine right?). Also my notes have all disappeared and it’s a dense read, will try and tackle again some day. Home Fire (Kamila Shamsie) I was told I had to read this by my partner. Something to do with connections with my own life. Vague connections include a Pakistani-born family, religious connections reverberating through a lifetime and a childhood displaced by families uprooted and thrown to the other side of the world. I really don’t want to spoil the plot or indeed the journey of reading it, so here’s my immediate scribbled thoughts from when I finished reading it: “Gaaah. this is incredible. beautiful writing, an incredible plot line. twists and turns and genuinely one of the best endings to a story I’ve ever read. heartbreaking moments, some beautiful back story and a seamless arc. unexpected.” … And thus ends book club for the week. Nah seriously though, I’ll try to occasionally do a post like this. Interested to see if anyone else is reading the same books I’m reading. Interested to see if you’ve got book suggestions for me. The other books I read this month (and it’s a super eclectic mix) are: The Mars Room (Rachel Kushner) [very good], The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) [wild but quite long, Russian fiction from the 1930s], The Planet on the Table (Kim Stanley Robinson) [some strong moments, I loved sci-fi as a child but am finding it harder to dive into these days], How To Be Good (Nick Hornby) [not as good as A Long Way Down, but still enjoyable, the ending disappoints], A Man of Two Worlds (Frank/Brian Herbert) [expected more from the author of Dune, but my assumption is Frank’s son Brian did most of the writing and it shows] and About Grace (Anthony Doerr) [author of All The Light We Cannot See, this is his first novel and the sheer volume of research he puts into his character’s backstories is inspiring]. I’m almost done with Creativity Inc, [the book by the guy who started Pixar] and I’ve just started Extreme Ownership, [a book about the US Navy SEALS which I’m finding problematic, BUT the lessons are probably still valid]. … I promise I don’t normally read this much. I made a remark to a friend yesterday that I don’t allow myself to read when I’ve got other important stuff to do (booking gigs, practice, teaching etc) because I devote 100% of my time to the book until its completely finished. There was a three year period at uni where I basically didn’t read fiction because I knew I had a degree to complete. It’s a problem, but a good one to have I guess? … I’m going to have a lot less time to read over the next couple of months. I’ve got a tour to announce (this week), a video to release (also this week), and a bunch of shows to play.
On Where I Began (part 2) If I got my musical ability from my mum (see part 1 here), then I got my entrepreneurial spirit from my dad. But which has served me better as an independent musician? … Many of the greatest musicians, the world-changing artists, the enduring inspirations that have shaped and defined the world we live in failed on the business front. One of my great loves, 1960s folk artist Nick Drake released a miniscule amount of music and gave up on life when it failed to become commercially successful. Passing away at the age of 26, his music would go on to inspire a generation of new artists and land on the Rolling Stones 500 greatest album list. This is an artist who despaired at selling a little over 3,000 records during his time. The business side of his career was weak, but the artistic side was strong, and this is what resonates long after he passed away. … On the other end of the equation, art often falls to the wayside in favour of slick marketing and the five minute pop-star is born. I often wonder which of the ‘big stars’ of the 2000s will have enduring careers and which will fade away. For every Madonna of the 80s there are a hundred other chart-topping singles which disappeared into the past. In 50 years time will the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears be examined with the same love as the Beatles and the Beach Boys? (can I even make that comparison?!) … From earliest memory, Dad was one of the greatest proponents of the ‘work from home’ lifestyle. Countless houses in countless countries housed studies filled to the brim with papers. Filing cabinets overflowing with lifetimes of work. Dad constantly had numerous new projects on the go. Dad passed on the ‘new project’ gene to me and I took it gratefully, throwing myself into idea after idea with abandon. The beauty of working from home is plenty of time to throw at other ideas as they come up. In one monsoonal flood season the local park filled with chest high water. Dad (possibly spurred on by my brother) took the opportunity and turned it into the ‘Great Raft Race (episode 1)’ and hordes of neighbourhood kids watched on in awe as three white kids and a middle-aged man paddled around the park in a dinghy. It was brought to an abrupt end with the discovery of some downed power lines sparking merrily away. We paddled home to safety. Episode 2 of the Great Raft Race involved driving twenty jerry cans and a pile of lumber eight hours to the nearest beach (Al Hudaydah). Several rolls of duct tape and a prayer later we pushed out to sea, a three-hour roundtrip to a sunken oil tanker off the coast. The Great Raft Race turned into a yearly fixture of the ex-pat community, final tally at around five rafts and some twenty people headed out to sea. Outside of nautical pursuits, Dad has ostensibly spent his life as a teacher, with combined hats of researcher, author, creator and entrepreneur vying for space on his balding head (I inherited the balding gene too). I spent child-hood summers earning pocket-money by turning Dad’s learning materials into books, page by page photocopied and spiral bound into educational materials for the courses he created and taught. No topic was too strange, with books on teaching Arabic to English-speakers, on teaching English to Arabic-speakers (including one specific course on teaching English medical words to Arab doctors). Dad wrote picture books for mum to use to teach health education to rural village women (a big killer in third world countries is diarrhoea, turns out babies get dehydrated and die if the parents don’t know they have to keep watering them). Dad spent years developing and self-publishing books then, working through the faculty of a university, spent years creating books for other people to publish. He now ‘tours’ the world, not in a musical sense, but lecturing, running short courses, inspiring a new generation of thinkers. … As I grow older, my schedule shifts to match that of my dads. He developed the daily routine of an afternoon nap (in a country where the afternoon temperature can reach 40 degrees and the entire city closes shop and sleeps) and worked late into the night. I find my most productive hours begin at 10 pm, which doesn’t bode well for drum practice, but works well as writing and reflection time. … The ones who inspire me in a business sense are the people who get things done. The Elon Musks or Tim Ferriss or Steve Jobs or Dads of the world, where no idea is too crazy to throw your energy at. Without these people where would life be? So I sit at a nexus between the creative and business worlds. I love the entrepreneurial aspect of music. I love creating business ideas, starting projects, pulling people in new ways and seeing what the combinations create. I love the beginning of an idea, where everything is so vague and new that you can push in any direction and make growth. I love sketching out ideas and seeing the possibilities that lie within. But I also love creating music. I love fleshing out lyric ideas, putting them into context against a groove with a melody and underpinning them with harmony. I love performing these parts and seeing what resonates with people. I love the visceral movement that comes from placing two notes a certain distance apart from each other and repeating repeating repeating until you have a groove. … I close with a quote from Ed Catmull, author of Creativity Inc and founder of Pixar: “Many of us have a romantic idea about how creativity happens: A lone visionary conceives of a film or a product in a flash of insight. Then that visionary leads a team of people through hardship to finally deliver on that great promise. The truth is, this isn’t my experience at all. I’ve known many people I consider to be creative geniuses, and not just at Pixar and Disney, yet I can’t remember a single one who could articulate exactly what this vision was that they were striving for when they started. In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself. I’m often asked to predict what the future of computer animation will look like, and I try my best to come up with a thoughtful answer. But the fact is, just as our directors lack a clear picture of what their embryonic movies will grow up to be, I can’t envision how our technical future will unfold because it doesn’t exist yet. As we forge ahead, while we imagine what might be, we must rely on our guiding principles, our intentions, and our goals—not on being able to see and react to what’s coming before it happens. My old friend from the University of Utah, Alan Kay—Apple’s chief scientist and the man who introduced me to Steve Jobs—expressed it well when he said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
On Touring (part 2) I write from a dorm room in FNQ (far north Queensland). Four bunks, piles of scattered clothes, instruments and remnants of last nights’ slab. Above, the rattling fan spins interminably, blowing gusts of steamy air down upon me and coming remarkably close to my bandmate’s head. Whose brilliant idea was it to pair bunk beds and a low ceiling fan? Surely a recipe for disaster, but in a 120-year-old pub built to house miners heading north, OH&S was probably the last consideration. Each subsequent publican retrofits a new concept to this heritage-listed building and we arrive at this sprawling mish mash of a death hole. The windows are slatted, creaking up and down with the hard handed jerk of a lever and in comes a flood of noise, the sounds of Yungaburra Fest. … This pub lies at the heart of the festival. Behind it lies the Garden stage where the local high school rock band kicks the day off at ten am with a set of heart-felt Missy Higgins covers. In front of the pub a farmers market, a kids DJ set, a stilted Poseidon rising out of the twirling crowd of rollerbladers to ring his town crier bell and heft his middle aged beer gut above the puzzled kids. Back and forth he sways. A precarious grip on his trident. A precarious grip on life itself. In the heart of the pub itself a female choir. The phrase ‘Welsh Women’ sticks in the back of my mind, but the alliteration invents itself in my early morning daze. Excited elderly white women co-opt cinematized black dance moves and sing ‘African-inspired’ repertoire. Think Sister Act, but no Whoopi Goldberg. Possibly no planned choreography either, just spontaneous appropriations. Probably less trained singers too I suppose. Truly an act to behold. Here in the middle I sit, seeking respite from the warmth (thirty-three degrees at ten am), the crowds (a thousand ticket holders invade a town of eleven hundred, imagine the outrage if Melbourne’s population doubled over night) and the noise (three concurrent performances competing in sheets of sounds destined to leave any puzzled in-betweener reeling). … These days are spent in indolent luxury. A pre-breakfast beer to fight the creeping heat. A meat pie from the supermarket for lunch is followed by another from the bakery for dessert and a third from a food truck as an afternoon snack. We wake to music and sleep to music. Afternoon nap beneath a tree to music. The music pervades the landscape: a young girl busking in the shade outside a café while an enthusiastically scarfed accordionist plays for his supper within the café itself. When one act finishes a set, or a song, or even pauses to take breath in the midst of a vocal line, you hear a swarm of others in the background, competing for sonic domination. … Official festival venues are overrun by ecstatic grey nomads, sipping iced-soy lattes and scoffing scones to fuel the midday slumber. Sleep defeats all, the afternoon sun slowing performances and more than one gig has a snoring uncle-figure in the back row. We wander in clumps. Singles and pairs meeting for a minute and heading different ways. We congregate for feature performances and to discuss day plans. We hear rumours of nearby Lake Eacham, a dormant volcano/lake/crocodile sanctuary. Rumours turn to action turn to an afternoons’ entertainment by virtue of a chance meeting with Beeeedge (actual spelling unknown), a sprightly Irish lady playing the Bodhran in the Irish jam. The Irish jam begins on the first day of the festival and continues non-stop until late on the final night when where we are asked to move on by a group of European backpackers staying at the pub (not to attend the festival but to pick fruit on a nearby farm). Beeeeedge has a hire-car and a partner who helped to start the festival some thirty-eight years ago. She drives us ferociously to the Lake, tells us this is her third swim in the lake that day and leaves us clutching a box of dripping Choc Tops as she dives back in for an afternoon sojourner. All around the heat permeates, seeping into the early evening, sucking the sweat softly from my skin.