On Touring New Zealand Tour is salt and vinegar chips, spilled under the driver’s seat. Tour is launching ourselves into every possible body of water. Tour is a 4 am bed-time, followed by an 8 am lobby call. We spent the week travelling up the guts of New Zealand’s South Island, ensconced within an eight-seater Kia Carnival I nicknamed Carmen in tribute to an ex-girlfriend. The car is a capsule, a bubble, a closed ecosystem with developed routines, rituals, ways of being. Sam and I inhabit the front seats. We alternate driving, marvelling over this car’s inexplicable features. The car beeps at us, non-stop from the moment we roll out of the rental carpark. It beeps to tell you when you’re speeding (sixty in a thirty zone), then it beeps any time you cross a line on the road, it beeps when you get within two metres of the car in front of you, and it beeps incessantly while you reverse. It beeps when we place a bag on the backseat, assuming it is a small child. The beeps all have slightly different cadences and wildly different pitches. One is Eno’s Music For Airports, another is Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name. We scroll through the car settings to try and disable them but eventually give up and accept the discordant symphony of beeps interrupting our conversation. Continue reading “On Touring New Zealand”
On Gusto Gusto’s New Album Gusto Gusto have a new album! To The Ocean They Returned is out today. It’s our debut full-length album, which is a funny music marketing thing I’ve seen everyone else do and figured we’d co-opt for our project. Is this our ‘debut album’? No, of course not. We’ve got two EPs out already. But it’s our ‘debut full-length album’, which basically means it’s the first time we’ve done a longer album. Weirdly, music industry people LOVE stuff like this. Anything that can make something seem new and cool sells right? Blergh. I first saw **name redacted because some of my friends play in his band** try this, and suddenly all these people were raving about this ‘cool new artist’ who has just released his first album. Not his first album, and definitely not new, he’d been kicking around Melbourne for years at that point, but he just scrubbed the internet of his first two albums and started fresh. The marketing worked and his ‘debut’ album did really well and now he has a successful career, so let’s see how it goes for us. To The Ocean IS a much different album to our two EPs. Continue reading “On Gusto Gusto’s New Album”
On Low Points Every tour has a low point. I’ve been asking the band for the last two weeks if they think we’ve hit the low point, first as a joke, then as a gauge of everyone’s energy, now with the hope that they’ll assuage my fears and say it’s all up from here. I hope our low point was Sunday morning. We played a show in London, a blurry late night blast of local ales (terrible), local pub food (excellent) and local experiences (mixed). Our tour has neatly lined up with the UEFA tournament, and England was in the quarter finals playing against Switzerland on the night of our gig. We stayed at a hostel in bustling Brixton. When we arrived they were busy fitting a new set of giant TV screens into the beer garden in anticipation of the night’s crowd. We tried to get in to the beer garden to watch the game but they were already at capacity, even when we told them we were sleeping upstairs and could literally see the screens from our window. We rolled on to a double decker bus and through the suburbs to Clapham where we were playing. When we got to our venue the game was on. First quarter, no points. We order meals, had some beers, watched the game. I’m not invested in sports unless it’s going for solo runs around the park, but it was fun to scream at the TV with a couple hundred Londoners. Continue reading “On Low Points”
Glastonbury (part 3) I am drinking gin and kombucha from a straw wheat cup. I am floating in a hammock in a forest glade near Totnes. I am feeling calm and clear and happy. We have reached the ‘hippie commune’ part of our UK tour. I am eating a giant bowl of vegan mac and cheese, deliciously irreverent mac and cheese accompanied by a side of crispy onions and garnished with a handful of brilliant orange flowers picked from the hedge behind the tent. The meal is served by a giant Italian man who appears to be mostly naked. He scampers over to deposit the food on the table in front of me and bold curls of chest hair erupt around the top and sides of the skimpy apron he wears. When he turns to walk back to the kitchen his bare arses winks at me in the British sunshine. I’m tempted to ask if he was wearing pants when he prepared the food, but hygiene standards be damned, this food is delicious and its got veggies in it, unlike any of the food I’ve eaten in the past week. … We left Glastonbury in a rush, up at 7 am to disassemble our tents and roll up the hill to the carpark in stages. Each person is overloaded, carrying gear first from the tent to the inside of Pedestrian Gate B, then carrying the gear out through the gate and dropping it on the other side of security, getting a pass back into the festival to pick up a second round of gear. It takes us over an hour to get from the campsite to the gate, then another hour to get from the gate to the car park. When I finally sit down in the car I’m a sweaty sodden mess, ready for a break, ready for tour to be over, ready for anything really, except another day of festival. The festival was grand. More people than you could ever imagine, crammed into a farm, forced to battle the elements, the sound, the dust, the sun. I had a great time, but it was a lot. We sit in the car with the airconditioning running and agree that it’s quite nice to be out of there, but then we have to navigate British country lanes. Most of the roads within ten miles of the festival have been blocked off for the weekend. It’s a complex network of one lane roads, where no-one is really sure who has right of way. Someone at the festival drunkenly walked us through the etiquette, ‘if you have a bigger car you have right of way, but if you’re going down a hill you should concede, that said always make space for the milkman, and tractors…’ This all goes out the window when we’re actually driving, because it turns out no-one else knows the rules either. The sides of the lane are giant hedges, stretching up above the height of the car, and every mile or so there is a little slip lane cut out to let people pass. You can reach out either window and drag your hand along the hedges as you pass. We manage to get caught in the middle of a section, headbutting up against a car coming the other way until eventually they conceded and reverse, pulling backwards down a country lane for five minutes while we ashamedly give them thumbs up through the front windscreen. We arrive at our next ‘festival’, a much smaller affair on a farm near Totnes, where a handful of people sit around on rugs in a field. It’s a stark contrast to Glastonbury. I assume everyone here knows everyone else by name. We play a loose set. A very loose set. Up until now we’ve been crafting sets, trying to figure out a flow that will catch the Glastonbury crowds walking past, draw them into our tent, keep them engaged. This festival is small enough that everyone is already in the room with us, so we pass it to Maddi our bass player and tell them to call out whatever songs they want to play. I’m finally feeling well again, after a week of battling a cough, and i’m in a silly mood, so I spontaneously shift feels in the middle of songs. Oom-pah becomes reggae. Funk becomes reggae. Rock becomes reggae. Everything becomes reggae, until the last song where I try to make the shift into reggae and Sam and Maddi side-eye me back into the original feel. The crowd is surprisingly excited for whatever we throw at them. We invite an audience member up on stage to rap over one of our songs. Meg takes a bongo solo. Everything is nice and loose, a cathartic release from the last week of shows.
Glastonbury (part 1) I get triaged by a lovely nurse who writes my name down as Natan. The doctor calls me Martin and tells me I’ll be fine onstage cause adrenalin is a wonder drug, but prescribes me some antibiotics for the yellow phlegm I’ve been coughing up all week. The pharmacist hesitantly calls out Martha Power, and when no-one goes up to the window I wander up to see if it’s me she’s waiting on. Oh, is that what it says? She asks, and then hands me a couple of packet of horse pills. They’re absurdly large, so much bigger than the pills I’m used to taking in Australia, but they do the job and in a couple of days I’m fighting fit again. It’s been a week of highs and lows. No mud, but a couple of days of heat in a field with no shade has turned the band into a sweaty mess, not to mention the hours of walking between stages. The festival is mammoth. A much larger scale than anything I’ve ever experienced. I guess there’s a reason everyone keeps saying it’s the biggest festival in the world. Continue reading “Glastonbury (part 1)”
On Glastonbury Festival Gusto Gusto are going to Glastonbury Festival. Yeeeeeep. This little band that came out of 2021’s lockdown bubble and played our first gig in May of 2022 is getting ready to jet overseas next month and play arguably the biggest festival in the world. It’s truly absurd that in 2 short years we’ve gone from our first gig at Thornbury’s Café Gummo to playing Glastonbury. I start to write our Grammy’s acceptance speech… “Gusto, from Gummo to Glasto…” Then I remind myself that we’re still going to be the smallest band at Glastonbury – we’re no Elton John or Arctic Monkeys or Rolling Stones. We’re not playing the main stages. We’ll be down the bottom end of the official poster (if they remember to put us on at all lol). BUT we’ll be there. And we’ll play a bunch of shows. And we’ll play our arses off, because we’ve been working hard. In the last 24 months we’ve played 76 shows. Released two EPs. Toured the country three times. We’ve sold out shows in a handful of places, and in the process had a lot of fun and met a lot of people. Continue reading “On Glastonbury Festival”
On the 400 Bones Single Tour Gusto just finished our second big tour, an odd collection of ten sets in three states across just over a month. We were touring to launch our new single ‘400 Bones’. It always feels a little weird to release singles as an instrumental band, it doesn’t really tie into the whole internet marketing machine – we can’t release lyric versions of our songs on Youtube, and if people hear our song in a random playlist they often struggle to find it again later (googling ‘clarinet, violin, uptempo song’ doesn’t really work). For the most part instrumental song names are fairly arbitrary, check out any of the post-bop albums of the 1960s. Without lyrics, meaning is a little harder to parse, and I often find I’ll write a piece of music with a place-holder title (inst. funk 3) and attach a title to it later based on the feeling it evokes. I’ll occasionally write using a title as inspiration – ie ‘Anathema Anthem’ from Gusto’s first EP, and it’s a nice creative exercise, but at the end of the day does calling a song ‘Amelia’ give it further depth, or imbue it with a stronger back-story? Continue reading “On the 400 Bones Single Tour”
On The Snow We are at the snow. It is way too warm inside, we had to turn the heater off last night and crack open the window to let most of the warm air out, and even then most of the band was half-naked, lying on top of blankets. We arrived yesterday arvo, rolling out of bed at six am and driving eight hours through the mountains. I spent most of the drive reading my book, a biography of Leonard Cohen. We dropped the car off at Bullock’s Flat to catch the Skitube, a train that runs through a tunnel in the mountain. The train is decrepit, reminiscent of the old Connex trains of the early 2000s, plastic bucket seats with big scratch marks from generations of skier’s poles. The brochure tells us this train is a feat of Swiss engineering. At the top of the mountain we see glorious white slopes and streams of skiers drifting in rows. Some of them are standing, many of them are not. We meet the festival team who tell us the snow is actually pretty shit and the ski lifts aren’t running yet, so anyone who is skiing has to walk up the slope for each run. As we stand in the carpark the band stomp into the sloshy snow that steams on the tarmac. I’m over-dressed, wearing two jumpers and a jacket and sweating my arse off. Continue reading “On The Snow”