On Tour’s End Tour is almost at an end. The feelings ebb, expand, explode. I’m feeling all of the feelings. Exhaustion. The tickle of UK hayfever. A modicum of happiness, a smidgen of pride, a genuine desire to stop lugging my over-sized cymbal case out of the car, on to stage, off-stage, in to the car. We’ve been talking about the tour as the tour unfolds. We’ve been talking about the tour since at least this time last year. We’ll keep talking about the tour for the rest of the tour, the rest of the year, the rest of our lives. It’s been a bloody delight, an insurmountable challenge, a test, the best of times. The general vibe I’ve caught from most band members is that it’s been fun. The general vibe is that we would do it again. That we thought it was a great use of three weeks. That we are ready for a little break before I coax them back into the rehearsal room for the next thing. Continue reading “On Tour’s End”
On Silly Things I’ve Done With My Life Gusto is getting ready to embark on the trip of a lifetime. Well, one of many trips of a lifetime. We’re not going to forget that time we all got into a van and drove out to Geelong to play a festival to absolutely no-one. The comment on arrival was ‘apocalyptic’, and as we stood there on a baked dry sports oval amidst a ring of food trucks and carnival rides with absolutely zero punters, it felt a little on the nose. We won’t forget driving from Melbourne to the Blue Mountains, all seven band members in a Honda Odyssey with instruments tetrised in between legs and over head rests, to arrive at a ‘winter solstice festival’ where most of our set was taken up by the MC running an enthusiastic celtic ritual that involved saluting all four directions and wishing your hopes for the year to come. It was so cold that by the time we got on stage the clarinet wouldn’t work, but we played a raucous 15 minute set, wondering if the ten hour drive each direction was worth the effort. We won’t forget playing the main-stage at Woodford Folk Festival for the volunteers afterparty. I had fallen off my bike and undergone hand surgery just before the tour so I was playing the drums in a sling, doing my best to keep the band together with one arm, but the crowd brought the energy and we fed off it. Continue reading “On Silly Things I’ve Done With My Life”
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 Moving Parts I dream of emails. I dream of emails with signed contracts, with confirmed itineraries, with tentative set-times, with the tag line ‘yep, lock it in’. For the last eight months I’ve been working on one of the biggest juggling acts of my career – lining up a fifteen show, seven person Gusto tour of the UK. I’ll do a bigger post in the near future, once the full tour dates have been announced, once the real big thing I’ve been working on can be put out in to the world, but for now I talk about moving parts. Organising a tour of this scale is a series of ever-increasing hurdles. First there’s the band availability – figuring out exactly when seven people are available to tour, how to juggle everyone’s calendars to minimise time off work, how much imposition I can put on the band’s day to day life. Then, into that ever-shrinking window where everyone says they’re free, I sketch out a rough itinerary – where do we want to go? where can we afford to go? what actually makes sense for a seven piece band from Melbourne to do on their debut Europe tour? Continue reading “On Moving Parts”
On Imposter Syndrome I’m releasing another new EP next Friday! This one is with Gusto Gusto, the raucous instrumental dance band I started exactly two years ago this month. In two years we’ve gone from not existing to two national tours, sold-out shows in three states, slots at festivals around the country (Woodford Folk Festival, Peak Festival, Questival – a full medieval festival in a castle with hundreds of punters in capes and wizard hats), and releasing our debut EP last year. It’s been a pretty wild rush, taking a couple years of COVID induced stasis and launching it full-bore into a seven-piece non-stop party band. It’s been exhausting at times, mainly co-ordinating seven peoples calendars, but also a lot of fun, and now we have a second EP (recorded, mixed and mastered by myself) ready to go. If you want to support us, please come to the launch next week! With the release of new music comes the return of imposter syndrome. Continue reading “On Imposter Syndrome”
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”