Glastonbury (part 2) The festival passes in a fever dream. A literal fever dream for some of us. Sam gets heat stroke and merrily projectile vomits across the festival. The medical tent gives him some rehydration salts and we set his air mattress up in the shade of a wall of fluoro plastic tubs labelled TOILET WASTE. Someone taps on the tubs and assures everyone they’re empty. For now. In the process of moving Sam I stumbled into a patch of stinging nettles. The entire side of my arm goes numb and tingly. Oh yeah, it does that, our neighbour tells me, and suggests I rub yoghurt on it, but we’re in a field in the middle of nowhere and that sounds like a messy solution. Our sets are fun. People have really left their inhibitions at the gate, and are ready to dance. The thing that really gets me is how each little stage is its own self-contained world. But the worlds are jammed in next to each other. At our second gig we can hear the stage across the road from us over top of our own soundcheck. It’s absurdly loud, and people walking through the site are bombarded with music from three or four different areas at once. No-one seems fazed though. Continue reading “Glastonbury (part 2)”
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 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 Local Scenes I saw my friend Greta play a show a couple of weeks ago. It was an intimate jazz gig, a group of friends playing music together at Open Studio on a Saturday afternoon, and Greta had pulled together an eclectic mix of original songs and arrangements of other people’s tunes to fill in two sets. They covered a couple of classics – including a great version of a Joni Mitchell tune. They kicked the whole set off with a version of local saxophonist Julien Wilson’s tune Rebellious Bird. A big part of the jazz tradition is re-imagining older works, often using them as a vehicle for improvisation, and covering other people’s work is nothing new – its part and parcel of being a musician. We learn to play our instruments by learning to play other people’s songs. Many people never get to writing their own music, and that’s fine – music doesn’t have to be original to be good, and there’s a lot of enjoyment gained from playing a song you love. As a side note – the ’covers scene’ supports a lot of original musicians. Playing weddings and corporate events where we presented versions of songs that people know paid my rent for many years. Playing covers music is a living for many of Australia’s finest original musicians, but it often feels like the setlists are pretty US-centric. Other than a couple of classic Paul Kelly songs, the occasional John Farnham or INXS or Cold Chisel, most setlists draw heavily from music written and recorded elsewhere – there’s a bigger conversation to be had re supporting homegrown talent. Continue reading “On Local Scenes”
On Accidents and Coincidences I had an odd experience today. I woke up on my day off, and went for a 15 km run. I was almost home, on the last stretch of the Merri Creek when I ran past a girl on a bike. A moment later I hear a light crunch sound in the background of my music. I turn around to look back and there’s no-one there, so I assume the girl has just sped around the corner, but on a whim, I stop and run back a couple of steps. When I get back to the bend where I passed her, I see she’s slipped with her bike off the edge of the path and fallen down the edge of the creek. There’s some big hefty rocks along the edge of the path and she’s standing in a crack between two of them, holding the bike up above her head with both hands. There’s a lot of screaming, coming from a baby I hadn’t noticed, strapped to the back of the bike. It’s hanging off the edge of the bike, which is hanging off the edge of the rock, all supported by the girl underneath who is holding it up and out of the water. Continue reading “On Accidents and Coincidences”
On Success An interesting conversation unfolded on social media over the last couple of days. A musician who has been around for a while and (from my perspective) has an established profile – is playing lots of gigs, doing interesting shows with awesome people, popping up on line-ups that I aspire to etc, made a post talking about feeling both busy and rejected by the local music community. It hit hard, because most of the comments were musicians who I look up to – all sharing the same sentiment. Strange that I find myself in the same category as musicians who play with Jessica Mauboy and Guy Sebastian, artists who’ve won ARIA and GRAMMY awards, bands who’ve played headline shows on overseas festivals. I’ve been thinking a lot this week on what ‘success’ looks like, as an artist who might just float along at this level for the rest of my life. This might be it – the pinnacle of my career releasing an album to 150 people in Melbourne then hitting the East Coast for a run of festival dates where we’re either on in the early afternoon before the audience starts moving, or on as a late night closing act after the headline act has played and most of the sensible people have gone home. I keep reminding myself that we’re lucky to be on festival line-ups at all. Continue reading “On Success”
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 A New Banjo EP I’m releasing an EP on Friday! It’s with the Backyard Banjo Club, a collaborative project that I started a couple of years ago with my friend Phoebe. We’ve been friends for over ten years, met at uni, and played in a bunch of bands together before she moved overseas. She came back around the start of COVID, which just happened to be when I bought a second-hand banjo from Cash Converters. I had big dreams of learning clawhammer, but I found the banjo much more intuitive played as a chunk chunk trad jazz thing. Phoebe’s a great violin player, and an awesome singer, so we connected mainly so I could practice my jazz chops. As most often happens with projects I’m involved with, it moved from being a covers thing to an original thing, and here we are three years later. Continue reading “On A New Banjo EP”