On Budapest We got scammed in Budapest. Well, not really scammed. Scammed in the idea that we spent money we weren’t planning on spending and definitely got overcharged, but when you have six Hungarian men playing double basses and cimbalon at you, what are you going to do? … Backtrack. It’s been an odd week. We started off in Edinburgh. 18 degrees. Rain. A whiskey tasting at Devil’s Advocate, a little whiskey bar on a ‘close’, a tiny alley in between buildings. I was introducing Grace to my high school friend Megan who I hadn’t seen in ten years. Like most of my oldest relationships, the conversation start fairly superficial (what do you do for work) and dives very deep quickly (how’s your childhood trauma treating you). Grace got a pretty deep look into my teenage years, I got to re-examine a bunch of child-hood beliefs, we drank some smokey whiskey. Followed it up with a cod sausage and a late night train back to Glasgow where we spent the day exploring the first of many museums. We stayed at a ‘tenement’ in Glasgow, which is basically an apartment, but originally built as low cost housing. With the passage of time, what was a cheap flat in the 1800s that would have housed 12 people is now a trendy light-filled four bedroom apartment walking distance from town. This particular one had incredibly high ceilings, a grand piano in the living room and an odd slant to the doorways. Glasgow was bombed during World War II and half of the building came down. When they rebuilt it they braced up the still standing section as much as they could, but there was still some irregularities. Squeaky floor boards and doors that don’t quite shut. Continue reading “On Budapest”
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 Tour The tour is passing in a blur. We played across the bottom of the country, a slow run from Glastonbury to Bath to Bristol to Exeter, a couple of days off in ‘Bideford’ (pronounced Biddy-fuhd according to the pundits on Tiktok) then rolling through London with a car break-in and a mad-cap run north to Liverpool to stay in an abandoned pub. Last night we played ‘a venue the Arctic Monkeys played when they were just getting started’. We’ve also played at ‘the pub where Coldplay had their first gig’, and ‘on the same stage as Muse’ and I briefly had a tinkle on ‘a piano that Elton John played’. Each time someone drops a famous name I remind myself that a) these are just names and b) every band has a starting point. Correlation vs Causation, playing the same stages as wildly famous but fundamentally different bands to us doesn’t mean much. I don’t see a recording contract with Universal in our future, or Grammy Awards, or private jets. But hey, we’ve made it to this point. We’re touring the UK! We’ve played Glastonbury! We’ve almost sold out of t-shirts! Last night I gave a free badge to a guy who said we were the best thing he’s seen all year, and maybe that’s enough. The little personal connections are the thing that make this music work, that have always made touring work. I’ve got friends in country towns in Australia who I met ten years ago through bands that no longer exist. I’ve got multiple personas from folk singer-songwriter to banjo player to drummer in an esoteric instrumental dance band, but the personal connections are the bit that remains. … I’ve been having a real fun time on tour. It’s great to be out of Melbourne, to be somewhere new, to be meeting new people, to get to play music every night. I think its great for the band too. The band expands on tour. The songs re-arrange themselves. The mid-set banter gets refined. We take more risks. I remind myself every time we tour that we should try and record AFTER we tour because that’s when the songs have finally found themselves, but of course we record albums so that we can tour and it’s a never-ending cycle. It’s also great to see different people come in to their own on tour – personal relationships evolve, little bits get developed between band members mid-set, the whole band grows in ways I couldn’t have predicted when I started booking this tour this time last year. I love being in a band where the show evolves as we go. I love being in a band where everything is a little bit silly. I love being in a band where instrumental music dreamed up on my Mum’s old piano in a garage in West Preston resonates with audiences across the world. I love being in a band where we leave it all on the bandstand, no notes left, a sweaty sodden mess. I love playing music.
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 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 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”