On Touring New Zealand (part 2) I am naked in a forest glade in the centre of a patch of purple heather. The festival organisers have set-up a shower block here which is a flimsy set of bamboo lattice and a couple of tie-dyed cotton sheets. It’s entirely see-through and I can see the rest of the band having breakfast while I shower. Peny tells me a bird flitted in and sat on the edge of the bath-tub while she was in there. Glimmers of Disney. I arrived here by van, a 1980s Toyota that barely made the trip up the mountain. Towing a campervan we did the entire journey in second gear, grumbling around hairpin curves with a convoy of angry drivers behind us. It took an hour to drive from Nelson to the top of Takaka Hill, then another hour along a dirt road that twisted through Pikikirunga Trail and into the Abel Tasman National Park. When we finally made it to the festival the driver pointed me in the direction of the info tent and cheerily told me to ‘watch out for the carnivorous snails’. We find out that this forest is home to a set of snails that eat each other. Not whole, but in slow snail sized bites. The risk of being caught and eaten by a snail is low, but the risk of humans on the snail’s natural habitat is high, so we’re warned away from them. The snails can live for twenty years, and we find a row of empty shells, large hand sized spirals stretched out on a branch in the woods. Continue reading “On Touring New Zealand (part 2)”
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”
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 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 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”
On Touring With One Arm My band Gusto Gusto just did a 4000 km two week round trip up and down the East Coast of Australia, playing twelve shows on the way with stops at Woodford Folk Festival. I went into the tour with a little trepidation – we had a couple of door deal shows that I had genuinely no idea what the turnouts would be, plus a handful of pub shows that I knew were going to be hard work. With the birth of a new project you discard most of the successes of your previous projects. None of the fans of the myriad blues or folk or country acts that I’ve toured the country with are particularly interested in the new thing I’m doing, because for the most part they’re fans of the sum, not the parts. Continue reading “On Touring With One Arm”
On Newstead There’s an urgency in the air. A poignant warmth of energy amongst the streaming crowds that waft across each street, holding back the traffic, criss-crossing in groups that intersect and divide and combine as mothers push prams and kids beg fathers for ice-cream money and people accost friends they haven’t seen since the last festival. I’ve had a couple months off. Tied up in the day to day of finishing last year I neglected this thing that I love and it’s so good to be back. There was a point last year where I attended a glut of festivals, probably seven or eight in a couple of months, and I started to take it for granted. In the height of festival harvest feast I forgot what famine felt like, and how easy it is to slip in to the complacency of staying home to ‘finish off some work’ and ‘oh there’s always the next one’. This was a return and it felt particularly good. I spent the weekend at Newstead where I was working with Irish lads The Ocelots. It was mainly a catch up weekend: catching up with an array of amazing musicians, some who I’ve known for years and some who I’ve eyed off from afar with awe. Catching up with punters, many of whom are more rabid about music than the musicians themselves and count time in festival experiences: “…yeah I’ve seen Eric Bogle once a decade since the 1970s” . Catching up with memories of what my favourite festival performers do, and all the little moments that fill in the slots between them. There are the easy memories: stealing a moment to make half cooked pasta, seasoned with borrowed srirarcha in a footy oval camp kitchen. Leaving the festival to dive into the nearest body of water (not limited to: bluegrass pool parties at Newstead Live, an impromptu beach run at Illawarra Folk Festival, leaving Queenscliff to ‘surf’ at Bells Beach and then arriving back at stage sopping wet to perform, a particularly freezing river bath from Tanglewood where I stood shivering in ankle deep water hoping to wash off three days of red dust but not willing to attempt death by a thousand cuts, and of course diving into a defunct volcano at Tablelands Folk Fest). Resigning yourself to stolen moments of sleep, from the early morning tent sessions where sleep is stolen from you by the swarm of dawn galas, to the mid arvo nap where you steal sleep back under a tree in the ‘backstage greenroom’. Coating every moment is a swarm of sound. Different stages blast converging streams of noise and in between there are the Morris Dancers and roving groups of Bolivian Pan Pipe bands, all mixed up with traditional fiddle sessions and on street buskers. I remember one particularly enterprising family band at Bello Winter Fest where the family’s five children had been separated and each given their own little turf down a stretch of main street. The quality of music inevitably declined as you walked down the line, starting with a relatively capable teenage blues guitarist, descending through several fiddle players and a ukulele and finally ending on the star child, an adorably cute four year old girl excitedly banging a triangle in front of a large bucket full of money. You can draw your own parallels to the state of the music industry and what elicits the biggest emotional response. … Here are some particular moments I want to remember from Newstead 2020: Attendees to this festival love singing, and I participated in impromptu sing alongs at nearly every show I attended (I was amazed at the first show to hear audience members start singing along before they’d been prompted. By the last show I took it as assumed that you could just start singing once you’d learned a couple of words) from Kerryn Fields, Michael Waugh, Rich Davies, The Ocelots, Tuck Shop Ladies etc. A big shout-out goes to the lady who sat next to me at one show and created a new harmony for every single chorus of a song. She started (quite naturally) on the fifth, then jumped to the third on the second chorus. For the third chorus she was singing in unison an octave up and by the last chorus she was happily warbling a wavering falsetto that slid silkily over top of everything and vaguely sounded like a theremin. We found ourselves at the pub nearing midnight on Friday. The dying moments of Roger Federer’s Australian Open match were on the telly in the corner (fun fact, I served Federer a cheese toastie at the Players Cafe in 2008). I found myself pulled from conversation towards the glowing lights, and finally resigned myself to pulling up a chair and a pint to watch him take the match against Millman to overtime and then push point by point to a final victory as a crowd of thirty people yelled at the TV, high-fived each other and generally carried on. About two metres behind us was a fiddle session, where twelve musicians played pumping Irish fiddle tunes, getting louder and faster to carry over our hubbub. It culminated in Federer winning, the TV getting flipped off and everyone resuming quiet conversation as the fiddle session pulled to a close and the grumpy barman called last drinks. It only occurred to me later to ask one of the performers how long they’d played for that day (five hours straight since seven o’clock) and then to compare that with how long Federer’s match went for (four hours). How strange, that where one group of performers are lauded for their skills, plastered across front pages and celebrated for their endurance ability, another group fight and flurry to boost their volume over a crowd of drunk punters and play traditional music composed over a hundred years ago. I left the festival late on Sunday afternoon to drive home, and as I pulled out of town I mulled over the memories. The term ‘folk festival’ incites a certain mood, a vague feeling of acoustic guitars and warm beers in plastic cups and tents that collapse in the night, but there is so much more to it than that. As much as I love to classify everything I come in contact with, each festival is the sum of a million parts and while the basic building blocks might be the same (singer-songwriters, dusty halls, worried looking folkies rushing down the road to catch the next set) its hard to encapsulate exactly what each festival is and what makes it special. While a festival like Port Fairy is amazing for the sheer number of patrons (and the drawing power that gives them to get amazing international acts in) and Tablelands is amazing for the location (glorious green rainforests in amongst the hills of Queensland), I have to say Newstead is amazing for its sense of community. The people behind it are some of the best in the world, and that makes it a world-class festival.