Riverboats Festival Promises Great Line-UP

The Riverboats Music Festival is the Murray River’s premiere contemporary music event. Staged in the twin-towns of Echuca-Moama, the Festival takes place under towering river red gums in a natural amphitheatre next to the mighty Murray. Historic paddlesteamers meander past all weekend, and occasionally the cockatoos get a bit raucous at sunset.  The Festival features one stage (so there wont be any need to miss any artists) and plenty of room for dancing, brilliant artists and delicious regional food and wine. It’s probably one of the prettiest, inexpensive, laid-back, family-friendly festivals in Australia.

In 2012 the Riverboats Music Festival will take place from Friday, February 17 to Sunday, February 19, with future festivals held on the third weekend in February each year. It will take you around two and a half hours to get to Echuca-Moama from Melbourne, and there are plenty of great places to stay when you get here. Colin Hay, Mark Seymour, Tex Perkins & The Band of Gold, The Bamboos, Vika & Linda Bull, Lanie Lane, The Audreys, Mick Thomas’ Roving Commission, Clairy Browne & The Bangin’ Rackettes, Ryan Meeking, Benny Walker, The Angel Voices Band The Bride Stripped Back.

 

Echuca Moama is 2 and ½ hours from Melbourne, up the Northern Highway.

 

• From the CBD travel up Sydney Road (or take Citylink / Western Ring Road) and get onto the Hume Highway
• Take the Wallan / Kilmore exit and travel up the Northern highway through Wallan, Kilmore, Heathcote and onto Elmore, following the signs all the way to Echuca
• Once in town, follow the blue tourist information signs to the Echuca-Moama Visitor Information Centre – the Festival Hub is right next door on Heygarth Street

 

Mark Seymour and the Undertow (Liberation)

Mark Seymour holds an important place in the Australian music landscape but it’s not easy to define. He’s not quite regarded as a “national treasure” in the way of Paul Kelly might be, but he’s also not seen as a nostalgia act trading off his illustrious path. He’s accorded much more respect than that.  His recent albums have had a relatively low profile though, and they’ve been regarded as the work of a solid tradesman who consistently delivers high quality, well crafted pieces of honest work.

This album may be seen as more of that worthwhile handiwork by some media and music buyers (not that that is a bad thing) but I think it deserves closer attention.

There’s a lot of nuance and many layers to this album that is a self-titled effort from Seymour and a band that consists of Cameron McKenzie (guitar and production), John Favaro(bass) and Peter Maslen (drums).

The first thing that jumps out at me when I listen to the opening track Castlemaine is that it reminds me a lot of Neil Young’s After the Goldrush. That is a good thing, of course, but if I’m not mistaken there’s a subtle message there given the song is a folk song set in the post-goldrush area in regional Victoria.

It’s things like that that give this album a sense of creative depth that pitches it at a higher level. There are plenty of musical references to be found if you want to hear them.

The duet with Angie Hart, Little Bridges, has a Gram and Emmylou feel to it, although the delivery has more to do with Northcote than Nashville, while the Stones riff and swagger of Eldorado is both unmistakable and a lot of fun to listen to.  That song is perhaps the most anthemic on the album, closest in feel to the brash muscularity of a Hunters and Collectors fist pumper. The fact that it gives casino-culture (now there’s a contradiction in terms) a nice slap, adds to its bite. The Red Lady’s Gone channels John Fogerty and River-era Springsteen and is the sort of rave-up a beloved stolen car deserves

Seymour manages to weave intimate songs about people living their lives in his vicinity (Classrooms and Kitchens, Sometimes I Wonder If I Know Too Much About You) with those that take a more panoramic, mythologized (but still personal) view of the human condition (Sylvia’s In Black, The Patsy).

He finds things to write songs about that most other songwriters tend to overlook – and to me that’s his greatest value…well, that and the fact that the resulting songs are pretty much all top shelf creations.

This is music made for adults by someone who understands what it means to be one.

 

The Dave Graney Multi-Media Experience

Dave Graney is one of Australia’s most iconoclastic contemporary music artists.  He works outside the mainstream and inhabits that region somewhere between the spotlight and obscurity, consistently producing a prolific stream of high quality work that sometimes sneaks under the guard of the gatekeepers and becomes briefly visible to the masses.

Graney is interesting and talented – but that’s the least of his problems. Recently Graney has fired a double-barreled salvo at the popular culture market. He’s released a very readable, yet definitely unorthodox memoir entitled 1001 Australian Nights and coupled that with an album of re-visited versions of some of his catalogue called Rock n’ Roll Is Where I Hide. And of course he continues to play live in various configurations.  And he’s a snappy dresser.

HHMM: What has bought on this sudden surge of Dave Graney revisionism?

DG: We’ve been pretty consistent with our output, almost an album a year over our past couple of decades, with a particular highpoint since 2005, with Clare Moore and myself doing Hashish and Liquor, and then We Wuz Curious, which was a real gelling of my band the Lurid Yellow Mist, with Mark Fitzgibbon on keys on that one. Then I did a solo album with some of the players called Knock Yourself Out, so it was one after the other. They were very good, but they weren’t quite getting to people in a way that I would like. They were very thrilling artistically but very hard to get people’s attention to them. Each one being in a way a different focus so I thought I should really try to get people focused on what we do, because we basically play live around Australia as much as we can. Our actual live band is actually quite up-tempo and fierce and ferocious r&b show, so I thought I should focus on trying to draw people attention to what we do. The record before this was a re-mix album of some of our earlier-in-the-decade stuff, called Supermodified and then I had the idea to do this one. It was basically because I liked the way Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters used to re-do their classic songs later on and it sounded really good. Waylon and Willie always used to do it too so there was a precedent for it. It’s always good to hear our band through familiar songs and they are all the songs that we have been playing for fifteen years or so in our live set, the songs that people always want to hear. They have been strong enough to take all that bashing around and different tempos and different feels. So Rock N’ Roll Is Where I Hide is a collection of revisited songs and we had the good fortune to have it mixed by VIctor Van Vugt in New York, who is an old friend of ours from Moodists days. He also did the Soft and Sexy Sound and we did four songs from that so he is re-visiting it as well. In my case I’m singing them a lot better than I did on the original recordings. It’s pretty live in the studio, there’s no overdubs, except some backing vocals and we sent them to Victor and it was the sound of the band in the room. I jokingly said it’s our third debut album because when  you do your debut album everybody’s been playing the songs in for a long time and you know what you are doing exactly and it goes onto the tape really sweetly.

HHMM: What you are describing reminds me of a line early in your book when you say that most rock musicians have to spend their time convincing people that they have content of interest. How do you reconcile that?

DG: I go on to say that I always had a problem that I thought my stuff was full of quite personal weirdness, but I didn’t want to put that out front and freak people out so I never came out as a brooding artist full of sadness to give to people. I always put on a bit of a show and I wanted people to come toward that music by making it an experience for them, but within the music itself it would have a lot of other stuff as well. In a way I tried to obscure my stuff and blow up a lot of smoke around it. I love all the songs I’ve written and they’ve always been pretty fresh to me. When I go and see the performers I like they come on and you are seeing a real dramatic thing and the performer has a story. It might be a new artist that you are seeing and they are so great that you see them so vividly or it might be an artist that you’ve seen a decade ago and you see them at a different time. Often its good if they are playing a few songs you are familiar with its good to see how they are able to do that. When I do a show I have a lot of songs within me and if people want to hear a song I always say they should yell out and I’ll have a go at it. They are all pretty fresh to me. I’ve never written songs for a youth culture type scene. I’ve always identified with country singers or R&B singers singing about adult kinds of things. I don’t feel any distance from any of my songs really.

HHMM: Listening to the album and reading the books leaves me with the impression that you are almost disdainful of the idea of musical genres. It’s more about creating at atmosphere than adhering to the parameters of a genre.

DG: I’ve had problems in the rock music area, because music is so full of precious little genres. It must be some ancient law of PR or something. It’s like invading an area, you take over a small town and radiate out from there. In what’s become known as the rock music scene its quite retro in a way. People have often talked about me as being ‘retro’ but I think my music has been informed by pop music in a way. I like to have choruses and snappy street language language and pretty short songs for the most part. I’m not into what people think of as dirty rock n’ roll. I’m more from the Steely Dan side of things, a bit informed by jazz and R&B. There are generic things I really like and I love people who work within small areas, but they are more personal. I like the songwriter Robyn Hitchcock and he works within this tiny area of recognizable British psychedelia in a way. He comes from the same area as Syd Barrett and I love the way he can find endless variations within a small scene. That Canadian singer Ron Sexsmith uses endless variations of a few chords. It’s very impressive when someone can do that. So I’m not really disdainful of country and things like that, more rock and indie-rock because its so uptight for the most part.

HHMM: Do you feel a responsibility to be shining a light on some of these dark corners of pop culture?

DG: I have enjoyed the way that some people who have read my book have picked up on some things that they like. As rock music gets more collapsed down – in Australian rock music they only talk about INXS and Cold Chisel and AC/DC – but there are so many other things that we’ve got and perhaps they were taking things from. All musicians take things from everywhere. But is collapses down into a very crude kind of story. I do like a lot of people who went off on little by-ways here and there. There are some things that were hugely popular but have now been forgotten in some ways and some things that were hugely popular in strange ways like The Grateful Dead. Acts like Ween. I love those things that sometimes sneak through.

HHMM: In the Appendix to the book you explain your music in terms of ‘tongues’, described as “identifiable licks, tones, words or sounds that artists insert in their work’. They might be references, nods or implied ideas. I don’t know what the collective noun for tongues is but would you say there is a common thread between all those tongues.

DG: I’ve always liked kinda occult things, meaning secretive, cliquish types of language where people recognize them and associate with each other within a larger world, almost like carnie folk. I love people who are kinda shady, but real at the same time. In rock music there is always a demand to be authentic and to be real and there’s a part of the book where I really go into the problems I had, and most Australians have , with being authentic and real within a music which is imported. They go through that in Aussie hip-hop too. I find that really excited. How can you be real and true when you are singing American music. You are wearing a mask, and I quite like that. When people wear a mask they say things that they cant normally. It actually makes a lot of Australian music very powerful.

HHMM: One of the other aspects of the book that I liked is that it is only loosely chronological and there are these random stories that pop up throughout. One of the stories I liked a lot was the one entitled I Cover The Belgrave Line.

DG: Well, the book is divided into two parts. One is me on the threshold of adult life, a teenager driving up the East Coast of Australia, getting into punk rock and feeling a sense of nowheresville and being excited by that. Having nothing to do and nowhere to go, but not in a sad way either.  I wish I could have that feeling again. Then the second part is me having been deep inside a music life and writing about things from that perspective. My language in the book is full of allusions to things. There’s an old song called I Cover The Waterfront and so I have I cover The Belgrave Line. I have little titles all through the book because I love 19^th Century newspapers have those titles that William Randolph Hearst kind of invented. With I Cover The Belgrave Line, I live in the outer suburbs, I’m not an inner city person. A lot of the talk about music is always focused in inner city cafes. I travel on the Belgrave line, an hour trip, and you go through all these suburbs  and its always an interesting trip with different characters.  You go through all those roughhouse areas and then you get into more genteel areas, it’s always a fascinating trip.

HHMM: The title chapter of the book, tells of a series of small incidents on a regional Australian tour and to me the whole book is a multitude of small incidents. Is that the way you look at the progress through your life and career?

DG: Everybody knows the feeling that life is very short and I’ve seen as few plays by Samuel Beckett and they are very simple – two people walking into a room and trying to talk to each other. Often it seems very abstract, but often life is just that. Over and over the same things. I’m trying to talk about being an artist and a player in the book and it’s eternally changing, but it’s the same argument over and over.  Young people coming in and changing it and other people trying to protect things and keep it the same. It’s the thing of chaos and order and I find it very repetitive, like Groundhogs Day.

HHMM: There’s almost a new genre in Australian literature and its populated by yourself, Stephen Cummings, Paul Kelly and Don Walker. How do you view the phenomenon of a set of people of a similar vintage and a similar set of life experiences all deciding to write their memoirs?

DG: We probably all had the urge to say something in a way. I’m not familiar with all the books you mentioned but I would imagine they would all be very different. I really enjoyed Mark Seymour’s book for very different reasons.  He articulated things that musicians would see in there, the very tedious parts of  being a musician, he tried to put it down on paper. It was very effecting – the bonds within his particular band that have dominated his life, the psychological, quite traumatic things. I found it an amazing piece of writing.

It’s such a chaotic world and live music has been and will continue to be such a big thing in Australia. It’s a big shared experience so it’s quite good that the players are talking because they have quite interesting perspectives.

HHMM: In Don Walker’s book he manages not to use the words ‘cold’ or ‘chisel’ together throughout the whole book. You also mange to not mention The Moodists by name until the end when you are giving a list of thank yous.

DG: I was trying to write in a more mythological style, an interior style. A lot of it is about things that might not necessarily be right in the importance I stress on some things  but that’s the way they are within me. Whatever a myth is , is the truth, is my kind of perspective. Also my experience is that I haven’t had the cultural impact that Cold Chisel had. He might have felt that he had a story to tell that was buried beneath this giant shadow over his life. But myself, I’ve lived in the shadows and I’m in a much more underworld place. I cant presume to try to talk to people and they will know the names and the dates I’ll drop in a more linear way, so I wanted to write in a mythological, non-linear way. People who don’t know all of the things but they might see it through this character which is ‘me’.

HHMM: You’ve survived the era of big omnipresent record companies to remain active in music. What sort of survival instinct was and is required to remain a working musician?

DG: I think you have to find a simple joy in the playing and hold that pretty close. And you have to find some comrades. I’ve been very lucky that Clare Moore and myself have been together the whole way. The two of us together, we only need one other person and we can make a show. We are like a band with a songbook ready to go, ready to put it out. We are lucky we have each other for that kind of thing and we have that constant thing in our lives.

Thurs May 5th The Bended Elbow, Geelong

Frid May 6th The Bended Elbow, Ballarat

Sat May 7th The Northcote Social Club, Northcote,

ALBUM LAUNCH “ROCK’N’ROLL IS WHERE I HIDE”

Sat May 14th The Republic Bar, North Hobart

Thurs May 19th Notes, Newtown, NSW

Fri May 20th The Vault, Windsor NSW

Sat May 21st Coogee Diggers, Coogee, NSW

Sun May 22nd The Clarendon Hotel, Katoomba NSW

Thurs May 26th Lizottes, Dee Why NSW

Fri May 27th Lizottes, Central Coast,

Sat May 28th Lizottes, Newcastle , Lambton NSW

Thurs June 2nd The Gollan Hotel, Lismore

Fri June 3rd The Jubilee Hotel, Fortitude Valley

Sat June 4th Sol Bar, Maroochydore, Sunshine Coast

Sun June 5th The Great Northern Hotel – Byron Bay

Friday 17th June Westernport Hotel – San Remo Victoria

Saturday 18th June- Baha Tacos – Rye Victoria

Friday 24th June the Loft Warrnambool Vic

Sat 25th June- the Wheatsheaf Hotel – Adelaide

Sunday 26th June- Semaphore Workers Club- SA

Thursday 30th June- Transit Bar – Canberra

Sunday 3rd July- Williamstown RSL

Queenscliff’s Great Line-Up

The first round of artists for this year’s Queenscliff Music Festival have been revealed as well as a number of exciting, new announcements.The 2010 festival line up when completed will deliver over 80 acts presenting 150 performances in 13 venues across Queenscliff on the weekend of 26-27-28 November.

New Festival Director, Michael Carrucan, has added a new stage called The Crossing Stage, and ensured everything kicks off well with The Lighthouse Stage opening a day earlier to encompass the Friday night.

In an epic summer weekend event that engulfs the whole of the town, Queenscliff Music Festival famously encompasses all types of music – blues, roots, rock, pop, soul/groove, classical, jazz, country, folk, world/reggae and acoustic – accommodating the tastes of young, old and everything in-between, in unexpected venues. This year’s Festival will be no exception with a line up which includes the following artists and shows:

Queenscliffe Music Festival 2010 first line-up announcement

RocKwiz Live
Kate Miller-Heidke
John Williamson
Little Red
Colin Hay
Washington
The Black Sorrows
Ash Grunwald
Mark Seymour
Shawn Mullins
Kaki King
Sally Seltmann
The Vasco Era
Mary Gauthier
Vika & Linda,
Gareth Liddiard
Katie Noonan & The Captains
Dan Kelly’s Dream Band
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Public Opinion Afro Orchestra
Mick Thomas & The Sure Thing
Pikelet.