111 Catalpa St, Clarksdale, Mississippi

With the $AUS getting close to parity against the $US this must be one of the bargains of the year – if not the decade.

Clarksdale is one of those small towns that was always going to be on its uppers when the Mississippi River decided to wander on it relentless course away from the town and it then lost a whole lot more when the railway closed down a few years ago.

When I was there earlier this year the town felt just a little bit like one of those “cultural museums” in that much of what was going on now was related to people and events from the past.

But there was also a very real sense of cultural, economic and community re-creation – the downtown area had some new storefronts, new business and ventures are finding their way into town and there is a very busy roster of blues music and literary events and festivals in and around this part of the Delta.

Plus you can all kinds of fun just cruising around the bayous and backroads and dropping into great jook joints like Po’ Monkey’s down the road at Merigold for a cooling ale and some of the raunchiest R & B you won’t hear on any radio – anywhere.

Roger Stolle and Cathead Music – among others – have led the rejuvenation of Clarksdale.

Today, Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art, Inc. is a 6-day-a-week store that features a full selection of blues CDs, DVDs, books, magazines T-shirts, artwork and collectibles. It’s kind of like shopping in a juke joint, I like to say. It’s the kind of store I always dreamed of finding but never did. It has become a base of operations for other blues projects and a clearing house of information about area musicians, juke joints and festivals

The cool thing is that Clarksdale, Mississippi, has a lot to offer. Great blues music four or five nights a week, every week — plus killer festivals a few times a year. Wonderful musicians, artists and characters live and work here. Since I moved here, I’m sure at least a dozen others have as well — from the Netherlands and all over the United States. Clarksdale is lucky also because in addition to its rich cultural history, it’s an hour or less from Memphis, Cleveland, Helena and Tunica. Because we’re part of the “roots music corridor” that runs from Memphis to Chicago, we get tourists from all over the U.S., Europe and Asia every single week. They come in search of the “land where blues began” and when they finally reach the blues mecca of Clarksdale for the first time, and they drop by Cat Head, I know they’re hooked!

And if you like the idea of cruising on the Sunflower or Mississippi Rivers on a canoe then John Ruskey and the folks at the Quapaw Canoe Company will look after you in the finest way.

One of Quapaw’s specialities is making hand-carved replicas (and modern versions) of the wooden canoes that local first nations peoples used on the rivers for hunting and travel – they are truly magnificent creations.

Launching the Wanbli Eagle

Quapaw’s website says that:

More blues musicians come from Clarksdale & surrounding Delta region than any other single place on earth. The main channel of the Mississippi River used to flow adjacent downtown Clarksdale, and it was once the center of a thriving Native American community of 2 – 3,000 known as Quiz-Quiz. There is evidence that Hernando de Soto and his conquistadors passed through this area during their 1540-42 ravage of the Southeast (and became the first Europeans to view the Mighty Mississippi River, which they called “The Rio Grande”). Jolliette & Marquette (1673), LaSalle (1681) and John James Audubon (1820) traveled this section of river.

…

Quapaw Canoe Company provides custom-guided canoe & kayak expeditions, day floats and other paddling adventures along the Lower Mississippi River from Cairo Illinois to St. Francisville, Louisiana. Spectacular reaches include the Kentucky Bluffs, Bessie’s Bend (20 mile bend of the river to go one mile), the 4 Chickasaw Bluffs, Memphis to Vicksburg (300 miles of remote river, only 2 bridges, only one town), Confluence of the Arkansas River & surrounding wilderness areas (rich habitat for the Louisiana Black Bear), Vicksburg to Natchez-Under-the-Hill, Natchez to St. Francisville. Long stretches of river, almost no industry or point-source polluters, few towns, few bridges, big islands, big forests, most varied inland fishery in North America, 60% of America’s songbirds, 40% of its migrating waterfowl. Longest free-flowing River (1160 miles). No dams. No schedule: we go whenever our clients are ready.

Sitting in one of Quapaw’s big canoes, doing not very much but watching that big river slide by under you with a soundtrack of the world’s finest blues and the American outback’s songbirds surrounded by the vast wildness of the Mississippi River – couldn’t hope for much better that.

And the house?  By Australian standards it is pretty well fitted out – and at this price…you’d be laughing!

And I just love this pitch from Roger for his house for its frankness and humour:

The front porch really is pretty big and cool. When you walk into the house, you find spacious, connected living and dining room areas that are loosely separated by built-in bookcases (that also work for blues CDs). There’s a long hallway with plenty of wall space to hang cool stuff, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a back office/sunroom, main floor washer/dryer, kitchen and butler’s pantry. There are decent closets throughout. The kitchen has a walk-in pantry and includes the built-in stove, dishwasher (sold to me by one of bluesman Big George Brock’s 42 kids) and garbage disposal; the two small fridges and the deep freeze are negotiable. (By the way, a full-size fridge fits/works fine; I just didn’t own one when I originally moved in.) The attic is unfinished but very very large and could be finished out, frankly, as an office or guest room. The basement is mostly crawl space; like most in the Delta, it’s fairly useless… except for housing the hot water heater, pipes, ductwork, etc. The house has modern, forced-air central heating and air conditioning, by the way; I like to stay comfortable. The yard is pretty nice sized and includes holly bushes, magnolia tree, etc. There’s a tool shed in the backyard that’s nothing special but holds plenty of junk. The backyard is mostly fenced in. The house is wired for cable/internet and has two ornamental fireplaces with mantles. A long driveway runs along side the house, conveniently linking Catalpa Street with Maple Street (nice for parties/visitors — though at least one visiting bluesman with the alias ‘T-Model’ has parked in the front yard, anyway, to my dismay!). In short, 111 Catalpa is a cool house located just across the Sunflower River from a neat little Delta downtown, and priced well below $100,000 — now at just $79,900 — it could easily be your next home or home-away-from-home! By the way, I’m only moving into a different house because my sweetie and I want to buy one together that is truly ‘ours’ if you know what I mean.

You can see the flyer for Roger Stolle’s house here.

Got a tip on a bargain-basement house of the week – anywhere?

Got some thoughts about what you’ve read here?

Mandawuy Yunupingu. Photo by John Elliott, National Portrait Gallery

Mandawuy Yunupingu has fought more than a few battles in his time – most of which he has won hands down.

But, if you believed the title and tone of an article written by Natasha Robinson in The Australian in December last year – Songline fades for Treaty man Mandawuy Yunupingu – you could be forgiven for thinking that Mandawuy had given up hope and that he was soon to “finish up”, as we say up here.

Nothing could be further from the truth – anyone who knows Mandawuy is aware that the last thing he could ever be would be a quitter.

Tomorrow night, Monday 19 October, Jimmy Little, who has had his own battles with renal failure, will present an Australian Story on the ABC that sets out the real stories behind the fight that Mandawuy is having with end-stage renal failure – a curse that disproportionately affects many in Aboriginal Australia and that can only be treated by frequent dialysis or a kidney transplant.

Chart from the Fred Hollows Foundation

This chart produced by the Fred Hollows Foundation gives a stark – though dated – outline of the relative incidence of end-stage renal failure rates between the Aboriginal populations in the Australian States and territories and in the non-Aboriginal population.

The Fred Hollows Foundation says that the rate of death from Kidney Disease among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is:

…approximately nine times the total Australian rate. In the Barkly region of the Northern Territory standardised end-stage renal disease (ESRD) incidence among Indigenous Australians is up to 30 times the national incidence for all Australians. The number of dialysis treatments in the NT is doubling every two years.

…

In end-stage renal disease (ESRD), kidney transplant or dialysis is necessary to maintain life. The health service costs of this rapidly rising epidemic are a major demand on resources. Projected cost of medical services required in the next five years for the treatment of end-stage renal disease in the Northern Territory is estimated to be $50 million.

The current epidemic is probably explained by the confluence of many risk factors over a short time period, associated with dramatic lifestyle changes and serious socioeconomic disadvantage.

I’ve known Mandawuy Yunupingu since the mid nineteen-eighties when I was working as a sound engineer and general factotum for a rowdy bunch of Darwin-based ratbags known as the Swamp Jockeys.

From the dim recesses of memory I recall that Mandawuy turned up one night while we were on tour in Sydney with an old battered guitar, a swag of great songs and a keen desire to get them heard by as many people as possible.

He did a few gigs as a guest with the Jockeys and it was soon pretty clear to us all that he was bound for great things – which he went on to achieve for many years as the frontman of that groundbreaking band called Yothu Yindi.

A testament to Mandawuy’s determination is that he already had a distinguished career as an educator – maybe enough for most of us.

But Mandawuy knew that he could do more to spread his people’s message through his words, music, songs and performances fronting one of the most musically dynamic and politically forceful acts we’ve seen in this country.

Through the work of Yothu Yindi and beyond he has raised awareness of any number of important issues that affect the daily lives of the Yolngu peoples of north-east Arnhem Land and of Aboriginal countrymen and women across Australia.

And these messages weren’t just for blackfellas – they reached out to mainstream Australia as well.

Yothu Yindi was always about more than music.

As their ground-breaking – and chart-topping – Treaty indicates, Yothu Yindi was all about building bridges between cultures and peoples:

Nhima Djatpangarri nhima walangwalang -
Nhe Djatpayatpa nhima gaya nhe-
Matjini…. Yakarray – nhe Djat’pa nhe walang – Gumurrtijararrk Gutjuk -

This land was never given up
This land was never bought and sold
The planting of the Union Jack
Never changed our law at all

Now two rivers run their course
Separated for so long
I’m dreaming of a brighter day
When the waters will be one

Treaty Yeh Treaty Now Treaty Yeh Treaty Now
Treaty Yeh Treaty Now Treaty Yeh Treaty Now

Nhima djatpa nhe walang
Gumurrtjararrk yawirriny Nhe gaya nhe matjini
Gaya nhe matjini Gaya gaya nhe gaya nhe
Matjini walangwalang Nhema djatpa nhe walang – Nhe gumurrtjarrk nhe ya-

Promises – Disappear – Priceless land – Destiny -
Lyrics by Yothu Yindi & Paul Kelly

The Yothu Yindi website explains that the band has deep roots into the land, traditional law and decision-making based on consensus and culture:

The Yolngu members of Yothu Yindi live in the tribal homelands of north-east Arnhem Land 600 kilometres east of the Northern Territory capital of Darwin. Some live in Yirrkala, a coastal community on the Gove Peninsula that was originally established by the Methodist Missionary Society in 1935. Others live in Galiwinku, a former mission on Elcho Island originally established in 1942.

A move pioneered in north-east Arnhem Land, the homeland movement has seen Aboriginal people returning to their traditional lands and lifestyles-relying less on the trappings of Western society and more on traditional activities such as hunting, fishing and cultural and ceremonial education.

Yolngu band members are drawn from two of the sixteen clan groups in the region, the Gumatj and Rirratjingu. The people of the region have had contact with Balanda (Europeans) only over the past sixty years or so. Consequently, their traditional cultural, religious, artistic and ceremonial activities are still among the strongest in the country.

The band’s approach to its career is deeply rooted in traditional decision making processes, so all traditional songs that have been performed or released have been done so as a result of substantial consultation with clan leaders and traditional lawmakers.

Yothu Yindi – the band – has cut back its activities over the past several years.

But Yothu Yindi – the concept and the philosophy – has gone from strength to strength through the work of the Yothu Yindi Foundation, which, among many other things, runs the annual Garma Festival at Gulkula, outside Yirrkala.

You can learn more about the musical work of Mandawuy and Yothu Yindi at the band’s website here, and see what the Yothu Yindi Foundation is up to here.

And have a look at this site to find out about the Garma Festival.

Rrrright now you can get a rabble of the master’s songs starting with “R” if you go to Paul’s homeage and follow the links to A to Z.

Over the last few years, Paul Kelly has performed a series of unique shows under the banner ‘A to Z’, whereby he sings 100 songs from his catalogue in alphabetical order over 4 nights. He is mainly alone on stage, joined occasionally by guests. These shows have sold out consistently in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Adelaide.

Every month, for FREE download one letter’s worth of songs will be available here at his website.

At the end of two years, over 100 songs will have been available for free downloads.

Some months will be fat, others skinny but rest assured, throughout, you will hear Paul Kelly’s characters portrayed in his lyrics as they love, marry, give birth, die, and speak.

And soon there will be, as Paul so succinctly says, A to Z – “S”

A shitload, a swarm, a sibilance, a storm, a (t)sunami of “S”s for all you sweethearts this month. Dan Kelly helps me out on a few, Sian Prior plays clarinet on Summer Rain and Trev Warner from Adelaide plays mandolin on Stumbling Block.

Surely God Was A Lover is based on a poem by John Shaw Neilson written around a hundred years ago. Sydney From A 747 dips the hat to the elusive Texan band The Flatlanders, and their song Dallas From A DC9.

Suck ‘em and see. Shake the sauce bottle and all that. There’s a ton of Ts coming so make some room on those hard drives.

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
SMOKE UNDER THE BRIDGE
SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY
SONGS OF THE OLD RAKE
SOUTH OF GERMANY
STANDING ON THE STREET OF EARLY SORROWS
STORIES OF ME
STUMBLING BLOCK
SUMMER RAIN
SURELY GOD WAS A LOVER
SWEET GUY
SYDNEY FROM A 747

Also on the website are some loving tributes to Maurice Frawley, with whom I spent some time working while he was in various versions of Paul’s bands in the early eighties – and of course the music scene in Melbourne was so tight (in more than the cohesive sense!) that you couldn’t avoid such a lovely guy as Maurice.

My pick of the tributes is this from Bill Miller, ex (I think) of the short-lived Melbourne pop group The Ferrets.

In the Australian rock music scene, there aren’t many fully fledged, over 50, gypsy musicians, who live for their music, and live hard, yet are loved by all they meet. Maurice was one. Yarn with him, and the topic would very quickly be ‘music’, and his face would light up with the sheer joy of being a part of that world. He genuinely encouraged every muso he came in contact with. Young or old. A circle was completed last year when Maurice taught guitar at Rochester High School.
He was one of the old style Aussie rockers who loved nothing more than jamming with his many mates. This habit of jamming, which was like eating or breathing to Maurice and his ilk, has all but died out in today’s music world of samples, computers and keyboards.
I ran into him at the end of one of his country tours, and asked him how he was going. His black jeans had obviously been on him for a few weeks (par for the course for gypsy musicians), and he looked a little dishevelled, but that glint was in his eye as he smiled: “I’m good, I’ve just got a little bit of Tourbum.” Like nearly every line he came out with, that line sounded like the opening to yet another Frawley gem of a song.

After his stint in ‘The Japanese Comix’ (1979-80), he co-wrote classic pop songs, including “Look So Fine, Feel So Low,” during his time as a guitarist with Paul Kelly and the Dots (1980-84). ‘The Olympic Sideburns’ (1983-86), producing an EP for ‘The Romeos’ (1989) and ‘Maurice Frawley’s Big City Burnout’ (1990) followed, before Maurice penned a string of top shelf cds which he performed with his band “The Working Class Ringos” (1993-2006). From 2006 he wrote, recorded and performed with ‘Maurice Frawley and The Yard Hands’.

Shellie Morris & Lynette Lewis

Catherine Lewis, Insight Publications & Andrew McMillan

Jennifer Mills & Mary Ann Butler

Kate Grenville reading from The Lieutenant

Sandra Thibodeaux, Festival Director

Wendy Price & Linda Jaivin

Andrew McMillan & Barry Nicholls, ABC Alice Springs

Andy Ewing, NT Writers' Centre & Steve Gumerungi Hodder

Tjulpi Band - mosh pit

Tjulpi Band - audience

Tjulpi Band - take a photo of us mob!

Tjulpi Band drummer and best friend

Tjulpi Band - Guitar and Bass

Tjulpi Band - Keyboards

Andrew McMillan & Sammy Japanangka Butcher - desert surf guitar hero!

Po' Monkey's Lounge rules

Poor Monkey’s Lounge (known to everyone as Po’ Monkey’s) is a jook joint surrounded by cotton fields on a dirt road outside of the small town of Merigold in the central Mississippi Delta – a part of the United States that is all but invisible to the rest of the country.

Merigold is in Bolivar County, which is one of the poorest counties in Mississippi, which has the lowest per capita income of all the United States. The average income in Bolivar County for 2005 was just over $12,000 per annum.

Po' Monkey's Lounge

While Bolivar County may be poor financially, it, and the rest of the Delta, has all manner of other riches. It sits on some of the deepest and most fertile topsoil on the planet and it has deep veins of musical and literary history that still flow and surface at places like Po’ Monkeys and dozens of other small bars scattered across the delta.

You can get a short glimpse of what goes on inside Po’ Monkey’s in this footage of “Cadillac” John Nolden & Bill Abel at Po’ Monkey’s in May 2007.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Po’ Monkeys has been providing quality entertainment and cold beer to locals and all manner of visitors for about 50 years.

Willie Seaberry aka Po' Monkey. Photo Luther Brown

Po’ Monkeys is owned by the wonderful Willie Seaberry (aka Po’ Monkey) who keeps a kindly but firm eye on his clientele, who he regards more as friends than billfold fodder.

By day Po’ Monkey works the nearby fields with tractors and other machinery – two nights a week he runs Po’ Monkeys Lounge.

By day he wears working clothes  – but by night he’ll dress up just fine – sometimes changing his outfits six times during the course of a night depending on his mood or whim.

From the outside, apart from the lurid and idiosycratic signage, Po’ Monkeys looks like many of the ramshackle sharecroppers shacks scattered around the delta – but the signs outside let you know that something else altogether is happening here.

$5 entry, $3 beer – no fire or liquor licenses or other permits or authorities – and Po’ Monkey vigorously enforces his own strict set of rules – no baseball caps, no guns, no baggy-ass pants – this effectively excludes young teenage gangsters from the lounge – no fighting, no beer bought in and no dope smoking.

Inside, Po’ Monkeys is a darkly colourful and glorious mess. 3 small rooms crammed with thrift store reject furniture, a kitty-corner dancefloor, the obligatory pool table, a floor that is challenging when sober but just fine after a few drinks and a low ceiling from which hang dozens, if not hundreds of stuffed soft-toy monkeys.

Inside Po' Monkeys. Photo Luther Brown

The walls are a moving feast of reflective silver plastic sheets, photos and found images, texture and clutter – here a collection of antique tractor photos, there a giant beer sign hung upside down, posters from past occasional live shows and all manner of stuff that might take some considerable time to work out the what, why, where and who of.

Welcome to Po' Monkeys

Po’ Monkeys is open two nights a week – on Mondays he gets a crew of, err, what we might call ‘working girls’ down from some small town over near Memphis, Tennessee who provide entertainment of the strictly non-family kind. Thursdays is called ‘family night’ but you wouldn’t want to bring your rug rats and you might want to leave the more sensitive members of your family behind. The music is well loud and DJ’s Candy and Doctor Tissue (don’t ask) play only genuine old-school soul-blues of the definitely risque variety – which goes down a treat with the clientele.

Po’ Monkey’s has been the subject of quite a bit of press attention over the years. The New York Times came to visit a few years ago. Good Morning America on the ABC broadcast a story on Po’ Monkey’s last year – it has some great pictures but ignore the advertisements at the start of the piece and the predictions of the imminent demise of Po’ Monkeys and other informal drinking and party houses across the south – Po’ Monkeys isn’t going anywhere too fast.

Luther Brown of Delta State University just up the road at Cleveland Mississippi has been visiting and writing about Po’ Monkeys for years and presents perhaps the best overview of Po’ Monkeys at Southern Spaces, an interdisciplinary web-based journal about the regions, places and cultures of the American south in general and the Mississippi Delta in particular. Southern Spaces is an online journal exploring the real and imagined places of the American South and their connections with the wider world and provides some interesting insights into life down here.

I loved my all-too-short time in the Delta – and I’ll be back next year to spend a couple more nights sittin’ and sippin’ at Po’ Monkeys.

Both Geoffrey and the Saltwater Band record for the Darwin label Skinnyfish Music who have put ten and more long years in support of Aboriginal music from across the Top End – check out their catalogue!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu has had a stellar rise that in my view is more than well-deserved.

Personally I think that his label hasn’t quite got the musical mix right yet – the quasi-jazz backing band with the double bass, squawky keyboards and fiddle (!!) he has been using lately doesn’t do much for me and I really think that he could do with a bit of time in front of a world-class producer – not that I can think of any obvious choices right now.

But Geoffrey’s voice, playing and obvious skill with a words – in both English and Gumatj – take him to another place above us mere mortals.

Mark Grose from Skinnyfish will hate me for using his favourite phrase (which I gifted to him years ago late one night) but I think Geoffrey makes a contribution to the national cultural estate that will endure for many years – but don’t stop with Geoffrey – check out the Saltwater Band albums as well – if you are looking for Gurrumul back catalogue they have some great songs!

Here is one of my favourites songs of Geoffrey’s, it is at once sad but somehow hopeful and uplifting in the truest sense…this is guaranteed to make those small hairs on the back of your neck rustle:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Enjoy.

I was torn between which of the songs that Dan & Paul recorded at this gig for Dig Radio in Sydney I’d post but somehow this song, which I didn’t really like when I first heard it, has really grown on me over the years and manages to drag a deep sadness from within in the first couple of verses…but by the time you get to the end of the song you are in another place entirely…here is a loving tribute to all those absent friends and family (whether in jail, lost, too-far-away or just gone) whose ghosts are always hanging around at every party, dinner, chance meeting with a mutual acquaintance, quiet moments alone or sometimes just down at the noisy pub…most times we ignore their silent presence but in this song Paul weaves his magic and brings them back among us.

Often as not I shed a quiet tear when I hear this – a testament to Paul’s power with words and notes and a reflection on the losses we all suffer – I’d love to hear how other people react to it…

Who’s gonna make the gravy, pour the wine, make the salad or keep us laughing or in tears of happy rage quite like that absent friend, lover or brother, mother or sister…

The Festival Au Desert has been running since 2001 and, according to the official website it origins lie in:

…the big traditional Touareg festivities, as Takoubelt in Kidal and Temakannit in Timbuktu, which represented for a long time a place for decision making and exchange of information among the different communities. At the beginning, there were songs and touareg dances, poetries, camel rides and games. Today, the Festival is opened to the external world and welcomes artists from other Malian regions, other African countries, but also from Europe and the rest of the world.

I’d heard about the Festival Au Desert somewhere in the more remote corners of the recent past but it hadn’t lodged in any of the files in my memory bank until I ran across this account of last year’s Festival by the self-described “cult artist, eclectic visionary, whatever the label” Hugo Race  – a past member of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and over the years, and it appears currently, member of a host of bands.

In his feature article in the August 2008 edition of Overland, Race details the travels of his current band, Dirtmusic, from Paris via Mali’s capital, Bamako en-route to Timbuktu and Essakane:

We’re in the backroom of the Djembe Bar, Bamako, Mali, over on the northern edge of town where the streetlights thin out and the shadows gather…Our band is Dirtmusic, and this is where we belong.

…The night is hot and young, and I haven’t yet got a clear idea of what this vast alien city is about, although one thing rapidly becomes clearer as the night goes on: if Bamako ever sleeps, it’s only for a brief catnap between four and five in the morning. Families sit outside dim cement-box homes around a television, a Peugeot crawls by, raising clouds of dust, a stray dog takes a dump in a puddle and the mosquitoes are zeroing in on my body heat…I head back to the pensione and crawl under the mosquito net, but sound floods the room from several directions: the distant thud of street djembes, the saccharine soul of Lionel Richie from the karaoke club across the way and the orgiastic guitar solos of Santana from the bar below.

A delirium later, I’m packing my bags for the trip to Essakane. The call to prayer rises like an air-raid siren from the neighbourhood mosque and the last taxis roll down Rue 254 in the temporary calm before Bamako reanimates at first light.

Reading this takes me back to central Kenya when I was last there in September 2008, waiting for the ’short-rains’ to come – long, steamy nights spent looking skyward for rain and activities to distract your mind and body from the heat.

In the arid, medieval desert city of Timboctou, bizarre columns and facades are silhouetted against the whitening sky, and women and children sell dried banana skins and fish scales on the shoulder of the packed-dirt road. A skinned pig drains from a meat-hook near the facade of an evangelist church mission, reminder of a not so distant past in which missionaries, slavers and mining companies ‘explored’ Africa and sent back home the wealth of millennia.

Race writes well and obviously had a great time at the Festival – Dirtmusic got to play to a new audience and open up more than a few musical horizons:

During the course of that scalding afternoon, we play something like twenty-five songs, several of them ours, in various configurations: usually a couple of acoustic guitars, some unplugged electrics, two djembes, handclapping and, of course, everybody vocalising, including the two Tamikrest women whose ululatory cries make the hair rise on the nape of your neck. There’s a lot of discovery going on here and the excitement is palpable. A shifting crowd surrounds the tent entrance, with videoists and microphones and musicians like Mary-Anne, a violinist from Lawrence, Kansas, who we will later invite to play on the show that night making us five in performance. But by the afternoon our instruments and feet are dusted in sand and desert burrs, our hands and throats raw, our cassette tapes all used up with batteries flat.

The festival MC hands us the spotlight. We take a breath, find a groove and go for it.  Dirtmusic is appointed thirty-five minutes tonight. After we’ve finished the reaction is somehow ecstatic – and it seems to me it’s not just about playing music, but about playing it here, in this place, and what that means to people.

But its not all about the music – Race takes some time to reflect on his encounters with the locals:

Picture: Desjeux

A family – the nine-year-old home from school kicking a plastic bottle around in the dust, the mother and sisters coming back for lunch, the father walking home with a rifle rested on his shoulder. I ask the boy what his dad is hunting and he says, ‘lapins, rabbits …’ Visiting the festival is allowed but he has to be home by the 1 am curfew. So how does he tell the time? He glances briefly at the sky and smiles. This desert is his home; the sun and stars strike the hours.

In the same way, it’s impossible to be alone here. Sooner or later, somebody will appear. I walk out beyond the festival camp, beyond the camels and tents and fields of men observing Mecca, until there is nobody in sight and sit down under a shade tree. After ten minutes or so, two figures appear on the horizon coming from different directions on tangents that both converged on me. The two naturally shout out as they pass, ‘Ça va?‘

The Festival au Desert runs from tomorrow for three days and sounds like a great time – if you leave now you might just get there in time!!

Claypots - great food, wine, laughs and 10 questions for PK!!

My friend Martin Hardie and I caught up with Paul Kelly at the wonderful Claypots in St Kilda when I was in Melbourne recently. I’ve known Paul since the early 1980’s when I used to carry his black boxes around the pubs and clubs of Melbourne and elsewhere for him (i.e. I was his roadie!).

For mine Paul has made the most evocative songs about people and place in the Australian urban landscape – when I hear his early songs like Adelaide, From St Kilda to Kings Cross, To Her Door and Dumb Things it is like a hook gets caught under my skin and drags me back to my joyfully wasted youth and the few years I spent living in Melbourne.

Later songs – From Little Things, How to Make Gravy, They Thought I Was Asleep and The Ballad of Queenie and Rover speak to the (Australian) human condition in a way that no other songwriter has.

And though I’m no great fan of Leonard Cohen, he and Paul are playing together around the country in late January and early February – should be a great set of gigs.

You can find out more about Paul Kelly here.

So, at the end of a tasty and relaxing meal at Claypots I got to ask a (somewhat reluctant) Paul Kelly some questions.

Here they are.

Cats, Dogs, both or neither?

Paul Kelly: Neither, don’t have the pet gene!

Most treasured possession?

PK – Collected works of William Shakespeare in three big volumes. Weighs about 50 pounds.

When did you last break the law?

PK – Can’t remember. Probably driving recently.

What is your Desert Island Disc?

PK – Dusty in Memphis, by Dusty Springfield.

What do you sing in the shower?

PK – I don’t sing in the shower and I don’t sing in the bath. I sing for a living. I do other things in the shower!

What was the first record you ever bought?

PK – Either Chunga’s Revenge by Frank Zappa or a Grand Funk Railroad record. I reckon Chunga’s Revenge and I paid less than $4.99 for it.

Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else before.

PK – No!

Who would you like to be in a band with?

PK – Johnny Marr (ex-The Smiths)

Where do we go when we are dead?

PK – We don’t go anywhere. We don’t exist anymore.

What are you reading at the moment?

PK – Fiction – Just finished Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy. Non-fiction – now I’m reading Darwin’s Armada by Iain McCalman in a proof copy – it is coming out in March. It is all about Charles Darwin and the others who helped him with the theory of evolution – it’s all about Hooker, Wallace, Huxley and Darwin.

For various easily-explained reasons my memories of the ’80s are a bit confused but I found myself back in the UK sometime in 1981 and by that time the Boys Next Door had morphed into The Birthday Party, the name pinched from a wonderfully bleak Harold Pinter play and movie. The band had crashed into the moribund post-punk UK music scene like antipodean bulls-in-the-china-shop, releasing the glorious Prayers On Fire to what was unexpected, but certainly not undeserved, critical acclaim.

I linked-up with the band just as they were breaking-out in the UK and over the next year or so did a lot of UK and European dates as their live-sound mixer cum factotum. For me this was a real highlight of my live mixing career – the band was red-hot live and gigs, as with most bands, ran from the execrable to the ecstatic – sometimes in the same night. Gigs always had a just-under-the-surface-BANG!!-its-erupted undercurrent of pain, sex, violence and a cruel sense of humour that many failed to grasp. Best of all was that the band could carry it off musically – the ballads would make you weep and the sheer crunching bloody momentum of the rock, for want of a better word, was as dynamic, musical, gut-wrenching and clear-headedly affective as any live music I’d mixed before or since. As a sound-mixer they gave me the goods and the freedom to be as creative, loud, clear, distorted and pain-inflicting (some of Rowland Howard’s guitar solos could inflict real pain!!) as I liked. And they were bloody funny, and great fun, to work with.

We came back for an uproarious Australian summer tour in 81-82 and what previously had been a flat-out hatred for what the Boys Next Door did so well had been replaced by a fawning sycophancy for the Birthday Party (BIG IN ENGLAND!!) that drove us berserk – all those that had previously hated the band – the music industry mafia, the snotty little glam-shits-now-turned-wanna-be-punks – they all lined up for the band’s grace and favours – which were ungraciously denied them. The band, seriously offended by this gratuitous faux affection, turned their backs on their new fans and favoured those few loyal to the cause – and played a series of blistering shows across the country. Later they went into the AAV studios in South Melbourne to record the Birthday Party’s next, greatest (for mine) and last, album, the rambunctious Junkyard, with legendary producer Tony Cohen, among others, in the chair. (those sessions deserve a whole book in themselves…) Later versions of the album included what was the “breakout” single for the band – the magnificent, riven-with-sex-screams, roiling punch-drunk Release the Bats, produced by long-term Bad Seeds collaborator the wonderfully crazy-man-of-modern-sound Nick Launay.

Who could ever deny lyrics like these?:

Baby is a cool machine
She moves to the pulse of her generator
Says damn that sex supreme.
She says, she says damn that horror bat
Sex horror sex bat sex sex horror sex vampire
Sex bat horror vampire sex
Cool machine
Horror bat. bite!
Cool machine. bite!
Sex vampire. bite

But I digress…at some length and unapologetically. What I really wanted to tell you is about this post by Carrie Brownstein at her excellent live music blog Monitor Mix at the NPR Music site. There she reviews a recent gig by The Bad Seeds at the Crystal Ballroom (!!) in Portland, Oregon on their just-finished tour of the US. Carrie’s post reminded me that Nick Cave has been given the job of curator of the first series of three All Tomorrow’s Parties gigs to be held at Mount Buller, Brisbane and, my choice of the three – Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, in January 2009.

From the ATP website:

Performers already chosen to appear at All Tomorrow’s Parties ‘09 include seminal Australian punk band, The Saints – featuring original members Ed Kuepper, Chris Bailey and Ivor Hay performing their first Australian shows (outside Brisbane) since 1977; British transcendentalists, Spiritualized; avant-blues artist, James Blood Ulmer (US); krautrock supergroup, Harmonia (Germany); electro-terrorists, Fuck Buttons (UK); pioneering synth-minimalists, Silver Apples (UK); psychotic space rockers, Afrirampo (Japan); Ex-Swan M. Gira (USA), the jazz-noir stylings of the Laughing Clowns (Aust), former Go-Between Robert Forster (Aust), the synth-punk of Primitive Calculators: former Birthday Party guitarist, Rowland S. Howard (Aust), post-grunge/noise devotees, The Stabs (Aust), classical-rock teenagers Bridezilla (Aust) & the sublime ambience of The Necks (Aust) – and that’s just the first release of artists.

…

In NSW, All Tomorrow’s Parties is to be held in conjunction with Sydney Festival on Cockatoo Island over the weekend of January 17th & 18th.
In it’s former life, Cockatoo Island has been a prison, a reformatory for wayward girls, and a shipbuilding yard. The industrial and maritime landscape together with the picturesque backdrop of Sydney Harbour make this urban island the perfect setting for this unique event. For 2009, All Tomorrow’s Parties (and Sydney Festival) will present a one day program on Saturday January 17th, which will then be repeated on January 18th. There will be three stages – all with amazing views of the harbour and surrounds – a food court (that’s real food – not regular festival mush), undercover bars, outside bars, a Bad Seeds video display, green ‘chill out’ areas, a free ride across the harbour to and from the show plus 20+ Bad Seeds hand picked acts.

Bring on summer! – I just hope the fruit bats in the Domain fly out over the harbour as the sun sets…Horror bat…bite!!

Please post your favourite Nick Cave, Boys Next Door, Birthday Party or Bad Seeds anecdote/s – you just might revive some of my lost memories!