Performance: Proximity festival 2014

Fremantle Arts Centre 
until November 2
 
It’s the third year of Proximity, the interactive/ one-on-one/ site-specific micro-festival of performance intensive care.
The curators, Sarah Rowbottam and Kelli Mccluskey (taking over from James Berlyn, who is an advisor to, and performer in, the festival) are really getting the hang of the thing, the only one of its kind in the country.
It’s also likely that Proximity’s audience – the 324 performances over nine days are sold out – knows better what to expect and how to handle its mechanics.
What’s indisputable is that Proximity has found its venue; the Fremantle Arts Centre’s maze of rooms, courtyards, corridors and stairs has a patina built over 150 years of use, and the echoes of its sometimes tragic history whisper in your mind’s ear as you move through it.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian.

MUSIC: Don Walker at FAC

Don Walker and the Lucky Strikes

Fremantle Arts Centre
Sunday 23 January, 2011 at 2pm

Don Walker and Dave Warner (a little bias showing here, maybe) were the best and most literate of the Australian pub rock writers that emerged in the late Seventies. Both of them produced material that was about much more than it seemed, and both of them inhabited their songs with authentic characters (almost always young males, admittedly) from the suburban streets and small towns they themselves came from. Neither of them needed to be esoteric or loquacious to be imaginative; both of them harnessed their creativity to the disciplines of excitement and accessibility needed for success. In Don’s case, that success was enormous and enduring – thirty years after Cold Chisel’s heyday, I suspect his APRA check would still match those of the international megastar songwriters.
Get down to see him on Sunday if you can; he’s an intense and captivating performer as well as a gracious and charming man, and his West Australian pick-up band the Lucky Strikes (there’s that Lucky Oceans again!) is a tasty treat. Don's work since Chisel, as a solo artist and with Tex, Don and Charlie, is every bit as interesting as his big-time stuff,  and well worth getting acquainted with, if you haven't already.
The surroundings at FAC are unbeatable, Freo is always cool even if the day is hot, and you can run the gauntlet of Operation Octopus and spend the money you save at the door at the bar.  
  

Steve Prestwich 1954 - 2011

I was knocking these notes together when the unwelcome news of the death of  Steve Prestwich came down the line. Brain tumour diagnosed two weeks ago; operation; gone.
Walker and Prestwich formed a fertile partnership at the heart of Chisel’s sound, with Don’s staccato piano working down around Steve’s blue collar drumming rather than up with guitar and vocals in the melody. It was that bedrock of rock solid percussion that drove his songs and made Chisel in their late ‘70s prime maybe the best live rock’n’roll band in the world, even if most of it didn’t know they existed. 

Steve had that Scouse knack of letting you know he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and that you were probably one of them. But there you go.    

There are some lines from Don’s Home and Broken-Hearted that stick in my mind: 

The beer we bought for Christmas

Ran dry this afternoon

On the radio it’s New Year’s Eve

What a low down time of the year to pack your luggage and leave  

Music and Conversation: Dave Faulkner with Lucky Oceans

Sonic Sessions

Fremantle Arts Centre

November 14, 2010

Dave Faulkner needs guitars

Listening in on Dave Faulkner’s conversation with Lucky Oceans Sunday night at the Fremantle Arts Centre, I was struck by the rare and privileged place he had reached in the 35-odd years he’s plied his trade from dive bars to concert halls around the world.

He’s one of the very few Australian rock artists – Paul Kelly, Nick Cave, Don Walker and Neil Finn (I’m cheating here) are the others that come to mind – who have pulled off the quinella of killer back catalogue and new material that keeps the punters coming back for more. 

Part of the reason is Faulkner’s ability to mine the hard bedrock of pop music that he understands innately. As he confessed to us, he’s a Beatles kid – an early Beatles kid at that – and it’s that sensibility which has carried him on his long, fruitful journey. Punk for him, as I suspect it was for most of its best artists, was more than anything a vehicle that let him recapture and legitimise the short, sharp rapture we got from our 45s and crystal sets in those achingly glorious days of It Won’t Be Long and Hold Me Tight.

Fortunately for us, Faulkner is a candid and well-organised musical storyteller, and his narratives of the genesis of his material, including his self-professed technical limitations (methinks he doth protest too much) and delight in rock and roll’s highways and byways were unfailingly revealing and insightful. One story, of how Miss Freelove 69 evolved from his love of the early rock musicals, Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar was mesmerising. You felt like jumping up and shouting “like wow – wipeout!”
For the record, Faulkner and Oceans performed Death Defying, Come Any Time, the heartfelt The Stars Look Down from the Hoodoo’s new album, Purity of Essence, 1000 Miles Away, What’s My Scene?, My Girl and snippets of maybe a half-dozen others. By and large they’re not big pedal steel-type songs, and Dave’s stories didn’t need much prodding from either interviewer or audience, so Lucky generally kept his side of things spare and self-effacing. As always, though, when he did slip in a couple of hot licks, his playing is the easiest of tastes to acquire.
The Sonic Sessions are a terrific innovation by FAC, and (forgive me for this) they're lucky to have Oceans to lead us through them. And to have their beautiful, convivial courtyard to hold them in. As a cool summer night out, they take a lot of beating.