Music: Kinky Friedman and Van Dyke Parks

Artbar

30 June, 2011

Kinky Friedman has built a long, singular career out of quirky country and western tunes sung in his surprisingly gentle Texan brogue, a distinctive take on life and his absolutely hilarious skills as a raconteur and quip merchant.

He had the Artbar crowd rocking with laughter and roaring their approval at his good ol’ dirty jokes, scurrilous opinions and twisted world view.

The edgy, mercurial Van Dyke Parks pounded his piano through a set of miraculous songs, pausing occasionally mid-stream to exclaim “God damn it!” or similar before sailing on again.
At its highest points — a mighty, elegiac dance by bluegrass master John Hartford called Delta Queen Waltz and his own magnificent On the Wings of a Dove (listen below) — his performance showed why many believe Parks occupies a place in American music shared only by the other contemporary inheritors of the legacy of Stephen Foster and George Gershwin, his friends and collaborators Brian Wilson and Randy Newman.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

PIAF: Waltzing the Wilarra

Written and composed by David Milroy

Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company

For PIAF 2011

Directed by Wesley Enoch

Musical Director Wayne Freer

Featuring Ernie Dingo, Jessica Clarke, Kelton Pell, Irma Woods, Ursula Yovich, Trevor Jamieson, Tim Solly and Alexandra Jones. David Milroy (guitar), Wayne Freer (bass), Lucky Oceans (pedal steel and accordion), Ric Eastman (drums) and Bob Patient (keyboards)

Subiaco Arts Centre

3 Feb – 6 Mar, 2011

The world premiere season of David Milroy’s Waltzing the Wilarra is an auspicious start to the 2011 Perth International Arts Festival’s theatre program.

Set in post-WWII Perth, the musical drama tells of a mixed-race dance club operating under the watchful eye of its MC and manager, Mr Mac (Kelton Pell).

Mr Mac has reason to be careful; Aborigines live under a regime of curfew, identity paper checks, no-go zones and nights in the lock-up. The races mix rarely, apart from in master/servant relationships.

In the club, though, there are black/white relationships of other kinds, despite the opprobrium of society and the law, such as the marriage between the club’s Aboriginal star, Elsa (Ursula Yovich), and the deeply damaged returned digger Jack (Tim Solly).

Trevor Jamieson and Ursula Yovich are
stunning in Waltzing the Wilarra (pic: Jon Green) 

Elsa’s Aboriginal stage partner, Charlie (Trevor Jamieson), has grown up like a brother to Jack but can’t deny or hide his affection for her. He, in turn, is pursued by Fay (Alexandra Jones) a white girl from the western suburbs who has been nannied since birth by Elsa’s mother, Mrs Cray (Irma Woods).

It’s a combustible mix, and someone’s bound to get burned. The first act leads inexorably to the tragic outcome of these tangled lives.

After interval we return to the club 40 years later and, for some minutes, we watch a young, pregnant woman (Jessica Clarke) re-arranging its furniture. It’s an oddly mesmerising ritual (the subject of much conjecture and debate after the show), but it serves Milroy and director Wesley Enoch’s audacious purpose of breaking the first act’s spell and preparing the audience for what is to come.

As the now much older surviving characters file in to a “reconciliation event” the day before the old hall is demolished, we find ourselves in a very different play. Instead of song and dance we have tightly scripted dialogue and biting social comment – nothing is sacred here, including “welcome to country” ceremonies and other shibboleths of the age of reconciliation. We have deeply-felt anger, grief and emotion as the characters work through the painful tatters of their lives towards truth and real, human, reconciliation.

This is a terrific, stylish production, and Yirra Yaakin has marshalled a powerful, charismatic cast for Enoch to work with. All the performers are outstanding, with Jamieson and Yovich remarkable both as the young, talented Charlie and Elsa of the 1940s and the haunted old couple half a century later. Most of the cast have star musical turns, with Clarke and Jones’s hilarious bathing beauty contest vamping and Solly’s striking Nick Cave-like ballad, “Criminal Love”, especially notable.

It’s always wonderful to see our National Living Treasure Ernie Dingo back home on a local stage, and he is his customary sagacious and hilarious self as the play’s chorus, Old Toss.

The music throughout is instantly memorable, especially in the hands of a white-hot five-piece band including Milroy and musical director Wayne Freer, along with musical luminaries Lucky Oceans (that man again!), Ric Eastman and Bob Patient.

The show looks sweet, the dancing’s elite, and the Subiaco Arts Centre space gives it just the intimacy it needs.

The raucous standing ovation and the contented look on her face after the show suggests that PIAF artistic director Shelagh Magazda’s last Festival has its first hit a week before it officially kicks off.  

   

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian 7.2.11 here 

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.