Almost there now!

It’s been almost 2 years since I updated this blog and the last one got us up to the beginning of 2018 so I’m going to bring it all up to the end of 2022 – a 5 five year tranche. Although it really is a period of just over 3 years since the pandemic took a big bite out of our lives during this period.

As mentioned at the end of the last blog, Dawn and I travelled to the Port Macquarie area of the Mid North Coast of NSW after we decided that Melbourne was not the right place for us to live. Apart from the weather, the idea of a ‘sea change’ was quite attractive. We were planning to annually get back to the UK to play music and so we could enjoy the coastal life when we were in Australia.

We didn’t know anyone up there apart from my cousin Vicki who lived in the Hunter Valley (about 3 hours drive south). It is also about a 3 hour drive from Tamworth – the country music capital of Australia – which we thought might be be useful in promoting the Heywood & Moore alt.country band. I also thought that there should be music work in the area as it was a holiday destination.

We decided to get accommodation in various locations around the Port Macquarie area so that we could sample the ambiances of the different areas. We found it to be pretty amazing with wild life like wallabies and goannas (Lace Monitor) on our doorstep – and picnic areas!

Later in January we popped over to the Tamworth Country Music Festival and linked up with our friends the Weeping Willows, Leonie McClure, Jy-Perry Banks and Brewn. We also wandered around the town checking out the buskers – some of whom were pretty amazing (some weren’t). This was the second Tamworth that we had been at and I was starting to get a handle on the way the festival – and the Australian country music scene – works.

One pretty amazing gig was the lunchtime family bush dance from the Bushwackers Band. Dobie called his standard set of Aussie / British barn dances to an enthusiastic audience mixed with a few songs. The Bushwackers were on the bush dance scene in Sydney at the same time as my first ‘pro’ band – The Bluetongue Bush Band. We chased each other around the venues such as the Balmain Town Hall. Anyhow it was a great gig and we chatted to Dobie at the end. It also gave us some hope as it was similar to what we were doing with the Hoedown Band.

Anyway, we headed back to Port Macquarie to see some more amazing stuff including a huge fruit bat colony (and smell!) and more lizards (water dragons), koalas and a pretty big huntsman spider. We also found a house in Bonny Hills which is a bout 30 minutes south of Port Macquarie and walking distance from the the beach on the edge of the South Pacific. It need some work done and Dawn used her well developed refurbishment skills to bring it up to scratch.

We also started our voyage of discovery of the local music scene when we hooked up with a musician named Russell and put together an acoustic trio which we called the Bonny Hillbillies. We had our first gig down at the Lakes and Ocean Hotel in Forster through an agent from Sydney called All Things Entertainment. The live set went down extremely well with great comments from both the audience and the management. Despite the great response from the audience and the venue management we didn’t get any more gigs there – this was the first indication I had of the ‘random’ nature of the local music scene.

So now the Australian end of the operation was pinned down and we went back to England to sort out that end. One of my least favourite things is to take apart the gear in a working studio. For a start it may not work when it is reassembled – especially if it being shipped to the other side of the planet.

We also had a bunch of gigs to do so we had to rehearse up the Hoedown Band for a manic three months with gigs in England and Wales ranging from barns to tents and a fantastic one at the BBC Television Centre in London (see video below). We also had recording sessions in Tigersonic Studio, packing up all our gear for shipment to Australia and a final gig in Kent where I played bass guitar with a lineup of old friends including Sam McEvoy, Mannie & Pete McClellan along with Liz & John Scholey. That’s not counting the social and business networking encounters!

Anyway we were back in our new Bonny Hills home, waiting for the gear to arrive in time for Christmas (ho ho ho!) with the odd frog for company. After the manic UK trip we had a chance to calm down. We had one scratch gig with some local musicians – we went out under the name of The Kickin’ Country Band which made a cheerful noise and had the Harrington Bowls Club on their feet, dancing the night away.

In December, I was asked to audition for a Taree based rock band called Trigga – a five piece with keys – who had just lost their bass player. Taree was about an hours drive south but I thought that it might be a good way to get my head into the local music scene.

So the year finished without the furniture, my gear, my studio stuff and various other things due to it all being stuck on the dock in Port Klang in Malaysia waiting for a ship heading to Sydney. We had a quiet festive season in Bonny Hills on garden furniture.

2019 started pretty quietly as well with the first major event being the arrival to the stuff we shipped from the UK. I was pleased that my guitars, amps and PA gear arrived in one piece and in working order. However there was quite a bit of damage to the furniture and my studio gear. Certain bits of furniture were completely smashed and some of my studio stuff was damaged, probably from the time spent on the dock in tropical Malaysia.

In all, the whole process of shipping stuff was pretty poor, despite the crates being packed by the shipping firm in the UK. The delivery in Australia was bad as well with the workers not giving us time to check the delivery and actually damaging the floors in our house. We did get some insurance compensation but that took a while and wasn’t really to the value of the broken stuff. So, if you ever decide to move to the other side of the world then don’t ship your stuff – sell it off and then buy new when you get there. Not only would you save money, but you’d save a lot of stress as well

In February we had a state election and we were invited to Coogee (in Sydney) to hear the leader of the NSW ALP (Australian Labour Party) Michael Daley give the music policy that would be applied if they were elected. The music licencing in the state was pretty chaotic and generally discouraged live music performances. I wondered at the time if it was kept that way by the LNP (Liberal National Party – essentially Tories) wanted to suppress live music. For some reason they thought that it encouraged drug use, though perhaps it was in line with the right wing religious elements wanting to stop anyone having fun.

Workwise, we were doing a few things to get our music out there including tying to start the equivalent of our UK “Music In Hospitals” work playing for the retired in care homes. We did a quite a few, including getting a ‘sort of’ residence in one in the Sherwood district of Port Macquarie. While the audiences loved what we did, the management were very half hearted about the affair. This was the first hint of the problems of working in Port Macquarie.

In February our single “Turn the key” was released worldwide by our UK based record label – Thoroughbred Music – and spent 7 weeks in the Australian Country Radio Top 40 which was cool.

A few other gigs started coming in for the Heywood Moore band, some at quite short notice one at Panther’s Leagues Club. Our competition that night was Suzi Quatro and the Angels who were playing across the road but we got some of their fans at the end of the night.

We also appeared at The Basin Music Festival (TBMF) in Melbourne to which we drove down to to see what was possible – two days on the road sleeping in the car on the way. We stayed with or friends in Leongatha (Grazy & Aymes) who also got a gig at the festival. Again we went down very well but were surprised to overhear one of the festival organisers apologising to a guest about the country music in the festival programme.

We also did a number of photo shoots to promote the various bands and took a trip down to Sydney to attend the opening of Wendy McDougall’s Photo Exhibition featuring many Australian rock musicians and gigs (including Paul Kelly). We bumped into the singer/songwriter Johnny Diesel.

We did some more acoustic gigs including one outside the Port Macquarie Glasshouse Theatre. This gig was part of a regular series with this one coinciding with the start of the Iron Man rally and turned out to be the most popular concert that they had put on. Needless to say we neither got any pay or future bookings from this. I did a three Trigga gigs up and down the coast with the final one at Port City Bowling Club. Sadly this was the last gig the band did due to a tragedy with one of the band members.

We also did a Wedding Fair at a local winery and were featured in a local glossy magazine called ‘Focus’ which covers the Mid North Coast region of New South Wales.

Next stop was the UK. Our game plan when moving to Australia was that we would do a summer tour of the UK every year to keep our music moving there.After a short break in the Norfolk Broads to get us back into the correct time zone, the 2019 tour kicked of with a country music festival near the south coast and ended with a festival headline gig in the Malverns for the VW Vanfest. The period between was filled in with gigs around southern England and included a couple more festival as well as function gigs for various folk including the Masons and a theatre group. While we would have been happy to do more, it was the first tour, so we expected to be able to build on this in future years.

As I didn’t have a guitar amp in the UK, so I approached Marshall Amplification who lent me one of their Origin valve guitar combo amps. This amplifier was ideal for this kind of situation with a great valve sound and easy to lug around the gigs. A big thank you for Marshall.

At the beginning of August we had some time free so we visited Galway in Eire with our friends and gigging colleagues Liz & John Scholey. We went to various sessions (played at a few) and visited the island of Inisbofin, one of the most westerly parts of the British Isles. One interesting thing was that our accommodation included a chicken run so we had fresh eggs every day! We also visited Dublin for one day and had some of the most expensive drinks we’ve ever paid for anywhere in the world.

We finished the UK tour with the opening headline slot at the Busfest Festival which was located just on the southern edge of the Malvern hills on the England / Wales border area. This was a great gig with between 500 and a 1,000 folk in the audience. It was fascinating wandering around the festival see all the VW camper van variations and there was even one converted into a bar inside the venue. The band featured Marion on fiddle and Gary on electronic drums to give us a big sound (a big thank you to the sound guys!). You can see the gig here (with poor sound due to the venue acoustics)

After that we headed back to Australia and hit the ground running with a gig in Bonny Hills for a church group. It was a great example of how the social dance we do with the Hoedown Party has a wide age range appeal with people of all ages, from young teenagers to older folk getting on the dance floor and having a great time. It was also the first gig I’d ever done where I had to escort a kookaburra out of the venue.

At the end of October our area was hit by bush fires, which got within a kilometre of where we lived. We had to put together an escape plan and load our two vehicles with the stuff we’d want to save if we had to evacuate. I went up onto the roof of our house with a hose ready to dowse any spot fires. Luckily the Rural Fire Service (RFS) were able to contain the fire. But for a couple of days we had planes and helicopters flying over us to bomb the nearby infernos.

After all that, at the end of the year Dawn found a fantastic place for us to live in Lake Cathie, just opposite the lagoon. We had found that our place in Bonny Hills was a bit big and too far away from the ocean. The new place was conveniently near services, on one level, has solar panels and a double garage. It also had a reasonably sized shed so that I could move my noisy studio activities out of the house. There was a bit of a delay moving so we took a trip to Perth for the new year. Perth is on the other side of the continent (4,000 km) but we bumped into a muso friend from Sydney – Jy-Perry Banks – in Fremantle!

So we saw the quokkas, the fireworks on New Years Eve and heard the first news items about the strange Chinese disease that was taking off in Wuhan…

The happiest animal on earth-Quokka-Setonix Brachyurus on Rottnest Island, Western Australia

So 2020 kicks off with us moving into our new home in Lake Cathie. We had started planning our tour of the UK with gigs in the Isle of Wight and Birmingham amongst other places. Two days later we were put in ‘lock down’ and the Australian government cancelled international flying. Our UK tour was cancelled, all local gigs were cancelled. In the UK everything was cancelled (except for Boris’s drinks parties!).

The next two years were pretty quiet. We were lucky in that we were in a rural area next to the sea – sort of a ‘lockdown in paradise’. I did manage to do some stuff like fit out my new studio, help set a musician online networking association called Club Muso MNC. But the most exciting activities were the vaccinations and covid tests.

Towards the end of 2021 we started to do some stuff such as some Club Muso events to mark the end of the lockdown. Still a few things went wrong, had to cancel my birthday trip to Cairns as Queensland shut down their borders and my Facebook account was cloned. We did do some promotional work for Heywood Moore – I remember doing a radio interview with Merilyn Henderson KLXFM (Kangaroo Is. WA).

We were released from lockdown around November and our UK Record Label – Thoroughbred – released our Tumbleweed single. This song was written by Dawn and was based on her experience from a previous relationship. We’d recorded the drums at Tigersonic Studios in London and We finished it off in the new studio with some tasty pedal steel guitar from our friend Jy-Perry Banks. To me, this song is a classic country song, telling a real story.

We filmed the video at a local historic venue – The Old Butter Factory. It turned out to be quite stressful as the local videographer we had booked pulled out at the last minute. Dawn took over the organisation and made a great job of it. I took over the camera work using my little HD camera and used my LED lighting rig to illuminate everything. The location shoot went well and then we had to do close ups of us performing the song. First we tried an outside shoot near Roto House but got chased off by clouds of mossies (mosquitos)! We finally did it using a blank wall in our living room. When I did the video edit I superimposed these shots on the location footage. If you look closely at my Telecaster shots you’ll see that I appear to have a hole drilled through me! (You can see the video here.)

Our UK label re-released our Christmas single and it was featured as ‘Song of the Week’ on SKY TV’s Saturday Night Live show. We recorded a short video intro down by the Lake Cathie lagoon having to work around passing car noises, rain showers and fishermen wandering past asking what we were doing.

We had a quiet NYE with friends which marked the fifth year that we had no gig.

2022 – getting back into the swing of it…

One of the problems of taking a long break – like for the pandemic lockdown – is that it takes a while to remember how to do stuff. It all seems rather strange.

The first thing that happened was a visit from a Bluetongue lizard which took up residence under our unit for a few weeks. I took this as a good sign as my first professional band in Sydney was called the Bluetongue Bush Band a name I’ve used a few times since then. In fact I decided to call my studio Bluetongue, rather than my first choice which was Gecko. The Gecko lizard is the only one that makes a noise – a sort of clicking. I don’t know if the one resident in the studio minded, though it is still there keeping down the bugs.

The musical side started with Heywood & Moore being chosen by UK Country Radio as their weekly featured artist as well as gigs starting with an Australia concert at the Long Flat Hotel. There were still some restrictions to live performances including a ban on dancing. However our enthusiastic audience hid behind the hedge when they wanted to bop, so I think that they got away with it.

We also started a new concert project of music from the sixties – the Hippie Flares. The repertoire took the music from the end of the British Invasion to the happy hippie music of the Woodstock generation. Dawn had always wanted to have a go and we thought that the dance band probably would not get much work as people would not want to get that close to each other. As I was musical director – I learnt a great deal about the music of the time as well as how to arrange to get a big sound out of a trio of instruments (guitar, bass and drums).

Living on the sub-tropical coast brought in some new experiences such as a Tsunami warning due to the Tonga volcanic eruption. I also had to fight off an ant invasion in the studio when they started a nest in one of my storage cupboards. One somewhat happier event was when Richard Clapton played down in Newcastle. He had a hit in the late seventies (Girls on the avenue) and I really liked his album but I had never seen him play play despite being based in Sydney. Seeing singers who you heard over 40 years ago can be less than perfect – for instance Paul McCarntey’s voice is not what it was – however Richard totally nailed it. A great concert.

For Dawn’s birthday trip this year we drove to Broken Hill. We hired a 4×4 and took a 3 week trip to the NSW outback. Dawn wanted to see the Australian bush and I wanted to show her how big the country was. So anyway we did a big loop across to the city then back down to Murray River valley – just under 4,000 km. It was a great trip with lots of desert and we saw opal mines (White Cliffs), other mines (Broken Hills), the confluence of the Darling and Murray Rivers. We also saw the geology, the aboriginal culture and heritage of Mungo National Park, as well loads of emus, goats, kangaroos, wallabies and other Aussie fauna and flora.

When we arrived back, we started gigging with Club Muso gigs featuring Hippie Flares and the Hoedown Band as well club and function gigs for both bands. It turned out the people still wanted to do the Hoedown dance gigs so we ended up having two working bands. The hoedown gigs were much better paid as the pub and club gigs, as well being longer, were pretty poorly paid. I imagine that this is due to the fact as this part of the local music scene is packed with hobbyist bands who use their ‘day job’ income to finance their music. Interesting Hoedown gigs were the bicentenary for a town at the western end of the Hunter Valley, a dual act gig with Barrel Dawg at the Old Butter Factory and a Home Educator’s dance at Wauchope Showground. The Hippie Flares appeared at the Slice of Haven Festival and various clubs around the area and a few parties.

We headed back to the UK in June, not for gigs but to finish sorting the stuff we had left behind. We also did a bit of sight seeing and visited the Sidmouth Folk Music festival where I met up with a few old friends and danced to my daughter, Lisa Heywood’s calling in the Anchor Gardens – a venue I’ve played a number of times. I also got a name check from caller Barry Goodman at the Hemlock Cock and Bull Band ceilidh in the Blackmoore Gardens. We filmed a video for our latest Heywood & Moore single – Own it! – at the Ashridge Estate in Buckinghamshire. It was filmed by our favourite videographer – Matt (MGH Video) – you can see the video here.

Other places we visited were Chester, Falmouth and to the Camden Club to see a blues artists album launch where we bumped in to a couple of our London friends. We were pretty amazed by how Camden Town had changed – as they say; “the past is another country”. We also met up with Adrian – who owns the record label who releases the Heywood Moore tracks – in the historic city of Winchester.

We flew back to Australia and got back into and pretty much got straight back into the gigs for both bands with a fantastic 150th birthday gig in Dudley (a suburb of Newcastle). We worked with a great local fiddler – Chin-Hwi Ang – and together we rocked the audience. BTW it wasn’t someone’s 150th, it was 3 peoples 50th. We also did a great Hippie Flares gig with a local musician – Geoff – who is a fantastic 60s drummer (plus Hammond Orangist)!

Other non-musical events were the Vincent Van Gogh immersive exhibition which was visiting Newcastle and my birthday trip up to Brisbane and Cairns where we met up with Allan Thompson who was the vocalis and main songwriter for my first serious band MSG which stood for Mono Sodium Glutamate – our guitarist Harry was a biochemist!

As we approached the end of the year we had a few more gigs including a Hoedown one that was rained off about two minutes before it was about to start :(. The final gig was a New Years Eve event for the Laurieton United Services Club (LUSC). This marked a return to normality for both the club – which had been shut down for two years due to the pandemic and for us, the first NYE gig for five years. We treated this event as a show – which had been the aim for the Hippie Fares – and involved a back projection to enhance the ambience of the musical subject. I found a neat little Android based device that let me play videos from a pen drive into the venue’s back projection system. It worked pretty well but could do with a few little tweaks before the next one.

So that’s the end of this mammoth catch up. I’ll document 2023 early next year and before then I may start doing some more general blogs along the lines of my Luton News & Dunstable Gazette Talking Music columns which ran for many years in the UK.

Select the Talking Music option from the menu to see the archive…

Moving right along now – 2017….

We flew into Sydney on the second January 2nd (we left London on January 1st!) still vibrating from a very busy 2016. As Dawn wrote on Facebook –

“Well, that was a bit of a crazy year! 

In the seven months that we worked in the UK, amongst all the usual band management fun stuff, we clocked up 54 gigs; wrote, recorded, mixed and released an album; did an awesome photo shoot; filmed three music videos; did a fab album launch; wrote & recorded four 30 second songs for two nub country albums & got into the Guinness Book of Records because of them; wrote a few jingles for radio; sat in a Sky music show audience and saw one of our videos played on that show; charted in the Australian Country Top 40! AND made some amazing friends!

Soooooo now we’re off to recharge our batteries and load up on some vitamin D in preparation for whatever 2017 may bring.

Thanks for being part of it.

Sydney here we come …..“

South Coogee (plus parrot!)

Our first port of call was South Coogee where we had a nice BnB place overlooking the sea. We were obviously very tired as we slept over 32 hours straight off, losing an entire day! we only just got up in time to get a meal at a great Italian restaurant overlooking Coogee beach. We spent a few days looking around, exploring the coastal walk and getting into the right time zone!

Anyone who’s listened to my recordings will know that one of my musical themes is setting Henry Lawson poems to music (also Rudyard Kipling). Check out the WoodworX album ‘Two short planX‘ if you want to listen to some. Anyhow, before headed north I managed to track down Henry’s grave in Waverly Cemetery which is just north of where we were staying. Another Waverley Cemetery coincidence is that Toni Wood’s solo CD cover was a photo of one of the angel’s statues from the place.

Henry’s last resting place (overlooking the sea)

Actually, Henry Lawson is a fascinating author / poet whose history was both inspiring and sad. Some of his strongest material was written in England when he was living just north of London in a village called Harpenden which was a short train journey to the metropolis. Like Kipling, his work was influenced heavily by growing up in the British Empire though his work had much more a socialist / union bent than his British colleague (who also was awarded the first Nobel prize for Literature for his novel Kim). I spent quite a bit of time living in that area when I was based in the UK and did a bit of research on the topic. At the time he was there in 1901, Kipling was living in Sussex south of London. It seems that Andrew ‘Banjo’ Patterson spent some of the time living in London between the two. As he was a friend of both, I’ve always wondered if Lawson and Kipling ever met in the city. There’s no record of such, but it would have been an interesting meeting to have been a ‘fly on the wall’.

From Coogee we drove north up the coast to investigate it as a possible places to live. The previous year we had looked at Tathra on the southern NSW coast however it was bit too windy and cool down there, so we decided to head towards a more tropical area. The place we liked most was Port Macquarie which seemed to suit us best of the all places we visited on the Mid North Coast. As well as having a great sunset dinner voyage on a Chinese Junk we saw the evening bat migration across the Hastings from a restaurant balcony overlooking the river.

The next day we drove up the coast to Coffs Harbour from where we cut west and headed towards Armidale on the way to the Tamworth Country Music Festival – via a quick visit to the laundromat. I’d been to Tamworth on previous Aussie trips, the first was outside the festival time and, despite being labelled Australia’s Country Music capital, it was pretty quiet and closed at 9pm. This was the second visit during the festival period and this year we managed to stay for the entire period and get accommodation about 20 minutes out of town in Duri, which meant that we could catch more of the music and meet up with new friends in the Aussie country music scene including a great pedal steel player – Jy-Perry Banks (playing with Cruising Deuces), 2RRR country DJ Leonie McClure, Grazy and Ames, Brewn, Craig Woodward and the fabulous Laura and Andrew who are The Weeping Willows.

The first event was a country music cocktail morning which was a preview of the talent who were appearing at the festival. We even got mentioned by journalist Laurie Bullock in The Northern Daily LEADER newspaper! She wrote; “In the audience were Brian Heywood and Dawn Moore who are visiting Australia from the UK, where they play in a country band. After seeing one day of the festival when they were visiting two years ago, this year they planned a trip to take in the entire week of country music. Brian was on hand when 8 Ball Aitken took to the stage and discovered he was short a guitar pick. The visitor grabbed one from his pocket and handed it to the Queensland artist.” Needless to say, 8 Ball didn’t return the pick. I wonder if he needed it for the rest of the festival? Anyway, we had a great time there and it taught us a bit more about the way the Aussie country music scene works as well as showing us some great talent who were performing.

Jy-Perry Banks with the Cruisin’ Deuces

Our next stop was Frankston which is on the Southern edge of Melbourne via Parkes – home of The Dish – and Wagga Wagga where we had an excellent lunch. As well as visiting friends and my eldest brother, we were still considering making the southern metropolis our base in Australia for a few years before heading north to a more tropical climate. So, we were looking at the south eastern suburbs near Port Phillip bay as possible location since it has more of a seaside aspect but still with easy access to the CBD where most of the theatres and other entertainment facilities were (and gigs for us of course!). We also had more in the way of music contacts in the area and Melbourne had a really good music scene at the time due to some great policies by the city’s administration.

We spent about three weeks down south with some shows and get togethers with our friends such as at Liam Davis’s fantastic Irish session at the Quiet Man and with Grazy& Ames and Andrew & Laura (Weeping Willows) plus some great concerts. We headed back to Sydney via Canberra where we checked out NASA’s Deep Space Network on the edge of the Australian capitol city. We stayed in Sydney about a week where I got a chance to show Dawn – and reacquaint myself – with various parts of the city I grew up in including Taronga Park Zoo, various cruises around the harbour and walks along the shore as well as a great Americana concert in Newtown.

Noisy session at The Quiet Man in Melbourne

Next Stop England.

This time in England was the last year that we worked there as full time performers / band and in the next seven months we did 48 gigs which included festivals, Holiday camps, military bases, weddings, parties, and a couple of record release promo gigs. We even did a prison which I guess puts us in the same category as Johnny Cash!

We kicked off with a gig in East London which was also the area that our drummer Mike Vishnick grew up in. Mike is an interesting bloke who I first met when we were both in the London based art rock band called The Quirky. If you look back through the blog, you’ll see a number of entries about the band and the gigs we did around London. The band was led by Tim Devine and had one album released (Fresh Lies) and played some of the classic London venues such as The Dublin Castle, the Round House and a quite a few others. Anyway, as drummer Mike channels Keith Moon (The Who) and is a fantastic performer. Apparently, he grew up in the same area as Mr Moon and once visited Keith’s mum who gave him a pair of Keith’s gym boots which Mike used to drum in.

Heywood Moore Hoedown Band (with banjo)

Getting back to March 2017, we had a single released by Nub Records which was a track that appeared on our album (Goodbye Yesterday) called “Everybody’s country now!” The story behind this was that we had had a fairly relaxed arrangement with Nub Records after we contributed a number of tracks to their release 100×30 CD. The album was made up of 100 tracks of (around) 30 seconds length. It was kind of a protest release to highlight the fact that when Spotify streamed a track, they paid out the tiny fee (0.05 cents) when the playback reached 30 seconds. So, the question was “Why make any track longer than 30 seconds since the payout is the same?”

The CD got a lot of coverage in the press from Billboard, Forbes, Wall St Journal, ITV News as well as worldwide radio play including BBC 6 Music recommended album of the month by renowned indie DJ Steve Lamacq. It even made it into the Guinness Book of Records – next to the Justin Beeber entry! It was an interesting project to produce songs that short, and it’s worth having a listen to see how the different artists / composers approached it. You can hear (or buy!) the CD or individual tracks on Amazon Music.

Anyhow, the original version of “Everybody’s country now” was only 32 seconds long but it actually got us quite a bit of positive feedback. We even got interviewed and showcased by Peter Cook at the Virgin Centre in central London. So, when we did the album I did a ‘progressive rock’ version of the song which was over two minutes long!

April was a quiet month with only four gigs – though one was an interesting old Music Hall in Shepherds Bush with Liz and John Scholey calling. Having a couple of weeks free I took a road trip with my son Alex in my BMW Z3 soft top around our ancestral bits of Lancashire in the north of England. Needless to say it rained pretty well constantly but we managed to see a few places that my parents and grandparents had lived and caught up with relatives who are still based on the Wirral. I also showed Alex the street named after my dad by a grateful council following his service in the RAF during the Second World War.

Heywood Boulevard

May was the beginning of the festival season for us, kicking off with a slot at the North Finchley Festival. This kind of event is what I call an ‘umbrella’ festival where several venues in a particular area get together under a single programme. Our slot was at The Elephant Inn which is on the intersection of Hutton Grove and Ballards Lane sort of on the edge of the town centre. I remember this gig for two reasons; the first is that I handed my Epiphone Casino electric guitar – which I bought when I joined Rick Christian’s ‘Open Road’ band over to the bloke who had bought it from me online. I really liked this instrument but I didn’t think that I would be able to take it to Australia as it was fragile.

The second reason is that Barry Ainsworth saw us there and booked us for the East Barnet Festival which is the biggest community festival in the Greater London area. We’d met Barry at networking events in London a couple of times, but this was the first time he’d seen us play. You might not recognise the name, but he was the engineer / producer for Otis Reading’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” and the one who suggested putting the whistling at the end of the track. Other festivals we played that tour were in Mill Hill, East Barnet and two in Buckinghamshire – HareFest and SwanFest which raised money for returned veteran’s charities, Portsmouth Festival (on the Express FM stage) and Broadstair’s Folk Festival.

As Dawn wrote on Facebook…

“Heywood Moore Hoedown Band

Whoo hoo! Now that was hot and sweaty. Storming Mill Hill Music Festival gig. They might not like Country Music but they LOVED us!

Much dancing, clapping and smiley faces all around.

Brian Heywood, Dawn Moore, Mike Vishnick and Guy Avern.”

We had a couple of TV connections as well, one being that we were asked to perform as the band a hoedown event for ‘The Only Way Is Essex‘ (#TOWIE) which is a long running English reality programme with an audience of millions. It was interesting to be on set during the production and it really brought home to me what I always suspected that Reality TV is more about ‘TV’ than ‘Reality’! Any way you can watch an edited version of our involvement in the show on Youtube.

The Only Way Is Essex #TOWIE

The other TV gig was a wedding in the family of Paul Martin, who is a British antiques dealer and professional drummer, and is best known for being the presenter of various BBC television antiques programmes including Flog It! Apparently, Martin worked with Average White Band, The Quireboys and The Dogs D’Amour in the 1990s and, when he heard that we’d be playing, he asked if he could sit in on a couple of songs which Mike was quite happy to allow. The other thing I remember about this gig is that – quite unusually – I broke a string on my PRS CE24 during the gig. Luckily, I always have a spare guitar (a Hohner G3T, which is their version of the Steinberger headless guitar which is very compact and light) which I used for the rest of the gig.

We had a few other interesting gigs such as playing at the headquarters of Greene King – which is one the major brewers in the UK- in Burton-upon-Trent and a load of holiday camps / parks which tended to be around on the coastal parts of the south of England. These tend to be interesting gigs as they are organised by professional showbiz types who tend to be great characters. This year we played Winchelsea (Rye Harbour, Kent), Rochester (Kent), Great Yarmouth (Norfolk), Leysdown-on-Sea (Isle of Sheppy), St Osyth (Essex) and Cosgrove Park (Milton Keynes) where we had them dancing on the tables! We also did a hoedown gig for the Duke of Bedford at his gaff – Woburn Abbey. We’ve done a number of gigs for the British aristocracy (including Charles Spencer, Lady Di’s brother) and they are usually pretty easy to get on with.

Feltam Prison (“I hear that train a-comin’…”)

Other gigs included one at Feltam Prison and, at the opposite end of the sprectrum, the village of Stanway which has the tallest gravity fed fountain in England, Castle Donnington (the home of heavy metal) and a number of gigs for the Music in Hospitals charity – the name pretty well describes its activities – one of which we got ambushed and ended up playing in one of the hospital’s café playing for a group of patients.

As Dawn wrote on Facebook;

“Feeling a bit blessed.

Just finished our travelling minstrel sessions around Willen Hospice and Milton Keynes Hospital wards.

Lovely patients.  Lots of smiley faces and singing.

We were accosted on the way out by a patient from the psyc ward who dragged us back inside for an impromptu song in Costa cafe.

Had baristas, customers plus all patients involved in a singalong. Followed out by a grinning security guard who thanked us and said that they should have us everyday!!

Thanks to Music in Hospitals for sending us along.”

I also launched my second single release – Too late (3am) – at the Alleycat Club in Denmark Street which is most famous as Britain’s “Tin Pan Alley” housing numerous music publishers’ offices. The Alleycat was a basement venue under the location of the studio that the Rolling Stones recorded their first LP – so a pretty historic site!

Back to Australia.

So after seven months back in the UK we flew out at the end of September and landed at Mascot Aerodrome and stayed at Bondi which was a familiar patch to get us back into the Aussie time zone. This was the start of a seven month stay down under with the aim of finding a permanent place to live. After a week in the Eastern Suburbs, I collected my first Aussie car for 38 years and we headed up to Port Macquarie for my birthday. After this we headed down to Melbourne to see if we could find a decent place to live in what was undoubtedly Australia’s music capitol – at the time anyway. Oh, and we also caught up with our friends and music colleagues down there including Grazy & Ames, Lloyd Clark, Bruce and Kerry Stephens, Tad and JimBob, Andrew and Laura (Weeping Willows), Peter Anderson and Craig Lee-Smith.

Travis Bolin, Grazy & Ames and Heywood & Moore…

We found a place in Saint Kilda since we wanted to be based near the water. We used it as a central point to explore the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne looking for a permanent place to live. We did make a brief return to Sydney in November to attend the the nominations party for the Golden Guitar awards at the ABC studios in Ultimo. We were in the running with our Goodbye Yesterday album but sadly missed out getting onto the final list. As Dawn put on Facebook;

“Dawn Moore is with Brian Heywood in Sydney, Australia.

Had the most wonderful day at ABC Studios nibbling canapés  (loved the pies!),  drinking too much champagne and catching up with Australian Country Music royalty.

Quick ferry trip from Circular Quay to Darling Harbour for dinner and MORE champagne before strolling home eating Italian Baci chocolates.

Could get used to this … ❤ So so lucky.

Great to see Lloyd Clarke, Troy Cassar-Daly, Dobe Newton, Leonie McClure, Luke O’Shea, Allan Caswell, Greta Zilla, Fanny Lumsden, Felicity Urquhart, Davidson Bros, Amber Lawrence, Travis Collins, the boys from Brewn and soooo many others ..”

After this we headed back to Melbourne where I was appearing with Grazy’s Country supporting the amazing Travis Bolin who is a Cigar Box guitarist (CBG) based in Nashville Travis was touring Australia with his mate and fantastic harmonica player. This was the first time I’d spent any time with CBG but it was a forerunner of future involvement. Saw some great concerts down there including Paul McCartney and the Scottish band Texas, who invited us backstage after the gig.

Sharleen Spiteri (Texas & us backstage…

Three months in St Kilda convince us that Melbourne was not the place for us as the weather was very similar to London so why bother moving halfway around the world. Also, the property prices were very high for anywhere that was half decent. St Kilda itself was a strange mix of attractive bits and the absolute pits. For instance, it was the first place I’d ever lived which had regular ‘ladies of the night’ patrolling the streets. Still there were some great bits as well; we adopted the Beach House by the end of the pier as our ‘local’ and the links to the centre of the city were brilliant.

We also did some song writing sessions at a number of locally based rehearsal studios and at Grazy & Ames’ studio at Leongatha for which we were very grateful. As you may imagine, Melbourne has a good professional music infrastructure which was only brought down for us by the traffic congestion and parking difficulties. One of our favourites was Bakehouse Studios in the edge of the CBD, as Dawn wrote on Facebook “Most interesting rehearsal space yesterday. 6 hour minimum time slots. Every room themed differently. To be fair, our’s was a tad distracting …. However, we had a nice spot to sit outdoors, a tuck shop and use of a fabulous vintage kitchen and bathroom just in case the hell fire fresco got a bit much …..”

Songwriting in Leongatha!

So, after a Christmas picnic on the shore of Port Phillip, we cut short our accommodation and headed to Sydney via Echuca where we checked out the paddle steamers. The final destination of the year was a New Year’s Eve cruise around Sydney Harbour with my cousin Vicki, her hubby Rob and a bunch of their friends. This evening must be one the highlights of my life (so far) as we had a front row view of the harbour bridge fireworks, a cocktail’s throw from Fort Denison. This was also a bit weird since it was the first NYE in about 20 years where I wasn’t gigging. So after heading back to our accommodation in Cronulla for a day or so – to recover – we headed north to Port Macquarie to see if we could find a place to live.

Sydney fireworks on New Year’s Eve

Next blog will cover our sub-tropical adventures and the trip to the UK to complete my four-decade residence in the UK…

Will just leave you with my parting message from Luton…

Heading back home in a land downunder…

2016 was another busy year split between the UK & Australia

This year we flew out of the UK on Jan 6th so that we could play a posh wedding at Brocket Hall in rural Hertfordshire. Where we were playing had a ceiling with amazing rafters and the green room was also fantastic. The ‘green room’ is a space for the players to change before the gig, get refreshments and generally ‘chill out’ if there are any breaks in the performance. The problem with many ‘function’ bookings is that there are no facilities available either due to the venue, or the client not doing anything. Despite having a clause in the contract about this we often had to improvise, or even just sit in the van. So the green room at Brocket Hall was really nice and helped us to get ready both physically and psychologically for the gig.

This time we flew into Sydney so that we could meet up with so friends and relos (that means relations in UK terms!) including my fellow UK MU Executive Committee friend and colleague Andi Hopgood who just happened to be in Sydney when we were there. I also found the time to buy a second hand acoustic guitar – a rather thin Ovation – so that I’d have and acoustic to play for practice and any music sessions / gigs we might get. I have had an Ovation Celebrity in the UK for a number of years which became my favorite gig acoustic so the new one fitted in really well. 

We then planned to head down the coast to Melbourne and look at the places on the way. We were looking for a place to move to when we moved back permanently. I thought that the south coast – say around Tathra might work as it was was mutually inconvenient for the three major cities that I had music connections with – namely Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.

We got to Melbourne near the end of January and did a few music sessions with friends including Bruce Stephens, Liam Davis and Craig-Lee Smith. February mainly saw us wondering around Melbourne enjoying ourselves and catching up with more muso friends. At the time Melbourne had the most active live music scene in Australia with more people going to gigs than to the various footy matches Melbournians seem to be addicted to. We also recorded a Heywood&Moore track for the Pocket Gods Shakespeare Verses Streaming (100×30) CD on my ancient laptop. The track is Bushed Lullaby  which I had originally created for a millennial Midsummer’s Night Dream production at the Queens Theatre in Hitchin (UK) for which I was musical director.

March was a bit busier with a single release (“Second time around“) which was launched at the Lomond music venue in north Melbourne. The track was played a lot on New Zealand’s TLC radio network so I guess that they loved the pedal steel guitar work from BJ Cole. A couple of days later we did some recording at Hugh McDonald’s studio with Rob Hornbuckle on bass and David Hicks on drums and Hugh engineering and playing some guitar parts. We recorded three tracks for the Heywood & Moore CD (Goodbye Yesterday) which all ended up on the album. Sadly this must have been one of the last albums that Hugh worked on as he passed away later in the year from cancer.

I had originally met up with Hugh, almost by chance, in 2002 when I decided to record my tracks for the WoodworX ‘Two short PlanX’ album in Australia after which we ended up as friends. It was a somewhat strange connection as his band Redgum started around the same time as my first professional band – Bluetongue. Redgum and Bluetongue actually appeared together on an EP released for a Ned Kelly Anniversary in 1980 (“100 YEARS A HERO” Bail Records). He laid down guitar parts for a number of my tracks over the years (40 days of rain, Goodbye Yesterday and Ticket to paradise) and it was a great shock when I heard that he had passed away.

The next stop was The National Festival in Canberra where my Bluetongue Bush Ceilidh Band was performing a late night extra at the Coorong social dance venue. As I mentioned above, Bluetongue was my first professional band which formed up in the late 1970s. This is where I was introduced to social dance when we had a regular gig at a series of bush dances at the Surrey Hills Community Centre in Sydney. This year the band was made up of Peter Anderson (accordion), Greg Hunt (fiddle), Ian Blake (bass) and John Jones (kit drums) while I was on electric guitar and band leader (there’s a bit of video here). We had a very rock based sound, maybe with a bit of jazz rock thrown in, which went down very well with the dancers. As it turns out this performance at the National Music Festival was probably the last gig we would ever do under that name. After I left the Bluetongue Bush Band it ran for a couple of more years but when I heard that it had folded I started using the name in the UK for any Aussie gigs I did over there. This gig featured my daughter Lisa calling which – apart from her fantastic calling – was a pretty amazing connection.

At the beginning of April we headed back to the UK to a packed gig schedule with our first being the Wild Duck holiday resort three days after we landed. From then on it was pretty solid gigs with a high proportion of hog roasts as the food for then band (and guests!). Highlight gigs over the next six months included a Thames River cruise, more holiday resorts, Broadstairs Festival as the band for Liz & John Scholey, an acoustic gig at The Alleycat Club in Denmark Street (London), at gig for Earl Spencer (Princess Di’s brother) at Althorp House, his gaff in Northamptonshire and a Contra gig for my daughter Lisa in Bristol (a first for me). I also started working with live banjo from Guy Rogers which was first time since my time in Bluetongue Bush Band with Lucy Gibson. I’d known Guy for a number of years through our work with the Musicians’ Union but this was the first time I’d actually worked with him in a band – he’s a great player and also did most of the banjo work on the Heywood & Moore album.

Apart from the gigs there was a lot of work handling the business, sorting out the set lists, doing rehearsals and we also did a couple of video shoots(Goodbye Yesterday, Friday feelin’ and Headin’ Home (for Xmas) with Mathew Hamilton Green. 2016 was also a busy year recording and releasing tracks into the real world both as Heywood & Moore and my solo stuff. I will be very brief here as I am going to do a blog on my history of recording and releasing music – maybe the next one. Anyway, I was really chuffed to do a number of gigs at the Alleycat Club in Denmark Street which was one of the classic music venues in the heart of London’s music scene. It was also below the studio where The Rolling Stones recorded their first LP so it had a really historic rock ‘n’ roll feel about it. We also appeared on radio and cable TV to talk about the new Heywood & Moore CD and even do some live acoustic sessions.

Throughout the year we also got a chance to see (and hear!) some great music from performers including Hugh McDonald, Rebecca Hollweg, True Brit, The Seekers (show), Weeping Willows, Stray Hens, McGoozer, Michael Armstrong, Lizzie Dean, Kacey Musgrave (we got caught on the BBC special at 43:15!), Wishbone Ash, Australian Pink Floyd and Lord Algie. I also met John Otway (again), Ginger Gilmour, Paul Brett, Steve Blacknell, Owen Paul, Mungo Jerry (who came along and supported our single launch), Jona G Lewie, Sasha McVeigh and photographer Christina Jansen who was Muhammad Ali’s favorite English photographer.

The last gig of the year was a Hoedown Band gig on New Year’s Eve at The Poacher’s Cottage near Stoke on Trent (UK) which was part of a restaurant chain. The band was a five piece including Guy Rogers on banjo giving a nice big sound. After the gig, Dawn and I headed back to Dunstable to unload the van, pick up our bags and head off to Heathrow Airport to catch a flight to Sydney as part of our continuing search to find a place to live in Australia – as well as do various musical things.

Catch you next year.

Talking the talk, walking the walk…

Only 5 years to catch up on now so I reckon that I’ll try and power quickly through 2015…

For me (and Dawn), the year starts out in England as we finish off a gig at the Lamb Inn in Burford – which was a regular NYE gig that we’d done for a few years, but this was the first time that we’d done it as a country hoedown (which went down very well indeed). After this we headed home to get ready to fly out to Australia. – the idea was to get sleep on the flight.

As Dawn posted on FB –

  “Well cheerio to 2014. Highs and lows.
    Busy busy busy with 80 plus gigs … No wonder we’re a tad tired!
    Home less than an hour. Van emptied. Showered. Packed our bags and 
   heading off to Heathrow. January 2nd hit Melbourne.
   Awesome start to 2015 … Who Hoo!“

I had agreed to play at Tasmania’s Cygnet Folk Festival with my WoodworX trio. No money of course, but it was part of my plan to get back into the Australian music scene. It was the first time I’d been to Tasmania since a trip there when I was at high school, so it was great to get back in touch. I found out more recently that the drummer from my first serious band MSG – Mike Gissing – had moved there so we probably walked past each other without recognition. The other two members of the trio were Marilla Holmes (female vocals) and Peter Anderson (accordion and acoustic guitar). WoodworX was originally a collaboration between myself and another Australian singer Toni Wood (thus the name) playing a mix of Australiana and blues. As Toni had moved to Germany, I needed to find someone to fill her role and I had done some work with Marilla at the National Festival in Canberra a couple of years before. We went down well, though the blues stuff was more successful that the Aussie songs.

After Cygnet we trekked up to the Tamworth Music Festival to help out Marilla who was performing at Andrew Clermont’s Supper Club. It was the first time I’d been to the music festival and met some great performers (and saw some very bad buskers!). One funny thing was that we met some Tamworth residents in Tasmania who had fled south to get away from the festival crowds! The other first for me was to do my first trans gig when asked to play on stage for ladies night. The last gig was another freebie for my cousin’s local Australia day party down in the Hunter Valley – another first for me.

So then back to England to a packed gig schedule with highlights being gigs for the Duke of Bedford, Green King and various festivals including the East Barnet Festival – the biggest Community festival n London. We were booked for the last one by Barry Ainsworth who was the recording engineer for the classic Otis Reading song ‘Sitting on the dock of the bay”. Apparently he was the one who suggested the whistling at the end of the track. The Hoedown Band also did a northern tour with 10 gigs in the week around July 4th and when Mungo Jerry came along to the launch of our Christmas single in London and hopped up on stage to perform his 70’s hit – ‘In the summertime”.

Another highlight was a gig with world famous Pedal Steel guitarist – BJ Cole – who also recorded some parts for the first Heywood & Moore album that we started recording this year. A great bloke and a fantastic musician. I also did an Aussie gig in London in November when I depped on guitar for Doug Jenner’s bush band – Buckley’s Chance – for a gig at the International Maritime Organization that was being hosted by the Australian Government.

On the recording side we provided a Hoedown Band track and I provided three instrumental tracks for Nub Records’ 100×30 album. This CD was a pointed political comment on the way Spotify treated – and paid for – tracks that they streamed and generated quite a bit of journalist comments, got into the Guinness Book of Records and changed the way Spotify regarded tracks (not for the better sadly). We later also did tracks for the Shakespeare and Christmas CDs as well. Other recording and studio included many radio interviews and we also recorded some station idents for our hosts.

The year ended with a NYE party dance in the home counties. No mad flight this time, we waited till Jan 6th before we flew back to Australia. Will say something about this in the next blog.

Changing places – catchup continued (2014)…

This blog is part of a very rapid tour of what I’ve been up to over the last five years, only four years to go….

So on with the motley…

January was pretty much of a washout as I was moving from the house I had lived in since 1993 into a flat nearby. Moving meant that I also moved away from the recording studio I had built up over the last twenty years. Now having a studio in the house is one of the things that most musicians crave and, while I did make good use of it in both my music and writing work, now that mine is gone there are some thoughts that occur to be about how much of a good idea this is.

The appeal is obvious; any time (night or day) you can pop down to the studio and put down an idea, you can record your next demo or single / album release without the expense of going to a commercial studio, you can even make it into an income stream by recording other musicians or ‘voice overs’. I did all these but not nearly as much as I expected I would. For a start, having it so near, so convenient, is a boon to procrastination. When you hire a commercial studio you have to prepare and work to a deadline which tends to concentrate the mind.

Another advantage of going somewhere else is that you get another pair of ears. If you have to be an engineer, producer and musician all at the same time tends to get confusing. Each of these roles has a seperate set of criteria and trying to do them simultaneously means that you can do none of them well. Having a sound engineer / producer that you trust means that you can concentrate on the main task of doing a good performance without having to control the machinery. After going studioless I developed a great relationship with a local project studio which has not only increased the quality of the music I produce but also the quantity.

Recording other musicians / bands in your studio also sounds like easy money, but it turns out that you are always on the wrong side of the glass, often trying to get the best out of inexperienced (let’s be charitable here) players. If your aim is to create your own music then the time spent is wasted and frustrating to boot. I’ve had some great musos in the studio as well as dire ones – like the bloke who wanted to use his recorded song as a seduction tool and wanted to come back into the studio every time he had a new paramour in mind to change the name of the girl in the song. And at the end of the day, do you really want a bunch of death metal players of dubious intent in your house?

January is always pretty quiet for live music but in February things started moving again though I had a gig cancelled due to stormy weather taking out the power at the venue. After knocking the covers band (Stencil) on the head we decided to give smaller venues a go with a duo doing a mix of country and pop songs with backing tracks to fill out the sound. Our first outing was at Jono’s Bar somewhere in north London which went pretty well for a pub gig.

I also decided to give BASCA (British Academy of Songwriters, Composers & Authors) a go to help push my songwriting and perhaps do a bit of networking. Towards the end of February I went to one of their events at their headquarters in London. The idea was that you would play some of your tracks to a panel from the music industry and they would give you an honest appraisal and advice. For me the whole exercise was something of a washout as it turned out the that the tracks were only shared with the other writers attending who selected one track to put before the panel. I was also called a ‘monkey’ by one of the other writers when I mentioned I was a working musician (she was a photographer BTW). Apparently my practical knowledge of music would sully the high art of writing a pop song!

Spring brought Cheltenham Gold Cup Festival which we were booked for the fourth year running – doing a a mix of celtic, pop and country music. This is the second time we’ve done this as a duo and we decided to use backing tracks again for some of the sets again. Last year I did this using Windows Media Player on a little Samsung Netbook I have. In the intervening year I did some research and settled on Anasoft’s OnStagePlayer which is a dedicated Media Player extension that allows groups of backing tracks to be arranged in sets. As the software is controlled by ‘hot keys’ I purchased a double USB footswitch to control the software; starting and stopping the tracks and selecting the next one etc. I also bought a little Mackie mixing desk with a USB input to keep the audio signal in the digital domain until it reached the link to the PA – a BOSE L1 Compact system.

The gigs went down well but unfortunately I had a RTA (Road Traffic Accident) on the way home when a stupid driver ignored a Giveway sign on a country road and shot out in front of the van and we collided. Luckily no one was injured and I was able to get the damaged van home before it conked out completely. I was registered with the UK Musician’s Motoring and Accident Aftercare benefit which arranged a replacement hire vehicle while they negotiated with the other driver’s insurance company for the cost of repairing the van.

The rest of spring was busy with Hoedown Band gigs including a secret gig in London for which we all had to sign a non-disclosure agreement! Other gigs included Hoedown playing at The White Hart in Alfreton, a large charity event in Stoke-on-Trent and acoustic duo gigs with Dawn Moore for Music in Hospitals. I also had to take a quick trip to Australia for family reasons.

After returning to the UK at the end of May The Hoedown Band performed on Yarmouth ferry dock for the Old Gaffers Festival on the Isle of Wight. Man-mountain Huw Pryce was on bass guitar and this is what he wrote on his Facebook page about it…

“Big up to the Hoedowns for a great day out. Odyssey of an outward journey, cliffhanger arrival. To Brian Heywood for doing most of the driving while jetlagged half to death. To Mike and Debbie for not being on Facebook. To Dawn Moore for inviting me and spraying my armpits in the dressing room (ferry terminal car park – we’re more of a piece of street theatre than a band at points). To the feral shanty band named after a mouthwash and their cute girl singer with the black knickers. To the two elderly ladies who came crashing down so spectacularly on the tarmac, to rise immediately and begin dancing again. And to the 18 year old Asian lad who served my exceptional breakfast kebab with extra chilli while fending off the attentions of three really fabulous drunk girls. All with two short sea voyages thrown in.

Not a bad day out all in all.” – Huw Pryce

The rest of the year carried on being very busy for the Hoedown Band with highlights being a fundraising barn dance in aid of a primary school in Fishbourne, Invicta Barracks in Maidstone and another charity gig in Enfield.

One unexpected surprize was meeting up with Anita – who was a lead singer in Rick Cristian’s Open Road at the same I was – at a gig at her school and a massive charity barndance for the National Farmers Union (NFU) which caused a traffic jam in Enfield (north London). I also did a solo gig for Luton promoter PDM at the Four Hourseshoes which stretched my audience engagement skills somewhat.

In August my youngest daughter called at the Towersey Folk Festival Dance tent with one of Simon Care’s ceilidh bands. Lisa has been going to barn dances – and festivals- since she was very young so it’s not surprising that she has a talent for this. It was great to be in the audience for once and have a bit of a dance!

The following month the Hoedown played a rare public ‘pub gig’ at the Nags Head in Dunstable. This type of gig is really very odd and we don’t do them very often. People often consider this kind of gig the basis of live music scene but I’m not sure I entirely agree. While they can help young bands develop their performance skills, unless the pub puts some effort into the staging and advertising the event then it’s just a waste of time for both the band and the pub. There were some good music pubs in the area but random pubs putting on random gigs really don’t cut the mustard and really just keep the standards – and fees – down. This kind of gig also favours the hobby band with a large number of friends and relations (F&R’s) over professional bands so I guess that’s another reason why I’m not keen on this kind of gig.

The end of the year had some remarkable milestones with the first recording sessions for the Heywood-Moore album at Latent Lemon studios in Luton under the amazingly talented and competant Justin Saban. In December my barn dance band had its last gig under the name of the MoonDance

Ceilidh Band (renamed to The Barn Dance Band) after a run of 14 years. This was due to the popularity of the Hoedown Band and the difficulty of competing with hobby bands who charge very low fees – since it really is a form of entertainment to them – paid for by the day job.

The last gig of the year was a NYE gig at the Lamb Inn in Burford and then home in less than an hour. After that we emptied the van, showered, did some final packing, then loaded our bags into a taxi and headed off to Heathrow for our flight to Melbourne.

So goodbye 2014 full of highs and lows with 80 plus gigs and a new world ahead of us with an awesome start to 2015.

See next the next installment for 2015 (only three years to go!).

Where does the time go – or Catch up (if you can)

It’s been awhile since my last blog, perhaps I shouldn’t have written at the end of the last one;

“Well that’s the end of Part One. My next blog will cover the Summer of 2013 and will be posted in the next week or so…”

Since then I’ve had quite a ride – over 260 gigs in both the UK and Australia, multiple single releases (two of which charted in Australia), an album release as well as an award nomination from Independent Country Music Australia (ICMA) for the “Most Popular Independent Duo” cataegory for our Heywood-Moore alt.country / country rock project.

Now, as I am in the process of moving back to Australia, hopefully to the NSW north coast near Port Macquarie, I thought I pick up the thred that I dropped in 2014 and bring the this blog up-to-date so that I can start posting more contemporaneous news and get back to being a more opinion and fact based blog based on my day-to-day experience as a freerange musician.

2013 (part 2)

I dropped the ball at the end of spring after playing a cracking gig with my Aussie bush dance band (Bluetongue Dance Band- http://www.bluetongue.co) at the National Festival in Canberra.

Back in England we had a very short break before kicking off with the rest of that years’ schedule of over 50 gigs. Notable bookings included Coleen Nolan’s Wild West Party at the Old Trafford Cricket ground in aid of Sara’s Hope Foundation and – apart from us – featured The Nolan Sisters singing their hit single “I’m In the Mood for Dancing” and one of the Atomic Kittens as a guest.

At the other end of the spectrum we played a couple of open air sets in Luton Town Square in aid of the visit by the Austerity Bus (organised by the Musicians’ Union). The final gig was in The Lamb pub in Burford, Oxfordshire which was the final gig for our rock/pop band Stencil. We decided to concentrate on the country rock band (The Hoedown Band) which was proving very popular with our mixture of raucous rock versions of country favourites and called line and barn dance. This fulfilled a long held ambition of mine to combine song and social dance in a single format.

Another new musical adventure that we embarked on in 2013 was playing concerts for the charity Music in Hospitals. I had originally done some work for the organisation in the 1990’s when I played with Rich Christian’s band – The Open Road. However earlier in the year Dawn and I did an audition for them in Birmingham and from may we started doing more concerts around the country – mainly in aged care homes but also in hospitals, hospices and community social clubs. Our repertoire of popular songs from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s being appropriate to the folk who were now in that form of care. The full name of the charity is “Music in Hospitals & Care” (MiHC) and their aim is to bring interactive live music sessions to people who are receiving care or treatment in healthcare settings across the UK. The aim is to make people feel good, one tune at a time. MiHC is a UK charity, founded in 1948 and the live musical sessions are designed to humanise clinical settings, to reach and connect people, to encourage communication and meaningful interactions and to elicit emotions and memories when it matters most. Our experience was that music is a form of communication that remains after all else has failed. You can find out more about the charity from their website.

One final episode from 2013. I’ve always felt close to grassroots in music and one visitor I had in May was a slow worm, the first I’d ever seen. It’s not a snake but a legless lizard. You can’t get much closer to the grass roots than that!

A year of living dangerously… [part one]

It’s been more than a year since I’ve put my thoughts down in this blog and what a year it’s been…

So what I’ll do a quick run through peppered with some random thoughts. Pay attention, there may a short quiz at the end (only kidding!)…

January always tends to be a quiet and so after a quick trip to Egypt (the first real holiday for more than a decade) the gig action kicked off towards the end of the month with a Burns’ Night Event in Kimbolton Cambs followed by another one for our friends in the Army Medical Corps at the end of the month in Aldershot.

The first of these was actually a gig that should have been the previous September. An agent that gives me a fair amount of work had asked – as a favour – to give the client an especially good price as a ‘mates rate’. I agreed to this since it seemed to be a good idea to keep on the good side of the agency. The problem was when the client wanted to postpone the gig due to poor ticket sales so I had to decide whether to agree to this or not. To insist on the agreed date and fee would be likely to cause a kerfuffle with the agent, but the postponement meant that I had a hole in an otherwise full calendar.

Furthermore, he proposed new date was a Burns’ Night which tends to be a higher payer due to the demand for bands. I agreed with some reservations – and a higher fee – but still I feel the agent should have known better in the first place than to ask for a lower fee, and then to push me to change the date. The client may be forgiven for not knowing what the score was when booking a professional band, but not so the agent. A good example of the adage “no good deed goes unpunished” I guess.

The Army is almost always a good gig as they have a culture of putting on events, a tradition of how to behave and they know how to let themselves have a good time. This was the fourth year running that we had played for this bunch, though we almost lost the gig the previous year due to the agent (not the same as the one above). The venue was different due to the relocation of the unit within the town. A good time was had by all as usual. I’ve put in a video from an earlier gig to give you a taster…

February was also quiet with just one paid gig at the beginning of the month which was a Hoedown for a 50th birthday party in a church hall in Kent. This gig featured the amazing Liz Scholey calling who I would say is the best caller in the land for this kind of event. Liz is a dance powerhouse and the only person I know who can kick higher than her head. She manages to communicate her amazing enthusiasm for dance to the audience and a good time is guaranteed for all.

This gig was the second we’d done at the this venue and was in the Hoedown Party format which is a mix of rockin’ country songs interspersed with barn and line dance segments. This was the first gig that we used the small BOSE pole system (i.e. the compact) which was loud enough to require that I mic’d up the drum kit. I was very impressed with the system which we had borrowed off Liz for the night. This was also the gig that I realised that the fiddle player was pretty much an optional extra with respect to the band’s sound.

This gig also marks the transition from working mainly as a ceilidh / barn dance musician to mainly playing in the new Hoedown format. In 2012 60% of my gigs were barn dance / ceilidh, either with MoonDance or one of the acoustic lineups (MoonLighting / MoonDance Acoustic), 30% the Hoedown Band and the other 10% a mix of covers / celtic / original and poetry.  In 2013 the Hoedown gigs hit 60% with and increase in the overall number of gigs by over a third.

Since then I’ve thought a lot about the change in direction but, apart from the obvious commercial reasons, it does make sense since my path up to this point had been via the folk rock genre, and country music comes from the same roots, albeit via a different path. Also, the combination of social dance (i.e. barn/line dance) with songs is something that I’ve been trying to do ever since I arrived in England in the early eighties.

The mix of country music and dance is much more compatible than trying to use english folk (or folk rock) – which most English audiences don’t ‘get’. The other thing I tried over the last couple or years was bolting on a covers set to a ceilidh outfit which, with a few exceptions, was just plain awkward – neither fish nor fowl. Also, I reckon I have managed to put somewhat of an original feel on the whole thing, the resulting music having a distinct rock feel which differentiates the sound from a ‘straight’ country band – sort of folk rock with a north american accent. Anyway the audience vote with their feet, in this case by getting up to dance.

The Heroes at the Four Horseshoes in Luton

February finished with a rare live gig doing original material for one of the worthy PDM gigs at the Four Horseshoes in Luton. The gig also featured two other bands playing in the rock genre and though, it wasn’t well attended, we went down well. PDM is one of the few promoters around that don’t rip off the bands. PDM are dedicated to promoting original live music and musicians in Luton and Paul Curry – who also plays bass for Third Law, a well known local band that he helped form. I’ve done a number of gigs for him over the years and can highly recommend his dedication to the local music scene.

A great barn for a hoedown

March saw things starting to hot up with a Hoedown gig at a amazing barn in Wymondley near Stevenage. It was built by King Henry VIII and apparently has associations with the Knights Templar (not to be confused with the Barron Knights) though we didn’t see any evidence of Dan Brown there. It was a 60th and the birthday girl’s requested song was Country Girl (Shake it for me) which is an interesting mix of rock and (almost) rap. We liked it so much we kept it in the set.

Sloane Rangers at Cheltenham Festival

The following week, Dawn and I did a run of gigs at the Cheltenham Festival which consists of four days of horse racing near the Welsh border. This was the fourth year I’d worked here, but the first as part of a duo. Previously they (i.e. Keith Prowse) had booked me to provide a band playing a mix of celtic and other material. However technical problems with sound isolation at the venue coupled with a tightening of the budget due to the recession meant that they needed to scale down. Luckily we had just started putting together a duo (now called the Sloane Rangers) which meant that I could pitch a cheaper option to them. The new format went down very well and they promised to book us the following year (which they did!).

The end of March saw me playing at the Australian National Folk Festival in Canberra with my Aussie outfit – The Bluetongue Bush Ceilidh Band. This ensemble is designed to bring back to Australia my experience of the current UK ‘e-Ceilidh’ scene. The ‘Nash’ line up featured a great bunch of musicians from both the Australian and English dance scene – namely; Peter Anderson on button accordion (and calling), Greg Hunt on fiddle, Ian Blake on bass, Jon Jones on kit drums and Dawn Moore calling. My aim is to bring the energy of rock and funk that I’ve developed over the years in the UK to the bush dance scene. The band debuted at the Fairbridge Festival in Pinjarra, Western Australiain 2009 and wowed the audiences there with both the ‘full on’ dance music and their approach to calling bush dance. In 2013 the band played at the National Festival In Canberra, receiving comments such as “…best dancing I’ve done in Australia” (Andy Stafford, Chippenham Folk Festival). It’s early days yet, but I hope to develop this idea over the next few years.

Bluetongue at The Nash in 2013

Well that’s the end of Part One. My next blog will cover the Summer of 2013 and will be posted in the next week or so…

 

 

The death of live music in Luton / Dunstable / UK?

(if you want it)

Live music is the most engaging – and least monetised – of all the multifarious forms of entertainment available to us here in the UK – and perhaps the western world. 

When I started writing my regular live column in the Luton News & Dunstable Gazette almost exactly 17 years ago, I saw it that my task was to write about the best in the local music scene. I also thought that this was a good place for highlighting interesting stuff which otherwise might not get into the press. So in October 1995 my first column covered local funk band Longevity, a gig at Luton’s 33 Club from the Chicago style blues rock outfit King Bizkit, A Madness / Bad Manners tribute band at Yate’s Wine Bar, a Halloween gig from Longlights’ Promotions in Dunstable and a review of a fund raising barn dance at Whipsnade Zoo.

 

Since then Dunstable’s Queensway Hall has been knocked down and converted to a supermarket, the 33 Arts Centre in Luton has been closed and now sits empty. We have gained The Grove Theatre and the Hat Factory but neither of these puts on any contemporary professional live music. It’s very easy to view venues like the Queensway and the 33 through rose tinted glasses, but having worked at both venues I know that they had real problems in terms of the sound (Queensway) and the facilities (33 Club). However they were both on the touring circuit and both had some amazing acts passing through.

For instance the list of legendary bands that played in Dunstable included Hawkwind, New Model Army, Blue Öyster Cult, Magnum, Killing Joke, REM, Thin Lizzy,  Metallica, Level 42, Uli Jon Roth, Steve Hackett, Dr Feelgood, Marillion, Gary Moore, Pretenders, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motorhead and the Sex Pistols just to mention a few. The 33 Club had a different feel with many great American Jazz acts dropping in, sometimes doing their only UK dates there on the way through to Europe. While the Grove Theatre and the Hat Factory are technically far superior as venues, they don’t seem to be able to match the programming of the older (and now absent) inferior venues.

When I sit down to write my column every week, I get the information from a number of sources. First I rake through the emails people send me – which is mainly from the ‘professional’ theatres, venues, promoters and PR types. I then check any ‘events’ I may have flagged on Facebook and as a ‘last’ resort, search the web – usually via Lemonrock – for local gigs. It always amazes me how little effort most ‘up-and-coming’ local musicians and / or bands put into promoting their band / gig / album / whatever. If there are any ‘hot’ issues that effect the music scene – such as the recent changes in music licencing legislation – then I try to fit in stuff about this as well.

State of the local music scene Luton / Dunstable

One ‘feature’ of the local music scene is the lack of any venues that regularly put on acts that are active on the national music gig circuit. There are a few ‘one off’ gigs on occasion but generally you have to go elsewhere to see an act that you’ve actually heard of previously. You could argue that Luton and Dunstable fall into the ‘rain shadow’ cast by London, but surrounding towns don’t seem to suffer from this as much.

There seem to be more live bands appearing around the local area with mainly cover bands appearing at pubs and clubs in the area. The good new is that mostly the gigs are free to the punter with the venue owners realising that customers like a place with live music. In fact research from PRS for Music (Performing Rights Society) has revealed that live music is the best way for a venue to increase sales with 95% of publicans reporting an increase in takings when music is on their menu. It also turns out that pubs that don’t have live music are three times more likely to go bust than those who book bands.

PDM Gig at the Hat Factory..

There seems to be a dearth of outlets for any kind of original music. Apart from the Stirling work done by the chaps and chapesses of the PDM and LAMA the only way you get to hear new music / artists is via pub ‘Open Mic’ nights and jam sessions. A lot of pubs have jumped on the ‘Open Mic’ bandwagon and the ones I’ve been to tend to be pretty much of a “Curate’s egg” situation. Perhaps if they were just one part of a more vibrant local music scene then they would feed new talent into the mix. As it is it’s usually just a cheap way for a pub to be able to put ‘live music’ on its blackboard.

Public funding of the arts…

Funding of the arts – or arts facilities – is a ‘hot topic’ at the moment as Local Authorities all around the country are under pressure to cut funding. In fact Newcastle City Council has completely cut its arts budget which has led to a lot of criticism being levelled at them. However this has also meant that other local authorities around the country are now considering following their lead as the arts are considered a ‘soft target’.

However, research shows that for every pound spent on the arts, two pounds of revenue is generated within the local economy. This means that massive cuts would essentially mean that the council would be shooting itself in the foot. I’ve not been able to get any hard information about the arts spend by the Luton council from their website, but I’m rather wondering if they are planning to penalise the local arts scene for the losses that they accrued from the big Olympic Torch Festival.

The recent Hat Factory stake holders meeting was an interesting insight into how the arts work in the People’s Republic of Luton. It seems that the council hived off the entire cultural part of the council’s remit to an independent charity that administers the libraries, the museum and all the arts venues. Luton Culture is currently mainly funded by Luton Borough Council (LBC) to the tune of five million pounds which is about 70% of the overall budget of the charity.

Anyway it seems that LBC will be slashing their contribution by around 40% over the next three years. Fortunately the fact that the charity is independent means that the council can’t just shut down the arts in the same way that Newcastle did. The reduction is pretty huge but the team at Luton Culture seem pretty confident that they can survive and continue to provide the core services including a Peripatetic Core arts team operating out the Hat Factory and Library Theatre. There will be cuts but arts will continue to be supported in Luton for the foreseeable future.

While it is not the business of our local authorities to subsidise the local music (or arts) scene, they can – and should – consider both the cultural and business aspects of the local cultural scene. It is possible for the holders of our council tax revenue to provide ‘seed corn’ funding to encourage newcomers as well as established artists and promoters and help address any gross distortions in the local scene caused by factors under their control. This is part of their remit as our elected representatives .

The Alternative…

There is always the X-Factor and it’s ilk I suppose. While I realise that there is a place in the music world for the likes of Simon Cowell (presumably under a rock), the bands that really made the UK the leading light in popular music were those who got the top by the hard road through gigs in the pubs and clubs, playing to a live audience. The idea of Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Stones, Coldplay or The Police (to name just a few) getting to the top by going through the X-Factor sausage machine is a bit bizarre. No doubt the audiences will get bored with the pantomime of TV ‘talent’ competitions eventually.

The famous BBC Radio One DJ John Peel once said that the biggest enemy of new music was the music fan. As the mainstream music industry is run by bean counters whose only aim is to get their hands on the cash from the those same music fans then it’s not surprising that the music scene is constantly rehashing the old and ignoring the new. If punters are prepared to take risks and weather Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) then there may be some hope of a vibrant music scene in the country and thus our local area. Otherwise we can look forward to a diet of rehashed hits from the 60’s (I can’t get no Satisfaction) and charming viral tosh from YouTube like Gangnam Style.

The Bottom Line…

We treat the British music scene as a given, a god given attribute of this cold and damp collection of islands perched on the north western edge of Europe. However if the ‘great British public’ don’t get off their collective backsides and go out to see some gigs then the whole shebang will wither on the vine and we’ll end up with a fantasy world of manufactured X-Factor style artists. These artists are chosen by a clique of promoters whose dedication to the music starts and stops at the bottom line.

My next blog will be a catch up on the gigs and other events from my arrival back in the UK in Spring 2012…

Leaving on a jet plane…

On my recent trip to Australia I flew Qantas and, with one notable exception, I was very happy with the service of the flight and on-ground staff – both in the air and on the ground.

So, I’m at the departures desk at Darwin Airport to check in my baggage and pick up my boarding pass for flight QF0271 from Darwin to Singapore (Changi). Although this is a Qantas flight number, and I purchased all my flights through the Qantas website, this flight is operated by Jetstar (JQ061).

The guitar in question…

On checking in to this flight I was told by the check-in operator that I would be unable to take the travel guitar onto to the flight as the plane was ‘completely full’ (which turned out not to be the case by the way). I tried to explain that I only had one item of cabin baggage and that I had never had any other problems with other carriers. I also pointed out that the instrument was not in a flightcase and that it was likely to be damaged if it was put in the hold.

What other passengers were taking on board as cabin baggage…

I also asked for advice on what I needed to do to sort out the problem the operator basically told me to ‘go away and sort it out’. While this was not done in a particularly rude manner, the desk person was pretty abrupt and unhelpful. I would have thought that a referral to a supervisor or even the flight cabin crew as to whether they would consider that the item would be too bulky would have helped – just one phone call.

If this wasn’t bad enough, after checking the instrument in via the ‘bulky items’ facility and rather hoping that this would be handled separately  Imagine my horror when at Heathrow the instrument came out on the standard baggage carousel amongst all the huge (and heavy) cases that travellers use when travelling to the other side of the world. Luckily the instrument wasn’t damaged so I didn’t have to sort out a claim for compensation. I did have a very brief conversation with a Qantas customer support person in the departure area at Darwin, but while she was friendly, she was unable to help with this problem at that point.

This is the first time that I’ve been unable to take my travel guitar in as cabin baggage and I’ve flown all over the world with this guitar. Even United Airlines in the US – which has something of a reputation – didn’t hassle me. On this JetStar flight, most of the other passengers were taking two large bags – while I had just one small guitar case (see photos above).

I’m a professional musician who works mainly in the UK but, as I am an Australian citizen, I am planning to start working a proportion of the year in Australia, and as it’s such a big country, this will entail flying between various states to appear at festivals and so on. I am aware of the space contraints on flight’s and so for many years I have been flying with a Shapelywood Leisa travel guitar which is a very high quality acoustic instrument with a total length of just 81 cm.

The issue of taking instruments on planes is something of a ‘hot topic’ in recent years with some carriers making a point of being ‘musician friendly’ (UK’s EasyJet for instance). In fact US Congress has just passed legislation reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration to create a uniform policy regarding musical instruments on air planes  Specifically – “Any instrument that can be safely stored in the overhead compartment or under the seat may be brought on board as carry-on luggage.” This certainly would apply to the instrument in question – which is not only designed by the luthier to be so, but long experience with other carriers as proved this to be the case.

Up until this point I’d been extremely happy with Qantas. However, my advice to others in a similar situation would now have to be that musicians travelling with an instrument should think twice before flying with any carrier if Jetstar handle any of the hops. As Dave Carrol – who famously discomfited United Airlines with his “United Breaks Guitars” video – points out. Customer service in the age of the internet is judged on how an organisation handles the ‘special’ cases.

I did contact Qantas when I got back to the UK, though I’m not sure what I expected to get out of this. An apology would’ve been nice. Or perhaps, some kind of statement procedure or strategy that musicians can use when flying the Aussie flag carrier to prevent this kind of thing happening to them. I’d even be happy to distribute to UK musicians via the MU Journal’s correspondence page, my blog and through the various publications I write for. Even if the only advice is ‘Don’t fly Qantas’ if you want to take an instrument into the cabin then this at least would be a useful – and honest – response.

Instead, what I got was “Thank you for getting in touch and I’d like to let you know we were concerned to hear about your dissatisfaction with your Jetstar flight.” Which was good (ish), and then “As Jetstar is operated as a separate company to Qantas, you will need to write to them directly at: Jetstar Customer Care GPO Box 635 Sunshine VIC 3020“. It would seem that Jetstar has such a low budget that they can’t afford email (or is there another reason?).

I did actually write to the Jetstar Customer Care address and received a response along the lines that they were sorry I wasn’t happy with the their service and reiterating their cabin baggage dimensions. Perhaps they should read Dave Carrol’s book – “United Breaks Guitars – The power of one voice in the age of social media“, they may well find it a good read, especially as it happened in their industry.

Oh well, rant over. I’ll still fly Qantas but I’ll think twice (or thrice) before booking a flight via JetStar…

Next Blog I’ll go back to documenting the ‘happy-go-lucky’ life of a free range musician in the UK and elsewhere…

Veni, Vidi, Exi – I came, I saw, I went away…

Time Flies like an Arrow, Fruit Flies’ like a Banana 

Finally the final instalment about my trip to Australia…

TANSTAALF rehearsal in 1973. Greg (Hough) is at the front playing flute…

After a packed musical weekend at The National Folk Festival in Canberra, I decide to drive up the Western side of the Great Divide to visit an old school friend who lives in Orange. Greg was also in the first band I ever put together – TANSTAAFL (i.e. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).

The trip takes me up some relatively minor highways so I get a really good look at the country. It takes this kind of road trip to appreciate the austere beauty of the Australian bush and the shear size of the country. The distance is around 280 kilometres – or in old money – 180 miles which for my English friends is like driving from London to Middlesbrough without going through or past any towns larger than Tring in Hertfordshire (pop. 12,000).

Watercolour by J R Heywood

Listening to the radio in the van, the interviewees talk a lot about the recent high levels of rain and how this has given a real boost to the local economy – which is basically based on cows and sheep. Looking out the wind screen I see a straw coloured landscape of grassy plains, dotted with copses of gum trees against a backdrop of distant ranges.  I have a watercolour painted by my dad on my bedroom wall that captures the mood pretty well.

The Boorowa Pub

I stopped at Boorowa for lunch which has a classic country hotel on the main street with deep verandahs that passing shearers would have bedded down on on their way to and from the seasonal shearing sheds. I wandered around the town a little, wondering what it would be like to live in a place like this. A good place to hunker down and go to seed I guess.

The road to Orange

Back on the road I pushed on to Orange and arrived just as the sun was going down. Orange is a regional centre and has pretty much the same population as Dunstable, where I live in England. Greg and his wife Sue both went to the same Highschool as me and they both went in to the civil service after graduating. They relocated to Orange when Greg’s department was moved there and have now taken advantage of the early retirement available to governments employees. It seems strange to me that one of my school mates is now a pensioner and enjoying all the perquisites of this station in life – including being a member of the lawn bowls club. I’m not sure that I’ll ever retire, or want to, but I don’t have any problems with anyone else taking advantage of the fruits of a life of hard work.

The van on Mt Conobolas

From Orange I took the road to Oberon via Mount Canobolas for the view and the good mobile signal so I could catch up on my email.  I was heading to Oberon to meet up with Mary for lunch. Mary (then Tierney) was a member of the first ‘pro’ band I was in – The Bluetongue Bush Band – back in the late 1970’s. She sang and played tin whistle and was (I thought at the time) from Tasmania. It turns out that she was originally from the same area of Sydney that I grew up in and had just spent some time in Tassie before returning to Sydney, the band and a teaching course. It was great to catch up and she returned to me a watch I had lent to her over 30 year ago when she needed a timepiece for an exam she was sitting. The watch was my father’s, presented to the first time he left Ainsworth Consolidated Industries, a company he helped found which later became extremely successful.

Leanne and friend…

From Oberon I crossed the Blue Mountains on my way to the next stop at Pendle Hill in Sydney where I planned to meet up with Leanne Lawerence, who was my neighbour in Kingsgrove when I was growing up. Pendle Hill is a suburb of Sydney that is just west of Parramatta and she runs a specialist firm that deals with VW parts and repairs called Volksbahn Autos. Again it was great to catch up and especially with someone who shared so many memories of our growing up. I was also very grateful of the offer of accommodation during my stay as she had a spare room available while her son was away.

The old team back together one more time…

During my stay in Sydney I managed to meet up with a few old friends including George Kyprios, who was also an original member of both TANSTAAFL and it’s successor – MSG – playing keys in both. In fact I met up with George a couple of times, once at his place overlooking the George’s River and once in town at a great little bistro overlooking Circular Quay.

In George’s garage, Kingsgrove

George took a different path from me in lots of ways and it was cool to compare notes. Mind you, I think that we may have got pretty much to the same place despite our different routes.

I also took the opportunity to wander around the Circular Quay area of Sydney, checking out some old haunts and just generally chilling out. It’s amazing to think that I can remember the Opera House being built and the number of times I went there to see plays and other gigs.

On the Sydney Opera House patio with the ‘coat hanger’ in the background…

In fact I remember seeing Split Enz (the predecessor of Crowded House) playing at the Recording Theatre soon after they arrived in Sydney from New Zealand. It was for a live broadcast by the infant 2JJ rock radio station and I was totally knocked out by the show. It was the first time that I had seen a band performance as a complete dramatic show integrating the music, lighting and stage antics of the performers. I reckon I’ve been to events in all the performance spaces of the Opera House at various times A great building, and a great feat of engineering. The iconic location also helps, on the harbour next the the Sydney Harbour Bridge (aka ‘The Coathanger’). Went I first saw the publicity pictures of The Sage in Gateshead at Womex in Seville back in 2003, it dead obvious to me that they had modelled them on the classic Sydney Opera House + Bridge pictures.

Where the dog shat in the tucker box, five miles from Gundagai..

From Sydney I had to get back to Melbourne in time for my flight to Darwin, and then back to England. I was originally planning to drive down the coast but a combination of bad weather (storms coming in over the Tasman Sea) and SatNav failure due to operator error I ended up heading straight back down to Melbourne via the Hume Highway. On the way I stopped at a little tourist stop just outside Gundagai which is famous for a story involving a “Bullocky Bill”, a tale of woe about his bullock dray getting stuck in the mud of the creek and all the things that subsequently went wrong, culminating in finding out that his dog had crapped in his tucker box (tucker=food). This is a famous story which was bowdlerised to “The dog sat on the tucker box”converting the dastardly deed into a “good and faithful” pal type story. The former is certainly funnier than the latter.

Crocodile rock…

The desert heart of Australia – Stuart’s Desert Pea?

From Melbourne I flew via Jetstar to Darwin to see my daughter Tahneen and grandson Brayden for a few days. This is the first time I’d been this far north. Darwin is quite a small place and relies on tourism and so has been hit badly by the dip in the tourist trade. During the flight I noticed that the desert was blooming, another result of the floods I guess – the desert plants have a very short life cycle due to the intermittent nature of the rain fall, so I was lucky to be able see this.

Darwin puts the crocodile back into Crocodile Dundee (or visa versa)…

One of the big draws of Darwin is the number of crocodiles found there. It was the first time I’d seen these up close – and one of them was the one that appeared in the Paul Hogan film apparently. There was an opportunity to go swimming in the croc pool in a specially armoured enclosure for an additional which, needless to say, I declined. A couple did so but didn’t get any reaction from the big reptiles – perhaps they weren’t that hungry.

From Darwin it was back to old blighty to a temperature of 5 degrees C from 33 degrees at take off, with fun and games at the airport check-in with regard to my travel guitar…

In the next blog I will be expanding on my ‘customer service’ experience with QANTAS / JetStar – stay in tune…