Ry Cooder Brisbane Convention Centre 21 November 2009

Friday, 27 November 2009

Next thing we know he'll be masking regular updates to his MySpace page and finding friends on FaceBook.

Well, maybe not quite, but even twelve months ago anyone suggesting that Ry Cooder would be resuming the life of a touring muso any time soon would have drawn a resounding You're kidding! No way, get real from just about anybody with a reasonable knowledge of the man and his work.

By late 2008 as far as anybody could tell Mr Cooder had settled into a comfortable semiretirement in Santa Monica, filling in the days writing short stories about L.A. and indulging in the odd recording project if he had some ideas that he figured might fly.

Actually, who could blame him?

High ratings of his series of critically acclaimed albums through the seventies failed to translate into commercial success, working on movie soundtracks was apparently, according to the man's comments in a recent interview, a rather harrowing experience and working live took him away from home for much longer than he would have preferred.

Had he chosen to do so, Cooder could have made a comfortable living from studio sessions in L.A. but one suspects that the constant need to come up with something new for each session would have put the kibosh on that as a long-term proposition.

Yet, there he was on stage with Nick Lowe at Brisbane's Convention Centre on a Saturday night in late November 2009, and from the opening Fool Who Knows it seemed like he was thoroughly enjoying himself.

Much of the credit for that, one suspects, lies with the & Nick Lowe with Joachim Cooder on the billing.

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© Ian Hughes 2015