Friday, 11 September 2009
Back on the cusp of the eighties, most Thursday nights you would have found Hughesy in the back bar of Townsville’s Royal Hotel enjoying the Burdekin Bush Band’s take on Australian folk music.
I’m not sure what the BBB’s background was - more than likely they emerged from the Townsville Folk Club - but I’ve always had a soft spot for trad material, influenced by what Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span had done within the British tradition and the way the early albums by The Band seemed to have grown out of its American equivalent.
Around the same time I was enjoying those Thursday nights with a number of beers washing down a counter meal of corned beef, white sauce and damper I’d also encountered the first Redgum album, If You Don’t Fight You Lose, with its scathing approach to various aspects of the Australian politics of the day. I found myself thinking back to those times as the first notes of The Push, the first album by a Cairns aggregation called Kamerunga hit the speakers here in Hughesy’s office.
Farewell and adieu to you, Brisbane ladies... is the familiar beginning of Brisbane Ladies, a staple of countless Australian folkies’ repertoires, though the trad version is a fair step away from the Kamerunga rendition. It’s obvious what’s on offer here is a carefully constructed fusion of traditional Australian music, original material and Celtic elements filtered through a world music/funk/ reggae sensibility designed to work in a live setting at some of the larger festivals - Woodford, Port Fairy, BluesFest in Byron and the National Folk Festival all get a guernsey in the band’s publicity material.
And it works. The opening track cuts in and out of Brisbane Ladies (retitled Farewell and Adieu) and the instrumental Ella’s Folly, showcasing Peter Ella’s string (mandolin, guitar, fiddle) skills. A jazzy Congress Reel comes before Mulligan, an original composition recounting events around the discovery of the Palmer River goldfield which in turn lead to the settlement of Cairns and Cooktown. You get a contemporary feeling through Mulligan’s spoken semi-rap delivery though there are indigenous elements lurking in there as well. Nice.