One of the most exciting young pianists in the country, Hong Kong-born Esmond Choi has given some memorable performances of contemporary music in recent times.
Esmond participated in the 2022 PianoLab festival, giving an insightful performance of George Crumb’s Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik, and he performed Crumb’s Metamorphoses Book I on 21 February, and Metamorphoses Book II on 24 February this year, together with music by composers as diverse as JS Bach, Olivier Messiaen, Franz Liszt and Galina Ustvolskaya.
Active in a variety of musical fields, Esmond is a member of the Novus ensemble, the organist for St. Cuthbert’s Anglican Church and he has collaborated with numerous ensembles, including the Elder Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra and the Elder Music Lab. He is undertaking postgraduate studies at the Elder Conservatorium of Music.
Esmond was interviewed prior to his upcoming performance of American composer Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 1 on 26 October. His remarks demonstrate his approach to his music and his willingness to undertake the most detailed research in preparing for his performances.
You frequently feature significant twentieth century composers such as George Crumb, Olivier Messiaen and even Galina Ustvolskaya in your piano recitals, composers whose music is rarely performed these days. What is your approach to programming your recitals? Are there other modernist or experimental composers who interest you?
Esmond Choi: I always use my piano teacher, Lucinda Collins’s method for programming. I would program a work I want to play and a challenge piece slightly out of my comfort zone for structure. In addition, I approach programming with a concept or a narrative/story. Like the fringe show I did earlier this year, I have featured the complete cycle of Crumb’s Metamorphoses in two separate concerts. The program is based on my emotional response to the passing of Crumb. That program carries a concept of change/metamorphosis and has a narrative of processing an unpleasant event. In addition, I always try to reinvent myself and my perspective on music and my surroundings environment.
I am in San Francisco, attending an experimental music festival called The Other Minds 28. And I could not believe what I had heard and experienced. At the moment, I am interested in the music of Annea Lockwood, Trimpin, and Jan Martin Smørdal. They all featured in this year’s festival. Outside of that, I am starting to be interested in the Australian music scene, such as the music of John Polglase, Luke Altman, and Nicolas Vines. Stockhausen, Aldo Clementi, Christopher Cerrone, and many more are outside Australia.
Your 18 September performance for Recitals Australia featured the music of John Cage, Charles Ives, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Maurice Ravel and Philip Glass, a diverse selection representing a range of musical languages that, together, created a quietly meditative atmosphere. What was the theme for the recital?
EC: The theme was daydreaming, but the word procrastination is more accurate and interesting. Sometimes we put incredible effort into delaying our main task. We have done things like reading, doom scrolling. I even heard some people do baking or cleaning the house just to avoid the main task! So, I wanted to try to program the effect of procrastination by “daydreaming”.
You are planning a recital of the music of American modernist composer Charles Ives (1874 – 1954), whose experimentation and innovative approach were highly influential. What pieces will you be performing and how will you approach the performance?
EC: I will be performing Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 1. Ives began composing this work in 1902 and completed it between 1909 and 1910. The sonata has an interesting history. Instead of writing a book, Ives only provided a description of the work:
“What is it all about?” – Dan. S. asks. Mostly about the outdoor life in Conn. villages in the ‘80s and ‘90s – impressions, remembrances, & reflections of country farmers in Conn. Farmland.
“Fred’s Daddy got so excited that he shouted when Fred hit a home run & the school won the baseball game. But Aunt Sarah was always humming Where is my Wandering Boy, after Fred an’ John left for a job in Bridgeport. There was usually a sadness—but not at the Barn Dances, with their jigs, foot jumping, & reels mostly on winter nights.
“In the summer times, the hymns were sung outdoors. Folks sang (as Old Black Joe) & the Bethel Band (quickstep street marches) & the people like[d to say] things as they wanted to say, and to do things as they wanted to, in their own way — and many old times… there were feelings, and of spiritual fervency!”
During the composition stage, Ives treated this work as a side project. Yet, later in life, he had a special attachment to this work. In Mrs. Ives' words, “He always liked to play it — even now he does sometimes and says it has 'a kind of tendency often to cheer him up with a shadow thought of the old day.’” (from Memos)
I was fortunate to visit the composer’s studio at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. His original studio was in Redding, Connecticut. However, the house was sold. The Academy took on the challenge of moving the studio from Redding to New York City. Not only did they move the studio, but they also made an effort to place everything in its original position, as Ives left it. On Ives's upright piano, he had multiple copies of the first piano sonata.
I have been studying this work intensively for a year and a half. The concert will have an introduction about Ives and a summary of the work that will guide the listeners in understanding the sonata better. And there might be some audience participation (no promises, just an idea!).
Your performance of Ives’s work forms part of your postgraduate research at the Elder Conservatorium, University of Adelaide. Can you outline your research project and how you see the nature of Charles Ives’s music?
EC: Before I initiated my Masters’ degree, I wanted to challenge myself by playing an extensive work. And Ives has always been one of my favourite composers to listen to. So, I decided to try to investigate Ives’s ideas and aesthetic influence. Long story short, Ives was interested in the American Transcendental Movement. More notably, the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. This fondness became clear towards the end of his life. In Ives’s Memos, he mentioned Emerson being “as great as Jupiter”. And this appreciation can be heard from the first movement of the Concord sonata (Piano Sonata No. 2).
I read a fair amount of Emerson’s essays and Thoreau’s Walden. I fell in love with Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance. This gave me the idea of asking myself Who I am and what it means to be in this creative discipline.
I chose the first piano sonata rather than the second piano sonata because not many people played the first. This includes John Kirkpatrick (essentially Ives’s right-hand man for Ives’s piano music). The first piano sonata has not been researched as well.
How much room for interpretation is there in the music of Ives?
EC: Interpreting Ives’s music is a complex and never-ending topic. When I was studying with one of the champions of Ives’s music, Steve Drury, he said, “For me, Ives is the first composer who writes in open form.” To put it in a simple explanation, the performer will become a co-composer. The work will become unique for each performer and each performance. This concept is notable in the works John Cage and Earl Brown.
He never said anything about how to approach his music. The most “scientific evidence” on this is some correspondences between Ives, musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky and Kirkpartrick. Slonimsky and Kirkpatrick both asked how to approach or interpret his works. And Ives simply replied, “do what you think is best.”
Second, when I was having a look at the manuscript for first movement, I noticed there are a lot of added pencil markings in his ink copy, and throughout Ives’s life, he always revises his works. So, his music is always constantly evolving.
Third, in this work and his second sonata, there is not much information on the score for the performer to interpret the character of the work. In the first sonata, there are moments of just musical notes and no expressive or dynamic markings.
So, is there a true interpretation of Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 1? In my argument, no. The best we performers can do is to embrace the present, embrace who we are.
What of the psychological or emotional state of the audience and the triggering of a transcendental experience?
EC: This is a difficult question to answer. Like the idea of interpretation, emotion is complex to discuss. I would say almost impossible. There is no right or wrong. Some people enjoy the music of J.S. Bach. I am certainly one of them. However, I know some of my friends dislike Bach’s music. I did ask why. They respond, “I don’t find it interesting.” Which is fair enough. When I ask about people’s reactions to a work of art, I never expect an extended, detailed response. Sometimes, the reaction is simple. This answer can be applied to many elements of life, like food, religion, politics, cars, and planes. Anything you can think of. Each individual will have unique experiences and opinions about everything. And this includes Ives. Even the composer himself plays differently each time. Or even completely rearranges the piece itself. Fortunately, we have some recordings of Ives playing the piano towards the end of his life. In the recordings of They are There, Ives practically recomposed the entire song.
In terms of a transcendental experience, I would approach it with an ambiguous response. There is no right way to listen to music. And there is no right way to experience transcendence. All I can say to the listeners is, in the words of Emerson. “Trust Thyself.” We must not alter our ideas and reactions towards a work of art just because people tell us to. If that is the case, art will become uninteresting. I believe it is much more fun to have a range of responses. Some will think that Ives is a bad composer. Some will think this will be a mind-opening experience. I can only guide and assist the listeners through this monumental sonata.
You are a composer in your own right. What is your approach to composition? Are you planning performances of your work or developing new works?
EC: It is 12:30 a.m. in San Francisco. I just came back from the last concert of The Other Minds Festival 28. I met many unique and exciting musicians and artists. When they ask me if I am a composer? I always answered, “Well…I just put dots on the page. So, not really…” and all of them responded, saying, “Well, if you write music, then you are a composer!” To answer your first part of the question (which is more of a statement; I want to give an amusing response), I don’t think I’m a composer. I just put dots on the page! My approach to composition is primarily based on improvisation, credited mainly to Josh van Konkelenberg [of State Opera of South Australia]. He introduced and taught me about improvisation and how to incorporate it into composition. Without his teaching, I would not be able to express the sound world that is in my mind. I have just started drafting some new material for a new work… this will probably be the largest by far. But that’s all I can say.
Chris Reid
Esmond Choi will perform Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 1 at 3.30pm on 26 October in the North Adelaide Baptist Church Hall. Tickets available from Recitals Australia.
Rob Younger – Radio Birdman
‘There's gonna be a new race
Kids are gonna start it up
We're all gonna mutate
Kids are saying yeah hup. Yeah hup.’
It is mostly an issue of time, is it not? 50 years may seem an eternity, or it may pass in what is merely part of a lifetime. For Rob Younger the fifty years since 1974 marks the time since he and Deniz Tek formed Radio Birdman, a band whose presence looms over Australian contemporary music like no other. One might ask Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to assess the importance of Radio Birdman to the Australian music scene, since he’s on the record as a fan, but Younger bats away a suggestion I make that the PM might be invited to attend one of their upcoming gigs, which features three original members; vocalist Younger, guitarist Tek and keyboard player Pip Hoyle. Other members are bassist Jim Dickson, drummer Nik Reith and Dave Kettley on guitar.
“There are no plans that I’m aware of,” he says, pausing, returning to the subject of the PM. “He came backstage at a gig in Sydney about five years ago… a very pleasant bloke,” and I suspect that is not quite the end of the story. After all, it is right that a music lover such as our Prime Minister should know of and revere a such a band.
Rob Younger, you see, is the quintessential Australian rock singer. Put him alongside Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett, Billy Thorpe, maybe Jimmy Barnes or Michael Hutchence and the idea still becomes a travesty; his name would be recognised by so very few in a list of those greats. Yet pretty much every Australia band since 1978 owes Younger’s band, Radio Birdman, an enormous debt of gratitude for its full-frontal assault upon the bastions of Aussie pub rock in the mid and late 1970s. It is, shockingly, 50 years ago that Radio Birdman was formed by Younger and guitarist Deniz Tek and began casting around for gigs to play in Sydney.
They took on the established music scene; the Sherbets, the Ferrets, the Selinas, ONJ, Sony Music, Young Talent Time and the shows which peddled a steady diet of such lightweight fare. Radio Birdman took a course in good old Aussie hypertension and added an American influence of The Stooges, MC5 and New York Dolls, courtesy of their guitarist Deniz Tek. Without them there would never have been Midnight Oil, The Saints, You Am I, Silverchair, nor Divinyls, Savage Garden, and hundreds more. They released an EP then their debut album, and by the end of 1977 were based in Europe, contemplating a US tour with The Ramones. It didn’t happen.
After less than four years together by June 1978 it was all over. Radio Birdman broke up. The second album was pretty much in the can, but they and a bunch of other bands had been dropped by the US label Sire Records when they switched distributors. Birdman were stuck in a dismal part of the world, far from home…
“You’re allowed to say ‘England’ aren’t you?” is Younger’s comment. Who could reasonably say they made a bad decision to spilt up the band?
“Uh, yeah, we were in Rockfield in Wales to record, and we were at each other’s throats, because we hadn’t been away for any protracted period prior to that… just forays to Melbourne or over to Adelaide, and always in a van. This sudden relentless close proximity had a lot to do with it. So, we broke up and went our separate ways. Of course, the record we recorded didn’t get released: Denis rescued that in about 1981; went over to Wales and got the tapes.” This became the album, ‘Living Eyes’.
Various members went off to sundry projects; one of the best was the short lived ‘New Race’ tour, which spawned an album and added lustre to the story, and then Younger went back to the band he’d formed, The New Christs.
At one point early on I ask whether it seems an impertinence to begin an interview asking about The New Christs, a band who came about after Birdman split and whose career seems to have atrophied as a result of the reformation and resurgent interest in Radio Birdman. It’s complicated, but as he was the link between those projects, he allowed the question about lyrics in his songs. “It’s always moaning about myself or my various alter-ego’s,” is the suggestion, and being more than familiar with songs such as Born Out Of Time, I Saw God and Headin’ South, I am quick to agree.
Radio Birdman 2024 - Rob Younger 3rd Left
I’d wanted to ask about the New Christs because they remain a seminal influence upon me. I had been too young by about three years to have seen Radio Birdman back in those far off crazy times. It may be that I am the only Adelaidean of a certain age to have never claimed to be in the audience one fateful 1977 night at the Marryatville Hotel when the ABC outside broadcast crew captured ‘Birdman in full flight. A room which could comfortably hold 400 people has swollen tenfold in the telling of the legend, or so it is said. In any event the footage remains one of the best and most visceral Australian music performances of all time.
“I know that film better than I remember the event," Deniz Tek told me when I interviewed him in 1996 when Birdman reformed for a run of Big Day Out dates, and nobody knew if there was more to it than that. Tek’s analysis from then remains on point: “"When there is film, it tends to supplant memory, because that becomes the memory.” We are told Radio Birdman are one of the seminal Australian bands and if we are told it often enough we unhesitatingly accept it as the verdict of history.
Rob Younger’s recollection?
“We played a warm-up show in Sydney and I remember thinking ‘Oh Gawd, I hope we’re good enough. But we rose to the occasion.’
Somehow, and at some point, the decision was taken to see how far the reunion could be taken. Was it obvious? Did the band sound excellent? Fresh as a daisy?
“I thought we sounded fine, the shows were enjoyable and all of that,” he confirms. “They were throwing a lot of money at us,” he changes tack. “When you play Big Day Outs you have the ability to earn quite a lot of bread, and there’s an incentive to stay together because we’re suddenly making money, which we never did previously.” It sounds plausible, this mention of the power of cash, but I suspect he’s underplaying his hand again when he adds “So I wouldn’t rule that out as one of the motives for sticking together.”
It is entirely the point for Younger and I sense he is not completely comfortable talking about it. It strikes me that Rob Younger remains one of the most elusive of figures, so very little is known about him. As we talk, and I’m reminded I’ve never before interviewed him, I get the feeling he slides off point almost as a protective device. I need to point out it’s an observation, not criticism. A case in point: I’d read somewhere he has a daughter but I know nothing of his private life. “Oh yeah, a son and a daughter,” he confirms easily. “They both live in Melbourne.” And that’s it. You get no more.
“Sometimes the idea of demystifying, of finding out about people might not work. It might be better to keep people in the dark, so they make up their own wonderful stories,” he offers. “It’s more entertaining than really life anyway.” It’s a valid point: the cult of anti-fame works exceptionally well in the realm of pop music, and it is much better, perhaps, to know next to nothing about Lady Gaga, Trent Reznor, or for that matter, Rob Younger.
Does Younger feel more comfortable being known through his music? Up to a point I guess is the right answer. Famously the band refused an offer of induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame feeling they would not accept handouts from the industry who had tried to shut them out so completely. It eventually happened in 2007 when Silverchair’s Daniel Johns announced their induction, and the band then performed the obligatory couple of songs.
As we discuss recognition and the public persona, and whilst he’s comfortable with that he pushes back when I suggest he is ‘famous’. He’s reluctant to assume that mantle; much more a background figure when not front and centre onstage. For many years he was a record producer for literally scores of Australian bands as well as working on his own band’s projects. If you listened to Australian bands through the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s you’ve heard Younger’s work. It’s quixotic. When questioned he admits he doesn’t have a favourite but evinces pride in his role in a number of Died Pretty recording sessions, making sure I understand he’s not claiming credit where it was not due.
Died Pretty were fellow Sydneysiders, fellow Citadel Records labelmates, and a number of whom were members on and off also of Younger’s band The New Christs. What a heady vibrant time it was to have been a fan of Australian music. He mentions in passing just how much work there was; how many bands recording and needing production help in the studio. Mostly he was in either EMI’s recording studio or Trafalgar Studios in Annandale. In the event, the rise of home recording and laptop computer-based software put paid to much of that, and the contraction of record companies and the recorded music market meant there was less money around to pay for it in any case. “I thought this is a great life, but then,” he draws a deep breath and offers what I have come to recognise as a classic piece of Rob Younger understatement, “the scene changed.”
By then Radio Birdman had released their third studio album, ‘Zeno Beach’ and the band was performing well and doing plenty of touring.
“I keep hearing things about what I did years and years ago and I just don’t remember any of it. I was reading something the other day about something I was supposed to have done at a gig - it was quite violent – I don’t remember it at all, but the person who reported it I’d trust with my life so it must have happened. But that’s not characteristic of me.”
He expands on the point. “There are people who have experienced formative parts of their lives through things you’ve done and you don’t know who they are and have no control over that experience anyway. You can imagine what it’s like for someone - everyone the world over knows their face. It must be an absolute bloody nightmare.”
I realise I must ask Younger about the ‘Five-O Tour’, such it is named. I had believed it might be the final tour for the band, and start asking him about favourite songs and what we might expect to hear...
“I’ve always liked Anglo Girl Desire,” he says. “If it’s not in the set I have a quiet moan about it because I always enjoy singing it. But most of the early stuff is Deniz’ work and I mean, I wouldn’t play anything I don’t like.”
Ah, well clearly we’re going to hear TV Eye then, a crowd favourite which cannot be overlooked. I recalled seeing them at The Gov a few years ago when Younger seemed disenchanted with the idea of playing that song, one of a handful their audience expects to hear. “I like playing that song. It’s a good song,” is his comment, “maybe I wasn’t in the mood that night, but they should probably expect to hear it this time around, too.”
We laugh, it’s as much an expected part of the ceremony as any other; the chopping staccato guitars, the silence and the anticipation of the crashing drums bringing the song back to life. The fist pumps and the chants of ‘Yeah Hup!’ Long may it continue.
Alex Wheaton
Radio Birdman perform at The Gov on Sunday 23 June, with support Cull the Band. Tickets from OzTix.
When: 23 Jun
Where: The Gov
Bookings: tickets.oztix.com.au
Triptych: a story in three parts.
Part One.
I first met the Tea Party in 1993 in Melbourne when the band were touring Australia’s East Coast. They were promoting the ‘Splendor Solis’ album and I had convinced their record company (EMI) to fly me over for the weekend so I could write a profiling piece on these three Canadians who dared to take on the best of rock music and make it their own, a bewitching distillation of the sixties and seventies school of hard rock and then flavour it with a filigree of Middle Eastern stringed instruments and detuned minor chord structures. Musically they seek to confound critics like me; drummer Jeff Burrows uses an array of acoustic percussion such as doumbek and djembe.
Discovering they had a love of Australian red wines we cemented a friendship over a very long lunch. That night I saw one of the great performances by a rampant three-piece band; in front of a mesmerised crowd Martin swaggers his way into the spotlight and invokes all the great bluesmen as they power through The Raven and Turn The Lamp Down Low. It is a watershed moment; we are at the crossroads and the ceremony is about to begin.
Later that year I saw the Tea Party (drummer Jeff Burrows, bassist Stuart Chatwood and guitarist/vocalist Jeff Martin) play their first Adelaide performance, a magical night in front of a full house at Cartoons (now Hindley St Music Hall). A year or so later they had sold out a night at the Tivoli Hotel – another insanely packed night – a sold out Thebarton Theatre and were then booked for an opening night concert in the park for the Adelaide Fringe Festival. It was another magic evening.
Part Two.
Fast forward ten years. By 2005 the band were in trouble. Jeff Martin was living in Australia, later to relocate to Ireland. The other two still lived in Canada and communications were strained and the spirit of creative input was being tested. There was a perception that with the albums ‘The Edges Of Twilight’, ‘Transmission’ and ‘Triptych’ the best might be behind them. When I met up with Jeff Martin he was dampening down speculation the Tea Party was over, but would talk about a solo career and his plans to record his own music. He was, in some ways, a victim of his own successes, and excesses.
“Yeaaaaaah.” He fills in what would otherwise have been an awkward pause. “Put it this way. There were some personal demons that I had to deal with, not only chemically but also emotionally.” He leads away from the question quickly, offering something of an apologia for his own at times sketchy behaviour. “I was getting frustrated with the industry we were in and the way things were being handled at the time.”
The end result: The Tea Party broke up in 2006 and Chatwood later posted on the bands website ‘As far as Jeff Burrows and myself were concerned, the band was taking an extended break.’ It was one way of explaining what their fans already knew. The old phrase ‘creative differences’ was invoked.
“I think I needed to get away for a while and find my passion for making music again,” says Martin, carefully choosing phrases which say so little and yet explain even less. Jeff Martin went off and recorded his solo album, formed a new band, broke up the band, and by 2011 it seemed perhaps The Tea Party had a future, with something to celebrate.
Jeff Burrows had moved on to other musical projects and was hosting a radio show, Stuart Chatwood had a lucrative line composing the soundtracks for Ubisoft’s ‘Prince Of Persia’ video games. But it takes a lot to destroy friendships that deep and the Tea Party announced they were back.
By 2014 there was a new Tea Party album, ‘The Ocean At The End’ and then a sedate four years or so after that the ‘Black River’ EP, which includes a bustling cover of Led Zeppelin’s Out On The Tiles… you don’t expect Jeff Martin to sound like Robert Plant but a careful listen reveals that deep in the mix of the chorus there’s a lively falsetto trying to reach the surface.
Somewhere in the last five years came a blast from a different direction, a full blown cover version of the Joy Division at their depressing best with Isolation. It was the perfect accompaniment to a world confronting a pandemic with its simple rhythmic intonation. Jeff Martin says Joy Division and Ian Curtis were one of his formative influences in the 1980s, and that even though people thought he was influenced by The Doors, he “never got into the music. There was too much of that circus organ shit going on. The darkness of Joy Division was something really attractive to me at the time. So, I love that recording… it sounds like if Joy Division was still recording today that’s probably what it would sound like.”
Photography: Francesca Ludikar
Part Three.
The Tea Party are coming back to Australia. It is 2024 and they have announced an Australian Tour. Would I do an interview for old time’s sake? Well, why not?
The band may be back together but these days they live on different continents. Jeff Martin is at home up on the Blackall Range behind the Sunshine Coast, where he is about to be joined by the other two prior to the tour beginning.
Jeff Burrows in the meantime is home in Lasalle, Ontaria, getting set for the oncoming Canadian summer, but he of course will be away touring.
“The boys are flying over here and we have a few days of rehearsals, and maybe a day of recording as well,” says Martin, explaining that it’s all in a day’s work. “That’s about all it usually takes; I mean the length of time we’ve been doing this… when the three of us get back in a room it takes no time at all to find that magic again.”
He emphasises the bond between them and mentions he and Jeff Burrows first played music together when he was 10 and Burrows 11 years old.
“The way I look at it is we’ve been playing music together longer than The Beatles and Led Zeppelin were together,” Jeff Burrows chuckles. “It’s not Bad Company. The nice thing is we’re still in that position where we like to challenge ourselves and put ourselves in that situation where we can do so.”
He goes on to explain how the challenges came with – for example – reconstructing the songs of ‘Triptych’ for performances with a symphony orchestra, as they have on numerous occasions. “They’re our songs, yes, but they are songs which were transposed for orchestra over 20 years ago, and I think Stuart reminded me of that last time we were in Windsor together, playing with a symphony orchestra in our hometown.
The three of them have such a chemistry – musically – that it remains difficult to let anyone else in on the secret. “That’s one of the hardest things…” muses Jeff Martin, “what this band is known for, and what we kinda pride ourselves on is that there’s no one definitive way to perform one of our songs. It can take many, many courses, and playing with a symphony you have to be absolutely on point. Don’t screw up, no improvisation, and that is the most nerve-wracking thing for me because I’m always off with the pixies.”
He laughs at himself. “I think the challenge with this tour is that ‘Triptych’ – when was that, Jeff, 1998? I’m very proud of that record but wow! The guitar work on that album – some of those songs, man, and I’ve gotta remember all of those parts and all of those tunings. Some songs might have five parts in five different tunings…”
As he reminds me, he must distil that soundscape down to one guitar part which covers those bases and keeps the song faithful to its musical heritage and intent; the eternal quest for bands who perform live.
Along with 1997’s ‘Transmission’ album, ‘Triptych’ is notable for its foray into electronica, with songs driven by samples and loops, harder cutting edges used to drive the tempo, but the other half of the album is purely organic, characterised by their cover of The Messenger, a sizable hit for them in Canada.
Jeff Martin makes it clear that in his view their recorded music has a timelessness about it and says - as he has to me before - that the Tea Party were never a 90s grunge band and never identified as such. That is true, they always have had a lofty pretention about them which could only come post-1970s, I suspect, and in some ways as a band of the 1990s they were not always of their time.
“Well, I think that’s what makes the Tea Party’s music special and means that now it can be discovered by a younger generation and we couldn’t be happier,” says Burrows, noting “this past fall we’ve had possibly the most successful tour since 1999, to be honest, and one of the great things we’ve got to witness is you start seeing these familiar faces. We’ve started seeing that but it’s people we’ve never seen before, half mum and half dad, which I think is fantastic, because that happened with me through my college and university days and it’s happened with my boys as they were grown up. I like that. I like the fact they are as open-minded as they were.”
So what do we get with this tour: billed as the ‘Triptych Tour’, it now appears we’re getting more than that.
Martin is direct. “Yeah, well. I think Jeff would agree we’ve never been fans of when a band is celebrating a milestone and that’s all they do. I think if we were to do that there would be a violent reaction in the audience. If we were not to do some of those other songs [he mentions in passing Temptation and Sister Awake] well, we have to hit those signposts or people are gonna go away very disappointed.”
He mentions also the big hits from ‘Triptych’, Heaven Coming Down and the Daniel Lanois penned The Messenger and suggests they’d like to try some of the ‘deeper cuts’ from the album. The Halcyon Days is particularly noted.
Burrows adds “We’ve never been known as a band to just do the hits, we’ve always thrown in other bits, and as this is an anniversary tour, I’m really not worried about it. It’s just gonna make it more interesting for us and for the fans.”
Alex Wheaton
The Tea Party perform ‘TRIPtych 25’ at Norwood Concert Hall on Tuesday 18 June. Tickets through Ticketmaster.
When: 18 Jun
Where: Norwood Concert Hall
Bookings: ticketmaster.com.au
Show titles don’t come much shorter.
However, when one adds A Theatrical Love Letter to the Music That Saved You and Set Your Teenage Soul On Fire, they don’t come much longer.
Playwright and director Rebecca Meston would seem to both have her cake and eat it, too, in the naming department.
Not only but also, in this production, she’s realising a rarely realised place for women in the big wide world of popular music.
This show, destined for The Space theatre in July, has roots set in the concept of women quietly making their stand in the loud world of rock.
It was Julia Zemiro who sparked Meston's imagination.
She recalls the way in which, at the end of the Kate Ceberano Cabaret Festival when Julia was announced as incoming to the position, Zemiro stood up on stage and said: “I'm going to direct this festival because I can”.
Meston reflected on Zemiro's irrepressible can-do career, Rock Quiz et. al., and started thinking.
“This was an idea to pursue with joy and the seed of it took on a life of its own,” she says.
“I thought of all the billboards over the years with never any female lineups."
She rattles off the names of great bands we all know and love - The Eagles, Pink Floyd - and pondered the place of women and how she could turn these thoughts into a play.
As a girl from a musically-oriented household, she was conscious of the different musical exposure the young gain from their fathers and mothers. Her observations indicate that fathers influenced with their heavy rock preferences while mothers created environments aurally adorned by easy listening and soft rock. She cites the content of popular local commercial radio stations such as Cruise FM and 5AD.
And in her musical peregrinations she thought of music festivals, of the Big Day Out, of the way in which rock gods emerged from the 1960s and 70s, those wild old days before the Internet ruled the world.
Since Meston is a playwright, as well as a teacher, creative, and mum, her big-picture view generated a central narrative character, a girl who represented the feminine ascent in pop awakening. Rhiannon. She’s just a 15-year-old girl from the burbs.
She is Rebecca’s Alice in (the subversive) Wonderland of rock.
“It is a retro concept", explains Meston. “A love letter to the past."
It is the 1990s, prior to the ubiquitous Internet, a time of teen magazines such as Dolly.
Rhiannon's adventures begin in a record store, the real sort, those record stores of yore which had stacks of vinyls and, as Rebecca recalls, a sense that one had to impress the store staff with the sort of music one was choosing.
And, in the underground record store, she finds Suzie and a musical awakening.
Rhiannon had never met such musical denizens as Suzie before. She discovers punk in her soul. It’s wild and thrilling. And, in it, she recognises “her tribe”
Thus is the beautiful and surprising power of music
“It’s all about how music can save your soul,” says Meston.
Perchance souls will be saved, and nostalgic joys revived when Hit opens in The Space.
It features lead performers Eddie Morrison, Annabel Matheson, Emma Beech, and Ren Williams along with what Rebecca describes as her "mosh pit” of a fabulous 12-strong chorus. It has an “amazing live band", of course, along with “fabulous voices” and the “magic” of Jason Sweeney’s sound design.
“Audiences don’t often get to see this many performers on stage together because the world has become very expensive these days,” she reflects.
It won’t be in any way a quiet show but, very conscious of the different tolerances people have to volume, she has earmarked balcony seating in The Space and also sound-reducing headphones for those with delicate hearing.
“It will be joyous action including dance sequences,” she promises.
"And it will be a privilege to make people happy."
Samela Harris
When: 3 to 6 July
Where: The Space Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
She says she’s a behind-the-scenes person in the arts, which is probably why not everyone knows her name.
But everyone has very probably indeed been somewhere at something which bears the hallmark touch of our Cabaret Fringe Festival’s new producer.
Simone DiSisto is a creative producer, a designer, an educator, a storyteller, a copywriter, a techie and, if the circumstances call for it, a dogsbody. She embodies the whole shebang of the performing arts.
Her hand has been behind the production of concerts, WOMAD events, comedy shows, kids’ culture, and all over the logistical scenes of Edinburgh Festival productions.
She has stepped into the CabFringe role because it was there, and she was there. She was assistant producer to legendary producer Lauren Thiel in 2023 so she not only knows the ropes but knows everyone involved in knotting and bow-tying them.
Not only but also, as a visual arts teacher at Marryatville High, she knows a huge stretch of the upcoming generation.
Now, aged forty-three with one thirteen-year-old child plus nine-year-old twins, she sees herself as a model Gen Xer, one who has moved through the world between analogue and digital eras.
“Technology and the world changed in our lifetimes,” she explains.
We have had to learn things on the go. But we are a generation which has the grit.”
And “grit” is important to Simone DiSisto.
She’s come through life learning one has to do the things one has to do to pay the bills.
She’s a Port Adelaide girl, through generations on her dad’s side albeit her mum’s family came from Perth.
A few years in Wudinna did not change her attachment to the Port, or the generational family tradition of teaching. She attended Woodville High. With her dad, the distinguished sportsman David Mundy who played baseball for Australia, she was surrounded by cricketers and the spirit of Australian sports. Her dad still has an influential hand in baseball. He’s a lifelong role model to her and her siblings. One of those, Troy Mundy, has carved his own significant role internationally in the physical art of dance. This Adelaide dancer, now with business degrees under his belt, presently resides in Dubai.
Remaining in Adelaide, Simone talks of “the beauty of being a local”.
Simone is deeply committed to arts and entertainment in her hometown, to the various shades which make up cabaret and the amazingly ingenious and alluring venues in which cabaret may be performed.
“South Australia is great to grow up in, fabulously immersive in so many arts”.
Venues are one of Simone’s “things”.
She sees relationships with venues as a pivotal, and also joyful, part of her new role, one underscored by decades of working the gigs with entertainers.
She cites that genius comedian Micky D as lifelong bestie and potent influence through early Edinburgh fringes and beyond.
It all has imbued in her a love of seeing the faces of audiences and a feeling for “diverse arty spaces”.
And, of course, as a local who has been a part of the ever-evolving arts, she adds a respectful nod in the direction of the late beloved Frank Ford, father of the CabFest and also its audacious offspring, the Cab Fest Fringe.
“The Cabaret Fringe attracts beautiful audiences,” she enthuses. “It is like what the Fringe used too be. It is just the right size. People book for several shows."
Among the sprawl of entertainment options this year is, of all things, Peter Goers’ stage production of Noel Coward plays, Cowardy Custard at Holden Street Theatres. Some hundred other performances are programmed, from drag to dance to comedy to concerts. There are Libby Trainor Parker, Cossack dancers, She Shanties, Gay Bingo, burlesque, jazz, circus…
And wonderful venues, such as the Arthur Art Bar, the Howling Owl, the Gatsby Lounge, the Grace Emily, and even in its swan song, My Lover Cindi.
Simone thrives on finding and liaising with all these venues since she’s an organiser, among the many other things for this multitasker.
There is a secret to her boundless involvements: “I’m neuro-divergent,” she laughs. “I have ADHD. It’s a bonus in the arts. I can keep going and going and going.”
She also has a can-do spirit with which she fearlessly tackles new challenges in technology. She was brought up that way.
It all comes back to those favoured terms, “grit” and “learning things on the go”.
Another is “transferrable skills” and “playful problem-solving".
Hers is the ability to adapt and improvise, to make the most of what you find and work miracles on a shoestring, and glow with positive spirit.
No wonder, from her time doing IT, ticketing projects, and software solutions at Carclew, this versatile, rising arts identity earned the nickname “Disco Tech”.
Samela Harris
CabFest Fringe runs from May 24 to June 2 all over town.
The full program is to be found at: cabaretfringefestival.com