Stand and Deliver!

I can’t remember if Kate Fagan approached me with the suggestion of an interview, or if David Ross Macdonald approached me out of the blue himself on Kate’s recommendation, but the story of the Waifs’ drummer who was a singer/songwriter in his own right – of ‘dark folk songs’, no less! – was too good to pass up. In the good old days when things were less structured, I’d be able to create a ten-minute interview including snippets of various songs; nowadays I’m trying to maintain the discipline of a regular weekly music news segment, so the interview component can only be about five minutes of that segment. It is thus fitting that I make a proper return to this blog – after a month’s absence spent coping with both the rolling of that boulder up the side of the retail mountain and bouts of incredibly debilitating arthritis – with the transcript of the original full-length natter with David Ross Macdonald.

I will follow it with a transcript of the broadcast version. However, if you prefer, you can download and listen to an MP3 of that shortened version.

Demetrius Romeo: David, you play guitar and you sing, and yet you’re also the drummer for the Waifs. How did you end up on the drumstool behind that band?

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: That was a very, very, very fortunate thing. I was playing with a Perth band called the Ragabillys and that was a ‘boom-chick’ band. I was on washboard. We were at the Port Fairy Folk Festival and the Waifs were there as well. They saw me play and I was having a good time and we drank a lot and we had a lot of laughs and then Donna suggested I should go on tour with them, just for one or two shows, just for a bit of fun, because I was from the west and they needed a drummer when they were touring the west. I said, ‘sure. Sign me up!’ So three months later I was on a little tour with them up to Broome. We had a great time and it grew from that.

Demetrius Romeo: Your earlier album, Southern Crossing, is a collection of guitar instrumentals played specifically on handcrafted Australian guitars, so clearly you are a guitarist as well as a drummer. How do you divide your interests, and how did that particular album come to be?

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: As far as dividing my interests, guitar came first. I did classical guitar when I was a teenager and played a bit of rock ’n’ roll at school, as we all did. And then I really dropped it, to become a geologist. So when I went to university, I did that. For a number of years I endured geology as a profession. And then I went to jazz college! I played drums at jazz college. I taught myself drums, and for some reason, they accepted me. So I was always surrounded by music and keen to pursue both drums and guitar. That’s how that happens.

People say most guitarists are drummers in re-hab, or vice-versa, and it’s the percussive side of playing guitar. It’s a very percussive instrument, anyway. And drummers have a lot of time to sit back and watch guitarists. Especially when I was playing with the Ragabillies. Rodney Vervest is an amazing finger-picker, so for six years I’ve watched him play finger-style guitar and I picked that up – so that was how I managed to get influence in that, I suppose.

Also through Rodney Vervest, he was a keen supporter of handcrafted instruments from Western Australia. He introduced me to the whole world of luthiers. And then a long time later, I was in Toronto, very jaded with the touring thing with the Waifs, and we were coming up to the end of the tour in 2001 and I just decided that I would do something completely different, and that would be to visit all these luthiers that I’d heard about in Australia and take my laptop and a couple of microphones and one by one, from Brisbane to the Margaret River, I visited these luthiers and had cups of coffee, went into their studios with the wood shavings and the cups of coffee and the cigarettes and the radio – that’s their sort of lifestyle, a very solitary sort of lifestyle, building these instruments – and we’d talk, he’d show me guitars, and I’d set up the mics and I’d just record. So I did it. I just went from one state to the next with my laptop and then I ended up with a record. I was taking photographs along the way – the scientist in me definitely came out in that little project. If you do own the record, you’ll see it has a comprehensive little booklet that describes construction and glues and woods and anecdotes about each of the builders.

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: Your new album, Far From Here, has guitars, has vocals, has drums, has an ensemble playing on it. Tell me about how Far From Here came into being.

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: Far From Here was a project that came into being because I had started to become heavily influenced by Americana singer-songwriters. With the Waifs touring a lot in the US and Canada, at a lot of the festivals that we went to, a lot of fabulous singer-songwriters came to my attention, and I’d been writing songs for a long time but I had never really seen people performing… ‘obscure folk music’, I suppose. I mean, singer-songwriter stuff that’s not ‘pop music’. A lot of the material that I write has certain abstractions and poetic quality to it that isn’t something that you’d hear on popular radio, so it isn’t something that I would ever pursue or tour or record. But after my experiences of seeing people like Steve Earl and Kieran Kane and Kevin Welch and Kelly Joe Phelps, David Francey – these folks write amazingly abstract and beautiful as well as really touching and simple folk music, and it gave me the confidence to pursue it myself.

So I really got down to writing the songs and then eventually finding the time in Melbourne to get some of the guys out of Paul Kelly’s group to help out in the studio. Also some of the guys from Things of Stone and Wood – I’ve got some pals there that I could call – and that was the first half of the album, with the rhythm section. The second half of the album is just myself with Stephen Hadley on bass.

We did that not that long ago – last summer when I was house-sitting John Butler’s place, up in Byron Bay. He had a lot of instruments lying around. Once again, I used a laptop and a couple of microphones to get the takes that I felt really comfortable with. Then we pulled it all together again, with Shane O’Mara down in Melbourne, who does a lot of studio stuff. He’s great. It came about in a process of about two years, in between Waifs tours, and I called it Far From Here because I was never anywhere in particular, so I thought that was the only name I could give the record.

Demetrius Romeo: That’s interesting, because you talk a lot about specific memories of places, for example, ‘Pearl’, that sounds like a true-life experience that happened in a beach town somewhere. Can you tell me a bit about that song?

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: Yeah. That song actually does have a very quick reference to Broome. A lot of my experiences up in Broome, as far as checking out the local history, is steeped in Chinese traditions. You have Chinese cemeteries and you have the old architecture there, and the history of Chinese pearl divers – because a lot of the Australians were too damned lazy to do any of the hard work themselves, so they got the illegal immigrants to dive for pearls. From my travels in Northern California and Arcadia, you had the Chinese in the 1880s, 1890s, they were working in the coal mines. At the same time up in Canada, in Victoria and British Columbia, the Chinese were building the railways. It’s kind of an interesting historical fact that after the gold rushes of the mid-1800s, Chinese immigration, whether it was illegal or not, happened in America and Canada and Australia and probably a lot of other places that I don’t know of, and their labour was used and abused. I suppose ‘Pearl’ is a song that ties in that exploitation, because it was evident at that time. And also some of the aboriginal history of the area, because it’s got amazing aboriginal history: the aborigines used to collect the oyster shells and ground them up and take them inland because they thought it brought rain. I thought it was beautiful that the white man was there exploiting Chinese people to get pearls, while the aborigines just wanted the shells to ground them up and take them inland. It was an interesting story and I felt compelled to put something down.

Demetrius Romeo: One of the songs that stands out from the pack is ‘Seeds’ and I say this because, to me, the introduction sounds almost like an Irish kind of folk song. Is it fair to say that it stands out? And how does it fit in to the rest of the collection?

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: It is a little bit anomalous because it’s a tune where I wanted to muck around with the time signatures and it has a waltzy ‘jig’ sort of feel to it because the ‘three’ component of the 5/4 time that it’s in is very strong. And also the song actually starts with a single bar of three, so it feels as if it’s in 3/4, but then it goes straight into 5/4 and then dances around. I liked that rhythmic idea and I suppose I decided to sing over the 5/4 time signature to kind of disguise it, so that it didn’t come over as a straight 5/4 composition. That was just a fun thing to do.

The whole metaphoric value of seeds, whether they be seeds in conversation or ideas or letters, we all have seeds in our lives some of which grow and some of which don’t. I imagined that in the context of overhearing someone’s conversation in a park. That was the background for that song – a combination of music I had been working on first, and then pulling in lyrics that I had been working on in another area. That was where seeds came from.

Demetrius Romeo: Are you going to continue to divide your time between drums and guitars?

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: Definitely. I’ve been with the Waifs now for six years and I think the first five of those six years were an incredibly dense period of touring. I remember our first American tour, we were out for over eight months, just touring and that was very intense. We went to a lot of festivals and got a lot of great music under our belt and made some really good friends over there and realised the scope of the folk scene in America is wonderful… broad. But now that Viki has had a little baby, we won’t be touring half as much as we used to, and it provides me with a great opportunity to play my music to the really small folk clubs and the little house concert series that we hear of. Also, being a member of the Waifs, you get your e-mails returned. You don’t necessarily get a gig out of it, but you get an e-mail returned. That way I’ve made a lot of connections. I’m just gonna play as much as I can, whether it be the guitar or the drums.

I don’t think I’m going to play drums for anyone other than the Waifs. I’ve had a few offers, but my commitment first and foremost is to the Waifs. I don’t want to be in a position where I have to say ‘I can’t tour’ because I’m playing drums for someone else. That won’t happen.

So, yeah, I’m going to balance the two up for as… well, forever, really, that’s the goal of life: to play music until you drop dead. That’s mine, anyway!

Demetrius Romeo: An excellent attitude! David Ross Macdonald, thank you very much.

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: Thanks for your time. Appreciate it.

Here’s the bit that got broadcast as part of the music news segment on ABC NewsRadio – but really, rather than read it again just to see where I made the crafty edits, why not download it here and listen to how I made crafty edits instead?

Debbie Spillane: New releases: let’s have a look at what’s happening in that department. Far From Here by David Ross Macdonald.

Demetrius Romeo: Let me tell you about David Ross Macdonald. You don’t know him, but you do know him: he’s the drummer for the Waifs, but he’s also a great guitarist and a folk singer, and he sings what he calls ‘darkfolk songs’. Now, I did have a chat with him, I will play the interview, but before I do, let’s have a listen to some of his instrumental guitar work, because his first album, Southern Crossing, was a series of instrumentals played on handcrafted Australian guitars.

Soundbite: ‘Old Macs Tractor’ played on a Wright Guitar by David Ross Macdonald, from his album Southern Crossing

Demetrius Romeo: David, you play guitar and you sing, and yet you’re also the drummer for the Waifs. How did you end up on the drumstool behind that band?

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: That was a very, very, very fortunate thing. I was playing with a Perth band called the Ragabillys. We were at the Port Fairy Folk Festival and the Waifs were there as well. They saw me play and I was having a good time and we drank a lot and we had a lot of laughs and then Donna suggested I should go on tour with them. I said, ‘Sure!’ We had a great time and it grew from that.

Demetrius Romeo: Your earlier album, Southern Crossing, is a collection of guitar instrumentals played specifically on handcrafted Australian guitars, so clearly you are a guitarist as well as a drummer. How do you divide your interests, and how did that particular album come to be?

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: Guitar came first. I did classical guitar when I was a teenager and then I really dropped it, to become a geologist. So when I went to university, I did that. For a number of years I endured geology as a profession. And then I went to jazz college! I played drums at jazz college. I taught myself drums, and for some reason, they accepted me. I was always surrounded by music and keen to pursue both drums and guitar. Then a long time later, I was in Toronto, very jaded with the touring thing with the Waifs, and we were coming up to the end of the tour in 2001 and I just decided that I would do something completely different, and that would be to visit all these luthiers that I’d heard about in Australia and take my laptop and a couple of microphones and one by one, I visited these luthiers and just record.

Demetrius Romeo: Your new album, Far From Here, has an ensemble playing on it. Tell me about how Far From Here came into being.

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: I’d been writing songs for a long time but I had never really seen people performing… ‘obscure folk music’, I suppose. I mean, singer-songwriter stuff that’s not ‘pop music’. A lot of the material that I write has certain abstractions and poetic quality to it that isn’t something that you’d hear on popular radio, so it isn’t something that I would ever pursue or tour or record. But after my experiences of seeing people like Steve Earl and Kieran Kane and Kevin Welch and Kelly Jo Phelps – these folks write amazingly abstract and beautiful as well as really touching and simple folk music – it gave me the confidence to pursue it myself. And I called it Far From Here because I was never anywhere in particular, so I thought that was the only name I could give the record.

Demetrius Romeo: One of the songs that stands out from the pack is ‘Seeds’ and I say this because, to me, the introduction sounds almost like an Irish kind of folk song. Is it fair to say that it stands out? And how does it fit in to the rest of the collection?

DAVID ROSS MACDONALD: It is a little bit anomalous because it’s a tune where I wanted to muck around with the time signatures and it has a waltzy ‘jig’ sort of feel to it because the ‘three’ component of the 5/4 time that it’s in is very strong. And also the song actually starts with a single bar of three, so it feels as if it’s in 3/4, but then it goes straight into 5/4 and then dances around. I liked that rhythmic idea and I suppose I decided to sing over the 5/4 time signature to kind of disguise it, so that it didn’t come over as a straight 5/4 composition.

Soundbite: ‘Seeds’ by David Ross Macdonald, from his album Far From Here

Debbie Spillane: That’s ‘Seeds’, from David Ross Macdonald’s new album Far From Here, and David’s currently playing gigs around Australia with details on his website.

News of a bunch of Fagans performance dates gives me an excellent excuse to post the interview I did with musician and poet Kate Fagan earlier this year. The Fagans are about the most famous Australian folk family. They began as a duo consisting of Bob and Margaret, but expanded to a trio pretty much as soon as daughter Kate could carry a tune. Son James brought them to a quartet. James's partner Nancy Kerr, with whom James performs regularly in the UK as Kerr & Fagan - regularly enough for the pair to be voted Best Folk Duo in the 2003 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards - brings the combo to a quintet. However, the erstwhile activities of the various family members means that being able to see the complete line-up is a treat that doesn't present itself often enough.

I don't remember the exact date of broadcast of this interview, but it was the Saturday before a Sunday evening fundraiser for Indonesian women factory workers, held at Newtown's Sandringham Hotel (the 'Sando') at which Kate was headlining. The support acts consisted of my buddy Emma Driver, as well as another woman guitar balladeer called Bridie O'Brien, whose work I liked enough to buy the EP she had on sale. I already owned a copy of Emma's disc, and of Kate's book of poetry, so when I found myself in possession of the winning raffle ticket that entitled the holder to both discs and the book, I chose to step up and request that the raffle be drawn again. This may have looked like altruism, but it was shameless self-promotion: there was now a whole room of people who knew exactly who I was. ("Oh look, it's Dom, that shameless self-promoter.") Which was good - I didn't have time to stick around and network - I'd been invited by Peter Koppes of The Church to check out his daughters' band at the Annandale Hotel. Consisting of three twenty-something girlies in skimpy tops and miniskirts with guitars strapped onto them, plus a tank-topped heavy metal boy behind the drums, Peter Koppes' daughters' band was known as 'Menage a Trois' and they played a loud, fuzzy, gloriously noisy brand of guitar-based pop, and, particularly following the political/folk gig I'd just been at, were fun and sexy if not for all the right reasons, then certainly for some of the wrong ones.

Keep whatever mental image you've made somewhere handy for easy reference: a chat with ern or der of the Menage a Trois will appear here some time. For now, here's Kate Fagan. And, in case you've forgotten where we began before I took you meandering through these various freely associated reminiscinces, the Fagans' performance dates are listed below the interview.

Demetrius Romeo: Although the Fagans have been together for thirty years, we only have three CDs from them. Are the Fagans primarily a performing unit rather than a recording unit?

KATE FAGAN: In a sense, performing with your family goes with the territory of this kind of music, what would now be seen as 'roots-based acoustic music'. It's not unusual for people to perform with their families, and the idea of that being directed towards performing out in public is not really what it's about. You start with your family, you're playing around the table, it's just going on as something that's happening in the background. And performing with your family has got all those... you can imagine the overtones in terms of how it is for your kids to be jumping up on stage beside you. There are plenty of bands in Australia who do the same thing, particularly in country music and things like that. Think of Anne Kirkpatrick and Slim Dusty - not that they would be related explicitly to our music. So yeah, there's a tendency to be working less as an 'on-the-road' band and more as getting together and doing one-off gigs and playing when we can. But we do do a lot of our communicating on stage. We won't see each other for a while and we'll jump up on stage, and suddenly you're having the conversations you haven't had for three or four months.

Demetrius Romeo: Has it ever been detrimental? Has there ever been a full-on 'revenger's tragedy' opera taking place?

KATE FAGAN: I don't think so. But I can remember getting on stage mid-conversation when something probably should have been resolved beforehand, and just letting it smooth its way out during the set.

Demetrius Romeo: On the first Fagan's album, Common Treasury, you've got a 'trad. arranging' credit, whereas by the third album Turning Fine, you're writing songs. I imagine you've actually been writing songs for a lot longer than that, though...

KATE FAGAN: Sure.

Demetrius Romeo: Can you remember the first time you wrote a song?

KATE FAGAN: Probably the first song that stuck around was... I would have been... I used to arrange a lot of poems to music. I always had both relationships going at once - my love of poetry and my love of music. So I used to set a lot of other people's poems to music.

Demetrius Romeo: As a published poet, some of the reviews I've read have described you as a lyrical poet; at the same time, your lyrics are poetic. When you set out writing, do you know from the onset whether you're writing a song or a poem?

KATE FAGAN: That is something I defintely know, whether you're in one genre or 'creative zone', or the other. But I never know where either of them is going to end up. I just know when they're starting and when they're finishing, both for poems and for songs. I think one difference would be that a poem for me often begins out of a space of thinking a couple of lyrical phrases that I hear in relation to the world, and the equivalent to that [in music] for me would be a riff on the guitar - I get a riff in my head and a couple of words that match that riff and we're off.

Demetrius Romeo: Can you give me an example of your poetry?

KATE FAGAN: Okay. It's from a book called The Long Moment. This is a poem called 'The Waste of Tongues', and there are seventeen parts to it. It's a long, serial work. I tend to work in series that are sort of 'improvisations' of thinking and word, in a sense, not unlike musical improvisations. This one has, I suppose, a social and political impetus to it. I'll just read one piece of it.

For a fortnight you speak to me
from the furthest lake, each encounter
along its glazed perimeter. Nothing is dusty
because everything is dust. Experience
in transposition, a memory sets firm without
indifference, a phone on the hill blinks
in and out as we hang from a satellite.
At the hotel bar you wonder who pays
for a silver and rose underworld, as though
when he said spectacular, he meant it.

Demetrius Romeo: I always have a gut reaction after a poem, to ruin it by going, 'so what does it all mean?' Do you find that the way you communicate with your audience is different with poetry, than with music?

KATE FAGAN: Definitely.

Demetrius Romeo: How does it differ?

KATE FAGAN: I think music sets off a really different series of reactions in people, often very physical, even though I have had that at poetry readings as well - people being very moved by something that is appropriate to them or relates to their particular life experience or something they were feeling. A friend of mine said to me once, "I didn't know I thought that, and then I heard you read that and I realised I'd been thinking that all along," which was probably the highest compliment.

Demetrius Romeo: What project do you see yourself pursuing next? Are we currently in poetry mode or music mode?

KATE FAGAN: A little bit of both. What I'd really like to do now is get my solo album off the ground because I've written all the material for it and I've been working a lot over the last decade with the Fagans. I'm currently doing all the 'pre-' work for my album right now. Most of it's written. So that's the next big thing on the horizon for me.

Song: 'Joan of Arc' - The Fagans

The Fagans: March-April gigs confirmed

Saturday 13th-Sunday 14th March
Blue Mountains Festival, Katoomba
The Fagans appearing @ 11am (main stage) and 7pm (Guinness stage) on Saturday,
and 5pm (Clarendon Hotel) Sunday
Kate appearing @ 3pm (Clarendon Hotel) on Saturday

Saturday 20th March, 8.30pm:
The Fagans @ Brunswick Music Festival, Melbourne
East Brunswick Club Hotel
Bookings: (03) 9388 1460 Booking Number 23 (Festival bookings)
Internet bookings: www.brunswickmusicfestival.com.au

Wednesday 24th March:
10.00pm: The Fagans live on Late Night Live, Radio National

** Saturday 27th March, 8.00pm sharp **
The Fagans @ The Harp Hotel
900 Princes Highway, Tempe, 9559 6300, $15/$12
Opening set by Kate

Thursday 8 April - Monday 12 April (Easter):
National Folk Festival
Many gigs in many combinations!

Wednesday April 21, 8pm, Town Hall or Seymour Centre (venue tbc):
The Fagans @ benefit for East Timor and the Kirsty Sword Gusmao Foundation.