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.

From an EMI press release:

EMI Music Australia are proud to announce that Slim Dusty’s new album ‘Columbia Lane - The Last Sessions’ has achieved Gold sales [ie, sold 35,000 copies] less than two weeks after its release.

‘Columbia Lane - The Last Sessions’, which debuted at #5 on the National ARIA Album Chart on Monday (the highest album debut for this week), sits comfortably in the Top 5 above albums from the Black Eyed Peas, Jack Johnson, Jet & George. It also debuted at #1 in the ARIA National Country Album Chart.

The 1st single from the album, ‘Answer to Billy’ is also the #1 Country Airplay Single in the country.

“Slim and EMI were a great team, and they still are,” Slim’s wife Joy McKean said. “Slim's last recordings are among his best and a fitting finale to an inspiring and remarkable career that never ceased to amaze me."

Slim as we all know, was no stranger to Pop Chart success throughout his long career, but it is coincidental that Slims last solo studio album release, ‘Looking Forward Looking Back’ also debuted at #5 in the National ARIA Album Chart in July 2000. ‘Looking Forward Looking Back’ then went on to sell over 180K and spending over two months in the Top 10 of the National ARIA Album Chart.

It should also be noted that Slim received his first Gold Award in 1957 for his international hit ‘Pub With No Beer’, and it became the first official Gold award presented in Australia.

Slim Dusty. The Legend Continues…

Well I certainly played my part in perpetuating the legend!

And speaking of legends, I must express gratitude as the recipient of a ticket for an upcoming Waifs gig. Read what I have to say about the Waifs, or what they have to say about themselves.

When Slim Dusty set about recording his last album, he did so knowing the end was near. Despite terminal illness, he managed to lay down seven very fine vocal and guitar tracks before passing away. Slim’s widow Joy McKean saw the seven tracks to completion and release as Columbia Lane, album number 107 at the end of Slim’s sixty-year career.

Although not an ardent lover of country music, I come to it via the musicians I’m into: Elvis Costello and T-Bone Burnett’s country turn as ‘The Coward Brothers’, for the single ‘The People’s Limousine’, and Costello’s countrified King of America album, which Burnett produced; Bob Dylan’s excursion into country and the Rolling Stones’ excursions into dirty blues versions of the same. Nowadays, there is a respect given to country music via its rock ’n’ roll end, nebulously labelled ‘alt.country’. (“We keep hearing the words ‘alt.country’,” the Waifs’ Donna Simpson told me when I interviewed her. She had no idea what to make of the epithet with which her band had been tarred. “What is ‘alt’, ‘dot’, ‘country’? ‘Alternative country’? ‘Not quite country’? ‘Not quite folk’? I don’t know. It’s just acoustic music – a bit of country, a bit of blues, just whatever we’re inspired by.”)

Oh yeah, this went to air on Saturday 6 March 2004.

Music: ‘Nature’s Gentleman’ - Slim Dusty

Demetrius Romeo: Joy, this album ‘Columbia Lane’ consists of some of the songs that Slim Dusty was working on before he passed away. How much work had to go into the seven songs contained herein to prepare them for release?

JOY MCKEAN: Not a lot vocally, but some of the instrumental parts had to be completed because Slim was concentrating on getting down the vocals and his guitar. They were the main things he had to concentrate on getting done.

Demetrius Romeo: How difficult is it working with Slim’s legacy after his passing?

JOY MCKEAN: It is difficult at times and yet, over the years, I’ve always worked with Slim on projects and albums and I am training myself to try and look at this as another one his projects that I have to go ahead and do my normal work on. I think that is the way I’m getting through it because, of course, it’s difficult when I think of him, and of him working on these songs.

Demetrius Romeo: Are there other projects that you would continue with after this? I understand that there was a live album planned at one stage.

JOY MCKEAN: There was a live album planned. There’s not a lot of material. He’s not going to ‘do a Jim Reeves’ with stacks and stacks of things coming out of the woodwork simply because Slim was a very prolific recording man. As you know, this was album 107. As soon as he'd get things ready, they were more-or-less released, you see. So there’s not a big backlog.

Music: ‘Long Distance Driving’ - Slim Dusty

Demetrius Romeo: The title Columbia Lane I understand refers to Slim’s home studio, which itself was named after the studio Slim used to record at when he was first signed to Regal Zonophone. Was there a lot of sentimentality and love for his career throughout?

JOY MCKEAN: Yes, you see, Columbia Lane was the lane everybody had to walk down to get to the recording studios and it meant a lot to Slim because when Slim began recording, Regal Zonophone was the only label at the only recording company in Australia. So to walk down Columbia Lane in the footsteps of people like Peter Dawson, Gladys Moncreif, all the radio big bods was a terrific thrill for Slim.
Are there other songs that just couldn’t be completed for release from this project?

Music: ‘Long Distance Driving’ - Slim Dusty

Demetrius Romeo: Listening to the songs, they’re all trucking songs. What was the project they were originally designed for?

JOY MCKEAN: Actually they were designed for a trucking album but you’ll see that ‘Nature’s Gentleman’ is very different. It was written by his mate James Blundell, and he’d had that one for a while and he wanted to get it on record, he really did. He hadn’t been able to fit it into a project in the previous year, but he was determined he was going to get that on record even though it wasn’t a trucking song. So he did that, and then of course, the Don Walker one which is so very different, but that is slightly trucking. And then of course ‘Blue Hills in the Distance’ is about being on the Gann, that new train. Rather, I should say it was a trip on the old one it was written about actually.

Music: ‘Blue Hills In The Distance’ - Slim Dusty

Demetrius Romeo: Despite being a prolific songwriter himself, I see Slim does sing a lot of other people’s songs. How would he go about chosing what songs he would record for his next album?

JOY MCKEAN: He always looked for something he could relate to, that he felt the people he knows so well could relate to, he looked for something that had a bit of grit to it, something ‘real’ to it. He had a gift being an ordinary Australian bloke. He had that gift of relating to what he could relate to, and because he was like so many other Australians, they could relate to it. That’s what he looked for all the time: really good, strong lyrics. And even if he only got lyrics, he could set them to music that would bring out the story and what the lyrics were trying to say.

Demetrius Romeo: Joy, for a lot of people, the name ‘Slim Dusty’ tends to conjure those more well known songs like ‘Pub With No Beer’ or ‘Duncan’, songs that we all know or know of. But having had such an extensive recording career, there’s such a depth of songs to draw from. Do you think that this is a time that more people will come to get to know Slim’s work, and what will they find if they do?

JOY MCKEAN: Well I think that a lot of people may decide to have a closer look. It’s like I’m hearing from overseas people saying, “I’ve only just found Slim Dusty in the last month or so”. If they do listen, they’ll find a very different horde of work than just ‘Pub With No Beer’ and ‘Duncan’. Slim was recording for a period of sixty years and he was drawing from real-life stories and experiences, so if you listen to a body of his work, Dom, you’ll hear all sorts of changes: changes in people’s outlook, in the Australian culture, the way we look at things and all the different things we’re interested in. If you listen to a selection of Slim’s work over that sixty years, you really will be amazed at the changes his music portrays.

Music: ‘Get Along’ - Slim Dusty

Demetrius Romeo: Joy McKean, thank you very much.

JOY MCKEAN: Thanks so much, Dom, it’s been really nice speaking with you.

Music: ‘Get Along’ - Slim Dusty

En route to Italy last year in order to settle my dead father’s estate, I detoured through Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival. A particularly fun haunt for white collar drunkenness during daylight hours was the so-called ‘Famous’ Spiegeltent, in which fabulously talented musicians such as Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, Paul Capsis and The Waifs chose to play.

I tried to use my Festival Media Pass and what ABC NewsRadio bona fides I could manage in order to wrangle entry to the Waifs' gig plus maybe land an interview thereafter. The ‘friend-of-a-friend’ network paid off as far as the performance was concerned. As for the interview, however, I was told beforehand that Donna would be happy to submit to my questioning, but it would cost me a bacardi-and-coke. By the end of the show, her price had risen to a double. When I got backstage, she laughed and said she hadn’t really been serious, but accepted the drink. I’m glad. Through the course of the interview, where I traced biography in order to set up a question, I casually informed Donna that her dad had died some time after he’d taught her to play guitar, which is why she and her sister set off across Australia in a campervan. “That’s so funny,” Donna insisted, laughing. It turns out that Mr Simpson was in fact alive and well. “You’ve got to promise to keep that in the interview.” In hindsight, I realise that I was probably ascribing to Donna and Vikki’s lives the plot of a later episode of Sea Change. Scoff if you may, but there was a time when I consumed music and music journalism the same way I consumed television: ripped to the gills!

Oh, I guess I should mention that I took photographs of the gig with my then-brand new toy, a digital camera. These toys aren’t designed to operate under stage lights, hence the need to turn some of the lesser photos into ‘psychedelic mini-posters’. With the flash, there was just too much light. But enough disclaimers…

Music: ‘London Still’ – The Waifs

Demetrius Romeo: How did you and your sister come to music?

DONNA SIMPSON: We started just playing when we were fifteen or sixteen and just really loved playing around Albany – our home town in Western Australia – in tennis clubs and pubs. Pretty much the day Vikki finished school, I bought an old campervan and went and picked her up. It had psychedelic yellow fluff through the roof.

Demetrius Romeo: At some point you picked up a third member of the band.

DONNA SIMPSON: Yeah, we found Josh up in Broome playing bass in a rock ’n’ roll band. He kinda liked our sound so we auditioned him for five minutes and he joined.

Demetrius Romeo: Was it a big change to go from a duo to a trio?

DONNA SIMPSON: Not at all. It was really exciting to have a guy on the road touring with us. It was all about traveling back then; it wasn’t about the music. We wanted to travel around Australia. Everyone else was picking fruit and waitressing and we just thought, you know, ‘hell, we can sing, so we’ll get this guy as well…’ and we just kept going. It was really more about the traveling in those early days.

Demetrius Romeo: Was it perceived as ‘weird’ by friends and family for you to just go off into the night in a campervan and not be seen again?

DONNA SIMPSON: It was, because we’re from a pretty small town. I used to see cars from Victoria come through our town with a different number plate and I’d look at them and think, ‘gee, I really want to be doing that one day – have a different number plate. They’re so cool, they’re traveling…’ It was kind of scary; we’d never driven in traffic lights before, we’d never seen a McDonalds. I was twenty-two years old and I’d never done any of that. It was kind of scary and exhilarating. We didn’t stray too far from home in the beginning, just went four hundred kilometres away, and then just kept heading north. Everyone was freaking a bit. We were getting all sorts of gigs in biker bars, and then we went up all through the mining sites, up through the Kimberley region. Through the zinc minds and diamond minds in Argyle. It was incredible.

Music: ‘London Still’ – The Waifs

Demetrius Romeo: So much of your music speaks of travel. A lot of it has the railroad motif with the harmonica that is common to those forms of music, be they folk or blues or even country. How much does it inform your music?

DONNA SIMPSON: Mate, we’ve been on the road for eleven years; this is pretty much all we know. It’s been a long time. This is our life and this is what we do, and I don’t think any of us can write about anything that we’re not experiencing, we’re quite honest songwriters in that sense.

Demetrius Romeo: You have one of the few distinguishing attributes for a support band that has opened for Bob Dylan, in that you’re about to do it for a third time. He’s asked you onto a third tour. Tell me about it from your perspective.

DONNA SIMPSON: It’s surreal, in a way, to be totally honest. I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan, always have been, and being from the town that I’m from, country Western Australia – somewhere where you’d see people on TV and never ever think they’re real or listen to records without thinking that these people exist – and then to be touring with Bob, it’s such an honour. We just feel so blessed to have this tour. And then again, we’ve worked really, really hard. And I prayed so hard when I was fifteen years old to get this tour. I’m thirty-three now and it’s coming through!

Demetrius Romeo: Have you had the opportunity to jam with him yet?

DONNA SIMPSON: Yeah, we sang ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ with him in North Carolina. About a month ago Vikki and I got dragged onto the stage. He said, [assuming gruff, Dylanesque growl] ‘get the girls!’ So we came onto stage and tried to sing the ‘ooohs’ with a big grin on our faces. It’s hard to sing ‘oooh’ with a smile.

Demetrius Romeo: ‘Home’ is an interesting concept when you’re always on the road and you’re engaging with so many communities and you’re singing about all these places that you’re visiting and it’s imbuing itself into your music. Is Australia still ‘home’ for you?

DONNA SIMPSON: Absolutely. I love it. Even though we spend most of our time away and I’m actually based somewhere else now, Australia will always be home. Always. It’s in my blood. The smell, the plants. I know the land. I come over here [Scotland] and I get into the mountains and I wouldn’t know how to survive. But in Australia I know the snakes and the spiders and all the plants and the orchids and the bush. We grew up pretty much in the bush. To have dirt on your feet again is really nice.

Music: ‘London Still’ – The Waifs

Okay now. Check out the photos here. And check out the upcoming tour dates because if you are ever in the same part of the world as the Waifs, you really ought to see them!