f36 H


e does admit, however, that the switch from medicine to music was tough in the early days. “Not musically – it was very liberating musically – but tough financially. I didn’t slide down a hill, I jumped off a cliff. We strug- gled early on and I felt a long way from home. Nancy and I have shared the same madness on the journey.”


Nancy has flirted with songwriting in the past, but some downtime in Australia last year focused her mind in an unexpect- ed manner as she suddenly produced a ream of material reflecting the partnership’s dual cultures. “I’ve always wanted to write an album but it was a question of the right time and setting,” she says. “We’ve had some really busy years but when we were in Aus- tralia there was some thinking time. I’ve practised songwriting but I’ve never been prolific, but I just reached a point where I felt con- fident about doing it and suddenly I’d written 12 new songs.”


Nine of them made it on the album. “It was quite a creative time,” she giggles. “I knew the shape of the album we like to make and the kind of songs we like to sing and put out there. I wanted a sea song and a peace song and a song that sounded English with maybe a slightly questionable time signature, so I wrote them and we made them happen.”


The first one she wrote for the album was Flowerpicker’s Song – a song about migrant workers which pre-dated the Oz ‘purple patch’ but planted the seed for the deluge that followed. Opening track Queen Of Waters was born of watching friends leaving their home on a canal for a new life on dry land and the accurate pre- monition that she and James would soon be following. “That song sprung out pretty much fully formed and after that the whole pro- cess got much easier.”


The peace song (Sweet Peace) was inspired by Pete Seeger’s


90th birthday, while Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday is celebrated on Rammed Earth; the Oz side of the equation is reflected in tracks like Dolerite Skies (about a drought in Tasmania) and, most strikingly, Jerilderie, which takes its title and creative pulse from the New South Wales town where the outlaw Ned Kelly dictated his defiant last message to the world in 1879.


“Nancy was saying we needed another song on the album for my voice and I went out to the shops and by the time I got back she’d written Jerilderie,” he says, still apparently shocked by the experience. “I was maybe gone two hours at the most but when I got back it was there – this haunting, stark tune with a really con- cise set of words all ready to sing. And it’s such a powerful song. Nancy has known me for 15 years as a singer and she’s written four songs which suit me perfectly because she wrote them with my voice in mind. We’ve always searched for songs we can relate to but there’s nothing more real than your own words in that setting. Nancy hasn’t set out explicitly to tell our stories but they inevitably contain a fair bit of our truths and I’m very proud of that.”


s he cheerfully acknowledges, James himself isn’t a songwriter (“I’m not short of words generally but songwriting just isn’t something I do”); although he’s created a rich chest of original tunes, he’s never per- formed a self-written song… unless you count those he makes up on a daily basis to sing to baby Hamish. “I could make a double album of children’s songs I’ve written but there’s a few too many wombats in them…”


A


He once consulted the great Australian-based Scottish song- maker Eric Bogle on his abortive attempts at songwriting. “Eric asked me how old I was and when I said 25 he said ‘You’ve still got four years until you hit 29’. I said ‘What’s the significance of 29?’ and he said ‘I never wrote a good song until I was 29’. So I’ve always had the Eric Bogle ‘29’ in my mind and when I got to 35 I thought jeez, I might be letting this go. And now I’m 38…”


Still, with Nancy’s dramatic late development as a writer, they now have that particular base covered. Her own previous reticence in putting her songs into the public arena was largely based around the reverence in which she held her own favourite songwriters – specifically Leon Rosselson.


“It’s such a high bar to live up to. I grew up listening avidly to Leon Rosselson’s writing, singing and music. He’s a huge influence and still is an absolute favourite. He just blows me away every time I hear him. His imagery captures a time in my childhood, that apoc- alyptic ’80s time when things were rough in so many ways. I was brought up on those songs.”


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100