41 f
Gothic Novel
Australian fiddlesinger Jenny M Thomas is about to visit these shores again with her band Bush Gothic. Christopher Conder encounters the dark side.
I
was in Australia last year. I think you are allowed to count a country as ‘visited’ once you have left the air- port, and I make the above claim on that proviso; my time there consist- ed of a half-hour walk outside Brisbane air- port. As I picked my way over the boggy land alongside the main road, I gratefully gulped down lungfuls of luscious warm air. But the sustained attack of hundreds of ferocious biting insects soon forced me back inside again.
I was near the end of a 39-hour journey to the Solomon Islands (see fR390). To keep me entertained through four different flights, I’d aimed to load my mp3 player with music from each of the countries I was stopping over in. My album to represent
Australia was Bush Gothic by Jenny M Thomas & The System. It’s a masterful collec- tion of Aussie folksongs, sung by the epony- mous Jenny and dynamically accompanied on violin, piano, double bass and drums.
I first saw Jenny perform around a decade ago at the Bedford Hotel in Sid- mouth. Her stark solo fiddlesinging stayed with me and in 2012 I got in touch to ask when she would next be in England. We started an online correspondence that’s continued over the ensuing years. With eight hours to kill in Tokyo airport on the way home from my Pacific adventure, I sat down to listen to the bluesy Japanese sounds of Shunsuke Kimura and Etsuro Ono and tapped out an email to Jenny. A few days later, she replied. The joys of two chil-
dren, regular orchestra commitments and the cost of flights had kept Jenny in the Southern Hemisphere for the last decade, but it was with much excitement that she told me of her return to the UK as the sup- port act for her countrymen, the Spooky Men’s Chorale.
Several months later and Jenny was sit- ting at our dinner table, along with her Bush Gothic bandmate and sometime Spooky Man, Dan Witton. Joining us were fellow fRoots writer Ken Hunt, his wife San- tosh and the renowned Indian violinist Kala Ramnath (fR276). My partner, two more friends and a loveable old Jack Russell also managed to squeeze into our front room and a merry time was had by everyone. Then we suggested Jenny and Kala play for us.
Photo: Christopher Conder
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