I’m at Sydney airport. I’m tired and ready to go back to Melbourne. To go home. My partner and I have been out on the road playing shows to launch…

It’s the lushness and colour which struck me the hardest returning from London two weeks ago. Everything is alive and buzzing. Houses are different colours, streets are wide and lined with nature strips. The sky is blue, there are clouds discernible against the sky, instead of the one steady sheen of grey. There is time. And space. 

 

I had a small, unpronounced fear upon returning to Melbourne from London, where I’ve…

Hello everyone. Just before we launch into this week's rant - a side note: Sometimes I post these blogs and, after reading them back (after having already proof read it a lot), I notice something weird and go in to amend it. So, the way to make sure you're reading the 'most properly' edited version is reading this on the website instead of in your email. They're never big changes, but sometimes…

My dear subscribers,

My apologies for not publishing a piece yesterday (Sat evening in UK/Sun morning in AUS). It's grant writing season and that, combined with my new pilates obsession, meant that I ran out of time.

I'm gearing up to get ready to go to Australia for the launch of my record The Second High in a few weeks and things are hectic. I'm working pretty much non-stop preparing for the…

 

There was a special deal at a reformer Pilates studio in Finsbury Park, a ten-minute cycle from where we live. A month of unlimited classes for a reasonable amount of money. Everything in London costs a shitload, though. Prices are inflated, doubled and even multiplied in some cases, compared to the rest of the country, so the Pilates deal seemed reasonable, despite it really not being that good. 

 

Anyway, Pilates…

 

It’s Wednesday evening. I’m sitting upstairs, backstage at the Hamburg show on the outskirts of the Reeperbahn. The venue is surrounded by sex shops and kebab restaurants. I have a banging head cold, inherited from Emily who’s been sick for most of the tour. What with the close quarters and sharing mics, this was bound to happen. 

 

Because I feel like death on a stick, I’m particularly excited to get…

 

I’m writing this backstage in Utrecht, Netherlands. This is the tenth show, or thereabouts, with Emily Barker and it’s been lovely and, mostly, pretty easy travel-wise. The last day has been a bit more hectic though, due to having to travel from Winchester in England after a show there last night to a hotel near the Channel Tunnel, and then continuing on after four hours sleep this morning to Calais and…

I didn’t think I’d have time to write this week but I’ve found a window of time, on a grey and windy Liverpool Friday morning, before we have to check out and move on to the next place. I played in a church in Liverpool last night opening for Emily Barker, a songwriter from WA who spent twenty years living in the UK and who's only just relocated to Fremantle. She’s back…

 

I’m by far at my best in the mornings and, because of the time difference between Melbourne and London, most of my meetings and the sessions with my consulting clients start very early (at 6am). Between 6am and around 1pm I get a huge amount of work done. My mind feels sharp and I have a particular kind of drive. And then I have something to eat, and/or a break, and…

 
On my first ever trip to NSW…

 

The last week has brought with a series of coincidental bits of contact with friends in Canada and it’s thrown me back into the time I spent living there, pre-pandemic. Canada has been a big part of my life over the last ten years and, were it not for Covid, I would most likely still be living there as a permanent resident, which I became just before I left Australia to…

 

As I approach the release of a new album I’m faced again with the task of ‘creating content’ to promote it. This phase fills me with dread. Because of various delays this year, I’ve had to cram two photoshoots, a live video shoot and the filming of an official music video into the month of December and the onslaught of lenses has brought all of my neurosis and insecurities wriggling back…

 

For most of my life, since the death of my mother when I was fourteen, I had thought that sadness and anxiety were…

 
Inevitably, at this time of the year, I start looking back at what’s happened in my life since the last time January 1st happened. Time is a strange beast, divided into neat and strange segments of itself. A year is an important segment. The full turn of the season wheel, the ending and the beginning. 

 

I moved to London on December 31st, 2023. I arrived at 6am at Heathrow…

I worked for a while with a person who didn’t like me. Now, without seeming like a knob, it’s very unusual for me to not get on with people. I’m good at people. I love them and I’m able, for all my other personal failings, to get on and connect with pretty much anyone I meet. I’m a people pleaser from way back, so there’s that, but I’m also genuinely interested…

 

There’s a guy who frequents the café I now make coffee in in central London. I work for a company that provides the catering and hospitality for some of the biggest businesses in the city, including for an internationally renowned structural engineering firm which has offices all over the world, including in Australia. The café I work in is situated on the ground floor of a six-story building in Soho and…

This is a personal account of what it was like to be on the inside of one of the greatest bands Australia has ever, and may ever, produce. It’s the musings of an Oils fan who became, for eighteen glorious months, an Oil themselves. And a personal commentary of the impact they’ve had. On me and on the Australia I know. 

 

I vividly remember meeting the band for the first time…