On The Road

Always Forward, Always New

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…

Thanks For Your Feedback

 
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…

Tour Lyfe #1

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…

Castlemaine Golden Sounds Keynote Speech 2021

Next week I'm setting off on tour and announcing some exciting stuff so I'll be pretty flat out for the next three weeks. I'll endeavour to still post every week, but if there's a lull in proceedings, you'll know why :)

 This week is the transcript of a speech I was asked to make at the 2021 music conference Goldsounds in Castlemaine, regional Victoria. 
 
On my first ever trip to NSW…

My Life as a Midnight Oil


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…

Made in Manchester

We played nine shows opening for The Teskey Brothers around the UK and Europe in September this year, including four in England. The tour culminated in Thursday and Friday nights in Manchester and the Saturday in Birmingham. I was particularly pumped for Manchester. I’d always romanticised the city, maybe due to my obsessive teen love of Oasis or the ubiquitous influence of that other 90s cultural spectre - David Beckham’s sixpack. I…