I'm going to be there, Andrew's not going this year, so we won't be hanging out at three am and the Legends Lounge at West Leeks Club watching people's square dance into the way hours. Unfortunately, you won't be doing that by myself.
From The Australian. This is the weekend edition of The Front. I'm Claire Harvey. Last time we sat down for a chat with review editor Tim Douglas. He just returned from a trip to Japan exploring the world of Yayoi Kasama.
Just below that is this pumpkin. I think it's a real metaphor for Sama herself.
You know, it sits.
There on this precipice. It feels like it could be just one calamitous event away from terminal decline, and yet it endures.
Tim's a very smart guy and he loves his high end art forms. But he also loves a plaintive vocal and a jangling guitar, and that's why he spent this week at the fifty third Tamworth Country Music Festival. When it came to throwing a coin in the jukebox and choosing a song, jazz legend Charlie Parker, the virtuoso genius who changed the art form forever, would always choose a country song. Friends would ask why country. It's the stories man, was his famous answer, and a century on, it turns
out today's superstars are also a little bit country. From Beyonce to Post Malones, country music is one of the world's most popular art forms, and it's all about the stories, relatable, honest and just so damn catchy.
When I was a kid, you know, we did this trip up through the central Australia and it must have been a big time for John Williamson in the late eighties, early nineties, and he had this song called the Boomerang Cafe and it went at the Boomerang Cafe where I first met you, where you with lipstick on your lips, with lipstick on vinegar on your chips.
Beautiful.
John Williamson, who turns eighty this year, is still touring and he performed on the big stage last night in Tamworth. Tim I always am intrigued by Tamworth as an expression of Australian culture, an expression that's kind of, you know, framed in this very American art form of country music. How has Australia and Tamworth in particular, claimed country music as its own.
I think there's been a lot of snobbery over the last kind of four or five decads towards country music. But until you've kind of taken step on the invariably melting bitumen of Tamworth in high summer and immerse yourself in this most singular festival on the Australian calendar, you really can't pass judgment because it is a festival like no other. It has since nineteen seventy three owned country music.
Since that time it has grown and grown and grown, and so too has Australia's country music industry at a local level and Australia's consumption of country music. It's grown exponentially.
Why is Timworth surviving as a festival when so many other music festivals are really struggling in the post COVID era, It's a great question.
Tamworth is unique because it's a community owned and run event. The council does most of the work, and most of the local venues licensed and otherwise run their own shows. It's overseen by the council, so it's very different. I mean, obviously there are commercial imperatives from the artists and also obviously the council. But it is a grassroots festival through and through.
Is there something too about the demographic tim, I'm presuming it's not quite the same young people who are queuing up at the pill testing tent who come to the Tamworth Music Festival. Or am I wrong about that?
Well?
Look, there are pills being tested, but sometimes when Webster packs no, I mean I'm being flippant there. Of course, this is a really interesting thing. It's not all boot scooting and square dancing. There's an old country side to the festival too. There's a place called the World's Dog and the Tamworth Hotel which posts you know, these alternative country musicians like Georgia State Line, Henry Wagons comes and plays there and so you get the hip country kids
coming along too. Of course you've got you know Casey Chambers, you're John Williamson's De Troy Cassa.
Daies etc.
Who sell out the big ticketed shows at the Entertainment Center and the town Hall.
But there are so many things happening.
We're talking about more than eight hundred artists and five thousand shows across ten days. It is the biggest live music event in the country, indeed in the Southern hemisphere.
So it's a massive event.
You're going solo this year and what are you looking forward to seeing.
I'm really looking forward to Peel Street. Now Peel Street of course, the main street running through Tamworth. Four hundred buskers every year, at any time of the day populate this little boulevard, the Boulevard of dreams they call it. Keith Urban was spotted on Peel Street. Casey Chambers, Becky Cole, Troy cassa daily. They all did their time as buskers and now they're the senior members of the Australian country music industry and they give back to these young kids.
And you know, it's a real kind of organism, the country music festival. People are always giving back. Yeah.
And how does it fit into the kind of landscape of live music in Australia. Team We often hear talk about how live music is dead, that pubs aren't allowed to play loud music anymore because residential areas have grown up around them, that it's difficult to fight with the pokes to actually get a space to play in the venues that have nurtured some of our great bands. What do you think about how country music and particularly Tenworth fits into.
That Spotify I put out a report last year that said Australia was the third highest consumer of country music in the world. The US, of course, the spiritual home of country and western first, then Canada second, and Australia was third. And I think that's a really interesting statistic to bear in mind because for anyone who thinks that he's a blip on the cultural landscape, I mean it really is not. Also, everyone's a country music star now know.
Beyonce last year had a huge hit with her country album. We are critically assessing this week in review, Ringo Star's latest album is a country album. And you know, in case we hadn't jumped the shark already, the Whittles have a country album coming out in March, and this is no small fry lp. We've got collaborations with Dolly Parton, Awful Peck, Troy Cassa Daily, the Wolf Brothers. It's called Wiggle Up, Gide Up, and you should expect to hear
much about that. Everyone wants a piece of this pie. Now the dial has really shifted. It is no longer something we.
Do in the shadows. Country music is a big player.
What have been some of the musical highlights that you've seen over the years at Tamworth.
Well, I have to thank music writer Andrew McMillan for putting me onto Fanny Lumsden. She's a country music staff from the Snowy Mountains in South Wales. She grew up in West Wylong and indeed has a song about growing up on the other side of the Great Dividing Range.
She's a fantastic singer.
Her brother and her husband are in her band and her shows are just so joyous. Andrew and I saw Fanny out at Tamworth a couple of years ago.
It was really one of the highlights.
Andrew also wrote a piece last year about the best gigs of twenty twenty four and one of his highlights was Casey Chambers at the Town Hall in January last year for the festival.
We're both there for that show.
You Better Yourself, and she finished it with this rousing rendition of Eminem's Lose Yourself, best known from eight Mile.
Only Girt one shot.
Do not miss your chance.
To blow this up, but son. She starts off with a banjo and her just singing and ends with Casey screaming at the top of her lungs and kind of collapsing on.
The floor as a dad. Bill Chambers is kind of wailing.
On guitar and her partner Brandon on another guitar and the drum. It was the most phenomenal musical experience for me too of twenty twenty four.
We just sat there and had her hair blown back.
Tim Douglas is editor of the australians Beloved Weekend Arts section Review. Tim and the team cover the arts twenty four to seven and you can check it out anytime at the Australian dot com dot A. Thanks for joining us this week on the front. Our team is Kristin Amiot, Leat, Sam mcglue, Tiffany Dimack, Joshua Burton, Stella McKenna, Stephanie Coombs, Jasper Leek, who wrote our music as well as producing and editing this episode, and meet Claire Harvey.