The Axis of Awesome - Interview for Aphra Magazine

So, I got to interview my first comedy act last week, The Axis of Awesome. Luckily, they were awesome, so they're not liars. And, even more luckily, they are playing soon at a comedy festival near you! Which would be true if you live near Adelaide or Melbourne.

Get along to see them if you can, and if you can't just google them or hit them up on YouTube. You'll thank me later.

Read the funny stuff they had to say over at Aphra Magazine here.

Dave Rawlings Machine : East Coast Tour February 2016 - Bangalow A & I Hall

Dave Rawlings sings sweet and country. His hat’s not as high as some but it’s perfectly clean and cream. He plays that 80-year-old guitar like it’s gonna take him away to another planet.  At once caressing it, then tugging and working it round a solo to within an inch of its life.

Gillian Welch sings, her straight, wide mouth hiding the smooth and effortless sound that escapes it. There’s no confusing whose voice that is. She smiles frequently, at us, at Dave, enjoying herself and the music they’re making.

It’s Dave’s name on the bill, but on stage the two are equals. One wouldn’t be without the other.

Gillian jokes that it’s going to get hot and sweaty, which is just as well because that’s how they like it. For sure, the night is still and the old hall is an oven full of bodies.

The guitars are pretty high, the jeans straight and not-too-narrow, and the denim double. Americana for the clothes as well as the tunes. Long dresses brush ankles, all checks and laces up the front. Gillian hitches hers up to hoe-down along with us.

Sweet harmonies blend like honey and golden syrup warmed up on the stove. Country, folksy, bluegrass, twang. I’ve no idea what it’s called but I don’t really care. I feel like I’m in a movie, watching myself in the audience of the old hall. Their accents (they all live in Nashville these days) upset my sense of place, so I imagine that instead of surfer vans and nice hatchbacks, outside there are pickup trucks and red tractors.

 Willie Watson is a character. Short, with a scrunched up face and raised eyebrows when he sings. Sounds wonderful. Even though the two stars don’t seem to need him, he makes himself indispensable by tying them together and keeping them riding high. When left on his own, he commands the audience like he’s done it since he was 5.

The fresh-faced, rosy-cheeked American boy (of 29) on the double bass is Paul Kowert. He takes a song and a low baritone emerges from his body behind the big, shiny instrument. He twists and lifts his wooden partner around behind the others, finding the sweet spots where he can listen to the lead vocal and follow a string solo.

Brittany Haas is the girl on the fiddle. For a lass who’s not even 30, she’s got the thing by the balls and steals the show time after time. Who needs a voice when you can make strings sing and skip like she can.

Beside me Tim floats off to heaven. He’s seen the Promised Land, or rather heard it with his own ears, and he can hardly believe it.

Have We Met? Kylie Bridges :: Artist and Collaborator

“We were all set up in Sydney,” says Kylie Bridges, shaking her head in slight disbelief at what she’s about to say. 

“I really didn’t think he’d walk away from it all, but he did and we’re here and we love it”, she says, referring to her husband, Mark, a self-employed bathroom renovator and musician, and their decision to move to Clunes 13 years ago. “I still actually go ‘wow, we really did it’, because we were in a really nice situation, in a little house, great friends, great street”, Kylie explains. 

A chance encounter between their son Josh, a toddler at the time, and a stranger’s playful dog on a Byron Bay beach changed their lives. The dog’s owner told them how he’d lived all over the world but had now settled in Clunes. “‘It was God’s country’, he said, and he told us to ‘do yourselves a favour and just go out into the hinterland while you’re up here’”, Kylie recounts. She never did learn his name.
 

Now primarily a self-employed graphic designer, artist, and mother, Kylie draws on the skills picked up throughout a varied career which has encompassed administration, retail management, call centre work, customer service and hospitality. 

Completing a visual arts degree straight after school, her artistic side has been a constant anchor. “I’ve always done something creative, just whatever I could find”, Kylie says. This year Kylie’s daughter, Elke, the youngest of her four children, is starting school at Clunes Primary, following in the footsteps of her three older brothers, Josh, Toby and Ethan. 

“It will be bittersweet”, Kylie says, of her child-minding days ending and her own pursuits coming to the fore. “This is my year to bring it all together and see what it can be,” she says. “Now I need to work out for me and my career, I’m all grown up. Far out!”  

The past two years have been challenging and enlightening, as Kylie has ventured into the world of hospitality together with her business partner and friend, Emma Nichols. Looking for a way to combine their shared love of art, exhibiting, food and coffee, they took over the Eltham Valley Pantry in 2013 after it was marked for closure. Emma, being a talented cook, and Kylie, being passionate about collaborating and exhibiting with fellow artists, desired to create an art workshop, gallery and coffee house.

“We knew it would be hard but it was so much more than we thought”, Kylie confides.  The pair discovered it wasn’t easy to put their own mark on a space with such a solid, existing reputation, and make it their own. But by the time they decided to move on, Kylie and Emma were able to pinpoint the direction in which their partnership should go next. “Through that process we realised it’s not what we wanted. That’s how Found came to be”, Kylie says.

Found Coffee and Creative was the pair’s second foray into hospitality. A café and a place to exhibit, produce and talk about creative projects in the centre of Lismore, it was a wonderful, if short-lived, venture. While the timing and the building weren’t meant to be, Kylie is proud of what they started there, and the connections they made have continued to bear fruit.

Energised by the idea of connecting with and encouraging fellow creatives, Kylie and Emma have now begun to focus on curating pop-up artisan markets, such as the one held in Bexhill last November. It’s an ideal way to foster a community of talented people and give them access to the public in an encouraging environment.

Collaboration is an essential part of Kylie’s work, both in business and in art. “I really get inspired seeing other people’s talents and creativity. With the portraits that we do, obviously it’s going to have my influence, my style, but I like to know what their scenario is, what their surroundings are”, she explains. Recently, a client was so moved he burst into tears when Kylie unveiled a portrait she’d done of his two sons. “It’s trying to find those stories to put in there, that’s what I really love to do. It’s the challenging thing but the most rewarding part of it.”

www.kyliebridges.com 

Soundtrack to a road trip

Since I've moved towns, my summer road trips have become down right familiar. They take me back to where I grew up, along a road I've travelled a hundred times before. Each year we optimistically pile our kids, Christmas presents, pet, beach gear, party outfits and active wear into the car and set off for our little 3-hour journey down the Pacific Highway.  

I'm not getting to many festivals these days, or going off on spontaneous camping weekends with my mates, so this annual drive is one of my only chances to feel the carefree vibes of taking to the road, air-con in my hair and porta-cot jammed in behind my seat.

This time, we had so much gear we decided to take two cars, and on the return trip I get the kids while Tim has the dog. Luckily, I also get the CD stacker.

Since we're constantly trying to educate our 4.5 year old how to appreciate modern rock music, and since kids are such good learners, he now complains whenever we play anything that "doesn't have enough guitar in it". Ergo, the stacker is a constant rotation of albums which have good "dir-nir" bits in them, loud bits, riffs that you can strum along to on your air guitar while strapped in a 5-point harness. 

Have We Met? David Meldrum :: Paediatrician

Paediatrician, David Meldrum, initially studied engineering at university, but left halfway through his degree. “I couldn’t stand it, quite frankly the maths was beyond me!” he exclaims, sitting in his office in Lismore Base Hospital. After a break working and travelling, David thought he’d give medicine a try, and hasn’t looked back.

After finishing his medical degree in Melbourne, where he grew up, David took a year off to travel in Australia and overseas. He settled in Sydney when he returned, and there met his wife, Kim, who had also just been travelling the globe. It was 1996 and Kim had recently emigrated from England. The two met at a party and immediately hit it off, swapped suitcase stories, and it turned out they’d been to a lot of the same places, right down to both having stayed with the same family in the same yurt in a remote village in western China.

Camping with kids. Why do I even bother?

I’ve just recovered from our family’s most recent 36-hour, self-inflicted sanity test. Sometimes it’s called camping. I’m seriously thinking about re-popularising the literal description of this hobby, where it shall once again be known as ‘making camp’. 

Unless you have as many holidays as a private-school teacher, your trip will probably be so short that you will actually spend more time planning your trip, packing for it, and erecting the blasted tent than you will spend enjoying the company of your family or your see-through polyester abode. And if you have kids, that ratio goes off the scale. Plus, don’t forget that if you, like me, decide to pack up your tent in the middle of a lightning and rain storm then you need to factor in an extra day or two to unpack, dry, clean out and re-pack all of your belongings once you come home. ‘Un-making camp’, you could say.

Now, if you’re one of those childless, van-owning free spirits who just grabs a book and a tray of sausages and sets off into the sunset at a minute’s notice, I don’t want to know about it. (Just send me a quick text when you’re leaving so you can pick me up on the way).

Seriously, what makes people pack their entire human world of shelter, food and loved ones into their cars, along with an extra jumper, but alas, never an extra airbed in case yours goes down in the night. Because it will go down.

This time we even packed our airbed already armed with the knowledge that it had A HOLE IN IT, with no plan as to how we would prevent it from deflating underneath us overnight, leaving us lying on small pockets of air and hard plastic-edged stretchers. 

Of course, anyone who goes camping thinking they will actually sleep more than 2 hours a night is deluded in the first place. What with keeping one ear open for torrential downpours, one eye open for intruders trying to sneak under the tarp and nick your bodyboard, one arm out the side because no grown person can fit their whole body comfortably in a sleeping bag, and one hand on the torch for when junior wakes you at 2.23am and needs to go to the toilet.

Why would anyone agree to go on a “holiday” if you can call it that, where you probably won’t have a shower for days, despite the fact that you are covered in more grit and sweat than at any other time. It’s not as if you have a good excuse for that level of squalor. You’re not climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. 

No, if you have children you will probably just reason that it’s more efficient to call a beach dip a shower, to have an extra rinse off after the pool, to not bother wetting another towel or attempting to dry yourself with that heavy, salt-encrusted thing you have hung on the nearest tree. The only redeeming quality that springs to mind in such circumstances is the thought of ample opportunities to do nothing but relax and unwind, since you won’t be wasting time showering or brushing your teeth. In defence of this most recent adventure, I did get to drink one cup of tea while sitting in a chair. Can’t say that happened last time.

Why do we inflict ourselves with the torture of camping? Are we drawn to the idea of it like a moth to a flame, knowing there’s not much chance we’ll survive but we still decide to do it anyway? If there are kids and work timetables involved, it’s hardly a split second decision. There’s plenty of time to back out, renege, change our minds. 

Several weeks of calendar perusing, several days of stuffing ropes into bags and canvas sleeping apparatus into cases they never fit into, several hours of meal planning and spooning condiments into tiny plastic containers. You could call it off at any time. Actually, if you’re up to the condiments phase you’ve probably already passed the point of no return.

I have such fond memories of going camping as a kid, when I wasn’t in charge of making sure the gas bottle was full or the guy ropes were strong enough to bear the weight of a waterlogged tarp in summer storm. But I remember one year, when we had grown a little older and my parents thought we knew enough about the whole process to go it alone next time, my mother issued a declaration loud and clear. “That’s it, I’m done with camping, I’m never coming again!”, she announced. Us kids thought she had lost her mind, who would say such a thing?

As I swept the sand off my scorching hot tarp in the backyard this week, I finally started to see the sense in her statement. Making camp is dirty, exhausting, stressful and time consuming. It can be risky, thanks to the weather and your own equipment.

But despite this, sometimes we feel the need to set ourselves little challenges and put obstacles in our own path where they could just as easily not exist. Even if these challenges are only in the form of folding-table-to-car-boot-size puzzles. Or how to batten down the hatches so your tent doesn’t leak while still ensuring enough air circulation so you don’t all suffocate to death overnight. 

It’s about seeing if you can meet those challenges, and also about letting your kids watch you do it. It’s about loving the fact that you hardly see a mirror for days, and playing more cards in a weekend than you do the entire rest of the year.

But hey, if these reasons aren’t enough to make you want to go crazy at a disposal store, there is one other added bonus. Owning a camp stove, having an esky full of ice and a few rechargeable lights comes in handy when you get home to find your entire village is in a blackout, after being hit by the very same lightning storm which just forced your early exit from the campground half an hour down the road.