|
|
 |
Colcannon.
 What do you do if you have a top international act touring Australia and you haven't got a suitable support band lined up? Simple: you throw one together. "I think the whole story behind Colcannon getting together really sums us up," vocalist Kat Kraus fondly reflects. "There was no support band for The Battlefield Band, who are a very famous Celtic folk-rock group, when they came out in 1988. I was doing a bit of music with Mike O'Callahan and he was best friends with John Munro [vocals, guitars, mandolin], and Mike was asked if he could pull a few people together and learn a half dozen songs to be the support act. The only anticipation was that we'd basically have a one night stand, and that would be the end."
Seventeen years, many major national festivals and several trips to the UK, Canada and New Zealand later, and Colcannon are now set to launch their eighth album, 'Journeys', before heading back to the airport in July.
"A lot of the songs we were originally playing were anything up to four-hundred years old," she recalls, "so when we first went overseas about five years ago we discovered that people were really interested about Australia, which to us sounded really ridiculous in 1999, so that prompted us to start writing songs about where we came from; and then political comments began to sneak in. Let's not forget that the purpose of traditional music was to tell the stories of the then-current times. I mean, that was their news of today and what we're hearing today with all genres of music is technically going to be traditional folk music because it's telling the stories of now."
"I think folk is a very broad term and for me it became particularly blurred around the WOMAD time," adds latest recruit, bassist Jenna Bonavita, "and that was a fantastic thing because a lot of people who wouldn't normally go to such shows were suddenly exposed to the different styles of music. The term folk is almost irrelevant, you know? It's still about the communication with the audience."
"Our live performances are a different ball game altogether," adds Kraus, "because there's a huge amount of energy and a lot of fun where you never know what's going to happen; there's songs that I've sung up to a hundred times that still make me quite teary because of the sentiment behind them. For goodness sake, if you're going to go out you're going to want to have a good time, and sometimes having a good time means laughing and crying, and getting emotionally moved."
Steve Jones
 | Colcannon launch 'Journeys' on Fri 20 May at the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel |
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
