The Holy Sea

It's been a good while since we last saw folk-rock group The Holy Sea. After the release of their last album 'Blessed Unrest' in 2000, the Perth fivesome disappeared from the music scene and changed careers, locations and even girlfriends. Yet sometime last year, in a Melbourne Art Gallery and five years onward, the group finally reunited and produced their second album to date, 'A Beginner's Guide To Sea'.

From rockabilly tunes about chugging beers to ballads with mantras of desperate loneliness, it seems that a five year hiatus for The Holy Sea lads was just what the doctor ordered.

"What suddenly triggered in my life to create the album? Um... there are a lot of answers to that," says front-man and vocalist Henry Skerrit, followed by a long pause. "Look, I've never been a hugely prolific songwriter who constantly churns out music. After 'Blessed Unrest' had been released, I felt that things I had done musically had run their course."

A few years after the success of 'Blessed Unrest', Skerritt did indeed put his music career to rest. After leaving Perth and moving to Melbourne, he achieved a Masters in Arts at university and secured a career as a curator in an Aboriginal art gallery. "Working in the gallery, part of my job was obviously working with really, really talented people," he says. "And in a way, my job was to facilitate their dreams and creations - not my own."

Yet eventually, Skerritt found his own creative juices flowing once again. "At a certain point I started to think that I should be creating something myself," he says. "Over the break I had been ever so slowly building up a set of songs, with no intention to play them with a band or anything - they just sort of occurred as statements of exasperation."

It was only when former band-mate Dan (Hoey, pianist) came to Melbourne in 2007 that these "statements of exasperation" were kicked into gear. After hearing the songs Skerritt had written, Hoey urged him to get the band together to play them. Shortly afterwards, former guitarist Victor Utting, rhythm master Andrew Fuller and drummer F. David Bower were recruited, and The Holy Sea had reformed.

"Six months later we were in the studio!" he laughs.

Produced under the wing of recording tycoon David McCluney, the man who brought us Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and The Drones, 'A Beginner's Guide To Sea' also saw contributions from pedal-steel legend Garrett Costigan and vocalist Emma Frichot.

The final product of their promising arrangement speaks for itself. An album that ranges from hilarious anecdotes of the group's endeavours into alcoholism to soul-wrenching ballads of the isolation Skerritt felt when moving cities, 'A Beginner's Guide To Sea' is a record that covers all bases. Though Skerritt happily admits the intended humour in songs like Paddy, There's Got To Be One More Bar Open, he stresses their underlying meanings.

"For songs like Paddy, the biggest thing with that I think is that there's a strange sense of being in a bigger city where you can't go everywhere and you can't see everything in it," he says. "Coming from Perth where everyone knows each other, it's rather unsettling. But at the same time a wonderful feeling too."

Did the band partake in much bar-hopping while writing the album? All in the name of research of course...

"There are two answers to that, and one answer is yes," Skerritt chuckles. "When I was writing Paddy we were constantly going to all the bars and er - well I enjoyed that," he laughs. "But the other answer is that the album is about being in the line of that great tradition of drinking songs."

A man who certainly loves his history, Skerritt then launches into the memoirs of drinking traditions. "The Irish had a long line of drinking songs that were about dying, poverty, depression - the suffering around them at the time that they were trying to drown with alcohol. I guess that what I was trying to do with Paddy, trying to make a contemporary drinking song that was a zeitgeist and captured the spirit of Australia in 2008," he says. "I think people like a sense of community in songs, it gives them something to latch onto."

Miranda Freeman

'A Beginner's Guide To The Holy Sea' is out now through Amphead.