musings of an ancient muso...

WORDS & Music

Having In Lieu published inevitably led to the next logical step: a book launch. And having a book launch led to another problem—how to entertain people for longer than the few minutes it takes to read a short passage and thank everyone politely.

Somewhere along the way, a thought arrived uninvited: music. More specifically, a song. Even more specifically, a song about one of the characters in the story.

Looking at Jade Zivanovic’s sketch of Barty Spleen, the subject matter became fairly obvious.

With the help of Rob Luckey, we wrote The Ballad of Barty Spleen and performed it at the launch. For reasons that remain unclear (at least to me), Rob decided it would be a good idea to record it. This meant contacting my friend Darcy Rosser, who kindly agreed to let loose his small studio.

That decision had consequences.

During the process, Darcy mentioned that he wasn’t entirely happy with some of his own lyrics and wondered if I might be interested in having a go. We tried it out and ended up writing We Don’t Talk. Darcy already had the music and the bones of the story. From there we simply kept going.

Then Covid-19 arrived, bringing with it lockdowns and the logistical challenge of two elderly gentlemen living roughly fifteen hundred kilometres apart, armed with an idea but no obvious way to make it happen.

Fortunately, modern technology exists. If one person has a recording studio, the other has a Scarlett Focusrite audio interface, and both have access to Reaper and Google Drive, progress—while not rapid—is at least possible.

The original plan was simply to get a few songs to the demo stage and see what might happen next.

Meanwhile, an interest in video recording began to develop, so we decided to add video to a few of the songs. Naturally, this meant we needed a name.

It turned out we already had one.

Back in 1966, Darcy and I played exactly one gig together—a fill-in performance at the Hydro Majestic. The band name from that singular event was Fairy Mudhole. Since it had been sitting unused for more than half a century, we felt it deserved another outing.

During the Covid period we wrote twenty complete songs, along with a few partial ones that are still waiting patiently for attention.

Videos

Credits

Words and music: FairyMudhole
Videos: Barry Dean
FairyMudhole image from Going Nowhere: AI generated