2005<\/p>\n
In Adelaide for the Foggy Highway Bluegrass Tour, Paul Kelly talks to Murray Bramwell about recent projects.<\/p>\n
The A-Z Solo Concerts<\/p>\n
They were the opposite of a retrospective for me. I had to do some shows in the Spiegeltent in Melbourne last December and I wanted to do something special. It was always going to be mainly solo. I had one of those middle-of-the-night ideas – four nights, a hundred songs, A-Z with no repeats. Then I realised,\u00a0 God, I\u2019ll have to practice, I can\u2019t remember all those songs. It was a really good thing to do because I went back and met some of my old songs again.<\/p>\n
I did those shows in Melbourne then Julia Holt invited me to Adelaide for the Cabaret Festival in June and I am going to do them again in Sydney in December. My idea now is to make it a regular thing, the way Weddings Parties Anything used to do their Christmas shows.<\/p>\n
It has been a revelation because it\u2019s given me a whole new way of working. It is the performer\u2019s dilemma – always between the new songs you want to play and the old songs the audience want to hear. I hadn\u2019t realised until I\u2019d done it that this A-Z format totally short-circuits those problems. It takes it out of chronology\u00a0 and totally into the alphabet. It gives the audience something to play with – will I go the first night and miss Wintercoat\u00a0 or To her Door\u00a0 ? or go to more nights ?<\/p>\n
It was hard work and I had to do a fair amount of rehearsal. For Melbourne I spent about a month. I realised the show needed some storytelling. I had to write some script. I\u2019m not a naturally off-the-cuff person.<\/p>\n
And still to come\u00a0 ?<\/p>\n
More bluegrass shows in Tassie, the Gympie Muster and Tamworth in January. But this month I have to work on the score for Ray Lawrence\u2019s new movie Jindabyne<\/em>. It\u2019s based on this Raymond Carver story that keeps following me around – So Much Water, So Close to Home<\/em>. I met Ray not long after he made Bliss<\/em>. He asked me about the song based on the story – Everything\u2019s Turning to<\/em> White<\/em> and I lent him the Carver collection.<\/p>\n We lost touch and fourteen years later he called me and said \u201cI\u2019ve got this movie, Lantana<\/em>,\u00a0 do you want to do the music ?\u201d Since then he has got the rights to the Carver story and the film has been shot – Jindabyne<\/em> features Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Leah Purcell, John Howard and Chris Haywood. I\u2019ve seen the rough cut, it looks great. The music will be built around voices – keening, humming, women\u2019s voices, men\u2019s voices, lots of drone. There\u2019s a strong landscape presence in the film and it\u2019s going to need a really good soundtrack, so the pressure is on\u2026<\/p>\n The Adelaide Review, No 274, August 5, 2005, p.18.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 2005 In Adelaide for the Foggy Highway Bluegrass Tour, Paul Kelly talks to Murray Bramwell about recent projects. The A-Z Solo Concerts They were the opposite of a retrospective for me. I had to do some shows in the Spiegeltent in Melbourne last December and I wanted to do something special. It was always going to be mainly solo. I had one of those middle-of-the-night ideas – four nights, a hundred songs, A-Z with no repeats. Then I realised,\u00a0 God, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}