peteg's blog - noise - music - 2014 01 23 MickTurner

Mick Turner, live at the Sydney Festival.

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"This is a song about finding yourself at an airport with James Brown one day and Mick Turner... Mick Turner, ladies and gentlemen... boy from Sandringham, done good..."

There comes a time in every man's life when he's listened to the Dirty Three's Live at Meredith so many times he can lip sync to Warren Ellis, and it is that very moment, when the bits have worn off those CDs, to see what the boy can do solo. I grant that a tiny circus tent on the edge of Hyde Park, and the Sydney Festival itself, is not that conducive to ruminating on new tunes, especially when one is totally preoccupied with showing that a garbage collector collects garbage, and only the garbage.

Atypically he played with a band featuring three ladies and two other blokes. I sat in a strategically stupid spot and got the Warren Ellis treatment, i.e. he faced away from me the whole time. In fact the only person I could see was the (entirely agreeable) bassist Peggy Frew, and I got the impression that his tunes were not taxing her. One lady did vocals, the other keyboards. A bloke played some kind of backing guitar and the drummer was up against it with Jim White sitting in the crowd, though maybe I hallucinated that last part.

Bernie always reckoned Mick Turner was too much of a doodler to take the lead, and he was somewhat right; however as I'm looking for that kind of spaced-out non-intrusive and not-boring thing that he carried off so well on Ocean Songs, I later blew another $85 on what's available from his online shop.

All this came at the end of an afternoon in the State Library. Their internet is still all Port 80, which precluded a commit that I've been aiming for all week. I was also very tired, and am not sleeping enough presently. Betts got parked out front of the Lands Office, in a 2hr zone next to a red CB250 with ~30,000km on it, and a bit later on, next to the adventuring kind of BMW I just don't want.