Season 404 - Ten Years Up Over

Evening folks - well it’s taken the best part of a month, but my internet woes finally seem to be sorted - hallelujah!

I suspect this won’t be the only version of this one you’ll hear over the next week - such a good song and the first that sprang to my mind.

Cheers for hosting Ryan!

 
Well we are off to an absolute flyer this week! All caught up , there have been some stunning performances already! Keep 'em coming guys!
 
Here's one from me. Powderfinger are my favourite Aussie band, in my all time top 10 bands, and Odyssey Number 5, which this song is from, is in my top 5 albums. I really wish I'd had the chance to see them live.

 
Let me explain about the drum... y'see Bernie and Christopher got their prizes already, but yours was a bit bigger and it didn't fit in the same size box.. It's on its way soon.

As I'm sure you know, Angus and Malcolm were themselves expat Brits brought to Australia when they were children too.

 
We’re just into Tuesday here in the UK so it’s only appropriate that I post this one now. I originally wrote this song for Linda Turtledrum’s excellent ‘Eight Days A Week’ season last year. I’d always planned to rework it at some point, and as the lyric revolves around the protagonist’s (unexpected) return home it seems to fit Ryan’s theme this week. I asked Kevin (Mezcalero) to take the lead vocal and to add some electric uke magic to my keyboards, rhythm and backing vocal. Once again he rose to and far exceeded the challenge wonderfully as you’ll hear for yourselves. (The rural photos in the video I took in the late summer of some of the countryside near to where I live in the very south east corner of the country - it’s very flat here but very peaceful and beautiful.)

 
thank you for hosting mate
an original song for the season written and recorded today about the most special place to me in the whole world
the pictures/films are from the most recent trip that joo, zacko & me took down there in January this year



DENNES POINT, BRUNY ISLAND

As a young boy I remember driving south from Hobart town
My shirt stuck wet to the vinyl w/ all the windows down
Mum & Dad up front w/ me in the backseat pining
For the beaches and the water of Dennes Point, Bruny Island

Every Christmas, every Easter & some weekends 'tween the two
We'd drive up on the Mirambeena hoping to get a top deck view
& we'd set out 'cross the channel, spreading out the foam
On the way to Dennes Point Bruny Island, my second home

All us relatives we'd gather for barbecues & beers:
A specky in the breakers! & all the uncles & aunties cheered!
& then us kids'd strip off & swim out on the tide
Though the water it was freezing none of us did mind

My father built a shack there & he sold it for a song
I miss him like the sunrise these three years now he's been gone
& my love is like a candle flame that's burning ever brighter
For the days we spent together at Dennes Point, Bruny Island

Now mum she's growing older, I guess we're growing older too
& our days are growing shorter like the days they tend to do
I'll always be that little kid there in the backseat pining
For the beaches and the water of Dennes Point, Bruny Island
 
I ask for leniency from the host. I honestly thought this guy was Australian - turns out he was born in the UK, but spent many years there, enough to sound the real deal.
I first heard Gerry Hallom 30+ years ago, when he was a regular floor singer at a folk club in York, and playing at clubs all over the country. He mostly did songs from or about Australia, and always impressed me. This song is from the one CD of his that I have (he had a few LPs out in the good old days of vinyl - not sure how many of them made it to CD). This one is one of his non-Aussie songs, inspired by a poem by Maya Angelou.

 
Note to self: don't try and do minor tweaks to a project you've been working on for two months just before you're about to go to bed! Recording software is going screwy and seems to have wiped some stuff which is frustrating.

You guys have brought a few beauties over the last 24 hours though! Bit of a slow start to the week overall though, would love to see some more!
 
Thanks for hosting Ryan, and great theme!

Hope this song works within the parameters. It's a Talking Heads song about home being where the heart is! I broke out the uke bass and I'm hoping it will lead me to using it more. Playing acoustic and electric tenor ukes as well ~

 
steel strings, loose definitions of ukes (BEV)
loose definition of a u-bass? i've been having loads of fun recently plinking on this, what i call "pretend fretless u-bass", it's a cigar box instrument, 21 inch u-bass-y scale, however only 3 strings, and they are fat guitar strings, they give an EAD tuning but only as low as the low end of a guitar, not truly bass-low. soooooooooooooooooooooooooo it may be a stretch too far, but i thought you might like to see and hear it, i've thrown in some scattered cigar box tenor uke arpeggios to sort of keep it legal, but they are few and far between! all in all, it very well might not count, but the song is by australian singer-songwriter wendy rule...

 
Having mentioned the "Transports to Botany Bay" in my re-cycled song from a previous season that I posted earlier. I thought I would see if there was some info about them on the web that would inspire me to write a new song.

As luck would have it, after typing "Australia + Transportation" into a Google search engine, among the information offered was what seems to be a really good book on the transports.

I dived into the "look inside" section and was shocked to find that children as young as eight had been transported to Oz. That was something I don't think I had ever been aware of.

Obviously, if I ordered the book, it might not turn up in time for me to read it and be inspired before the end of the Season. So I went to Youtube to see if there were any existing documentaries on the subject.

That was where I found this excellent series of videos made by Sydney Living Museums about just this topic.

Inspired by these videos (and my own experience of boarding schools) Tom O'Brien started to take shape in my mind.

Yesterday, while Carmen was being seen to at the hospital (routine gynaecological visit) I sat in the waiting room and wrote the draft of this song. This morning I put a tune to it. Please let me know if I have plagiarised the tune from an existing traditional song, or whether it just sounds like one. (Geoff???)

Hope you like:

 
Last edited:
Someday no one will march there at all...

 
As Trent likes to say, "I took the sopranino challenge on this one." This is a down under version of "Winter Wonderland" that I learned from a podcast about Christmas music called Tinsel Tunes. It's produced by a Kiwi, so he was able to explain all of the slang terms that I wouldn't have otherwise understood. Since we often have quite warm weather at Christmastime where I live, I was able to empathize quite a lot with this song, and had no trouble understanding "a backyard full of all your distant rellies, so we pass the can of mozzie spray around." LOL!

 
Top Bottom