1st – Mike Radford NSW

2nd – Leonie Robertson NSW

3rd – Fay Davidson VIC

We need to gather the names of everyone who participated, as well as the number you were allocated at the beginning of the parade. To submit these details please click on the link below:

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Brendan Gleeson

One of my favourite films is ‘In Bruges’ closely followed by ‘The Guard’ which both star the inimitable Brendan Gleeson. There’s not much Brendan Gleeson and I have in common except that we have both taken up the fiddle late in life, though BG thinks he left it far too late by his early 30s.

Brendan, I have since heard of a bloke who wandered into a music store in the US and at 94 said he’d been waiting 78 years to learn an instrument and took up the guitar.  It’s all about perspective mate.

Why the fiddle?

If the truth be told, in this my final blog, I had been lusting after the mandolin.

Its upbeat melodic sound left a lasting imprint after seeing ‘Oh Brother Where Art Thou’. American mandolin player Mike Compton, one of the finest in the world, plays the mandolin on the film’s soundtrack. He loves the Folkie, having performed there several times now. When he played ‘A Man of Constant Sorrow’ at the Trocadero one year you had to scrape my heart off the floor.

Word gets round in this town and after some barely audible mutterings about wanting to play the mandolin, Canberra musician Sharon Casey lent me hers – more than two years ago I am deeply ashamed to say.

It sat in the backroom unopened. Handmade by the much-loved Graham McDonald here in Canberra especially for Sharon it was a very special and generous long-term loan.

To Sharon it has its own soul and she thought it disrespectful to hang it on her walls for just the occasional play. It was certainly not destined to sit idly in a back room along with the sewing projects that never saw the light of day and the unwritten film scripts.

When it came time to choose an instrument for our Adult Learning project Marcus gazumped me and had claimed the mandolin out the back for himself in record time. I was hardly in a position to argue. And now that he is playing tunes on it, it was clearly meant for him. Sharon I can assure you Marcus treats it with great respect and something bordering on awe. It will have a name soon but I promise no stickers on the case.

So if no mando what could I play? I really did want a challenge and I wanted to play something that was obviously steeped in folk tradition.

I have always been drawn to the music of the Civil War and early 19th century hill music – plaintive, gritty, sexy and yearning all in one hit.

I loved the hill music and the early delta blues featured in John Sayles’ seminal film ‘Matewan’ (about a group of West Virginian Coal miners struggling to form a union in the 1920s).

My great grandfather, the rather austere and incredibly Irish Morgan Hartney, was playing the Irish tin whistle in Australia around the same time (which I hope suggests some atavistic musical gift in our family line). I wonder if he took it up as a boy or if it came later in life to help relieve the pressures of bringing up a large family during the Depression.

Now in hindsight the fiddle was an obvious choice. It was apparent no more so than in these past two weeks.  I have simply loved playing the final tune set for us, a Civil War song ‘Angelina the Baker’. Our two instruments just sing together. I can’t get enough of it. Sebastian has taught me how to do a blue-grassy slide in one spot.

It has been such a gorgeous journey. Stressful at times, what with work, kids, house, neglected friends etc. I have wanted to throw the towel in on more than one occasion.

This week is insane. My parents have just arrived from Brisbane. My lovely friend Anne Bell (who I introduced to the NFF along with many others) is sewing me outfits and wanting to plug in fitting sessions. I have taken the week off work to practice and get my head around how different this festival will be for us  – the first time as “performers” (albeit it blink and you’ll miss it).

Friends and family are asking when we are playing and the ink is only just dry on arrangements. I desperately want people to know we may only play one or two tunes on our own in the two early gigs and will mostly be supported by our friends and teachers (so if we lose the plot may just mime a lot – just saying).

We will never stop playing now. It will be years of course before we can really do these instruments justice.

But our lives have been immeasurably enhanced and we have met some of the most amazing people. And it’s just fun! Those few moments when we have played with other real musicians have been wonderful and I understand how people get in a trance in a session.

A few years ago at the NFF my dear friend from my journalism days, Karen Middleton, along with others joked about forming an all girl band The Cow Patties. It was a running joke because no one could actually play a musical instrument – at all. Now I have actually gone out and begun playing a real live musical instrument there is some fear and trepidation the Cow Patties may actually form.

Really anything can happen and probably will.

Double Delusion (aka Adult Learners Virginia Cook and Marcus Kelson) will speak about their journey and perform with friends at The Bohemian Blackboard venue on Easter Saturday at 3.30pm; at the Flute and Fiddle on Easter Sunday at 6pm; and at the closing concert at the Budawang from 7pm on Easter Monday.

The photo above is of Virginia and Marcus practicing ‘Angelina the Baker’ last weekend.

A week before the folk festival and both ‘Virginia my bride’ (as I often call her after 24 years of marriage) and I have been learning and playing our respective instruments for a bit over forty days.

Taught by people who have been playing for a bit over forty years, and we ask ourselves, how on earth are they better than us? After all this time?? I am a journalist and people in my profession, you’ll be astonished to discover, are the smallest bit impatient and have the attention span of a dragonfly.
We have almost three songs together in a weird combination of notes, chords, strange looks and tears and we have been playing these together now for around a fortnight, and we are v…e….r…y  s…l…o…w…

I don’t want to under-sell our prodigious talents, but elephants on Mogodon move faster – but I digress.

These past few weeks have been utterly amazing. I have never felt this way before, still struggling but thinking about music (something I have loved and critiqued for three decades) in a completely different way.

As I write I am reminded of last weekend when we got together with some actual musicians to play the songs we’ve been going through and I sat there utterly gobsmacked at the speed, finesse and enjoyment all of them, bar me, were getting out of it.

In any other circumstance this may have acted as a deterrent, and I could just have easily said stuff this for a joke, but I am a glutton for punishment and so is Virginia, so we went home and turned on the metronome (another device clearly designed by the architects of the spanish inquisition) and started plugging away again and again and again.

Looking at the tips of my fingers on my left hand I have noticed that fingerprints have been replaced by a sort of smooth calloused skin.

I have to say, it feels strange to think, for someone who picked up a musical instrument, as you’ve read, just over two months ago, at the age of 51, for the very first time, and with around nine lessons, that I am looking forward to playing (quite badly I fear) this coming weekend.

I have just fallen in love with the mandolin which has been lent to me (and which I lovingly refer to as the bastard lute from hell – sorry for the language) and I really have to thank the Job like patience of Col Bernau for being such a wonderful teacher.

This is a first step on a new voyage of discovery, and I hope to be playing music long into the future, with Virginia until our last breath.

What I love about the National Folk Festival

Funeral at Mathews Funerals, Cave Hill Road Lillydale, 1pm Thursday.

Dave Grohl at the 2012 Grammy Awards.

This week I walked into a supermarket expecting aisles of food, but instead found a sea of Easter Eggs looking prematurely smug.

There was no sudden yen to devour handfuls of chocolate but rather, a wave of terror that said: “OMG! It’s almost performance time”.

And this freaks me out.

Why? Because, and apologies to Dave Grohl, it may not be about being perfect, but surely it’s about being half competent!

After a positive start on the fiddle, where I went from knowing nothing to being able to play some vaguely recognisable tunes, I perhaps got slightly ahead of myself and then, last week, hit the wall.

My good friend Zena reminded me that, “Adult learning is not a steady upward progression. More like a series of steps and plateaus, with the occasional plunge into deep icy crevasses”.

My ice-pick was sadly missing when I had my lesson last week.

Remember I have been practising every day, (well almost every day), since mid-November.

I now have four tunes I can play.

Between lessons I try to play alongside Sebastian on Sound Cloud. I also scour the Internet and match myself against the dodgy prowess of the “bedroom protégés” — the midnight virtuosos who film themselves playing after four lessons and post into cyberspace, hoping to validate their progress. I like these people because I can almost outplay them.  Of course the world of U-tube musical wannabes is a whole other story….

Marcus is progressing well. He walks around the house with the mandolin hanging from a strap looking like a poor man’s Mike Compton. And a few weeks back we had our first little jam in the back room, me playing the notes for Spanish Lady, he strumming chords on the mandolin, an instrument that sounds magical, no matter what you do with it. It was a wonderful moment.

We were feeling buoyed by our experience “off road”. Having never ventured beyond the safe confines of the National Folk Festival, we had stepped into hardcore folk festival territory. After the Big Day Out on Australia Day, we spent the Saturday and Sunday just down the road from Cooma, at the four-day riverside campsite ‘session’ that is the Numeralla Folk Festival.

Marcus hates camping. He used to hate folk festivals. Just getting him from Amaroo to EPIC, (a five minute drive), was a Leviathan task in itself. That we were a) camping, b) at a folk festival on the other side of Commonwealth Avenue Bridge, and c) we had instruments we actually intended to take out of the car and out of their cases – well, it verged on the miraculous.

And we had a ball. Such a wonderful community of generous people: from helping us to put up the tent, (another tale), to giving us endless words of encouragement about our journey.

But BEST of all we had our first session with real musicians. We played along to Spanish Lady and it was simply the greatest feeling.

And the icing on the cake? Dave O’Neill taught me “The Britches Full of Stitches”, (really, where do they get these names from?), as we sat by the river in the morning sun.

I was feeling high for weeks after this beautiful little festival, where the musicians were ridiculously talented (oh, those South Coast fiddle players!). I was also feeling reassured by a stream of friends and family, who all seem to have a violin or a mando out the back and have offered to help.

Then last week, feeling good, I had the lesson from hell.

Nothing worked. I played my tunes and made more mistakes in one lesson then I have made in four months.

The bowing was awful. It takes years to get this right. I have weeks. Fingers that had been so confident gliding across the strings seemed to slur with inexplicable memory failure. Sebastian has since placed yellow marks on the neck of the fiddle so my fingers don’t stray too far from where they should be. It suddenly felt remedial.

I still don’t know how to tune the bloody thing. Oh and I don’t “do timing”.

Unlike Marcus and Col, where there has been a more traditional approach to teaching, Marcus initially focused on chords and understanding timing. Sebastian and I went straight to the tunes. It has worked for me. But now Sebastian says, “remember to think about timing”; to “find your inner metronome”. Your what?!

All too much to think about! So last week I found it hard to maintain momentum.

Sebastian says it is at this point that 80 to 90% of people give up. And if weren’t for this Pilgrim’s Progress project I have signed up for, I may well have just quietly put the fiddle in its case and pushed it to the back of the wardrobe into evening wear oblivion.

But … I have persisted. I have played and played.

I was in Bathurst on the weekend at a dear friend’s place, (she introduced Marcus and I some 27 years ago). On her balcony I played to a group of friends and family and even had people singing along to “She Moved Through the Fair”. Almost a great moment, except for the one dog who left the balcony yelping. The other stayed but he was, my friend informed me later with a cheeky smile, completely deaf. Of course he was.

Happily on the upswing, I have had two great lessons with Sebastian this week. I basically play alongside him, both of us on our fiddles.

Today I had the day off work and had a lunchtime lesson. (In the video you can see me attempt the ‘The Britches Full of Stitches’.)

Sebastian has given me some more hints on bowing and says it will come.

I am under strict orders to play more against his recordings on Sound Cloud.

With the Folk Festival now only a month away I need to play until my arms ache every night.

As I type, Marcus is in the kitchen cooking. Afterwards we are going to play Spanish Lady together. He can now play the notes and it sounds like music.

Yesterday I had my fiddle at work and played to one of my young staff members. Her eyes lit up and she said she felt inspired to learn.

Then I remembered why I am doing this – to encourage and remind others that it really is never too late to pick up an instrument. It might be hard. It might be full of highs and horrible, hell-scraping lows, but it is an amazing journey.

From next week I am hoping Marcus, Col, Sebastian and I can get together and we can start getting Marcus and I playing together, so we have the courage to get up on a stage in front of people who may not know we are adult learners.

A few days ago Marcus joked that we should continue with these instruments and do the festival circuit as “Double Dissolution”. I quipped that perhaps we may be more aptly titled ‘Double Delusion’.

Time will be the judge. But there’s no doubt, things are starting to get interesting.

2012 National Folk Festival Book Program

You can also download a pdf of the daily program below:

2012 National Folk Festival Program PDF

When I first undertook the challenge of learning a musical instrument I and my wife Virginia were to choose between violin (or fiddle in the folk world) and Mandolin. Once in High School I picked up a violin and made such a howl with my first bow I put it quietly down and left the room swiftly – I wasn’t going to make that mistake twice. Added to this was the fact that one of the great pop songs of recent years, Losing My Religion by REM, featured a Mandolin prominently… so really, my choice was made for me.

But my initial enthusiasm turned to despair…

Early conversation/lessons may have gone something like this:

“So first finger, second fret on the G string, but after the open chord…”

“What’s a G string? There’s a piece of music by Bach yeah?”

“Not important… then the other strings, D, A and E. Think of it as G’day! “

“OK, what? Sorry but where’s the apostrophe string, shouldn’t there be five strings then? Why are there eight but kind of four, because you play two together? But not really when you’re playing chords… and where’s the Y?”

“No the E is the last one, G’day is only how it sounds…”

“So the E is the Y? Please tell me why I am here because I am confused and I want to cry….”

As I said Col is a very patient man…

After four lessons I am kind of playing notes, I know three chords badly and I have callouses on my fingers where they have never existed before. No, I still don’t know what I am doing but the mandolin is much better than the fiddle – or at least that is what I am telling myself.

This was all before this week’s lesson with Col, who asked me if I was having fun. I paused for a moment, because I hadn’t thought of it like that before. Just trying to get my thoughts around a musical instrument has done my head in these past few weeks, but in recent days I’ve just been strumming away making a bit of a racket and not really thinking about it.

This is when I had something of an epiphany. “It doesn’t matter because I just love it,” I replied.

When the folk festival sent out the press release, I did a few radio interviews and most of the announcers expressed surprise Virginia and I were even doing this at all and often praised our bravery. However, it isn’t bravery. It is the excitement of something new and different and these instruments, even when we play them badly, sing to us.

Yes it will take time and who knows how we will sound when the festival comes around, but I have something new in my life and it is making me think differently about one of my greatest loves: music.

So you see I’ve started a voyage, and no doubt it will be a long one, but my bags are packed and I’m on the ship, and we’re slowly pulling away from the dock!