LIVE IN CONCERT: ABOUT THE SHOW

In 2016, Buried Country: Live in Concert became the fourth dimension of the Buried Country phenomenon after the book, film and album, a touring stageshow version of the story. Starring a rotating cast of BC’s featured artists from across the generations and across the continent – backed by house band the Backtrackers – performing a selection of the songbook’s greatest hits, the show made its successful world premiere in Newcastle, in August 2016, and continued to play the festival circuit up through to 2018.

​The show was really the brainchild of Melbourne music maven Mary Mihelakos. Off the back of the new edition of the book and CD in 2015, after I’d thrown a launch party in Sydney complete with a few songs by a cast of stars - see something on that here - Mary got me down to Melbourne to present a screening of the film, accompanied by a performance by Vic Simms, as part of the Leaps & Bounds festival she runs there; you can see something on that here. It was late at the end of a long night in a small bar when she said to me, Have you ever thought of putting Buried Country on stage? To which I replied, Well yeah, over the years it's occasionally crossed my mind – and then been promptly banished as something that just seemed all too big and daunting to contemplate. But by then with a rip-off play in production that simply changed its name from Buried Country to Country Song when I doth protested (thus circumventing passing-off charges; copyright protection is effectively non-existent when it comes to works of non-fiction), I was ready, in the spirit of offence being the best defence, to seize just such an opportunity. And so I said to Mary, alright then, you’re on, if you’re game so am I…

Antecedents: Sydney book launch, 2015...

... and Melbourne launch, 2015

​Our first thought was to find a Musical Director, someone to lead a house-band, and it didn’t take much thought to come up with Brendan Gallagher. Not that it wasn’t a smart choice. But Brendan almost chose himself for the gig, what with a decades-long career in music but most importantly with his track record as a producer of Aboriginal acts like not only the late Jimmy Little, on his career-reviver album Messenger, but also L.J. Hill and Kutcha Edwards. Brendan and I set to batting back and forth ideas on singers and repertoire – again, not such stretch for me given my experience as a DJ, which is all about mixing and remixing sets of songs – while Brendan set to recruiting players for the band and Mary and I set to raising some moral support if not money. With the extraordinary amount of goodwill Buried Country just seems to generate – people just seemed to want to help make it happen – the momentum quickly built, and soon, with a bit of funding from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council, the show was in serious pre-production.

Beyond Mary and Brendan, there are a number of key people it’s my enormous pleasure to thank for making real the merely possible. Firstly, the true stars of the show; the list below makes links to all their own individual websites but you can also read here a page of Star biographies:

• Warren H. Williams
• L.J.Hill
• Leah Flanagan 
• Luke Peacock
• Frances Peters-Little
• Auriel Andrew 
• Roger Knox
• James Henry

​Thanks too to the band, the Backtrackers, that quickly came together behind Brendo, numbering Jason Walker, Jim Elliott, Buddy Knox and Teangi Knox. For a bit more on these guys, go to the Band biographies page here.

The show has, simply, organically evolved, and there is no other word for it than that overused cliché. Other personnel to have subsequently joined the team include production designer Paul Lim, who is building a stage set around an animated backdrop that re-mixes paintings by the wonderful Aboriginal artist the Blak Douglas, which you can see at the bottom of this page. The show also includes a video component, a 'remix' of excerpts from the original feature documentary Buried Country.

Full-scale rehearsals and an invite-only little showcase performance at Enrec Studios in Tamworth during the festival there in January 2016 just seemed to go so well, so smoothly – sounded so good so quickly; see a bit more on it here – that it was almost disarming, and we progressed from that point with a huge amount of confidence. As the late Iain Shedden put it in his Spin Doctor column in the Australian, our glorified dress-rehearsal was itself “a stirring occasion,” one of two shows he saw that “were more entertaining than some of the scheduled programming I attended” (to see his full report go here). 

TOP: Doing the introductions at Enrec. ABOVE: Three generations of Knox - Buddy, Roger and Teangi. RIGHT: Angus Rabbit of Mop and the Drop-Outs, who were like the session's support act; Angus sadly died not much later in July 2016 - RIP. All pix by James Henry

​Sheddy wasn’t the only observer so impressed. Steve Britt similarly wrote in Rhythms that what was really merely an officially-unlisted dress-rehearsal, for him, was “the highlight of the festival – a warm, moving, stirring celebration.” ABC Local Radio’s Kelly Fuller also attended the event, and in her blog – which you can read in full here – she concluded, “I really hope all Australians get a chance to see what we saw.”

Happily, at least a few Australians did get that chance.

Blak Douglas remix backdrop