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blues and was conscious of it being blues, was when I was 17 and I went to college. There was
a fabulous folk and blues club on campus and I very quickly found them and the guys that were
involved in that club, the president in particular, was very into early blues and so when I first
heard the stuff that they were playing and the bands that they were getting in to play on
campus, it was like a revelation. This is what’s been missing in my life. So I became a huge fan
and I went out to see a lot of blues bands at that point in Melbourne. There was a lot of very
lively music scenes, so you could go out many nights of the week and see blues. So really

between about 17 and 25 I was a huge fan soaking up the music but not yet a player myself.

BiTS: Do you have a favourite artist from that kind of period?

FB: Well, certainly the first stuff I ever
heard was documentary recordings
from the 20s and 30s, so I do love a lot
of that rootsy – I think over the years
I’ve been really interested in exploring
different regional styles of blues but
I’m happiest when I can hear
something that tracks me back to the
roots of the music. So certainly early
country blues, fingerpicking like
Tommy Johnson and Reverend Gary
Davis and Big Bill Broonzy and the
sheer power of Howlin' Wolf and
Muddy Waters, of course.

BiTS: Big Bill Broonzy is my very favourite. I run a website called broonzy.com which is a kind
of tribute to Big Bill. It’s not been updated for a long time. I need to do some work on it, but it
is a tribute to what I think is one of the greatest guitar players I’ve ever heard in my life. It
wasn’t until I heard Big Bill that I knew that you could play rhythm and melody at the same

time [chuckling].

FB: Look, this is exactly the point that I try and make to people because I think I was listening
to a whole lot of early players and so I was hearing a lot of the early country blues players, but
Big Bill, in particular, it was interesting that I was listening to this material on bootleg
cassettes and all sorts of things, but the first person I saw, a live musician playing at a gig in my
hometown of Melbourne, Australia, who was playing that sort of stuff, was a guy called Dutch
Tilders. Dutch was a finger-picker, a strong guitarist, a strong vocalist, very charismatic and he
did a lot of Bill Broonzy’s stuff and I remember thinking, oh, my god, it’s one thing to hear this
music and love it, but another thing to hear a live musician right in front of you playing it and
that really cemented my love for the music and made me feel like, oh, my god, wouldn’t it be
wonderful one day to be able to do that.

BiTS: You turned professional, I think, around the age of 27 or something like that. Did you
have a job before that? What did you do?

FB: I was a graphic designer, a commercial artist actually and that’s what I was studying at
college and a lot of graphic designers go into advertising, which I did for a couple of years.
Discovered it wasn’t really a great fit for me and then ended up in publishing and various other
places and that overlapped with the beginning of my music career. But yes, I really did my first
public performance when I was about 26/27 and then sort of playing more regularly by about