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incidentally [laughs], and “Voodoo In The Shadows”, if it was the last one, was 2018. Have you
got something lined up for the future, immediate future?
FB: Well, “Voodoo In The Shadows” was the last studio album and you mentioned earlier
about the solo versus band thing, the last couple of studio albums I’ve done have been
recorded in Melbourne, Australia with my Melbourne band and for many years now I’ve been
running a Hammond trio, which is fabulous because I have a drummer who’s not only a very
good kick drummer but he’s also a wonderful hand percussionist and he often invents crazy
percussion to give extra to things and my Hammond player will also play electric bass with me.
So we can go from cigar boxes, swampy percussion and bass, right through to full drums,
Hammond organ and more
traditional single-string
electric guitar styling, so that’s
been wonderful. “Voodoo In
The Shadows” I did with those
two guys, Tim Neal. Actually
Tim played Hammond, electric
bass, piano and baritone
saxophone. He’s also a
saxophonist. So one reviewer
called him the Swiss army
knife of the band [chuckles]
because he played lots of
different things and Mark
Gruden who’s my drummer
and percussionist.
So that was the last studio
thing but during lockdown in
2000, at the beginning of the
lockdowns here in Australia, I
did a reissue. So I re-released my very first album that I did under my own name which is
called, “Blues In My Heart”, and that album was recorded direct to analogue tape in 2000 and
features a lot of my early acoustic fingerpicking style material. And I’d heard the album a
couple of years ago and like a lot of musicians you tend to make new albums and you move on
and play that new material, write new songs, so I hadn’t really listened to that album for a long
time and when I revisited it, I thought that the performances stood up really well and so I
thought it would be fun to have the synchronicity of having a 20-year celebration reissue in
2020.
So I had planned to do that, but then as it turned out because we were all locked down and I
had something like three or four months of international touring that was cancelled, it was a
double-edged sword, but what ended up happening was that I took that reissue idea and I
decided to dig into the project of writing quite extensive liner notes for the reissue and it gave
me the opportunity to go back through files and boxes that I’d dragged round so many house
relocations and I found photos and memories and diary notes and all sorts of things. So it was
a really good project. It was quite therapeutic in those sort of dark and strange times when we
were first locked down, to write these liner notes. So I did the reissue of “Blues In My Heart”
with a 24-page booklet, which sort of gave you an idea of why I recorded the album when I did