Over the next few months we have a project going on here at Locals where we’ll be putting albums up (some no longer to be on the streaming platforms) with their associated ephemera - extra photos, hand written excerpts from the lyric books, video, unreleased tracks, alternate versions, that kind of thing. This will all be available to our Locals supporters. These will be found in Content/Playlists Hope you enjoy.
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The first album we’re putting up is PC: TheSongs of Patsy Cline. This was recorded to accompany the 2001 theatre tour of Always…Patsy Cline by Ted Swindley. This starred Deborah, playing & singing the part of Patsy Cline. Rather than a recording of the show which offered faithful renditions of the Patsy Cline records, we thought we should do a more impressionistic version of these classic songs, similar but different. After all, our thinking went, you can always listen to the original & we didn’t want to be a pale shadow of that.
The opening track starts with a brief excerpt of Patsy’s track I Fall To Pieces which quickly “deconstructs” itself & falls to pieces & becomes our version. Some people thought their CD was faulty and we had to gently correct them telling them we meant it that way.
PC: The Songs of Patsy Cline was the last album of our slightly abrasive, electronic/electric period (some albums more so than others) which began with Bitch Epic, onto Ultrasound, My Third Husband, Exquisite Stereo, & finally PC. Patsy steered us back to the austere, pristine beauty of acoustic instruments & the album is a strange chimera of the two approaches, equal parts electronic & acoustic. We were pushing ourselves on these records (& our audiences!) and were sometimes successful in our art & other times fell woefully short but we tried, ladies & gentlemen, we tried. Which is not to say that our subsequent acoustic efforts have been “safer”, just different to what went before. There is definitely a through line but our later albums are perhaps more inside the song & less inside the texture.
PC was a lot of fun to make and was recorded in various places though mostly in our home studio amongst the chaos of young children & babies. We’d like to think, in the spirit of country music, that everyone on the record are still our friends today & the playful spirit of people comfortable with each other is captured herein.
A special thanks to Cam Reynolds & Gerry Hale who “made” the record.
Album credits:
Music performed & arranged by The Patsy Clones:
Everything Real - Gerry Hale
Everything Unreal - Cam Reynolds
Everything Else - Willy Zygier
Additional Musicians:
Backing Vocals - Rebecca Barnard
Bass - Edmond Ammendola
Hammond, Piano & Alto Saxophone on “Walking After Midnight” - Tim Neal
Trombone on “Walking After Midnight” - Russell Smith
Guest Vocal on “Sweet Dreams” - Glenn Richards
Produced by Willy Zygier & Cameron Reynolds
Mixed by Chris Thompson at Shop Studios
Mastered by Tony ‘Jack the Bear’ Mantz at Sing Sing
Photography - Ross Bird
Artwork - Muchos Locos
Happy New Year to the faithful & the unfaithful, to the movers & the shakers, the sad & lonely, to those who get it done & those who want it done. May you appreciate this is all a gift that one day is taken away and passed on like a baton in a relay that you wish could be held onto just a little bit longer. xx
From 1999 a rarity called Happy New Year. By the time New Year rolled around in 1999/2000 we were in hospital with a one day old baby girl, our third. We briefly wished each other a happy one and then went back to our dreaming.
From Paul Kelly’s self-described ‘mongrel memoir’ ‘How To Make Gravy’ pg 139-140
"Everybody Wants To Touch Me’ is sometimes read as a riff on celebrity. That seems to be Sydney cabaret singer Paul Capsis’s take on it on his album of the same name. Medusa-haired Deborah Conway, Melbourne singer-songwriter and mother of three, knows a little about celebrity and pregnancy both. She fronted a band called Do-Re-Mi in the eighties and had a big hit with a song called ‘Man Overboard’, featuring the memorable lines ‘Your pubic hairs on my pillow, your stubble rings the sink.’ Her shapely posterior was also famous, full-framed and proudly bare on big Bluegrass Jeans billboards nationwide, with the tagline ‘Get yours into Bluegrass’.
Do-Re-Mi functioned as a collective - a shaky construct in pop music at the best of times - and used language such as ‘ideologically unsound’ (the predecessor of ‘politically incorrect’) in their band meetings. Deborah, with her ...
Antarctica, destination of majesty, of mystery, of dreamlike otherworldliness; the air so clear you could see the future. Our nights rocked by the seas, our days filled with light, colour, wildlife, adventure.
And no internet! For 11 whole days the world could not intrude.
Thanks @Chimu & @Intrepid
Back in Australia with almost enough days to recover from jet lag before the next stop - Israel.
