KUTCHA EDWARDS ON CULTURE, CONTENTMENT, CONTINUING STORIES part 1
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YOU DON’T ALWAYS KNOW where you’re going to end up when you start talking with Kutcha Edwards – you can’t really claim that it’s an interview in the old sense of the word given you’re not really guiding this thing – but you can sure it’s going to be fascinating getting there.
The singer/songwriter, cultural leader, family figure and Mutti Mutti, Yorta Yorta and Nari Nari man, ostensibly is on the line from his home in Melbourne to talk about 60 Cycles Around The Sun, a show that marks his 60th birthday and “a lifetime of songs and stories” that in his richly expressive, lived-in voice cover a modern and ancient Australia with songs that touch on blues and folk and rock.
But there’s more at play, or at the very least more beneath such a seemingly simple title. And this is going to be told in instalments, beginning as we find Edwards “just plugging away at it”, as he puts it, with a welcoming smile. “It’s a bit dreary here.”
We’ve all be plugging away but while he and I are not that far apart in age, I suspect Edwards get asked for wisdom more than I do. A lot more. Now, for a while I thought it was the beard letting me down, but he’s not afraid of some healthy facial hair on occasion. So I need to know, how do you become a wise man of a certain age?
“I remember I was walking across what is called The Common, from the Katoomba RSL to the main marquee, like a circus tent, and I was clean-shaven and I was by myself,” Edwards says, remembering a show on Sydney’s fringe at the Blue Mountains. “This woman came bounding up, all excited: ‘I’ve been waiting half my life to do this’. And I said, to do what? ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for a very long time’, and she was all excited, shaking. ‘Can you please sign this CD?’.
“She handed me an Archie Roach album,” Edwards chuckles away.
“I said, darling, I’ll sign this but I’ll sign it under my name, Kutcha Edwards, and she got all ashamed. But when I got into the space where I was performing she was sitting probably two rows back and I got her to stand up.”
With her permission he told the audience the story and announced to them “my name is Kutcha Edwards but I am the artist formerly known as Archie Roach”. It worked.
“Because of the heaviness when I’m telling my story, you need the balance,” he says today. “You need the balance of banter and imparting your journey, your truth.”
Part of that truth is a lifetime marked by sorrows, beginning but certainly not ending with being part of the Stolen Generation that scarred his family. See for example how he marked his 60th birthday late last year. He and his wife drove from Melbourne to Echuca and spent a few days there, marking what would have been the 50th birthday of his parents’ eldest grandchild.
“I don’t know whether that’s because I’m getting to an age of contentment, or my spirit tells me to,” he says. “But when you talk about wisdom, I think you reflect and you go back in your journey. My niece was born two days after my ninth birthday and she was four weeks old and my oldest brother brought her and it was the first time we had met, all those years since we were taken. He wanted to show off his daughter, the first grandchild of Nugget and Mary. She looked like a black porcelain doll, she was so beautiful.
"And then you look at the intergenerational trauma: tomorrow I bury another brother’s son and I question the validity of what it is that I do. How can I celebrate on a stage on Friday and Saturday when tomorrow I bury another Edwards family member? Six months after my brother. They passed away in the same hospital, two floors apart. So I look: what’s my role in the whole scheme of things? What is it I’m doing? I’m not performing, as such; I’m telling my story, my songline, and my connection. Not only to my direct family but my ancestors. 60 Cycles Around The Sun it’s an interesting way to say it’s a birthday party, but it’s more than that. People will come and say happy birthday, but is it?”
As Edwards says, what he does is more than celebrate or even commemorate, he projects forward into a story that goes on and connects that future to the past.
“I do, I do. I did a live performance, would have been midyear, with Cash Savage And The Last Drinks [who are part of this 60 Cycles tour] and me and Brian [Nankervis, the MC of the shows] this one show on Friday, the Friday Revue and it was the song, Mrs Edwards, the song that always takes me back to that moment when I saw mum, that six year old kid meeting his mum for the first time.”
He explains that during this performance at Monash University, he arrived at the point in the song when Joe White, the lead guitarist of The Last Drinks, and that’s when things changed again.
“I’ve closed my eyes. I’m not looking at an audience, and I’m standing in the lounge room with my mum. We come out of the solo and I’ve opened my eyes but I can’t remember the lyric. It’s gone because of that moment,” says Edwards. “I had to make up two lines or something and then my spirit comes back to me and I find the lyric.
“The song finishes and Brian says to me ‘Kutcha I’ve heard you sing that a lot but I’ve never heard you sing like that’. I said, this is the band, they do the heavy lifting so I in a sense can enter that space of contentment. Not enter the lyric, just sitting in the moment. And this is what I said live, ‘when we went into the solo, physically I’m standing on stage, but I was that six year old kid again.’
“It’s that moment in time when it’s not a performance, I had entered the space of contentment. That’s the real purpose of music, to take people to that place of beauty.”
THURSDAY: In part two of this interview Kutcha Edwards traces cross-cultural connections, meets a hero and is a hero. “A tear came to his eye and we got emotional. That’s when we embraced. When we left the security guards asked if we got a photo, and I said no, the memory’s enough for me.”
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60 Cycles Around The Sun – in conversation and in concert – will be performed at Melbourne Recital Hall, April 17.