ROLLING FROM THE MURRUMBIDGEE TO MEXICO: A KUTCHA EDWARDS YARN part 2
- Apr 2
- 5 min read
DELICATELY POISED BUT OH SO perfectly positioned, part one of this interview with that towering figure of Australian music, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, Kutcha Edwards, finished on him remembering a special day when he was only six. Caught mid-song, it was a moment of reverie that was beautiful and at the same time suffused with pain as, with eyes closed as the band played around him, he went back to a moment seeing his mother for the first time in years in her kitchen, knowing now it was still eight years from when he and his Stolen Generations-torn family would be united.
Tallying up the decades leading to his 60 Cycles Around The Sun show this month – marking not just 60 years since he was born in Mutti Mutti country near the Murrumbdigee River, with a swag of well-known musician friends and fans, but a lifetime of crucial, moving and powerful music - and asked what kept him going, what kept him intact in the 50 or so years since, his answer is not faith or love or ambition or anything that simple to our imagination.
“To be honest, I’ve been with my wife for 30 years now but in reality, my closest and best friend is music,” says Edwards, leaning forward to the camera. “It’s hard to explain but even though I can confide in my wife and my children and my grandchildren and my family as such, my best friend has taken me around the world.
“All these people, especially the performers on 17th of April, they will come with the understanding of their connection to my journey. Brian Nankervis [MC on the night], obviously, who is a long-time friend of my wife anyway. Richard Pleasance who helped me record my first solo album, which was produced by Paul Kelly, Paul Hester and David Bridie, and I remember going to Caulfield where Richard had a studio. You walk into someone’s kitchen with Paul Kelly and that gives you a bit of clout [he chuckles]. That’s when I first me Rebecca Barnard and Shane O’Mara too.”
A question about whether he’s every talked to these musicians, all of whom have their own experience of his music and their connection to his journey, about what the songs mean to him finds us on a typical Edwards route, away from being centred on him and to a wider tale, one that puts him in a lineage and in a shadow.
“The very first song I ever wrote in a professional capacity, Roll With The Rhythm, was written after I’d gone and seen [veteran bluesman from Georgia] Robert Cray in 1989,” he says. “I was admittedly a little tipsy, I’d say – I am 30 years sober – and I didn’t understand who he was: a cousin had got some tickets and come into the park in Fitzroy and said anyone interested? I went home that evening and started Roll With The Rhythm – Bumpy, my niece will sing that on the 17th – then in 2018 I got to meet [Cray] and I said to Robert, I am supposedly one of the only Indigenous blues artists in Australia, but you dropped the pebble for me in 1989.
“I handed him four albums and I hugged him and thanked him – my wife stood back and said there was a glow over us - and said to Robert, and I’m not trying to stretch the truth here, I believe that our ancestors would have met millennia ago. And said our grandsons will meet one day. 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.”
Edwards must know that people have that experience, that connection with someone who set them on the path or who showed them a way to be, with him too. How does he react when he is put in that position Robert Cray experienced?
“I question my purpose,” he says. “But isn’t that my role? I ask the individual why, why do you see me in this light? And I suppose it’s about being given the opportunity. I’ve been fortunate: I’ve travelled the world and haven’t paid a cent to do it. The music has taken me there.”
And one of those places he’s travelled spawned one of his favourite stories, one likely to be retold at 60 Cycles, about the routes music takes and the temporary guardians of those songs that performers are.
“We were in a place called El Tajin, Veracruz, in Mexico, about 400ks out of Mexico City, where the Mayan pyramids are, and they had re-established a festival that hadn’t been conducted for 500 years by the traditional people of that area. Being Aboriginal you get fortunate sometimes to travel in the context of cultural business and this was in the year 2000,” says Edwards. “We were doing a soundcheck and we did a song called Yil Lull, a Joe Geia song – to us Aboriginal people that’s like our national anthem – and afterwards we were [backstage] and this young, 18-19-year-old Mexican kid comes running up saying ‘are you the band from Australia who just sang a Paul Kelly song?’.
“I said what are you on about, that’s not a Paul Kelly song, but how do you Paul Kelly and that song? He said ‘about eight months ago Paul Kelly stayed at my dad’s house and sang that at our kitchen table coz my dad is a guitar maker and Paul was there to buy a guitar’. And then at the actual gig, he was standing in front of us and singing every lyric and I said get up on stage young fella. He was surrounded by about 10 beautiful young Mexican women and they thought I was calling them up on stage too so the whole 11 of them came up on stage and it’s mayhem.”
So good was this that even though a camera Edwards was using to film from the stage went missing during this mayhem (“I wasn’t worried about the camera, I was worried about the footage.”), the mood carried long and far.
“We told this yarn to Joe Geia [who had been in The Black Arm Band with Edwards] and he leant over towards me and he said, brother that’s the beauty of what it is we get to do. The song had travelled further than the person who wrote it.”
That must have then and to this day still, given Edwards something like hope and maybe even validation.
“You’re right, when you look back, this is what I deserve. I sang with the Black Arm Band in Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Thames and the irony of me singing that to the Poms was ming boggling for me,” he says. “But when I was actually on stage, that moment when I closed my eyes, I was singing to the people who put Aborigines in the predicament they are.
"That’s when the spirit takes over and the intellect takes a backseat. The spirit guides me.”
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60 Cycles Around The Sun – in conversation and in concert – will be performed at Melbourne Recital Hall, April 17.
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