radionotes podcast episodes

063 Andrew Farriss

by | Apr 5, 2020 | episodes | 0 comments

063 Andrew Farriss

Andrew Farriss now in their sixth decade is about to release their debut solo album and its Country in flavour.

Ahead of the album’s release Andrew gave a window of their time to speak to radionotes…

To listen, click the green ‘play’ triangle… [note: may take few seconds to load] 

IMAGE CREDIT: Kiki Kiana

First Singles from the self-titled album include: Come Midnight and Good Momma Bad

This is not an interview about INXS, rather a – quick – chat with the man who is about to release their debut solo album and where they’re at around that.

True, did during the course of this chat ask about tune ‘Never Tear Us Apart’, as he co-wrote the tune that is likely to be heard right up to the AFL Finals in 2020.

SHOW NOTES: Andrew Farriss

Where to find the show to subscribe/follow:

  • PlayPodcast – this link directs you, to the Podcast app on your device (subscribe to not miss an episode)

….or you may prefer to Search “radionotes Podcast” in your favourite podcatcher.

The socials…  Instagram  –  Facebook  –  Twitter

Feature Guest: Andrew Farriss

[Added August 2020] New EP before the Album release – Love Makes The World:

While the self-titled debut Solo album from Andrew Farriss has been postponed from the original May release date, there’s fresh news that an EP called ‘Love Makes The World‘ (LinksTo – including Pre-Add/Saves) is due out prior during October 2020.

First Single from that release is All The Stars Are Mine (LinksTo)  and the skies amazing in the Official Music Video

At time of posting this addition, there are signed copies available to purchase – HERE

As I write (well type) this.. I see that both Ciaran Gribbin and Suze DeMarchi are on the release, both great artists in their own rights.

CREDITS

Theme/Music: Martin Kennedy and All India Radio   

Web-design/tech: Steve Davis

Voice: Tammy Weller  

You can make direct contact with the podcast – on the Contact Page

TRANSCRIPT

First version provided by REV team member Anna R – check to audio before quoting wider

John Murch:
Andrew welcome to radionotes.

Andrew Farriss:
Hi John. How are you today?

John Murch:
Absolute pleasure to speak with you. And even more so that you’ve been getting into the Adelaide Fringe Festival season. How is that?

Andrew Farriss:
Well, that was awesome. I’d never actually taken… How can I put it? A specific journey to really check out one of the festivals and I was really blown away. Marlena, my wife and I, we went and we had a great time. We went to lots of different shows we saw. There was elements of the performances and the whole festival that really were fantastic. I can’t recommend it highly enough to people.

John Murch:
From your experience, because I saw that you were at Gluttony, which is a fantastic festive carnevale kind of atmosphere. What was the Rebel show like? I saw it two years ago and was absolutely amazed by the talent upfront.

Andrew Farriss:
Yeah, no, I agree. I thought the Rebel performance in the Spiegeltent was awesome. I got to say what really impressed me was not only were they great musicians, but then they were doing circus acrobatics and that sort of thing, gymnastics or whatever. And as much as I’d like to fantasize that I could always do that in my show, I highly doubt that. And that’s what I thought when I saw that. I thought that’s amazing because you’ve got such awesomely talented people who are multi talented and in different arts. I thought it was really impressive.

John Murch:
We’ll move on and focus deeply onto you and of course the up and coming album in just a moment, but just to keep it parochial for one more moment, because at the moment I record between what is Gluttony and what is the Port Adelaide Football Club. So may I ask you how you feel about your song that you penned being used as the Port Power theme song?

Andrew Farriss:
That’s a great question, John. I remember when, I think it was David Koch, championed Never Tear Us Apart, the song that I co-wrote with Michael all those years ago, to be used for the footy theme for Port Adelaide. And at first, when someone asked to talk to me about, I thought, “That’s a great idea.” But it wasn’t until, I think it was on a YouTube feed, I saw it and I was just knocked out. And I was overwhelmed actually more emotionally than I thought I was going to be with seeing everybody singing together, a song that I’d written all those years ago with Michael, which was even more bizarre because Never Tear Us Apart, was one of the songs that we weren’t sure suited the Kick album, believe it or not at the time when we put it on, because it didn’t sound like the rest of the album. Goes to show you, sometimes the wildcard can be a very, very important thing in your life.

John Murch:
Let’s talk about the cattle ranch. It’s been over two decades now that you’ve had a cattle and grain farm.

Andrew Farriss:
Do you know much about farming at all or agriculture?

John Murch:
I know a little bit. Teach me.

Andrew Farriss:
Sure. I was going to say, look there’s a hell of a lot I’ve got to learn yet too and I’ve only been in it for 28 years, but I was going to say that for me, I originally got into it, it’s a long story, but I got into the agricultural world because I wanted something to do with the physical world where I was living out of a suitcase and traveling all the time, in the entertainment industry. And I just found it wasn’t particularly good for my soul. I just felt very disconnected from reality. And that was one of the reasons why I got into wanting to be involved with agriculture and farming because the people that work in those communities work outdoors a lot and they’re constantly in touch with nature. And I liked the people and I liked the environment and the small communities that run with that. I think it’s very important for our country.

John Murch:
Is it a sense of home? How would you describe that particular aspect of the farm lifestyle?

Andrew Farriss:
Like I was talking to a bloke yesterday and he was telling me how much he hates going near the ocean. And he’s an old cocky from out in the bush. I said to him, “Well, I don’t dislike the ocean. I like swimming in the ocean, but I get bored sitting on a beach, which is one of the other reasons I like the country is because, there’s lots to do out here and I feel part of it. I understand the communities and I get it and I live it and I have mates and friends and family out in these areas. And that means a lot to me and the people in my world. And I was actually born on Cottesloe Beach, in Perth in Western Australia at the old Women’s Hospital there that the Americans built for service men, both Australians and Americans during World War II.

John Murch:
What sense of family did you have back in Perth?

Andrew Farriss:
I had a very fortunate upbringing. There’s a book written by a man called AB Facey, called A Fortunate Life, a brilliant book. I highly recommend it for anyone to read, especially an Australian. Having read his book, I’m beyond a fortunate life.

Andrew Farriss:
I had a fantastic upbringing in Perth in the 1960s. I grew up where we didn’t have to lock the house up and Dad left the keys in the car. And it was just that kind of a lifestyle when we were growing up as kids. And I used to say to Dad, “Why do you leave the keys in the car?” And he goes, “Well, son.” This is back in the sixties. “There’s nowhere they can drive it to.” And I thought it’s quite a good point, actually. To a certain extent, I know what Dad meant, where it was such a small town, really.

Andrew Farriss:
Perth was a frontier town really in those years when we were growing up as kids and so my family life reflected that from my brothers and I, Tim and Jon and my sister, Alison and my mother and father, Dennis and Jill were basically… Most people in Perth in the sixties there and I suppose late fifties when Mum and Dad were around there, 1950s, basically most families or people knew each other back in those days. It wasn’t that big city feeling where there’s concrete everywhere and nobody knows everybody and everyone’s a stranger and they talk to each other through flat screens.

John Murch:
I note, when you were inducted and congratulations, by the way into the Member of the Order of Australia, Keith Urban was on the list and a few other people, including the wonderful Deborah Conway, but Tim Minchin a fellow Perth person was on that list as well. Now he obviously is a tad bit younger than yourself. Did Perth give you the grounding that you needed?

Andrew Farriss:
I think so. Well, first of all I grew up within a wonderfully grounded family upbringing, I thank God and my family for that, but also I think Perth definitely gave and that sense of Western Australia… Texans will talk about how big Texas is, but Western Australia is three times the size of Texas. So I grew up with a feeling of space and that anything’s possible as a kid. That there’s no frontier big enough. And I think that continued on into my life, somehow into my aspirations and I don’t just mean… I appreciate what you said about the Order of Australia. That’s a huge award to be given to me or anybody. And I acknowledge Deborah Conway and Keith Urban and of course Olivia Newton John and Glenn Shorrock and all the others that got those awards.

Andrew Farriss:
I know those awards being given… fell within an awful horrible time for most Australians with the bush fires and I looked at the front page of the Telegraph, I think it was, or one of the papers that had on Australia day on the 26th of January. And I went back and looked at that front page, the other day and it was also acknowledging giving medals to the firefighters and the families of those people that fought those horrific fires. My heart goes out to those people that lost their homes or lost people in their lives and that’s a national disaster really.

John Murch:
And you’ve been contributing to Hay Mate for a number of years, but this year would have been more significant.

Andrew Farriss:
Well that’s right. Unfortunately I couldn’t be everywhere I wanted to be. I really would have loved to have done that concert and performed at it. But also, my wife, Marlena, her family are from Dayton in Ohio in the United States and we spent this Thanksgiving with them in America and also for Christmas because her mother had gone through a serious back operation over there in the US and we wanted to be there to support her and her family.

Andrew Farriss:
As an Australian I really understand, as I said before, living out in a more remote, rural community. I understand the pressures and the needs of these people out here. I rally their cause a bit because they don’t get a lot of voice sometimes, I don’t think, where they need it. They’re a pretty tough bunch. They may not look it on the outside, some of them, but I can see how resilient and how much they care about things that people would be surprised about in the city.

John Murch:
Let’s briefly talk about the first single, because that does relate to your wife, I believe. It was her alarm song, a demo version perhaps was the song of choice on her alarm.

Andrew Farriss:
Yeah, that’s right. My first solo release, single is Come Midnight and the oldest song that I’ve written on my album. And what happened was I had it, yeah, as a demo version, very similar to the version that you would know now or as I’ve released and it will be on my album, but very similar to that, it just wasn’t finished. And I hadn’t tracked it with a live band and that sort of thing. It was pretty close to being the way I wanted it. Well, Marlena always loved it and she put it on her cell phone as a wake up call. And at first I was like, “Oh no.” As an artist, you get over yourself pretty quickly, once you hear something a few times, especially as a songwriter or recording artist, you hear something you’ve recorded or written.

Andrew Farriss:
And at first you might think, “Oh, this is great. Or maybe it’s not or whatever.” But after a while you get over it, you don’t want to hear it. But she kept having it as a wake up call. And so I took it literally as a wake up call. I thought, “Well hang on a minute. If Marlena really likes it, maybe somebody else will.” So one of the first things I did was I went and tracked it. When I started recording my album, I tracked it in Nashville, actually, even though I’d written the demo and recorded it back here in Australia, I decided to track it over there while I was in the United States. And that’s the vision that you can hear now.

John Murch:
How important is Marlena to this album? The musical process… it sounds like highly because it contributed to a single.

Andrew Farriss:
Oh, Marlena’s definitely been helping me drive in the background, a lot of the art work and photography and the design look of it all, besides the music. Music’s been more my department. She’s more of a tastemaker. She’ll tell me if she likes or doesn’t like something and I’ll take that on board or not depending on how smart or stupid I am at that point in time. But I thank her enormously for the contribution to what we’ve been doing, I suppose, to put all this together and make it a commodity or something… Well, we’ve got vinyl. My album will be coming out on vinyl, which I’m quite excited about.

John Murch:
Where do you press vinyl, in America or in Australia?

Andrew Farriss:
Well, would you believe it? As I’m talking to you, John, I’m actually sitting here holding the test pressing for that vinyl in my hands, which is kind of bizarre. It came in the postbox today. I’m really excited about that.

John Murch:
Have you put the wax to the test yet?

Andrew Farriss:
I haven’t, but I will. Definitely going to do that. I’m sitting in town at the moment where I’ve got good phone reception, just outside the local coffee house, having a coffee and having a yarn with you. But when I get back out on the property, I’ve got a good turntable and hifi there and I’m going to let it spin and see what happens. But I’m pretty excited about it, I tell you. I think you’re going to like the vinyl package. I’ll be a bit of a salesman for a minute. All of us, myself, Marlena, our art team, photography, the artwork layout design, done by our mates over in the US. I think you’re going to really like the look of it. It has a real feel to it. Yeah. I’m excited to play the album.

John Murch:
Let me just say that the caps and cards as in playing cards are available right now. I think something like a shot glass is available there as well on the website, andrewfarriss.com is where you should go for that. We didn’t answer the question of where that test pressing’s come from.

Andrew Farriss:
Yeah. No sorry. I wasn’t doing a squirrel.

John Murch:
No, you were distracted.

Andrew Farriss:
Yeah. That’s right. I wasn’t doing a squirrel. Actually, I was watching a truck drive by in the middle of town here, seriously. But to focus on your question and the answer, the test pressing, believe it or not, came out of Czechoslovakia. Now I read the other day, there’s a big vinyl factory in the US that had burnt down. It was some disaster, financially. That’s a shame, because in the years I’ve been watching slowly vinyl rebuild, especially amongst the younger generation right now. I was amazed when I was last in the US.

Andrew Farriss:
There’s a big, huge, well, there’s lots of them, company in the US called Books & Co. And I remember when I first went and looked in their bookstore 10 years ago for Christmas gifts or whatever for family and they had a small section on vinyl. Well when I went in there the last Christmas gone in 2019, I was staggered at how much vinyl they’re selling again. It really blew me away. I thought, “That’s great.” There’s something about the package with vinyl, especially there’s a bit of a surprise for people buying vinyl record. I think they’re going to… And I’m talking, I’ll give you a little clue. It’s the vinyl itself you should check out.

John Murch:
I want to talk about clocks and particularly that of time. Does time play a part in your life? Does time matter to you? You seem to reference it in your film clips and you like looking at your watch.

Andrew Farriss:
That’s right. That was a theme that there’s going to be two more videos come out that I’ve already made. One’s called Run Baby Run and the other one’s called Apache Pass, which was shot in literally near Apache Pass in Arizona in the United States in cowboy country. And Run Baby Run was shot with the Mary Valley Rattler, the steam train people up in Queensland, near Gympie Muster. Those videos have got reference to time as well.

Andrew Farriss:
Basically we all live with clocks. If you’ve got a modern digital device, it will be telling you that it’s time to do this and time to do that. And we live our lives with this idea of clocks and time. And part of my thinking was, it’s in my videos, when you draw people’s awareness of how affected and controlled we are by our idea of time. Whereas say, older cultures would have taken a more deep a breath and relax and said, “Well, maybe it’s not time to do that.”

Andrew Farriss:
It’s just something that I’ve noticed is how much we live our lives. According to in the 19th, 20th century, 21st century, we’re living this idea of time. Whereas in older cultures and in different times, there we go, in different times of history with humans, I wondered if some people paid that much attention to what particular time it was or did they say something a little bit more instinctual? Like, I think it’s the right moment for this to happen rather than it had to happen exactly at such and such a time.

John Murch:
I want to draw you in on that, because you do live on the land and a couple of weeks ago, we spoke to Anna Smyrk. She’s a singer song writer who bases themselves in the Solomon Islands and places like that, where the sunrises and sunsets and the water tides and all those is their time. That’s how they see time and how things get done. Do you have that sense of time as well, that the land tells you when things get done?

Andrew Farriss:
Absolutely. The land will tell you. We’ve just come… Well hopefully, please God, we’re coming out of three years of the worst drought I’ve ever seen in our district in the northwest of New South Wales and I really hope that we’re coming out of this drought. And looks like it’s got signs of coming out of it. But it’s done this before, it can be quite cruel. But it will do whatever it’s going to do. It doesn’t matter how much you throw a tantrum or you do a rain dance. Whatever you’re going to do, it’ll do what it’s going to do in nature’s time.

Andrew Farriss:
This is where human beings have become a little bit disassociated with the old world. We think that we can solve everything with a device or technology or whatever. Some things are going to be bigger than us. That’s just what I believe and I think farming teaches you that as well, is that there are some things that you’re going to have to just be patient and wait for things to happen in their time. You can try to force things to happen. You can try to make all the precautions or whatever. But here we are in the 21st century in a new decade, 2020, but still some things haven’t changed, they’re in their own time and they always will be.

John Murch:
Trains have their set of times obviously, but also that the railroads themselves will take their own time to be built. What’s that fascination with rail and trains for you. You may have mentioned it before.

Andrew Farriss:
Well, you can imagine too some of my album is about this subject where a lot of the storytelling I’m doing on my album, some of it’s very modern with modern social issues or comments, or even just having a good time, in a modern sense. And some of it is set in period. And that’s to say around about 1880 up to about steam-punk is the era I’m writing about and singing about and including outlaws, cowboys, bush rangers, old world problems in that old European sense. Explorers, the era of explorers, all that kind of stuff I’m writing and singing about. And the idea of the railway or railroad as the Americans call it, is all part of it because you’ve got to imagine what life was like before electricity, the railroad or the railway virtually changed the world. Because before that, before the motor car, before, you basically rode around on a horse, or you had a horse and cart or you didn’t go anywhere.

Andrew Farriss:
That’s what you did. Or you went by ship. Or you walked. Virtually beyond that, it wasn’t until the railroads or the railways came along, that it opened up, like this little town I’m sitting here, I’m talking to you right now from, would have had a pioneer railway line laid out here as did a lot of places in the world. And it joined communities together. And that joined the cities together that made for progress. It made for the building of countries. I’ll reflect on this for a minute. There’s a book called Nothing in the World Quite Like It, that was written about at the end of the civil war in the United States. You had a very sad situation where even though the North won against the South, you had two communities of people that in a sense, hated each other within one country. And so Abraham Lincoln, I think, thought of the idea of a railroad joining one side of the United States being California, San Francisco, I think it was, with Chicago to the east and they’d made a competition.

Andrew Farriss:
And so a lot of the people from the Confederate army joined on one side with the railroad. I think it was the Central Pacific. And then they… I think this is right. And then the Union, I think, took it from San Francisco being the other railroad Union Pacific, maybe it was, to join up and form for the first time, a way to get across the United States by rail. Now, if you stop and think about that, before, it was cowboys and indians, wasn’t it? It was horses and stage coaches and whatever, all that cowboy history. When the railroad came, it joined all that together and it formed what has become the strongest, biggest, most powerful country in the world.

John Murch:
Also reflective of the fact that you come from Perth and that Australia had its own history of actually having a railway that went from Perth to the eastern side. Sure, rail gauges will always be an issue, but we can talk about that a different day. Do you also reflect on that? How the railways have established Australia and given that sense of opening up the country?

Andrew Farriss:
Absolutely. I think Australians realised during world war II, how dangerous it was not to have a standard gauge railway. When the Japanese came down to invade Australia, I think the Australians at that time recognised how dangerous it was compared to the United States. Sure, the United States might have had narrow gauge railways or whatever, but it didn’t have the problem we had in Australia where you had broad gauge, narrow gauge and standard gauge railways, all trying to convey soldiers, food, medical supplies and ordinance all around Australia where they have to unload and load each train. Crazy, dangerous for Australia to have an unregulated system was nuts. And I think it slowed Australia’s growth down as a country, actually.

John Murch:
It’s your birthday on March the 27th, happy birthday, you’re turning 61 years of age. How are you feeling about this decade of your life?

Andrew Farriss:
I’m feeling really good about it, John. I’ve got to say, thank God I’m not in my fifties anymore.

John Murch:
Talk us through that. What went wrong, hey?

Andrew Farriss:
I don’t know. Maybe I went through what they call a midlife crisis, but I’ve definitely come out the other side of that now. I’ve got a whole new lease of life and I just feel really good about everything. I’m not living in the past. I’m very much in the present and I like living in the present. I’m not living in the future. I’m not living in the past and I’m just enjoying the now and enjoying what I’m doing with my friends, my family and my career. Just feel really good about everything. Looking really excited, looking forward to getting out and playing my music to people, to convey a positive message about everything with other people.

John Murch:
I bet you’ve got one eye though, on May the 15th, when the album does drop, as you’ve shared exclusively with us. The test pressing has arrived, you’re about to go and listen to that in the next 24 hours or so. Andrew Farriss, thanks very much for joining radionotes.

Andrew Farriss:
You’re welcome, John and have a great day mate. We’ll talk again hopefully.

 

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *