Brainbox vs The Boogie
It was at Craig Horne’s 70th birthday party that the concept first occurred to me. It was a very pleasant September day, and The Hornets had set up to play a set or two with the Merri Creek amiably meandering at their backs.
The birthday party revellers were well primed, but I felt that they would’ve been powerless to resist the Hornets’ blues-boogie shuffle even if they’d been stone-cold wowsers.
‘Maybe The Hornets and The Indelibles should play some gigs together,’ I mused.
It seems to me that back in the ‘70s there was a distinctively Melbourne take on the blues, as exemplified by the Carson-County Band at one end of the boogie scale and Daddy Cool at the other, that positively demanded the audience get off their bums and dance.
Being on the Aquarius tour with Daddy Cool, I keenly felt the contrast in audience reaction – Spectrum’s more cerebral approach prompted the audience to sit on the floor and thoughtfully contemplate their navels, but that same crowd rose as one to move in sync with DC’s music. (I wrote a song about it, enigmatically titled ‘Untitled’, that appears on the Milesago album).
Mike Rudd’s Indelibles is a loose counterpart of The Indelible Murtceps, but today’s Indelibles’ remit is more inclusive and represents both sides of my Ruddy and Cruddy output from the ‘70s to the present day, with a bunch of half-remembered blues tunes thrown in for good measure.
Craig Horne is widely known and respected as an author and of course expertly wrote my biography, I’ll Be Gone, but his long-term musical sojourn with guitarist, Jeff Burstin, emulates my own long musical relationship with the late, great Spectrum bassist, Bill Putt, and, like my bands since the original Spectrum days, his band The Hornets has been grafting it out with live performances and recordings for decades.
To my mind, the pairing of The Hornets and The Indelibles is long overdue and has just been waiting to be dreamed up. The two bands’ respective audiences may exist in parallel universes, but I think it’s an utterly enticing combination that will win over both sets of devotees.
So, the question remains. Who will win – Brainbox or The Boogie?
