The Waifs singer Vikki Thorn free to go her own way as ThornBird
WA musicians have been largely shut off from the rest of the country due to a hard border closure, but Vikki Thorn found a silver lining.
Each of us had our wings clipped by the pandemic in one way or another, but for musician Vikki Thorn, the disruption offered the chance to take flight under a new stage name: ThornBird.
The resulting album was released on Friday and sees the singer-songwriter – who is one third of the acclaimed Western Australian folk-rock band The Waifs – venturing into the gritty genre of Americana.
Thorn was forced outside of her comfort zone once it became clear that The Waifs would be unable to perform together for a long stretch, with singer and guitarist Josh Cunningham based in NSW. At first, this realisation was a major blow.
“You think when you’re in your mid-40s, you should be able to cope with things – but I realised to that point in my life, I hadn’t really had a lot of serious challenges,” she told The Australian.
“With all our gigs being cancelled, and this being my only source of income, I didn’t really cope very well,” she said. “I got a bit depressed, which I’d never done before in my life; I wasn’t being me.”
Her fledgling career as ThornBird began when she found her new collaborators by chance: guitarist Luke Dux and drummer Todd Pickett were playing in the front bar of an Albany pub named Six Degrees, and she admired their mixture of looseness and confidence as players.
By November 2020, they were in the studio recording her ThornBird album together, alongside Waifs touring bassist Ben Franz.
Having spent the past two years based in Albany, after relocating from southern Utah with her family just before the pandemic was declared in early 2020, she is among many WA musicians to be shut off from the rest of the country due to the state government’s hard border closure, which was finally lifted on March 3.
During this time, Thorn eventually managed to find a silver lining.
“I did everything from headlining festivals to a lot of house concerts; I just performed anywhere and everywhere I could within those restrictions,” she said. “If there were limits on gatherings, then we’d just do smaller gigs. In the end, I think it was a really positive time for a lot of local musicians.”
The biggest example of this WA-centric approach to live entertainment was at the AFL grand final, held in Perth on September 25 last year, where performers including Birds of Tokyo, Eskimo Joe and John Butler flew the flag for their home state before about 61,000 people.
At Optus Stadium, Thorn sang and played harmonica alongside her Waifs bandmate and sister Donna Simpson during a stunning Butler-led cover of Great Southern Land by Icehouse, which interposed Indigenous language in the chorus and verses.
“What an incredible opportunity; I can’t think of another set of circumstances where I would have been, at this point in my career, asked to perform at an AFL Grand Final,” she said with a laugh.
“It was the biggest gig that landed on my lap, and Donna’s as well,” she said. “It was a really beautiful moment for West Australian music, and people here were over the moon that West Australian music was being represented on that stage that day, too.”
Since reopening its border on March 3, WA is currently subject to the nation’s strictest rules on live music events, with outdoor gigs capped at 500 people until early April due to a recent increase in Covid cases, while indoor concerts are capped at 150 people and seated events held at theatres and stadiums can proceed at 50 per cent capacity.
Thorn is also among the performers at Wildflower, Australia’s first touring festival of female-fronted acts, alongside artists including Missy Higgins, Kate Miller-Heidke and Kasey Chambers.
The first Wildflower concert was held at a Yarra Valley winery last Saturday, while its next date is at the Brisbane Riverstage on Saturday (March 19), followed by shows at Hunter Valley (April 2) and Mudgee (October 29).
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