Vic Simms is on the upswing

“Blackfella music has gone beyond clap sticks and didgeridoos,” Vic Simms says. “There is commercial talent out there.”

Vic Simms and Luke Peacock are writing songs together and hope to make an album and then tour. Picture: Brad Hunter

There has never been a better time in Australia to be an Aboriginal musician, according to Vic Simms. “Blackfella music, Aboriginal music, has gone beyond clap sticks and didgeridoos,” Simms says. “There is commercial talent out there.”

The 70-year-old Sydney singer, who began performing almost 60 years ago, has a wealth of experience on which to draw that he wants to pass on to a new generation of artists.

This week at Campbelltown Arts Centre, west of Sydney, Simms and his younger collaborator, Brisbane singer Luke Peacock, are doing just that, passing on their knowledge to young indigenous performers as part of a mentoring program that runs until the weekend.

“We’re on a journey of music and we hope we can pass on what we do,” says Simms, who began his career in the 1960s, touring with acts such as Col Joye, Johnny O’Keefe and Shirley Bassey. In 1961 he made his recording debut with single Yo-Yo Heart and followed that with I’m Counting Up My Love. That was before he went off the rails because of alcohol and ended up in Bathurst jail for robbery.

Simms is best known for his debut album The Loner, which he recorded in the prison in 1973. With songs such as Get Back into the Shadows, Poor Folks Happiness and Stranger in My Country, the songwriter documented and railed against the prejudices Aborigines faced in the 1970s. “My songs weren’t aggressively, bitingly political,” he says. “It was just what I thought at the time. I wrote what I saw. I lived through the Stolen Generations. I lived through the oppression and ­racism in western NSW.”

While on tour with Joye in the early 60s, Simms was asked to leave a swimming pool in Moree because of his skin colour. “I felt bitter towards that later in life. I wanted to tell my side of things.”

The Loner was snapped up by a major recording label, RCA, and remains an Australian cult classic.

In 2013 Peacock, a singer-songwriter who plays in the Brisbane band Halfway, encouraged Simms to let him and other Australian performers such as Paul Kelly and Ed Kuepper re-record the album under the name Painted Ladies. Through that project, The Loner and Simms have found a new generation of fans.

“That was quite a thrill,” says Simms, “because those songs were gathering dust for quite a few years.”

Following his release from jail Simms, a Bidjigal man from the La Perouse area of Sydney, went on to release more albums and tour Australia, including with the Painted Ladies project. Now he and Peacock are writing songs together that they hope may result in a joint album and tour.

Peacock agrees there has never been a better time to be an indigenous artist.

“We have access to a wider audience through radio and social media,” he says. “The old singers who are still remembered were kind of restricted to their communities. Now anyone can hear the music.”

And he’s happy to admit he has learned a thing or two from Simms during the past few years. “One thing he has taught me is to always give it my best,” Peacock says. “The most I’ve got out of Uncle Vic is encouragement and a belief that I’m on the right track; that what I’m doing is good enough and it’s worth it.”

The two musicians and their students will perform together at the Campbelltown Arts Centre on Saturday.