Spin Doctor: keeping the beat at Blue Mountains Music Festival

An unlucky break has seen our music editor down but definitely not out for the count.

Apologies from SDHQ for the absence in the past few weeks, an enforced one brought on by the unfortunate meeting of my right shoulder with the unwelcoming turf of Marrickville Football Club’s Mackey Park in Sydney’s inner west a few weeks ago.

As such this week’s missive comes at you from the rapid fire of one left-hand digit on the keyboard rather than from the two-pronged affair approved by the journalists union. This temporary upper unidexterity, to paraphrase the great Peter Cook, is nothing compared with the life-threatening trauma suffered by my colleague and tennis partner Stephen Romei, this newspaper’s literary editor, who details with his typical eloquence just what the hell happened to him in his Ragged Claws column on pages 16-17 of this week’s Review. We did get to compare broken bones earlier this week, but that’s as far as the similarity of ailments went.

A broken arm did present SD with a minor dilemma, however. In my alternative universe as a drummer I had three gigs scheduled last weekend at the Blue Mountains Music Festival, a regular fixture on the Aussie boutique festival calendar that this year featured luminaries such as Luka Bloom, Colin Hay, Steve Poltz and the delightful American folk-roots chanteuse Rhiannon Giddens. I would have to cancel. And yet.

So it came to pass, after much discussion about “just percussion and singing”, I joined local outfit King Curly behind the skins for three performances with my right arm in a sling and motionless, and my left one doing what it could to cover for its unfortunate neighbour. It just about worked: three one-hour shows in two days and more than enough Def Leppard references, and it was done. I never considered one-armed drumming as a thing but now it’s on the CV. In these precarious times, it pays to diversify.

This weekend I’ll be pointing my sling at a few of those same acts that were in the Blue Mountains last week, including Giddens, at the Byron Bay Bluesfest. Today’s line-up at the five-day roots extravaganza includes Joe Bonamassa, Steve Earle and the Dukes, the Residents, the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band and Eagles of Death Metal.

Spin Doctor at Bluesfest

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