The Waifs tour a road well-travelled for Up All Night 20th anniversary
Since 1992, the chart-topping WA folk trio has been lapping the country in a HiAce van, building a strong grassroots fanbase by playing in every corner of the country, repeatedly.
Their musical partnership began in a hotel room attached to a pub on the West Australian coastline. As they breathed new life into a Pink Floyd classic, three sets of ears pricked up – two women, one man – sparking an alchemical connection and a spontaneous invitation to join forces. Their fates became intertwined. They still are.
More than three decades ago, those three musicians formed what would become Australia’s most successful folk band since pioneering 1960s group The Seekers, which skirted the line between pop, folk and rock ’n’ roll by borrowing instrumentation from the older art form and wrapping it in contemporary songwriting and sounds.
Like The Seekers, The Waifs have made an art from blending acoustic instruments with closely sung vocal harmonies. “What would you say: we were too ‘rocky’ for folk, or too ‘folkie’ for rock, or something?” says guitarist Josh Cunningham with a laugh. “I don’t think we’ve ever necessarily identified ourselves as any particular genre. If you listen to our records, you can hear a great variety of styles of songwriting and music, just because there’s three of us that are writing the tunes.”
Platinum album sales, No.1 chart debuts, festival headline sets, sold-out tours, ARIA Awards and scores of gigs supporting one of the greatest singer-songwriters in music history: the trio has done all of that, but unusually, these accolades were achieved while working as an independent act powered by a do-it-yourself spirit.
Since 1992, this group of musicians has been lapping the country in a Toyota HiAce van, initially as a three-piece and later bolstered by additional players on stage and in the studio. The band built a strong grassroots fanbase by playing in every corner of the country, repeatedly, each time drawing a bigger crowd.
When The Waifs broke through in 2003 with their fourth album, titled Up All Night, they were a seasoned if somewhat road-weary act poised to capitalise on an influx of attention that had been earned without the backing of a major record label.
Suddenly, thanks to heartfelt, stirring compositions that would become signature songs, including London Still and Lighthouse, those disparate fan communities across Australia had reason to celebrate as one. What had been among the best-kept secrets of the indie scene was thrust into the spotlight of mainstream culture, as commercial radio and TV audiences were introduced to an act whose acoustic sound was earthy, intimate and warm.
On the 20th anniversary of the release of their most successful album, The Waifs are readying themselves to hit the road again on an extensive trip around a country the group knows better than most. Its accidental alchemy of pop, folk and rock found a wide audience two decades ago, and plenty of those fans remain rusted-on loyalists.
“I don’t know what the technical definition of ‘folk’ is, but to me it feels like music of everyday people,” says Cunningham, 49. “We’ve just done music that’s true to us, as the people that we are – and I think there’s a resonance because we’re all pretty similar, at the base of it all.”
Their relationship began by happenstance in 1992, when sisters Donna and Vikki Simpson were playing as a duo at The Roebuck Bay Hotel in Broome, WA. Under the banner of Colours, the singing sisters had built a multi-hour repertoire of covers and a strong enough following to be booked as the resident act in the Pearlers Bar, the pub’s main performance space, for three nights per week.
Out in the beer garden, Cunningham – who grew up on a farm near the small NSW coastal town of Moruya – was playing guitar in a touring blues-rock band that was doing the hard yards typical of all young performers trying to make a name for themselves.
Booked with a cover charge, despite the visitors’ relative anonymity, their draw was much smaller, and so the blokes were put up in donga-style temporary accommodation whose basic facilities lacked hot water.
The sisters often befriended the visiting acts between sets, and listened in on one another to congratulate or commiserate depending on the crowd reception. When they learned of the underwhelming amenities, Donna Simpson piped up. “He was cute,” she recalls of Cunningham with a laugh. “I said, ‘Oh, you can come back to our place for a shower. Come in, young man, said the older sister’ – before the younger one jumped in.”
“He played the solo to Wish You Were Here, and he played the solo to Hotel California. And I just said to him, right then and there, after knowing him for like 15 minutes, ‘You should leave that band and come and join ours.’ I didn’t even ask Vikki.”
“He said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said ‘Hell yeah. We’ve got this old HiAce out in the car park. You can travel around Australia with us.’ He said, ‘That’d be awesome.’ His band was so pissed off that he left them; they said he got ‘c..tstruck’,” she says, cackling at the memory. “That was the first time I’d ever heard that saying.”
The younger sister, who is now known as Vikki Thorn, tells her version of that interaction. “I was a bit taken aback,” she says. “I looked at her with raised eyebrows, as if to say, ‘What the hell? We don’t even know this guy. What are you doing? We need to talk about this…’
“Donna’s beautifully spontaneous like that,” says Thorn, 49. “[Josh’s] reaction indicated that he was completely up for that, and it was a serious question. I think it was a week later he came back from Darwin to do a gig with us, and never left.”
Musically, the group combined their talents on cover songs at first, and settled on a new name – inspired by a coincident description by two of their grandmothers, who both classed the young adults’ road-hardened appearance as waiflike – before later writing and recording their own material.
Romantically, Vikki and Cunningham were a couple for more than a decade, and were in the process of breaking up during the writing, recording and subsequent touring of Up All Night in 2003.
“Josh and I were in a relationship, and starting to go through the beginnings of the end of that relationship through that time,” says Thorn.
“It wasn’t the best situation personally, but we felt a little trapped by that, too: how could we end a relationship and maintain a career at the same time?”
It’s a big, tricky question: few bands survive the entanglement of art and love, and fewer still remain successful while suffering such heartache behind the scenes, particularly while living together on the road.
But it speaks to their mutual respect that, in lengthy individual interviews with Review, all three speak highly of one another and remain firm friends. “He’s turned out to be my brother; my soulmate,” says Donna Simpson of Cunningham, before correcting herself: “Our soulmate in life.”
Growing up at a seasonal salmon fishing camp on WA’s southernmost point for half of each year, entertainment options were thin on the ground for the Simpson sisters. They had no television, and the only radio in earshot was in the car, which would eventually result in a flat battery if they overdid it.
An old guitar sat around their home until one day, when Donna was in her early teens, their fisherman father showed her how to play a few chords. The first song he showed her was The Times They Are A-Changin’, the opening track from Bob Dylan’s 1964 album.
The hobby became an addiction, and she soon flashed past the point of painful digits on strings that can deter novices from sticking with it.
“Luckily, I was a 15-year-old girl who’d been hauling salmon for three months – before school, after school and on weekends – so my hands were a bit rough, and I didn’t have time to whinge and complain about sore fingers,” says Simpson with a laugh.
Around the same time, the teenage girl was keeping a daily diary of her innermost thoughts and dreams.
“I wrote, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a hippie that travels around Australia and plays music – and then I’m going to go on tour with Bob Dylan, and he’s really going to like my music’,” says Simpson, 52. “How weird.”
Weird and wild, because all of that came true, through another unusual coincidence akin to the musicians’ original meeting at the Roebuck Bay Hotel.
In 2002, The Waifs were performing at the famed Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island.
Dylan was the headline act, and was returning to the event where he’d famously shocked the music world by plugging in an electric guitar in 1965, upsetting followers of his folk songs while changing the course of music history.
The story goes that Dylan was walking near the stage where The Waifs were playing, heard Vikki playing harmonica, and stopped to watch the set. Impressed, the great American songwriter instructed his management to contact the WA band’s manager, Phil Stevens, to book them as the support for a seven-date Australian tour in February 2003.
While playing here, Dylan liked their music so much that he extended the invite beyond our shores: they joined him for 30 shows across the US – which included a one-off request for The Waifs to provide backing vocals during Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, midway through his set in Raleigh, North Carolina – followed by another 17 shows across Europe.
In October 2003, amid this dream run – in the same year that Up All Night thrust the band into the national spotlight, achieving platinum album sales in excess of 70,000 copies and winning four ARIA Awards – Cunningham told a reporter for The Age newspaper: “Obviously we’ve got other shows of our own but I’d be happy being Bob Dylan’s permanent opening act.”
Reminded of this quip two decades later, Cunningham laughs. “If we had managed to stay as his permanent support act, and still be doing that now, I reckon I’d probably still be pretty excited by it. It was inspiring, educational and very exciting, to be embraced by Bob and his whole crew. I stood there, by the side of the stage, watching every second of every show that we were on with him.”
The guitarist continues: “I personally wanted to be there myself. But I felt almost a duty and an obligation to every musician or music lover that would have given anything to be able to have that opportunity. I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to go sit in the band room or go back to the hotel and watch the telly: I’m going to be here, because this is where I’m supposed to be.’”
Since 1992, the band has issued eight albums, including an ARIA chart-topper in its most recent release in Ironbark, a 25-song collection to mark the band’s 25th anniversary in 2017. Both in the studio and on stage, the trio is joined by longtime sidemen in bassist Ben Franz and drummer David Ross Macdonald, as well as keyboardist Tony Bourke.
But it is Up All Night that is the focus of an extensive run of upcoming shows. Unlike the handful of capital city concerts that some acts class as a national tour, The Waifs are truly hitting the road: 44 shows, in all eight states and territories, from late May to late September.
They will be taking these well-travelled songs across much of the country, but it won’t be like the old days: they don’t plan on sleeping in any vans, for instance, and all three have families of their own.
Both sisters live in WA with three sons apiece; Cunningham is partnered with acclaimed country singer-songwriter Felicity Urquhart, and they are raising her two daughters in a small town on the NSW Central Coast while recording and touring as a duo. Their 2021 debut album was titled The Song Club, and they’ll be supporting The Waifs on several dates in August, with Cunningham pulling double duty for those shows.
The audience response has been heartening: in a tough market for concert ticket sales, more than 22,000 fans have bought in so far, and the final tally could stretch toward 30,000.
“I’m living the dream now,” says Thorn, with gratitude. “Now is amazing. Now is incredible, to get up and to be able to play the songs that we love, and pick and choose, and we’re good at it – and then, to have this audience that turns up and says, ‘What have you got for us?’ We’re prepped for it, now; we’ve not got anything to prove anymore.”
At the centre of each Waifs show all the way back to the very first one is the magic of their three musical voices melding as one. There is a beautiful circularity at play with this upcoming run of shows, too, as the itinerary tells a story in itself: three musicians joined forces at a pub in the northwest corner of Australia, stayed together through thick and thin, and they have the poetic sense to end their tour at the very same place where they met.
The Waifs’ 44-date national tour begins in Queenscliff, Victoria (May 31) and ends in Broome, WA (September 24), including festival appearances at the Birdsville Big Red Bash in Queensland (July 4) and Mundi Mundi Bash in NSW (August 17).
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