Archie Roach
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Archie Roach

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It is something of a surprise, then, that his eighth album, Into The Bloodstream, is such a gorgeous, dreamy and joyful affair. Equal parts country and western, soul and gospel, this album practically soars with such a life-affirming quality. Produced and arranged by Roach’s longtime friend and producer Craig Pilkington, and featuring guest turns by fellow luminaries Paul Kelly, Emma Donovan and Vika and Linda Bull, Into The Bloodstream tells its tales of love, friendship, support, forgiveness and returning to ancestral homes with emotional honesty, quiet strength and a love for life.

But what may be most surprising about the album, really, is that it got made at all.

Speaking with the softly spoken Roach in the Mushroom Music conference room, he concurs. “You know, losing [Ruby], I just found that maybe I’d dried up; or maybe through her passing, [my ability to write music] had passed away too, or something.”

Seeing the great man in person is startling; but not for the reasons one would assume – his voice is as clear and sharp as ever, his gaze is unfaltering and, in the wake of such calamitous set-backs in his life, he has managed to maintain a quiet and steely resolve.

The stroke, he believes, was his grief for Ruby’s passing manifested as sickness. “I’d felt strange when I went to bed,” he recalls. “I got up out of bed [in the morning] and the pain! I felt so strange and I couldn’t feel the right side of my body or my face or anything…I tried to stand up and I fell, managing to fall on the bed. Thank goodness there were people around. My mate Shane Howard, I was singing out for him and he came in and I realised something wasn’t quite right.”

He was then flown to Broome, where he spent the night in hospital, and eventually went on to Perth, where he stayed on for rehabilitation. It was a time for this proud man to learn how to walk, write and – yes – play guitar again.

“The best thing [for rehabilitation] was to try to get back into playing guitar, so that was my therapy,” he recalls. “I had to learn to write again and how to walk; and it’s really crazy, ‘cause I couldn’t write. I could just scribble and I could hardly walk! And I couldn’t strum the guitar; my hand just wouldn’t do what my brain was trying to tell it.

“But gradually, just singing a song, you know?” he asks me rhetorically. He holds up his left hand. “This hand works just fine, so I could make a chord – and I just strummed the best way I could. I just wanted to strum and sing.

“But I wasn’t thinking of doing an album; that’s the funny thing. I thought to myself, ‘It’s just not there anymore.’ Because Ruby passing, she was my sounding board. I couldn’t write anything, and she would always tell me if it was good – or bad, too, if it was just crap she’d say so! So I thought it was no longer there anymore.”

His longtime confidante and producer friend Craig Pilkington, however, would beg to differ. He’d helped produce Roach’s 2002 album Sensual Being and they had spent some time in the studio before Roach suffered his stroke. “We’d gone [into the studio] to record some songs,” Roach tells me. “Ruby had wanted to do a children’s album when she was alive, but we didn’t get a chance to do it while she was living.

“But Jen Anderson, another friend of mine who plays on [Into The Bloodstream] as well, she had these old recordings of Ruby singing a children’s song. So we took them into the studio with Craig and we just added some more vocals and some instrumentation to the songs.”

Pilkington had listened to these songs Roach was putting together and heard a definite gospel vibe. “Craig said, ‘I don’t know if this was the direction you were trying to take with these songs,’ and I said, ‘Well, maybe if I do another album, then this is the way I want to go.’ So when we got into the studio to do this album, we had a bit of direction. More of a gospel, soul-type album!”

And that sound would perfectly describe Into The Bloodstream. In fact, one of the first things a listener might notice about the work is how jubilant it is; joyous and full of life. But it is not without depth; the echoes of loss and love and spirituality are threads that run through many of these 12 songs.

One song Pilkington and Roach had listened to before the stroke became the centrepiece of the album, a lovely and tender ballad called Mulyawongk.

The Mulyawongk, Roach informs me, is the ancestral being who guards the Murray River for the Ngarrindjeri people. “Other people might call it a bunyip,” Roach says. “And there’s nothing really to fear from a Mulyawongk – unless you hurt the river. And Ruby, being a woman of the river, the Mylyawongk watches out for her spirit.

“You might have gotten away from the river, but the Mulyawongk will always call you back.”

BY THOMAS BAILEY