Having toured alongside good friend Josh Pyke in late 2016, Evans is well and truly warmed up for an extensive three-month tour across Australia, and ready to settle in to the solo-performance mindset.
“The band shows and the tour I did with Josh were both very structured shows and they had to be that way in order to work but playing on my own I have the freedom to do whatever I damn well like whenever the mood may take me and I won’t be blindsiding anyone. The whole thing rests on me, which is a good thing to do from time to time.
“I’m going to try and play a few songs people may not have heard me do live before and maybe dig up some cover songs that I’ve performed over the years but maybe haven’t played live for a while. Of course I’ll take requests and screw them up because that’s how I roll.”
The tour offers an exciting chance for fans to connect with the work Evans has done behind the scenes in this time, with ticket buyers getting their hands on a special six track EP of unreleased music from the ARIA winning artist.
“For ages I’ve been watching my hard drive fill up with unreleased demos. Every year the list gets longer, to the point that now I think I must have over 100 of the little fuckers.
“I’ve wanted to do something with them for a long time, because I still really like a lot of them so I thought by doing this EP and giving it away for free to ticket buyers it kind of satisfied that urge, encouraged people to buy tickets and also hopefully served as a small token of my gratitude to the people who have been supporting me for a long time and might enjoy hearing what I sound like when I’m recording myself at home.”
In his 20 years performing solo and with Jebediah, he’s ventured across many stretches of the great southern land, but there’s still venues to discover, and new places to discover.
“Every time I do a tour of this nature I’m always looking forward to the places or gigs that I haven’t done before because, with all modesty aside, I have been touring for over 20 years and after that amount of time you tend to get to know places pretty well. On this tour I’m looking forward to going to Castlemaine as I’ve never even visited before and also Baha in Rye because I love Mexican food and am mildly jealous every time I see one of my fellow singer/songwriters playing a show there.”
As he gears up for the massive tour he reflects on his earlier days. With the Bob Evans tour, and a Jebediah tour with Midnight Oil in October, 2017 is a far cry from his first solo gig, back in 1997 before he went by a pseudonym, a night he remembers fondly.
“I wasn’t even expecting to play that night. I was at the Punters Club in Melbourne, RIP, to watch Something For Kate. As fate would have it, their support act for that evening were in some kind of car accident, nothing serious, but they weren’t able to get to the gig in time. Either Paul or Clint or both of them, I can’t really remember that detail, asked me if I would like to play some songs for some free beer.
“I didn’t need much encouragement. I sat down on a chair and played Paul’s electric guitar through a little amp and I think I played some Jebediah songs without any distortion. It was probably pretty average but hey, that was the kind of crazy crap that happened in the ‘90s.”
By Claire Morley
