The first time I encountered Blue Grassy Knoll was at a gig at the Empress of India in North Fitzroy in February 1998.
The first time I encountered Blue Grassy Knoll was at a gig at the Empress of India in North Fitzroy in February 1998. On the evening, Blue Grassy Knoll was performing its own score to accompany a series of 1960s ‘stag’ films. To commemorate the event, Blue Grassy Knoll offered a prize for the best porno moustache.
My then housemate trimmed his facial hair to create an unbeatable sexual follicular statement, subsequently walking away with the prize: a zucchini and half a tube of KY lubricant. Blue Grassy Knoll banjo player and flautist Gus Macmillan remembers the evening, but not the prize. “Yes, I remember that night,” Macmillan says. “But I don’t remember the KY jelly – but it sounds like just the sort of thing we would’ve done,” he laughs.
Blue Grassy Knoll’s excursion into the soft and sexy world of porno soundtracks eventually came to a halt after an unfortunate gig at the Punters Club; by this time Blue Grassy Knoll had begun exploring a surrogate soundtrack concept that would eventually see the band travel around the world. The band had become aware of a show at the Adelaide Festival, in which a group of musicians had put together a live score for a silent film. Blue Grassy Knoll was intrigued by the idea and decided to pursue it. “My girlfriend at the time was a film student, and she suggested this Buster Keaton film, My Hospitality,” Macmillan says.
Neither Macmillan nor his band mates were familiar with Keaton’s work. It didn’t take long, however, for the quality of Keaton’s silent films to become apparent. “”It wasn’t until we watched My Hospitality that we realised it was genius,” Macmillan says. “He was a masterful filmmaker. Unlike Chaplin, his character hasn’t dated.” Blue Grassy Knoll soon realised that Keaton’s films provided a fertile ground for the band to create a live soundtrack. “It was his filmmaking technique,” Macmillan explains. “He’s a very graceful editor, and his understands the medium of film very well. Watching his films is like listening to a great piece of music. He was light years ahead of other people at the time – and he’s still incredibly funny and relevant today,” Macmillan says.
Blue Grassy Knoll went on to create scores for other Keaton silent films, including The General and Sherlock Junior. The Keaton soundtrack concept provided Blue Grassy Knoll with the opportunity to inject the band’s own artistic element into Keaton’s films. “We’re pretty much in control of all of the sound,” Macmillan says. “We can dictate how people are feeling throughout the film. It can be a mundane moment, but you can affect the momentum of the plot.” A successful soundtrack required Blue Grassy Knoll to find a balance between improvisation and staying true to the film’s original dramatic edge. “We always leave open sections for a particular rhythmic riff,” Macmillan says. “But we also follow the film very closely to watch for the edit points.”
Blue Grassy Knoll took its Keaton score concept to various locations around the world, including a three-week season in New York. “They put us up in an apartment on 72nd street, and we’d walk down Broadway and walk in the stage door on 42nd Street – that was mind-blowing,” Macmillan says. After embarking on a particularly intense touring schedule in the early part of this century, Blue Grassy Knoll now restricts its performances to once or twice a year. “We needed to have a break after we did a four month tour of the States,” Macmillan says. In 2007 Blue Grassy Knoll was approached to write a score for the 1922 Chinese film Labourer’s Love. It was the catalyst for Blue Grassy Knoll’s return to occasional live performance. “We decided we could do it again, but not as a full time gig,” Macmillan says. “We do it once a year – we like to go to places we haven’t been to before, and play in really nice venues. We’re calling it Blue Grassy Knoll version 2.0,” Macmillan says.
On Friday November 5 Blue Grassy Knoll will make a rare Melbourne appearance, when they perform the soundtrack to Our Hospitality at the Melbourne Recital Centre. “This Friday’s performance will be completely different to when we first played it ten years ago,” Macmillan says. The passage of time hasn’t diminished Blue Grassy Knoll’s affection for the film. “When we were rehearsing the other week it was like looking at an old photo album. And the film is still a cracker,” he says.