Originally from the Bellarine Peninsula, Annie-Rose Maloney and her brother Hugh started playing as a duo around Geelong before getting a band together and making the move down to Melbourne. The original band has since dissipated and for the past two years the siblings have been backed by Mitch Rice on Hammond organ, bassist Ivan Blackett and drummer Daniel McKoy. Hugh Maloney, Blackett and Rice all look a bit worn out from their day jobs as they soak up the sun in the Retreat Hotel’s beer garden as Hugh recalls the move to Melbourne.
“We got offered a few gigs at the start so that was really lucky,” Maloney says. “It’s so hard when you don’t have contacts to get gigs. You’re just trying to ask venues but you don’t know who to ask and you don’t know where to ask. We’re in a position where Annie’s done a real lot of hard work of getting good connections around Melbourne and she’s able to organise a tour this December where we’re playing seven or eight shows in two weeks. We organised it in about a week with Annie just sending text messages to people and booking shows.”
Tamworth Country Music Festival seems to have fallen for Murdena’s country-infused folk with the band being invited back this year after playing the festival in 2013. That first year, the band took out the highly competitive Busking Championships and won a slew of new fans. Something akin to the thousand yard stare enters the eyes of the lads when they talk about the festival most recently past. In 13 days, the band performed nine times not including the daily busking stints they played to raise cash to fund the trip with a couple of dedicated fans following them to every show.
“That was really frigging hard,” says Maloney. “We came away from that exhausted. Busking on top of those shows, playing three 45 minute sets during the day, going back to camp, trying to get something to eat and go in and busk. We were playing for five hours. It started off fun but by the last of the three days we were just exhausted.”
“I never wanted to see any of you ever again,” Blackett chuckles.
“We were expecting that we’d be too weird for them,” Maloney continues. “We’re not weird music but just for what they’re used to. Australians are not into contemporary country. They like their Lee Kernigan and that sort of thing. I think they warmed to us though especially the first year. Seeing a bunch of young people having a crack at country music, we still have people asking us to come back.”
Despite their concerns being quashed, it’s easy to see what Maloney means as, despite their obvious country influences, their sound leans more towards folk than the bush country Tamworth celebrates. Their latest EP Ruby shows the group are spending more time to develop the textures and dynamics of their songs as they continually refine their music which Maloney owes to his more musically-minded band mates.
“Our first EP was a lot lighter because it was just Annie, me and Cameron McKenzie who was the fella that recorded us,” he explains. “We would just come with an acoustic guitar and record what we’ve got and then layer until we got what sounded like a band. The second EP was basically just us. He [McKenzie] didn’t have much involvement, he just recorded so it was nice to do that and experiment with sound and muck around with dynamics.”
Plans to record their first album are set for January, when they make a trip down to Tasmania to record in their friend Bart Thomas’ studio but before that they’ve got an interstate tour set for December. A Murdena show is definitely not your usual folk event with rowdy punters at the Ruby EP launch stripping down to their unmentionables, crowd surfing and generally causing havoc. It showed the dedicated community that has built up behind the group which is something no artist can exist without. A nugget of wisdom from another friend of the band before their sold-out first EP launch at Cherry cemented this idea in the band’s collective mind.
“I remember going into that gig and Chris Wilson, who taught Annie how to play harmonica, said, ‘When you do your EP launches you should do it for everyone who’s helped you out,’ ” Blackett tells. “We went in with the idea of getting all our friends together and having a sick time. It’s really not about you; it’s about everyone who’s got you there.”
BY RHYS MCRAE
