“Obviously there aren’t a huge number of Australians out there picking cotton and living in a tiny shack on the Mississippi delta,” he jokes, “so you know, I don’t think blues is entirely about your situation, it’s more just about feeling, and expressing those often negative emotions, but being able to make people smile and dance through that. That’s what I see blues as anyway.”
Despite their geographical differences, Kirk’s humanistic approach to music is surprisingly similar to the blues players of old, and the story of his blossoming love affair with his guitar is like something out of a fairy tale. “I was loosely into lots of bad American hip hop. I guess that was kind of due to the crowd that I was hanging out with back then. I was probably hanging out with the wrong people, and then when music came along and that was when life really changed. I got away from the bad crowd and started to kind of… do what I wanted to do. My mum just randomly put this old crap nylon string guitar in my room one day, as a motherly instinct to get me a creative outlet to express myself, I guess… and get some of the grit that was inside of me in my teenage years out into the open.”
The guitar sat there for about a year, and then when Kirk broke his ankle and had to sit around in bed for three months, learning to play suddenly became more appealing. “I had a few lessons at the start, but that was it. Once my mum wouldn’t pay for them anymore ‘cos I was 18 and had to start paying bills, I just went, ‘Well I’m not paying for guitar lessons, I’ll just teach myself’. That kind of makes you come up with your own little style I think. You can’t really teach someone how to paint a picture, you know?”
Blues was never the original appeal either. “I’d been playing at open mic nights all over Melbourne, and most of these open mic nights were blues-based, and the only blues I really heard there was terrible.” At this point Kirk starts singing his impression of bad blues down the phone. “You know? Repetitive, long boring guitar solos and that kind of thing, so I hated blues until I got to about 21 and then once again my mum took me to an Eric Clapton gig. Shortly after that I think I went to an Ash Grunwald and… There were young people everywhere! I was amazed that there were so many young people at a blues gig. And the switch just flicked and that was it.”
Kirk’s warm, genuine nature is reflected in how he treats the style. “Blues is all feel. The twelve bar thing… man, all the greatest bluesmen break the rules. It wouldn’t be strictly twelve bar, every now and then they’d jump up to the fifth out of nowhere and their band members just had to be switched on. People forget that it’s about feeling, the seem to think it’s just a structure, and a rule that you have to stick to these twelve bars.”
The live setup includes stompboxes, tambourines and an array of other percussive bits and pieces. He explains that it’s far more than just finances which led to the choice to tour as a one man band. “It started because I wanted to be a full-time artist and I didn’t want to work nine to five. I just couldn’t afford a band. [The solo thing] was just a vision in my head and I’ve sort of added one thing at a time until I’ve now ended up with this massive mess in front of me of six different things at my feet, and before I knew it, people were up and dancing exactly as I imagined they would if I had a band. The advantage of it just being me is that I don’t write setlists or anything like that, I mean I literally turn up to the gig and it’s all spirit of the moment, and if I want to stop a song and crack and joke then I can. I think it makes it a lot more real for people, you know? It’s not over-rehearsed, and it’s different every time.”
BY MAX PFEIFER
