Blame the war. Or perhaps it’s a rebellion against a generation of synthetic tunes, all written and recorded with a marketing budget in mind. Whatever the cause, there’s a folk renaissance taking place in popular music, and Simon and Garfunkel getting back together has got nothing to do with it.
Over the past year, singer/songwriters – for the most part accompanied only by the strum of their acoustic guitars – have produced some of the biggest-selling albums on the Australian hit parade. Major record labels are now signing up folk and “roots” singers at a rate not witnessed since the counter-culture movement of the 1960s.
Vikki Simpson of West Australian trio The Waifs doesn’t need any convincing that a “quiet revolution” is taking place in modern pop culture. Her outfit’s most recent album, ‘Up All Night’, was released in the second week of 2003 and shot straight to No. 3 on the ARIA music chart.
Following a national tour in support of the record – including high-profile appearances at diverse music festivals such as Big Day Out, Byron Bay Blues and Roots, and the Tamworth Country Music Fair – The Waifs have spent most of this year touring the United States and Europe, sharing a stage on more than 30 nights with that most legendary of folkies, Bob Dylan.
“There seems to be a resurgence in roots music all over the world,” says Simpson, speaking late one night from a hotel room in New York, having just got back from another gig opening for Dylan in front of 3,000 fans at the Hammersmith Ballroom. “Particularly here in the States... it’s coming in vogue again and younger people are turning to it. I think we’re all a bit over the pop sensation and the celebrity music thing.
“I think the general population has clued on to being pushed these manufactured pop songs, having them shoved down their throats – day in, day out – and people are looking for something with a little more substance. Real music that is being played by real people and songs that actually say something. I like to think that's what's happening.”
Enjoying similar success is John Butler, another West Australian-based “roots” artist and The Waifs’ label mate on the independent Jarrah Records (the two acts co-own the label with their manager Philip Stevens). Butler recently completed a sold-out, 21-date national Australian tour and his two most recent albums, 2001’s ‘Three’ and this year’s live recording ‘Living’, both charted strongly. Three alone has sold more than 100,000 copies in Australia.
Unlike pop starlets, says Butler, popular folk artists don’t simply fall off a record company conveyor belt. Most have been honing their craft in virtual obscurity for much of their lives. “Lots of us have paid our dues for a long time,” he says.
“I guess when people like myself or The Waifs or (American artists) Ben Harper or Jack Johnson get popular, and the industry and the fashion-conscious get a hold of that, it draws attention to people who have been doing it for a long time. The more popular a genre gets, the more attention people in that genre will get.
“It’s a good thing. I think it’s definitely a renaissance. I think when troubled times come on, people want to hear something real, heartfelt.”
It’s not just at the top end of the charts where the times are a changin’. The flow-on effects of this mainstream assault are also evident at a grassroots level, in a growing number of small acoustic clubs and coffee houses in cities around the world.
For the past five years in Sydney, music promoter Martin Contempree and his colleagues have staged their weekly Club Acoustica night, where anyone with a guitar can get up on stage and have a sing. Contempree says he has noticed a significant escalation of public interest over the past 12 months.
Contempree now runs his Club Acoustica nights across three Sydney venues. Another three clubs in Brisbane also put on regular shows. By the end of the year, Club Acoustica will have expanded to Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide and Byron Bay.
He proudly points out that three recent signings to Sony Music Australia – Charlton Hill, Sandrine and Pete Murray – all got their start more than three years ago in one of his rooms. “Club Acoustica has always had as its moniker: driving the acoustic renaissance and making it real again,” says Contempree. “Music made by humans, in effect.”
Contempree believes this spike of interest in the past year has a lot to do with “the Jack Johnson phenomenon”. For this quiet revolution has a most accidental of leaders – he carries the name of a former world heavyweight boxing champion but is the most demure of superstars.
Hawaii’s Johnson never imagined he would end up with a career in music. The 28-year-old was having the time of his life travelling the world making surf films. He also just happened to play guitar, heavily influenced by the laid-back sounds of Hawaii’s native slack key style. Johnson started adding his own songs to the soundtracks of his films, played a few tiny shows and, in 2001, released a low-key debut album, ‘Brushfire Fairytales’.
No one was more surprised than the surfer when the record went on to sell more than 1 million copies in the United States. His follow-up album, the recently released ‘On and On’, reached No. 2 on the Australian charts and No. 3 on the American charts, selling another million so far.
“It’s hard to grasp that it all started happening,” says Johnson. “So I don’t feel like I have to hold onto it – I will be ready when it starts to fade out. I never dreamed it was going to go beyond playing coffee houses with just a few people sitting around listening. And that’s where I was really happy doing it.”
Johnson cringes at the idea that he’s leading a revolution. “I hope not,” he says, laughing. “I don’t really care.” In fact, he questions whether there’s a revolution taking place at all.
“It seems a lot of times once someone realises there is something going on, it is almost over,” he says. “It’s like, as soon as you can say there is some kind of movement going on, it might be right near at the end of it because it is apparent enough, or pop culture enough, for people to realise it is happening. It’s nice when it’s just a subculture.”
Back at Sony Music Australia, Michael Taylor, the company’s A&R manager, whose duties include signing new talent, says it’s just coincidence that his label has recently released records by three new folk-influenced singer/songwriters. “It is not like we suddenly say we’ve got to go find a new acoustic-type artist like Ben Harper or Jack Johnson,’ says Taylor. “A lot of these artists are already out there doing it and we have been looking at it and working with it over some time. An artist like Pete Murray we signed just about a year ago. So it wasn’t like we decided last week to work with him, signed him, and got a record turned around.”
But Taylor acknowledges that, if there’s no revolution, there’s at least a very big buzz on acoustic music at the moment. And if your business is selling CDs, then you have to cater to what the market wants.
“To an extent, that’s it,” says Taylor. “Suddenly the public and fans start to want to get turned on by a certain type of music and they start consuming that type of music and then it seems there’s just a lot of it out there. And radio starts playing more of it and all those things just seem to fall into place.
“But I don’t want to sign artists and build a roster because of what radio is going to play. You have just got to sign the stuff that you truly believe in and then hope that radio comes around to it.”
Whatever the case, don’t be surprised if you hear a folk song on a car commercial before the year is out.
