Club Acoustica - Reviews

With his six-string acoustic and booming baritone, Brett Hunt has been playing shows in Sydney since he arrived from Bega six years ago. He plays often – sometimes two or three times a week – but one recent performance eclipsed the rest.

“It was when I supported Taj Mahal at the Basement,” says the 28-year-old. “That was, like, wow! This is an artist who’s always done such things. And after the show, drinking tequila at 3am, Taj said to me, ‘Now here’s a man who comes from a culture of singing.’ See, my grandfather taught me to sing and he’s Welsh, so I have this big Welsh baritone…”

Take it from the legendary American bluesman: Brett Hunt has talent. Better yet, Hunt is just one acoustic-wielding member of a burgeoning subculture of innovative new performers. Acoustic nights are springing up all over town, regularly yielding a handful of head-turning performances. Quite rightly Hunt says Sydney is enjoying a “new acoustic renaissance”.

At La Bar on Darlinghurst’s Oxford Street there’s Club Acoustica on Thursday nights, where $10 buys you an evening of unplugged acts. The Iguana Bar down the road does a similar thing on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, while once a month The Basement hosts its own Club Acoustica soiree – the next one is on Wednesday, August 29.

Further afield the Roxbury in Glebe hosts three acoustic acts every Sunday night; the Commercial in Balmain has an acoustic night each Thursday; and, on August 26, Kelts Bar in Blaxland will launch its Sunday afternoon 'acoustic lounge'. And on Wednesday and Sunday nights at the Excelsior in Glebe you can see Melanie Horsnell and her shifting band of collaborators. Actually, the Excelsior has an interesting musical history: in 1999, after four years of Sunday nights, Sydney troubadour David Lane played his last Excelsior show. (Incidentally, Lane has just released his impressive second album, Put Me in a Taxi.) A year ago the Glebe pub finally found a worthy successor in Horsnell and she’s been building her audience ever since.

“Wednesdays are more rocky, Sundays are more cruisey,” says Horsnell, a virtuoso classical guitarist at age 22. “It was great last Sunday. We had our one-year anniversary. All these musos came down – we had 10 people playing and you could just feel it being alive again. People were walking away afterwards saying it’s great that this is back again." Apart from her Glebe residency Horsnell will launch a four-track EP, Magic Mirror, at the Hopetoun in Surry Hills on Wednesday, August 29. (For the trainspotters, her EP is produced by Garth Porter of Sherbet fame.) Traditionally a rock‘n’roll town, Sydney is embracing its softer side. We’ve flirted with it before (recently with Cactus Child and Leonardo’s Bride) but never has there been such an outpouring of raw acoustica.

So why the resurgence of mellow music? Martin Contempree co-founded Club Acoustica three years ago. He says La Bar attracts 80 to 100 punters, The Basement in the range of 300, while his weekly e-mail newsletter goes out to 2,000 folky fans. "This is all a bit of a phenomenon for us,” Contempree says. “I guess is harks back to the folk music that was played in cafes in New York or London 50 years or so ago. And there’s something about the human spirit. While rock relates to music and dance can be about drugs and beats, in a folk atmosphere you get that feeling of almost communing with the artist, the instrument is live and real and you can almost hear every word they say. People can really relate to that, and also see how much incredible talent there is in this city.”

Perhaps the upsurge in acoustica is, in part, a predictable reaction to an increasingly complicated world: acoustic music offers a sincere, simple, quiet antidote. "I can feel something coming on in acoustic music,” says Dominique Fraissard, a gifted singer/songwriter who has just released an aptly titled CD, Catharsis. Brett Hunt has his debut album scheduled for release later this year. He agrees with Fraissard. “At La Bar there have been moments that were extraordinary,” he says. “There were nights with myself and Dominique and Stella One (Eleven) at the Basement playing to a capacity crowd, and I looked at Martin and he looked at me and we thought, ‘We’re here.’ That was really cathartic.”