Moving on to your career as a community musician, could you tell the readers a little bit about the Bondi Youth Wave?
That was my first community music job.
I had a daughter in 1991 and I really had to start finding work where I wouldn’t be on the road touring. I was in a group with Amanda Brown called Cleopatra Wong and we both had young babies and we tried to tour with that project and it was impossible. So I had to come to terms with that; that I wouldn’t be in a touring band any longer and I had to make money.
I lived in the eastern suburbs of Sydney and I went down to Bondi, to the Community Centre, and I said “I am looking for work,” and they said straightaway, “We have this programme, would you like to work on it?” I worked on that project for 25 years.
Basically, it was getting groups of young people, initially from 17 to 25, to get involved in songwriting and arranging music. That lasted for 15 years. The programme took place three months of the year, from May through to August, and the sessions were only two hours long. We would teach people how to play instruments, and they would learn songwriting and there would be a recording session and finally a performance.
It changed when the higher education institutions started offering music courses and that meant that people in the original age group didn’t want our kind of course any longer because they could enrol in music courses at school. We changed the workshops so that they were for Secondary School students and another set of workshops for kids of Primary School age.
The programme catered for kids from all backgrounds, so it wasn’t just looking for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds which most community music programmes do. There were kids from private schools and there were kids from poorer areas as well.
Could you tell the readers about your work with The Junction House band?
I think this is the best work I did. Junction House was a Community Centre in the eastern suburbs. The Junction House Band were a group of intellectually disabled musicians that I started working with in 1993.
The lead singer, Brook Crowley was highly autistic. A lot of people today would say they were autistic but they do function very highly. He was highly autistic and he wrote incredible songs.
Albert Blackley was on keyboards and he could reproduce pretty much anything he heard, although he could really only play a particular rhythm. We had a great bass player called Tony Elkins and we had a young woman with Down syndrome, (Nina Gotsis), who started on drums and moved on to guitar. We had a violinist as well.
And I was with those same people for 22 years. That was why it was such an incredible project because if people can stay together, you can achieve a lot. We met every Sunday morning. We produced three musical theatre shows; toured them. We played all across the east coast of Australia.
Sadly there is only one video of that project. I do have a video of one of the theatre shows and I might try to get that digitised and get that up on my YouTube channel.
Did this group get any mainstream or commercial traction?
No. The group had a residency at the Wataboshi Festival which is an international festival for people with disabilities. That was fantastic. We played Parliament House which was incredible.
All of the gigs the group played were in the context of a community music environment. There was no avenue for this particular group to crossover into the mainstream music industry, and of course I think there should be. But I think I understand the music industry pretty well, probably better than anyone, and there just isn’t a market for something like the Junction House Band.
For more information regarding the work of Lindy Morrison see the links below