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Features The Future Is Leah Monday, March 03, 2008 Leah Flanagan Unites Indigenous Australian, Irish And Italian Heritage In Her Unique Country/Folk. By Martin Jones
As is usual, the Bluesfest aims to introduce us to a number of artists on the rise at this year’s festival. Few such introductions are likely to be as welcomed as Northern Territory singer-songwriter Leah Flanagan’s. Though Flanagan’s remarkable voice and distinctive take on folk/country are gradually gaining the national renown they deserve, earning her bookings on festivals such as Woodford and Tamworth, her musical career is only just taking off thanks to the imminent release of her debut album. Indeed, Flanagan will be seizing the opportunity to launch the album at this year’s Bluesfest.
Back in their home base in Darwin, the Leah Flanagan Band are celebrities, opening the Darwin Festival to 6,000 people and earning a 2007 NT Indigenous Music Award for Emerging Act of the Year. Though Flanagan says she grew up in a non-musical family, she found herself surrounded by music socially, and was particularly inspired by local artists like Shellie Morris and Cloudy Davey. Music so enthused Flanagan in her teen years that she earned a degree from the Adelaide Conservatory of Music, an experience that was crucial in broadening her musical experiences.
“I had to explore my musical tastes or influences through just my own personal knowledge and research,” Flanagan recalls of her childhood. “Well I wouldn’t exactly call it research, just stumbling upon things – I’ve always had an open mind so if someone says ‘you’ve got to listen to this’ I’ll listen to it and go ‘oh man that is good!’ Because I come from a family of non-musicians and basically football players. And coming from the NT, you know, there’s only so much Chisel you can handle!”
Whilst a bit of Charlie Pride and whatever she could glean from local radio made up Flanagan’s pre-adolescent musical diet, attending university allowed her to explore the music of her Irish and Italian heritage.
“I love Irish folk songs,” she says. “I’ve got a degree in music so I got to explore a lot of traditional songs in Irish and Italian music through that and I spose when you come from a passionate sort of background, those sorts of music are so passionate!”
The other side to Flanagan’s background is Indigenous Australian, and she’s very much aware of the lineage of Indigenous country/folk musicians that, though perhaps more nationally prominent in the ‘60s and ‘70s, has remained strong in the Territory.
Those influences have combined in a very organic way in Flanagan’s music – she’s steered away from the pop/rock side of contemporary country music to explore folk arrangements driven by acoustic instruments like banjo and fiddle, and delivered with a vocal presentation that seems to owe to something to the great jazz divas.
Flanagan agrees that the band of musicians she has fallen in with definitely helped shaped her music.
“Toby Robinson, for example, who played the Dobro and the banjo on the album, I never thought I’d be working with an instrumentalist such as that. Like I was always a soloist just playing with my guitar and I love folk music. When I was in high school, Jewel was ‘like the coolest thing eva!’ you know. But I love acoustic and organic, warm sounding instruments and I think that’s why I always thought, man it would be so great to play with a violinist. And we just asked a couple of friends to come and jam with us and the sounds that we created with those instruments and with a nice bass sound, it was so good. And we went through a few violinists and got Netanela [Mizrahi] who’s playing with us now, and I don’t think I could ever play music and not have a violin in it any more.
“I suppose I like bluegrass but I can’t play bluegrass.”
Who can!?
“Yeah really! I like jazz but I can’t play jazz. I like gypsy swing but I can’t play any of that, so we just play what we do and it sounds a little bit different I think.”
So Flanagan feels as though this path has lead her to a style she can call her own?
“I definitely think that the one thing we have is that we don’t sound like any other band,” she confirms.” When people always ask me ‘so what do you sound like? What sort of music do you play?’ I’m like ‘orrhh I dunno. Come and see us play, that’s a really tough one.’”
Which is exactly what you’ll get the chance to do at Bluesfest. With the album all ready to go, Flanagan is particularly excited about the timing of the Bluesfest show.
I think after the recording of the album we’ve become, I don’t know we’ve set things a little bit differently. We’ve got new songs which we didn’t previously play before the album because we spent so much time focusing on the album, but I think we’re much tighter as a band than we’ve ever been after that process. None of us had ever recorded before so that process so that process made us really tight and really think about a lot of things.”
Revealing that the entire album, from the musicians to the artwork, was produced by Territorians, Flanagan affirms that she’s thrilled with the finished album.
“It’s a bit surreal, I feel like a bit of a country hick,” she laughs. “But I’m really, really stoked with the way things turned out.”
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