Dingoes, bourbon and the blues
Kiwi country-blues maestro Skyscraper Stan is bringing his whisky-soaked sound to this year’s Nelson Arts Festival. Grant Smithies delves into his interesting world.
Heat and flies and sunbaked dirt. Gum trees and weak lager; poisonous spiders and snakes.
The historic village of Chewton is about 90 minutes’ drive north of Melbourne, in rural Victoria. Population: 403. Whatever made expatriate Kiwi singer-songwriter Stan Woodhouse move here after a decade in Melbourne is anyone’s guess.
But if you were to break into his house and have a nosey through his record collection, I have a fair idea what you might find.
There’d be some scratchy old Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard LPs liberated from various op shops. Some Nick Cave would have to be in there somewhere. Bob Dylan, of course. Maybe a bit of gravelthroated blues from Tom Waits, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Captain Beefheart. He might even have a few records by Lyttelton’s premier voodoo blues practitioner, Delaney Davidson, who is perhaps Stan’s closest cousin this side of the ditch.
‘‘Actually, you’d be wrong on most of those,’’ says Woodhouse, who performs as Skyscraper Stan.
He’s just arrived back home after a whistle-stop New Zealand tour, but will return to play the Nelson Arts Festival in October.
‘‘My early musical touchstones mostly came from my Dad, so my record collection’s mostly rock and soul. The Beatles’ White Album was on high rotation, and Otis Redding’s Live at Whisky A Go Go. Actually, you’re right about Dylan and Tom Waits, though ...’’
A seriously lanky specimen, as his stage name suggests,
Skyscraper Stan grew up in Auckland but has lived across the Tasman for so long that he has the pancake-flat vowels of a local.
Musically, he’s quite something. ‘‘One part Nick Cave, two parts Hank Williams,’’ wrote one impressed reviewer, while the Sydney Morning Herald went so far as to call him ‘‘a revelation’’.
Woodhouse specialises in sad songs that make you feel good, heavy on cunning wordplay, rattling snare and twangy guitars. The arrangements are rich in robust flavours: a thick, meaty stew of rock’n’roll, country, juke-joint soul and the blues, and there’s the feeling that many of his lyrics might have floated up late at night from the depths of a whiskey glass.
Woodhouse tells me he went through a big country music phase before making his 2015 debut album Last Year’s Tune.
‘‘I went over to America and travelled around all the classic blues hotspots like a total white person, you know? And I was pretty obsessed with those early Bob Dylan songs that go for way too long but have a great narrative arc and a twist in the tail.’’
A twist in the tail. You find just that in many of the songs on Stan’s latest record, Golden Boy Vol I and II.
It was recorded with his ace touring band The Commission Flats, and Stan packs a great deal into every bruised ballad.
Fast women in the slow lane, bottom-shelf bourbon lukewarm from the can, wrecked families, child visitation rights on a Sunday. And that’s just the opening song, Dole Queues and Dunhill Blues, a tragic tale boiled down to its essence, delivered in Stan’s agitated baritone over hefty drums, organ and electric guitar.
Elsewhere, we move through a landscape blighted by endstage capitalism: boarded-up strip clubs, kids growing fat on white bread, vodka sessions in damp basements, tough-as-nails suburbs where you don’t dare ring someone’s doorbell.
‘‘A lot of the stories are stories I think are important,’’ says Woodhouse.
‘‘There are songs about gentrification and poverty and Australia’s really poor attitude to people seeking asylum . . . about people being marginalised and forced into unstable casual employment or crime.’’
Many tracks cut deep. ‘‘I don’t think I can stand/another frontpage photo of white men shaking hands,’’ he sings in Flag Of Progress, a song inspired in part by attempts to ‘‘clean up’’ Sydney’s King’s Cross.
The lyric rails against a type of compassion-free land commodification that dislodges a community’s most vulnerable while providing yet another financial bonanza for those already rich. ‘‘I notice that happening a lot in New Zealand as well these days, where more and more public space gets sold to private developers.’’
Rather than merely declare a political position, Woodhouse likes to tell a story about people affected by the unequal distribution of power, influence and cash.
And he has seen a great deal of the society he critiques. After moving from Auckland to Australia at age 21, he has spent much of the past decade crisscrossing the continent, singing for his supper.
Alongside band projects, Woodhouse has done umpteen solo shows with just his guitar, some of which are collected on a 2016 live album
But Golden Boy Vol I and II is his most accomplished work to date – the first side faster and bleaker, the second more reflective. The songs are so character-driven, cinematic and narrative-heavy, they resemble literary short stories that have been ruthlessly condensed.
I wonder if Woodhouse gets this in part from his mum, novelist Stephanie Johnson, who will also be appearing at the arts festival this year (The Granary, October 28), as part of the Pukapuka Talks books programme.
‘‘It’s funny you say that. I remember a conversation a few years ago where my Mum said, ‘Stan, do you ever think you might write anything more than just songs?’.’’
Both parents contributed to his love of well-turned words. His father is an avid reader, storyteller and occasional poet. And his mother has written plays, novels, short stories and screenplays.
‘‘My Mum’s dedication to her craft made a big impression very early on, but I also got to see how fraught the life of an artist really is, and how much disappointment can be involved. And yet I still decided to do it! What an idiot!’’
‘‘There are songs about gentrification and poverty and . . . people being marginalised.’’
Skyscraper Stan and The Commission Flats play the Nelson Arts Festival mainstage on Saturday, October 26 at 8pm. Come early for a free gig by Sun City Soul in The Granary at 6.30pm.