Uni singer-songwriter’s cultural sojourn in a Sydney suburb
Photos courtesy of Lyndal Irons
Wed, 29 Mar 2017 09:56:00 BST
Academic Dr Toby Martin is one of Australia’s leading indie rock singer-songwriters, now he celebrates Sydney’s multi-culture in his latest album Songs From Northam Avenue
WHEN Dr Toby Martin’s (pictured right) students at the University of Huddersfield are in search of extra course material they can just download his latest album. For he is not only a trained historian with academic publications to his name, but is also one of Australia’s leading indie rock singer-songwriters, who continues to add to his catalogue of recordings.
It might be pop music, accompanied by promotional videos and radio airplay, but it is also a valid part of his research, argues Dr Martin. This certainly applies to his latest release – a series of songs inspired by a multi-cultural suburb of Sydney.
The recording – acclaimed by rock writers – integrates unusual ethnic instruments with guitar, bass and drums, plus the songwriter’s soaring vocals. The project was the result of a community arts initiative and provides a model that could be replicated in the UK, said Dr Martin.
In fact, some of his students of popular music at the University of Huddersfield have done just that, after being instructed by their lecturer to position themselves in the centre of town and absorb sounds and sights that can then feed into their songwriting.
The new album is titled Songs From Northam Avenue, referring to a street in the Sydney suburb of Bankstown. Toby Martin – well-known in his native Australia as lead songwriter and frontman of long-established band Youth Group, soon to record a new album – was invited by the arts organisation Urban Theatre Projects to take up residence in Northam Avenue for a spell and respond to the place and the people.
“It was a new way of writing songs for me. I’ve never done it sitting in someone’s front yard before!” said Dr Martin. “It was like psychogeography in musical form – trying to let the feeling of sitting outside in a suburb every day for two weeks infuse the lyrics,” he continued.
“Musically, the songs are quite simple and minimalist. It was all about finding an open musical space for the stories and the words to sit in.”
Once he had written an album’s worth of songs, he decided on the best approach to recording them. The cultural diversity of Bankstown, where 55 per cent of the people speak a language other than English at home, provided a solution.
The suburb has large numbers of residents from Arabic, Vietnamese and Chinese backgrounds.
“Come out of the train station at Bankstown and you enter into a hugely diverse neighbourhood – Vietnamese shops, Lebanese bakeries, but all very Australian,” said Dr Martin. He decided to reflect the mixed musical cultures of the suburb and invited expert players of the Arabic oud and Vietnamese stringed instruments the đàn tranh and đàn bầu to take part in the session.
After sorting out some differences in tuning and temperaments, the experiment worked well and now Toby Martin and the band assembled for the Northam Avenue session will tour Australia for live gigs. An online video gives background to the project and there is also a location video for one of the album’s songs, the uplifting Spring Feeling, described by Rolling Stone website as “a shot of pure pop joy stippled with sunlight”.
“The songs on the album are not about Bankstown,” said Dr Martin. “They are inspired by conversations that I had and things I saw in in Bankstown, but they are more universal. The themes are global – families, generational conflict and different cultures living alongside each other.”
For Toby Martin, the new album is the latest development in an unusual career that has seen popular music making run in parallel with an academic profile that led to his appointment at the University of Huddersfield in 2015.
He was a student of history and obtained his PhD at Sydney University. A key research area has been the influence of country music in Australia, and outputs include the book Yodelling Boundary Riders: Country Music in Australia since the 1920s. He has also explored the significance of country to Aboriginal people, who use it as a form of protest music.
“My post at Huddersfield is a way of bringing both my careers together,” said Dr Martin. “I am going to continue doing my historical research, but my music is research too.”
◄ Songs From Northam Avenue CD cover
