The Inside Line

It’s always nice recognition to be nominated for awards, even if it means dealing with the inevitable shit fight that goes on in a small town. The 2009 Amplified Awards are upon us, and Lincoln le Fevre & the Insiders have been nominated for a couple of gongs.

Artist of the Year is a nice one to be in the running for, and it’s voted on by an industry panel, so it’s more like the Oscars than the Logies. However, I’m pretty sure The Scientists of Modern Music are at the top of the pool table.

Now here’s where it gets tricky. There are a few categories that are open to the public to vote. I’ve been inundated with spam from people asking me to vote for them this year, most commonly via facebook, even in categories where The Insiders are sharing the shortlist, which is more than a little cheeky. So I’m going to be completely transparent here and say Sure, I’d love you to vote for us, and I’m going to give you the link, but really, it’s not a big deal, so if you can be arsed clicking the link, vote for whoever you think is good.

2009 nominations - Lincoln le Fevre & the Insiders:

• Best Solo Act
• Best Songwriter
• Best Blues/Roots

So click here to see the voting shortlist.

Amplified Gigs:

As part of the week’s festivities, we’ll be playing a few shows:

Friday 17th July - Hobart Mall (1pm)
Live on the Edge - Broadcasting Live on Edge Radio

Friday 17th July - The Brisbane Hotel (9pm)
Let’s Tear this Fucking State Apart - three stages, all night party

Saturday 18th July - The Republic Bar (9pm)
Roots Up! - Four acts of blues and roots, til late.

We got a few gigs coming up this month, starting with a solo gig this Saturday night, supporting Evan Dando (of The Lemonheads), and with special guest James Dilger (Sole Stickers, The Reactions). I’m a massive fanboy of Dando’s, so I couldn’t be more excited about getting to share the stage with him. Show starts at 10pm at the Republic Bar.

To top that, the next week features a full Lincoln & the Insiders show with young Texan Ben Kweller, also at the Republic Bar. Again, I’m a massive fanboy. As a side note, this will be the Insiders only Hobart show for a while.

Launceston fans, we’re finally coming up to play another show for you. This time on the 18th of April at the Nothern Club with Melbourne swagger rockers The Vandas, and again with James Dilger’s new band Sole Stickers.

In dot point form:

Saturday 4th April
Evan Dando, Linc, James Dilger - Republic Bar, North Hobart (tickets)

Wednesday 15th April
Ben Kweller, Lincoln & the Insiders - Republic Bar, North Hobart (tickets)

Saturday 18th April
The Vandas, Lincoln & the Insiders, Sole Stickers - Hotel New York, Launceston.

Cheers everyone.

See you at a show, and stay tuned.

Linc

It’s not often that I’d post a draft of a song up here, but this one kinda came out all in one go, and I get all excited and energised when that happens, so I wanted to share it with you. Any suggestions welcome, too.

Linc

Hope & Crown

We stumbled on into the bar, and I knew that I’d seen her face before, I think her name was Anne or Anna, and I think that we’d both been to school together the year before. I can’t recall exactly why we went in there at all, but I had never seen that much of any girl before. So Caleb got his cigarettes and grabbed me as he headed for the street. I got one foot out the door when Anne or Anna turned and looked around, then right at me. I can’t recall exactly where I’d seen that look before, like she was crying out for help but they were crying out for more, at the Hope and Crown.

They didn’t have no dancing girls the next time I went by a few months later. They tried to clean the carpet but instead they cleaned out all the clientele, save for a couple sailors with tattoos on their arms of birds to guide them back to land, and secrets in their faces, and in the creases of their hands. They were talking to a kitchenhand that moved to town some twenty years before. She said one night she’d packed a bag, and with her daughter flew for seven hours here from Singapore. She told us that her husband was a killer and a dealer, and all the while her smiling face stared down a margarita at the Hope and Crown.

Through the window, I saw someone’s lady laying down a taxi fare, and the smaller sailor watched her through his empty glass, and I think he knew that she’d find him there. She came in from the corner drunk and looking for a fight, and looking like an ashtray that’s been left out in the rain all night.

She said “I ain’t never fired a gun, but I think that I’d feel like I feel now. I got my finger on the trigger, with the words I gotta give to you, but hear me out.”

He said “I’ll keep you out of trouble if that’s what I gotta do, even if I wind up in the gutter lying next to you, near the Hope and Crown.”

So, apparently, Australia is now one of the fattest countries in the world. Tasmania, it also turns out, is the fattest state in one of the fattest countries in the world. Now, I’m well aware that I’m not responsible in any way for that statistic - hell, I don’t even have an arse (note, for future reference: Linc has no arse) - but that’s gotta be a worrying sign. A state full of poor, unemployed, fat bogans that didn’t finish grade eleven. But we all knew that already.

I saw a uteload of said fat fuckers on my way back from Eastlands the other day. Imagine if you bought five human-sized balloons, stuck them in all in a car, and THEN inflated them until they consumed ALL CONCEIVABLE SPACE in the car. It was like Gilbert Grape’s mum had been squashed into a small aquarium fishtank.  This is basically what I saw. Fat. Fucks.

In other news. Lochie J put me onto this band. He calls them math rock, I call them awesome. They call themselves Giraffes? Giraffes! and I don’t know anything else about them. They don’t like giving much away on their website.

Check out the video Giraffes? Giraffes! live in New Hampshire (i can’t embed it for some reason)

The Scandal are about to launch a new 7″ single. I worked with the band in the studio a few months ago, and this is probably the best thing that’s I’ve produced so far. Check out the new single up on the band’s myspace.

For those who haven’t heard me say it, David Foster Wallace is probably my favourite author ever. News of his suicide late last year left me a bit rattled, and saddened not just to hear what he’d been living through, but also from thinking that there would never be another DFW novel. Testament to his own compassion are the hundreds of memorials and tributes that flowed in the following weeks to McSweeney’s, to which he had been a contributor in the past.

The New Yorker has run a longform article on his life and work, and published an excerpt of his unfinished novel The Pale King, which looks to have been finished by D. T. Max and is said to be ready for release some time next year.

Article

Excerpt

In the meantime, if you haven’t already done it, set aside a whole month and read Infinite Jest.

In other news, you can now follow my inane bullshit on twitter. Follow me!

So, now that the bedbug bites have stopped itching, I can start planning some more shiz.

There are a few confirmed shows, and a few still in the pipeline over the next few months, and I’m starting to get pretty excited. March, in between recording a new EP with a new punk rock band, I’ll be doing a bushfire benefit at The Brisbane Hotel, and supporting Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls) with Enola Fall.

April sees me playing support to two of my own heroes: Evan Dando (4th April - tickets here) and Ben Kweller (15th - tickets), both at the Republic Bar in North Hobart, as well as a potential Launceston gig. Something I’m really excited about at the moment is an idea for a sit-down theatre show, featuring a chilled out Lincoln & the Insiders with a string section and maybe a few other guest artists on board. I’m not gonna make any money from it, but fuck it’s gonna be a cool show.

In May, I’m looking at playing Sydney and Canberra shows with friends Jordan Millar & the Question, and maybe a support gig in Hobart with another couple of punk rock heroes.

Look, get excited. This is gonna be a rad year.

Linc

It’s all finished. Nine cities, ten shows (eighteen for me if you count the solo support slots), couple thousand kilometres, one dirty taco and a handful of parasites down, and we’re about to get on a plane to come home.

Last night’s final show at the Public Bar was pretty good. Since most people we invited to the show said something like “where the hell is the public bar?”, we weren’t expecting much, but a few people came through the door. It was also our second show with Geelong kids The Houses, and these guys sounded much better in a decent venue.

For me, it’s on to planning the next run of Insiders shows. At this stage it’s looking like Melbourne and Geelong one weekend, Sydney and Newcastle with Amy Vee and Jordan Millar on another, and a couple of solo Linc shows in Brisbane, somewhere in the vicinity of March/April. Keep and eye on the shows tab on www.linclefevre.com and join the mailing list if you haven’t already, and I’ll let you know.

We’re all dirty and exhausted, so we’re just gonna hang around and wait for the plane to take us home.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

- Linc

Having a three hour drive to get to Melbourne was a blessing after the previous day’s eleven hour marathon drive. The weather once we got there, however, was not. Forty three degrees, I heard someone say. I have honestly never been in that sort of heat ever. It was bullshit (or boowwshit, as the old guys say it, jowls a’danglin’).

We check in at the FLAGSTAFF MOTOR INN, and make our way to Brunswick to the venue. Nice place too. In fact the whole suburb had a nice je ne sais quoi about it. Actually, that’s a bit of a misnomer in translation, since we knew exactly what it was about Brunswick that gave it a certain charm, and that was the total lack of electricity. Literally. The whole suburb’s power grid was out, due to a whole chunk of Melbourne being blacked out from the heat. Shit was melting fuseboxes all over the place. This blackout also extended to the very pub at which we were to play.

But, since this has been a tour of ‘making the most of it’, we were all ready to do an acoustic show in the dark, just for the hell of it, when the power came back on. Not to worry. But, everyone had already decided to stay at home with their working air conditioners by this stage, so we played a quiet little show to a few very supportive fans.

Where were we staying again? Oh yes, the FLAGSTAFF MOTOR INN. Now, this place had a few things: a working air conditioner, a relatively clean bathroom, a TV, and BEDBUGS. I woke up bitten to shit with, like, a dozen of the little fuckers running around under the bedsheet.

You can't see much, but these are a couple of the little scabs.

We cracked the shits with management and demanded a refund (which is proving difficult for the moment), and hotfooted it to another hotel across town.

At this point, I thought we were in the clear, but I thought it would be wise to double check the bags, and sure enough, the bags were crawling with the little fuckers as well, trying to hitchike along with us. Or last full day of tour, and a Saturday in Melbourne no less, and I spent the day with a can of bug spray, a dozen maxi-sized garbage bags, and a roll of electric tape, trying to suffocate the little shiteaters (or bloodsuckers, technically) in the thrity-degree heat.

In the meantime, Hamish has got an ear infection from one of the scummy hotel pools along the way, and asked for directions for a doctor from last night’s infested hotel (THE FLAGSTAFF MOTOR INN, from memory), only to arrive at an accupuncture clinic. Thanks guys. You’ve been great.

It’s just about time to head to the Public Bar in North Melbourne to play our very last show of tour. Still pissed I couldn’t go and see Ryan Adams last night or tonight. Naw well. Laters.

Did I tell you someone got shot outside our hotel? Surfers Paradise - what a place. Road rage, they say. Unleashed a hail of gunfire, they say too. What a place.

Thanks a billion to Jordan Millar and the Question for playing with us at the Hopetoun in Sydney on Wednesday night. What a great bunch of guys. Top work from Mikey from the Question especially, having played three shows straight, and then had to get on a plane at eight the next morning to go to LA to play some more.

In a rare rock and roll moment, there was even an after party for the show, thanks to a gracious host. However, by the time we drove the van back to the hotel and walked back to the party, it essentially involved two guys sitting in their loungeroom pulling cones and the rest of us sitting out in the backyard talking about how the other two were just pulling cones. Good times.

There are currently five of us sitting in a hotel room in Sale, too hot to wear shirts, trying to get drunk on whatever we’ve got left, after having spent eleven hours in the tour bus to get here from Sydney only to find that the gig here had been cancelled. Still, in this heatwave, we’re quite happy to have a night off.

Brunswick hotel tomorrow, in the forty degree heat. Watch me melt.

Now don’t get me wrong, and don’t get all RSL on me, but there’s just something that makes me connect any overt display of the Australian flag with a vaguely racist sense of nationalism. First thing I notice about Surfers Paradise, is that every second car has one or two Australian flags flying from the car roof, and an equivalent number of a variety of sizes of flags gracing most houses up and down the Pacific Highway.

We played a show in a suburb called Miami, and played essentially to the other bands, and a few people we knew from Hobart. The rest of the people milling about the place seemed to be some kind of blond, tattooed, tanned bogan. Dumb and territorial. Still, our hotel had a pool and we kicked it around there for a few hours. Suffice to say the rest of the band have had to endure the smell of my post-swim dreadlocks, which, especially in this humidity, something akin to a dirty bath towel that’s been on the bathroom floor for a few days.

We’ve just got home from a show in Brisbane, which happened to be right next door to the Here and Now Festival (which we can only guess has popped up in response to the Future Festival), at which Regurgitator played a no doubt amazing show to a home crowd. Hamish wandered off at one stage during the night to run into what at first appeared to be a really drunk guy who had stumbled out of the festival all covered in mud, but it turned out had actually had the shit beaten out of him and was pretty concussed, so Hamish had to find his friends to come help him. Hamish wins at samaratan.

Hamish also wins at getting massages from weird name dropping chicks. You know the type, that after having ‘worked in the industry’ for seventeen years is perfectly poised to offer all the respected words of wisdom they think they can muster. What’s that? You gave Chris Cornell the same massage? Who gives a fuck? Why don’t you tell us some more about all the famous people you know in a pathetic attempt to get some respect from some young impressionable musos because NOBODY ELSE LIKES YOU. Fuck.

Okay, I’m out. Next gig: The Hopetoun with Jordan Millar on the 28th of Jan. Should be a kicker.