There are a few definite tracks already: Hope & Crown will feature, and so will a track I learned from an old busker in Victoria, plus a piano ballad and one of the covers I’ve been tossing around live. If you’ve got any requests of songs to stick on the album, drop a comment and I’ll see how it’ll fit.

Dear friend FMJ has started sketching out some ideas for an album cover, so I’m looking forward to seeing how that comes up. You can see some of her other stuff here.

I’ll be coming to Brisbane next month to play a show at the Troubadour with Ben Salter (The Gin Club, Giants of Science, et al), so come along if you’re up that way. Thursday June 10th, the Troub, with Ben Salter and Tash Parker.

In the meantime, check out the latest on my other band Ride the Tiger. (MySpace here).

Catch you all later,

Linc

I’ll set the scene: I was playing a solo show on a hot and humid Hobart night just a few days back. It had been a long day; I had already played an afternoon gig in the sun and I was pretty ruined, but I pulled myself up and on to the stage where two other punks had just finished playing a couple of acoustic sets.

The weird thing is that no matter how shit I feel, it disappears when I start playing a good show, and this one had started well. Halfway through the first track — a cover of Uncle Tupelo’s ‘Still be around’ — I take a quick breath between words and suck out of the microphone a mouthful of what I could only distinguish as seawater. I was more surprised than anything else, not only by the fact that I had a gob full of juice, but that there could be seawater in the microphone.

Before I had time to think about it more, I started to get ready to sing the next line and instinctively swallowed. The instant it went down I thought of Kenny and Pat, the two preceeding sweaty punk rock singers, and realised I had just drank two hours’ worth of their fruitiest spit and sweat.

I drank fucking sweat.

Apologies that the embedder isn’t working, but here’s the link.
Reruns (apologies to Christina)

He had honeyed hair hanging thinly down to his unshaven chin that framed a contradiction of an intelligent gaze and a dumb smile, and he stood casually, leaning back on a crooked hip so that his back leg took most of the weight of his body, and his arms hung down behind his arse. The back of his open jacket would have been swinging gently in the breeze had it not been such a still day.

She, in her thirties, dressed ten years younger and looked all the better for it. The remainder of her gloss-brown hair not cut in a severe line across her brow was collected loosely behind her head and held there by an oversized toothed hairclip. For the entire duration of the time I watched them, I remained undecided as to whether her face was intriguingly cute or distortedly odd.  She had the air of someone who liked to tell people that she worked in advertising, despite being merely a half truth given that she was the firm’s accounts clerk. He was definitely an architect.

The daughter sat like a typical girl her age, straight backed and legs outstretched along the ground at forty-five degrees, bright red kicks punctuating the lines of the angle. Her hair was dark and cut like her mother’s, except for the two loose pigtails that hung unevenly on either side, and her cheeks had the strawberry complexion of someone whose last batch of tears had only recently dried. The scowl did not move from her face, nor did her gaze shift from her parents’ as she stood up. She stretched her top down to cover the bottom of her puppyfat belly and wobbled uneasily before regaining her upright balance. Then she began walking uphill away from the crowded market.

The architect and the accounts clerk simply continued with their wide-eyed fascinations and their dumb smiles as they called after the girl. From behind the glass of the window I heard nothing above the thick hiss of the coffee machine, clinking of crockery and the prickly hum of a dozen conversations, but their faces showed no authority, and their chests and necks showed no sign of volume or projection. The daughter, ignoring them, simply continued along her uphill trajectory until finally, the accounts clerk sprung forth, handing the architect her latte and handbag, and vanished out of sight to the right of my window.

He remained where he stood, juggling the girl’s red parka, two coffees and a handbag, but as his balance shifted forward to his front foot, his mouth changed shape to form an O, and his eyebrows rose sharply. He fumbled to regain his grip on the parka that had become unbalanced and was slipping out of his grasp, and in doing so, tipped one of the two coffees at such an angle that its contents were emptied all over the parka, handbag and footpath, while somehow keeping the now-reclining glass resting on the saucer. Fearing that he might overcompensate and lose the second coffee, he froze, the O still on his lips.

The accounts clerk returned to the frame carrying the girl under her arm at an awkward angle before returning her to the same forty-five-degree sprawl. The architect and the clerk argued briefly over who should drink the remaining coffee, gesturing theatrically – no, it’s my fault; it’s okay, I don’t need one anyway; no you go; no you go; no really – but their expressions did not alter from dumb fascination, which in the end, seemed to be less the look of unbridled love and unwavering joy, and more the look of two fumbling adolescents with a new puppy they had just brought home from the pound.

So I went and bought a shitty webcam so I could maybe show you some songs I’ve been playing with for a while. This is a track called Still Be Around by Uncle Tupelo that I play live sometimes. I’ll upload some more over the coming weeks as I get a better idea of how the piece of crap works.

Special congratulations to our wonderful management team, Julian and Helen at Perfect Crime, for taking out best management. I can safely say that they put a lot more work into things than I do. Oops.

Congratulations to all the other winners as well, especially to Joe and Enola Fall (Most Popular Group), The Scientists of Modern Music (Artist of the Year), and The Brisbane Hotel (Most Supportive Venue, Outstanding Contribution to Original Music).\

Gigs:

Sunday 9th August – The Alley Cat, Hobart
Linc solo with Hayley Couper (4pm start)

Sunday 6th September – Bar Open, Fitzroy
Lincoln le Fevre & the Insiders, with the Mike Meston Band, and Emily May & the Alarm Bells.

Friday 11th September – The Penny Black, Brunswick
Lincoln le Fevre & the Insiders, with the Mike Meston Band

Friday 2nd October – Republic Bar, Hobart
Lincoln le Fevre & the Insiders, with Jen Cloher

Saturday 3rd October – Hotel New York, Launceston
Lincoln le Fevre & the Insiders, with Jen Cloher

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.

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

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.”

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.