Celtic folk for St Patrick’s Day

AUSTRALIAN Folk Band of the Year 2024 Austral will join an all-star lineup from the Melbourne Celtic Festival to celebrate St Patrick’s Day in the Tweed on March 15.

Founder and fiddle player Angus Barbary said the award-winning group formed organically in the music ‘sessions’ scene, sharpening its teeth in traditional sessions at the Melbourne pub Glass Jar.

“Sessions are informal gatherings to play music and share culture,” Barbary said.

“Sometimes there’s dancing, but it is mainly about the tunes, someone’s house, or it might be just down the local public house, and everyone’s working out stuff together in the aural tradition.

“You listen and learn by word of mouth the names of the tunes you just heard, and then you’ll pick them up.”

The four-piece combines Irish pipes, flute and whistle, high-energy fiddling, didgeridoo and energetic foot percussion.

Austral’s debut album, Thylacine, won the Australian Folk Music Award for Best Traditional Album of the Year.

“The recording is when things really took off – lots of gigs and festivals around the country,” Barbary said.

“The energy of the genre connects with many people, whether you have Celtic heritage or not.

“Everyone picks up on the energy of the music. The melody has a lilting structure to it, and that tickles something.

“Lots of things are happening at once, and that’s exciting. And there’s the beats and the chords as well.

“We write many of our own tunes that bend a few traditional rules, but the thing that modernises most is probably our use of percussion and didgeridoo,” he said.

Barbary aims to put Australian Celtic music on the map with the other Celtic nations.

“We have great representation as a diaspora nation, not a homeland like Scotland, Brittany, western France, or Galicia in northern Spain,” he said.

“All the immigrants from these places have formed communities here and brought culture and music with them.”

The band’s publicity shots show a precarious jump with instruments aloft from a Melbourne skyline rooftop, prompting a question on its authenticity.

“It’s real, but we’re jumping from the rooftop’s edge onto the roof floor,” he said.

“It’s actually the roof of Glass Jar where this all started, there is a lot of kinship there.”

Austral and its co-billed artists will bring energy, tradition, new sounds and kinship in spades.

Joining the bill are Scottish singing-songwriting and harpist sensation Chloe Matharu and traditional Irish trio Bhan Tre.

Visit twintowns.com.au/events/melbourne-celtic-festival-on-tour