Meredith Campbell

Luka Bloom

BLOOMIN’ WONDERFUL

Irish singer LUKA BLOOM , aka Kevin Barry Moore, has been riding the wave of success for around 20 years now. Although at times it’s been hard to get on board.

Despite his love affair with the sea, he admits that he’s a crappy swimmer. If he ever met a mermaid, of which exotic species he describes lyrically as a “water ballerina”, his first word, of the printable variety, would probably be “Help!”

Luka Bloom, he of the heartfelt bon mots and sanguine slide guitar, is in Australia to play for Aussies, whom he calls “Paddies with suntans”. He loves Australian audiences, before whom he, dare I say it, will freestyle.

“I don’t do setlists,” he explains in a lilting email. “Setlists are like planning a conversation. I don’t have a highly technical show requiring seamless coordination between lighting people etc... It’s just me and my songs. I decide the first song about ten minutes before the gig, then I say three Hail Marys.”

Luka has lived and played in the UK and two continents since commencing his recording career in 1978 with the album Treaty Store , drawing his strangely euphonic name from two diverse and unconnected fictional anti-heroes: Suzanne Vega’s Luka, and James Joyce’s Bloom. His 1990 album The Man is Alive was inspired by one year’s residence and rhyming in New York.

These days, the man’s home is his castle: Costa del Bog, deep in County Kildare. Yes, that’s a long way from the sea, his salty heaven. For Luka, the self-confessed bogman, the natural world, both land and sea, continues to inspire and humble him. Many lyrics describe his deep concern for the survival of the world’s natural places.

He remarks rather bitterly that Aussies and the Irish share another common cultural trait, defining in part their relationship to their homelands. “We Irish talk a lot about how much we love Ireland and nature, but as a nation we seem quite content to utterly destroy the environment. Sadly, this seems to be something we have in common with Australia.”

He describes his ongoing relationship with Australia in typical Bloomspeak: heartfelt, gritty, poetic and revealing. “Australia is an awesome land. She always leaves me breathless, and it is the only place in the world I feel sad when leaving, even though I’m going home. I guess this constitutes affinity, though it feels more like love.”

And that also goes for Australian audiences. “The main reason for coming to sing for Aussies is that they keep showing up. This makes it incredibly easy to love Australian audiences; the simple fact that they choose to be there.”

So the soulful bogman of Kildare has ventured again to the world’s largest island. He always returns to the sea. And this time he reveals deep insights. “Women in skimpy clothing go there. This is very inspiring.”

Hail Luka. Everything is possible in God’s time, but nothing is foreshore.

Luka Bloom is performing three nights in a row at Tilley’s – Tuesday-Thursday March 22-24. The latter two have sold out, but tickets are still available for Tuesday night at $56.50 + bf via Ticketek.

Mikelangelo And The Black Sea Gentleman

MIKELANGELO AND THE BLACK SEA GENTLEMEN are hopping on board their gypsy caravanserai this month to launch their third CD in Australia; in August and September they tour the United Kingdom. Curiously, a Black Sea season is not planned for this current round of promotions, although front-man Mikel, of the circus strongman proportions, hopes that the Black Sea region will loom up through the band's spy-glass sometime in the future.

Like Mikel, this tour will be "bigger than Ben Hur."

"There are plans for the Gentlemen to circumnavigate the Black Sea, playing shows along the way and filming the journey to make into a docu-melodrama," he says. "This will be some years in the planning and executing. As the politicians say, we will have everything in place by 2020."

In the meantime, this charismatic clutch of musos, mystics and misfits remains in the thrall of new creativity, with their CD, Dead Men Tell a Thousand Tales, and a swag of Aussie tour dates firmly stuffed 'neath their collective cummerbunds.

The Gentlemen are Rufino the Catalan Casanova on violin, The Great Muldavio on clarinet, Guido Libido on accordian and Little Ivan on doublebass. Chuck in such fabulous instruments as the vibro-slap, the jaw-harp, the tulip tone-blocks, the glockenspiel, the tin whistle and the spoons for added ethno-music cred and crackle.

But dominating the line-up on that stalwart Centralian stage was the uber-male, Mikelangelo, alternately alluring, intense, pathetic, promiscuous and gentlemanly; all these personae seamlessly linked by the booming baritone and immaculate presentation that have become his performance trademark. (He also plies the guitar, drums, cymbals, glockenspiel and piano).

Mikel maintains that the band's enduring creative ethos is the art of storytelling, "the heart of what we do as a group. We tell fairytales with all the good bits left in - the beauty, the wonder, the hilarity and the horror."

He describes the band's musical genre as Kabaret Noir. "To create this, we throw in an unlikely but tasty variety of ingredients into the pot to cook, and from that we make a hearty and rich stew, a formidable marinade, so to speak."

The Gentlemen who devise and serve this pungent pastiche and mellifluous melange are, according to their leader, gentlemen all, "wonderfully charming fellows who break most established codes of gentlemanliness, whilst upholding a strong sense of honour among thieves."

I asked Mikel how the band got its name. He sidled up close to deliver his answer, his breath redolent of the aromatic sage and wild lavender that grow rampant near the shores of his beloved Black Sea:  "It was whispered into my ear by a Black Sea mermaid who rescued me from certain fate after a storm washed me overboard."

Thanks to this mermaid, the Gentlemen concoct and serve their formidable marinade to audiences on far distant shores.  Things Will Never Be The Same.

Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen sidle into the Street Theatre on Sunday July 12 at 6 and 9pm. Tix $28/$23/$19. To book call 6247 1223.