Romantic Time

Geelong-based folk country songsmith Luke Legs and his band The Midnight Specials have long been gathering a reputation for high-quality songwriting and exhilarating performances layered with family band harmonies and a distinctly grassroots feel. Their debut album, Why Oh Why (My Caroline), was acclaimed and saw them perform to sell-out crowds during a massive national tour. Given all this, it would be easy to think that Legs himself would be taking an upcoming appearance at Queenscliff Music Festival in his stride. The truth is, though, he's as excited as a kid on Christmas morning, to put it mildly.

“Yeah, look, I've got a pretty bad hangover today, but the thought of playing at Queenscliff is going to snap me out of it for sure. If someone had have told us this five years ago when we started the band, we would have not believed it. We've always been punters there, and now we're just so stoked to be part of the event. I'm a Geelong boy, so I've been going for years. I just can't believe it, I'm so stoked. As a band, we had a set of goals we wanted to achieve. Right at the beginning, we thought that it would be amazing if, one day, we could play Queenscliff.”

But Legs is not just excited about the thrill of taking the stage. It seems that he's almost as happy about the line-up of great bands he's going to be seeing – not surprising, since the 2012 festival is arguably the best Queenscliff has ever seen. “You kind of have your show in mind all the time, but the bands that are there are just such amazing bands, some of them we're really inspired by. So, I think, seeing some of these other bands perform actually gives you inspiration and motivation for your own show. I don't plan to leave the festival the whole time. I want to party. Despite all the expectation and organisation for our own show, I think it's important to take a moment and realise where you are.”

Even though it's obviously not, will Legs be attempting to treat Queenscliff as just another gig? The reason we ask is that a number of artists are on the record as stating that this is the kind of thing they feel they should do at big festivals. Legs, though, is decidedly not one of them. “We're definitely changing the way we play. Our setlist will be different to any other setlist we've ever played. Our live show is evolving all the time, and we really think about every show we do. We want to debut a whole lot of new songs at Queenscliff, which is a bit of a risk, because our fans all love our old songs. But we really want to see how they go. All our songs are stories, in a way, so I'll be thinking long and hard about what stories I think the fans are going to relate to.”

Finally, it appears that Legs is bravely going to use this show to debut one particular song that's very close to his heart. If his description is anything to go by, it should be worth the price of admission alone. “Playing a song live and seeing how people react is a really good indicator of what's working and what's not. We'll play a song live and, depending on the response to it, we'll work from there. We're going to debut a song at Queenscliff based on a story my grandfather told me. He wasn't a romantic man, but him and grandma used to go out and look at the moon and that was their romantic time. After man landed there, they stopped doing it because they felt it was never the same. I've put that into a song and we'll see how that goes.”

Luke Legs will be playing the following shows:

Saturday 24 November - Queenscliff Music Festival, Queenscliff VIC