Fading Dreams, New Beginnings

5 February 2014 | 4:29 pm | Steve Bell

"I love everyday stories – sometimes things don’t work out and there’s not much you can do about it."

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Any Old Love, the fourth album from Brisbane rockers Halfway, is so much more than a mere collection of songs. It's a holistic combination of recollections, images and tales (even second-hand referrals via the liner notes) which unite organically with Halfway's ever-gorgeous music to tell a tale set in central Queensland in the 1970s; a story of tough times, broken dreams and, ultimately, redemption.  

“I talked to the band about making this concept album, which is difficult because even though they're right across us pushing a story we were all a bit scared we'd be left with some bloated double album jam-out thing – concept albums are often terrible – but we focused on the story and just went with it,” recalls frontman/songwriter John Busby. “It's based around this guy and his family in the late-'70s in Barcaldine, and he's suffering a heap of disappointment; he's had a life of great promise but he's just hit a fork in the road and can't go that way anymore. He's an ex-jockey who's now got to embrace a normal life at the same time as wrangling a really young family and working with all these guys on a road crew in central Queensland. It's his first shot at a normal life – or just an average life – and there's nothing wrong with it, it's just not spectacular. It's not the big dream you have when you're young – he got really close to achieving it, and then it all got pulled away from him just through injury and a few other things. It's just about how things sometimes things don't work out.

“It's based around the Shakespeare Hotel, this place right on the Capricorn Highway. There's a string of six or seven colossal pubs right there in a direct line from Rockhampton – the whole of Barcaldine is on one side of the street, and the other side's just fucking desert, there's nothing. They used to be full of shearers but by the late-'70s they were half-empty all the time, just full of working gangs and crews coming through – only a couple of thousand people live there. So it's about him tackling that, and being at the Shakespeare gives him a chance to dine out on what he's done – the boys there all love him because he's done all this shit in Brisbane, and he's got a lot of stories.

“He's going from being a straight-edge with big dreams to having a family and dealing with alcohol, so I guess the Shakespeare is like a siren that's dragging him further and further away from his family who are at home waiting for him. He's getting all of his sustenance from this hotel and his drinking mates, living hard. It's based around that story – him, her, the pub, his mates and their bar stories. I love everyday stories – sometimes things don't work out and there's not much you can do about it.

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“These boys at the time were listening to Tom T. Hall and Freddy Fender – they were all rock'n'roll kids really – but they went out west and they were listening to a lot of country music. Nothing really super-cool like Townes Van Zandt or Guy Clark or any of that shit, more the big seventies heartbreak stuff like George Jones. That's where we got Sunlight On The Sills from – we wanted to play it in that Willie [Nelson] style to exacerbate the heartache. We wrote that one in the style of the music they were listening to – basically they'd finish work, get fucked up, wake up and do it all again. Essentially it's my old man's story.”

And there's the kicker. Any Old Love gets its unabashed resonance from the fact that its story is Busby's story; he lived it all.  Even the songs contributed by other members of the band flesh out the tale, and seemingly tangential songs such as Dulcify and Erebus & Terror represent conversations between the Shakespeare's barflies.

“I lived up there as a kid and spent a lot of times in pubs,” Busby reflects. “We were always involved in racing – my old man was a jockey first, then later a bookmaker and a trainer so he lived a pretty big, colourful life and pubs were a big part of that. That pub in particular made a real impression. It was a good life, Dad was always fair, but he always battled with that balance – he was only young, and he'd already lived a whole life before he had to start again. He's a fucking good bloke, but sometimes good people make bad decisions. There's no way he's a villain in this tale – he's so much more than some character just fucking up.  It's just not the case, and I'm not interested in stories like that anyway.”