Keeping It Real

And, as so often happens, success didn’t bite until Morris stopped searching for it. In 2013 he released Skarkmouth – a blues album based on colourful Australian characters from the 1920s and ‘30s – which unexpectedly reached the ARIA top ten, and he’s just followed it up with companion piece Van Diemen’s Land, which has performed even better (peaking at number four).

"I was seduced by the pop sirens and was dragged onto those rocks, and followed the pop scene for a long time. That was a lot of fun"

“It’s been a revelation,” Morris marvels, “it just came out of nowhere. As an artist you’re always proud of what you’ve done before, but you also think, ‘Gee, I wish I could do something new.’ I was always trying to write stuff but no one was really listening, so it’s a fabulous feeling.

“I started out playing the blues like most of the people in that era – we were all Rolling Stones fans. But then we started to realise that [those songs had] been written by people like Howlin’ Wolf and Leadbelly and John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson, so we started getting their albums and playing their songs live.

“Then I was seduced by the pop sirens and was dragged onto those rocks, and followed the pop scene for a long time. That was a lot of fun, but I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to do a real basic blues-roots album, and I got to a point in my career where nothing had worked for 30 years so I just felt, ‘Hell, why don’t I just please myself?’.”

Van Diemen’s Land covers distinctly Australian topics such as the Eureka Stockade and Breaker Morant, but Morris explains that it wasn’t initially meant to be so parochial.

“I was in the middle of writing a blues-roots album, but it sounded a bit pseudo-American and I thought, ‘This doesn’t sound honest, it doesn’t sound right,’ so I dismissed it and figured I’d write some more songs another time,” he recalls. “Then I was in Sydney reading the newspaper and there was a story with a photo of a guy called Thomas Archer from 1916 and the picture just spoke to me – it was almost like he reached out to me from the past and said, ‘If you want to write blues-roots songs, you’re not an American – you’ve got to write about what you know, the blues and roots that we grew up with,’ and that was the catalyst that started everything. I realised that if you’re going to write in this style you’ve got to write about where you grew up.”