Channelling The Drama, Simplicity & Truth Of Folk Songs

Jenny Thomas is back from her solo tour of the UK, the kids are at school, the dog's been walked and Bush Gothic's frontwoman is where any sane person would opt to be on a cold winter's morning, rugged up by the heater. "Nice and toasty," laughs Thomas, something she does regularly and with abandon. Soon though, she and the band are headed back out, this time for the National Celtic Festival.

"There's something quite curious that happens at a festival when people just devote themselves to one whole weekend to have a good time and just get into music," says Thomas. "The audience is always very quick to be involved and a part of the music. It's just — everybody's on holiday from everything, so that's very appealing."

"The competition I went to was dead serious and there was a microphone and there were judges and you got judged on your diddling ability."

The NCF in particular, a celebration of Celtic culture and craic, seems the perfect arena for Bush Gothic's dark amalgam of modern and contemporary folk, though it's been a while between pints of Guinness for Thomas. "I haven't been for a long time, I went many, many years ago," she recalls. "I remember because I went in a competition, a fiddle competition. But I got there late, I got there very late, and I wasn't allowed to enter but I played anyway. I remember a lot of Irish music and Scottish music and they have a very, very clear focus of… the Celtic realms — and really good quality too, because of that. [It's] not quite so diluted as other festivals might be." 

We'd like to see that competitive spirit this year, maybe to the festival's Limerick competition.

"Ooh, I like that idea. I haven't entered but maybe I should. I don't mind a good competition like that. I've been to a diddling competition in Scotland.

"Diddly diddly aye diddly aye diddle ee dee die," sings Thomas, leaving her audience a little amazed and confused.

"It's all people who can't actually play any instruments but, they just go 'oh well, you know what? I'm just going to get up there and do something anyway'," she explains. "They sing a song but with diddles, 'oo de la de die do diddle aye diddle o die' and they're really serious. The competition I went to was dead serious and there was a microphone and there were judges and you got judged on your diddling ability."

Like Irish air guitar? "Well this was Scottish," giggles Thomas. "I think the Scottish have that one more degree of seriousness about it all."

Despite the demonstration, Thomas herself is more accustomed to the fiddle than the diddle, an instrument used to great affect on Bush Gothic's recent album The Natural Selection Australian Songbook, a collection of reinterpreted Australian folk songs. "The colonial Australian songs are — I've been drawn to for a long time just because the stories are so intriguing and dramatic, you know. They're all about heartbreak, and loss, and treachery, and being lonely in another country thousands and thousands of miles from home.

"I think a very good folk song, or blues song, the simplicity and truth of it, it almost resets you, you know. It's what we yearn for that simplicity, we all yearn to access that, oh, resetting, so we can get on and cope with whatever we need to in life."