Halfway: How The 'Terror & The Beauty' Helped Shape The Classic Songs On 'Any Old Love'

There are plenty of great rock songs on Australian topics. But in the rock’n’roll world, there are surprisingly few albums devoted to lives and issues far beyond the capital city limits.

Indigenous artists like Warumpi Band and Yothu Yindi have done that, so too albums like Born Sandy Devotional by The Triffids and Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust.

The fourth album from country rock band Halfway, Any Old Love, belongs in this company. When it was released in 2014, I reviewed it five stars out of five. Nothing in the years since has changed that opinion. 

Any Old Love came at a pivotal moment for a band that traces its beginnings to the Queensland regional coastal city of Rockhampton. Singers and songwriters John Busby and Chris Dale and drummer Elwin Hawtin met in the band’s tiny indie rock scene. “Fifty people, tops,” Busby says.

They teamed up again in Brisbane in the rock band St Jude in the ’90s. The band didn’t last, but the partnership did. The flavours of the music they loved – Bob Dylan, The Band, Neil Young, the literate tales of country mavericks like Townes Van Zandt – started to emerge in new tunes, and Halfway reflected that.

They needed a band big enough to create the widescreen sounds they imagined for the songs, joined by bassist Ben Johnson and Irish brothers Noel and Liam Fitzpatrick on pedal steel, mandolin and banjo, members to this day. Their debut album, Farewell To The Fainthearted, was released in 2004. 

This was a band that thought deeply about their art and from the start the goal was to make great records. As they ready their ninth studio album, The Styx, for release in 2025, that remains their guiding star.  

Busby says: “There is something about growing in a regional town where you think, ‘You probably can’t do this.’ In the ’80s, in Rocky, unemployment was high, and the goal was just to get work, and that was hard. So, from the start, you aren’t aiming high. But for my friends and I, there was Grant McLennan, in the UK, making records with The Go-Betweens. He wasn’t really from Rocky, but he was born there.” That was something to hold on to. 

John Busby. Credit: Dane Beesley

Still, Busby had a steady job as a signwriter and says he might never have left Rockhampton. But in December 1994, his world shifted forever when his sister Cherri was killed in a car accident.  

“Small towns are hard when something like that is going on,” Busby says. “Everything’s a memory. Cherri was 21 when she died. The world isn’t fair or unfair. It just unfolds, and you do your best. I learnt that at a young age and Any Old Love is pretty much about just that.”

In early 1995, John moved to Brisbane and hooked up again with his friend Chris Dale.

Life is seldom easy for any Australian band making music with their own distinctive tone, especially one with a large line-up that is difficult to tour, but the early Halfway albums helped them win friends along the way.

Busby was surprised to hear that Grant McLennan’s Go-Betweens bandmate Robert Forster was a fan: that seemed almost unbelievable for a band with its roots so far from the centre of the music industry. Adele Pickvance, bassist in the later line-up of The Go-Betweens, introduced Forster to Farewell To The Fainthearted.

“I thought it was a great title,” Forster says now. “I borrowed the album and really liked it. Patience Back knocked me out; it had an Exile On Main Street vibe that I loved. So I reckoned here was another great Brisbane band and they weren’t just doing indie rock, there was something else going on.”

In 2008, Busby and Dale received the Grant McLennan Fellowship, which honours the memory of the late songwriter and enables Queensland songwriters to travel overseas and focus on their writing. Busby and Dale spent a productive few months in the UK.

Forster produced the band’s 2010 album, An Outpost Of Promise. Halfway had introduced themes across records before and, taking inspiration from albums like Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, wanted to explore that even more deeply with their next album.

Busby says: “Chris was a voracious reader, people like Hemingway, Steinbeck, writing about regional areas, finding the beauty in people struggling with everyday things. He always had a great feel for that outsider thing. He gave me the cue for Springsteen’s Ghost Of Tom Joad album, too.”

Chris Dale. Credit: Dane Beesley

As a child, Busby spent a couple of years in western Queensland in Barcaldine. “When I was a little kid, my dad, John Snr, was a great jockey. When that career didn’t work out he went building railway bridges out there with his brothers.”

While assembling tunes for the next recording, Busby found he had three songs that drew on those experiences: Shakespeare Hotel, Sunlight On The Sills and Hard Life Loving You.

“Those people in the gang in Barcy were working hard, and none of them were doing what they really wanted to be doing,” Busby says. “Basically, they were breaking rocks in the hot sun, doing the hardest work. Every night was a party. But there’s a sadness to it as well.

“Hard Life Loving You and Sunlight On The Sills are my mother Barbie’s story. My old man was a good guy, he just wasn’t a great father. My mother was amazing and brave. The night she packed Cherri and myself in the car and drove back to Rocky was proof of that. She was just 26 then.”

These songs pointed the way ahead. “We had done a fair bit of this, tackling the memory thing without getting too deep into nostalgia, which is the big sugar hit that wears off fast,” Busby says. “Sentimentality is what we try to avoid.”

By the time of recording, the band had expanded again with keys player Luke Peacock and former Go-Between John Willsteed, now a full-time member on guitar. A formidable team was assembled for the recording, with engineer Phil Graham working at the Queensland University of Technology recording studio Gasworks.

Willsteed was working with producer Forster in the studio for the first time since The Go-Betweens classic 16 Lovers Lane. American producer and A&R legend Peter Jesperson, one-time manager of The Replacements, joined them as co-producer for part of the sessions. These were some of the best ears in the business. 

John Willsteed and Robert Forster. Credit: Dane Beesley

Simon Homer (manager and proprietor of the band’s label + 1) contacted Jesperson before a trip to Brisbane’s BIGSOUND music conference in 2012. Jesperson says: “When I read the band formed based on a mutual love of Dylan, Springsteen, Big Star and The Replacements, I thought, ‘I’m in!’ ” Jesperson returned for some of the sessions for the album.

Crucially, the band was all-in on the album concept, tailoring their songwriting contributions to the overall theme. 

Dale left the band in 2019 but returns to join them on stage when they play the album in full later this month.

He says: “The catalyst was the Grant McLennan Fellowship and working with Robert on Outpost Of Promise. We were late bloomers, learning so much about how to make records, how you built the songs to work together. Not just from a writing perspective but within the band, how we played together, learning how to listen to each other better.”

Peacock delivered a killer tune called Dropout. Dale had a song called Erebus And Terror, based on the story of Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic exploration. Much of the album was through the eyes of a son’s experiences with a father. This one went the other way, a cautionary tale from father to son. 

Busby’s Dulcify might be the most heartbreaking song ever written about the world of horse racing. Busby says: “Back in Rocky, my dad got into racing again as a trainer, so the races were always a background in my world. There’s fear, there’s hope. You see the terror and the beauty all at once. Which way is it going to go?”

Forster says: “Busby and Dale were joined at the hip. Chris has a classic big voice, able to reach out and fill the room. John’s a talker, a whisperer, able to get right in your ear. A nice contrast, and what was great was when they sang together, a third voice was created. That was handy for a producer.”

Equally impressive was the cohesion of the eight-piece band.

Forster says: “I’d never worked with a group of musicians that large before. It was a big blend to get into the songs, but it worked. They were a gang making music, and I loved that. I dug the photo of them on the cover of Outpost – they looked like trouble but the kind of guys who, if you broke down on the highway, would stop and lend a hand. In the best kind of way, that’s what they were doing with the songs.”

Busby says: “The recording felt very special. Phil Graham made us feel at home with his belief. Even stuff that was off-the-cuff and half an idea was met with conviction and enthusiasm.

“We knew by then the only thing that mattered was to make something good, not to worry about the things that are outside your orbit. On Outpost, everything was planned and rehearsed. With Any Old Love, it was more relaxed. So much work had gone into the album that we wanted to see if we could wing things too.”

They did that with different versions of the song Any Old Love, a recurring motif through the album. The Waking Hours was just finished, unrehearsed, everyone standing in a circle with charts written out a few minutes before at their feet.

“There was a lot more confidence in the band, and that’s because everyone was completely happy with who they are, why they are and where they are. It was a different kind of record as well. We weren’t trying to do the same thing twice.”

Jesperson says: “The band benefitted from the affirmation of people they respected. There was a strong sense of mutual respect, and I’ve seen that work wonders in many recording sessions.

“Seeing them live, Halfway are a lesson in dynamic ensemble performance. Every band member is there to serve the song. My friend John Perry (guitarist in The Only Ones) once said: ‘Why is it I can see an 80-piece orchestra and hear every instrument but a four-piece rock band so often drown one another out?’ Halfway, an eight-piece, never do that.”

Halfway with Robert Forster and Peter Jesperson. Credit: Dane Beesley

Halfway perform Any Old Love, plus a set of other favourites, at The Old Museum, Brisbane, on October 26. Book at www.oldmuseum.au.