Hat Fitz & Itchy: Hat’s Entertainment.

Hat Fitz & Itchy play the 11th Annual Brisbane Blues Festival at the Waterloo Hotel on Saturday.

Raw and acoustic, always wickedly spontaneous. They’re mountain men with attitude and sometimes without shoes. Hat Fitz & Itchy are the real deal, or as close as we’re gonna get in white, urban Australia. Their blues may be brash and bushy, but these guys are laid-back in the extreme. They enjoy their music-making and you can’t help but dig that groove too.

Asked to pin a tag on their musical melange, Hat falters: “Hillbilly, redneck... don’t know. It’s been called many things over the years. I guess mountain blues. We’re sort of reliving the 1920s with in our own Queensland fashion. We’re influenced by all the old blokes like Tampa Red, Bukkha White, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson, Charlie Patton and all those 1920s dudes, as well as the standard Earle Scruggs, Bill Monroe bluegrass stuff.”

Hat and Itchy’s musical partnership stretches back a span. They were first together in Hat Fitz & The Blooze Bitz, they teamed up with Jeff Lang as the Silverbacks, and somewhere in there partook of Hatz Jug Sloucherz.

Hat elaborates: “Just the duo’s been eighteen months, but Itchy was in the Blooze Bitz (with his brother, Scratchy). He’s been pretty well on side for five, six years now.”

Hat Attack is the first album for Hat and Itchy as the duo, but there are two albums from Jug Sloucherz days, one with the Blooze Bitz and one with the Silverbacks.

“We should have another one finished in about a month. We’re half way through it know. Me and Itchy are doing another one. We’ve added fiddle and a bit of trumpet and stuff on there. We’ll have finished recording in a month but it won’t be out till next year. I’m putting a few slower, more melodic ones on the new one. The other one, we just got together, Me and Itchy, and banged out what we done. This one will have a few more slower ones in there. There’ll be a bit more variety.”

“Hat Attack I did all myself, as far as producing went. I recorded half of it a studio in Eumundi there, and the other half at me house, a bloke came around and set up.”

Released earlier in the year, Hat Attack features fourteen, full-tilt tracks. True enough, it’s no slick studio recording but you can’t help but be captured by the raw energy, emotion and spontaneity oozing from every groove.

 “About four songs on it are original, the rest are sort of 1920’s based stuff, but with me own arrangements. The originals I just make up on the night, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m not much of a writer. Have a listen to the words and see what you reckon. I make it up, sing about someone in the room, sometimes you pull it off, sometimes it’s not on. The new one will be about half half.”

As well as recording the next album, it doesn’t sound as if Hat and Itchy will get the time to be idle.

“We’ve got the basic festivals. We’re hopefully back in Byron and we’ll be in West Oz in about two weeks. We’re going back down to Sydney at the end of December. Just the basic Australian runs. Fly here. Fly there. Can’t stop.”

Hat Attack is good fun, but the best way to experience this act is live.

As Hat says: “We’re more of a live band than a recording band. It’s something you’ve got to experience yourself. What I like doing is little pub gigs and packing out the little rooms. That’s where we go off. And festivals that are packed.”