The Be Good Tanyas: Horse Play.

The Be Good Tanyas plays the Arena on Friday, the Troccadero, Surfers Paradise on Saturday and the Nambour RSL on Sunday.

“We always thought that when we went to Australia we would tour with The Waifs,” explains Trish Klein, one third of The Be Good Tanyas, a Canadian act about touch base with Australia’s clubs with one Paul Kelly.

“The Waifs totally took Canada by storm,” she continues. “They were a huge hit. We ended up doing maybe fifteen shows with them over the last little while, and we’d always discussed coming to tour with them, and how it would be so fun. We weren’t planning to tour for another year and the offer from Paul Kelly came through.”

Our gain in having the bluegrass and gospel tinged folk trio paying us a visit comes at the detriment of a couple of UK shows. And quite possibly the act’s collective sanity.

“We were actually supposed to be in the UK. We were like ‘what are we going to do, we can’t take this offer’, but a lot of the dates in the UK weren’t firm. We thought, if we just cancel a few shows, we can fly to Australia, do the shows and get back to London for these other shows.”

Jet lag is not a major consideration then?

“I guess not,” she laughs. “We’re going to be so exhausted. It’s going to be ridiculous but we thought we might as well go sooner that later.”

Although The Be Good Tanyas debut album Blue Horse is being released in Australia for the first time to tie in with their shows, the recording is actually well over a year old now, and the band were in the studio working on their follow up when this interview was done.

“We finished Blue Horse about a year and eight months ago,” Trish explains. “It seems like a long time. We have a whole bunch of new stuff that we’re trying to get out and record. We try to introduce new songs live as we go. Sometimes we’ll try things out for a while and we cull things down to the best stuff to keep for the albums. Something that we like to play on the road might not even end up on an album, just so we’re not playing the same stuff every night, you know.”

“We want to balance our albums out so there’s a mix of traditional songs and original songs, ballads, more uptempo songs. We wouldn’t want to do like a whole album of ballads. It might be nice… I don’t know,” he laughs. “We want a diversity of different styles. We’re workin on some gospel songs, which we didn’t do on Blue Horse. Also some stuff that’s a bit groovier.”

Where did the gospel element come from? Is it something you’re all just getting into, or has it been waiting to come out for a while?

“We all listen to old gospel music, old gospel recordings. Frazey’s mother sings in a gospel choir, so she had a background in that. We tried about six songs that we’d been playing in the live show, and there’s going to be two on the album. There’s so many versions of these traditional songs that people know different lyrics. I guess that’s the point of doing a traditional song – trying to create something unique out of it. We want to keep a traditional element in what we do, but create our own little versions.”