LAUGHING OUTLAW RECORDS & MANAGEMENT: News

- 19/6/2012

Downtown Upcountry

Watch Video "BEER & CIGARETTES"

They reveal the nuances of everyday life but don’t shy away from the sometimes brutal truths that lurk in the shadows cast by the blinding sunlight.
Their songs range in location from the backstreets of the inner city, to the wide open roads of the Nullarbor.
Their stories are about the people who occupy these spaces and haunt these landscapes.
There’s domestic violence, drug abuse and neglect of the powerless. But there’s also salvation and power in the belief that a sense of belonging - of clinging to those who you love and those who love you - will see you through to the following morning and beyond.
Perry finds his inspiration in the inner city streets where he lives. “I want to write songs like Ken Loach movies - just showing how people are living, especially in the kind of environment that I’m very familiar with. And these days it’s one that seems to have less and less of a voice.
“But the stories that exist there are still compelling, and still universal.”
Adam’s approach to the songs on The Aerial Maps’ latest release, “The Sunset Park”, found him travelling alone “in the steps of the characters” across Australia from the west coast to the east.
“I wanted to feel the loneliness and the sense of space the characters would have felt, feel the kilometres running under my wheels, and pass through the small towns they would’ve passed through,” Adam says of his 3500km journey.
“The funny thing was, a lot of it was like I had already imagined … it confirmed to me that the lyrics and the moods of the music were on the right path.”
Both have been busy with other pursuits over the previous year, engagements that have only enriched their songwriting and performing. During January, Perry made his acting debut for Belvoir Street in “Buried City” as part of the Sydney Festival, while Adam spent his summer as an artist-in-residence in Haukijärvi, Finland.
Now, they return to the stage and for the first time, with their respective bands, come together in an enthralling double bill of songs, stories and film at The Vanguard in Newtown, on July 6 and 7.
Adam and his band the Aerial Maps will take the audience on that journey from the shores of Fremantle to the caravan parks of the Gold Coast as they revisit “The Sunset Park” – a multi-layered story that the Courier-Mail labelled “an Australian classic.”
Perry and his band will revisit the emotional and physical terrain of his critically acclaimed three albums – from the teenage embraces of “Meter”; through to songs about community that informed “The Last Ghost Train Home”; to tales of Nissan Pulsars being set alight on the ARIA-nominated “Johnny Ray’s Downtown”.
Two distinctive storytellers and singular songwriters, over two very special evenings in July.

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