LONDON: The Slaughtered Lamb

Saturday 30th July, 2022

7:30pm

Event information

‘Rising folk stars, inventive and edgy’ - The Guardian

'Extraordinary, even revolutionary. Unforgettable folk.' - The Canberra Times

'Rescues Australian folk from the world of beards and blue jeans.' - The Age

Bush Gothic wander through the dankest, weirdest corners of the trad song books and emerge as post modern slash anti establishment slash folk feminists. Are they outsiders, lurking on the cultural fringe?
Or have they penetrated to the inner core of Australian identity? BBC Music Magazine gave them FIVE STARS and they are multiple Best Music Award winners at The Adelaide Fringe.

With a 5 Star review in BBC Music Magazine and fRoots Album of the Year Runner Up, this daring trio have toured their modern imaginings of traditional Australian songs across the world. Band leader Jenny M. Thomas began her career as a classical violist before taking up touring as a fiddle-singer and Indian Karnatic violinist. Exposure to Australian folk music on the festival circuit compelled her to begin a bush band of her own, but one that would shake up the folkocracy by focusing on the female story and including a defiantly modern aesthetic to these achingly old songs.

It was 2009 when fiddle-singer and composer Jenny M. Thomas began a series of urban bush band sessions – gigs where every week a new crop of musicians would join her ‘bush band’ and improvise through a playlist of traditional Australian songs. Out of this series she picked only the bravest musicians to form her band, named after the genre of Victorian-era literature titled ‘Bush Gothic’. Their first gig was a live-to-air broadcast on ABC Radio National’s ‘The Music Show’.

The individual members of the band, Jenny M. Thomas (fiddle-singer, piano, spoons) Chris Lewis (drumkit) and Dan Witton (double bass), have worked as composers, instrumental soloists and theatre performers across the globe with companies including Circus Oz, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, The Australian Opera, Strange Fruit, Meow Meow and Chamber Made Opera.