Press
If you like the hair-rising-on-the-back-of-your-neck excitement of hearing a banjo roar into high gear, the foot-stomping sound of bush- rock and back-road ballads from everywhere in Australia, from inner-city dives to desert gold mines and remote stations, you have to see this band!
Press Reviews
Love’s Last Stand album reviews
various
The Re-Mains
****
Rolling Stone Magazine
Love’s Last Stand
Croxton Records / MGM
Raunchy live record from hard-working heroes.
Northern NSW Country Rock & Roll hellraisers the Re-Mains hit their boozy, bluesy, slide-and-banjo laced straps on this live album, combining a rootsy twang with inner-city smarts and genuine affection for rollicking, tumbling hillbilly sounds. Authentic enough to be endearing, they keep a respectful tongue in their cheek with songs like “You look Like Keith Richards”, and by quoting hip-hop phrases in “Folksinger Blues”.
Luke Anismoff
ABC Radio: Jarod Watt
The Re-Mains - Love’s Last Stand
Talent: Leigh Ivin, Michael Ward, Mick Daley, Sam Martin, Shaun Butcher
Date of release: February 2007
Date of Review: Monday, 26 February 2007
The Re-mains - Love’s Last Stand
One of the hardest-working, longest-driving country rock and roll bands in Australia give us a live album worthy of the thousands of kilometres they’ve driven.
Imagine a 70s Holden which has been fanged, hooned, thrashed and cruised from one of the country to the other, mainly on bad roads, never breaking down but continually having parts replaced as the long distances take their toll. This, in essence, is the story of The Re-mains.
When banjo player Shaun Butcher (aka Uncle Burnin’ Love) decided to quit the band last year the decision was made to record their final show with this lineup at the Durrumbul Hall in Mullumbimby; the performance captured is one of a band who love to play, whose musicianship has been honed in front bars up and down this continent, whose rock and roll influences marry perfectly with their plaid-shirt country swagger.
Rare are the country bands who’ll drop lyrics from Grandmaster Flash, The Herd and even the old Cranky hit Australia Don’t Become America before breaking out into a thumping banjo-driven instrumental dedicated to bush turkeys, but this rollicking five piece act are anything but your standard idea of country music.
Amidst the slashing lap-slide and furious banjo playing it’s important to note that frontman Mick Daly is an excellent lyricist, ranging much further afield than your standard boy meets girl/let’s drink rum and drive utes-type Australian country songwriting. “He always wanted to be a star football player/ But the poor guy had a build like Leo Sayer” still goes down as one of my favourite licks to sing along to in the modern bushranger tale Ballad of Wrong ‘Un, while The Dirt Farmer’s Gavotte is perhaps the finest drought-inspired piece of songwriting I’ve heard, managing to avoid clich�, patronising rural stereotypes and ‘they’re doin’ it hard’ platitudes equally � the thrust being it’s Mick talking with his Dad about the declining fortunes of the town and farm, including a humorous exchange on whether you make less money as a touring musician or a farmer.
The playing gets a bit looser, a bit louder towards the end of the album, and purists would argue there’s more rock than country (which is how it should be) � but this is an excellent recorded souvenir of a classic lineup of a band that keeps on keeping on
“The Re-mains of the day” By Nina Rousseau, Sydney Morning Herald
smh.com.au
The Re-mains of the day
By Nina Rousseau
June 10, 2005
The Re-mains are not a cult. They’re not a religion. They are a country rock’n'roll band with the zeal of missionaries and enough band mythologies to rival Moses.
Mick Daley and Leigh Ivin formulated the concept of country rock after playing together at an old copper mine in outback Nymagee.
They never forgot the birthplace of the band - particularly after one man was pronounced dead during their gig.
“It was hot and dusty and there was this drunken crowd of shearers who’d been speeding and tripping and drinking for days,” Daley says. “We played them an Acca Dacca song and one of them dropped and had a heart attack. He was only in his mid-20s.”
From an inner-city Sydney punk venue to a hard-drinking workers’ pub in Tennant Creek, the Re-mains are used to their music provoking strong audience reactions. At one gig in Bourke, a woman got Daley in a headlock and insisted that her son sing with them.
“He’d just got out of jail and he was a big boy, so he ended up wailing into the mic for about half an hour,” he says.
The Re-mains provide a fresh take on the homogenised sound of mainstream country music, fusing rock and punk sensibilities with pedal steel guitar and banjo. Their new album, Field Conditions, coincides with a four-month Australian tour, which kicked off this week.
“We were trying to create a kind of timeless record, something classic and enduring,” says Daley, who describes their high-energy sound as “careening from banjo-delic rock onslaughts to pedal steel-drenched alt-country sagas”.
The band’s influences - Dylan, Neil Young, Blues Explosion, Floyd - are easily spotted but cleverly woven with down-home lyrics about Holdens, Kakadu, bushrangers and hitting the road. It’s the sort of driving album that will take you from Melbourne to Cape York.
Few alt-country outfits have authentic red dirt on their sneakers but taking the pioneering sound of country rock’n'roll to the “coalface” is the philosophical crux that unifies the Re-mains.
“The coalface is the cutting edge, where the hard work needs to be done,” Daley says. “We see each new town as a fresh coalface.”
If other bands banged on as much about the coalface as these guys do, you’d think they were a pack of tossers, but the Re-mains are the genuine article. So dedicated are the group to doing “outback strikes” that guitarist Ivin is even going for his light-aircraft pilot’s licence so, eventually, the band can fly between gigs.
“It’d be awesome to be able to drop into Alice Springs for the weekend,” he says.
By taking their sound to the bush, the band has uncovered a rich seam of wildly grateful audiences.
“We had this idea that we could resurrect those band circuits that were so strong in the ’70s and ’80s,” Daley says. “That we could tour hard and play hard in the country.”
Daley laughs as he recalls a gig in a rough-nut Darwin truckers’ pub.
“I thought they were going to hate us, but we had this one massive trucker in tears.”
Despite the band members being scattered from Canberra to Federal on NSW’s north coast, the Re-mains are a tight-knit group.
The distance makes rehearsing difficult but Ivin says it’s immaterial. It all fits with the band’s philosophy and ideology for things to come together when they play live.
The tracks selected for Field Conditions were chosen from a huge back catalogue.
“We’ve got at least three albums’ worth of songs,” Ivin says. “So a lot of stuff we play live is just that: live.”
About 90 per cent of the album was recorded live, the rest of it over-dubbed later.
“It’s more organic and believable,” Ivin says. “We sound like who we are on the album.”
The band have extreme faith in themselves as a group, clearly defined roles and an unshakeable belief that the music they’re making is part of a bigger cultural picture.
“It’s really tough at times,” Daley says of life in the Re-mains, “but there’s a lot of time, emotion, money and skill invested and we’re not going to let artistic or personal clashes get in the way.”
Radio airplay isn’t a priority for the band, who are uninterested in being fresh roadkill for Triple J.
“We get lots of radio airplay on the regional ABCs, which is great,” Daley says. “But it’s not a priority. We want audiences who are going to stay with us. We want to make sure this lasts.”
Newcastle Herald
THE RE-MAINS / Live Review - City Tavern, Tamworth
January, 2005
I BOUGHT a T-shirt, I never buy a T-shirt. It may have been the ridiculous heat. It may have been that I felt obliged to drink rum. It was probably that this band, a talented group of misfits committed to worshipping the country rock and roll gods, is so darn tooting worth wearing. The opening night of the Tamworth Country Music Festival is traditionally quiet, crowds build up over the week to a packed crescendo on the final weekend. Like many of the town’s pubs the city has a car park-sized marquee out the back for the festival. The crowd was neither big nor outlandish, like The Re-Mains would be accustomed to, but it was mighty appreciative. I was blown away. The banjo player seemed oblivious to his surrounds, twanging away like Keith Richards with straw in his mouth, singer-guitarist Mick Daley copped Tim Rogers comparisons and the rest of the players, pedal steel and guitar, bass and drums, not to mention guest fiddle and Hammond players, were nothing short of hot. Now I’m part of that irritating brigade that wears musical allegiances on their chest in pride.
Michael Gadd, Newcastle Herald
The Re-mains are a pioneering original country rock and roll outfit from the far north of NSW. In their two-and-a-half year tenure at the coalface of country rock and roll their banjo and pedal-steel powered dirt-track dirges have won them devoted fans and critical acclaim across two-thirds of Australia and even parts of Europe . Their music has been likened to influences as diverse as The Band, Nick Cave , Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, The Who and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
The band is touring nationally in June 2005 to promote their new album, “Field Conditions“.
The album was recorded in both Tamworth and on the North Coast of NSW, and reflects the dual nature of a country rock and roll band at its peak, playing music eschewed by country purists and embraced by lovers of raw roots music. The band members consider it their finest work to date. Their debut album, “ThankYou For Supporting Country Rock and Roll“, earned four and five star reviews from numerous National dailies and was Album Of The Week at no less than five ABC Regional radio stations and has recieved steady airplay on Triple J, Melbourne ’s PBS and 3RRR and Sydney ’s 2SER stations.
“Thank You For Supporting Country Rock and Roll” also earned a Guernsey in the National Top 20 Independent Best Selling Album Chart in the month following its release. Distributed by MGM, it’s now been picked up by Glitterhouse Records in Germany and is being sold and receiving airplay across Europe - as is their most recent EP, “Burnin’ Daylight”. Headed for it’s third pressing, their debut album has also won much critical acclaim along the way from the likes of Stuart Coupe and Glenn A. Baker, two of Australia ’s foremost music critics.
The Re-main’s intention from the outset was to tour, taking their music out to the country and as a result they’ve played across every state and Territory except WA and Tasmania - thus far, playing nearly 250 gigs to date.
They’ve successfully straddled the gap between alternative rock and
Country and mainstream country success, playing festivals as diverse as
Tamworth Country Music Festival and Splendour in the Grass held annually in Byron Bay .
Their driving, infectious music has won them dedicated fans in far-flung country towns as much as in the city, where they regularly play inner city haunts such as The Annandale Hotel in Sydney , The Espy in Melbourne and The Grace Emily Hotel in Adelaide . They’ve also featured at several national festivals alongside top-level National and International acts, detailed below.
- The International East Coast Blues and Roots Festival (three years)
- Tamworth Country Music Festival (three years headlining The City Tavern)
- Splendour in the Grass, Byron Bay
- Woodford Folk Festival, Qld
- Darwin Festival, NT
- St Kilda Festival, Vic
- Nymagee Outback festival (three years)
- Big Note Festival, Swan Hill, Vic
- Gunnedah Two Rivers Festival, NSW
- Caboolture Country Music Festival, Qld
- The Mad Hatter Regatta, Albury, NSW
- Lismore Country Music Festival, NSW
- Nimbin Mardi Grass (three years), NSW
- Desert wind Festival, Tennant Creek , NT
- Opening of Youth Week, Hillston NSW
- Brunswick Festival, Melbourne VIC
The Re-mains continue to travel immense distances to spread the pioneering gospel of country rock’n'roll, with tours to Darwin , Perth and beyond from May 2005 and further National and International tours in the months following.
CONTACT:
Mick Daley
+61 2 66884306
Mob. 0428 314881
mickdaley@optusnet.com.au
Re-mains presskit