Images below captured during their performance at the Lost Paradise Festival 2015.

Angus & Julia Stone are a brother-sister folk-blues duo who formed in Sydney in early 2006. Their parents, Kim Stone (marine biologist, singer and high school teacher who then spent 20 years in institutional funds management, now Kim Jones - a Non Executive Board Director) and John Stone (rock band, builder and high school teacher), were a folk duo before Angus and Julia's older sister, Catherine, was born (October 1982). Catherine, Julia (born 13 April 1984) and Angus (born 27 April 1986) grew up in the suburb of Newport on Sydney's Northern Beaches. They attended Newport Primary School and then Barrenjoey High School – they were all taught by their father with their mother singing to them and helping them to develop their musicality.[1] At family gatherings, when the children performed, Catherine was on saxophone, Julia on trumpet and Angus on trombone, Kim singing and John on keyboards or guitar.
During their teen years, their parents separated amicably. The children spent equal time with their mother and father, as both parents lived in the same suburb. During this time, Angus started writing pop songs. After finishing school, Angus worked as a labourer while Julia taught trumpet. Angus learned guitar and while recuperating from a snowboarding accident, Kim and Angus travelled to South America to join Julia and then go on to meet Catherine who was travelling in Italy.

Happy new Year  Peeps! Here are a few of my favourite shots of the Lost Paradise Festival! Enjoy Stay tuned for more to follow soon!

A few weeks ago I crossed paths with a very talented young man Bryn Douglas at the Wollombi Music Festival. He performed on stage with the crew of Sam and the Bird. Bryn and I recently had a photo shoot on the Central Coast. It was a Sunday afternoon filled with sunshine, rain, thunder, lightning and wind. Nothing was going to stop us from getting great shots! 

Q: If you could play with 1 other muso, who would it be and why? 
A: Haha I'd love to have a jam session with Gotye! He has an amazing musical mind! His music has been a massive inspiration to me, and I've been told it shows through in my music! 

Q: Describe your 1st instrument.
A: Ok so my friend played something he'd learned on guitar at school for my dad one time, so I immediately picked up a guitar for the sole purpose of playing it better, and became addicted! Since then playing and songwriting have been involved in every aspect of my life.

Q: What are the plans for 2016?
A: I've been playing and writing for other people for years until I decided that writing my own music was what wanted to do, recorded an incredible E.P with my good friend Andy Mak, which I'm about to release and tour throughout 2016. 

Q: What has been the craziest thing that you have done on tour?
A: The new band hasn't started touring yet, but we're just about to and it sounds amazing! Think Dustin Tebbutt's acoustic songwriting/vocal style with the production of Broods or Sia! It's truly a wicked mix stylistically and fun to play around with. 

Keep your ears on the ground for Bryn's single. I was lucky to hear a bit of it during our session. I know you will love it. 

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Special thanks to the crew at The Glass Onion Society for sharing their cafe with us! 
http://theglassonionsociety.com/

Find them on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/TheGlassOnionSociety/timeline

I had the absolute pleasure to meet and hang out with Ash before his performance which was filled with raw true emotions. During our casual interview we covered the following:

Q: Describe your the 1st instrument which you played?
 
A: The old nylon string acoustic guitar at the age of 10. My granddad from South Africa gave it to me. It was really cool. 

Q: How did you progress from there?

A: I did a few music lessons. Did some classical but it was too disciplined and then started my own journey. By the time I was in high school I would infrequently get lessons. I would do a term here and there. After a while I started to progress more when I was not doing lessons. The real hunger to improve drove me. 
I was playing sport and that was where my ambition was. Music was a natural thing and I never had the intention to be a professional musician. I did not think that option was available to me. I really only did it as a release. All I wanted to play was Blues. 

Q: How would you describe your teenage years?

A: I was trying to be the worlds best soccer player. That's my family religion. My siblings and my dad played for Victoria. I really wanted to be good but I did not think I was quite a good as them. When I was 17 I broke my leg, and that was good for my music. That was the turning point for me. I never really recovered from the injury. 

Q: Tell me a bit on the collaboration of your new album Nov which was released on the 25th of September 2015?

A: I have received some really good reviews, especially from Rolling Stone. Australia.  
What I really wanted to do was put together a three piece blues, rock psychedelic kind of feel. Instead of having a base player I wanted someone to play the synthesiser for some fat bass lines to really give us a good point of difference.
My manager found Ian Peres who plays in WolfMother and ex-BKB drummer Pete Wilkins. I did not realise until I started jamming with Ian what a lord he was. He is absolutely amazing! He brought more too it what I thought he would bring. He was also a trained classical pianist. We would be in the studio and we do these subtle over dubs of grand piano. 

Q: If I had to place you in a time machine and you only  have 8 hours, where would you go and what would you do. 

A: Well, the sixties and I would be hanging out with Jimi Hendrix. Woodstock would be a great place to be. Free amazing times. For me personally I have never come across such an bewildering talented progressive step forward like Hendrix. Still we have nothing like him! 

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About Ash Grunwald:
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When R L Burnside released the album Bothered Mind in 2004, teaming up with hip hop producer Lyrics Born, he showed the world that the blues were not just meant to mutate into rock n roll. The sound of the twelve-bar blues emerged in Africa, as did the beats that would give rise to hip hop and when Burnside combined the two, hundreds of years from their point of origin, it would be a marriage of fate that simply made sense. In Australia, at precisely the same moment, a gent of much younger persuasion surrounded naturally by the hip-hop of his generation and as deeply embedded in the blues as those far beyond his years, made the very same discovery. What Ash unintentionally proved with that parallel step, was possession of a foresight generally gifted to those well beyond his years.

Ash Grunwald, put together his first album, Introducing, leaning heavily on traditional blues but it was his second album I Don’t Believe released in April of 2004, that would change his state of play. It was his first album - of many to come - to graft technology onto the deeply rooted foliage of the Delta swamp.

On the back of his increasingly explosive and unique shows, he released a searing live album Live At The Corner; “When I play live, it has that four on the floor, modern pulse that we get from electronic dance music,” he says. His next studio album in 2007, Give Signs, was even more adventurous, and he took his energetic live show to venues such as London’s renowned The Borderline and Shepherds Bush Empire, and opened for acts as diverse a James Brown, Bo Diddley, Keith Urban, Jack Johnson, Missy Higgins & Pete Muray.

In 2008, after collaborating at a song writing workshop with producer Countbounce (Urthboy, TZU), he and Grunwald teamed up to deliver an album of thumping beats and grooves mixed in with blues jams. The result, Fish Out Of Water, was a genre defying record. Although Grunwald had regularly placed beats in his music, it was often simply a mash-up of DIY electronic beats with his blues tracks placed on top. “I wanted to smash the two together really hard, so that you couldn’t tell which side started it first,” Countbounce says. “More of a soul hip-hop approach. The drums would be sampled. And the feel of a hip-hop rhythm section with his guitars on top.”

Blistering live sets on the festival circuit throughout Australia, Japan, Canada,
America, Europe and the UK, have had critics and fans raving about his unique blend of roots, blues, beats and a whole lotta groove for more than a decade. Nominated five times for Australia’s ARIA Awards, and a swag of award wins including MBAS Blues Performer of the Year 2003 and the AIR Best Independent Blues and Roots Album, and in 2009, taking out a prestigious APRA songwriting award for Blues & Roots Song of the Year.

His album of 2010, Hot Mama Vibes, was nominated for Best Blues &
Roots album by both the Australian Record Industry Association and Australian Independent Record Label Association, and after a sold out national Australian tour, he capped off 2010 supporting Jack Johnson’s Australian tour. His first single from the album, ‘Walking’ received significant radio airplay, and was prominently featured in the Hollywood blockbuster, ‘Limitless’ starring Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper.

On May 11 2012, Ash Grunwald released to the world his most internal album to date. Trouble’s Door, found life in the fiery breath of injustice; the frustration of severe political and environmental mismanagement ‘It's some of my most personal songwriting,’ Ash confesses. ‘I had just done a benefit gig to stop coal seam gas mining.  There were other issues going on at the time, you can take your pick really, and it occurred to me that our system just doesn't work.  We are experiencing the result of rampant unchecked capitalism.’

The music of Trouble’s Door traverses many a tale as well; the blues propelled by driving dancefloor rhythms, buoyed by hip hop beats and slammed by the dubstep crunch. Naturally. The record also featuring the body-shakingly successful single ‘Longtime’ which would end up scoring Ash and his co-writer Colin Reily, an APRA award for Blues and Roots Work of the Year.

At the same time that Ash was picking up that commendation from his industry peers, he was in the middle of a collaboration that would have him (rock n) rolling about inside a whirly wind of commercial interest. He was asked to perform live on Triple M Breakfast in Melbourne, then Sydney…and then on Channel 7’s ratings winning program, The Morning Show. Ash’s immense credibility as a blues musician crossing the rich hearth and stepping into the expansive world of mainstream success, when he combined some undiluted rock n roll, a famous song and some incredible and rather prolific players. Teaming up with Scott Owen and Andy Strachan from The Living End, Ash released a ripping cover of Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ (which was meant to serve only as a beacon for Ash’s upcoming national tour) but ‘Crazy’ had a different mind. Developing a life well beyond the borders of a loyal fanbase, Crazy made it’s way out into commercial radio land, and took Ash with it. Within 6 days of his first appearance on Triple M, Ash along with Scott and Andy, had laid down his 7th studio album; the rock monster GARGANTUA was born.

Comprised of two new and original tracks (involving CSG, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a take-no prisioners attitude), three vastly different cover songs and a handful of utterly off the hook reworkings of some of Ash’s biggest tracks, Gargantua documents the findings of an unplanned experiment in altered methodology:

Ash Grunwald + Scott Owen and Andy Strachan = GARGANTUA.

In 2015 Grunwald continues with his commitment to evolve and to doing so with more mindfulness than ever before. Taking off from the same co-creation ethos of Guargantua, Ash brought in Ian Perez keyboardist for Wolfmother and Pete Wilkins, former drummer for Blue King Brown to work on his brand new, forthcoming album NOW. The effortlessly gifted pair built the launch pad for Ash’s detonative sonic boom, enabling him to explore the lose-yourself-sounds of psychedelic blues using synth rather than stringed bass. Keeping it old-school, the gents jammed it out live, forming a wall of sound as abundant in clout as it is in groove.  Standing behind the richness and warmth of the old Neve desk was famed American Record Producer Nick DiDia: who’s philosophy sits firmly in the power of performance and whose name is most commonly strung together in the same sentence as Springsteen’s.  Having worked closely also beside Rage Against The Machine, Pearl Jam, Powderfinger and many other legends, what Nick brought to Ash, above all else, was an intense focus on the structure of a great song.

The result is an album with immense force; strongly political, rumbling from the depths of internal rage. It is sonic thunder that wears all the suffering and the anger of the blues but does not forget for a beat that if you don’t get up sometimes and shake that shit off, if you don’t take a moment to look across the dancefloor and lose yourself in that boy meets girl moment, your heart’ll harden and you’ll lose sight of all the beauty you’re fighting for. NOW is due out in 2015.

Having well and truly conquered his homeland with endless touring resulting in a reputation of not-to-be-missed rocking live shows, Ash has shrunk the world with familiarity, making the entire globe his home. NZ, the UK, sold-out tours in Canada and a pioneering trip of America in 2014 with Xavier Rudd; every show, every tour continuing to feed the ravenous beast of Ash’s unparalleled creativity and his unbridled spirit of diversity.

13 years since the release of that first blues record and hundreds of thousands of arses shaken since, Ash welcomes you as always to strive toward life’s greatest mission amongst the chaos and the challenges – the presence of good times, the energy for action and the possession of a happy heart.

Wollombi Music Festival is a celebration of awesome music, film, markets & art in one of the most beautiful & unique environments in the Hunter Valley.

Wollombi is known for its creative & diverse culture with a rich indigenous history. The festival is about reflecting all those things & wrapping them into one groovy night of festival fun.

The Wollombi Valley is bordered by the World Heritage listed Yengo National Park and the main road into Wollombi is the convict built Great North Road. So after you’ve grabbed a few z’s & packed up your tent why not take a drive off the beaten track & check out some of the amazing places of the lower Hunter Valley.

I had the excellent opportunity to capture the celebrations at this festival. 


The lineup contained: 

Main Stage
11.30 Sam & The Bird
12.50 Nick Saxon
2.10 Queen Porter Stomp
2.55 Welcome to Country
3.15 William Crighton
4.45 19-Twenty
6.00 Marshall Okell & The Pride
7.30 Righteous Voodoo
9.15 Knox Fiji
10.50 Transvaal Diamond Syndicate


The Big Top 
12.10 Vanishing Shapes
1.30 Morgana Osaki
4.00 Drumming Workshop
5.15 Gabriel & Cecilia
6.45 Samba Dance Workshop
8.30 Grizzlee Train
10.00 The Sea Gypsies

Here are a few of my favourite shots! Looking forward to what 2016 brings! 

"George said in one of his final interviews  see here
 -” i don’t see the point in writing most songs, i could write hundreds of songs, i could churn them out, if i’m going to say something i’d like it to have some importance, some value.”


I think George Harrison’s work is more important now, than ever. He was before his time. And now, In a world dominated by information overload, with access to just about anything at your fingertips these days, i generally think most people are starved of the important information. To become conscious, it takes work. To become wise is only through experience but if you can light the way for someone else whilst working at it yourself, that’s when you’re own desires start to ripple out into society, and you start changing the world. When you raise your own consciousness you intern raise the whole of societies consciousness.

I see people always running around searching for the quick way to get rich or the secret to achieve happiness  and how to achieve peace. I was the same and i still have those desires in me, everybody does. How can you not have those desires, and have that outlook on life? When we are constantly surrounded by a society that tells us that you need to acquire the top marks, the gold medal, the big job, more money, fame, notoriety etc.. in order to be accepted in modern times. George, through his music and great presence in interviews taught me that all of these “achievements” are hidden within us already. We just have to search for it. And to realise that the duality of life is essential. Where there is good, there is bad, night and day, life, death. We only know happiness, peace and what it’s like to be rich when we have experienced it’s opposite, out of the darkness comes the light.
As George says in his song “Beware of Darkness” “Take care, Beware of soft shoe shufflers, dancing down the side walks, as each unconscious sufferer, wanders aimlessly.”
I don’t want to be that unconscious sufferer no longer.
In this day and age, we forget to look around ourselves and love the people right in front of us, trading them in for an alternative life out there in cyber space or the pursuit of wealth, and all the egos needs. “Life is what happens to you, while you’re busy making other plans” – John Lennon.
George reminded me personally, that I need to become more present and search within myself. To unlock my own true desires and release my own traumas for a more peaceful world.  My prayer for this show is that it be just another key to help someone unlock something greater within themselves.
Whatever country you’re from, religion you are, colour you are or sexual preference you have, we are all human. It’s time to become conscious of each other and our planet again. I think George Harrison reminded us all of  the important things in life through his words and music, and we need to start listening again, opening up our hearts a little more and stop to look at the simple wonders in life.

 Maharishi said, ‘For a forest to be green, each tree must be green.’ So the same for the world to have peace, each individual must have peace. And you don’t get it through society’s normal channels. And that’s why each individual must tend to himself and get his own peace. And that way the whole society will have peace.” – George Harrison. "




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Please note that Wes Carr presents Here Comes The Sun is not endorsed by or connected with the estate of George Harrison or the Harrison family.


http://www.wescarr.com.au