Absence

You know that movie Three Men and a Baby? Pretty crap movie, yeah, but just imagine for a moment that you take the three men and you replace the baby with a bluegrass band. Call that bluegrass band The Lunch Mothers and imagine it’s also a newgrass and a popgrass band. Now also imagine – if you can – that these gentlemen occasionally lend a hand at their local public school canteen, out of the goo
dness of their hearts and to score chicks. Then add another gentleman and a lady to make five players.
 
These players, by order of the alphabet, are Dave Carr (banjo), Miles Fraser (geetar), Wyatt Moss-Wellington (mandolin, vox) Mary-Christina Rapp (doghouse bass) and Ian Watson (fiddle), along with a revolving door of superstar guests.
 
Carr has been a mainstay on the Sydney progressive folk scene for years. Yes, Sydney has a prog folk scene. Other projects he’s involved in are Dave Carr’s Fabulous Contraption and Lolo Lovina. He packs a mighty beard; he’s hard to miss. No, he won’t kick you in the face because he’s a pacifist. Most people think that he’s the nicest guy they ever met. He first learned to play music when, from outer space, a spotty man brought him to life with his cosmic dust. He took him to a magic cloud where Mother Nature gave him special powers. That man became Dave Carr.
 
Fraser graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 2003 with a Bmus(performance). After years of sober reflection on the wood and the nylon, he emerged ready to terrorise his hood with an expensive steel-string. When you lay your weary head down on your pillow at night and you can hear shredding guitar echoing around the suburbs of Sydney – that’s Fraser. Fraser lived at 29 Acacia Road when he was a schoolboy – but he was leading an amazing double life, for when Miles eats a banana an amazing transformation occurs. Miles is Banana-Guitarra Thing.
 
Moss-Wellington is a prog folk singer-songwriter and (he thinks) provocateur who makes music that tries not to sound like other music. Aside from his solo projects, he has worked with outfits including Wartime Sweethearts and Gold Star Band. He has released two solo albums, 2011’s 'Gen Y Irony Stole My Heart' (“unerring humanity … scholastic rigor … downright titillating … deranged therapy” Progression Magazine) and 'The Supermarket and the Turncoat' in 2009 (“Challenging preconceptions of song structure, guitar and vocal techniques, subject matter and stylistic homogeneity” Sydney Morning Herald). Moss-Wellington comes from somewhere in the dark and nasty regions where nobody goes, working as an overworked servant to The Thing upstairs. But that’s nothing compared to the horrors that lurk within his mandolin, for there is always something down there in the dark, waiting to come out.
 
N.B. None of the Lunch Mothers ever really worked at a school canteen.

Absence

lunchmothers