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.

Wyatt Moss-Wellington is a progressive folk musician, an idiosyncratic vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, a composer of humanistic narratives in songform and a swell bloke.

His third studio album, Sanitary Apocalypse, releases March 1, 2014. He provides mandolin and vocal services to bombastic Sydney newgrass group The Lunch Mothers.

Moss-Wellington’s second album, Gen Y Irony Stole My Heart, released in 2011 and has been called “sophisticated … touching … enchanting … beautiful” (Sydney Morning Herald); “He can reach places with his writing that others can’t” (Alternative Media Group); and, “Should come with a sticker that reads: Warning: guaranteed to destroy all your staid, stereotypical notions of folk music for good … unerring humanity … scholastic rigor … downright titillating … deranged therapy” (Progression Magazine).

Moss-Wellington has recorded and produced singles for Gold Star Band, Nina Stamell, Bud Petal and Christian Perrin, as well as providing guitar and harmony vocals to Expressionist-jazz-pop outfit Wartime Sweethearts’ debut Pancake Orion. In 2012 he provided lead vocals for Robert Moss’s project Skeletons.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s John Shand said of Moss-Wellington’s 2009 debut, The Supermarket and the Turncoat, “Challenging preconceptions of song structure, guitar and vocal techniques, subject matter and stylistic homogeneity … the listener is bounced between satire and aching tenderness, power chords and delicate finger-picking - sometimes all within one line! Moss-Wellington makes most of his peers sound like they have never fully considered the breadth of options open to them.”

Moss-Wellington has been playing piano for as long as he can remember, guitar since 13, mandolin since someone handed him one on his 21st birthday and voice since he learned to squawk at his sister and parents almost immediately on disembarking the womb. He grew up picking out Loudon Wainwright III, Richard Thompson and Nanci Griffith folk songs on his guitar before being exposed to avant-progressive and Canterbury scene music.

Moss-Wellington writes at journalisnt.net and recently completed an MA research project on humanism in the cinema of John Sayles at the University of Sydney.

lunchmothers is following