On the Ghostline,with Hands of Lightning is a sweeping,crisp album inhabited with conversations and memories of best friends,sisters,lovers,jockeys,pub fights,plane flights,the Sunlander and of the silver,Cuban-heeled boots worn by Hoodoo Guru Clyde Bramley.
Halfway songwriter John Busby and the band,drummer Elwin Hawtin,bassist Ben Johnson,brothers Noel (pedal steel guitar) and Liam Fitzpatrick (banjo and mandolin),guitarist and former Go-Between John Willsteed and Luke Peacock (keyboards and guitar) are taking stock – and pushing forward – after 20 years.
Busby says his life in Darwin compelled him to use the image of the fishing nets,seemingly trapping and recycling these memories.
“It’s because I’m away from home. I’m concentrating on memory. Trying to recall them and make them live,make them breathe,” Busby says.
“When away from the band it gives me a lot of time to work on music and work out what the band does well. There are a lot of memories of the band looking back at itself as well on this album.”
The opening track,Ghostline, is built on huge,circular riff that grows over Halfway’s best-kept secret:the huge space provided by their rhythm section for other instruments to colour,not crush.
The album was recorded in Brisbane and mixed and produced in New York by Malcolm Burn,who has worked with Bob Dylan,Emmylou Harris,longtime U2 producer Daniel Lanois and late Australian legend Archie Roach.
Halfway singer-songwriter John Busby.Tony Moore
Early in the album,Busby talks of friendships on current single1994. Here you can hear the sound of Halfway’s 2014 track,Dulcify,about the 1979 Melbourne Cup runner.
“[1994] is set around a group of friends. We were very young. We started the year one way,and we end it another,” he says.
The friends hung out in parks drinking Passion Pop in their younger days,rather than the clubs,he says. Rockhampton’s clubs had a heavy scene in 1994.
“We’d still go to clubs. But you know,the fight was complementary with your pint and there was no way around it.”
The song’s chorus paint a different,gentler picture.
The long grass,it’s just us,the warm night,take me home all right ... in the park light,you can dream tonight, the band sings.
Busby shifted to Brisbane in 1995 and the band coalesced in their new home.
“The ties that bind,that sort of stuff,” Busby says later at Halfway House,their practice and office space near Windsor,in Brisbane’s north. It’s where they have rehearsed twice,three times a week,for 18 years,before he shifted to Darwin with partner Shannon.
“I took a series of really,strong memories I always think about. Those things make you who you are. You take them to the launch. You take them to the pub to watch St George,but they’re always with you. They make you what you are,and the band are part of that.”
The quieter,reminiscingMotorcade,with its Beatles-esque intro and outro chords,tells of a haunting family funeral procession in Rockhampton.
“It’s a memory of me in a car in a procession talking to the person in the car in front,in the hearse,” he says,quietly.
There are thumping tracks;By How Far seethes like Velvet Underground,Black Kites has a bass and drums intro to die for,before the twin guitars and slide guitar lock you to the lyrics about hawks circling over Darwin’s Berrimah Line,the divide between the city’s “haves and have nots”.
The spirit of former Halfway songwriter Chris Dale (Dale and Busby won the Grant McLennan Songwriter Scholarship in 2008) is captured in the raucousOne Dreamer Down.
Busby says Halfway are in music for the long haul,growing a sound forged from the Church,Tom Petty,Hoodoo Gurus,R.E.M. and Townes Van Zandt into their own.
Their 2021 album,Restless Dream,with and was nominated for an ARIA.
“Even now that we’ve made eight records,the idea is to make 10,” Busby says.
“Then we’ll look around and see if we’re still enjoying it as much and see where we go from there.”
Halfway plays at The Triffid in Brisbane on Saturday,September 10,with Aerial Maps and Suicide Country Hour;andat Marrickville Bowls Club in Sydney Saturday,September 17,with Aerial Maps and Bryan Estepa.