VIT WAGNER
POP MUSIC CRITIC

October 23, 2003

When singer/songwriter Greg Quill and multi-instrumentalist/producer Kerryn Tolhurst needed some backing vocals for the song "Always To The Light," they put out a call to the Pigram Brothers, a seven-piece aboriginal folk rock group located in Broome, a pearl-diving town on the coast of Western Australia.

"They have their own studio," says Tolhurst, who had produced the Pigram Brothers' most recent disc, Jiir. "I sent them a version of the song. They obliged by doing their vocals and then sending the tape back. And we put it in."

Quill and Tolhurst couldn't have conceived of making music this way back in the early '70s, when they were members of Country Radio, described by the Australian Encyclopaedia of Rock & Pop as "one of the most accomplished Australian bands playing in an electric country-rock vein."

In fact, Quill, a long-standing music critic and feature writer for the Toronto Star who lives in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Tolhurst, a musician and producer who divides his time between New York and Melbourne, were rarely in the same place at the same time during the two years they wrote and recorded "Always To The Light" and the 10 other roots-flavoured tracks on So Rudely Interrupted.

The album, released by True North, has its official launch tonight in the nia room at C'est What on Front St. E. The tandem will be joined onstage by keyboardist Garth Hudson, formerly of The Band, fiddler Anne Lindsay, guitarist Mitchell Lewis, bassist Dennis Pinhorn, and drummer Bucky Berger.

"Writing the songs together over long distances was easier than it sounds because we instinctively knew each other's tastes, playing styles and approaches," Quill explains.

"Bits and pieces of the music, in analog and digital form, were scattered around different parts of the world — in studios and apartments and bedrooms in New York, Niagara, Melbourne and Broome. Kerryn had the key to how it all linked up."

The project was hatched in 1999 when Quill and Tolhurst, who had stayed in touch but hadn't worked together professionally for more than 25 years, crossed paths in Melbourne. Quill, who had quit music altogether in 1983, was on holiday. And Tolhurst, who has continued to work in the music business since leaving Country Radio to form the Dingoes in 1973, was in Melbourne to work with several Australian artists.

"There had been some rumblings back in Australia that we should put Country Radio back together again and do a nostalgia tour like everybody else," Tolhurst says. "That didn't really appeal to us at all. But we got together and played. And the idea occurred that if we could write an album of new material it would make it valid."

One thing leading to another, the tandem ended up touring Australia for three weeks earlier this year.

"I didn't understand till I started playing and writing songs again just how much spiritual nourishment I had missed, how much damage I'd done to myself after I put my guitars away," Quill says. "Bringing a song forward and working to make it mean something to an audience is a transcendental process, particularly when I get to play with musicians that I've always admired."

One of those musicians is Hudson, who turned up at one of Quill's regular gigs at Graffiti's in Kensington Market about six months back.

"I was playing there a couple of times a month," Quill says. "He showed up one night and sat in on accordion. A few weeks later he did it again. He really loves the songs."

Despite rediscovering his love of music making, Quill has no intention of quitting his day job. And neither does Tolhurst, who spent much of last week preparing for performance with R&B veteran Jimmy Norman at a New York Jazz Foundation fundraiser at Harlem's legendary Apollo Theater, featuring Quincy Jones, Cassandra Wilson and Branford Marsalis.

But plans are already underway for a follow-up CD.

"We're obliged as artists to carry the process along to the next step," Quill says. "And if that means playing every once in a while with my old musical friends, so much the better. A song isn't a song till it's sung."

No matter how it gets written and recorded.