Melbourne's award-winning singer-songwriter Ernest Aines is embarking on his first-ever UK tour including a date at Brighton’s Folklore Rooms on Sunday, January 28 (doors 7.30pm, tickets £11 on 01273 733238).
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00:00 Perfect.
00:03 Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor for Sussex Newspapers. Now, by the wonders of technology, it is fantastic to be speaking right now to Ernest Ains in Melbourne, Australia.
00:13 Now, you won't be there for that long because in early 2024, you are heading for your debut UK tour.
00:20 Now, that's incredibly exciting. You'll be heading to our country in January. You've got a date in the folklore rooms in Brighton on January 28th.
00:27 Why is it important for you as a folk musician in Australia to come to England in January in the middle of winter?
00:36 Yeah, I think, you know, coming in winter is the least of my troubles.
00:42 I think it's the long journey, getting over the jet lag and all that sort of thing is going to be pretty tough.
00:49 But I'm coming over to England. I think the main thing is for me just to place myself into the land of folk and the land of, you know, the land of songwriting and sort of this really beautiful history that you guys have over there.
01:09 So musically, it's a kind of homecoming then?
01:12 Yeah, I feel really drawn to England. I just know there's such a richness of storytelling over there.
01:22 And it's something that I really want to deepen in terms of my ability to tell stories and to write lyrics and to really hit home with people and sort of entrench them in what type of emotion I'm putting forward.
01:39 So in that way, it's a journey into sort of deepening my musicality.
01:44 But also, my family living over there is a big reason for me traveling there.
01:51 My dad was adopted out of England and his extended family, his father's side live over there.
01:58 So I'm keen to go over and meet them and sort of break down.
02:01 And that's his family you've never met before. You haven't been to the UK before?
02:06 Never, never before. I've been to Europe and I've been to a lot of airports.
02:15 I say, oh, yeah, I've been to Turkey and France and all this. I've just stopped off at their airports.
02:20 But yeah, I've really never set foot in England at all, not even at the airport.
02:25 To be heading over here partly to meet family, that's incredibly exciting, but also quite daunting, isn't it?
02:32 You don't know quite what you're going to meet, quite what you're going to find out.
02:37 Yeah, absolutely. There's no real way of knowing.
02:41 The only person that's met my extended family is my dad.
02:45 And he spent, I think, a few days with them there.
02:48 So at least they were nice enough to put him up there.
02:51 So I know that they're nice and welcoming, but I don't really know too much else about them.
02:58 I hope you will find out before long. And obviously, it's a really good time for you to be coming across.
03:03 Not terribly long after the release of your debut album, which came out in Australia in September.
03:09 And you were saying you've had a good response to that album.
03:13 Absolutely. Yeah. So it's been out for four months and we've had, I think, six or seven really incredible reviews that have been so glowing that it's kind of hard to bear talking about them.
03:28 And yeah, they've just been really glowing about all of the things I thought were the weaknesses of the album.
03:37 I was really concerned about how the album was going to come across in terms of how varied the track listing is.
03:46 Genre-wise, it changes and chops in so many different ways.
03:53 And that was something that I was told to embrace early, that it was a part of what makes me unique.
04:01 And so that is one thing that it took me a while, even after a couple of reviews, I was like, eventually someone's going to call me out on this.
04:13 And, you know, really despised my attempts at kind of just writing whatever comes to mind.
04:21 That must be fabulously encouraging then.
04:25 Absolutely. Yeah, no, it was very validating to have people think that it was worthy to listen to.
04:33 And I got a lot of comparisons to Peter Gabriel and artists that were breaking the boundaries.
04:42 And so that was really encouraging that people with sort of a diverse musical taste were able to go, oh, cool, we can still sort of understand you in a way.
04:55 And our way of describing you is to compare you to people who have done diverse things as well.
05:02 So that was really calming and gave me a lot of confidence.
05:04 Presumably all that heats up the pressure for the second album. When will you start thinking about that one?
05:11 I've already started. I'm probably four songs or five songs deep in the writing of that one.
05:19 But I think, you know, it's going to be a little bit of time before I set foot in the recording studio again.
05:27 But between this album that's just come out and the next one, I've got a lot of beautiful projects coming up.
05:34 One in particular that I'm super excited about is me with a trio from Sweden called Northern Resonance.
05:42 They play traditional fiddles of different variety. I would try to pronounce their name, but I have no chance.
05:54 I wouldn't dance off the raps.
05:57 Good, good. I could just take a stab at it. I wouldn't disrespect them in that way.
06:03 But one of the instruments, I was told by someone in that group, took, I think, on average, an hour to tune.
06:14 To actually tune the whole violin fiddle.
06:18 But it's because it has four strings on top, five strings underneath the soundboard.
06:22 They resonate with sympathetic frequencies.
06:27 And so that means it resonates from the top strings that you can see.
06:31 And so they take a very long time in competitions to tune for one song that goes for five minutes.
06:41 And so, yeah, I'm doing a song and a gig with them and the song's coming out on their compilation of songs with other singers.
06:49 So lots of exciting things happening. Brilliant.
06:53 We're really good to speak to you. Have a fantastic trip to the UK.
06:56 I hope you love it. Good luck meeting the family. Great to speak to you.
07:00 Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.