The first record I ever bought was Neil Young's Harvest. It was a huge cassette (about the size of a video cassette) that played in a tape player in our family car. My parents drove an old brown Holden station wagon when I was a kid – it was dented, scratched with hot, vinyl seats. We only had the one cassette so I played it over and over. Out On The Weekend was the first track. Today when I hear that scrappy guitar strum and lazy harmonica I'm right there in that car with my sweaty, skinny legs stuck to the seats, my Dad in his short stubbies and a blue, kinda crocheted singlet top. My Mum humming along in huge sunnies and white tennis shorts.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
When I was young I thought I would be a detective. I once read way too many adventure books. Particularly The Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Three Investigators (those books triggered an obsession with Alfred Hitchcock movies that I still have today). I even went as far as recruiting two other friends and making business cards, which we placed in mailboxes around the eastern suburbs of Sydney.
The perfect Saturday night is being at home with my family. I'm a homebody. Playing guitar with the kids, reading a good book or a curled up watching a movie. It's the small things that make me content.
I'm currently reading Donna Tartt's The Secret History; Mary Rose, a play by JM Barrie (and is a book that Hitchcock had always dreamed of making into a movie), a Bob Dylan bio and a Whitman poetry anthology. At least that is what's currently piled up next to my bed. So far I haven't been able to put The Secret History down – that's always a good sign.
The thing about making music is once you start you can't stop. It eats away at you. It's all consuming. It's like an animal constantly scratching around for your attention. It keeps you up at night. It taunts you when you suffer periods of inactivity or writer's block. It gives you very little back in return... yet somehow you continually come back for more.
Mark Moldre will be performing at the National Folk Festival in Canberra in 2015. The first six artists announced for the festival are Moldre, Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas; Fred Smith; Chloe and Jason Roweth; Dark Horses; and Gordie MacKeeman and his Rhythm Boys. See folkfestival.org.au
