Fear not Tamworth, but embrace it, says Kasey Chambers, not just a veteran of the country music world’s biggest and longest bash of the summer but an enthusiastic participant. One who marks the beginning of the year not by fireworks as the clock ticks past midnight on January 1 but by ute-revving on Peel St mid-month.
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“I can’t imagine starting my year without Tamworth,” Chambers said, still vividly remembering her first visit when she was a teenager and her family band had to busk on the streets just to get noticed.
Ask her what advice she has for surviving the beer, the heat, the crowds and the ever-present danger of stepping on a busker if you turn around too quickly during the next 10 days of the country music festival and the ARIA-winning, globe-trotting Chambers sees not problems but opportunities.
“All of those things you just said, they all sound like positive things to me,” a laughing Chambers said.
“I always say, I can’t wait for Tamworth: it’s going to be hot, it’s going to be crowded, there’ll be lots of beer and there’s buskers everywhere. It’s all about outlook.”
Keep on the sunny side obviously isn’t just a Carter Family song (which Chambers almost certainly sang with her own family band growing up on the edge of the Nullarbor) it’s a philosophy.
One which the most successful Australian country act ever is taking on with a bit more fervour than normal, and not just because she headlined the festival’s opening concert on Friday night and has a chance of winning six Golden Guitars at the country music awards next weekend.
The festival is the first chance for Chambers to perform since being forced off the road – and into a very quiet Christmas of no yelling at the kids – by nodules on her vocal cords, diagnosed just as she began to tour the new album, Bittersweet, late in 2014.
“I am absolutely itching to get back on the road, I’m keeeeeeeen,” Chambers said, bubbling about a new, young band backing her at her Tamworth shows and on the national tour that begins in February.
“I feel like I just got out of prison: let me at it, let me at it.”
Hopefully she’s also celebrated by getting a new “prison tatt”.
Apart from a celebratory tattoo and a visit to the skate park if, like her, you have children who don’t drink beer all day, Chambers has one key recommendation for anyone enthusiastic, or brave, enough to come to Tamworth for the festival: walk up and down Peel St.
“You’ll hear some of the worst buskers you’ve ever heard in your life and some of the greatest songwriters you can’t believe are busking on the street,” she said.
“It’s one extreme to the other and I love that about Tamworth.”
