Local muso, Garth Prentice will roll into the Wickham Park Hotel next Friday night (May 27) for a gig with his band, the APrentices. Having established himself in the Country Music Capital of Tamworth, Garth is now in Newcastle looking for better things. We caught up with him last week for a quick Q and A.
NL: How was the band put together and who’s playing?
GARTH: Vacy Blues and roots comp was so great!! I don’t usually get to do my blues pieces as a solo act so it was awesome to try out new things. The aPrentices and myself have been doing low-key blues gigs around Newcastle for around 3 years now!! I started it out as a little experiment in Wallsend where we would put on a Blues night every Thursday, which most of the time no-one would come too (Shout out to the awesome people that did come!!). I would have nearly a different band every week, from 3 – 9 players, so it was pretty tricky to keep it tight but we had a lot of fun and that lasted nearly 8 months. After that finished we had a little bit of rep and a few venues invited us to come play, I needed a solid band and the boys that are playing with me now kept coming back for some reason… Probably because I’m so nice to them…
The line up for the 27th is:
• Jono Burgess – Bass Guitar, who is currently doing his masters in Jazz performance at Sydney Con and plays with One of Newcastle best function bands, The Hang Suite!!
• Jeremy ‘Suhr/H9’ Minnet – Guitar, also from the Hang Suite but more notably the newest guitarist for Australia’s best new Country Music Band “The Viper Creek Band”
• Thomas Dawson – Drums, playing at the moment for Newcastle Rock’n’Roller’s “The Midnight Movers” and long term drummer for the GMS – Gosford Musical Society.
• Unfortunately the beautiful Jasmine Abbott, our BV master, will be missing from our quintet because she is gallivanting all over Europe and even though I asked really nicely she wouldn’t fly back for the gig.
All monsters of tone and taste!!
NL: Tell us about the set list?
GARTH: This year I have re-invented the setlist so if you have seen us before it is going to be a bigger and better show. Number 1, we have heaps of original material that wasn’t a part of our show in the past. We trialled them at the end of last year at a few gigs and they were kick ass so it will be pumping and groovy when we get to play them again!! Number 2, Heaps of old school blues and funk, We’ve just past the 1 year anniversary of BB’s Death which marked the day that all of my blues heroes died… So to remember the good old days we have a heap of Ray Charles, BB.King, Freddie King, James Brown etc. Number 3 Heaps of New artists, and by that I mean artists who are still alive. Playing with the shit hot players that I do I need to keep them excited so I have sourced songs from a heap of monster artist’s for us to play. People like Gary Clark Jnr, Jon Cleary, Robben Ford, Allen Stone, Aussie Tunes from artists like Owen Campbell and Lachy Doley and even some Hip Hop with tunes from Urthboy and D’angelo!! Soul Funk and Blues all round.
NL: Vocal Philosophy?
My vocal idol is Brian Johnston from AC/DC and as a kid a wanted to sing like him and Andrew Strong from The Commitments. Both Massive voices that I have no hope of getting anywhere near. So as a 14 year old trying to scream like those guys lets just say it was lacking in ability. Real turning points were when I got feed back from musicians I respected, people who might not even remember talking to me as a young one. Barry Walton, Mike Vee, Roshani Priddis, Grant Walmsley are all people who I have a memory of instantly improving in my singing after them telling me what I could do better, constructive criticism at it finest. My wife also tells me when I’m doing a bad job… Maybe she just would like some quiet time. Having your performances recorded is always a real eye opener as well, you can see and hear what is bad and work on improving it. In summary I spose just keep performing, but surround yourself with people who will give you good criticism, do your best but never believe that you are finished improving yourself. It also helps if you have sexy back up vocalists to make you look and sound good!!
NL: Guitar Set up?
If you want to talk gear you should be talking to these other two because they just wont shutup about pedal’s and guitar’s and amp’s. Every second sentence is Garth you should by this, now that you’ve bought that Garth it’s actually crap compared to this new one that has come out. In saying that I have taken some advice from them and would recommend them as gear nerds to anyone.
Here is their set up:
Jono:
Basses
Fender Precission
Fodera Monarch Deluxe
Effects
Tuner =>Cali76 TX =>Boss OC2 => 3 Leaf Your Doom => 3 Lead Wonderlove => Strymon Timeline =>Neuanber Seraphem
Amp
Epifani 902C =>T310
Jeremy:
Guitars:
Suhr Telecaster
PRS Mira
Effects:
Boss CS-2
MXR Distortion III
Zvex Box of Rock
Menatone Red Snapper
Keeley Boss TR-2
Eventide H9
Catalinbread Belle Epoch
Amp
Grumpy Amps JTM45
1×12 Cab w/EV12L
Garth:
Guitar
Japenese Strat
Effects:
Hotone Soulpress
Hermida Audio’s Zendrive
Xotic Ep Booster
Mallekko Trem
Boss DM-2w
Ditto Looper
Amp
Fender Deluxe
NL: Next Big Project?
The Biggest thing now is to get some music recorded and out there!! Original music that is, as you saw we did the “Live at Spinlight Studios” series in Newcastle last year but that was all covers. So hopefully some release dates will be happening in the next 6 months. Check out garthprentice.com.au for a few updates and some cool videos!!
We are also looking into working with a charity called Indigenous Community Volunteers – ICV to help support and stabilise a bunch of Australian communities and we will hopefully have some T-shirts for that for this gig on the 27th!!
Other than that we will be gigging away and we do have some more Newcastle Dates coming up in July so we will see you again then!!
See you on the 27th of May at The Wicko!
