Luka Bloom Returns To Adelaide For One Night Only…

Much loved Irish troubadour, Luka Bloom is a master of the concert stage. His incredibly gifted electro-acoustic guitar playing guarantees an impassioned live performance of his original, poetic and melodic songs.

Luka’s concert arsenal includes both tender and dynamic original material and a surprisingly eclectic selection of other people’s work. Over the years Bloom has brought his inspiring lyrics and sumptuous melodies to clubs, theatres, festivals, bars and arenas all over the world, but he has a special place in his heart for Australian audiences and has earned a devoted following in this country. Luka talks to Hi Fi Way about returning to Adelaide to play The Gov.

Another Australian tour, is this your favourite place in the world to tour?
You know, apart from where I live, which of course is Ireland, my second favourite place in the world is Australia and it has been my favourite place to tour since 1992 when I first landed here. I love doing my shows around Europe, don’t get me wrong and I’ve had many, many great tours in America, and I love singing in my home country. But as an exceptional faraway place to visit and sing songs, nowhere comes close to Australia, I just love it. I make no apologies for it. Maybe people think that I have to be careful when you’re saying good things about a country because people think you’re just doing it for professional reasons or you’re just blowing smoke off people’s arse, you know, because you want people to like you. It’s the genuine thing with me. I don’t even fully understand it. I just love the place since the first time I arrived and I feel very much at home here, and I’m just one of the blessed ones who has managed to hold onto enough people who want to come to the gigs and justify coming back again and again.

Does it feel more like a holiday than it does work?
No, I have to be honest, it doesn’t feel like a holiday. It’s, it’s pretty intense because I put a lot of work into my gigs and I work hard at my gigs, and I take my gigs seriously. I take my audience seriously. So, there are moments where you can hang out and chill out a little bit, but once it kicks off, it’s full on and it’s all about the work. I don’t mind that because I know how privileged I am to have this job but part of the privilege of having this job comes the responsibility of making sure you do a good job and I won’t be doing a good job if I’m out partying in Australia every day.

After the last couple of years are you finding now that you enjoy the touring side of life a lot more than you ever have before?
It’s a very good observation and I have to say that I’ve always been grateful for this beautiful job that I have, but never more than I am now. The last time I was here was 2019, and by the end of that year, Australia had to endure the most horrific fires. Then you went straight from the fires straight into Covid. We all suffered from Covid, but I don’t know if anywhere suffered as much as you guys did because you’d just come out of the awful fires. I did think maybe in 2020 that maybe that’s it, maybe I’m done. Maybe I’ll never get to sing in Australia again and that really upset me. So to be able to come back here and sing some songs for you people and to find myself going to somewhere like The Gov that I love very much, Adelaide is kind of like the hometown gig for me. It’s a privilege, it’s an immense privilege and it’s not lost on me out how good I have it.

Are some of your sort of most fondest tour memories, tour stories or the shows that really stand out mostly from Australia?
I got a lot of standout shows, to be honest with. There was a period in the nineties where I would’ve done a lot of very huge festivals that you would normally never see a solo guy perform at, like Pink Pop in Holland or Roskilde in Denmark, or Glastonbury in the UK. Sometimes it’s the really small gigs, you know! It’s the really small gigs, I still remember my first gig in Adelaide at The Office. I don’t even know if that place is there anymore. I remember another time I’d doing a gig in Adelaide, it was kind of funny, we’d flown up from Hobart and I was really sick. I had a really bad fever, and the gig was being filmed. It was in the Norwood concert Hall. This was probably twenty years ago, I was so ill, I thought I didn’t think I was going to be able to do the gig and in the hotel downtown Adelaide, I didn’t think I’d be able to do the show. I said, I’ll tell you what, I’ll just get some good drinks and I’ll go like ginger drinks, I’ll go and do a sound check, and if I feel like I’m able to sing, I’ll try it, but I’d be nervous about the recording of it. I ended up having this amazing gig, so Ill thinking I was going to die, and then suddenly, it’s amazing the adrenaline you can get from shows. I still remember my very first show in the Southern Hemisphere in the Enmore Theatre in 1992, boiling hot weather, and two thousand people crammed into the Enmore Theatre to see this guy.

I literally arrived in Australia for the first time two days beforehand. I couldn’t believe this. I could not believe that so many people were showing up to hear my songs. My whole life is full of memorable gigs and I probably remember a lot more than I should really because I do so many. I don’t take any of this for granted and sometimes special gigs aren’t the really big ones. I’ve, I’ve had special nights in The Gov, really, really magical nights in The Gov. I have a lot of shows to do now before I get to The Gov, but I’m looking forward to it.

Is it also humbling to see like that generational shift in the fan base with a lot more younger people coming to your shows?
Yeah, it’s funny. I get these young kids now coming to the gigs. They come up to me after the gig, and they say my parents made me listen to you when I was a kid or worse than that they, they had to listen to me in the car on the way going driving to a holiday or something. They’d been forced to listen to my stuff in the car, but they’d kind of come around and as I was saying to you, I’m almost seventy now and so the idea that I can come to a city like Adelaide and people still choose to buy a ticket to come and hear me sing, it’s just amazing. It really is, I’ve been doing this since I was seventeen years old professionally and since I was nine or ten years old. I’ve never done anything else. I never imagined when I was a teenager starting to do this that I’d ever have concerts anywhere, never mind in Australia. So, it’s all pretty miraculous stuff.

I don’t think you can underestimate the power of live music and despite the everyday challenges we all face we need these experiences.
I will say this, I do have a sense that I think people all over the world globalize music, but I do think there’s a kind of a hunger for live music in Australia that’s almost unique. I think there is an appreciation of people making the effort to come to Australia and connect with Australia and get a feeling for Australia and Australia in life, and then sing songs here. I think there is an openness to that in Australia that’s really heartwarming. It makes for a very special case.

Did you still think you’d still be creatively prolific like four albums since the last time you were here and no signs of slowing down anytime soon?
I know nobody’s more surprised than I am because I think I’m lazy. I suddenly realised last year that I put out four albums in the last five years, which is crazy. One of them was a live album, but I just love it. I just love it. I have to say, I love the independence of not having to get approval from a record company before you can release something. I think there’s great freedom in if you can manage it to just create your own work and get it out there. I’m in a lucky position that I’ve built up an audience over the last forty years. That’s a different challenge for people who are starting out, but I think there’s a lot to be said for having the freedom of independence, no matter how small the scale is, to just put your work out there and send it out and hope that enough people will get to hear it. That will justify coming and doing live gigs. I’m one of the privileged ones, that’s for sure.

Do you still believe in the physical product such as vinyl and CD?
It’s a very simple thing for me. Apart from the financial side of it, which is really disgusting. I think I buy CDs, I buy vinyl and the reason I do it is because if I hear a song by someone, I want to hear a body of their work. I want to touch the product. I want to feel the pages of the booklet that tell me about the person, a little bit about songs. Then I feel I’m connecting with the work of an artist that I’m never going to get that experience from Spotify ever. Maybe it’s because of my age. I do accept that that could be a factor of my age, but I don’t care. I just don’t care. It just feels more nourishing and enriching for me to buy a physical product that someone’s gone through trouble of creating and connecting with that person, and then go and see a show. I don’t know how younger people are really engaging with music now. It’s certainly different experience than what I grew up with. I know it sounds like an old curmudgeon talking, but I’ve no problem with change as long as the change actually constitutes progress, and I don’t see Spotify as progress.

Is it getting harder to fit an entire career in to ninety minutes or so now?
It’s an interesting one because there are a lot of songs to choose from. The most important thing for me about a gig is that every gig has to be a little bit unique. I never ever want to feel like I’m just going through the motions or that I’m in some kind of comfort zone because I think that’s kind of insulting to people who’ve bought a ticket. I think everybody’s bought a ticket in that room, deserves just something that’s unique to that evening, for that evening and I want to have that as well. A lot of the time I don’t even make out a set list. I just walk out on stage and sing whatever comes to me. There will be two or three songs that get played every night because I know that there are two or three songs that people really want to hear, but for the rest of the night, then we just go on a little bit of a trip together and see where it takes us.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Tickets for Luka Bloom from Bohm Presents…