Indie folk/pop duo, Women in Docs, will be heading to Tamworth this month for a bunch of performances at the Tamworth Country Music Festival. Chanel Lucas took time out to chat to Rock Club 40 recently about the girls’ first visit to Tamworth in five years, including a show at the curiously named Dag Sheep Station, on 18th January. “I haven’t been there yet,” she admits, “But apparently it’s a fantastic venue. Everyone we’ve spoken to in Tamworth is saying what a great venue it is. It’s a little bit out of town but it’s an old sheep station, as you would think, but apparently it has some fabulous gigs so I’m really looking forward to that one. And there’s a bunch of other shows. There’s a show at the Family Hotel and there’s a Lifeline Concert that we’re doing and then the other shows that we’re doing are little guest spots. Other artists that are performing have invited us to do one or two songs in their shows so we are doing a couple of guest spots with The Bushwackers, Bill Chambers and also with Andrew Cleremont at the Soccer Club.”
Chanel agrees that the shows will help to broaden their exposure. “That’s why we’re going. We haven’t been to Tamworth since about 2010. We’ve just had other things on at that time of year, other commitments. The reason we’ll be going to Tamworth this year is because we ran into The Bushwackers at a festival in the middle of the year and they invited us to come and do some shows with us and then Bill Chambers invited us so we thought maybe this is the year to go back to Tamworth and play some shows. And also Carousel, the album, has had a good response with a lot of the country music media and the radio stations so we wanted to follow up the success of the album with a trip to the Festival as well. We do have a country twang to a lot of our music but we also play at a lot of folk festivals in Australia like the Woodford International. We’ve also played at a lot of the mainstream festivals like The Melbourne Festival and festivals like The Big Day Out and places like that so we do cross a lot of genres. For us, it’s really about the songs and the stories. We’re more focused on trying to be songwriters and trying to tell a story.”
A lot of their inspiration for their songs comes from the girls’ travels. “I think that’s because we spend so much time travelling when we are putting out a new album or a new single. Australia’s a big country; you spend a long time sitting at airports and in cars and also around the world. We spend a lot of time travelling and so the people we meet and the stories that they tell us are very inspirational for us, I think. So be careful what you tell us,” she warns me. “It could end up in a song.”
And those stories behind the songs get a bit of an airing at Women in Doc’s shows, according to Chanel. “If you buy the album, you’ll hear the song but if you come to the show, you’ll hear a lot more of the stories. There are a lot of funny stories but there’s a more serious side to it as well.”
The Tamworth shows will be the end of a big year of touring for the duo. “We are kind of finishing our year with Tamworth,” Chanel explains. “And then our next step is to go back into the studio and record the new album and start working on some new material. We’ve collected a whole bunch of new stories over the past year of travelling so we need to put them into songs.”
The girls have also been in discussions with contacts in the U.S. but, says Chanel, “We haven’t confirmed anything yet but we’re looking at going back to the U.S.A. and then maybe a couple of festivals. But our focus will mainly be on trying to get another album happening.”
by Sharyn Hamey
Copyright © 2015 Sharyn Hamey. All Rights Reserved
