Formerly a trio, Bluehouse has recently reinvented itself as a two-piece act and released a new album ‘One Last Kiss’. Here’s Jacqui Walter and Bern Carroll of the Melbourne-based dynamic duo.
JW ON…
The Album: It is still Bluehouse, no doubt about it. We had to fit in a 3rd harmony in the past, so the harmonies as a duo are a bit more organic. There is a symbiotic thing that happens to us as a duo singing.
U.S. vs OZ: When we go to America, it makes such a difference because we are Australian performers and have been brought up in pub culture. Even your friends go in there [the pub] to socialize, not to listen to you play. I’ve done it too, gone with friends to a show and just gone ‘blah blah blah’ at the back of the bar. America has the listening room culture. When we first went to America we were quite daunted by it – we wanted to check that people were alive.
Being ‘Indie’: If you put your heart and soul into it and you believe in what you are doing, you will find an audience that responds to it. It is getting a chance to do that which is the difficult thing. Getting venue promoters to take a chance is the hardest thing.
Songwriting: We tried to write a song a day, like the Beatles. It was a really disciplined way to write. At the end, we said, wow, how did we write these songs in such a truncated amount of time?
BC ON…
Their Fantasy Festival Lineup: Beth Orton, Emmy Lou Harris, Jeff Buckley (if he was alive), The Pretenders, or Blondie, Elton John (because he is really fun to see live) in his heyday in the 70s dressed up like a crocodile. [For the headliner] all I keep thinking is the live show from Pink Floyd or Electric Light Orchestra, something like that, maybe with a little bit of Pink.
Stage-diving: We did it in Sydney once at a very packed hotel, and we have done it in America, though we asked if they would catch us first because we’d heard horror stories of crowds parting…
