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Tamworth 2007   

Report  by Phil Doublet.

  Well I'm sitting here on a Monday morning feeling very weary

  Just got back to Sydney after a 6 hour drive from a gruelling 7 day adventure in Tamworth at 1:30 in the morning. I'm now putting pen to paper with the sound of the cymbal delay still ringing in my ears, with a coffee as my companion to tell you all about the Tamworth Country Music Festival 2007.

  Tamworth has been on "bucket" restrictions for water this year, it's yet another dry and extreme summer for them,. and as you can imagine, 45 plus degrees celcius which doesn't help drought matters.  There had been some debate as to whether or not to cancel the festival this year, but I guess you can't postpone the juggernaut know as “Tamworth” that easily.

   On The first day we arrived someone in our house of communal living (I think there were ten of us) had the inspiration to walk up the infamous Peel Street to check out the buskers and street performers. But since our house had the air conditioning on night and day and that it was about 40 degrees outside. I felt like I made the smart choice to decline the offer.

   I've been playing the festival now for the last 4 years. As some of you may know I play lead guitar for "Luke O'Shea and Medicine Wheel" (We have a new album out incidentally. thought I’d get that plug in,  please be sure to check out    www.lukeoshea.com  )

 This Year We played the Tamworth services club every day for the week, which were pretty cool gigs.

For a change, our singer Luke thought it would be a good idea to incorporate 2 obligatory   acoustic sets into our shows. It's kind of funny now that I think about it, but our band is renowned for high-energy shows and usually when we hit the first chord half of the senior audience makes a B-line for the door. but held their attention for the duration of our shows.

The Band was nominated for the "Best Group" category at the "Tiara Awards" (Tamworth Independent Artist Recognition Awards). The other bands in our category were "Jonah's Rd", "Jetty Rd", and one other that escapes my mind right now..... "And The Winner Is........ Luke O'Shea And Medicine Wheel!" STOKED!

  After Luke's Acceptance speech and several congratulatory beers we had to go and play a gig.

Caught up with a few kiwis’ this year and it's always great to see some familiar faces over here. Marian Burns, John Nieper, Kylie Austin, Clay Middleton and T.C Wells and his lovely wife Sue.

Anyway I'm Back in our little shoe-box apartment now contemplating having a can of red bull with a little berocca depth charger to try and recover, but I just found out Luke wants to come over for a rehearsal?!?!? hmmmm....

If you haven't been to Tamworth I highly recommend it,  it's a fantastic festival and there is always something to see and do.

And Oh Yeah............ come and check out "Luke O'Shea and Medicine Wheel" THEY ROCK!!

Take care everyone,  see ya’s all again real soon.

cb@nzcountrymusic.com 

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