Music and memoir and magic: Stereo Stories

On Friday evening, June 16th I shared the stage of Williamstown Town Hall with a group of wonderful writers and musicians as part of the 2023 Stereo Stories concert.

Stereo Stories, the brainchild of Williamstown writer Vin Maskell, is a simple but brilliant concept: each writer contributes a piece of memoir about a song that has been important in their life, specifying a time and a place; they read the story accompanied by the Stereo Stories band which plays the song, weaving the music in and out of the words.

Photo: Eric Algra

Part of what makes the event so appealing is that writing is usually a solitary pursuit, unlike music which is a collective endeavour. I’ve always felt envious of musicians who have the talent and opportunity to create something great together. Thanks to Stereo Stories I have to opportunity to feel what that is like, if only for a few minutes..

I’ve been lucky enough to be part of half a dozen Stereo Stories events now, including at Mildura and Williamstown Literary festivals, but this was certainly the biggest – with an audience of 400 or so – and perhaps the best. The band is a versatile, talented and tight outfit that switches effortlessly between genres from rock to new wave to gospel to Icelandic punk. And the stories were equally diverse.

Guest writers pre-show: Jock Serong, Nick Gadd, Katherine Kovacic, Smokie Dawson, Angela Savage, Andy Griffiths, Jacinta Parsons, Rijn Collins. Photo: Eric Algra.

Jock Serong told a story worthy of one of his own novels, of his younger self travelling in South America being held up at gunpoint and fleeing for his life with Nirvana ringing in his ears. Angela Savage gave us a touching reminiscence of her late father’s love for The Rhythm of Life. Katherine Kovacic took us to Antarctica, Rijn Collins to Iceland, Vin Maskell to Moggs Creek, and Andy Griffiths into his own strange and fertile adolescent brain, in which he was a surfing rock god.

My own story was a riff on ‘Once in a Lifetime’ by Talking Heads, which was one of the first songs – I was about 15 at the time – that gave me a sense of other worlds and other ways of living, and showed me that music was a way into finding them. A big part of the song’s appeal was David Byrne’s frenetic performance in the video, which I attempted to evoke in my performance of the story (you can read it on the Stereo Stories website).

A glorious night, which I hope to be part of again.