FolkBlog

Blogger’s Note - Sue Barrett is a music journalist and writer in Australia covering folk and acoustic music, with particular emphasis in women in music. From time to time, she will be contributing artist profiles and reviews to the folkblog.

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Cyndi Boste — A Constant Revelation…

By Sue Barrett

For Australian singer-songwriter Cyndi Boste (whose surname rhymes with “toast”), growing up in the foothills of Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges provided idyllic moments (“bush, cows, paddocks, bikes and Tarzan swings”) and challenging insights into human behaviour (“I learnt a lot about life in childhood”).

From that time, Boste has had a love of music.

“I was always buying records — every Friday, mum and I would go down the street and buy four or five singles. It was a real passion. And I always had a trannie [transistor radio] under my pillow, listening to [radio station] 3XY!”

It was during her primary schools days, that Cyndi Boste began playing an instrument — a piano accordion.

“An Irish sailor bought me a tiny little thing — three keys each side. But I moved on to the guitar when I was 12 or 13 — guitar was a lot cooler — you’re not going to pick up with an accordion!”

At around 15 years of age, Boste started working professionally as a musician and, for a couple of years in her teens, was a regular guest on the Channel 0 television program, The Early Bird Show.

“They’d place me on mushrooms and haystacks, bring Marty the Monster in and Tim the Tiger, and I’d do a couple of songs each week.”

During the early part of her career, Boste performed covers, including songs by Don McLean, Neil Young and John Denver, essentially being a “human jukebox”.

“For a long time I got caught up in making a living. I was getting paid really well to do covers in pubs [bars] — it was a booming scene. The music was paying more than my day job, so it didn’t take much to convince me to give up the day job and just do the music. I had too much fun playing in the pubs in my 20s and I didn’t think too much about making my own music.”

Gradually, however, Cyndi Boste (whose husky, soulful voice has been likened to that of Lucinda Williams, Bonnie Raitt and Gillian Welch) transformed into a singer-songwriter, with her roots-based music (folk, blues, Americana, soul, country) telling of travelling the highways and byways of life, complete with potholes, detours and dead ends.

“In about 1990, I did an acoustic tape of some songs that I’d written. I try to forget about the tape — it’s pretty bad! — although there are people out there who still really like it.

“When my brother Rory was in the band Steve Boyd and the Preachers, I’d go to see them perform all the time and so I started to understand that there was another way to do music. Then I joined the band — what a treat — I’d never played with other musicians before. I talked to Kerryn Tolhurst, who produced an album for Steve Boyd and the Preachers, about making my own record. And that’s been my life ever since.

“My songs come in different ways. Sometimes, although very rarely, a song comes in one big blurp and I can sit down and almost write it verbatim. Usually, however, they just come from living life and keeping moving — all of a sudden a line or an idea will come. From that first inspiration, the rest is the artistry or the work really. If I’m half-way through a song and it’s not doing anything for me, I won’t put it aside to come back to, I just dump it!

“I’m not a prolific song writer — although I think that I’d write a lot more if I didn’t have to run the business. One of my greatest frustrations is the hours that are lost to running a small business — it breaks my heart.

“If I seriously think about whether I should walk away from music, because it feels too hard or it’s costing too much money, then the pain in my gut is so strong that I can’t think about it any more and I have to keep going. If I were to retire from the road just to write songs, then that would be retirement bliss. The touring is a grind, it really is, and it’s getting harder and harder in this country to tour successfully.”

Boste laughs at quote from a recent novel that describes artists as “a mysterious combination of deep passion, volatile sensitivities, and uncommon vision…persons of rare fragility and unsurpassed emotional complexity”.

“I know that person — can you put those words on my tombstone!”

For Boste, writing and performing her own songs is very, very personal and extremely exposing.

“I don’t suffer very much from performing nerves, but always, no matter what I’m doing, when I wake up on the morning of a show, the anxiety is hideous. Then I’ll have a cup of tea and, from almost that moment onwards, the anxiety goes. Once a show is over, I like to have a few beers and sit down and relax. And, although I hardly sleep at all, I do sleep better after a show!”

Select Discography
Home Truths (1999)
Push Comes to Shove (2002)
Scrambled Eggs (2004)
Foothill Dandy (2006)

Website
http://www.cyndiboste.com.au/

Sue Barrett is an Australian music writer, with a special interest in women in music. She has interviewed Cris Williamson, Cindy Bullens, Catie Curtis, Cathy Fink and Cheryl Wheeler (as well as many performers whose first name didn’t start with the letter ‘C’!). Sue also listened to 3XY on a trannie when she was growing up.

A small part of this article appeared under the title “Cyndi City” in the November 2006 issue of the Australian music magazine, Rhythms.

© Sue Barrett 2006/2007