From humble beginnings in songwriter Hayden Donnell’s basement to two-time winners of the Tui Folk Album of the Year at the New Zealand Music Awards, Great North have been doing something right.
Their last two albums, 2012’s Halves and last year’s Up In Smoke, both took out the award at the Auckland Folk Festival. They both came as a shock, and there was definitely no sense of expectation for the second one. “The songs were hard to write for Up In Smoke,” Hayden says. “We were more surprised this time, but very happy to win it.”
The folk world wasn’t always where Great North aimed to be, but it seemed like the natural home for the band after Halves. “It was a broad enough expansive wilderness for us, big and accepting.” In most cases this has been true - last month they performed a sold out show at The Bunker, Devonport Folk Club’s home. The Tui awards have helped cement Great North as a household name in the folk world and granted them access to the beautiful and welcoming folk clubs around the country on their many nationwide tours.
“In 2008, I had just had a break up and was starting to decide that it was time to back myself and play the music I had been putting together on tapes, on my dad’s legal tape recorder.” Hayden got together a group of friends in his basement and started the band, among those early members was his future wife, Rachel. Hayden originally started playing piano, but now he almost exclusively plays acoustic guitar as well as providing lead vocals. Recently another shift has seen more songs driven by the male and female harmonies that come from the voices of Hayden and Rachel.
The band began with an EP and debut album Newfoundland that had a more rock-influenced sound, before giving way to folk with Halves. This was a roaring success and brought them a whole new audience and successful tour of the country, and performing stripped back without drums, has become common for Great North.
Up In Smoke was my favourite album of last year and so it came as no great surprise to me that it picked up the Tui. It was a bigger sound, moving closer to Americana, than Halves. The album has tones of cynicism and bitterness that often come through when Hayden introduces each song while playing live, but by the end of a performance and, certainly, by the end of Up In Smoke, you come to realise that this is Hayden accepting things. He jokingly talks about the last year or two of songwriting as him accepting that he is turning 30 and romanticising his lost youth. Up In Smoke features the full Great North band, Rachel on bass and vocals, long time members Dale Campbell on piano, guitar and vocals and Strahan Cole on electric guitar and drummer Ryan Attwood. Matthew Hutching was called in to play pedal steel. The pedal steel perfectly sits behind Hayden’s words on many songs, often augmented by choir and ambient guitars.
The band changes from gig to gig with Hayden calling on who he needs each time. The addition of pedal steel and stand-up bass at recent gigs has been beautiful, and allows Rachel to focus entirely on her vocals and balancing out Hayden’s dry stage banter.
A new album is being written and many songs from it currently make up their live show. Hayden hopes to see it released next year and hints that it might see the the band moving in a more upbeat direction, but we’ll have to wait and see. Whatever they put together, it’s sure to be excellent.
Great North will be performing on Sunday 6 September at the Auckland Old Folks Association Hall as part of Folk at the Old Folks. They will perform as one of their smaller line-ups, with Hayden and Rachel fronting, supported by one of their talented band members. Doors open at 4pm with music including two other local folk artists beginning at 4.30pm. Entry by donation.
Check out Great North online, at their website or on Bandcamp to have a listen to their albums.