The dark tales of Tasmania's convict history are brought to startling life in the words and music of folk-punk outfit The Dead Maggies, who play National Folk Festival in Canberra this year.
The Dead Maggies appearance at the 2019 National Folk Festival comes after a relatively quiet period for the band in 2018 brought about by a series of line-up changes. “We’ve had two line-up changes,” double bass player and band leader Mark Downie says.
“We’ve just got that sorted recently, so we’re back in the swing of things now. We did plod along for the past 12 months but we were sorting out the line-up for a lot of that time period, that’s why we haven’t done so much touring.”
The shuffle in personnel saw new drummer Sam Wellings take over from Ruben Reeves, who left the band in 2018 citing medical reasons, and the addition of established banjo player Teresa Dixon.
“We’re pretty lucky to have them join the band and both of them are keen to join us as a touring band, which is what we are,” Mark says.
“So they’re happy to not let jobs or families get in the way of things and hit the road as often as possible. We’re all primed with our new line-up and ready for an exciting 2019. We've got a few summer festivals, so we’ll knock them over first then plan our touring for the rest of our year.”
The Dead Maggies formed in 2013 and bring together a versatile mix of musicians from rock, punk, folk, classical, metal and thrash to create a vivid and lively performance of original songs about bushrangers, highwaymen, convicts and other great Australians of history.
As purveyors of folk-punk, blending tales of colonial Tasmania with the unhinged energy of punk music, Mark says The Dead Maggies operate in two worlds: they can can either be "the acoustic band at a punk gig or the raucous band at the folk gig".
For their National Folk Festival show, Mark says he's very much savouring the prospect of being the latter. “We played National Folk Festival a couple of years ago and it was a great gig, and again it was the case of being the rowdy band at the folk festival; we enjoy being the ratbags and playing the music louder and faster than the other bands do,” he says.
With their line-up stabilised and the ensemble back in performance mode, the year ahead is looking to be productive for The Dead Maggies and Mark says new music isn't far away.
“We've definitely got a lot of new material and a lot of half-written songs we haven't added to the set because we've been doing the two line-up changes,” he says.
“So it is likely we'll have the new material ready for next year, but we've got no plans for recording as yet though. We'll have to write and learn some more songs, which will take up the rest of the summer while we play the shows.”
