Halfway’s ninth studio album, The Styx, digs deep into the places, and people, rarely visited in rock music.
These are songs set among the rivers, estuaries and massive out-tides of Central Queensland. The Styx isn’t the one of Greek mythology but the river near the fishing village Stanage Bay, a place of deep natural beauty and danger. The band’s John Busby spent time there as a child, camping out on fishing trips with his father.
There is nothing mythic about these stories of love, lust, longing and leaving, which feel as real as an errant fishhook deep into flesh. Brothers George and Lennie are the kind of hard-bitten characters who might be found in stories by John Steinbeck or Richard Flanagan, battling the elements and themselves and always with an eye out for the fishing inspectors. Just before daylight Lennie goes to check the nets. He doesn’t return..
The album is the first recorded by the band themselves, mixed by Mark Nevers (Calexico, Lambchop, and producer of the band’s The Golden Halfway Record and Rain Lover albums) at his South Carolina studio.
The Styx features the return to the fold of band co-founder Chris Dale after a six-year absence, and contributions from guests including Chris Abrahams (The Necks, Midnight Oil) and Adele Pickvance (The Go-Betweens).
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The Story
Halfway is a eight piece band based in Brisbane, Australia. Three of the members – John Busby, Elwin Hawtin and Chris Dale originally hail from Rockhampton, Central Queensland. After moving to Brisbane and recruiting the like-minded Ben Johnson (bass/vocals), Halfway was formed in 2000.
Joining shortly after were Dublin born brothers Noel Fitzpatrick (pedal steel) and Liam Fitzpatrick (banjo/mandolin/tenor gtr). The finishing touches to the lineup were added with the inclusion of ex-Go-Between John Willsteed (guitar) & Luke Peacock ‘The Bird’ (keys/vocals).
I remember Ron Peno, the flamboyant singer from Died Pretty, once telling me a story about when he first moved up to Brisbane in the early 80s, to get together with guitarist Brett Myers to form the Pretties.
He related how he’d been warned by people, Watch out up there Ron, it can be dangerous with Bjelke-Peterson and all that, they don’t take kindly to southerners, especially ‘wierdos’ like you… And Ron couldn’t quite understand what they meant; until, he laughed, he hadn’t been off the train but for a few minutes – likely sashaying along in leather or latex – before he was picked up by the cops…
If that’s what Brisbane was like, imagine how much harder it must have been in Queensland’s outlying regions!
The duo at the core of Halfway, John Busby and Chris Dale, come from Rockhampton, and well do they recall how hard it was growing up in the self-proclaimed Beef Capital of Australia in the 1980s.
The first (fullscale) song on this album – and really its scene-setter and centerpiece – “Bret Canham’s Leather Jacket,” is about a kid they knew who, with his penchant for ‘weird’ clothes/hairstyles/music, stood out in Rocky the same way Ron Peno did in Brisbane, and who similarly suffered for it… but who equally refused to submit; who flaunted it, and wore a defiant smile even as he was knocked down; who eventually fled town and lived his dream, or at least gave it a shot, in a by-then relatively more tolerant Brisbane.
Which is a not dissimilar narrative arc to that of Halfway themselves. From Brisbane, it’s a long way to go to Nashville to make a record that’s not very country, and is very Rockhampton – but just as Grant McLennan, who was conspicuously also a Rockhampton boy, had to go to London to write “Cattle & Cane,” it’s often, as they say, only the road out of town that leads you back to yourself.
And whether or not Bret Canham’s story – or Ron Peno’s, or Halfway’s for that matter – has a happy ending, the point is that Halfway go all the way. They are giving their dream a shot too, and they know that ultimately the only thing that might beat them is the inexorable passage of time itself..
Clinton Walker, 2016