|
||||||||||||
|
Other Links:
|
Biography
Originally from England, Martin got his
first guitar at the age of 8. Soon afterwards he heard a new form of pop
music called “skiffle” and took to it immediately –
not realising that it was basically up-tempo folk music from the USA. He
played in small rock, jazz and folk groups while still at school, and after
leaving and taking up climbing and walking, he found his interest in folk
music was shared by most of his companions. From the day of his first visit
to a North London Folk Club he was hooked.
Martin emigrated
to Australia in 1969, and almost immediately began performing. Within a year
he founded and was running his own folk club and festival in Tennant Creek
and became an integral part of the Northern Territory folk scene. Later while
living in Perth he first met recent immigrant Eric Bogle, and was so inspired
by his wonderfully written yet simply constructed songs that Martin changed
his style completely, eventually leading to him becoming a songwriter.
His passion for mountains brought him over
to New Zealand with his family in 1975, and he was very soon established in
the remote Cardrona Valley in the high country of
the Southern Alps, running a horse trekking business and a small transport
company. In 1976 he organised the first
Cardrona Folk Festival,
which proved so successful that
the event is still on the calendar every October, having become one of the
highlights of the New Zealand folk music year. Soon after this he began songwriting, composing several ballads about the historic
gold mining area in which he lived. One of these songs, "Gin &
Raspberry" – named after a famous gold claim across the road from his
house - soon became a folk club standard and has since been recorded by over
a dozen musicians in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The
song was also the title track of his first album, which is still rated as
N.Z’s best-selling folk album. This success led him to continue writing and
recording whenever funds would allow. His third album (“The Daisy Patch”) was
a finalist in the Folk Album of the Year awards in 1990, run by the Recording
Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ). To date he has released 9 albums
of New Zealand music.
About this time he also purchased his first
mandolin and mandola, and formed a Central Otago
based ceilidh band called “Snowgrass”. At one gig he found himself compelled
to do the dance calling when a band member left, and has enjoyed this role
ever since, collecting many dances on his tours around the world.
Martin Curtis loves giving live solo
performances, and has toured widely throughout New Zealand in the last few
years, singing his songs from Stewart Island to Cape Reinga. He has made
several TV and Radio appearances in New Zealand and overseas, and has guested
at most of the music festivals around the country. He also occasionally tours
as a duo with New Zealand guitar virtuoso Graham Wardrop
and their two-man show has received acclaim wherever they have performed.
Martin took his songs overseas with a tour
of Australia in 1986, followed by an exploratory tour of the U.K. in 1987 and
then a bigger tour of Britain in 1991. Since then he has returned regularly
to the UK every alternate year, and in 2009 completed his eleventh and
busiest tour yet. One of the more
unusual highlights of his UK tours was sailing around the isolated Orkney
Islands on a chartered boat for eight days with three other top Scottish
acts, giving concerts each night in tiny and remote island settlements. As
well as the usual folk clubs, festivals and concerts, recent tours have
included performances in Austria, Norway and in many schools around the
islands of Orkney, Shetland and Mull. He has also put on several shows for
schools in Kent, Sussex, Hertfordshire and Somerset, a unique and rewarding
experience that compliments his schools programme
in New Zealand.
He has performed his songs and humorous
bush poems in a wide variety of venues; from isolated islands in the Orkneys
to busy cities like London, Bristol and Glasgow; and from tiny pubs in Wales
and the Isle of Mull, to St David’s Hall in Cardiff, the national concert
hall of Wales. On route he has given concerts in Perth, Darwin, Melbourne,
Hong Kong and even Nepal. He has featured on BBC radio in Glasgow, Cardiff,
Swansea, Shetland, and on Radio TV Hong Kong.
In
1998 he was commissioned by the Otago Primary Principals Association in 1998
to write the linking song for a big event at the Dunedin Town Hall,
commemorating 150 years since the first settlers arrived in Otago. His
composition “Otago My Home” became extremely popular and on the strength of
this, he made the decision to sell his mail contracting business and go into
music full time. Martin put together a special heritage programme for schools
called Let's
Sing a Kiwi Song, which involves the children in songs about their
own country. This has taken him as far north as Northland and as far south as
Bluff, and also included the release of an album and songbook of the same
name. In 2005 Martin returned to the magnificent Dunedin Town Hall to perform
“Otago My Home” with the Dunedin Symphonia as part
of their annual Last Night of the Proms. He describes this as one of the
hardest but most satisfying performances he has ever had to do, with the
orchestral arrangement of his own song making it almost unrecognisable to
him.
In 2002, Martin released an
album of new material called Beyond a Climber's Moon. This was a
collection of songs inspired by his love of travelling and mountaineering.
The arrangements were much cleaner and simpler than previously, using far
fewer backing musicians and the album captures much more the essence of his
popular stage performances. This was followed in 2008 by another CD in
similar vein called Sea to Summit and again received recognition
from RIANZ by being a finalist in the Tui awards
for “Folk Album of the Year.” Both
these albums were recorded by and with New Zealand virtuoso guitarist and
musician Graham Wardrop. “Sea to Summit” featured
new original songs and included his tribute to Sir Edmund Hillary, a hero of
his since boyhood. The song “Sir Ed”
has since been picked up by the producers of Kiwi Kids Songs and approved for
school use by the Ministry of Education.
It is featured in their latest release and is being sung by children
in many schools throughout the country.
The same partnership with Graham has now continued with the release in
2017 of his 10th and latest album Where the Peaks meet the Skies – exactly 35
years on from the release of his very first best-selling album Gin &
Raspberry. This new album features 8 original songs from Martin himself, plus
several songs and tunes from other well known folk
singer / songwriters. As usual the overlying theme is material about New
Zealand plus a few songs about other parts of the planet that Martin also
loves dearly.
In December 2003, Martin released his first
DVD Otago my Home,
a project that he had been working on for some years with a professional
cameraman in Wanaka. This is a video of some of his Central Otago material,
and is set and filmed in the very surroundings that inspired the songs. A new
DVD production is still planned, incorporating many of the conservation and
wildlife songs and involving filming in many isolated parts of the New
Zealand mountains.
As the South Wales
Echo, in
|
|||||||||||
