The Wishing Well Band

Well wishes for coins

By Ben Hermann

Not for the faint-hearted:
The Wishing Well played 70 days straight in Europe

Melbourne folk-rock troubadours the Wishing Well are not a group that do anything by half measures. Since their inception in 2007, they’ve traversed not only our own brown land but also parts of North America and Europe, playing almost 700 shows and burning through 32 band members in the process. This month sees them launch yet another tour, bringing them through Canberra twice in two weeks.

”It’s really tiring, and certainly not for everybody. All the musicians we’ve played with have been world class, and absolutely beautiful people, but to maintain our lifestyle takes a lot of stamina and vision”, says Rivkah Larkan, the group’s violinist – a law graduate who worked for the UN before committing herself completely to music.

”When we were recently in Europe, we’d get up around 9am, go find a busking pitch, play for three hours, have a nap, then go to sound check. We did that every day for 70 days. As is the case in Australia as well, the busking is more profitable than the shows. We made back all our money from flights, food, accommodation and venue hiring, plus saved enough to record our next album.

” Such feats would normally have even the most hardened on-the-road musician quivering with a nervous chill, but Larkan brushes it off like nothing more than a hard day at work, digressing to discuss tales from when the group were once paid for their threehour show in wilted beetroots, to playing with Van Morrison, and busking for 500 people in front of Milan’s famous cathedral.

”The amazing thing about music is that if you truly love it, it gives you so much energy” says Larkan. ”You can play a particular chord or lyric and you can physically see how it moves people. It’s a true and deep feeling, and completely and utterly addictive” she says.

”And as the Dalai Lama is quoted, ‘You should judge life by what you’ve given up’. Now, we’re not successful by any stretch of the imagination, but we gave up security, jobs, and I was in huge debt at the beginning of our last tour. But we’re doing what we love to do, and that’s play music. We can do it all day every day and we don’t have to do anything else. There’s not much more we could ask for.”

In the context of such a masochistic touring lifestyle, it’s not surprising the group has only released one album – Life on the Border – thus far. Recording for their follow-up, Fire on the Hill, was scheduled for late last year, but as Larkan points out, time has slipped so easily through their fingers.

”The recording we’ve done so far has been more challenging than our first album. It’s more epic, and there’s a lot more production, which has taken up lots of time” she says. ”But we don’t really have much time to just sit down and work on the music. Jai [the group's vocalist and lyricist] has difficulty finishing his lyrics with such constant disruption. So we’re at a point now where a majority of the music is finished but things still need tidying up.”

But before then, there’s more touring to be done, including trips to both the Phoenix and the Front. Larkan suggests that seated venues dedicated to live music are the group’s ideal, but that every setting is entertaining in its own right. ”RSLs are entertaining every once in a while. Once a guy threw a bottle at us,” Larkan says. ”But it was actually because he liked us. He was just really excited.”

The Wishing Well With: Vamp When: Monday, January 18 Where: The Phoenix, Civic (& The Front on February 1) Tickets: Free

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