Richard Tregear
I grew up in Williamstown in the 1950s. There was a lot of live music in the West back then. I was immersed in it, as was my musical partner Samual Gadd. Our musical collaboration goes back to when we were teenagers living in the same street.
I wasn’t singing in bands; I was writing poetry. But Sam, who was playing guitar, had the chords while another friend, John Day, played the piano beautifully. The song writing chemistry was instantaneous.
Our approach was to put a tape recorder in the middle of the lounge room and record what we were doing. I wanted to capture everything. Tragically John passed away when we were in our mid 20s and that took the wind out of our sails for a bit. Eventually though, Sam and I got back to writing songs and over a period between the late 1970s and the late 1980s we wrote dozens of compositions. Then the writing and recording stopped, the tapes were forgotten, and we’d sort of lost touch. Life with work, family, and mortgages got in the way.
The musical hiatus in our creative partnership lasted for 40 years until one day at home in Sunshine an unfamiliar box turned up. Opening it I found three old cassettes. I knew what they were. I listened to them and thought: ‘Oh…they sound all right. There’s a kernel of something good there.’ Worried about the fragility of the tapes I had them put onto a USB stick.
What to do next? I hadn’t seen Sam for a decade, but I knew where he lived in North Altona. I decided I would drive past his house and if I saw him I’d present him with the USB. The third time I drove past he walked out the front door and I thought, right, time to present Sam with this evidence of our well-spent young adulthood.
Sam listened to the songs and agreed, there was something there. So, we got together in his home studio and started to practice and refine what we’d written all those years ago. After six months of solid work Sam said: ‘What are we going to do with these songs now?’
We found a wonderful producer who, with the addition of bass, drums and extra guitar, helped us to realise what we envisioned when we first wrote the songs. You could hear the spirit of the compositions. But we knew they were for now. The songs became the album, Because, which we launched at Kindred Studios where they were performed publicly for the first time – and us in our 70s!
I never thought we would record these songs. To see them reincarnated and take the form they have is a beautiful surprise.
Our name LunarFringo stems in part from the fact that we came from a left-wing region of naval dockyards, railway workshops, slaughter yards, wool sheds. I’ve always been interested in social, political and environmental issues, and for that you could be branded as the lunatic fringe. And I thought, you’re not a lunatic for believing the planet’s worth looking after and a fair society is a good thing. They should be mainstream beliefs.
