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28 illinoisentertainer.com december 2015
F
rom Midnight Oil and Australian
Crawl to more recent outfits like the
late, lamented Powderfinger, there is
a type of band that’s almost peculiar to
Australia, which prefers solid meat-andpotatoes songwriting – often in minor
keys with oblique, surreptitious hooks –
coupled with a charming humility that’s
referred to Down Under as Tall Poppy
Syndrome. As in, any flower that grows
too proudly above the others will
inevitably get scythed back to size. Now
Sydney’s whimsical Boy & Bear can be
added to that pop pantheon; Its new third
effort, Limit of Love is aglow with hearty,
chiming humalongs like “Ghost 11,”
“Walk the Wire,” “A Thousand Faces,”
and the title track, all delivered in bandleader Dave Hosking’s neighborly, everyman drawl. The songs simply creep inside
your head and stay there. Long before
you’re even aware of it.
Understandably, Limit of Love just hit
#1 on the Aussie charts. And – over the
course of its last two albums, 2011’s
Moonfire and Harlequin Dream in 2013 –
Boy & Bear also won five prestigious
ARIA Awards, plus a Breakthrough
Songwriter of the Year trophy at the 2012
Australasian
Performing
Right
Association Awards, or APRAs. “We really love what we do, and I’d love to have
our band be seen up there with those
other bands, like The Crawl and
Powderfinger,” says Hosking, who lives a
down-to-Earth existence with his brother
and his brother’s girlfriend in scenic
Sydney. “Time will tell, I suppose. But in
the meantime, we’ll just keep plodding
along and working hard.”
And Hosking acquired his estimable
composing skills the toughest way possible – by playing in a series of hardscrabble
cover outfits, often to drunken millennial
crowds that truly despised them. “I did
covers for a long time – for a good period
of time, that was my sole source of
income,” he sighs. “I used to play shitty
pubs and clubs, and me and Tim (Hart)
our drummer used to do it, as well. He
came into Boy & Bear a little later on , but
we still needed money at that point, and I
knew he was doing his own cover stuff, so
we ended up joining forces and doing
covers as a duo. He’s a wonderful guitar
player and singer, as well.”
The shows would always start the
same – slowly, quietly, leaning heavily
toward gentle acoustic folk. Then, things
grew increasingly louder, more electric, as
Hosking began pulling out the hits. “So at
the end of the night, I’d be playing tambourine badly and singing vague harmonies to “Bad Moon Rising” and
“Wonderwall” – that’s anyone ever wanted to hear,” he sighs. His most notorious
gigs always took place at a local hotel
called The Greenwood, frequented by
fresh-out-of-high-school teenagers.
The first half of the two-hour sets, they
played to mainly exhausted business folk.
“But the second half, these kids would
come in, and you’d hear music at the bar
– which was not that far away from us –
start to get louder,” says Hosking. “And I
remember just sweating our way through
the show, and feeling the pressure of those
kids not wanting us to be there, because
we were holding the party back. This one
guy even came up in the middle of a song
and just yelled in my ear, ‘Where the fuck
is the DJ?’ And as I walked offstage, I
remember thinking, ‘Wow. This is kind of
soul-destroying.’ But at that point, you
just take your paycheck and get out of
there.”
Hosking says he still has a soft spot in
his heart for his old retro-pop concert catalog. Just recently, he was even studying
an old Australian Crawl classic,
Continued on page 47
By Tom Lanham