G'day folks,
well, I haven't managed to organise another blog post for over a year now ... It's a bit of a poor effort and I'm sorry about that! But ... I hope to make up for it with this post!

Ok, so what have I been doing for the last year? Well, firstly, like everyone else, I've been getting my head around living in a COVID 19 reality - because Reality Changed - bigtime! Down here in Oz, we've been fairly lucky so far ... our state governments have been doing a great job of keeping the numbers of infections and deaths low and trying to minimise the covid incidents that pop up from time to time. As I write this, however, greater Sydney is dealing with an outbreak of the Delta strain of the virus and is in the midst of a three week lockdown. In rural NSW, where I live, we have restrictions in place, but are not currently locked down. It's an annoying inconvenience that people all around the world are tolerating.

School is busy - as always. This year I have three year 7 classes, one year 8 class called "Instrumental as Anything" - designed to be timetabled practice sessions for dedicated young musos, and one and a bit year 10 classes. We had to learn about teaching from home early last year and I enjoyed that. Accessing Google classroom and providing the kids a bunch of work was challenging, but also very rewarding. Nicer once we were back at school though!

And what of my music? You may have read that my Bucket List buddy, Leigh, had moved to Hervey Bay and we were officially on hiatus, well, he recently moved back to the Gold Coast and The Bucket List is once again breathing the sweet air of complex acoustic musical performance. It's exciting! I'm looking forward to learning a few new tunes. We will be performing at Greens fundraising concert on July 31st at Rous Mill Hall - it's called Greens Unplugged. 

And speaking of the Greens, my latest exciting adventure is that I am running as a Greens candidate for the upcoming local council elections for Ballina Shire Council. I've been thinking about it for bout 10 years now, and I really would like to take a seat at the council table on behalf of the environment. I am keen to do everything I can to honour the Ballina Council's recent declaration of a climate emergency - looking for solutions to difficult questions like "how can we as a community take action to significantly reduce our overall carbon footprint?" Not only am I looking at ways of protecting our environment through ecologically sustainable development, I'm also keen to do what I can to help make Ballina Shire a better place for all by ensuring open and clear community consultation on major planning issues and promoting the wonderful sense of community and the village-like atmosphere found in our towns.

So, here we all are, living in splendid isolation while we strive to reduce the number of Corona-virus cases across the country and give our medical system a chance to be able to cope with those affected by the virus. It's certainly a challenging time, but well done us for meeting these challenges with a smile!

So, life has certainly been interesting for this musical educator! Once the COVID-19 situation began to develop, I joined the ranks of musical professionals who's income streams were stopping overnight. I had to immediately stop all face to face private music tuition and choir work - at a cost of about $650 per week. Ouch!


I then got straight onto investigating Zoom as a means of conducting my business online. I tried an online class with my choir Men Wot Sing and we managed a successful rehearsal ... despite the frustration around the annoying time lag that the online platform seems to give. At the end of the session, we all agreed it was great to have a sing, and hang out online together. At the conclusion of the session, I felt a glimmer of hope in the financial department - maybe I wouldn't lose ALL my sole-trader income after all.

After a couple of successful sessions with Men Wot Sing, I then contacted my Alstonville Choir Awesome Voices and ask them if they might be interested in giving it a shot? For the most part, they all thought it would be a great idea and agreed to meet up during our regular Tuesday night slot. It was great to see everybody. We then went through a bunch of warmups tried a few more simple warmup songs and then we ran through our catalogue, with a little bit of my help on one or two of our more recent songs.
When we sing together, I need to mute everybody so that we can all sing along to the previously recorded audio track without the terrible lag that the online platform provides. If I don't mute everybody, we end up sounding like a barn full of farm animals … And we are not used to sounding like that! So ... Awesome Voices  seems to be hanging in there as well!

Sadly, my newest choir, Awesome Voices - Evans Head, has not had enough momentum to continue running. The group was very new - only about 6 weeks old - and didn't have enough singers on board to keep going through this time. I will contact everyone again when it looks like we might be able to start singing together again and see how we're all placed ... until then, I wish all my Awesome Voices Evans Head crew safety and excellent health! see how

I then decided to try an few Zoom lessons with my private guitar students. This platform worked really well with these one on one sessions as there was more scope for rhythmic fluidity and less need for strict "In time with me"-ness. So ... guitar & bass lessons still going ok. I plan to try a Zoom vocal lesson with a student this week, so fingers crossed that should work alright as well.

One very sad development in my musical world within the last few months is that my Bucket List buddy, Leigh and I have had to go our separate ways. Leigh has found work three hours North of Brisbane and has moved away from the Northern Rivers. While I do celebrate Leigh's new job, I'm also really sad that we are now too geographically distant to be able to make The Bucket List work. Six hours physical separation is just too far! So, for now at least, The Bucket List is now more! Here's a short pictorial tribute to our awesome duo!

So, if you happened to be there at our previous gig at the Ballina Markets on March 17, you'll have noticed that the weather was miserable and that no one turned up! Yep - it was cancelled! We were all good to go right up to the day before but, as it wasn't looking too good weatherwise, I called the organiser and he told us not to bother! He said that if there were less than 25 stalls, the whole thing was going to get canned - and so, sadly, Leigh and I chose not to risk it. Leigh travels down from South Queensland and it was too big a gamble in a very rainy way!

BUT ... this Friday night, The Bucket List will be performing at the Alstonville Bowlo from 7.30pm. There's a trivia thing happening, and we'll be performing for 20 minutes or so at 7.30, and then from around 8.15 onwards we'll be playing the night away! It's very exciting!

The plan is to get there a bit early on the night, set up the PA, etc. and then be ready to kick off at 7.30 sharp! This will be our first extended gig - having done many shorter format shows at various open mic nights! We're both really looking forward to it! Hope to see you there!

A very exciting time is ahead of Leigh and I in our duo, The Bucket List. We have our first full length gig at 7.30am on this coming Sunday morning, March 17 at the Ballina Markets and we've also been booked to play from 7.30pm at the Alstonville Bowling Club on Friday, April 12. Two gigs in the very near future! Awesome!

The general feedback we've been getting from audience members who have seen us at any of the smaller 'open mic' type nights has been wonderful. Over the last few months we've played Rous Unplugged, Tintenbar Upfront and Stokers Siding - 15 Minutes of Fame. The vibe has been fantastic at each event and the audience response is always extrememely positive. And as we continue to play, we just keep getting better! Noice!

Here's our most recent promo pic! If you're able to get to either of the gigs, it'd be awesome! Make sure you come and say"G'day!" I'll make sure I have a copy or two of my CD, Reality Changes for sale as well!
Looking forward to seeing you there!

And so, after a great holiday, we dive headlong back into the bread and butter of life!

I have returned to my substantive position, working 7 days a fortnight, at Alstonville High School as one of the two music teachers. And I must say that I am enjoying being back at work very much! It's certainly challenging, but also very rewarding!

Our first Rous Unplugged for the year will be taking place this evening at Rous Mill Hall. It's a great looking line-up and, no doubt, will be an awesome night! If you haven't yet come out and seen what all the fuss is about, definitely make the effort this year - it's a fantastic evening's entertainment - all for the low,low price of $5 per adult! Noice!

My duo, The Bucket List, is still hard at work, rehearsing as often as we can to start gigging around the North Coast of NSW and the Gold Coast. It's all about playing tricky songs well and our quirky repertoire is looking fantastic - including not normally seen songs like "I Was Made for Loving You" by Kiss, "Whip It" by Devo, "Go Your Own Way"by Fleetwood Mac and Supertramp's "Breakfast in America". The whole emphasis is upon unusual songs played well ... and our awesome setlist continues to grow! We'll have 30 songs ibn the next couple of months. The Bucket List will be performing this evening at Rous Unplugged and our first Full Set performance will be at the Ballina Markets on Sunday, 17 March. If you can make it down, please join us!

My choirs, Awesome Voices and Men Wot Sing have kicked off for the year as well, and we're already well into preparing some performance repertoire for the year. Awesome Voices has been offered a gig on May 11, as part of a Mothers Day festival ... I still need to talk to the folks about that one, and see if they're up for it! Men Wot Sing continues to be a fantastic fun ride with a bunch of silly lads ... and we're always on the hunt for more blokes ... if you can sing and like a good laugh, come along! We rehearse in Building A of Southern Cross University on the Gold Coast, just next to Coolie Airport.

The exciting news for the moment is that I have spoken to another sound engineer - my previous sound guy is not recording at the moment - and I'm just about to embark upon recording my next album! Woohoo! Can't wait to get back into the studio! I would record all day, every day if I had the opportunity!

Anyway, great to catch up! I'm looking forward to tonight's Rous Unplugged! Might see you there! Come and say G'day if you do come along!!

Cheers, S

Well, it's been a fantastic Christmas holiday for my family and me. We've travelled overseas to Scotland, catching up with so many of our Scottish family members and spent a week in France as well. It's been awesome! The scenery has been incredible as has the seasonal change - we've completely missed out on the Aussie summer heatwave so far! No snow here yet, but plenty of cold temperatures and some fairly mild ones as well. We did, however, have a drive through the Cairngorms National Park and passed by the Scottish ski resort of Glenshee where we found a big pile of man made snow and made the very most of that! Snow for these Aussies is always a special day!

So ... our trip began in early December, flying into Glasgow and heading out to our base camp at Juniper Green, Edinburgh. So great to get off the plane and step into the crisp Scottish air. Our family loves it here - it truly is our second home. After a couple of days catching up with family, I was booked to perform as a featured artist for the Science Fiction magazine, Shoreline of Infinity's Event Horizon. On this occasion, the downstairs room at the Frankenstein Pub in Edinburgh was booked out and filled with SciFi fans for the book launch of a SciFi Poetry book. I played three original pieces from my album, Reality Changes, and had the absolute pleasure of singing alongside my daughter, Jessica, who sang beautiful harmonies to my melodies. It was a treat and such a buzz to sing with Jessi. A bit different to Aussie crowds, the Edinburgh crowd was very hard to read. They just sat there, listening and not giving anything away. It was hard to tell if they enjoyed the music, but the applause was loud and heartfelt, and I learned later that it's very common for these audiences to simply sit and listen intensely. It was a great night and a real treat to play in Edinburgh.

And here's a wee clip of one of our songs.

After another day or so, we headed off to Bordeaux, France for a week. We were going to visit an old friend of Shirley, whom she hadn't seen for more than 30 years! It was so great to meet Nathalie and her husband Eric, and we all fell in love with Bordeaux! While there, we walked about the spectacular, historic city and visited Le Basin D'Arcachon (a picturesque coastal region where oysterculture is the main industry) and the beautiful medieval town of St Emillion. It was Awesome! Shirley and I immersed ourselves in in speaking as much French as possible and by the end of our stay, we could have almost passed for a couple of locals! A family favourite was the cosy Marche de Noel (Xmas markets) at Bordeaux, where the mulled wine flowed and the wild nougat grew in heady chunks alongside the tasty liquers that seemed to spring from the very land itself. Yum!

Once we left France, we returned to Scotland to join some of our Scottish family in Innerleithen for an excellent Christmas. And over the next month, we spent time in many parts of Scotland with several families from within our close Scottish relatives.
Our holiday included time in North Berwick - where we climbed the impressive tor which overlooks the town and met some of its wild ponies, Skye - where we walked alongside the footsteps of dinosaurs and drove through the rugged Cuillins, Aboyne - where we walked in the castle grounds and I nearly killed myself falling down a set of stairs at my sister-in-laws house, Carnock - where we saw grey squirrels aplenty and walked along the rail trail towards Dunfermline.
We visited our family estate at Carcant in the Scottish Borders and walked up to our favourite hundred year old log cabin, and spent many days throughout the month in Juniper Green, Edinburgh, where we rested and recovered from the crazyness of constant travel. But the best thing of all was spending time with our Scottish relatives - young and old and rekindling our international family connections.

And as we head back to Australia, we're already looking forward to our next trip to Scotland - whenever that may be!

Well, it's that time of the year! The Christmas holidays are fast approaching, the weather in Northern NSW is starting to heat up for Summer and work is beginning to wind down at the same time!

All my school reports are in and proof-read, I've got no more assessments due - at this time of the year, classes are more or less heading into the home stretch. All the students can feel the end of the year approaching and the overall vibe is a little more relaxed.

Last night the boys from Men Wot Sing and I had our final get together for the year. We met at Currumbin RSL and had a nice end of year meal! It was crazy crowded for a Monday but great to see the blokes before we have our end of year break. I wanted to have a quick sing before we left - but the boys were not there to work ... it was all beer, pizza and nachos instead! And tonight, it's Awesome Voices' turn! We'll be heading to our local Wollongbar tavern and having a bit of a sing and another splash up meal! Noice! Might get in a song or two with this mob! Fingers crossed!

I love that my work is with music! I love teaching (although it's very hard at times!) And I love working with my choirs as well. Being a musical director for a choir really gives one an opportunity to play the choir like a big, beautiful instrument. I find conducting to be truly magical! I can move my hands one way and the choir gets softer, another way and the volume swells. I can tweak the pitch and rhythm on the fly. I can adjust the tone colour and texture with a wave of my hand or a simple suggestion. The chordal work is fantastic, as is working with solo singers and the best thing about directing a choir is that not only am I playing wonderful music with this living, breathing instrument, we are also singing lyrics that carry depth and meaning, sweetness and power.

If you haven't already done so, I heartily recommend you to join a choir! It's awesome! You get to make amazing music, hang out with incredible friends, feel healthy (there's heaps of great endorphins running around the brains of singers!) and participate in awesome performances.

Well, it's time for dinner! Can't keep Awesome Voices waiting!!

Until next time! Simon

So, it's been an interesting last couple of weeks! My duo partner, Leigh and I, have been on the journey to try and find another name. The Bucket List - which has been our moniker for the last year or two -  seems to be quite a popular name for bands worldwide. (When I did a google search and checked the name with www.bandnamevault.com I discovered at least four different versions of the name.) Damn shame! Sad-face emoji!

So Leigh and I embarked on the journey to rename our act! And we tried on about a hundred or two and, try as we might, we could not come up with a name that we both felt comfortable with.
We tried on solid names like Thundershed, Complex, Serendipitous, Hope Mountain ...
We tried clever word game names like InTentCity, The Complects, The Flight Sabres ...
We tried clever amalgams of our two names like Lemon Crate (weird!), Chate's Crossing, Crossing Chate, Cross and Chate etc.
... and nothing seemed to say "Yes" to both of us at the same time! We even tried The Bucket Listers - so close to our original name ... only two extra letters ... but still nothing grabbed us! Nothing, that is, apart from our original name - The Bucket List!

And so, while there's a couple of other The Bucket Lists out there - we think we're the only one in Oz and that's probably a big enough region for us to get started with.

And so, this is who we are - We are The Bucket List. Based in Australia, a duo playing complex acoustic material, catchy songs that you'd not usually see in an acoustic duo. We're sounding great, increasing our repertoire and loving it!

Long Live The Bucket List!!

Here's a quick pic of us performing at the inaugural Broady Unplugged on Saturday, November 17, 2018. A photo snapped by the local mayor - Robert Mustow! Cudos, Rob, for the photo!

G'day folks, time for another quick blog post. This time, I'd like to focus on my awesome new duo act that I'm developing with a young friend, Leigh Cross. We're called The Bucket List! Leigh plays acoustic guitar and sings and I play acoustic bass and sing.

The Bucket List began a couple of years ago and we compiled a small set list, played a few unplugged nights and even played a wedding. Our original goal was to pick tricky songs and acoustify them for performance at some of the local talent nights like Rous Unplugged, Tintenbar Upfront or Stokers Siding 15 Minutes of Fame. We didn't last long, however, as Leigh was not in a position to focus on the project in any depth at the time. Move forward two years and time has opened up for Leigh and I and we are now developing The Bucket List in earnest.

We're performing at open mic nights as often as we can and are growing a great repertoire list with the aim of taking to the pubs and clubs in the very near future. Our repertoire tends to be drawn from the mid to late 70
's and into the 80's with artists like The Police, Simple Minds, Peter Gabriel, Kiss, Simon and Garfunkel, Daryl Braithwaite, Hunters and Collectors, Spit Enz, The Angels, etc. It's a great song list and is developing all the time!

Leigh has a great high register voice - similar in range to that of Sting - while I have a lower register voice - more of a baritone range (sadly the years of high school teaching has tired my voice and deepened my everyday register) and the combination of our vocal ranges really works well. We're both taking the lead vocal role on different songs and we try to harmonise those choruses and specific mid-verse lines as often and as well as we can!

Leigh's guitar work is improving all the time and I'm loving getting back into the bass again. And now, having compiled a good solid repertoire list, you should start seeing us - The Bucket List - playing in some of the local venues in the Northern Rivers and up onto the Gold Coast. 

Here'a a few links to some Youtube clips of songs we played at a recent Tintenbar Upfront event. Please check them out, subscribe to my Youtube Channel and leave a comment or two on the videos! Let us know what you think!
Cheers! Simon

So, we all hear it ... life is BUSY! There's no getting around it! We all seem to live at a crazy pace nowadays!
My life is chockablock! I have my beautiful Shirley and our two kids, Jessica and Ewan and our dog, Buddy, and we've got all those extra-curricular activities to taxi kids to like tennis, yoga, water polo, etc. I teach high school music five days a fortnight (7 next year), I teach singing and guitar after school, I run two fantastic weekly choirs - Men Wot Sing and Awesome Voices -  plus I'm working on the final stages of a comedy adult novel with a mate of mine as well as working on developing an awesome musical duo called The Bucket List with a young mate, Leigh Cross.

Life is busy - but it's very fulfilling!

On Tuesday this week at Alstonville High School, we ran our junior CAPA night (Creative And Performing Arts) and we had a fantastic time with it. The show ran smoothly, the acts - both musical and dramatic - were polished and well presented. It was a wonderful event that ran over two showings - we had a shorter matinee program for many of the local primary school kids and then ran the full show for the evening event. The school hall was beautifully decked out in works of art and textiles by many of our students. It was a great event all round.

One magical part of our CAPA presentations was watching my gorgeous daughter, Jessica, performing with two of her friends, Samina and Charlotte. They performed an original song as well as a couple of covers. They have a sweet and tight vocal harmony blend which sits perfectly on Jessica's finger-picked guitar and it is truly a pleasure to listen to. Here's a quick snap of the girls performing.

That'll do for now. Looking forward to catching up again very soon with another glimpse into the busy life of me!

Cheers, Simon

PS: Please feel free to comment!