 |
Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms |
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
Other Links:
|
About 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 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.
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 2007 completed his tenth and busiest
tour yet. A more unusual highlight on this trip 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 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 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 now under way,
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
|
|||||||
