They’ve got a ticket to ride

Skin & Bone, from left, Anna Bowen, John Dodd, Steve Hudson, Emily Sterk and Mike Moroney.
Skin & Bone, from left, Anna Bowen, John Dodd, Steve Hudson, Emily Sterk and Mike Moroney.
Dunedin band Skin & Bone are keepin’ on swinging, John Dodd tells Tom McKinlay.

When you are blessed with the sort of players that Skin & Bone can call on, there are endless possibilities.

And certainly, on the band’s debut album, they investigate more than one or two. But mainly, on Last Bus to Brockville, they swing.

No question that’s made easier when the well-travelled and well-educated first-two fingers of John Dodd’s right hand have the rhythm locked down on the upright bass.

But the band is also the inheritor of the accumulated musical wisdom of two long-running Dunedin combinations — Catgut and Steel, and The Chaps.

As Dodd tells the story, Skin & Bone is an expression of a tangent taken by the Catgut and Steel duo, which is made up of the talents of fiddle player Anna Bowen — queen of the Dunedin Scottish Fiddle Orchestra, among other outlets — and guitarist Mike Moroney, stalwarts of the local folk scene.

When they took a turn towards swing music, they decided they needed a bass, Dodd says. And they asked him.

He was keen, but also interested in continuing the sort of work his "cowboy lounge" band The Chaps had been doing — a band in which Moroney and Bowen had also been members.

As luck — or other ingredients — would have it, The Chaps also brought the swing, so mashing the two made a good bit of musical sense.

"The Chaps, we were playing acoustic vocal music, and so there's always an emphasis on having good harmonies where appropriate, vocal harmonies in the songs, and The Chaps used to play with a lot of swing rhythm too," Dodd explains.

Twelve of the 15 songs on the new Skin & Bone album, played largely acoustically, are written by either Dodd or Moroney. Then there are some bluesy swing covers from back when swing was king — among them Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, a tune made popular by Louis Armstrong and others back in the ’30s — as vehicles for Bowen’s vocal skills.

"Mike's songs tend to be in more of an old-style swing, and mine tend to be ... influenced a bit more by contemporary songwriters," Dodd says, doing his best to nail down the territory the pair inhabit.

The remainder of the band is Steve (Huddy) Hudson (Whirling Eddys) on drums and, now, Emily Sterk on sax and clarinet — who also plays with the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra. The album actually features the in-demand woodwind playing of the virtuosic Nick Cornish, but the many calls on his time means he’s now passed the reed to Sterk.

"Nick is on the CD, but he was too hard to pin down for gigs, because he had so many other jazz gigs going on, so we got Emily, and she's worked out fantastically," Dodd says.

The way it’s transpired, Sterk appears in the YouTube-hosted videos for two of the band’s songs, Won’t Be Coming Home Much More, a Moroney tribute to the persuasive power of the pint glass, filmed in North Dunedin institution The Inch Bar, and Dodd’s Your Beating Heart — a Paris Agreement-referencing call to optimism in a troubled world. But that’s Cornish you are listening to.

While swing is the watchword, Dodd says they’re not limiting themselves.

"I think both Mike and I are just trying to write good songs, and then some of them fit into the band, you know? And some of them, like Early Winter in a Southern Town, we wouldn't do that song in a dance gig."

The song, a downbeat ballad evoking Merseyside traditions, transports the listener to a cold early evening Gore doorway — and the town’s musical festival.

Like all of the songs on the album, Early Winter in a Southern Town features a note-perfect musical arrangement.

Across the record, fiddle and saxophone play off each, a mandolin line appears as counterpoint to the melody, and backing vocals rise and fall as Hudson’s brushes shuffle things along.

"You know, Nick was by far the most competent at being able to rip off a solo. But the rest of us are very experienced musicians at creating arrangements and trying to do interesting things," Dodd says.

"And Nick, actually, he loved that about us. You know, he kept on saying, you guys do such interesting things with your songs. And I think that's one of our fortes.

"None of us are going to pull off the most amazing guitar solo or fiddle solo ... so it's all about the songs and trying to create interesting songs that take you somewhere. And I think a lot of our songs, we're going for the song form of verses and choruses, but if you listen carefully, there's all sorts of little arrangement things that subvert that."

For Dodd, a touchstone of that approach remains Beach Boys’ frontman Brian Wilson.

"I've always been attracted to songwriters who just didn't do things in the four-square manner, you know?"

There’s a good bit of story-telling on the album, as the songwriters riff on life or lies to inform a lyric.

Dodd demurs that at his age he needs to move on from the skirt-chasing tropes of much contemporary music to topics more appropriate to a retired teacher of music.

"A lot of my songs, I start off because I read something that captures my attention. And I think, ‘ah, I could maybe write a song about that’."

Northbound Train, is one of those, a syncopated, skank-adjacent exercise in local history.

It’s a story about the tragedy that befell Scott of the Antarctic, or at least those who survived.

"It's about how his boat came back into the Oamaru Harbour, in the dead of night. Nobody knew what the ship was. A couple of mysterious people rowed ashore and wanted to know how to get to Christchurch. They were carrying the news of Scott and his party's demise, you know. And they couldn't tell anybody because it was important. So they had to get to Christchurch and then telegram London so that London could tell the world.

"So that's what that song's about. But it's just an example for me of, I read something and I think, ‘oh, maybe I could knock a song together around that’."

As for that album title, no, it has nothing to do with the The Monkees’ chart topper, Last Train to Clarksville.

"So, my wife came home one day from work, and she said — I think she was talking to one of her apprentices — and they said something like, ‘Oh, I caught the last bus to Brockville". And it registered in her head, and Marianne came home and she said, ‘you could write a song called last bus to Brockville’."

That other song had not occurred to him, Dodd says.

The band has already spun around the motu, Te Waipounamu anyway, as far south as Invercargill and up into Nelson, and has plans to go further afield yet.

Dodd sings a familiar tune about the difficulty of finding places to play in Dunedin, as the city continues to struggle for venues, but there’s a gig scheduled for November at Blueskin Bay venue Arc.

"We'll definitely be out and about," he promises.

The album

• Skin & Bone’s debut album Last Bus to Brockville is available on CD, at Bandcamp and on Spotify.