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Hell Herons is an Australian spokenword+music collective featuring awarding-winning poets/writers/performers/makers Melinda Smith, CJ Bowerbird, Stuart Barnes, and Nigel Featherstone.
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OUR STORY
In 2022, at the tail-end of the pandemic, the award-winning Australian poets/writers/performers Melinda Smith, CJ Bowerbird, Stuart Barnes, and Nigel Featherstone (scroll down for bios) arrived at a simple idea: what if we started setting our texts to music, which we would make ourselves?
Wanting to see - and hear, and feel - what might be possible, we just started somewhere; there has been no masterplan. We played, experimented, took risks. Some texts were poems that had already been published, others were unpublished fragments. In some cases, the music came first, inspiring the text.
As Melinda and CJ live in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Stuart in Queensland, and Nigel in regional New South Wales, texts were emailed to Nigel, who over months wrote, performed and recorded the music at home. Nigel also recorded the first attempts at the vocal performances - in his closet. Sometimes Melinda and CJ dropped in to Nigel’s home and tried out their own versions of the songs, and Stuart made his way to Canberra; it has always been a core principle of Hell Herons that the poet’s voice be on the final recordings.
Always, especially when experiencing the inevitable doubt, we came back to another core principle: if it gave us goosebumps, we were heading in the right direction.
Eighteen months later, we culled the demos to sixteen songs, enough for an album.
A double album.
Thanks to funding from artsACT, at the beginning of 2024 we engaged Kimmo Vennonen of kv productions in Canberra to re-record all vocals, then mix and master the album. Kimmo was also given the space to add his own flourishes to many of the songs, especially in terms of noise manipulation.
Yes, we set out to play, experiment and take risks, and we aimed to delight and surprise ourselves.
We hope all that is on The Wreck Event. We also hope the album gives you goosebumps too.
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layers of love & ruckus
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xo
MELINDA SMITH is a poet, performer, editor, teacher, arts advocate and event curator based in Canberra. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winner Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call. She frequently collaborates with artists in other disciplines including dancers, musicians and visual artists, and is also a former poetry editor of The Canberra Times. From 2017-2020 she co-organised the That Poetry Thing weekly poetry reading series at Smith’s Alternative. She created a site-specific spoken word short film as part of the Lurk Burley Griffin collective for Contour 556 Canberra Art Biennial 2020. Her latest book is Man-handled (Recent Work Press, 2020).
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CJ BOWERBIRD is a spoken word artist, physical performer and winner of the 2012 Australian Poetry Slam. CJ’s practice ranges from solo shows to interdisciplinary collaborations. In 2018, he released Beyond This Blue, an album recording the show he created with the Downfall Choir for the 2017 National Folk Festival. He has performed his one-poet show Meta at the Bookworm International Literary Festival in China, and Razing a Man, a performance combining spoken word, music and dance commissioned for the You Are Here Festival in Canberra, Australia. CJ is a member of the Canberra-based Sound and Fury Ensemble—a multi-disciplinary company that stages art parties that combine spoken word, music, dance and performance. He is part of The Street Theatre’s associate artist program and is currently developing a verse play with the working title Coward Punch.
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STUART BARNES is a Queensland-based poet. He is the author of Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing), awarded the 2023 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, short-listed for the 2024 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and highly commended in the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and of Glasshouses (UQP), awarded the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize, commended in the 2016 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Gilmore Award. An earlier version of ‘Off-World Ghazal’ was shortlisted for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize. From 2013 to 2017 Stuart was poetry editor of Tincture Journal and from 2017 to 2019 he was a program adviser for Queensland Poetry Festival. He is currently working on his third collection.
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NIGEL FEATHERSTONE’s most recent work, the novel My Heart is a Little Wild Thing, was published by Ultimo Press (Hardie Grant) in 2022. It has been described as ‘A remarkable look at Australian masculinity and its meaning’ (Newtown Review of Books), and ‘Yearning and intimate’ (West Australian). Nigel’s war novel, Bodies of Men, was published by Hachette Australia in 2019. It was longlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, shortlisted for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year, and shortlisted in the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards. As commissioned by the Hume Conservatorium, Nigel wrote the libretto for The Weight of Light (music by James Humberstone from the Sydney Conservatorium), which was developed by The Street Theatre, Canberra, and had its world premiere in 2018. Nigel’s short fiction has appeared in the Review of Australian Fiction, Meanjin and Overland, and his journalism has appeared in Guardian Australia, Sydney Morning Herald, and the Chicago Quarterly Review. Since 2019, he has been developing his play with songs The Story of the Oars, which will be produced by The Street Theatre in 2025. In 2022, Nigel was named the ACT Artist of the Year.
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Images appearing on this website are by Nigel Featherstone
© all rights reserved Nigel Featherstone
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Hell Herons writes, creates and performs with Ngunnawal/Ngambri/Gandangara Country. Sovereignty never ceded. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal Land.
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The Wreck Event by Hell Herons has been supported by the ACT Government through artsACT
