Tony Dwyer

Acoustic / Rock / Blues

Sydney, Australia

Billboard

About the recordings

They are demo recordings, recorded in a non-soundproof basement on a Mac. They have not been professionally mixed, engineered or mastered. Almost all the stringed instrument sounds (sitar, banjo, mandolin, guitars, etc) are Line 6 Variax equipment - a 700 acoustic, a 500 electric and a 700 bass. I have also used a 1956 Supro lap steel, a couple of cheap Chinese resonator guitars and a Cole Clark Violap on some of the songs.

More recordings at MySpace and at at Musicoz.

History

I began playing live in about 1970, aged about 14, in Canberra, in a duo with my best pal Angelo O'Reilly. Yes, that really is his name. We both played guitar and sang Simon & Garfunkel covers and that kind of thing.

After a couple of years we formed a band called Doeg with some other pals from school - Fabian Billerwell, Al Capello and Mark Tolley. I was the fairly reluctant singer because they decided I was the only one who could pull it off. Angelo became the reluctant bass player because the others flatly refused to do it. We did a few paid gigs, one of which got our photo in the Canberra Times in December 1972 when I had just turned 16.

After the inevitable split up I began playing solo and trying to be a singer/songwriter. Most people at that time were strumming covers by the Eagles and Neil Young. I wanted to stand out so I did covers by Jethro Tull and Yes - a fair bit more difficult and demanding than 'Desperado'. Anyway it seemed like a good idea at the time and it sure made me stand out.

At the beginning of 1976 I moved to Adelaide, where I played and sang 4 part harmony Broadway Musical numbers for good money in a show at the Camelot Castle Restaurant in the hills, then did some solo and duo work. In '77 I joined Lucas Aaron, a prog rock band in the style of Genesis, but I left in '79 when they decided to move towards experimental instrumental jazz stuff. Not much use for a singer in a jazz fusion band. Then I moved to Sydney.

After a few performance free years I joined The Dreams in 1982 with an old Canberra acquaintance, Peter Marshall, who had a pretty successful career playing electric bass with the likes of Marc Hunter, Russell Morris and Jim Keays. For the rest of the '80s I played with a variety of other bands including Cocktails at 7 and Naughty Rhythms, but had quit music again by the end of that decade. It was 17 years before I played in public again, at an open mic night at the Coogee Bay Hotel in May 2005.

I've played a lot of very different styles of music - straight rock, '60s soul / R&B, ska, Broadway show tunes, blues, jazz rock, prog rock and the story continues...