Successful ex-pat Kiwi musician in Sydney features on East FM, Saturday arvo

Phil from Farm Cove

Wayne Gillespie, an ex-pat Kiwi in Sydney, is a true-blue New Zealand and Australian music performer and collaborator and he’s our featured artist on tomorrow’s She’ll Be Right on Saturdays Show with PJ Taylor, 3-7pm (NZ time), July 2, on East FM.
We’re talking live with Wayne at 5pm, then playing in entirety his first new album in a few years, his sixth – FRAZZ – Wayne Gillespie and band Famous Blue Raincoat, with Rob Grosser.
FRAZZ is described as the concoction of Folk-Rock-Jazz, with traces of rock-edge, cheeky surrealism, jazz juices, folk reverence, African flavours, hypnotic grooves and dark tales.
Singer-songwriter Gillespie has delivered high-quality music in Australia since CBS released his second album New Locations in 1987, while he was already well-known in NZ. Drummer and percussionist Grosser has worked with some of Aussie’s best musicians including the late Pete Wells of Rose Tattoo, Jimmy Barnes, Tim Gaze, and Bob Daisley (Ozzy Osbourne, Gary Moore), as well as overseas artists such as Bob Margolin (ex-Muddy Waters), and Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, Ian Gillian and Steve Morse.
Famous Blue Raincoat started with the end of another band. In 1995, Wayne and Rob were in three-piece Passionfish, releasing an EP, Love Comes Down, and promoting Gillespie’s third album, Living in Exile. When the bass player moved on, the musical chemistry suggested Wayne and Rob stay in touch. They kept jamming, recording what came up and seeing where it would lead. It was a new way of writing for Wayne, accustomed to being the solo acoustic singer-songwriter with folk-rock roots, yet strapping on an electric guitar and playing to grooves Rob laid down made perfect sense.
Life inevitably got in the way, relationships blossomed and children arrived, as did a new career for Gillespie as an entertainment psychologist. The jam tracks, though, were still there, honed into real songs by Wayne and enhanced with the help of friends: Sax player Ric Robertson (Baecastuff), with whom Gillespie had played with in NZ, as he had American-Kiwi Nigel Gavin, who’d played in Robert Fripp’s League Of Crafty Guitarists; bass player Goby Catt, now living in Canada, was a pal from the Slide McBride Band; and another Kiwi, Brendan Power, on harmonica, whose credits include Van Morrison, Sting and Ray Charles.
Gillespie cut his teeth playing London folk clubs and busking in Paris Metros in the 1980s, returning to NZ to release three albums and making the finals of the NZ Music Awards in 1984 and 1988.
He’s also performed and played with the likes of Suzanne Vega, Neil Finn, Lorina Harding, the late Chris Whitley, Stan Ridgeway, Ed Keupper, Shona Laing, The Narcs, and Amanda Brown (Go-Betweens), to name a few.
The She’ll Be Right Show with PJ beams out of East FM, East Auckland’s community-powered public service radio station, on local frequencies 88.1FM and 107.1FM, nationally and globally at www.eastfm.nz... and on app iHeart Radio.