Ffrom March 18 to April 10, the Great Southern Nights live music event will bring hundreds of gigs to venues throughout New South Wales. A selection of Australian artists are ready to perform, with shows taking place everywhere from Sydney’s Oxford Street to regional hubs such as Gosford and Goulburn.
One of the acts is Sarah Blasko, who is set to play at Sydney’s State Theater on March 24. Since the early decades, Blasko has been one of Australia’s most respected musicians, having now released six albums that span the line between indie rock and art pop.
During the release of his 2007 album, What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have, the Sydney-born musician visited New York – and lived on the apartment floor of another Australian star, Sia.
That trip turned out to be somewhat catastrophic, but it was also here that Blasko picked up his most beloved object – a guitar from the 1960s. Here she tells about the visit that led to her beloved instrument, as well as the story of two other important personal belongings.
What I wanted to save from my house in a fire
I have an old Martin guitar from the 1960s which means a lot to me. I bought it during a fateful one-month stay in NYC for the release of my second album. Sia, whom I had never actually met until then, offered me and my guitarist friend Ben to stay with her and her roommates in her attic apartment in Soho.
I had a hard time paying her anything to stay with her as I had only chatted on email so she came up with the idea that I should buy a bed for the room as payment – she wanted it to feel as a children’s room. She sent me a picture of a used bunk bed in pine trees from the 80s, but when I wanted to impress her, I decided to buy a brand new steel bed instead.
To make a very long story short, the bed did not appear until very late in the stay, and it was completely broken – as if it had been run over by a semi-trailer. I spent the rest of the time getting the company to take it back and refund my money. We slept on sofa cushions – eventually we had to pay the doorman to discard the bed piece by piece, as if it were a corpse – and finally we handed Sia some cash.
She found a pine 80s bunk on eBay within about an hour of the financial exchange. At least a lot of annoying and ridiculous things happened during that time, but let’s just say that the album did not exactly make a splash and the bloody bunk bed caused some real problems! NYC lost some of its luster, but I still have the story, and I still have the sweet, old guitar.
My most useful object
I do not want to brag, but I have a great garlic crusher. You can spray the garlic whole and unpolluted, and it does everything for you – then it has a very handy black rod that pushes the garlic from the crusher into the container. It’s not even electric, it’s manual!
See, you may have something just as or more impressive, but let me just say that when I was growing up, as I did, and then living in shared houses, I did not even know that there was a garlic crusher of this caliber. We also have a tomato knife, which I am very happy about, but I will not go into that this time …
The item I most regret losing
My mother had a beautiful antique gold cross that she left for me when she died and it was stolen when someone broke into my apartment a few years later. It was heartbreaking.
They obviously just wanted cash and little things and could never have known the sentimental value of the jewelry, but it was something that just could not be replaced.
I looked in lots of Cash Converters, but unfortunately I never found it.