Andre Camilleri & The Broken Hearts
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Andre Camilleri & The Broken Hearts

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"One Fine Day CD Reveiw"

Andre Camilleri dipped deep into the stone country template for his first album with The Broken Hearts.

He laced ruptured romance requiem Emily with morphine, cocaine, heroin, grass and bourbon and followed it down with a chaser in I Got A Little Drunk.

"I got wasted on morphine and cocaine/ I smoked cannabis and tried heroin/ ecstasy and LSD/ nothing made me forget Emily."


Camilleri is unlikely to have heard Melbourne band Hit & Run singer Dan Robinson's live seventies anthem Smack, Smoke & Whiskey.

The singer-songwriter was born much later in Germany where he sang and picked in Berlin beer and wine mines and Streight Street on the fringes of the red light district of Valletta - capitol of his ancestral home Malta.

But Robinson and his music, dating back to sixties rockers Wild Cherries and Virgil Brothers, are well known to Camilleri's pedal steel guitarist Brendan Mitchell.

Mitchell's life imitated art with a liver transplant 25 years after writing Ballad Of A Dead Liver - theme song for the Dead Livers.
Pedal steel players rarely dominate peers' discs but a liberal lacing enables Camilleri to ignite entrée songs Leaving On My Mind and Broken Heart as a salient signpost to Sad Old Clown, All About Gone and Cold Heart Woman Blues that add melancholic meat to the bone.

It's hard to listen to Sad Old Clown without thinking of Smoky Robinson's 1970 hit but he didn't have The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas stage show pedal steel player Mitchell on his tune.

Cut All The Weed is not an anti-dope song but savage social comment on Middle East wars with battles over oil on troubled waters not too far from Malta.

Morrisville is a macabre, humorous homily, about a teenager stealing a head from a tomb to make a bong - sardonic segue to the optimistic finale, the title track.

Chris Franklin on harmonica joins partners in rhyme - bassist Chris Birnie, guitarist James Stewart and drummer Maurie del Citto - on Cold Heart Woman Blues.

Vocal students may debate if Andrew strayed far from the gene pool of his dad Joe, but unlike Skyhooks, he doesn't have Dan Robinson singing the high notes on tour.


- Beat Magazine


"Keeping it Country"

Keeping it Country!
My first encounter with Andre Camilleri dates back to the summer of 2000. I had previously heard of him through the local indie grapevine: a musician who had earned quite a healthy reputation busking away in Valletta by day, fronting his own band, Red Necks On Parade, by night. Being forever interested in anything that makes waves away from the mainstream, I made a point of being at the CD launch of Red Necks on Parade’s self-titled, self-released debut, highlighted with a live performance by the band that I had later described as a “wicked country twang” in my review.

Relocating to Australia in 2006, Camilleri wasted no time in finding his feet in the country music scene down under. After forming his own band, The Strange Things, and a solo stint, he now fronts a new band, The Broken Hearts – four musicians with a significant track record in their own right with whom he has now established his place on the Melbourne Country circuit. Given the accolades that they have been receiving from the critics, it looks like Andre and his band are also gaining ground on a national level, and if the songs on their debut album One Fine Day, released in Australia by Ramblin’ Records with distribution by Sound Vault Records, are anything to go by, that should be any time now!

Helping myself to the free MP3 downloads on the band’s MySpace website, I couldn’t help but notice the intensity of Camilleri’s vocal delivery, reminiscent of the original Country timbre and punctuated by a variety of inherent and acquired elements. Behind Andre’s lead, the band – Chris Birnie on bass, James Stewart on lead guitar, Brendan Mitchell on pedal steel and Maurie Del Citto on drums – skim effortlessly through relatively ingenuous compositions, the focus of which is firmly fixed on the familiar attributes that evoke Country music’s perennial emotive connection. Of the four tracks available online, it is Cut All the Weed – gloriously flowing in melody and lyrically deep – that stands out above the rest. Don’t Bury Me in Morrisville and I Got A Little Drunk adhere (perhaps a bit too closely) to a vintage blueprint, although this does give them a certain verve. Cold Heart Woman Blues, as the title openly suggests, treads into Blues terrain, a move emphasised with some nifty harmonica that lends it a pre-electric Dylan-esque edge.

Essentially, Andre Camilleri’s music has never really stuck to any given rule. His songs go where the feeling takes him, and that can stretch from a traditional style to the edges of alt.country. It is in itself a characteristic that gives his music a genuine touch, reeling you in on the strength of permeating guitar melodies and alleviating vocal undulation, until it’s too late to ignore it. He won’t be with his Broken Hearts down at Poxx Bar, but Michael and Thomas will provide adequate back-up, having been in Andre’s old band, Red Necks On Parade. Beangrowers and Shostakovich’s Nightmare will also be performing on the night. For more information, visit www.myspace.com/theandrecamilleriband or www.andrecamilleri.com



Q. Family ties aside, what had brought you to Malta all those years ago?

I was (in Germany) pretty much down and out (again). My band split and my girlfriend broke up on the same day. Frankly I had no reason left to stay in Germany, so I thought I’d go to Malta and lay low for a while.



Q. Your bio states that you write tunes to “keep the devil in his hole”. How often has that “devil” held you back?

All the time! It’s writing songs and playing gigs that keeps me sane and grounded. Some guys do yoga, others chase women or drive fast cars, but I go to a better place when I play songs.



Q. Your list of influences is endless. What first attracted you to Country music?

My Maltese dad did a lot of groundwork because I was raised on Elvis and Johnny Cash. However initially, I used to be into American Punk bands like Fugazi, Minutemen, Minor Threat, Black Flag, Sonic Youth, etc. One time in the late 80’s REM played in my home town (Bielefeld/Germany). This was before they hit the big time. Their support band was Uncle Tupelo (Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy’s former band). They played five beautiful acoustic songs and then grabbed their electric guitars and blasted everyone away. I was hooked on Country from that day. Sometime later I saw the late and great Townes Van Zandt perform and there really was no way back from then on.



Q. With Country not being exactly chart-

orientated, you must have ulterior aims in your musical career. What are your ambitions?

Sometimes I wish I was an accountant, or maybe a lawyer or architect. I would make some serious money, ha, ha. I guess it wasn’t meant to be. No seriously, I try not to worry about money too much. I have a day job now that pays the bills and I can play the music I want to play. My ambition is to write the best music I can, and judging on how I am getting on in Melbourne, I think I’’m doing all right. Ot - Malta Independent


Discography

Their first album CD ‘One fine day and other songs’ (released by Ramblin’ Man Records, distributed by Sound Vault Records) is receiving ample radio play all across the country. More importantly, the Broken Hearts are quickly establishing themselves as one of Australia’s top live music acts. And this is what significant others had to say: Dave Dawson, Beat magazine: Melbourne’s Andre Camilleri has dipped deep in to the stone country template for his first album with the Broken Hearts… It’s hard to listen to ‘Sad Old Clown’ without thinking of Smoky Robinson’s 1970’s hit, but he didn’t have the Best Whorehouse in Texas stage show player Mitchell playing on his tune!” Phil Knipe, Radio KLFM: “It's the sort of stuff I like to present - neither super schmaltz (a la Charlie Landsborough et al) nor faux contemporary Nashville like so much Australian C&W. Thanks for the decent music.” Kristy Edmunds, Melbourne Arts Festival: “And again, I really enjoyed the music.” www.andrecamilleri.com www.soundvault.com.au

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Bio

Andre Camilleri's Broken Hearts are the latest addition to Melbourne's Country music scene. Andre learned his trade singing and drinking in the shadows of Malta’s red-light district around the infamous Straight Street, deep in the guts of the island state’s capitol Valletta. In 2006, after years of drifting aimlessly around the world, writing tunes just to “keep the devil in his hole”, Andre arrived in Melbourne. Here his luck finally started to turn when he found a bunch of like minded musicians he had been searching for so long. They are Chris Birnie on bass, James Stewart (T-Bones, Overnight Jones, The Warner Brothers) on lead guitar, Brendan Mitchell (Dead Livers) on pedal steel and Mauro Del Citto (The Rhumbats, April Seven) on drums. Oh boy, these guys can play! Andre’s song-writing is firmly rooted in the Blues tradition, voicing the lament of the down and out, broken hearted and alienated people. Influenced by the likes of Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Bo Diddley, George Jones, Gram Parsons, Johnny Cash, Townes van Zandt, Roky Erikson and Jay Farrar the Broken Hearts have created their own uniquely Australian take on ‘good country’ music.