Four decades after finding his place in Melbourne’s Goth and post-punk scene, Bangalow musician and artist M.E. Baird is opening a new creative chapter. Digby Hildreth discovers how illness, survival and a lifelong search for meaning continue to shape his music.
Musician and artist M.E. Baird found his milieu in the dynamic Goth and post-punk scene of 1980s Melbourne. Forty years on, post-cancer, he is more interested than ever in experimenting with sound.
Baird’s 2023 EP Spinning Man finishes with a softly spoken number whose repeated lyric is “Whatever we do now, it has to be something new”. It’s in the context of a troubled couple re-committing to stay together, but applies equally to humanity’s stepping into the future, and could be a mantra for his own creative ventures.
The long-term Bangalow resident will bring new songs to Pearces Creek Hall this month, along with tracks off Spinning Man, and most of its predecessor album, 2019’s Time. And, in a first for the pastoral venue, a drummer will be part of the band on stage.
Any music played in the hall needs to cater for the acoustics of the small timber room, says venue manager Simon Winfield, and Baird’s “dark folk” fits the bill: it’s spare, atmospheric, emotionally resonant; the vocals haunting and expressive.
“Matt’s music and art create a necessary space – not an emptiness, but a place to rest,” says a recent Baird collaborator, Georgi Milln. “And in that quiet, you have time to not just feel the beauty of the sound or image, but to truly engage with it.”
The music has certainly evolved over the 40 years since his teenage love of the insolence and outrage of the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls and the glam and Goth posturing of the ’80s, but the echoes can still be heard in his exploration of the darker reaches of the human condition.
Unusually for a rock performer, in conversation M.E. Baird quotes Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl on the connection between suffering and creativity. His own search for meaning has been fuelled by an effort to reconcile the two powerful and conflicting forces in his childhood home, and by the experience of having – and surviving – cancer.
“I had this really strange upbringing, where on my father’s side they were virtually Gypsies, and it was all art, music, writing, freedom of thought. On my mother’s side was this hardcore Irish Catholicism: violence and alcohol. And guilt. So, I think my whole art career, perhaps my whole life existence, has been trying to reconcile the two.
“I’d say that probably 90% of my songwriting has been a 40-year exorcism of the Catholic.”
Such repressiveness meant a boy was destined for one of two things, he says: prison or the priesthood. “I didn’t like the idea of either, so there’s always that pressure. But it’s good fodder (for creativity).
“It’s still here now; everything I do with art is that duality; it’s either light or dark. There’s a battle going on. The same with songs as well.
“My first thought when I got cancer was, I could hear my mother in the background going, ‘Sit there, you haven’t been a good Catholic boy, so you’re being punished’, and I carried that for the first 12 months, the thought that I’m being punished for all my past.
“But I soon realised that I had to leave that behind.”
That light-dark dichotomy is expressed in the song Spiritual Prey, from Spinning Man, recorded while Baird was undergoing radiotherapy for prostate cancer. The disease is personified, and expressed directly: “You came to me on a winter’s day, to teach me how to live with pain.”
It’s dark! But M.E. Baird is fully recovered now, with renewed energy, a fresh lease on life. In person he twinkles with warmth and good humour. Spinning Man was cathartic, and served to “get it out of my system”, bring a new freedom, not just from the sickness, but also from the concern with what others think. He has stopped second-guessing himself: “After the cancer I was like, ‘I don’t care anymore. I can write what I want to write, you know, have some fun’.”
It seems that there was a gift in being ill, he says; a light in the darkness. “I’m actually more interested in experimenting now than I was when I was younger, because there’s nothing to lose.”
Always a keen collaborator, he is more enthusiastic than ever now to work with others, including making a record with the musicians alongside him at Pearces Creek, performing as The Fold. Among them are Bangalow locals Leroy Who on drums, bass player (and Bangalow Herald contributor) Darren Bridge, and guest Ashleigh Bo to handle backing vocals (“a massive, incredible voice”, Baird says).
Support act is the hypnotic Orly Raquel from Melbourne: “She plays classical guitar, sings, and is very like a female version of Leonard Cohen, who she cites as her spiritual leader,” he says. “And she’s very interested in the darker side of things, with song titles such as Witch and Chaos and Bones, so she’s perfect!”
The theme of darkness will be graphically represented on the night by the work of botanical installation artists Bob and Selena from Immortal Soils, who are creating a Gothic garden on stage. “We’re really making a night of it!” Baird laughs.
Along with everything else, M.E. Baird has an impressive history in teaching: architecture, design and the visual arts. He walked away from academia after 25 years but is now drawing upon the teaching material he developed to deliver regular lectures at Pack Gallery in Byron Bay.
The talks combine philosophy and history, all centred on visual art and literature. Baird feared there would be little interest but the sessions have proven popular. As Pack Gallery owner Paula Bannon explained to him: “People want that interaction; they want to be in a room with other people.”
This “classroom” represents a whole microcosm of creativity and community, and reveals a brightness in the young people attending that fills Baird with hope for the future, helping to keep the darkness at bay.
A Night of Dark Folk
Pearces Creek Hall
Saturday 4 July from 6pm