The octogenarian elder from the Australian desert who beat Nick Cave for the Australian music album of the year in 2024 is headed to Brighton this month on her first tour of the UK and Ireland.
Kankawa Nagarra plays the Folklore Rooms at 12 North Street on Monday, August 10, arriving in Sussex shortly after an appearance at WOMAD. The show starts at 7.30 pm, and tickets are advertised at £16 with the booking fee.
Nagarra is a Gooniyandi and Walmatjarri elder from the Kimberley in the north west of Australia, and her journey into music was anything but conventional. She didn’t own a guitar until she was in her 40s, and everything she plays now carries the traces of a long life spent listening. There were the tribal songs she heard as a child, then the gospel numbers sung at the mission where she grew up, then, of course, there was country and rock ‘n’ roll. It was the blues, though, that lit a fire in her soul.
The blues allowed her to speak about the people she sees struggling around her and about a planet she believes is being stripped for profit in a way that resonates with people who might not always listen otherwise. But her music is only one strand of a long working life. She’s a survivor of the Stolen Generations, and during the 1960s she was one of the people who helped compile the Walmajarri dictionary. Since then she’s worked as a teacher of Systems Awareness, campaigned on human rights, and pushed for open conversation about youth suicide and substance use in Aboriginal communities. She’s also behind a project she calls Ears of the Heart, which she’s mapped out in her own painting. The idea joins Indigenous spiritual wisdom to Systems Awareness thinking, and it asks people to face up to what they owe each other and to country. She argues that we’ve been listening with our heads when we ought to be listening with our hearts, and that we’ll only really hear one another once we’ve shifted our ears down.
One of her biggest career-defining moments came in December 2024. Her album “Wirlmarni” took the 20th Australian Music Prize, worth $50,000, off a shortlist that included Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Amyl and the Sniffers. She made the record outdoors in her own country, and it moves freely between styles and the languages she sings in. What you hear behind her is whatever happened to be there at the time, so insects buzz through the night takes, and birds call across the daytime takes. There’s even a moment where you can make out foil crinkling as a kangaroo tail gets wrapped for the fire.
Wirlmarni, a word that carries the sense of disappearing, was recorded in the open air at Wangkatjungka, the remote Western Australian community she comes from, and it sounds like it. The record moves between musical styles and between languages, and the environment sits in the mix alongside her voice. Insects hum through the night-time takes, birds answer back during the day, and at one point you can hear foil crackling around a kangaroo tail as it’s wrapped for the fire. Accepting the prize, Nagarra said the album had been thousands of years in the making.
Joining her in Britain is Darren Hanlon, who produced and recorded the album and runs Flippin Yeah Records, the label that released it. Hanlon is a well-established performer at home in Australia, where years of touring and a string of albums have earned him a devoted following, and he’s built up smaller pockets of listeners elsewhere. British audiences may have caught him already, since he’s toured with the Magnetic Fields and Billy Bragg, and he’s played Green Man and End of the Road. He also turned up in the children’s television hit Bluey, voicing the door-to-door salesman Alt Energy Dog.
The Brighton evening comes in three parts. Hanlon opens with a set of his own, then sits down with Nagarra for a question-and-answer session about her life and her connection to language, before picking up an electric guitar to back her for the closing performance.
Tickets can be purchased at https://www.tickettailor.com/events/flippinyeahrecords/2260244
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