POND frontman Nicholas Allbrook will pay tribute to iconic local artist Theo Koning with an avant-garde performance on Sunday.
Appearing at Fremantle Arts Centre, Allbrook’s fully-improvised 45-minute set will reflect on Koning’s love of satire, wry humour and spontaneity.
“Strictly no rehearsals allowed,” Allbrook says
“This is bloody terrifying for most musicians, and I’ve had to constantly suppress the urge to just have maybe just one teeny tiny little practice…maybe just write down a couple chords.
• Nicholas Allbrook will pay an avant-garde tribute to the late Freo artist Theo Koning.
Creative
“If we do even a teeny tiny practice then we just turn into a badly rehearsed band. It’s no longer ‘instinctive’, its just kinda crap.”
Allbrook hopes they can capture that elusive lightning in a bottle moment.
“Ideally I want people to see something coagulate in real time, hear the moment when something solid creeps out from the fog,” he says.
“That’s the magical bit of creativity and I’d love if everyone got to share that with us, that little alchemical spark where stuffing around starts to develop a skeleton and flesh and bones.”
Reflecting on Koning’s role as a “wry narrator”, Allbrook undertook some life-threatening research.
He ploughed headfirst into the dusty bargain bins at Mills Records (some say there’s ancient druid stones down there) and came away with a handful of obscure cassettes including Business Essentials 1989, Beware of Losing Faith by Drawing Away from Jehovah, The BFG, and a tape “mysteriously labelled” ABC program on Australia ban of witnesses.
He says he’ll be playing snippets of the tapes during the performance, “to act as the nascent ‘squiggles’ to our ‘Mr.’ Hopefully I’ll chuck these poor relics of the cassette age onto the sword to unblank our canvas.”
The band tasked with keeping up with this mayhem is Ben Witt (Romeo Walker) Ben McDonald (Katy Steele, Little Birdy, Human Buoy) and Warsame Hassan (Mudlark).
They’ll also be joined by saxophonist Bill Rogers, who was a close friend of Koning.
“It’ll be really special to have someone who knew the artist so well to help make some noises that pay tribute to his work,” Allbrook says.
The musical tribute complements the first major retrospective of Koning’s work, which opens at Fremantle Arts Centre this weekend.
After passing away in 2022, there was a groundswell of support for a review of the artist’s career, which spanned five decades and included sculpture, painting, poetry and performance.
Joining Allbrook on the Sunday Session line-up are Lyndon Blue (Methyl Ethel) and friends, and Ash Baroque.
“In the middle it’ll be the mind buggering gothic-drag cabaret of Ash Baroque, an artist I admire very very much,” Allbrook says.
“It’ll be a weird, fun and surprising arvo, for both punters and artists.”
The free Sunday Music is at Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty Street on November 16 from 2pm-4pm.For more details see the FAC website at wfac.org.au. The Sunday Music sessions run until the end of March.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK