Kalgoorlie pure gold for Seymour
After travelling the length and breadth of Australia in an enduring music career, rock great Mark Seymour still craves new frontiers in WA's vast expanses.
Exploring Kalgoorlie for the first time yesterday, the Hunters & Collectors frontman was almost speechless as he stood at the lip of the city's famous Superpit.
"It looks like the Grand Canyon," Seymour, 58, said.
"All I want to know is, where did it start?"
Seymour, whose songs such as Holy Grail and Throw Your Arms Around Me have become Australian rock staples, played his first-gig in the Goldfields yesterday after the annual Hannan's Handicap horse race.
He has travelled WA from Albany to Port Hedland and even played on a pontoon stage on water in Dunsborough. And while the cost of touring through WA has at times been prohibitive, Seymour said the further he went, the more he wanted.
"With Hunters & Collectors, we just started playing at all the pubs - it was all about driving and joining the dots up on the map," he said.
"In the last few years, WA has seemed a conspicuously wealthier place.
"You could tell people had money just by the clothes they were wearing.
"But you really get a sense of how big Australia is, how isolated it is, how much distance there is between towns and the differences between regional communities.
"We've played at some very isolated places and you're seeing an aspect of Australian society that is virtually hidden.
"I see it on a very grass-roots level as playing to working people and you've got to go where they are, you don't discriminate."
Seymour said he had been surprised by the $13 cost for a pint of beer at a Kalgoorlie pub but had been taken by the city's charm.
"It was pretty pricey, I got a bit of a shock," he said.
"But you get the sense of a really big history in this place."
Seymour said he had written several songs from his experiences in WA.
One of them, titled "Fifo", will appear on his new solo album Mayday, due for release in April.
Hunters & Collectors will play what he said would be the band's final gig in New Zealand in November.
