From 18 March to 10 April, live music event Great Southern Nights will bring hundreds of gigs to venues across New South Wales. An assortment of Australian artists are set to perform, with shows taking place everywhere from Sydney’s Oxford Street to regional hubs like Gosford and Goulburn.
One of the acts is Sarah Blasko, who will play Sydney’s State Theatre on 24 March. Since the early aughts, Blasko has been one of Australia’s most respected musicians, having now released six albums that straddle the line between indie rock and art pop.
During the release period for her 2007 record, What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have , the Sydney-born musician visited New York – staying on the apartment floor of another Australian star, Sia.
That trip turned out to be somewhat disastrous, but it was also where Blasko picked up her most cherished object – a 1960s guitar. Here, she tells us about the visit that led to her beloved instrument, as well as the story of two other important personal belongings.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
I have an old 1960s Martin guitar that means a lot to me. I bought it during an ill-fated one-month stay in NYC for the release of my second album. Sia, who I’d never actually met until then, offered for me and my guitarist friend Ben to stay with her and her flatmates in her loft apartment in Soho.
I felt bad paying her nothing to stay at her place, having only ever chatted on email, so she came up with the idea that I should buy a bed for the room as payment – she wanted to make it feel like a kid’s room. She sent me a photo of a secondhand, 80s pine bunk bed but, wanting to impress her, I decided to purchase a brand new steel one instead.
To make a very long story short, the bed didn’t turn up until very late into the stay and it was completely broken – as though it’d been run over by a semi-trailer. I spent the rest of the time trying to get the company to take it back and refund my money. We slept on couch cushions – eventually having to pay the doorman to dispose of the bed piece by piece as though it were a dead body – and finally handed Sia some cash.
She found a pine 80s bunk on eBay within about an hour of the financial exchange. Anyway, many annoying and ridiculous things happened during that time, but let’s just say the album didn’t exactly make a splash and the bloody bunk bed caused some real problems! NYC lost some of its shine, but I still have the story and I still have that cute, old guitar.
My most useful object
I don’t want to brag, but I have an amazing garlic crusher. You can pop the garlic in whole and unpeeled and it does everything for you – then it has a very handy black bar that pushes the garlic off the crusher into the receptacle. It’s not even electrical, it’s manual!
Look, you might have something equally or indeed more impressive, but let me just say that growing up as I did, and then living in share houses, I didn’t even know that a garlic crusher of this calibre existed. We’ve also got a tomato knife that I’m very fond of, but I won’t go into that this time…
The item I most regret losing
My mum had a beautiful antique gold cross that she left to me when she died, and it was stolen when someone broke into my apartment a couple of years later. It was heartbreaking.
They obviously just wanted cash and small items and could never have known the sentimental value of the jewellery, but it was something that just can’t be replaced.
I looked in plenty of Cash Converters but I sadly never found it.
