Uh!Oh! How it began..
A group of Melbourne musicians gathered on a warm Wednesday night in Steve Purcell's back-room studio, a room full of vintage recording gear, vinyl, books and treasures. Purcell, a bassist and bandleader who also co-founded BOOF, the swampy wah-wah pop band formed in Amsterdam in the mid-nineties, had invited friends and bandmates over to play through songs lifted from the B-sides of records they loved. The Wednesdays continued through the summer, with each musician bringing favourites to try - Devo, The Beatles, Billy Idol, Fats Waller - and over time it became aparent there was a special magic in the room when they played together. It was Hetty Kate who saw the project for the jewel it was, and who carried this into the world as an official release.
The title track comes from Don Elliott and Sascha Burland, first recorded by their 1960s jazz-vocal novelty act The Nutty Squirrels. From there the record roams freely: Pete Shelley's punk-era 'Ever Fallen In Love' beside Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh's 'I've Got Your Number' and Allen Toussaint's 'Workin' In A Coalmine'. What binds the songs is the pairing at the record's centre: Hetty Kate's voice - warm, girlish and unmistakably of another era, against Dale Lindrea's tenor guitar, pushed through pedals and effects until it becomes whalesong and laser beams.
Among the originals: Steve Purcell's 'Clouds', a seven-minute centrepiece with guest trumpeter Steve Grant; Australian Hammond organist Tim Neal's 'Hymn for Her', reimagined here as 'Hymn for Him'; and 'Cellophane', which closes the record.
Released before Instagram, Tik Tok, influencers and virality - though Uh!Oh! earned an Australian Jazz Bell Award nomination it never quite found its category at that time. Melbourne had no shelf for a record that was part jazz, part lounge, part something harder to name. The band kept working, from Red Bennies, a velvet-and-neon cabaret on Chapel Street, to the Lomond Hotel, one of the city's best-known live-music pubs, and in 2014 appeared as the house band for an episode of Spicks and Specks, the ABC's prime-time music quiz show and a fixture of Australian television. When Hetty Kate's jazz career carried her overseas and the others returned to their own projects, The Twenty 20s gently folded, leaving Uh!Oh! as the band's only album.
Fun fact: the band was named by Hetty Kate, who had laser eye surgery the year the album came out and finished it with 20/20 vision.
