The Waifs’ Donna Simpson reflects on the band’s beginnings
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15.10.2019

The Waifs’ Donna Simpson reflects on the band’s beginnings

Words by Fergus Neal

The Waifs singer and guitarist, Donna Simpson, is excited for the mixture of old and young at the Queenscliff Music Festival, where the longstanding all-ages event will play host to established acts while supporting fresh talent.

27 years in the music game, and off the back of a sold-out North American tour, it’s almost impossible to imagine Simpson once being terrified at the prospect of trying to make it in Melbourne.

“It’s scary starting out. I remember going over to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe, I was working as a nanny at the time,” she says. “One of the guys there was Peter Lawler who played in a band called Weddings Parties Anything. I said to him, ‘We’re moving to Melbourne to make it there’, and he said, ‘I don’t want to let you down kid, but Melbourne’s a tough city and you’ve got to be pretty cool to get in there’.

“I became terrified of moving to Melbourne, because we had nobody saying we could do it except for each other. But eventually, we got down there, and recorded an album. You’re so hungry starting out. You must be, to survive. Any pub that would have us, we’d play at. We just wanted to play music.”

Simpson knows the importance of giving emerging acts support to enable a smooth transition to bigger performance settings. This comes from her own experience as a newly-minted artist when The Waifs supported Bob Dylan on his Australian and North American tours in the early-noughties.

“It’s like a dream and a nightmare all at once,” Simpson says. “You get this gig and you think, ‘Holy shit, can we do this?’ Nobody’s there to tell you, ‘You’ll be okay’, There are just a whole bunch of people saying, ‘Don’t fuck this up’.

“But then once when we got on to perform, we look side-stage, and Bob’s standing there, whistling and tapping his feet. After the gig, I was packing up my guitar and he just appears out of the shadows to tell me he enjoyed the show,” Simpson says.

This experience highlights the importance of older acts and festivals fostering new talent and is a testament to QMF, which has continually provided a launch pad for new artists with its Emerging Artist Grant and Alison McKenzie Mentor Program.

Furthermore, the message from the recent climate strike will be upheld by QMF as it continues to rigorously pursue its War On Waste initiative. At last year’s festival, the initiative diverted an amazing 90.7 per cent of waste from landfill – a new benchmark for festivals all around the world.

QMF will likely host a flock of students who attended the climate strike, as the all-ages event has come to be a quintessential component of the festival and a big reason for the event entering its 23rd year. Simpson hopes the diverse crowd will come together for a celebration of music regardless of their age. As people have done since the festival’s launch in 1997, and similarly in Simpson’s own neighbourhood back in W.A.

“My neighbours across the road are in their early twenties, and they have a swimming pool,” she says. “One Australia Day, they were playing triple j Hottest 100, it was cranking and about forty degrees outside. I don’t have a pool, so I said to my kids, ‘Come on kids, let’s go meet the neighbours’.

“I went over and said, ‘Hey, years ago I was number three’. And they looked at me like ‘You?’ I’m sitting there with two little toddlers in floaties, the suburban mum. When they asked me for what song, I told them ‘London Still.’ They said they’d never heard of it. But we still got to go for a swim and listen to music together, despite the generational differences.”

The Waifs perform at the 23rd Queenscliff Music Festival from Friday November 22 until Sunday November 24. The festival is sold out but head to the QMF website for resale opportunities.