In My Backyard is an exciting kids album released by Spikey and Friends, Byron Bay’s top pop-rock performers. Based around the bushland of Byron Bay, it takes the kids on an adventure through their own backyards, where friendly bushland creatures introduce them to the magic of music and nature.
Spikey the echidna sings the kids through meetings with all his bushland friends and through them the kids learn simple lessons about the animal’s biologies and habits. With great respect but a great sense of fun, the kids meet Old Man Bray, an elder of the Bundjalung people, who shows them around the country his people have looked after for millennia.
It’s a brilliant way or teaching about the country and the animals, just as the indigenous people have always done it, mixing lessons with music and fun, so the kids are too involved to realise that they’re actually taking in a great deal of knowledge about the place they live in.
The album was recorded in the hills behind Byron Bay at Christian Pyle’s highly regarded Goonengerry studio, with the best musicians in the area.
Spikey and Friends are a band of experienced musicians and performers whose exciting music will captivate your kids attention while they romp with the bushland creatures. You’ll love the music too, its jazz-inflected grooving rock and roll with the guitar twang of Link Wray and the sinuous beauty of great pop-rock.
Spikey is Michael Turner, an Aria award winning singer/songwriter who has toured Europe and Australia with such bands as Wild Pumpkins and Midnight and more recently North Coast retro surf-folksters The Durga Babies. He has released a previous kid’s record; Peaceful Stars, Days & Dreams, a beautiful album recorded in Mumbai, India with under-privileged rural children. He also co-produced Kangaroo Club, an album by popular north coast children’s performer Mereki, an indigenous Kamilaroi woman, in 2001.
Thierry Fossemale, on bass, has played with the likes of The Whitlams and more top shelf jazz combos than he cares to remember, while drummer Nick Fisher used to work with Ed Kuepper and the New Christs when he was a crazy kid himself.
Assisting this terrific trio is Suzie Surprise, aka Suzie Leigh, a hugely experienced acrobat and circus performer who has turned heads across the world and trains aspiring circus runaways at schools around NSW’s north coast. While the band performs live, Tina conducts workshops in body balancing, juggling and hoops.
Assisting this terrific trio is Suzie Surprise aka Suzie Leigh, a hugely experienced acrobat and circus performer who has turned heads across the world and trains aspiring circus runaways at schools around NSW’s north coast. While the band performs live, Suzie conducts workshops in body balancing, juggling, hoops, plays games and dress-ups and dances with the kids as she plays different characters and makes sure they all have heaps of fun.
The album also features a cast of singing local kids and guest musicians on didjeridoo, saxaphone, violins and organs, all creating a huge album bursting with information and great music.
From simple nursery rhymes to energetic pop-rock reminiscent of The Beatles or Crowded House, songs about dolphins, echidnas, koalas, bush turkeys and cane toads will echo through your kid’s heads for years. They’ll learn respect for animals and the history of this ancient land, and get a great musical education too!
Mick Daley 