Armed with a big, 1950s Gibson, Australia's Minnie Marks brings new energy to International Guitar Night
On her first North American tour, Australia’s rousing singer and propulsive electric guitarist draws on Down Under blues and follows her heart
Minnie Marks
International Guitar Night comes to New Westminster’s Massey Theatre on January 25
ALTHOUGH SHE’S ESSENTIALLY unknown in North America, Minnie Marks has already established herself as a triple-threat force at home in Australia. An uplifting, energetic singer and driving, propulsive electric guitarist, she’s also got a secret weapon—but we’ll get to that later. What we want to talk about first is some music that she hasn’t yet recorded, which is definitely going to add depth and singularity to her already considerable appeal.
You can get a taste of what that music might sound like by going online and seeking out Marks’s 2022 performance at the Bendigo Blues & Roots Music Festival. Sixteen-odd minutes into a set of hard-driving blues numbers about sleeping rough and drinking dangerously, she shifts gears and slips into “Bag of Bones”, a beautifully rough-edged fingerstyle number that posits music itself as the best kind of adventure. “Something about it just takes me away,” Marks sings, making it obvious that not only is the stage her natural environment, she’s also a talent on par with the ’60s icons that were her initial inspiration.
“My folks had amazing records, and we always had the needle on. It was really quite a musical household,” she notes in a telephone interview from a Los Angeles hotel room before heading to Vancouver for the International Guitar Night. I’d hazard a guess that Texas bluesman Johnny Winter and Bay Area innovator Jorma Kaukonen were frequently heard blasting from the Marks family’s Queensland windows. Marks also credits the Australian folk-blues duo known as the Hussy Hicks with showing her that the concert stage was a viable career.
“I first saw them online, and I told my mum, ‘Mum, I’m going to meet these two girls some day.’ And she was like ‘Yeah, whatever,’” Marks recalls, laughing. “But it ended up happening! Julz [Parker] is a mighty fine guitar player who used to trip around with [Australian guitar legend] Tommy Emmanuel, and Leesa [Gentz] is an incredible singer, so that really kind of fuelled most of my younger existence.
“I got into all the fellows as well, but I think finding some like-minded souls who lived a few hours up the road really kind of helped me,” she adds. “It was really cool, too. They’re a bit more alternative and really put themselves out there; it’s not pretty, or what a lot of people would expect females to do and represent. So it kind of just allowed me to explore and be whoever I needed to be and wanted to be. It was really good for me and just made it a clean slate, I guess.”
One more ingredient was necessary to catalyze Marks’s artistic persona, and that came in a form that would have been familiar to many of the blues artists she idolizes: suffering. But heartache wasn’t the cause; it was her heart. In 2021, Marks went through open-heart surgery and then developed complications that nearly killed her, but instead fuelled her drive to create.
“That song, ‘Bag of Bones’, I wrote just after my open-heart surgery—or during it,” she reveals. “One of the nurses told me that I wasn’t going to make it out of hospital, ’cause I ended up with a blood clot in my heart. So I pretty much wrote that one for myself. Oh, they’re all for myself, really, but I thought that was one that I was just going to have to hang on to, that no one was ever going to hear. But it’s a song about how wonderful music is. And it doesn’t matter what genre of music it is: we’re all connected and music brings us all together in one way or another. We’re all trying to get to the same place.”
That’s pretty much the ethos behind the long-running International Guitar Night concert series, but even so Marks is something of an outlier in the 24-year-old event’s roster. In the past, the focus has been on guitar virtuosos of a somewhat more orthodox kind: fleet-fingered technicians, almost all of them focusing on acoustic instruments that are far removed from Marks’s big, flashy 1950s Gibson. This year is no different: on the bill with the Australian blues-rocker are Luca Stricagnoli, a wondrously inventive performer known for his polyrhythmic two-handed tapping on a triple-necked guitar; Thu Le, trained in the Western classical-guitar tradition but also conversant with her native Vietnam’s highly distinctive six-string styles; and Marco Pereira, a veteran Brazilian composer and teacher able to pivot from classical music to bossa nova to jazz.
Marks is understandably nervous about being thrown into such deep waters on her first North American tour. “I’m excited, too,” she says. “They’re all amazing guitar players. But I guess there’s got to be someone to break the ice and make a fool of themselves—and I don’t mind being it.”
Actually, there’s little chance of that—and that’s where the secret weapon comes in. Not only is Marks a rousing singer and a raucous slide guitarist, she’s an effective percussionist, too. Even more remarkably, she can do all three things at once, having helped road-test the Michigan-based inventor Pete Farmer’s Farmer FootDrum, a pedal-controlled acoustic drum kit that does a very convincing job of sounding like a fine set of traps. International Guitar Night shows typically conclude with a four-way jam session between all the participants, and it’s a sure thing that Marks’s multiple abilities will only add to the fun.
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