Melody master performing at festival

By Jaci Hicken

Jul 25, 2024

Glenn Skuthorpe, founder of First Nation Voices, will perform this weekend at Winter Blues. Photo by Contributed

Glenn Skuthorpe is a master of melodies and one of Australia’s most prolific and powerful lyricists, composer and performer.

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With six highly regarded albums and music featured in movies and documentaries such as The Emu Runner and John Pilger’s Utopia, Glenn’s sound spans a vast gamut from urban street blues to wide-open skies.

The Nhunggabarra Kooma man acknowledges his family’s role in becoming a lifelong musician.

“Honestly, it runs in my family on my mum’s side, I think that is where the music talent comes from,” he said.

“I had eight brothers, they were all guitar players, and all played three chords.

“My Uncle showed me three chords, D, G and A and said that was all you will need to know.”

Glenn will perform at Winter Blues as part of a three-piece band with Steve Wilkie on drums and Mike Haynes on bass.

“Hank Williams would be my first inspiration, but as I grew older, Archie Roach, Kev Carmody and Warren Zevon and all these different artists,” Glenn said.

“I love to listen to much broader music genres and to put a lot of different inspiration into my music.

“My three-piece band has got that sort of raw guitar sound.

“There is no rhythmic guitar, just hard guitar playing and pretty loud music.”

Many of Glenn’s songs are about the struggles he has gone through as an Indigenous man.

This contributed to his founding ‘First Nation Voices’, a worldwide collaboration of music between different Indigenous groups.

Glenn Skuthorpe is a master of melodies, singing about many of the struggles he has faced. Photo by Contributed

“My lovely sister, here in Adelaide, Nancy Bates, we are collaborating on a tour to Canada and getting the First Nations people from Canada and the US to come over here.

“We have an Indigenous South American lady here in Adelaide called Lenny, who is a marvellous Chilean singer-songwriter and we have been doing some stuff together.

Glenn, Nancy Bates and Lenny recently toured through Outback NSW, doing 16 shows in three weeks.

“It is important to bring cultures together,” Glenn said.

“We have a Barkindji Song Woman, a Nhunggabarra Kooma man, and Lenny, who is an Indigenous Chilean.

“All three artists were out the front, and every piece of music was different, with different stories to tell, but we all came from the same struggle.

“And people just loved it.

“When I do gigs with the First Nations people from Canada, it is a different sort of set together again.

“We have all these different people, but talking about the same struggle that we all have, and even though we come from oceans away, we still have the same struggle.

The singer-songwriter is currently recording his seventh album and will perform tracks from it at Winter Blues.