"1988 delivered a mother lode of song.
I was living in the East Village, Manhattan.
At the New York Film Festival that year I saw some short films made in Russia in the early 1950’s
The Birthplace of Electricity and Angel.
I believe Stalin was unimpressed with them and they languished (on the gulag floor?)
But they became a launch point for song
Angel and Hole in the Middle.
As a child I had been fascinated by a painting in Arthur Mee’s “Children’s Encyclopaedia”.
Napoleon leading his defeated troops down the road, out of Moscow.
The frozen limbs of dead soldiers poking out of snow drifts, the broken baggage wagons and circling vultures in the sky lured me back to the page over and over again.
Of course it was an event that never happened, Napoleon returned to Paris long before his shattered army tried.
One song started out on unplugged telecaster plus mournful wailing noise from the most rudimentary Casio sampling keyboard.
And the other a folk guitar poem.
Then in the 90’s they were reworked as primitive electronica using my half inch 8 track tape deck , a scratchy old sampler and a distorted Yamaha organ
On relocating to rural Queensland in 2004 everything was unplugged and I reverted to my first instrument, the Appalachian Mountain Dulcimer.
Annette and I began seriously rehearsing as an acoustic duo.
In 2012 producer Kalju Tonuma appeared and we started recording.
Annette spliced the two songs into one and interrogates me about the chorus,
‘You’d look a whole lot better with a hole in the middle’.
What was it about?
It bore some relevance to the film Angel, a cossack counter revolutionary executes enemies of the Czar with a sledge hammer in a pine forest.
But there was more to it than that, I didn’t know what, a hunch, but insisted it stay in the song.
Then whilst researching the Napoleon retreat image I found it," (Geoffrey Datson)