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This Sunday 3rd March as part of The Brunswick Music Festival we are broadcasting our RRR show, THE JVG RADIO METHOD, live from THE RETREAT HOTEL in SYDNEY RD. The show broadcasts as usual between 2 and 4pm. I’m playing between 3.30 and 4pm with a full band that includes these ILLUSTRIOUS musicians: Ed Bates, Nathan Farrelly, James Stewart and Michael Barclay. Here’s the gig poster. Hope to see you. D

The largest crowd to date came to celebrate start of summer at the 10th annual RRR BBQ Day at Ceres Environmental Park in Brunswick. JVG had decided on a vegetarian theme this year to counter an ongoing onslaught of meat-themed tunes, such as Cat Stevens’ ‘The Worst Cut is The Cheapest’ and Crowded Houses’s ‘Weber with You’. The MBO (Melbourne BBQ Orchestra) saw a slight change of personnel, with Paul Thomas taking on electric guitar duties and Sgt Slaughter attending to the trumpet.

The rest of the MBO was made up of past BBQ day stalwarts: Ed Bates on pedal steel; Nathan Farrelly on bass; Matt Earl on drums; Dave ‘Dr Bellows’ Evans on accordion and piano; and Dan Warner on acoustic guitar. Dan’s vegetarian songs this year included the Jimmy Webb tear-jerker, ‘By The Time I Eat My Weetbix’ and the Elton John tribute to the salad fetishist, ‘Rocket Man’.
Straight after BBQ Day, the MBO repaired to The Lomond Hotel for a couple of sets of après-BBQ sizzle. James Stewart from The Warner Brothers was subbed in on guitar (one of the highlights was James’s definitive Melbourne song, Stuck in Melbourne, which was bellowed across the pub by the entire crowd). Song of the day, perhaps, was a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘From a Buick 6’.

Here’s a photo of RRR’s Ian Bland posing for an apres-BBQ-Day shot in front of the Christmas Tree at The Lomond. A passing punter was heard to remark, ‘Ian Bland: a wise man and a Christmas decoration’.