Martin Martini and the Bone Palace Orchestra
Hundreds of bands go through the Evelyn. Some go completely under my radar, but that was never going to happen with Martin Martini and his Bone Palace Orchestra. The posters for his gigs, wrapped around the poles of Brunswick Street and blu-tacked on the windows of the Evelyn, were colourful, creative, quirky, sometimes surreal, and reminded me of maybe vaudevillian travelling circuses. And when I actually saw the guy, it completed the picture — he looked like a circus ringleader, or one of those guys running a freakshow in the early 1900s. Him and his posters were clearly part of the same act, so his awareness of image impressed me. His actual performances were also really good, which reminded me of Tom Waits. So it was, as they say, a no-brainer to do a portrait of him, and it was also obvious that his posters should be there with him. Since those days, he’s founded a short-lived record label, which produced “some of the best records never heard”, and after that he became an expert on wild mushrooms, running fungi workshops, during “Mushroom Meanders”, where you follow him around the bush and find mushrooms together. Life takes people in different directions.
