FANNY LUMSDEN RETURNS!
Famed Australian ‘Country Halls Tour’
To Make Overseas Debut in Scotland
More UK Dates By Popular Demand in July and August
AWARD WINNING ALBUM HEY DAWN OUT NOW
Following a hugely successful run of dates in the UK and Ireland in April, 2x ARIA and 9x Golden Guitar award-winning Australian singer-songwriter Fanny Lumsden and her band The Prawn Stars are back for selected shows in July and August. What is more, she brings her infamous ‘Country Halls Tour’ to the UK for the first time, with four shows in village halls across Scotland.
From the humble beginnings of the Country Halls Tour in 3 remote halls in the Riverina, Australia in 2012, Fanny and her small (mostly family) team have put on full band, full production shows of original live music in over 250 halls across Australia and New Zealand ever since, raising funds for communities and raising the roof of halls off the regular touring circuit, with their all-in-community-night-out.
Alongside her band The Prawn Stars, Fanny has “established herself as one of the genre’s most esteemed performers” (The Australian), and debuted in the UK in 2023 at none other than Glastonbury. 2024 saw April’s triumphant headline tour of the UK and Ireland, prompting Fanny and the band to make a swift return for more shows this July and August.
July 25 BERWICK-UPON-TWEED Berwick Rugby Club * COUNTRY HALLS TOUR
July 26 BALQUHIDDER Balquhidder Village Hall * COUNTRY HALLS TOUR
July 27 CARRBRIDGE Carrbridge Village Hall * COUNTRY HALLS TOUR
July 28 MALLAIG Mallaig Village Hall * COUNTRY HALLS TOUR
July 30 GLASGOW Classic Grand
Aug 1 MANCHESTER Night & Day Café
Aug 2 YORKSHIRE Underneath The Stars
Aug 6 BRISTOL Exchange
Aug 7 BIRMINGHAM Hare & Hounds
Aug 8 LONDON The Lexington
Tickets – https://www.fannylumsden.net/ukandietour
Single “When I Die” is taken from Fanny’s award-winning album Hey Dawn and has a muse: a big, bearded lumberjack called Brett, who has meticulously planned his wake. It involves a hillside with an ‘awesome view’ as he calls it, a bonfire of an old truck, live music from Fanny and his ashes getting shot out of shotguns. Brett approached Fanny at the pub one day to ask her how much she would charge to perform at his wake. She replied: a cow and 2 loads of wood. A few months later, Brett arrived at her farm with the first load of wood…. The song is really about sticking to your guns and being true to who you are both in life and in death. Fanny wrote it sitting alone, around a campfire on the Nullabour plain in Australia.
Fanny Lumsden grew up on a remote sheep farm, spent much of her time touring regional Australia in a caravan, is a volunteer firefighter and documentary filmmaker, and her songs are born of the red dirt, snowy mountains, and all the people in between. She currently lives on a farm on the western side of the snowy mountains, about 6 hours from Sydney and 6 hours from Melbourne. She’s a story-based singer-songwriter with a strong sense of place and her live shows are legendary.
Her latest album Hey Dawn has already been festooned with praise and numerous awards – much like its predecessor, ‘Fallow’. So far ‘Hey Dawn’ has won Best Country Album at the 2023 ARIA Awards, plus Alt-Country Album of the Year at the CMAA Golden Guitar Awards 2024. Not only did the album debut at number one on the ARIA Australian Album charts, and Top 10 of global ARIA charts, it also became the 4th highest selling country album of 2023, and boasts country radio Top 10 and CMT Number 1 hit ‘Millionaire’.
Fanny honed her art by driving around Australia in a caravan playing shows in halls on her ongoing ‘Country Halls Tour’, touring with her family – bass player husband Dan runs operations, is the graphic and website designer, photographer and video editor, and her brother Tom sings in the band, and runs the tour merch. Her kids, aged two and five, are meanwhile growing up on the road. She’s toured with artists like Paul Kelly and Kasey Chambers, headlined sold-out theatre tours, played Americana Fest in Nashville, and been feted everywhere.
Don’t just take Fanny Lumsden’s word for it though. Critics from publications including Rolling Stone, The Australian, Beat Magazine, The Music, and Rhythms Magazine have described the singer-songwriter and her music as ‘breathtaking’, ‘spine-tingling’, ‘stunning’, ‘unique’, ‘timeless’, ‘compelling’, ‘frank’, ‘heartfelt’, ‘visionary’, ‘distinctive’ and a ‘triumph’.
Four albums into her recording career, Hey Dawn is a rich character study, with stories that have shaped her and those around her. More sonically diverse than previous records, it incorporates guitar-based indie-pop into her gorgeously crafted, emotionally rich acoustic songwriting. As she says: “I wanted to have fun. I didn’t want to think too hard about it. I just wanted to feel.”
It has dawned on Fanny Lumsden that “you have to tell the stories of the moment you’re in, and you have to put them out and trust that that is okay. It’s a new day, we’re here.”
Credit: Jackson James
