Lucie Thorne Explains How Her Bushranger-inspired Album 'Kitty & Frank' Came About

So… it’s true. My new album Kitty & Frank is a ‘concept record’, all about a young frontier woman, Kitty Walsh, and the charismatic bandit who became her lover, Frank Gardiner. 

I first heard the wild true stories of Kitty and Frank from Craig Lawler, tour operator at Blind Freddy’s Bushranger Tours, after a show at the Gooloogong Log Cabin back in 2015. It was the morning after the night before, and Craig was regaling us with a raft of unbelievably entertaining tales of the local area’s bushranging past. I was captivated. It was Shakespearean in its scope. It had everything - adventure, romance, hardship, love, loss, tragedy. I knew right away I wanted to write a song for these two lovers, and by the time I'd landed home in Melbourne that night, I'd written Nothing Comes Close. I demoed it there and then, in the wee hours, in my little cabin in Pascoe Vale, under thunderous skies. (There’s a bloody loud thunderclap on that original demo right when I sing "My ears strain for hooves like thunder" – seriously!). A little while later I wrote All The Love, and when I started playing those two songs out, the (crazy?!) idea of writing a whole album for Kitty and Frank started to creep in… 

"It had everything - adventure, romance, hardship, love, loss, tragedy. I knew right away I wanted to write a song for these two lovers."

There’s plenty written in history about Frank, a lifelong outsider with a proclivity for large-scale stock theft and a penchant for roadside robbery. When gold fever strikes the Lachlan District, Frank, fresh out of Cockatoo Island Prison, arrives in the area, and not long after begins an affair with a young, married Kitty. Short version is they fall madly in love and run away together… and do not live happily ever after. 

Turns out there’s very little written about Kitty, or her sisters, or in fact any of the women of the time. And the more I thought about their story, the more I found myself drawn to imagining Kitty’s world, imagining it all from her perspective, and stewing on the idea of narrating a kind of ‘historical fiction’ through her eyes. 

Fast-forward to April 2018. For a blue-skied autumnal week I sent myself off on a songwriting retreat to a little shack on the Howqua River in north-eastern Victoria. I’ve always cherished any opportunity for creative solitude, and this time on the Howqua turned out to be especially productive. I had a week's supplies, a simple recording set-up, plenty of firewood, no internet, a borrowed midi-keyboard, and songs to write! 

Lucie Thorne, writing in north-eastern Victoria

The whole wild story of Kitty and Frank had clearly been rolling round my head for a long time by this stage, but it was there in that week on the Howqua that the shape of the record really flew in; something shifted/lifted, and I could suddenly taste just what kinda record I was gonna make, sonically speaking. I’ve always written songs with a guitar in my arms, but there I was, writing synth riffs and melodies, and it unlocked something in my little songwriter-y brain. And all the while I was vividly imagining just what my A-team (ie Hamish Stuart, drums, Dave Symes, bass, and Chris Abrahams, keyboards) could and would do with these sketches. 

After fleshing out the songs some more (and sourcing a few more juicy details from chief sleuth Lawler), we recorded most of the album live to tape at Sydney’s Golden Retriever Studios over three days at the start of summer, with consummate engineer Simon Berckelman. I then took those sessions home and continued to arrange, re-layer and record, and then mixed the album with the wonderful John Lee at Phaedra Studios, Melbourne. 

And here it is! To be honest there’s a part of me that’s pretty spun out that this whole wild crazy idea has actually come together!? I couldn’t be happier with what we’ve made, and I’m so bloody excited to finally get to share it all! We take the Kitty & Frank show on the road across Australia throughout the spring. And I sure am looking forward to making the music and telling the tales along the way…