Cross country with Dilip & The Davs

Multi-genre Fremantle treasure chest Dilip & The Davs are set to release five live YouTube videos of their recent set at the Perth Blues Club over the next few weeks. It’s been a busy and diverse start to New Year for Dilip Parekh, who tells BOB GORDON all about it.

If there’s a philosophy that Dilip Parekh might have about music, then it would simply be ‘more of it’.

Since 2006 when his long-running outfit Dilip & The Davs was born out of the old Davilak Tavern in South Fremantle, Dilip has been committed and passionate in regard to playing all kinds of music with all kinds of musicians. Over 50 musicians have passed through the ranks in the 18 years since he formed the band.

“In the Davs at the moment we have a guitarist who is a metal player (Jorb Uangakoer), a drummer who is into African music (Warren Harvey), a harp player who is into blues (Andrew Pring) and Alan Dawson on bass who’s into everything,” Dilip laughs.

The Davs also features saxophonist Douglas Jones and regular guest harpman, Jean Guy Lemire. A recent gig at Fremantle’s Gypsy Tapas (where they’ve held down a monthly residency for the last 15 years) was the fourth time there has been a father and son combination in the band.

Dilip and Rowan Parekh, Mark and Daniel Wiggins, Glen and Julius Rogers and now Jorb Uangakore with his son Beau have made this band more of a multigenerational family than most.

“It’s always been a theme throughout the band and there’s also been people of all ages,” Dilip explains. “I think at one time we had people from three or four different decades in the band at the same time. There’s not many bands who’d have had that.”

That ethic of diversity has also applied for Dilip outside the Davs, with his lounge jazz outfit Charlie Carters often gigging around Fremantle. In recent times he’s teamed up with The Wildings on their monthly Live At Central Beat YouTube show, produced by Patrick O’Connor. Previous songwriters invited to present new songs to rehearse, perform and record include Wayne Green, Rose Parker and Gerard Maunick.

Dilip recorded three songs with The Wildings, including Aunty Bella, which was recently posted on their YouTube channel.

“It’s an interesting song that one,” Dilip explains. “I went down to Albany with my wife because she’s doing an exhibition there in April, so we went down looking for inspiration. There was an exhibition of indigenous artists at the town hall, and a lot of the paintings were by an artist named Bella Kelly who’s really well known down in the Great Southern.

“I heard the story about her, and I talked to the organiser and he said, ‘Dilip we’ve got the exhibition, and we have the paintings, but we don’t have a song!’ He gave me a challenge (laughs), so I decided to write the song and it took me about a month.”

It’s the third song Dilip has written about indigenous painters. On the first album Don’t Mind If I Do (2008) he wrote Carrolup about the school near Karratha where stolen indigenous children were taken to during the ‘40s. Drawings by many of these children—which were later exhibited around the world—evoked both the tragedy of the Stolen Generation and the beauty of the children’s resilience and artistry.

Dilip also wrote Not For Sale about late Goldfields artist Dr Mary Pantjiti McLean, whose paintings captured the essence of her country, Ngaatjatjarra land in the central deserts of Australia.

Bella Kelly was born in Mount Barker 1915 and passed away in 1994. “She was influential for a lot of young, indigenous artists, especially her landscapes of the Great Southern,” Dilip says.

“Bella used to go around town selling her paintings. Going to farmer’s wives and knocking on doors to try and feed her family. In the streets of Albany she was really well known for going up to people and trying to sell her paintings. So I tried to capture all that in a song.

“She was like a matriarch, a maternal figure. In Aboriginal culture I think quite a few women have to be like that to hold things together. She was a very interesting person. She had two families, one family her children were taken away, she had another family and they got taken away as well. A lot of tragedy throughout.”

Aunty Bella is a hybrid country-reggae song and interestingly Dilip has also embarked on a country road of late with the Davs with the release of two singles, You Crossed The Line and Get To You.

“I like to say that we’re grazing in a different paddock for a little while,” Dilip laughs, “because previously we’ve always done funk, reggae, ska and recently we’ve been going into more cruisy-lounge-jazz-tinged kind of stuff. So we went and did a couple of country singles, and that was such great fun. The boys really enjoyed it, especially all the twanging guitars.”

The boys have indeed been busy, with the band’s performance at the Charles Hotel’s Perth Blues Club last November being filmed in entirety. A selection of songs—Golden Man, Hawaiian Blues, Too Late Now To Turn Around, Driller and Get To You – are set to be published on YouTube each week over the next month.

“They’re the current songs that the Davs do with the post-COVID band,” Dilip notes. We’ve had over 50 local musicians through the band since 2006 and the current iteration is going really nicely. We’ve been playing together for a couple of years now and it’s very smooth. The live songs that we’re putting out are really good… they’re broken in!”

As well as the YouTube video releases, Dilip and the band will continue their busy gigging schedule, and plan to record more new songs at Alan Dawson’s Witzend Studio. In all its incarnations The Davs remains a dearly held entity in Dilip’s life as a songwriter and performer.

“The most powerful way of presenting songs is through a band of musicians who work with you and understand how a song works,” he says. “For me it’s about finding likeminded musicians who do the best they can to present the song, adding their own experience and their own interest.

“My job as a songwriter is to provide the sketch for them to add all the colour from their talents,” he smiles. “It appears to have worked quite well up to now.”

Catch Dilip & The Davs’ Perth Blues Club live videos here and see them in the flesh at Gypsy Tapas Bar on Saturday, January 20, 2024.