The Gray Brothers aren’t fracking around

Rising Broome duo The Gray Brothers will perform at Blues at Bridgetown (November 13-15) and head to Fremantle to launch their new single, Black Mountain, at The Buffalo Club on Friday, November 20, with support from Clare Perrott. Elwood Gray chats to BOB GORDON about fracking, blood harmony and putting in the hours.

Your new single Black Mountain confronts a serious issue. Tell me about the song and about the background to it…

I wrote the song right after the EPA approved fracking in the Kimberley. There’s a Texan fracking company called Black Mountain Energy, and they have plans to frack in the Canning Basin, which would poison the river systems in the Kimberley. So when we found out that news, it felt fun to write a bluegrass song, sticking it to the Americans, about something that we’re taking on at home.

It’s also a call-out to the State Government about what’s going on there, isn’t it?

Yeah, absolutely. We’re calling out the Texans, but also, it’s Roger Cook who’s got to step up and listen to his own party and ban fracking in the Kimberley. I’m not sure of the right terminology, but essentially the Labor Party has said they want to ban fracking, but Roger Cook is just being a little bit gutless and dragging things out. (Labor Party members voted to extend the fracking ban to all parts of WA at the party’s state conference in November 2025.)

In things I’ve read about the band, yourself and your brother Albert, there’s a really interesting term that’s used about your vocals, ‘blood harmony’. Describe blood harmony for me…

When you sing harmony as brothers you’re kind of cheating a little bit because it’s just a whole lot easier to blend your voices. I mean we’re still developing our vocal skills but when you listen to those amazing singers like the Louvin Brothers or the Everly Brothers and it’s just like their voices interlock and buzz a little more than people who aren’t related.

So we feel like we’re cheating sometimes, not that our harmonies are the best in the world, but it definitely makes it easier singing with someone who you’ve known for your whole life. You can kind of tell when they’re going to sing something, when they’re going to not, when they’re going to push and when they’re going to hold back.

We grew up playing together as little kids in Broome and out in the Great Sandy Desert. Our parents lived quite a nomadic lifestyle where we got to just take a lot of time off school and focus on the real world and playing music and listening to CDs and being out in the bush.

In terms of that upbringing, who passed a torch onto you musically?

I think our uncle gave our older brother and Mum the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack probably around the time the movie came out. So we were little kids then, maybe the early 2000s and we also got a hold of the Anthology Of American Folk Music around that time as well. That was all kind of blended in with The Warumpi Band, Midnight Oil and Weddings Parties Anything. Our dad had had these sorts of Australiana influences as well, but we kind of really gravitated towards the American folk music.

As I was saying, we lived quite a nomadic lifestyle and were really young by the time we settled down in Broome full-time. We were probably five or six years old. Broome has this really unusually vibrant music scene for how isolated it is. We were lucky enough to have some wicked mentors like Dave Mann, Guy Ghouse, and some of the Pigram Brothers. And still to this day we get to partake in a really awesome music scene. Even though we’re living out on the edge of the Indian Ocean, we’re closer to Jakarta than we are to Fremantle. But all of those influences sort of tied together into all those backyard jams and playing with people. That’s our earliest musical influence, really.

When did you start doing actual gigs and touring?

Well, for Albert, I think he was playing with our older brother from when he was about eight or nine years old. He was on the drum kit at Pearlers Bar at the Roey Hotel. We’d obviously busk as little kids, but then by the time we got to be teenagers, we started gigging around Broome regularly, playing cafes and bars and stuff.

Then we both sort of dropped out of school and decided to tour around the North West and WA really as much as we could. So we’d play literally anywhere that would have us, like roadhouses and bars. Skimpy bars under the TAB, all sorts of places. It was really a good time. We wouldn’t do that anymore, obviously, because you don’t want to be heckled to play Jimmy Barnes at the Karratha Tavern on some random Saturday. You want to be playing a house concert in Denmark or something, but that sort of hardened us up a little bit. We got our hours up and then post-COVID we’ve sort of been lucky enough to just be more selective with where and when we’re playing and it’s been really awesome.

What about writing your own songs and gigging constantly? Where has that taken you musically, given the influences that you had and your own evolution with songwriting, and then also gearing that around so many live performances?

Interesting question because if we were playing all of those gigs in the rough and rowdy pubs, if we started writing songs that were super upbeat and yada yada then maybe we would have kept playing that environment. But we just kept getting pulled towards the slower, sadder side of country music. We have a little sticker that we put on our items that says, ‘Make Country Music Sad Again’. We noticed that we were just more drawn to like Gillian Welch and early Bruce Springsteen, those kinds of sad, slow records are what make us hum. So that’s eventually what we started writing more and more like.

With that said, this Black Mountain single is an upbeat bluegrass song, but the style of song that we’ve been writing mostly lends itself to intimate shows. So we’ve ended up prioritising house concerts and small festivals and town halls where we can. So that’s sort of how the songwriting has shaped the show.

So you’re ending the year with a single release and what does 2027 look like it’ll bring for you?

We’re planning on recording in March. We’re going to get some good surfing done over the wet season up here in Broome when the cyclones come. Once we’ve recorded, I guess we’ll start releasing later in the year. It’s just more of what we’ve been doing, really. Just keeping at it.