'We didn't know what a Golden Guitar was': Kasey Chambers remembers 1992

The ARIA Hall of Fame inductee will be performing hit songs from most of her 12 albums, including The Captain, Barricades and Brickwalls, Rattlin' Bones, and Wayward Angel, on January 25 at the Tamworth Town Hall.

"I like playing the old songs better than the new ones because I know them better but I will be throwing in a few new ones throughout the night," she told the Leader.

"It will be this little journey that takes the audience with me throughout all of these times, where songs came from and what they're about."

Kasey will be showcasing the breadth of human emotion and story-telling in her chart-toppers, such as in the vulnerability of her 2001 single Not Pretty Enough, the title track of her first album The Captain (1999), and the stronger more self-assured Barricades and Brickwalls (2001).

The multi-award winning musician returns every year to perform at the Tamworth Country Music Festival (TCMF), using it as a great excuse to catch-up and live jam with "muso mates" for visiting and local audiences.

"I feel really lucky that I actually get to call that a job, because I'd do it even if people didn't pay money to come and see it, but I'm very glad they do," she said.

Kasey first stepped onto the TCMF scene in 1992, when she arrived with her mother Diane, father Bill, and brother Nash, as part of the family's Dead Ringers Band.

They packed up and travelled the nearly 2000 kilometres from their then-home in South Australia to Tamworth because her father received a Golden Guitar nomination for Things Are Not The Same On The Land. She has since relocated to the NSW coast.

"We didn't really know anything about the music industry [back then], we didn't have a clue, we just knew that Tamworth was the country music capital of Australia," she said.

"Somebody rang up my dad and said, 'you've been nominated for a Golden Guitar', because of that song of his which Slim Dusty recorded.

"And my dad said, 'what's a golden guitar?' We had no idea what a golden guitar was. So when they told us about what it was, we were like, 'oh, cool, we might go to Tamworth'."

The naturally talented family of musicians busked outside what was then known as the Tamworth Hotel (now called the CH Boutique Hotel and owned by Jye Syeborg, following a $2.5 million make over in 2014) during the week that Bill Chambers won his first Golden Guitar.

"We couldn't get a gig because we were too late. We didn't know we had to book them in advance. So, we just sort of rocked up to see what happened," Kasey said, reminiscing about the four-man tent they all stayed in under the sweltering Tamworth summer.

"So, we set-up in front of the Central Hotel and busked because we didn't need permission back then. We played every night for the whole festival for about a week and we had a ball. It was amazing. It was so good. And we fell in love with it."

Kasey has since gone on to win multiple TCMF Golden Guitars, beginning with her first two in the year 2000 for Female Vocalist of the Year, and Best Album award for The Captain, and most recently in 2019 for her latest album Campfire.

Her list of awards and achievements are huge, including about 10 APRA awards, an Australian Independent Record Awards (AIR) for best independent country album, about 13 ARIAs, two Australian Entertainment (MO Awards), and in 2018 she became the youngest female inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.

Kasey said she will also be "jamming" with her father, Bill, for his annual gig at The Pub, located in the Bill Chambers Room at 99 Gunnedah Road in Tamworth, during the 2024 TCMF.

Later this year, Kasey will be releasing a film called The Song Trail that she has been working on during the past year.

"I've been taking all my old songs back to the places that they were written and we've been filming it," she said of the project that also involves her family.

"I am looking forward to sharing that because it's really something quite different for us."

The TCMF is on from January 19 to 28, 2024.