Hawksley does band a Favour

With producer, trio can talk music, not business

In Concert:

Great Big Sea

Where: The Centre for Performing Arts, 777 Homer St.

When: Tomorrow and Thursday at 8 p.m.

Tickets: $34.50-$59.50 at Ticketmaster

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Its roots might be in Newfoundland but Great Big Sea always has moved on.

The band that signed to Warner Brothers in Canada in 1994 around Alan Doyle, Bob Hallett and Sean McCann, has toured incessantly and seen its albums regularly top the national chart. Along the way, Great Big Sea has become one of Canada's most popular concert attractions. It has experimented with different instrumentation, such as drums, and on the relatively recent Fortune's Favour, producer Hawksley Workman has freed the band's punkish inclination, but essentially Great Big Sea is still a bodhran-bound folk band that draws its inspiration from Newfoundland. Maintaining this trajectory hasn't been easy. The band that started as a quartet is older now, which makes touring harder while family responsibilities mount, and dealing with success had at one time distorted its perspective, even while touring has become crucial to its survival.

"One of the reasons we went with Hawksley Workman is that we were talking too much about business," admits Hallett. "We were talking about flow sheets and realized that this is not the way to make music."

Workman allowed the band the freedom to concentrate on its music while bringing out a looseness in Great Big Sea. The result hasn't been the most popular LP of the band's career but it did open up Great Big Sea.

"You can't stand still," Hallett reasons. "You can either go forward or go backward. I'd rather go forward."

"We certainly never started out with any preconceptions," puts in Doyle. "Nothing. A lot of our music is based on Newfoundland. I write more in that tradition or way than 12-bar blues or rock 'n] roll."

From that foundation, Workman and Great Big Sea let out their personality. A song such as "Straight to Hell" doesn't sound like The Clash song of the same name but it similarly shows Doyle's rowdy side.

"I still consider myself as a novice as a songwriter," he continues, "but I realized at some point we had three or four guys who could write.

"I know we wouldn't be here if we didn't have a commitment to each other. You just couldn't do it."

That removed any pressure Doyle might have been feeling and was a green light to Workman to restyle Great Big Sea.

"These are the ones that Hawksley liked," says Hallett simply.

Now the band is on tour. It can fill places such as The Centre. Just as well.

"You have to now," Doyle says. "If it was important in 1995, it's essential now. It's the only way to make any money."

"Your chief source of revenue is from playing live," Hallett agrees.

tharrison@theprovince.com

The Vancouver Province