Bio
BIO
Peter Baird is a singer/song writer/guitarist from South Gippsland ,Victoria, Australia. His music combines the timeless sensibility of the folk song with the spirit of the innovators and singer song-writers of the 60’s and 70’s. He explores texture tone and atmosphere with melodic guitar parts to provide settings for vivid lyrics that effortlessly marry the personal with the universal.
‘I was born in bayside Melbourne in 1958 so I guess that makes me a late boomer. My dad just scraped into the end of the war. I remember as a 9 year old or something hearing this unearthly sound coming from the television as I lay in bed and just having to get up and investigate, regardless of the consequences. It was Jimi Hendrix on the BBC, teeth, guitar behind the back, the whole thing. I also remember Sargent Peppers arriving in my neighbourhood like some exotic artefact from a parallel universe. So the music from that era was certainly formative for me.
‘My Mum and older brother had pretty good record collections so I was exposed to a large diversity of music. From Bach to Dave Brubeck to Sam Cook, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor on and on… and my older brother had just about every Bob Dylan album. I went out and bought All Along the Watch Tower and Disraeli Gears myself. I always felt I could write songs.'
While he sites these and subsequent influences he says his writing is inspired directly from life, not by listening to other people's music. ‘ I think you can feel a song coming. Sometimes they just turn up, or at least a line, some melody….a seed feeling you know contains a whole song. As I write the song and if I go on to record it I always refer back to that seed feeling to be sure I’m being true to it, to make sure I’m revealing and not obscuring that essence. It's in listening back to the songs after the whole recording/production process that you hear how all these influences have bled through from the subconscious. ’
He started playing solo at coffee shops in the late 70’s, Started in bands in the early 80’s and spent the late 80’s and 90’s living in and around St Kilda Melbourne putting together bands to play his own music as well as working as a sideman in other bands often with his wife Nicky also a singer, guitarist and writer. His band Soul House held long residencies at The Rainbow Hotel Fitzroy and the now defunct Ruby Reds in Latrobe Street and won the Melbourne Battle of the Bands in 1996.
In 2000 he moved to the South Gippsland coast and has lived there since. Since the move he and Nicky formed the duo Little Oberon and released 5 albums and performed countless gigs in their area and beyond. Being a prolific song-writer he has produced a large backlog of material that he is now beginning to record and release.