Luke Spook was so inspired by his home on the South Coast that he created a concept album and built a model world to represent it.
With his album – Small Town – about to be released by Sydney label Third Eye Stimuli, the film clip for the title track has been attracting a lot of startled eyeballs, and has even graced the screen on ABC TV’s Rage.
Not bad for a psychedelic folkie from Stanwell Park who wrote the entire album of 12 tracks and played every instrument, including the disorienting backwards guitar solo on the title track.
“I tried to get this concept going as if you walked into your grandma’s house and picked up a fairytale book and just fall into that world,” he explains.
“So I tried to create an alternative world in which the music is the soundtrack.”
The alternative world is modelled on Stanwell Park, where Spook grew up and still lives on a horse farm, and the world of his imagination, which goes back to the 1960s sounds of the Kinks and the more folky tunes of Pink Floyd’s late and lamented genius Syd Barrett.
Spook painstakingly recreated this world in the film clip, reading up on model building and making multiple trips to Bunnings to build the set and then film the animation. It took him several months.
All up, the effect is as if Postman Pat has taken an LSD trip, with the small town figurines frolicking away to the evocative and other-worldly music which seems to come from another time and place but in reality springs from Luke Spook’s musical inspiration. There’s even a character in town called the Troubador, who is of course Luke.
Luke Spook is not his real name, you won’t be surprised to learn. While his first name is Luke he was pondering stage surnames and there were a couple to choose from.
“I couldn’t decide between Luke Spook and Luke Warm,” he jokes.
“But I thought Luke Warm might turn people off, and Spook has a nice rhyme and gives a good intro to the freaky side of what I’m trying to do.”
As Luke Spook, the recognition is growing and momentum is building.
The Small Town album follows his debut single Isabella on an earlier EP in in 2017, and Spook is now entrenched on the roster in the Third Eye Stimuli family, the bold venture of creative entrepreneurs Josh White and Richard Snowden.
Third Eye Stimuli are staging a lot of shows around Sydney, at venues such as the Landsdowne and the Chippendale, where they are showcasing their growing roster of original and independent artists.
You can see a heap of them when Third Eye Stimuli take over the Sly Fox for the King Street Crawl on September 1.
Check out Luke Spook and the Third Eye Stimuli catalogue on Facebook and on their Bandcamp.
