EXPERIENCE ASLEEP AT THE REEL

ASLEEP AT THE REEL

Asleep at the Reel are a genre hopping Brisbane-based ensemble equally comfortable with an Irish jig or singalong as they are with a dance hall country shuffle. Yes it’s folk music – but not as we know it Jim!
The band’s repertoire is delivered with finesse by high quality musicians – including Tamworth Golden Fiddle Award winner Hugh Curtis. They can play a wide range of covers – from Dylan, Van Morrison, The Beatles, Steve Earle and many more.
Their original music is powered by the deft song writing of Mark Cryle, who rose to prominence in the 1990s with Spot the Dog and was once described by the Courier Mail’s Noel Mengel as ‘one of the best songwriters in Australia’. Cryle’s songs, according to a recent reviewer in Dublin’s Irish Music Magazine, ‘evoke the centres of our Irish world whether it be the pub or the parish; he has conjured up places where craic and companionship are the glue of life’.
Asleep at the Reel have now released two cds of original music – The Emerald Dream (2018) and Time and Tide (2021). Each is a rich and diverse collection which joins the dots between Celtic music and contemporary Australian song a ‘wonderful melding of Celtic influences and Australian stories’ as another reviewer noted.
Asleep at the Reel have forged original songs and tunes which one commentator has recently called ‘the cultural vaccine for the Irish Diaspora.’
The band take its stylings from their roots in the peat-smoked pubs of Ireland and Scotland, from the kitchen, the hearth, the veranda, the dance hall and the shearing shed all the way to the stage where they throw in a little backbeat just for the fun of it.