FOR more than ten years the Black Shadows have been bringing music to the Far West, though many of the original band members have changed since the early days.
The group all met playing in a church band in Wilcannia, and years later decided to form a band.
“I was just sitting around bored and thought ‘yeah let’s give it a go and start a band’,” said bassist Kyle Whyman.
The name of the band has also been through many iterations, with The Black Shadows born from covers the band was playing six years ago.
“When you look at our band, it’s made up of all Aboriginal people and people think our band is called that because of our colour,” Whyman said.
“But actually, it’s because we used to play lots of instrumentals of the band The Shadows.
“So it came about because of what we played but also what we wore. It just turned out that every gig we’d all wear black, and so we combined the two to call ourselves the Black Shadows.”
Whyman said the band meet to practice about two or three times a week, and often add new covers to their sets.
“We base what we play on what the crowd gets into, and what we feel comfortable performing,” he said.
“But we’ve come a long way from just pub rock, we play all different genres now – Koori classics, country, blues.”
On Wednesday the band performed on the Mundi Mundi main stage.
“We’ve all played the Mundi Mundi stage before but with different bands,” Whyman said.
“Tim performed the first time with Midnight Oil actually. And I played in Leroy Johnson and the Waterbag Band.”
The band had previously split a set with the Waterbag Band, but this year had an entire set to themselves as the band were unavailable.
“A big thank you to Leroy Johnson and the Waterbag Band for giving us the opportunity on the big stage,” he said.
