Inspired as a teenager by the poets and singers of Sydney's folk haunts, and seduced by the sensual guitar vocabulary of the 20th century, Blue Mountains singer/songwriter, domestic dare-devil & self confessed psuedo-virtuoso guitar/voco, Nikki Madden, marries cool acoustic guitar grooves with energy efficient lyrics to create the kind of luminous style that places her among the leading lights of the new acoustic sound.

Nikki's song themes lean towards the primitive favourites - love lost, love simply mislaid, sudden fabulous wealth.

Propelled by zippy fingerstyle guitar picking on the steelstring, her 'grin & bare it' documentary style seems to have found a warm welcome with audiences already pulling on their psychic shades in the bright millennial dawn.........

Nikki's conspicuous social justice interests include getting practical Intuition onto the school curriculum, promoting the natural enviroment and the right to bare arms, and phasing out the infantile Competition vogue in economics in favour of the more adventurous and scary Cooperation model.

FURTHER...

For a songstress whose cultural roots place her squarely among the brave, pioneering consumers of the late 20th century Western democracies - part of that courageous and foolish movement to redefine individual and collective endeavour as 'market forces' in dollar terms for ease of accounting, Nikki's willingness to 'put the boot' into some of the idiotic assumptions of our times (let's see you put a dollar value on this) is driven more by personal experience than ideology.

Trying to raise kids on a contemporary musician's income, Nikki found herself working as a factory hand, a delivery driver, building worker, sleeper cutter and cowgirl - in communities where the currency consists of things like trust or courage, affection or kindness, while the promised land of plenty, central to so much of the relentlessly advertised Western dream, often seems to go hand in hand with an equivalent ethical poverty - it doesn't take a great deal of theoretical ideology to sing about the bleeding obvious. 

influences &c

Nikki celebrated her childhood in the new, generic, post WW2 suburbs of western Sydney. The people were generally friendly and supportive. Timeless days mucking around in the bush.

Indigenous Australians were considered something less than fauna. The Doris Day brand of womanhood appeared to be the ideal. The future was assured.

Coming from a musical family where singing was commonplace, Nikki early on considered herself plain lucky to have confirmation that there were things you could do for fun - which were not against the Law or God.

With some relief, the Law and God gave way to the discovery of self-motivation in adolescence - albeit sensually driven - plunking away on a guitar in the bedroom opened up dialogues unavailable in everyday English.

With every tune in the 'Hillbilly Songster' safely mastered (mistressed?), Nikki's attention turned to the wider spectrum of musical possibility. As much as you wished "they all could be Californian...." it was patently not so.

Nikki played her first paying gig in 1968, aged 16, at a church hall in some remote suburb, the entrepreneurial boy drove the car. The thing happened where the roof lifted off the room at some point and the audience embarked on some transport of delight. Nikki thought she played pretty good that night.

By age 18, in the final year of her suburban high school, Nikki was gigging 6 nights a week in bars, clubs and theatres and rallies. She watched her male school mates consider the options offered them upon their 19th birthyear - conscripted as a soldier, go to gaol, go bush like a dingo with a price on your scalp. The boys seemed quiet that year.

With the arrival of children and a landlord, commercial music reared its stylish head, long enough to get moved to the yikes basket. When the fun gigs dried up following the demise of the Whitlam government in the 1970's, Nikki bailed for the bush on the North Coast of NSW and kept an eye on the growing children while exploring some delicious musics with the leisure of low overheads. The bush lifestyle opened up opportunities to play with lots of different musicians - blues, bush, indigenous, R&B, eclectic instrumental ensembles and surf thrash - while continuing to write occasional pieces of commercial music to help pay for school shoes(!).

All the time the children were growing so was Nikki's idiosyncratic fingerstyle guitar vocabulary - elements of the part-wise movement of voices she encountered in keyboard arrangements - inflatable guitar chords to buoy up that good old suspension of disbelief. Throw in a lifelong love affair with language - especially the way poetry can resonate between the lines long after the sense of the words has passed on - Nikki was consciously and compulsively developing a substantial music of her own.

She counts as those influences who most inform her own music (kind of chronologically) - anything on the radio, Woody Guthrie, the Carter Family, Slim Dusty, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Son House, Joan Baez, the Incredible String Band, Bob Dylan, Donovan, the Holy Modal Rounders, the Fuggs, Joni Mitchell, Bert Jansch, Dave Brubeck, the beat poets, John Cage, Phoebe Snow, Heitor Villa Lobos, Nina Simone, Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, the Mighty Diamonds, Billy Bragg, Midnight Oil, pretty much anything funky or quirky or adventurous or just plain true.

Recent live appearances - in support of some great folk-roots & acoustic artists like Bert Jansch, Tiddas, Kavisha Mazella, Deborah Conway, Kev Carmody and Ralph McTell as well as her solo festival and nightclub performances have seen Nikki's loopy songs, ultra tasty guitar picking and dreadful jokes finding an easy rapport with a whole new generation of weirdo individualists disguised as ordinary folks.

Currently based in the Blue Mountains near Sydney with her partner of 20 years, empty-nested Nikki has made some time for recording.

'Next of Skin' is Nikki's first solo studio album. She really likes it.

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