Ah, this takes me back: March 2000 and My Friend The Chocolate Cake play a sold-out Spiegeltent, treating a rapturous Fringe audience to a near flawless performance. And back further to 1995 when I hear my first snatch of The Red Wallpaper on a borrowed copy of 'Brood,' my first MFTCC encounter.

Now while I'm normally unflinching in my disdain of 'Best Of' collections from bands with anything less than six studio albums under their belt, I can't help but embrace this one guilty pleasure as it combines thirteen years of music on one exemplary disc, albeit from just four albums and one live concert. Given that I came to MFTCC in their 1994 'Brood' phase, it's also great to finally hear the studio versions of earlier pieces from their self-titled debut album, Nanny's Farewell, The Romp and the wonderful A Midlife's Tale.

'Parade' balances the jaunty string-laden songs like Throwing It Away and their cover of Magazine's Song From Under The Floorboards with the melancholy of Here Come The Sirens, and even when it's just David Bridie and piano opening The Gossip, it's still a quiet magic Bridie hasn't yet managed to reproduce in his subsequent sans 'Cake albums.

Listening to 'Parade' I'm reminded of just how good songs based on Australian suburban life can be, and MFTCC were to my mind always the perfect band to colour Bridie's lyrical tales of housewives, depressed workers and forgotten dreamers. For the unfamiliar this is kind of like a Michael Leunig cartoon to music. As expressed in The Gossip it's hard to escape that "...the bleak's quite beautiful".

I couldn't ask for more in a 'Best Of' from one of my favourite Australian bands, except of course a band reformation. Unlikely I thought, until I heard new song Let's Go Walk This Town and two new instrumental compositions included here. And what's this I find typed plainly on the inner CD sleeve? "to be continued..."? Joy.

Tomato Records Top 100 songs of 2004

Along with the top 10 albums we've decided this year to also tell everyone what our top 100 songs of the last year were. My Friend the Chocolate Cake toped the list with their amazing instumental "Tv Theme #47", while the band's lead singer David Bridie made it into the top 20 two more times time with the closing track to his Hotel Radio album "Stumble Away" at #10 and "Looking after ourselves again" at #13. A few of Mark Gardner's acoustic versions of the classic songs he sung with Ride made the list however it was his beautiful new solo tune Beautiful Ghosts that made the top 10. Overall however Gelbison had the most coverage, with their fantastic debut 1704 still getting rotation in the TRM offices and their awesome follow up See the World being released this year the band managed to get a total of 7 songs into the list the highest of which being all the rage at # 3.

1. MFTCC - TV Theme # 47

37. MFTCC - the black dog follows

41. MFTCC - Lets go walk this town

That's all we have to say for now, we hope you have enjoyed reading the articles, reviews, stories and rants in Tomato Records Monthly.

Lets Go Walk This Town
fasterlouder.com.au, April 30 2004

Conceived as another outlet for the creative outpourings of Not Drowning Waving’s David Bridie and Helen Mountfort, My Friend the Chocolate Cake have long since left the pair’s original outfit behind, releasing their breakthrough album Brood in 1994 just as the former were dissolving. This, the first taste of the band’s forthcoming Best Of release Parade, Lets Go Walk This Town exhibits instrumentation lush enough to satisfy as an instrumental despite, or in spite of it’s vocals, giving the track a visual quality suitable for a soundtrack. Typically, Bridie’s piano anchors the tune while the violins criss-cross a path to the chorus-perfect for the melancholic climax of a film. That said, Bridie’s voice has never sounded better. His airy croon sounds more like a breath than a vocal exertion, the male equivalent to the gentle whispers of Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval.

Similarly, the lyrics themselves are effortless and unassuming, almost resembling speech as if to emulate the conversation between the song’s lonely protagonists. Enhancing the track’s poignancy is Bridie’s painfully articulate manner, particularly when he sings I can see the darkness in your eyes which is chilling, as much as it is pensive. Nonetheless, Lets Go Walk This Town isn’t wholly cathartic. In fact, you get the feeling Bridie’s holding back ever so slightly, which, for those who don’t like to be spoon fed is actually kind of nice.

Disc of the Week
Mornings, ABC Radio Tasmania
Presenter: Tim Cox
Monday, 19 April  2004 

Hear "Parade" this week on mornings.

Each week, Coxy features the best new music on CD. This week it’s My Friend the Chocolate Cake with "Parade".

This is what Tim had to say about this album:
I can't recall a previous occasion where a compilation has been made Mornings' feature album but the career of Australian band, My Friend The Chocolate Cake is so stellar - and so unrewarded - that you might be hearing many of these songs, classics all, for the first time.

There's humour, insight and, in some cases, a sharp political edge to some of them but it's a joy to be reminded what can happen when half a dozen (give or take) like-minded Melburnians shelter from the cold and fire up their instruments to keep warm. Maybe. David Bridie and cohorts romp and roll through over a dozen years of invigorating, original music on "Parade", all this week on Mornings.

Time Off
5th June 2002

Melbourne chamber pop act My Friend The Chocolate Cake are a unique musical entity, deftly combining lush orchestral arrangements and silky pop melodies into something almost other worldly. Curious – the band's fourth studio recording and first since 1996's ARIA Award winning long player Good Luck – may not be an instant affair, but like a fine wine, reveals subtle hues and textures with every taste. From the rubbery bass line of `I Like it Like This' to the sad piano chords and pizzicato cello of instrumental `Curious', it's musically both creative and engaging. Lyrically, songwriter David Bridie presents a darker picture, tackling issues from the Stolen Generation in a stinging rebuke of our public leaders (`I Guess it Don't Get Much Better Than This') to the independence struggle in West Papua (`Kelly Kwalik Country'). Indeed, Curious often harks back to a lost era in music, a time when liberty, social justice and infectious melodies shared the same page. From the joyous (`The Kilana String band Song') to the despondent (`Weep'), Curious has a mood for your every moment.

Inpress
5th June 2002

It's hard to think of other contemporary local acts as unique and peerless as My Friend The Chocolate Cake. They push forward a sound that is primarily acoustic-based, but takes in so many styles and mimics them with such justice. One will hear echoes of chamber music, folk rock, Celtic and middle-eastern flavors, and brooding, smoky piano ballads. And it's all delivered in an evocative, mood driven sense of musicality that could possibly only come from Melbourne.

Main man, David Bridie is to Melbourne as the Whitlams' Tim Freedman is to Sydney. Both take on the piano man role as their fellow musicians lead on. Yet where Freedman indulges in novelty like ditties about fallen rugby players and air guitarists from the Cocos Islands, Bridie addresses his stance on political controversies within Australia and his beloved Papua New Guinea. This is clearly detailed in songs like `I Guess it don't Get Much Better Than This' and `Kelly Kwalik Country'. The former, with it's obvious sense of immediacy, continues in the MFTCC tradition of great second tracks like `I've Got a Plan' and `Lighthouse Keeper'.

Bridie is a master of landscape, best demonstrated on his excellent 2000 solo effort Act of Free Choice. But it's how he can musically interpret such contrasting locations, be it Richmond station or mangrove swamps within the Pacific Islands, and make them come together that is most striking. This is what justifies Bridie's demand for soundtrack work. On Curious, he allows himself to showcase his gift for pop songwriting, and render melancholic moments like `Malolo' (where he refers to the Prime Minister as an ``egghead") moving rather than whiny.

A welcome addition to the fraternity is Dean Addison's double bass work, adding a jazz foundation to `I like it Like This' and `The Mangrove Song'. When Bridie steps aside and lets string players Helen Mountfort and Hope Csutoros take centre stage on the instrumentals `Muckheap' and `The Boat Song', their opportunity is never wasted. Such is their precision and technicality, it's little wonder their services have been requested by everyone from David Chesworth to Underground Lovers. MFTCC's happy-go-lucky tendencies are not regularly exemplified here, leaving it only to the brief zydeco romp `The Kilana Band String Song', which grates against what is a generally downbeat collection.

Curious is MFTCC's first studio album since 1996's Good Luck. Regardless of the time between them, it manages to maintain what is a sparse yet amazingly consistent catalogue.

Tony Hillier
Barfly Magazine - Entertainment Cairns, June 2002

It’s been a long time between sandwiches — or rather cakes — but Curious follows on so smoothly from their last studio album, 1997’s Good Luck, it’s like My Friend The Chocolate Cake were never apart. The diligent music reviewer will know that David Bridie and his Melburnian Friends have hardly been inactive during the five year break. Bridie himself scored several films, notably In A Savage Land, and released a successful solo CD, Act Of Free Choice, while MFTCC’s cello-violin duo, Helen Mountfort and Hope Csutoros, produced an album as the gypsy band Cosmo Cosmolino and wrote for cinema and theatre. The trio’s collective musical adventures are manifest in Curious, subtly integrated in the chamber pop that is MFTCC’s stock in trade. The band’s fourth studio album — the convergence of the pieces of the Cake, if you will — was recorded in just three days, and Curious has the fresh feel of a band who find liberation in spontaneity, of playing in a live situation.
David Bridie’s familiar will-’o-the-wisp voice, sparse piano style and Melanesian influences provides lightness of being above a classical bed of sawed and plucked strings — cello, violin, double bass and mandolin (but no guitar!).

There’s shades of Tabaran — Bridie’s ground breaking project with Papua New Guinean musos — in the Kilana Stringband Song, and hints of Penguin Cafe Orchestra in a couple of the instrumental tracks. The band leader also draws inspiration again from the landscape (Swirl and The Mangrove Song) and quietly vents his political spleen (I Guess It Don’t Get Much Better Than This and Kelly Kwalik Country, the latter a tribute to the West Papuan freedom fighters). In addition, of course, to some characteristic Cake takes.

Ed Nimmervoll
Howlspace, June 2002

Whatever entity he decides to go with at any particular point in his music,  David Bridie remains one of the true individualists and innovators of Australian  music. Blessed with both a vocal and piano sound you can pick as his immediately he's primarily a collaborator, always surrounding himself with and inviting the contribution of others. That's what's made his path in music so interesting to follow, forever shifting ground, but never too dramatically not to take us with him, and always with great integrity and warmth at the heart of it. We haven't heard My Friend The Chocolate Cake on record for six years. Probably even David thought that name was behind him, put to respectful rest like Not Drowning Waving while both stood for something fine and meaningful.

In the beginning  MFTCC was a joyous respite from the dense, brooding NDW. David's recent solo  album 'Freedom of Choice' took the NDW adventure another dimension, clearly  leaving in its wake fertile ground for Chocolate Cake to explore with its trademark organic sounds, dominated by Helen Mountford's cello. The lines  between David Bridie's musical output are wonderfully blurred, not schizophrenic, but parts of a well-defined whole viewed from different directions. Chocolate Cake has grown over the journey if its four albums, making room for David's State Of The Nation songs - this time 'I Guess It Don't Get  Much Better Than This' ("This little country it's little again") - and David's  on-going commitment to the culture and politics of Papua New Guinea - 'Kelly  Kwalik Country'.

The pop sense Not Drowning Waving unearthed with the 'Circus'  album takes flight again in 'Leave' and 'I Like It Like This'. But of course MFTCC isn't a one man band. It works because its instrumentation is such rich  territory for David Bridie's soulfulness, and because he is such a strong foil for the rest of the band to play with. Instrumentals like 'Weep', The Kilana  Stringband Song' and 'The Boat Song' positively glow in their time in the spotlight.

Daily Telegraph
13th June 2002

It's a charming hybrid of pop and folk music, which can soothe and calm a troubled soul. My Friend the Chocolate Cake's fourth album, the first one in six years, is a bonus on the CD rack if you like violins and cellos and David Bridie. Bridie's vocals are integral to the acoustic group: the legion of stringed instrumentals fit around them. Without him, they sound bereft. Kind of husky, Bridie is sounding a bit like Bernard Fanning these days. More upbeat than past albums, Curious offers a range of lyrical and instrumental tracks. In every case, the narrative-style songs featuring Bridie's voice are the most gratifying. Throughout, Bridie can't make up his mind which mood he's in. One minute he's sad, the next upbeat. What is most extraordinary is the way the accompaniment almost always conveys a jovial vibe, irrespective of Bridie's lyrics `I Guess It Don't Get Much Better Than This' is a superb song. But pretty, lilting harmonies and stellar string accompaniments are the norm with this group.

Rave
11th June 2002

What with front man David Bridie's involvement in various other projects, not to mention the things the rest of the band have been up to, this fifth album (that's counting the live effort issued in 1997) is the first studio release from Melbourne's My Friend The Chocolate Cake in six years. And even though it actually came together quite quickly, it exhibits all the intricacy and attention to detail we've learnt to expect from a band whose music has come to be labeled, simplistically, chamber pop (just because they prominently feature cello and violin).

However, the ease with which these songs came together has allowed the band to open the sound up a little more. It moves from the lively echoes of Irish fiddle in Muckheap and the zydeco-meets-Africa accordion of The Kilana String band Song (two of four involving instrumentals here) to the slightly earnest mournfulness of `Malolo' and the anti-Howard irony of `I guess it Don't Get Much Better Than This'. As usual, there's the inviting balance of brooding elegance and evocative warmth here but there's also a sense of renewal that makes this a welcome return for this band.

Paul Barr reviews Curious
Readings Books & Music, June 2002

After a 6 year hiatus the much loved My Friend The Chocolate Cake have reconvened and come up with Curious, which was recorded in a 3 day stint reminiscent of their debut recording from 1989. All the ingredients for a classic My Friend the Chocolate Cake CD are here. There are the darker tales of urban angst, full on string driven instrumentals, moody cello interludes and more of David Bridie's exploration of the Australian landscape. This time round however there is a lighter feel, as well as added rhythmic drive from new member Dean Addison on bass.

Curious is beautifully recorded and captures these musicians in their element with their love of playing live coming through. A welcome return, that will hopefully herald more My Friend the Chocolate Cake albums down the track.

City Weekly
30th May 2002

Six years after David Bridie, Helen Mountfort, Greg Patten and Hope Csutoros put out their ARIA winning album Good Luck, finally MFTCC has another offering. It's still classic stuff; a mix of gorgeous acoustic strings, guitar, piano and shimmering percussion fluttering underneath wistful, dreamy lyrics about love and politics. Standout tracks include the exuberant, slinky tribute to biodiversity, `The Mangrove Song', inspired like many of Bridie's songs by the Pacific islands and featuring references to mosquitoes and a vampy harmonium line that will make you smile. In a similar vein, the wonderful `Kilana String band Song' is based on the traditional Trobrian Islander string band and carries with it echoes of hillbilly country and western tunes and lush ukulele-backed Pacific harmonies. `I Guess it Don't Get Much Better Than This' is overtly, bitterly political and full of shame over public life; the Tampa crisis, the stolen generation, the Kyoto Agreement and certain high-profile media and political personalities. This is an intelligent beautiful, instrumentally rich CD full of imaginative music and thoughtful words.

Richard Bell
Comes With A Smile, Autumn 2002

In the last six years lyricist and singer David Bridie has put out (an overblown) solo album and some soundtrack work, while cellist Helen Mountford and violinist Hope Csutoros collaborated on the Cosmos Cosmolino project. Now the Melbourne outfit who so thrilled in the mid ‘90s with songs like Sirens and I've Got a Plan are back together with a new studio album and a sell-out tour of Australia. Old fans won't be disappointed: the MFTTC trademarks are all here. Wistful, piano-led songs underpinned by strings, double bass and brushed drums, the arrangements alternating between the joyful skiffle of I Guess it Don’t Get Much Better than This and haunting ballads like More Heart than Me. The solemn mood (and lets face it, MFTTC do sombre better than most) is offset by some Penguin Cafe-style instrumentals (Muckheap). The pick of the tracks are I Like it Like This (beautifully mixed), the dark and urgent Swirl, and the protest song Kelly Kwalik Country. Over the record as a whole Bridie tends to rely on rather simplistic chord progressions, concentrating on atmospheres rather than innovative writing, (see The Mangrove Song). But, as ever with Bridie, the lyrics are exemplary, his subtle and cutting social commentary ("egghead prime minister" John Howard gets a mention) interspersed with the politics of personal relationships, as in Leave. On Kelly Kwalik Country the focus shifts overseas, to the thirty year independence movement of West Papua which parallels the struggle of the East Timorese. The sleeve profiles a colourful dolls house, the childlike innocence of the scene rendered fragile by soldiers and a rocket launcher on the roof, and image of Dubya frozen on the TV screen. For a major label release ‘Curious’ is a pretty deep record, an assured and re-assuring return.

Concert to feature the Australian range
by Thanh Huyeàn
Viet Nam News, January 2000

HAØ NOÄI — The capital next Monday will hear music from Australia ranging from atmospheric and ambient sounds through full scale romps and frenzied fun.

Bringing the works to the concert hall is the six member Australian band My Friend the Chocolate Cake, consisting of David Bridie – piano and vocals, Helen Mountfort – cello and vocals, Hope Csutoros – violin, Andrew Carswell – mandolin, Greg Patten – drums, and Dean Addison – double bass.

The concert is part of the celebrations for Australian National Day 2000.

The band will play material from their three recorded albums, the first self titled one, the second called Brood, and Good Luck, their third record, plus some new material which the band are working on now for their next album. "They (the songs) have an Australian perspective dealing with the sense of space in the landscape, our political history, personalities I have met – old people, strange people, and people with something to say," David Bridie, head of the band, told Vieät Nam News. The band’s sound at times has a sad atmosphere, a feeling of space, the rollicking big bang sound of a wild Hungarian wedding dance, or big belting rock instrumental sound."It is all over the place and we like it that way. There will be dancing and crying but not at the same time," says Bridie.

Performing in Haø Noäi, My Friend the Chocolate Cake expects to share their musical moods with Vietnamese audiences. "We’d like to learn something, observe and soak ourselves in a new city and people," Bridie told Vieät Nam News. "Melbourne, where we are from, has a very large Vietnamese population. And this has brought a strong cultural shift to Melbourne City. We look forward to soaking in the real Vieät Nam." And "maybe we will write some new songs based around our Haø Noäi experiences."

My Friend the Chocolate Cake was founded by David Bridie and Helen Mountfort, who are former members of Not Drowning Waving. The idea of launching the band began when David took a holiday in New Zealand and wrote a collection of songs that did not fit into Not Drowning Waving’s style. He and Helen then began My Friend the Chocolate Cake with the intention of playing all acoustic music. From the inception, the band emerged as an enjoyable ensemble, as musical friends and colleagues came together one by one to form their unique sound. Bridie told Vieät Nam News that there is quite a diversity in the band with different perspectives on music.

Bridie was a rock musician who dabbled in film making. Helen Mountfort and Hope Csutoros both come from a classical and theatre background, Csutoros also has a Hungarian Gypsy background and her playing has a wild flowing lean to it. Andrew Carswell has more of a folk background but has also played in rock bands, while Greg Patten has a funk dance background and Dean Addison plays anything from swing, jazz and blues. "But in My Friend the Chocolate Cake, it all moulds into a definite Cake sound, one that centres around melody, texture and atmosphere generated from acoustic instruments around the songs and lyrics," said Bridie. Influences on the music composed by the Australian band are broad. "The instrumentation draws from classical, rock and folk and the band’s sound draws on those influences and a whole lot more," he said.

After their performance in Haø Noäi, the Australian band plan to play in America and Europe.

My Friend the Chocolate Cake will perform next Monday at the Haø Noäi Circus in Lenin Park on Traàn Nhaân Toâng Street. Apart from the main show, the band will perform during the annual Australian Family Picnic this Sunday at the American Club at 21 Hai Baø Tröng Street, along with some didgeridoo playing and the laid back sophistication of Quyeàn Vaên Minh’s jazz at his club at Löông Vaên Can Street next Thursday.

Tickets for the main show are free of charge at the Australian embassy.—VNS

"Goodbye, Mr Ten Per Cent"
by Jon Casimir
Sydney Morning Herald, March 25 2000

A mate of mine plays in Melbourne band My Friend The Chocolate Cake. They've been around for quite some time now, and recently found themselves at the end of a contract. Rather than re-sign with the old company or forge a new contract with another outfit, they decided to go it alone, at least for a while. As a way of testing the waters, they rounded up a bunch of unreleased tracks from the vaults and pressed a CD. They then sold the album, 19 Easy Pieces, at gigs on their summer tour. At $20 a pop, a good price for the fan, they parted with more than 100 copies every night. Some nights, they sold twice that. All up, they played 14 gigs, with one in four punters choosing to buy the CD as well as a ticket. By the end of the tour, the band had sold a couple of thousand albums. Chocolate Cake had previously released four CDs. All four sold respectably, about the 15,000 mark. For each one of those individual sales, $2-$3 made its way back to the band. For each copy of the new CD they sell, about $17 in profit comes back. Do the maths. At six times the return, Chocolate Cake can afford to lose many of the supposed advantages offered by record companies (marketing, distribution, media attention etc). If they lose 75 per of their usual sales numbers, they're still ahead.

In between tours at the moment, they're shifting their attention to the Web, adding credit card facilities to the Chocolate Cake site to make it possible for 19 Easy Pieces to be sold that way. Who knows how many it will sell in the end? Probably not enough to make them billionaires, but enough, perhaps, to be a viable and attractive economic model. Not every band can take this option. New acts are often desperate for the exposure and advertising muscle that a major label can offer. But for those with an established audience, and a career that is, shall we say, mature and unlikely to scale up or down dramatically, it looks pretty good. Especially now the Net is here. And while everyone is getting carried away (justifiably, to some extent) with the future of the direct-download revolution, the fact is, musicians are already using the Web to do all kinds of things: to break down the barriers between themselves and their audience, and to cut out the industry middlemen.

David Bowie has used his site as a marketing and creative tool, offering exclusive tracks free from his own Web-site, soliciting lyrical input and allowing surfers to remix tracks. The Beastie Boys have done similar things and recently offered a Make Your Own Anthology service for a few months. Visitors could compile their own list of greatest hits which would then be burned to disc and mailed to them. Canadian singer Jane Siberry is another artist simply taking advantage of the Web to cut down the number of people between herself and the money earned by her art. Always a wilful artist, Siberry's work has rarely sat with the pigeonholing simplicities of the mainstream. Though she had worked with major labels before, Siberry has now chosen to release her records on her own label, Sheeba, and distribute them via the Web. From her typically wry site, she explains herself, interacts with the media and sells CDs, books, videos, T-shirts and choir charts. This is her window directly to the world, to her fanbase of, oh, probably a couple of hundred thousand people, a geographically spread community of a few thousand here and a few thousand there.

As with My Friend The Chocolate Cake, Siberry has decided, for the moment at least, that the major record companies have little to offer her. To be fair, you'd have to imagine the majors wouldn't be too sad to lose her as she was always a marginal commercial prospect, no doubt more difficult to deal with than the latest compliant 15-year-old popette. Siberry has not only decided to maximise the profit margin on sales of her albums, she has also grasped the bull by the horns and decided to use her freedom to release the kinds of records that few, if any, major companies would allow anyway. Her latest work, New York Trilogy, is a four-CD collection, a distillation of three concerts, each specifically themed. "Lack of cash has been a great teacher," Siberry says on-site, "but creative control is a rare thing. As head of my own label, I've had a lot of lessons in a short period of time that have put me in a much better position as a human being and creative person. I've enjoyed having the mystery removed from the 'artist's life' thing, so that the fans are seeing how it really is!"

THE RAINSOUND INTERVIEW
Off 'The Bagpiper', January 1997

Although My Friend The Chocolate Cake are not Scottish (they're Australian, actually), the music they make really fits in what we call 'rainpop'. Take songs like 'Sirens' or 'Talk About Love', for instance. They can't but remind of the Blue Nile, who David Bridie mentions as one of his musical influences. Also - the interview makes clear - there's more than one Celtic connection...

How much did it take to write and record 'Good Luck'?
Some of the songs had a gestation period of about 2-3 years but in terms of actual studio time, we started in late feb 96 and finished mixing in june.... about 2 weeks recording and 2 weeks mixing..

Do you think that 'Good Luck' is your best record?
Can't compare it to the first which we recorded in a couple of days, but I think we may have been on top of it all a bit more than 'Brood'... whether it's better is for others to judge.
'Good Luck' is almost totally dedicated to the sea. Is it just a metaphor?

What is your relationship to the water?
I wouldn't say almost totally but yes there are quite a few. I had a few writing sessions down the Great Ocean Road in Victoria overlooking the Aireys Inlet lighthouse, rough ocean seas, cliffs etc. A very beautiful place, rugged, intense.. I am a piscean but I don't believe in that stuff.

The 'tusitala' is a very fascinating character. What else can you tell me about it?
I spent some time in Western Samoa a few years back where Robert Louis Stevenson lived for a while and was given the tag tusitala. A tusitala is a story teller, a person who carries the stories and mythologies and bears the responsibility of passing them on so that they will not be lost which in a culture with such a strong oral tradition is quite an honoured and important role.This 'Tusitala' idea also has parallels within Papua New Guinean and Aboriginal society. But I guess in the song Lighthouse Keeper,its about passing on stories within a relationship,of needing and wanting to tell stuff, to communicate and share thoughts, songs, politics, colours, ideas whatever.. of keeping it vibrant and alive

What is the 'Kitsch Parade' to you? Who do you refer to exactly?
Circuses not bread.. The conservative government in Victoria and now also the Federal Government in Australia are cutting back quite severely on community services and pumping resources into casinos, the olympic games, statues and museums. Antipodean Thatcherism, parades and chest beating... playing the fiddle whilst rome burns ...economic rationalism over even the smallest hint of compassion... that kind of thing

Personally, I think that 'Talk About Love' is the best track in the album. Does it have a true story behind?
Some of it but it would be too long winded and personal to go into it. Needless to say, when things fuck up horribly, that is the real test of love and commitment...

You talk about sirens. Do they have anything to do with Ulysses?
No altho I think Dubliners is one of my favourite collection of stories. The song is about the 40 degree straight off the desert north wind summer days in Melbourne's summer that can bleed you lifeless... the whole city doesnt sleep, the dogs howl, the sirens wail, and the strangest thoughts run around the cities collective head throughout the whole evening.

John Phillips co-wrote some of the songs in the album. What happened to 'Not Drowing Waving'? and to the other members (apart from Helen Mountfort )? How many albums did they release?
Ndw released 8 albums..1 Another Pond 2 The Little Desert 3 Cold and the Crackle 4 Claim 5 Tabaran (together with musicians from Rabaul in Papua New Guinea) 6 Circus (Recorded at Rockfield,Wales) and two film soundtracks 7 Proof and 8 Hammers over the Anvil.The band split or more to the point ,petered out a couple of years ago .As to what the others are doing...John Phillips (the guitarist and co-founding member with meself) and I still work together quite a bit. This year we've done a few soundtracks together... 3 australian films.. 1 What I have Written directed by John Hughes, 2 River Street directed by Tony Mahood and 3 Idiot box directed by David Caesar plus a Sony New York film called The Myth of Fingerprints starring Roy scheider and Julianne Moore and Noah Wylie directed by Bart Freundlich... plus John has programmed loops and grooves for a couple of artists who I have produced... he also married Barry Humphries' daughter and has put on a bit of weight!! Rowan McKinnon (bass) edits Lonely Planet travel books and Russel Bradley (Drummer) has a successful desktop publishing business..

Do you read much poetry? In any case, who are your favourite writer and film director/film?
mmmmm Tim Winton, Patrick White, Nick Hornby, Coen brothers, Yeats, Coppola, Jane Campion, Raymond Carver... gee theres so many

Classical music seems to be very important in your songs (just like the Penguin Cafe Orchestra). What is your relation to classical music and do you feel you owe anything to any band in this sense?
Helen was a trained classical musician from new zealand who had very little rock upbringing... she'd never heard 'Smoke on the Water' until she was 27!!! So, she comes from a contemporary classical perspective and I come from the other way and I have immense respect for her musical vision and her sense of feel as a cellist... the Penguin Cafe were an inspiration at the beginning in the sense that their records seemed very loose, anything goes, the songs just fell away at the end and the instrumentation was largely acoustic... the dark moods and textures of arvo part are also in there somewhere altho for me, The Velvets and Eno and Paul Kelly and Bowie were probably more influential? It's difficult (especially for us) not to find links to Scottish pop in your songs (i.e. Deacon Blue above all).

What is the 'fil rouge' from Australia to Scotland?
My ancestors are from Dundee.. Andrew Carswell is from Glasgow... I guess thats 2 out of 6. I've only been to Dundee once.. seemed a bit lacking somehow. I much prefer the other places in Scotland I have visited... Lochalsh, Oban, New Cumnock!!!, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Easter Road Football Ground... (I wish I was there when Hibs beat Rangers a couple of months ago). There's heaps of Scots in Australia. I guess there are similarities in our attitude to the English, the harsh landscape, being countries that are neither too big or too small... a sense of pervasive irony, the ability to take the piss out of our selves... a lot of people say I sound like the singer from Deacon Blue.. I've liked what I've heard of theirs but I haven't heard much..

What has changed since "Brood"?
New drummer, Greg Patten. NDW has broken up so for Helen and I this is the main potato... the Cake has consolidated as a band... we probably take it a bit more seriously now.. It, not ourselves...

Boring but necessary question: why the name "My Friend the Chocolate Cake"? Does it bring you back to childhood?
We were mucking around, it's the name of a song on an album by an experimental electronic 1982 band called Ya Ya Choral from Sydney... I guess its a bit of a dieting joke

Is that sorrow and pain that comes out of your cello and piano or is just innate melancholy? What do you think is the natural engine of your music?
Both... although I think over a whole gig or album, this melancholy and tension is balanced out by other moods, but I think we do sparse, sad and personal best...

Why did you choose to cover a Magazine song in 'Brood'?
I think the Correct Use of Soap is a bit of a classic... Howard wrote fantastic lyrics, Barry Adamson ain't too bad either and I always wanted to play it... and Helen liked it too altho she'd never heard of them...

Where will the musical road you're walking on bring you to? And where does the 'open road to salvation' lead'?
Who knows... more challenges, other audiences outside of the southern hemisphere, strong songs sounds and albums... as for salvation... no idea.

©1997 Rainsound * The Scottish Music Club

The rise of My Friend The Chocolate Cake...
Helen Mountfort and David Bridie
MTV Australia, January 1 1997

MTV: Explain your musical backgrounds...

David: My musical background would've been like most kids in the burbs watching Countdown, and listening to records with my sister who is three years older. I was listening to Slade and Status Quo. She had Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen records. But my father was into Fats Waller. I did classical piano at school, so I had a bit of a mixed bag. In my teens, I got into the Melbourne music scene. Models, Birthday Party, Laughing Clown. It was very different from Helen's.

Helen: I grew up listening to nothing but classical music until I was 15 or 16, except for my brother's Kris Kristofferson and Neil Diamond records and Abba. At 16, my boyfriend had gone away and I went through his records that had come from the World Records Club and found this Talking Heads record. I put it on and thought, "This is great."

David: Helen hadn't heard 'Smoke on the Water' at the age of 25.

MTV: When did you decide you wanted to learn an instrument?

Helen: Actually, I decided I wanted to play the cello when I was three. I heard someone play it and I was obsessed by cellos after that. My parents bought me one when I was six and it was a little half size one, really cute.

David: We got a piano from my grandmother's place when she died, when I was about 8 or 9. I learned to play from piano books and would muck around with it from about that age on.

MTV: How did the band come together?

David: My Friend the Chocolate Cake formed in 1989 and Not Drowning Waving was still going on, and it started in 1983 with John Phillips. It grew into a 6 piece band with Russel and Rowan and James. Helen joined in 1989 and it was on a tour that Helen and I talked about starting up a side project just to do offbeat little shows when we weren't on tour, which was quite a lot. My Friend the Chocolate Cake started out of an informal conversation to playing odd gigs to using instruments we didn't have to carry around amplifiers. Most of the people we asked to join the band were friends. Andrew Carswell was my boss at work, Andrew Richardson was a guy I started a band with at 13 at school.

Helen: Hope was a friend of mine. So, we sort of chose band members on whether we liked them more than on their musical ability. But fortunately, we got the musical abilities as well.
David: The first My Friend the Chocolate Cake record we recorded took a day and a half to record and cost us 800 bucks. It was a fun thing to do and it did better than we thought. It actually sold quite well and the gigs started getting more of an audience and we quit Not Drowning Waving after 'Circus' was released in 94 or 95. My Friend the Chocolate Cake has kept going and has become more of a concern.

MTV: Is the My Friend the Chocolate Cake sound the motive?

David: Yeah, I think the sound is quite a motive for a couple of reasons. I think for the instrumentation, the cello and strings are moody instruments. Helen and I write on the moody side of things, counter-balanced by an in-your-face sound.

MTV: What sort of moods does My Friend the Chocolate Cake catch?

Helen: I'd say it catches a range of moods because of the nature of the instrumentation. Especially since the cello is a dark and moody instrument, we tend to get in that territory. Sort of a reflective melancholy, I'd say quite a bit. But also, some of the songs are upbeat and happy. There's quite a range. We like sad.

MTV: Does that reflect the personality of the band? Are you sad people?

David: Oh no, it's pretty fun touring. We're not a sad bunch, we have a good time. I think since the band started with very little pressure, because we didn't have a grand plan, it's helped it. We're a boisterous bunch. We enjoy playing.

MTV: How did you feel the night at the National Theatre Record was recorded?

Helen: It was a great theatre and we were really excited to be playing there. It was actually the second night of two, so we knew the sound was going to be good. It was actually good they recorded the second night and not the first because the first night we had the smoke machine on stage. Every time there was a quiet moment in the song, the guy set the smoke machine off and it sounded like someone was farting. If that had been there, there would have been no live album. So the second night we didn't have that. We were a bit nervous though.

David: We had some bad experiences too.

Helen: You can actually hear my bow shaking on one track, which I actually like.

MTV: Were there any mishaps in particular that occurred on that night?

David: There was a couple of bad lyric mistakes if you listen really closely, but nothing really too bad. We used a lot of acoustic and it was on a big stage, so there wasn't a lot of spill. The atmosphere of the theatre was glorious. I don't know how it happened, but I think it was captured onto tape.

MTV: It took almost a year from the recording to the release of the album. How come?

David: We've been overseas for a few months. We did the Edinburgh Festival and we went to England to do festivals. We didn't start mixing it until March or April, and then we went away for three months. Actually, we reckon a year from record to release is pretty good.

Helen: We weren't in any hurry and this time of year seemed like a good time to put out a record.

MTV: You were well received at the Edinburgh Festival...

David: This was our second trip to the Edinburgh Festival. The first year we went, no one knew us from a bar of soap. But we got some good reviews early and I think the music grabbed people's attention. Probably the instrumentation and it was a different sound and a stupid band name. The first show we played there this year was sold out and pretty much continued like that. It was really pleasing. It's a great place to play music at.

MTV: I read you did work on 'Home and Away' ...

David: Any band signed to Mushroom Publications will have their songs played on Home and Away and Neighbours. In one episode of Home and Away, they played a song in its entirety and it became a big deal in the UK.....It's funny when you go overseas and people have this perception of your country that's different from what you know intimately that they get from the media. It makes you think about home differently.

MTV: David, you said the music industry is obsessed with instant gains.

David: From a record company point of view, and it's understandable because they're a business and a business is about generating sales and profit. I don't think the music industry sets up bands to have a long term career. You see bands hyped up and get a lot of radio play and two years later you don't hear from them.

MTV: Would you agree with the statement, "If Led Zeppelin were roaming around Australia, no one would sign them up because that is the kind of industry we have?"

David: Yes, but I think Led Zeppelin would be signed up, but they might be doing a tour every year around the states and selling 60,000 records and after two years forgotten. It's got as much to do with the size of Australia as well as other things. It's understandable because we're isolated over here and for bands to make it overseas, you're up for $30,000 before you leave home just to go there.

MTV: Helen, who have you played with and who has inspired you?

Helen: The great thing about being a cello player in this country is that you get to do a lot of session work on other people's records, whether that's playing on their records, or live gigs. That's been really great because it's just great to have a nosey on other people's gigs and really see what they do. And playing other music is really great as well. Sometimes I get to sort of make up my own parts on what I'm playing on their records or their gig. Sometimes it will be someone else's arrangement, and that's always really interesting because they'll have a different angle on how you'd use a cello than I would. Like I've just finished this thing with Diesel and that was really interesting because he's a good cellist himself and he notated these cello parts and they're so different from what I would've written. They're low and grungy. That was quite interesting because you come away from that thinking, "Oh, maybe I might try something like that.

MTV: Did you do something with Nick Cave?

Helen: We did the string stuff on the stuff he did with Kylie with 'Where The Wild Roses Grow'. He was really fussy about the arrangement.

MTV: David, you've done a lot of producing...

David: Working with another artists gives you a different perspective on how you would work with your own songs and bands. You have to step back from being the performer and look at the wider vision of the record.

MTV: When will you start your next album?

Helen: We're not in any hurry, but we'll probably start recording the end of next year. We've got a long term vision with Chocolate Cake. We're not in any hurry to make the My Friend the Chocolate Cake studio album. We'll probably start the end of next year. We've got a different time scale with Chocolate Cake that most bands have. We're taking it really slowly because we want to be around in ten years. In fact, we want to have gigs when we're sixty.

David: Because we tour so little, we're thinking of doing one national tour a year and a visit overseas. Then do an album every two years to give people time to work on other projects on the side. There's no reason why we shouldn't be doing this in ten to fifteen years. We don't want to rush in to the next record.

MTV: Where does the name come from?

David: Where did we get the band name? The phrase My Friend the Chocolate Cake comes from a record from a band from Sydney called Ya Ya Chorale who were around in the late 70s and early 80s. I had an EP of theirs and I was sharing this house and all the women in the house always referred to it. I think it was an anti dieting joke. When we were mucking around, we came up with it and it stuck. Every second day I hate it and every other day I like it. It's a name people remember. If people haven't heard our music it's problematic. At the first Edinburgh Festival the people thought we were a comedy act.

The Guardian
September 1996

Suprise hit with audiences at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, this improbably monikered sextet are big news in their native Australia - indicating a refreshing antipodean freedom from category hang-ups, as the MFTCC sound is nothing if not hard to classify. 

A line up featuring piano, cello, violin, guitar, drums, mandolin and vocals gives them a broard palette to draw on, their range here extending from the lean, brooding title track to the tumbling upbeat kick of Your Ship Has Gone; from melodious chamber instrumentals like Cello Song for Charlie to the measured, tender simplicity of Talk About Love. Singer/pianist David Bridie's lyrics and boyish, yet world-weary delivery supply a clear line of focus throughout equally adept at evoking the arid, menaching emptiness of the Outback (Salt) or a lover's impassioned yearnings (Lighthouse Keeper).

Lush string textures are offset by tight snappy rhythms; the arrangements, however fulsome, carry no excess flash.  A decidedly different, but artfully intriguing collections.

David Bridie: A Cake by any other name
The X-press interview by Polly Coufos
X-Press, 1996

Not so long ago David Bridie was faced with a dilemma. Not Drowning, Waving, the Melbourne-based band he helped form in 1984, was struggling while his other band, My Friend The Chocolate Cake, appeared set to make some serious inroads into the inner circle of the Australian Music Industry. For many years he and cellist Helen Mountfort had kept both entities going, the process taking an inordinate amount of energy and enthusiasm. While not lame brain, the Cake was certainly the party band of the two. Where NDW may, and indeed did, trek to the highlands of New Guinea to record an album, the Choccies were content to stay in Melbourne and compose tunes in honour of Browlow Medalist Jim Stynes, and set about introducing their growing audiences to the unsuspected delights of Hungarian wedding songs.

Simply by 1995 the time came when something had to give, and so NDW waved good-bye. The decision may have helped Bridie and Mountfort keep focus, but during the following interview he says plainly that had the band received greater support it would not have folded. through his conversation comes a conviction towards his music, he is sure what he is creating is worthwhile, but remains confused as to why it has not been embraced by greater numbers of music listeners.

With instruments like cello, viola and accordion in the six piece band’s artillery, they maintain the wherewithall to go way beyond the bounds of regulation pop music. Bridie has always maintained this is no gimmick, all the parts of the Chocolate repertoire have equal importance. This is exemplified by the fact that favorable response to "I've got a plan", an ARIA winner and straight ahead pop song, did not lead the band to create a whole album of radio hungry hits in waiting. No chance.

With their brand new album, Good Luck, released last week, David Bridie was quoted as saying it was their first serious statement as a band. Good Luck will be the first album to gain regular release outside our region and currently the band is in the middle of a month long tour of the British Isles. As the following interview indicates he is not holding out great hope for good luck in the form of immediate success in a land that still regards Australian artists with indifference. Still he knows he is here for the long run, and he is a patient man.

Bridie has also made a name for himself as an infrequent, though high quality producer. From a myriad of offers proposed to his management Bridie has in the hot seat for Archie Roach (Jamu Dreaming), Christine Anu (Stylin’ Up) and the forthcoming debut album from Monique Brumby.
MFTCC are due to play Perth on a tour in support of Good Luck in mid November.
The album hit the shops on August 19, 1996.

Despite his obvious disappointment over the impending merger between his beloved Melbourne football club and Hawthorn, Bridie managed some semblance of a cheerful demeanor for a man in mourning. Still, as he has learned by now, only the strong survive.

You are off to England. Are you planning to take it by storm?
We don't take anything by storm, especially England. We are going to have to get past the ‘Neighbours’ references first. But surely you were the same man that I heard declare from the stage of the Fly By Night that one of the greatest achievements of your career was to hear your music during an episode of Home and Away? (laughs) yeah, that was me. Actually it was not as big an achievement as I thought. It was because Mushroom place all the music on those shows.

Was it easier making your new album without the pressure of this band being just a side project?
I guess, if anything, there may have been a little bit more pressure in coming up with something that was really good. One of the beauties of Chocolate Cake was that it evolved as a side project so there was never any pressure on it. And before we knew it there was a really good audience there for it. If there was any pressure there it was more than counteracted by the fact that we are a close knit bunch who have been together as a band for six years. We felt like we knew what we were doing and everybody understood each other's playing. The challenge of making a record that was solid and could stand up was good for us.

When the bands were both going, NDW and MFTCC, was it a struggle between them for your time? Did the public decide which band you and Helen should be giving more of your energy to? Did the public pick the better band?
I, um, look, I find it too difficult to compare. John Phillips is one of the great Australian guitar players and he's not in Chocolate Cake ... um NDW was around a long time and the energy just sort of ran out of it. The energy may have stayed if we were selling more and it was a bit easier to operate. It was a very expensive band to tour with because of the production values.
NDW didn't break up because Chocolate Cake was working, I would have been happy to keep the two going if that was what the vibe was.

You didn't feel the audience saw it as a bit of a two headed monster?
I actually think a lot of the Chocolate audience is different from the NDW audience. There's certainly more of them. You would probably be better to talk to somebody who was into the two bands and passionate about it one way or another.

One noticeable aspect of your recordings is how much your vocals have improved. Would you agree?
I think Jeremy (Allom, producer) captured the vocals really well and I think I'm probably singing a bit better too. It may be an age thing. When I first started I was singing because I wrote the lyrics, not because I was a great singer. But I think time and practice strengthens your voice. I'm still not really confident about my singing. It takes a bit of energy for me to sing in public, but I guess I identify myself as a singer a bit more than I used to. I fell like I'm a lot better singer than I used to be and a lot of it has to do with confidence too.

Speaking of confidence, how did the success of ‘brood’ and the ARIA award for "I've Got a Plan" translate when you entered the studio to record "Good Luck"?
The ARIA award was nice, but I think it was nicer for the record company than anything else. I always thought Adult Contemporary was a contradiction in terms. I thought "I've Got a Plan" was a good song regardless of whether it won an ARIA. Still it's nice to get something from your peers I guess.There wasn't so much pressure from that (success), but I guess what we would be hoping is that we can build on the 25000 that Brood sold. Our first CD is still selling and Brood is still selling, so it's an ongoing thing. I firmly believe this is the best Chocolate Cake record. My vocals were recorded a lot better, I think a lot of the strings sounds are a lot stronger, the instrumentals are mixed much better. That is a criticism I have of Brood: I think "I've got a plan" and "floorboards" and "throwing it away" were really strong but some of the instrumental mixes were mixed like they were lesser tracks. This time Jeremy understood that it was a really strong part of what Chocolate Cake does. They were just as important as the singles, and I think that makes the overall album stronger.
The song that appears to be the obvious single is "The Kitsch Parade." Is that a kiss of death giving it a title like that?
I actually vetoed it as being a single the other day. I have gone cynical on the whole singles process because no single I have put out in either of the bands has ever done anything. The only stuff I have been involved in that has done well is Christine's. I co-wrote 'Party’ and that was a pretty cynical exercise. What makes chocolate Cake albums work is the whole album. We put out ‘Lighthouse Keeper’ a while back and that got a little airplay but not a lot. Five years ago I would have been really depressed thinking the record was doomed, but now it's like 'Big Deal’. We don't have to keep worrying about songs that radio might play if we are lucky. We figure that we can do clips and they may be used as promos for the band overseas at least.

Do you have much support out of Australia?
It's good, but there isn't anything to hang your coat on. We mainly sell from import here. We sell a few in Germany, Poland and we occasionally get a letter from Israel or Hong Kong. This release of "Good Luck" in Europe and UK will be the first time a major focus has been placed on it.

The band has an intrinsically Australian sound. It's not about wallabies and beer, yet it seems you are more a descendant of Slim Dusty than Johnny O’Keefe?
Yep. I don't mind that. I think Slim's all right. I mean, it is not taking cheap shots at nationalism, yet there is something unique in there. It doesn't sound like an Australian version of something overseas. It may be both a blessing and a curse when it comes to working overseas? More of a blessing than a curse, especially in the UK because they hate us just because we do things better than they do. We've gotta better standard of living, working class people earn three times more than people in Britain, but they just think we are all dumb convicts. If we are dumb convicts we are doing better than them so that makes them even stupider. They don't think we are very cultured and ahhh... I remember reading an Underground Lovers review and there were references to Kylie and Neighbours in there. What the fuck has Kylie Minogue got to do with Underground Lovers? Hopefully there will be enough people over there who pick up on what we do and I think the Australian references and approach are subtle but they are there.

Why call a very downbeat album "Good Luck"?
Simple irony. In the song it talks of seeking out hope in a two dollar gift shop, you need good luck because you are up against it. The album cover reflects that as well. This little man is on a pier, hitchhiking out to a bay and there's a lightning storm. He's on a road to nowhere and you need good luck in those circumstances.

But you also need good luck when you have a band called My Friend the Chocolate Cake...Do you regret calling it that?
Yeah, yeah I do. But not enough to change it. I think people don't get hooked into the band because of the name then they were never going to be there anyway. It's been with us so long there is nothing we can do about it, but if there are people who are attracted by titles or covers, they won't be looking for us, unless they get the point later. I don't know if I didn't know anything about us and I saw a band called My Friend the Chocolate Cake, I'd think it was some piss take band or something. Maybe we do suffer from that but so what?

You have done a few outside productions. Is that work important to you?
It's good work when it is a good record to work on. It takes a lot of energy out of you and it is quite intense, because I always feel responsible to the artist. I've been lucky because of the three whole albums I have produced, Archie, Christine and Monique are all artists I feel are special. I felt privileged and proud to have been asked to produce them, and I put my heart and soul into them. For that reason too I can't actually do too much producing. I couldn't produce something if I didn't really believe in it.

You have written a tune for Jim Stynes. It can be assumed you are a Melbourne supporter?
Ooh yeah, and suffering bad depression over the merger talks. They are trying to take away your soul when they do things like that. They have no right. That's what big dollars do to things.

Is he aware of the song?
Yes, he came along to a gig once. He was quite honored. I was honored he actually came to out gigs. We don't get back in Australia until September and as we aren't in the finals I may have seen my last game. I hate the thought because I've been following them since I was five.

Tony Hillier
Rhythms - October 1996

While there's no such thing as a certainty in the fickle recording business, there must be every chance that My Friend the Chocolate Cake's third album will live up to its name and maintain the band's good fortune, following an amazingly successful sortie on the prestigious Edinburgh Festival.  For a splintergroup (from the revered Not Drowning, Waving), the ensemble led by the creative David Bridie has already far exceeded expectations, and "Good Luck" represents their best work to date.

Though it might not boast anything to match the classic "I Got a Plan" from the last album, it is a broad musical tapestry which truly reflects this unique ensemble, and its honorary members. Mixed in with the melancholia - the essence of MFTCC's music - is genuine merriment. Sad, reflective songs like "Salt", "Talk About Love", "Sirens", and "Can't Find Love" are perfectly counterbalanced by the uptempo numbers, "Lighthouse Keeper", "The Kitsch Parade", and "Young Girls", with their vaguely seventies feel. The classically inclined instrumental pieces are well positioned, "100 Flowers in Bloom" and "Song for Charlie" reflecting the natural mournfulness of Helen Mountfort's haunting cello; "Vandoloro" the Greek inflections of Hope Csutoros' violin.  The exotic "Algeria" sees Andrew Carswell's mandolin centre stage. 

"Good Luck" is an exhilarating emotional and acoustical music rollercoaster. Get your ticket now and enjoy one of the best rides of the year.

Music Network
September 1996

There is no denying that David Bridie, Helen Mountfort and their MFTCC cohorts occupy a unique place in the Australian music scene. The deep musicality and artistry which is central to all projects this group enters into (both collectively and individually) infects every moment of this, the third MFTCC album. The music draws from the multicultural influences and experiences of the musicians, mutating the songs into something completely Australian, new yet familiar.

The album opens with the title track, unexpectedly sombre for such a happy phrase, and we are then on a journey that could be described as ``ambience with words".  The album's sound revolves heavily around Helen Mountfort's cello and Hope Csutoros' violin./viola and David Bridie's piano backed with predominantly earthy instruments,  The first single Lighthouse Keeper is one of the rare uptempo tracks along with the rolling Your Ship Has Gone. 

There are reflective thoughts from Bridie's pen which are delivered in his expressive vocal, a great example being the beautiful Talk About Love.  Enhancing the overall mood are four strategically placed instrumental pieces which showcase the individual talents of the performers and provide great examples of the ability to mix Celtic, Eastern and European traditions. There is no doubt that the fans of this great Australian band will receive Good Luck with the same fervor they have had for the two previous albums.

Mushroom are (deservedly) making this album a priority so, as the MFTCC plays it's live shows around the country from October on expect a lot of profile and a lot of joy.

Anthony Horan
Inpress - September 1996

With the memory of Not Drowning, Waving now firmly laid to rest, David Bridie's one-time side-project, the esoterically named My Friend the Chocolate Cake, is now free to become an entity in its own right; and what an entity they are. If 1994's superb album Brood was the sound of a band carving out an individual musical path, then Good Luck is the sound of them refining and expanding their strongest elements. Much of the quirkiness that was the foundation of Brood is gone, replaced with an insightful melancholy and a heightened sense of both melody and atmosphere.  There's still light moments here - The Kitsch Parade and current single Lighthouse Keeper in particular, both recalling the earthy vibrance of Prefab Sprout's earlier material - but while these moments may give the album a better chance of accessibility to those who like a hook to lead them in, they seem strangely out of place amongst the other material here.

And what material - insightful, highly original and at times incredibly moving, the songs that David Bridie, Helen Mountfort and the band have crafted here moke no concessions to current musical fashio and, for the duration of this album, nothing else matters anyway. Gently pulling the listener into its world, the album takes more chances than its predecessor, the focus more than ever on Helen Mountfort and Hope Csutoros' strings, with instrumental pieces such as 100 Flowers in Bloom and Vandorlo (the latter, sounding for all the world like it's escaped from a 1940s Spanish movie, one of the most unique things you're likely hear on record this year) providing depth and fascinating tangents between the conventional songs.  Sure, that's always been the Chocolate Cake methodology, but never has it clicked in the album format like it does on this record. Another instrumental, the decidedly Eastern piece Algeria, provides further evidence of how skilled this band is becoming, in the most melodic fashion possible, of course.

The vocal songs here, meanwhile, are among the finest Bridie has written to date Salt and Sirens, in particular (the former written with the former Not Drowning, Waving cohort John Phillips) weave memorable melodies over backing tracks played with spot-on restraint; not a single note included without purpose, the band working as a seamless unit for the good of the song where most others would have peppered the recording with the showmanship of guitar solos and flashy drum fills.
Throwing icing on the (chocolate) cake by being even more beautifully recorded than its predecessor, Good Luck is far from the Difficult Third Album of legend. But then Bridie, Mountfort and Co. have been working towards this for many years, and they know what they're doing. That they do it so well is testament to their talent and insight - and for the listener, that's extremely good luck indeed.

Chocolate Dreams
By Bruce Elder
The Sydney Morning Herald, November 17 1995

"Not Drowning Waving are no more," says Helen Mountford, the classically trained cellist who has been an integral part of both Not Drowning Waving and the ARIA award-winning My Friend the Chocolate Cake. "David Bridie [keyboard player and main songwriter with both bands] and I still get quite sentimental about some of the albums, but we've moved on. It simply died."

So My Friend the Chocolate Cake, which started as a casual project, is now the main creative outlet for both musicians. Up to now the group has been a vehicle for David Bridie's particular vision of Australian suburbia. When they played at Paddington RSL a year ago, they decked out the stage like a suburban lounge room - complete with a venetian blind and a Hank Williams record sleeve.
Their unusual sound - the combination of cello, violin, keyboards, acoustic guitar, percussion and mandolin - was a perfect vehicle for Bridie's celebration of the simple beauty of a dream-like suburbia remembered and filtered through the innocent joys of childhood.

Chocolate Cake are an unusual concept. Some of the members are "amateur" musicians who have been drawn into the Bridie-Mountfort creative web. Some have regular jobs and have to find time to tour and record. In this sense it is still, much to the chagrin of their increasing band of fans, an irregular project.

Now, a little over a year since the group released and toured with their last album, Brood, they are on the move again. "We're starting a new record in December," Mountfort explains. "We're working on arrangements at the moment so this tour will be good for us because it will allow us to try out the arrangements. Our idea is to come straight back from the tour and go into the studio."
While Mountfort insists that the new material "certainly sounds like Chocolate Cake", she believes there has been "a major shift in David's song-writing".

"He's writing much more personal songs at the moment. There are even some love songs in there," she says.

Such changes will have little impact on the band's fans, who know that Chocolate Cake have carved a unique place for themselves on the Australian musical landscape with their limpid, dreamy music which is accessible, warm and highly original.

My Friend The Chocolate Cake play at The Metro tonight and Saturday.

C’est Plan Pour Le Gateaux
by Ross Clelland
Drum Media, 4 July 1995

Star Trek fans will easily accept this as a temporal abnormality, this interview actually taking place about four weeks before you read it, largely cause it was one of the few times David Bridie sat still long enough for it to happen. Between then and now (that’s as you read this, real time) the head Cake has, among other things, jetted off to Alice Springs to produce some promising Koori acts discovered by the CAAMA program, back to finish another film soundtrack with regular collaborator John Phillips, actually get the rest of My Friend together to rehearse for the tour this story is plugging ("we’re working up a version of Plastic Bertrand’s C’est Plan Pur Moi, it’s ummx interesting"), and maybe even fit in a couple of days at the footy to watch the Melbourne Demons get beat again.

More prosaically, this little MFTCC tour celebrating the very lovely Brood album now coming with a bonus disc: The Quiet Bits. An unlikely name for an Australian release, a country where the guitars are so oft turned up to 11? "Hmmm, Maybe," Bridie returns, "but we do have a few who do the quiet bits fairly well: Paul Kelly, Archie Roach, The Jackson Code (incidentally the Choccy’s support for the Sydney shows on the tour). So there is a bit of a tradition for keeping it down as well."
The Quiet Bits is basically in two parts, firstly songs recorded during the Brood sessions, some of which have snuck out as bonus tracks on singles and such, but much unheard, including a couple of covers: Randy Newman’s melancholic ‘Bad News From Home’ and ex-Velvet John Cale’s hypnotic ‘Chinese Envoy’, which folows nicely from the version of Cale’s ‘Buffalo Ballet’ from the first Cake album. Why does Mr. Cale get such a good run, David? "Ahh, that’s my fault," Bridie ‘fesses up, "there’s always a bunch of guitar heroes to choose from, but there’s never that many for we keyboard players. I mean, who have we got? Billy Joel? Barry Manilow? They’re hardly inspiring. The women aren’t much better: Kate Bush maybe, and god save us from the Tori bloody Amos’s of the world. So you find someone worthy like Cale, and you just have to grab it."

There’s also six tracks recorded live at Melbourne’s Universal Theatre, showing the band can rollick and roll pretty well, as well. But even this show wasn’t without drama. David: "I’d just got back from Papua New Guinea and the islands, and brought back some interesting tropical disease. I was really not happening. I think we played 24 or 25 songs that night, and I’m surprised we got the six that appeared - possibly they were the ones I was conscious for. Slow Way to Go Down (one of the songs included) should probably have been the theme song for the night. It was all a bit strange, Helen and Hope (Mountfort, cellist, and Csutoros, violinist, respecitively) were in fancy dress, while Michael Barker and Andrew Richardson (each of drums and guitar) were very due expectant fathers, and a bit tense as well. All a little surreal. I thought it sounded really strained, but we had people telling us how good it was. Huge thanks to the mixer must be in order, I think."

And what next for the Cake? "Well Brood is about to be released through Britain and Europe, but there’s no real hurry to get there. There really is no way to justify the expense," muses Bridie, "We’ll probably record something new and maybe think about going over say the middle of next year - when all the big outdoor festivals are on, and build an audience from there, rather than trying to find the right support slots."

It seems increasingly The Cake is Bridie’s main vehicle, and though the official announcement has yet to be made, it apears Bridie’s other truly original project NDW can be consigned to history. "It has kind of ended," is the candid response, "the minuses were just starting to outweigh any positives. Ironically, doing the film and TV soundtracks I’m probably working more with John Phillips (NDW guitarist and cohort) than before, but we really haven’t worked with any of the others for at least a year." But while that’s a bit of shame, you can still stuff yourself on Cake, and why not?

My Friend the Chocolate Cake and the Jackson Code play at the Sands on Friday July 7 and the Metro on Saturday 8.

A Lasting Heritage
by Andrew Stafford
Time Off, June 28 1995

"Fuck I love playing gigs in Brisbane! I'll never forget that gig either, it was a beauty." David Bridie is raptly recalling My Friend the Chocolate Cake's last Brisbane appearance. "The audiences there for some reason have always been fantastic to us, there were a couple of Not Drowning, Waving gigs we did there which were wild except for a rather unspectacular performance at the Livid Festival one year. And that last gig at Van Gogh's [with Chocolate Cake] was a boomer, things kicked in right from the beginning." He's not kidding. Chocolate Cake's performance in September was certainly one of the most spirited, joyous and well-attended shows of last year and were it not for the fact that the band have been especially flown up to play a wedding at Noosa the following day (a couple proposed over their last album Brood - ain't love grand?) they would probably be playing two shows this time around. As it is, the band are emerging from a brief hibernation. Bridie has been busy producing Christine Anu's acclaimed debut ‘Stylin Up’, working on an album with ex NDW collaborator John Phillips and moving house.

Now the band are fresh from rehearsals (where they've been working up a cover of nothing less that Plastic Bertrand's ‘Ca Plane Pour Moi’ for the live set, which apparently "sounds very frenetic with the strings") and have had a 10-track bonus disc of B-sides, live tracks and other odds and ends added to the band's successful Brood album from last year. (Those who already own the album can mail order the bonus disc for $8, making cheques payable to white Records.) While Brood concerned itself with urban Australia - about getting away from it (I've got a plan), protecting it (Throwing it away), growing up and growing old in it (The Old Years), Bridie's talk of recording a follow up somewhere out in the country perhaps hints at more pastoral themes.

It's been a constant dualism in Bridie's writing going back to the days of NDW. "We're going to see if we can find a place in the country where we can take a mobile studio for a while, in a place where the environment impacts on the recording," Bridie says. "Studios can be a bit sterile and because some of the people in this band aren't used to studios, like Hope [Csuturos, violin] and the two Andrews [Carswell, mandolin and tin whistle, and Richardson, guitar], they probably play better in less formal environment than a studio; less ‘You're On’, TV lights and all that sort of shit. And Michael Barker [drums] joined the band about two weeks before we were due to go into the studio to record Brood, so with this record he'll be there from the beginnings of the songs' evolution. The first [self-titled] Chocolate Cake record was very accidental, Brood was a bit more planned and now the band's much more settled as a bunch of personalities"

The other constant in Bridie's work is the aforementioned idea of letting the environment seep into the process of recording. "Sometimes it's just a good environment to bring the best out of you, you're more relaxed out bush that you are in town," he says. "With Christine Anu's work it was a very different thing because we were keen to have a very strong Torres Strait Islands influence on the record. It was a cultural thing - we didn't actually record up there but sampling stuff was an integral part of that record. "It's funny, I remember Cold and the Crackle, the NDW record which we recorded in this big hall in country Victoria, I listen to it now and realize that technically it was a bad mistake because the rooms just weren't right to record in. Sometimes it can be a bit of a headache, you can be too clever by half."

As for NDW themselves, Bridie says "Oh, we've been dead for quite a while now. I'd personally like to see us put together a compilation of stuff, and do a final bunch of shows. It's just sometimes the energy for these things goes out the door. If you can imagine breaking up with anything after a long period of time, it was an emotional strain and I don't think anyone wanted to come to terms with anything." He does, however, admit to missing his old band. "Now a year after, I'm starting to listen to the records again, which was something I wasn't doing for a while. We were all really disappointed with what happened with Circus, we all put a lot of energy and a lot of effort into that record and it was a bit of a kick in the head for it to go the way it did. There's a lot of things I miss about NDW now. We had a ball with it over the years and we did some great things, we look back now on things like recording Tabaran in Papua New Guinea off our own bat and pulling it off, and some of the live shows that we did in all sorts of venues... there's a lot of great memories and hopefully we've left a heritage that'll be there for a while." MFTCC play this Friday, 30th June at Van Gogh's Earlobe.

The Independent Monthly
December 1994

In the future, Australians will realise that David Bridie is one of the most exceptional musicians (in any genre) that this country has produced. This musical configurations celebrates, with gentle whimsy and astute understanding, the joys and rituals of suburban Australia.

Peter Familiari
Herald Sun, November 1994

A COLLEAGUE made a tape of some old James Taylor LPs for me and filled it out with half of a track of My Friend the Chocolate Cake's second album Brood. I listened while driving home, right through Taylor, got to Chocolate Cake's I've Got a Plan and I was hooked. I got to work the next day eager for more information about this amazingly talented Australian group. So a workmate good naturedly pointed out that Beat magazine nominated the album as one of the best for the year and that the band's individual members had played with some real heavyweights including Not Drowning Waving, Tim Finn and Deborah Conway. I got a copy of the CD and listened to each track in sequence. Then I scanned the repeat button to sample one of the most musically enjoyable and artistically intelligent albums I have heard.

My Friend The Chocolate Cake takes a musical brush to a carefully selected range of everyday Australian experiences and paints a picture of city and rural landscapes that pulsates with a satisfying emotional intensity. As well as the distinctive Australian phrasing of the lyrics, the musical arrangements also show that whatever has been borrowed overseas has been repaid and endowed by good local musical currency.

The recording quality is very pleasing, never hard but addictive.  Each instrument and vocal line can be followed as they converge into a pleasing and unpredictable texture. The tracks were put down at local studios Metropolis, Periscope, Platinum and were mixed at Sorcerer Sound, Soho.
Instruments beautifully played are all acoustic and include piano, harmonium, cello, violin, viola, hats, mandolin, tin whistle and mandola, acoustic guitar, drums and percussion.

The band comprises David Bridie, Helen Mountfort, Hope Csutoros, Andrew Carswell, Andrew Richardson and Michael Barker.

Anthony Horan
Beat Magazine, August 1994

With Not Drowning Waving having retired from the musical rat race. it's quite logical that what started out as a NDW side-project, the uniquely-named My Friend The Chocolate Cake, should get a little more attention from its founders,Helen Mountfort and David Bridie. Who would have thought, though, that this low, key side project would produce a record of such astonishing quality and diversity as Brood?

Freed from the pop-song format that had become NDW's mainstay, Bridie and Mountfort have fashioned an album that could be a film soundtrack one minute, and a warm, gentle pop album the next. The contrast is highlighted right at the outset, with opening track Dance - a haunting and spacious instrumental - leading into the gorgeous I've Got A Plan, a more conventional song with the full band.

Current single Throwing It Away is also a pop song, albeit one vath a chorus impossible to forget. and an arrangement that, like the rest of the album. allows Helen Mountfort's cello and Hope Csutoros' violin a great deal of prominence, melody is laid upon melody. the backing vocals layer more still. and the outcome is truly special.

Greenkeeping. the theme from the 1991 film, returns here in a more arranged form (its original is on David Bridie and John Phillips' Projects CD) providing a bridge to the melancholic The Old Years. Then the unexpected happens again with a cover of Magazine's Song From Under The Floorboards - newly powered by cello working so well it's hard to return to the original version.  The lively celtic instrumental Jimmy Stynes follows before the ood shifts again, this time to one of tension and despair on Slow Way To Go Down.  Already there's been an albums worth of moods in the space of eight songs, and the album's not even half way through; another string laden instrumental provides a perfect mood shift to the brisk Rosetta which in turn is followed by the gentle piano ballad The Gossip, given an extra emotional edge by the restrained strings.

Title track Brood is another instrumental in the mode of the opening track a piece of such perfect beauty it's breathtaking. Yandoit also an instrumental, builds to a climax reminiscent of Peter Gabriels earlier work. From here proceedings move from the quirky (The Pramsitters) to the epic (Aberystwyth) to the reflective (album closer Low), all the time never losing focus or the attention of the listener.

Whether by accident or design, Bridie and Mountfort along with their one time casual side project have created one of the best albums of the year, full of inventiveness, resonance and intelligence. At times recalling the early days of Not Drowning, Waving, but more often looking forward.  Brood is a masterful album that we're lucky to have around.

Shane Danielsen
Sydney Morning Hearald, August 1994

No surprise that the first MFTCC album featured a  gorgeous reading of Danny Boy: after all, David Bridie's preferred mode, both in terms of songwriting and delivery, is the elegiac, his preferred voice a kind of  affectless melancholy, as the tracks here, such as The Gossip and Aberystwyth, prove. At these moments, he maintains a fine line between regretfulness and sentimentality, and the result is often  heartbreaking.

This second album, Brood, sees the band,a  noticeably more balanced and cohesive unit than before, again combining carefully arranged instrumental tracks with chamber-pop songs.
The mood is less casual, however, and perhaps  slighly darker. Listening, you sense a newfound resolve that takes you by surprise. There's a superb cover of Magazine's Song from under the Floorboards, an undercurrent of real anger in Throwing it Away, while  The Old Years is Bridie's best piece of writing since NDW's The Marriage is a  Mess.

Helen Mountford's string arrangements are fuller this time around, suiting the essentially linear nature of these songs, though Slow Way to go Down see the band venturing into more angular, unfamiliar territory - and Bridie's lyrics at their most ambitious. Only The Pramsitters fails to work, its boisterous beer-hall chorus matched to a rather mundane treatment of one of Bridie's  recurrent themes: loveable old men lost in recollection of their salad days. Too cute by half. Still, this lapse aside, I've not heard a better local album so far this year.

Slice of Heaven
by Justine Oates & Adam Gibson
Sunday Telegraph, July 17 1994

MFTCC’s cellist Helen Mountfort wants to make one thing clear - the band is not just a mere throwaway side project of her acclaimed other band, Not Drowning, Waving. Just because she and NDW lead singer and songwriter Davie Bridie are involved with this "other band", doesn’t mean than MFTCC is any less important.

"It actually sells as many, if not more, records than NDW does," Helen said. "The bands are quite different - there are four other different people in both bands and they have completely different feels. We regard this band very highly and we put a great deal into it."
Still, comparisons cannot help but be made. Formed in 1989 after Helen and David decided to put together a wholly acoustic band MFTCC scored immediate success with a self-financed debut album. A hefty series of acclaimed gigs later, the band is poised to release a new album titled Brood on Mushroom Records.

"The other main differences, apart from the people between NDW and MFTCC is that MFTCC are a totally acoustic band while NDW are largely electric," she said. "MFTCC use just a cello violin, acoustic guitar, mandolin, pianos, and not even a full drum kit."

Check out the new album ‘Brood’ and the first single, ‘Throwing it Away,’ to hear what MFTCC are all about. Also look out for the band playing around town during the coming weeks.

Mountfort de rigueur
by Brett Thomas
(source unknown), July 1994

When Helen Mountfort first began playing music, she had no intention of ever joining a rock band. Her instrument of choice, the cello, was hardly de rigueur in either the sweaty pubs or cavernous arenas associated with rock and besides, she grew up surrounded by the grand sounds of classical music. But now, more than a decade later, the New Zealand born musician finds herself the preeminent cello player in Australian rock, with gigs in both the acclaimed NDW and its curious offshoot MFTCC. How so?

"I grew up in a family of classical musicains and I was obsessed by the cello from a very early age," Mountfort said. "All cellists are classically taught and I became obsessed with classical music. I didn’t listen to much non-classical music until my late teens and now everyone has great fun at my expense because there are still (famous rock) songs that I don’t know."
In the end, it was a chance encounter with a Talking Heads album that turned Mountfort’s musical life upside down.

"My boyfriend in New Zealand joined one of those record clubs and when a whole packet of albums arrived one day, I opened it up and took out a Talking Heads record," she recalled. "I put it on and I thought: ‘This is great.’ I must have been in one of those open, receptive moods. Now, I don’t listen to any classical music - all my old vinyl records are classical but my CD’s are non-classical."
Nine years ago, Mountfort moved to Australia and in 1988 she happened upon a show by a quirky Melbourne based outfit called NDW, a band which specialises in an intriguing blend of indigenous, ambient rock. From the instant she saw them, she was hooked.

"I fell in love with then," she said. "I realised they had a lot of cello and I thought to myself:’I want to play in this band, this is the band for me’."

Only a few months later, fate engineered a meeting with NDW’s David Bridie and Mountfort found her dream coming TRUE when she was asked to accompany NDW on their Claim tour.
"It was very different but very exciting," she said of her first rock tour. "There were a lot of new things, like doing sound checks and travelling in a Tarago. It was interesting."

Since then, things have moved ahead in leaps and bounds for Mountfort. NDW have received international praise from the likes of Peter Gabriel and their critical, if not commercial, success in Australia grows. Then there’s MFTCC, a band put together by the prolific Mountfort and Bridie to occupy their time between other musical projects.

Tomorrow, the band releases its second album ‘Brood’, an indication that the formerly sideline project might be getting a little more serious.

"It kind of is," Mountofrt tentatively agreed. "It has definitely changed colours, it has turned into a different project now. When we made the first record in 1991 we didn’t even have a deal, we just wanted to something with the extra money we were making from gigs. The first record did realy well and we wanted to play live shows every three months or so. Then it became quite absolute that we wanted to do a second album."

Mountfort said there were no difficulties in separating NDW from MFTCC.
"They’re very separate in our minds," she said. "For a start, there are four people in the band who have nothing to do with NDW (Andrew Carswell, Hope Csutoros, Andrew Richardson and Michael Barker) and that gives the band a different identity. MFTCC uses all acoustic instruments, so that gives it a very different sound."
"I think the sound is warmer and a bit softer (than NDW) and MFTCC is a very poppy band. MFTCC doesn’t see itself as part of the (music) industry, it does what it wants."
Mountfort said the idea to form MFTCC came when she and Bridie began listening to a a lot of instrumental music. The pair though it would be fun to record something using only acoustic instruments, with an emphasis on strings.

"We wanted an arena to expand some different things and that is what it has become," she said. "It’s very strong and financially viable."

From a basis of Mountfort and Bridie, the band grew bit by bit with friends and friends of friends joining as rehersals progressed over the weeks. Now MFTCC and NDW complement each other perfectly.

"In a way there has always been a lot of expectation on NDW and that has put a lot of pressure on us," Mountfort said. "With MFTCC neither the media nor the industry put pressure on us at the beginning and it was very easy to do."

Mountfort doesn’t restrict her work to her two bands - she’s an in-demand session player (Let’s face it, who else would you call if you wanted a bit of cello on your album?) and has worked with the likes of Paul Kelly and, more recently, Linda and Vika Bull. And she is aware of a growing popularity of strings in rock.

"I think that style is quite trendy at the momnent, which is good for me," she said. "I see many people using cellists here and I think it is just being seen as a great insrtument. It’s great for playing melody on and the deep tones are fantastic for sad songs."

More songs from Under the Floorboards
by Ross Clelland
(source unknown), July 1994

Brood; (v) 1. to dwell moodily in thought, ponder. (n) 2. family or offspring.

So, David Bridie and Helen Mountfort, representing MFTCC: Which definition means
more in relation to the new album of the same name? "More pondering than the family," says Bridie, "some of the record has a very melancholy mood."There is a bit of both though," offers Helen, "the only brood it isn’t is the one to do with chickens."

ER, yeah. I forgot: (v) 3. to sit as a bird over eggs to be hatched (part poultry)

MFTCC are the little side project that grew. Orginally a ‘have fun’ offshoot of NDW of which Bridie and Mountfort are members (singer and keyboardist and cellist respectively), having got to a second album, things have got a little more serious: "None of it was planned" according to David. "It was all very laissez faire from rehearsal to gigs to a record, it grew.

Helen: "Pre-production for the first album was a rehersal at David’s place the day before we recorded it, even people in the band were going: ‘That was for a record? I thought we were just mucking about in the studio.’"

That relaxed attitude to the whole process allows the Cake (If I may be so familiar) to indulge in a wide range of moods and musics across Brood. David: "Music should cross all terrain from extreme joy to the bleakly melancholy, and Chocolate Cake can do that. It actually fits with the instrumentation and even the personalities in the band - there’s bouncing buoyant music or we can do a big descending violin, cello and piano."

Helen continues the thought: "It’s good that people can’t quite find the pigeonhole for us, even the cover of the record re-inforces it: dark title , but the artwork is all bright colours and cartoon-like, it’s the same contrast. And having that range is one of the reasons we had the enrgy to make a second record."

But does MFTCC belong to smoky rock pubs of Australia with music that goes from Danny Boy to covering Magazine’s early 80’s pot punk anthem ‘Song from Under the Floorboards’?

Helen: "We can straddle a bunch of things, we can even alter the set to suit the venue we’re playing. We do sit-down theatre shows where people listen intently, or like a Republican benefit we did at the Collingwood Town hall where we turned into a big loud rock band.

"And then you slip in a song where you pump it up in a theatre or do one of the really slow instrumentals in the midst of the noisy pub," David Bridie shows a hint of the mischievous. "And with ‘Song from Under the Floorboards’, it was the indie pop song from heaven when it came out. I’m still amazed that Depeche Mode is the band from that era who became huge, Magazine and (Buzzcocks founder and Magazine Leader) Howard Devoto incredibly underrated. And we just all fitted together on that song: Helen’s cello playing the original bassline, Hope’s (Csutoros) violin doing the keyboard line, and a mandolin playing the guitar part. And how can you resist a song with the opening line ‘I am angry, I am ill, I’m as ugly as sin’. It’s a beauty." But UK post-punk covers aside there is a real Australian-ness to MFTCC, but is their vision of small town (even allowing for the small minded) Australia a little too romantic to be true?

David: "No it is ambiguous, but no, you can still walk in to a pub in the country, or even out in the western suburbs and you can sometimes feel that magic feeling of community. People are still helping each other, like a bloke gets laid off - so the hat goes round to get him some money - or more likely his mates rig the meat tray raffle so he wins it. That’s a quintessentially Australian way of doing it.

"But you can go in there the next day, and a woman is walking round with a black eye her husband gave her, or some guy is mouthing off about the ‘f--kin darkies’ or something."

"Everybody has their own prejudices," adds Helen, whether it be the ‘arty’ Melbourne community or the single mum groups I know. It’s human nature to favour your community and maybe that includes making up stories about some other group - whether they’re from the wrong suburb, the wrong ethnic group."

David: "And it’s not a nostalgia for the old days - they could be a joke, too. Just pretending domestic violence or incest didn’t happen, so it just didn’t get reported. And of course there was no such thing as homosexuals. Like John Howard raving about bringing back the values of the menzies-era, now, that’s a bigger joke.

"But that all becomes part of your community, like on ‘The Gossip’ (another Brood tune). There’s obviously a pretty loud potentially violent domestic argument, but even that provides currency and a talking point for the other people in the surrounding flats: ‘Oh-er, did you hear that in Number Three last night?’ It ends up as something to talk about."

There’s also a respect for age, not much seen in the Oz-rock idiom, the various members often perform., and just talk to the folks of aged care centres. "I don’t know the old folks would really want something like Noiseworks visiting at lunchtime - ‘Get those noisy bastards out of here!’ - or ‘jeez, he blew that solo after the second verse, didn’t he?’", Bridie jokes. "One thing about the Chocolate Cake is the characters. And the older people have such a storage of stories, and maybe we don’t listen enough. We need some of the Maori attitude or whatever happens, listen to and respect your elders. Or when NDW was doing the tour with (Papua New Guinea pop star) Telek, and trying to explain to him the trend of putting the elderly in retirement homes - he just though that was barbaric."

Their old people would remain useful, and we tend to dismiss them."

"We’ve even done it", Helen admits, "Like that Yugoslav bloke who talked to us when we were having a beer the other week."

"Oh, yeah, this guy comes slobbering up, and you can’t help thinking ‘oh, here we go’, like he’s going to pick on us for a conversation or cadging a drink. And then he started talking about his life in Yugoslavia during the war - and it was all so vivid, so articulate.

"Helen: "Maybe we’ll do it as we get older, talking with affection about what is our cultural things now."

Like Neighbours? "No, probably not."

One more character from the record, an instrumental in praise of Jimmy Stynes. Jimmy Stynes? Irish-born champion Australian Rules player, Brownlow Medal winner and just happens to play for the Melbourne Demons, the team supported a little too enthusiastically by Bridie and Andrew Carswell.

"The song was simply a ploy so they could meet him," Helen claims conspiratorially.

"So why didn’t we call the song Winona Ryder then?" defends Bridie.

"And Tony Modra just didn’t have the same ring as a title."

"That’s very good, did you just think of that?" he enquires.

"No. Stynsie’s an artist, he bought this little Gaelic football kick over with him - no-one else can do it, it’s poetic," the man is waxing lyrical ladies and gentlemen.

"Don’t worry, he gets like this," explains Helen. "It got a bit silly on one tour. It got to the point that if Melbourne won, it was a good gig, but if the D’s went down, don’t bother coming."

Fair warning, but there’ll probably be no need to check your scoresheets before attending.

[MFTCC play Friday July 15 and Saturday 16 at the harbourside Brasserie]

"Pop Eats Itself"
by Shane Danielsen
(source unknown), July 1994

The Current Six Thresholds. The Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber. Under the Angel’s Wing On a Steep Path ... No doubt about it, Paul Klee had a way with names.

One day in New York, visiting a Klee retrospective at the Guggenheim, David Bridie and Helen Mountfort liked one of his titles (Dance You Monster to My Soft Song) enough to borrow it for a then-unnamed instrumental. Bridie insisted on inserting the word "stupid" before monster, ostensibly on a whim (though partly, one suspects, to lessen the chance of being sued by the artist’s estate). Now it’s the opening track of MFTCC’s second album, Brood: the reference point in an album eclectic enough to draw inspiration from reactionary Victorian politics (Throwing it Away), British post-punk (their excellent cover of Magazine’s Song from Under the Floorboards) and Brownlow Medal winners past (Jimmy Stynes). And Paul Klee, of course, with whom they share an apparently playful, almost childlike quality that only serves to mask a darker and more idiosyncratic world view.

It is a good thing to discuss fine art with a fellow aficionado, but for some reason Mountfort seems curiously unwilling to participate. "David and I started the band," Mountfort explains, "and we run it together in a kind of benign dictatorship. We’ve tried working in a kind of democratic atmosphere, and it’s always a nightmare, making decisions by committee. So we’ve subtly manipulated this one to suit ourselves. Our own devious ends."

Paul Klee, I point out, never relied much on others. Sure, he hung out with Kandinsky and Marc for a while, ran with the Blaue Reiter crowd. He even traveled to Tunisia with Macke in 1914. But essentially he was a loner, and was such was spared the need for consensus. Hearing this, Mountfort makes a polite, faintly interested sound and again swiftly changes the subject back to her band, herself:

"You might notice," she says quickly, "that the others’ roles on this album are much stronger. Because the first album was written before the band really existed, and recorded very quickly - almost entirely live, in fact - there wasn’t a lot of input from the other members. Whereas this time we did a lot of preproduction and everyone had a chance to work out their own parts, make suggestions."

Not many people know that Klee was a musician himself, a highly accomplished violinist. Indeed, this background is evident in some of the compositions of his middle period between 1925-1932 - the strictly delineated, geometric divisions of colour in works like ‘Fire in the Evening’ replicating the major and minor keys of an harmonic system.

Curiously, Mountfort seems unmoved by this revelation. In fact, she audibly stifles a yawn.
"I think, for us, the challenge was to use the studio environment to its fullest. To employ more over-dubbing, get a fuller sound. And to make the string parts have more of a quartet feel, not just two lines, violin and cello. Last time we only used 12 tracks; this time we were running out of room..."

Through variations of colour and texture, Paul Klee sought to replicate the
tonal variety of a piano keyboard, a fixed but fluent system of visual grammar. As both an academic and a practitioner, his theories of music and an art were inextricably entwined.
But Mountfort’s musical obsession apparently knows no bounds. She is talking again, and not about Klee.

"We didn’t want to repeat ourselves. Someone said to me the other day that
every record you make is, to some extent, a reaction to the one before it, and that’s probably very TRUE of Brood as well. The last thing we wanted to do was just tread water."

[MFTCC appear tonight and tomorrow night at the Harbourside Brasserie.]

Darrin Farrant
The Age, June 1994

SOULFUL, melodic, mellow, even folky.  After lying low for a while, My Friend the Chocolate Cake has returned to the live scene with the same frustrating but refreshing ability to defy neat, journalistic pigeonholing.

The cosy confines of the Continental Cafe, borne to Melbotirne's most self-consciously grOovY set of over-25s, was an appropriate venue to hear the six-piece group as it gears up for the release of album number two, "Brood" in a fortnight.

My Friend the Chocolate Cake's recipe for 'Brood' is apparently much richer and darker than that for its earlier work; this was reflected on Saturday night with the delivery of several new moodier tracks that struck a cool and ambient tone to the evening.

Frontman David Bridle was in a relaxed mode from the opening.  He seems to approach matters with the simple attitude that if the band really enjoys playing something, then the audience most probably enjoy hearing it, too. Which they did.

This meant that the gang wasn't afraid to throw in the odd cover or two, as well as the regular combination of new material and some perkier, more upbeat tracks from My Friend the Chocolate Cake's younger days.'Throwing It Away', the group's current release, showed they have maintained a sharp political bent.

Bridie's cohort from Not Drowning, Waving, Helen Mountfort shone on the cello, while violinist Hope Csturos engaged in some clever instrumental theatrics with Bridie, and new drummer Michael Barker, meshed well. Csturos was a particular highlight.

My Friend the Chocolate Cake's performance had far too much sophistication and edge to be labelled as mere mood music, yet it managed to send one home at the end of the show in exactly the right mood.

Molly Bloom
Catalyst, March 1992

While on holiday in New Zealand David Bridie (from Not Drowning Waving) wrote some happy acoustic songs. He brought them back to Melbourne and cellist Helen Mountfort (also of NDW liked them. They got some friends together to add mandolin, violin and percussion to the songs and My Friend The Chocolate Cake is the finished product.

The self titled album is friendly listening. The ease with which the band fell together is reflected in the music. There's simple, acoustic based arrangements, smooth vocals and the gentle use of classical instruments.

My Friend The Chocolate Cake is a very mellow album. The sort of stuff that's a good companion for long distance traveling or laziness late at night. The beauty of this album is that pop appreciators, folk purists and classical fans alike will all find a space for Chocolate Cake in their record collections.

24 Hours
February 1992

The central figures in this 'special project' band are singer/songwriter/keyboardist David Bridie and cellist Helen Mountfort - both best known as members of Not Drowning, Waving.  This is a different sort of music, albeit one with definite connections to the Melbourne-based band, whose percussionist Russell Bradley is also present.

It's definitely a 'produced' album, but the accompanying bookiet's back-cover photo accurately conveys the mood - a group of friends gathered round a piano with acoustic instruments in their hands and relaxed expressions on their faces.

Bridie is the lead singer and pianist,with violinist Hope Csturos, mandolinist and occasional tin whistler Andrew Carswell and guitarist Andrew Richardson the other elements of the Cake. Most of the songs and instrumentals are originals, with John Cale's Buffalo Ballet and Danny Boy thrown in. The latter is the one song I'd have thrown out - a gentle and wistful flavour is present in much of the music, but on Danny Boy we enter more slushy and sentimental terrain.

There are some fine songs and tunes here, well-served by the non-flashy, spare playing and singing. Wistful remembrances of things past like Uncle Bill's Paddock don't descend into mere nostalgia, and there are some pleasingly uncategorisable instrurnentals.  The violin and cello are particularly haunting on A Slow Storm Brews, and who could resist one quirky instrumental that sounds as if it has emerged from a surreal trattoria or taverna, and was inspired by a Prominent Person's proboscis? John Elliot's Nose is more than just a great title, happily.

We're not talking 'desert island disc' here, nor even an attempt to be 'wildly innovative', but in its modest and most quiet terms, this is a very successful record.-It's unlikely to change your life, but My Friend the Chocolate is a warm and companionable album, especially at day's end.

Ross Clelland
Juke, December 21 1991

Unapologetically , a totally idiosyncratic choice to finish with, but a fixture in my stereo over the past few weeks.  Minus the pervading drums and rhythms of its parent band, Not Drowning, Waving, this is a more subtle, understated beast. Keyboard player and singer David Bridie knows he doesn't have to fill every space with noise (something a lot of others could learn) and conjures up some lovely feels and atmospheres, and some less pretty ones. The John Cale-style cover of "Danny Boy" is genuinely moving, while originals such as the jaunty Celtic jig of "John Elliot's Nose" and the darker ``Neighborhood Watch" make up a small but perfectly formed little work to savour.

Chris Beck
The Age EG, November 29 1991

This is a beautifully crafted acoustic album.  David Bridie, from Not Drowning, Waving and friends have not only triumphed with original material but have also put Max Bygraves to shame.  Their quiet, reverential version of "Danny Boy" left nary a dry eye in the house.

Singalongachocolatecakes. John Cale's "Buffalo Ballet" is also enhanced by a sparse, soulful treatment.  Bridie's rasping, sincere voice and the combination of violins, piano, cello and mandolin struck a chord in my heart. Listen and love.