Pinky Beecroft: The Lonesome Wolf Returns

Seventeen years between records is a long time. But sometimes you have to wait until you’ve got something worth saying.

Pinky Beecroft has never exactly taken the predictable road.

Best known to many as the frontman and songwriter behind Machine Gun Fellatio, Beecroft has spent plenty of time operating outside the neat boundaries of Australian music. Now, after a seventeen-year recording hiatus, he’s back with Lonesome Wolf — and it sounds very much like a record made on his own terms.

Recorded in Melbourne with producer and multi-instrumentalist Damian Cafarella (The Pleasures, The White Russians), Lonesome Wolf strips things right back. There’s soul. There’s country twang. There’s baritone guitar, banjo and piano. Rhodes and Mellotron drift in and out. But perhaps more importantly, there’s space.

At the centre of it all are essentially two musicians in a room. Beecroft handles vocals, piano, Rhodes and Mellotron, while Cafarella moves between guitars, bass, banjo, drums, percussion and whatever else the songs happen to need.

Nothing feels like it’s there simply because somebody thought the record needed more. And that was exactly the idea.
“Everything is played live, in one room, two people. It's an intimate kind of sound.”

Beecroft describes Lonesome Wolf as deliberately understated.
“The drums are restrained, there's baritone guitar, banjo, piano, some Rhodes, some Mellotron. We tried really hard to put things only where they might be needed. We wanted it to have some space to breathe.”

It’s a long way from chasing radio, algorithms or whatever happens to be fashionable this week. In fact, Pinky has a much better description for it.

“This is not a big, in-your-face pop record — it's a million miles away from that. It's more like a late-night record. Or perhaps a lazy, sunny afternoon album.”

That feels about right. 

There are a few familiar names scattered through Lonesome Wolf. The album includes “Band Of Gold”, featuring Queenie, along with “I’ll Be Alright” and Beecroft’s interpretation of the Ben Salter-penned “My Heart Is In The Wrong Place.”

There’s also a trip back into his own history. Beecroft revisits the Machine Gun Fellatio favourite “Unsent Letter”, this time with Gabrielle Parker on backing vocals, giving the song another life far removed from the world in which the original first appeared.

He also takes on The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses”, again joined by Queenie — a song that feels particularly at home among the album’s dusty, spacious arrangements. But Lonesome Wolf isn't really about looking backwards. It feels more like an artist arriving somewhere.

After seventeen years without a new record, there’s an obvious question, why now? Pinky asks it himself.

“The obvious question is... why? That's the question I ask myself, a lot.” The answer turns out to be remarkably simple. He made a record he loves.

“It doesn't happen very often to me — that things work out exactly the way I want, that the feel is right, the songs sound the way I imagined. “This one feels very different — it's the record I've wanted to make, for a long time.”

Maybe that’s the real story of Lonesome Wolf. Not a comeback. Not a reinvention. And certainly not an attempt to recreate something from twenty years ago. It’s simply a musician who waited until the songs, the players, the room and the moment all felt right. Seventeen years later, Pinky Beecroft has made the record he wanted to make. Sometimes that’s reason enough.

Lonesome Wolf is out now on Bandcamp (available on limited-edition Vinyl) and on all streaming platforms.