JAZZ vocalist and songwriter Liam Budge, one of Canberra music’s greatest success stories, is changing direction and, under his stage name Creswick, is about to stage a theatre work on the subject of fatherhood at The Street Theatre.

If your birth name is Liam Creswick Sydney Pepper Budge, you’re spoilt for choice when choosing a nom-de-theatre. Budge chose Creswick, which is also the name of a photography and video business (Creswick Collective) he shares with his wife, Canberra visual artist and photographer Abbey Mackay.

“In His Words – Voices of Fatherhood” is an exploration of fatherhood based on video interviews between Budge and nine fathers.

While not featuring a formal narrative, the stories are linked through visuals screened above and musical elements backed by the sophisticated combo of Brett Williams on keyboard, Chris Pound on bass, Ben Hauptmann on guitars and James Hauptmann on drums. 

Budge appears singing his own new songs while playing piano and guitar.

Budge tells me when we catch up for coffee at The Street that his play is “a meditation on fatherhood”, rejecting the idea that it’s inherently gendered. Parenting is universal, he says and he hopes the show will be a “catchall for people who love music, cinema people and those who love live narratives.” 

Schooled at Canberra Grammar, Budge studied at the ANU School of Music, where he was one of their star jazz students, then after a career whizzing between Canberra and Sydney, in 2014 he took off for Manhattan, where he sang and played with musicians including Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, Kris Bowers and Brad Williams, also studying with jazz vocalist Kurt Elling. 

Then fatherhood struck when, living in Brooklyn, Abbey gave birth to their son, Julian, and it quickly occurred to them that they were in the wrong place to bring up a young family.

Canberra being famous as a child-friendly capital and with their own families here, they arrived back in time for Budge to play the leading role at The Street in “Flight Memory”, Sandra France’s song cycle about the Australian scientist David Warren, inventor of the black box.

He slipped back into the Canberra scene very easily, because he had always been deeply embedded in it, calling it “a healthy environment even if a transient one, bubbling with creative vibes”.

He was soon able to reconnect with old muso friends such as jazz pianist Wayne Kelly, sax player John Mackey and dance artists Alison Plevey and Sara Black and now enjoys a busy life teaching voice in the jazz and contemporary stream at the School of Music while writing songs and running Creswick Collective.

An academy-trained musician, he happily admits to being self-trained in photography and videography and says, “that means when it comes to photo and video, I’m not burdened by things that burden me musically.” 

Arriving back just in time for the bushfires and the pandemic, he and Abbey set about parenting and shooting visuals, while he took part in an “early phase” program at The Street open to applicants with just the seeds of an idea which, once developed, could progress into their “First Seen” program.

The program allowed him contact with mentor Campion Decent, the writer of “Embers”, a theatre piece about the 2019-20 bushfires.

With the idea of creating a verbatim stage work (created from transcripts of real-life reporting) around nine fathers, he embarked on the process of collecting interviews and deciding which ones would work with an audience.

“It was a huge task… I spoke with 100 fathers from a broad range of cultures and ages and ended up with nine in the play,” he says. Budge developed his own process of 45-60-minute interviews, always asking his subjects towards the end whether they had anything they’d like to add.

There was, he reports, “a beautiful vulnerability in these interviews” as the men talked to him of their own fathers as role models, sometimes revealing bad relationships, which meant they were fathering despite themselves. 

Budge is most definitely not a member of any kind of men’s movement, but rather hopes he has created “a very new interrogation of the topic of fatherhood”.

It’s a universal topic, he says, so he hasn’t gone for arty fathers, although Canberra’s Michael Sollis and Sam Martin from Candelo, both very well-known musicians, are there. But, he stresses, he’s interviewing them as fathers, not as musicians.

The conclusion of the show features his own son Julian, but it would be a spoiler to say exactly how.

“In His Words: Voices of Fatherhood”, The Street Theatre, June 23-June 25.