Sime Nugent is an Australian singer-songwriter, musician. He is also a visual artist and furniture maker.
Sime has toured nationally and internationally throughout Australia, Europe and America and released more than a dozen albums with a range of bands in his 20 year career.
Sime’s work under his own name; with indie folk duo Sweet Jean and three time ARIA nominated band The Wilson Pickers has received both critical and popular acclaim.
Sime travels with an extensive repertoire as a soloist, writer, band leader and band member.
“Devastatingly powerful, highly listenable roots and pop influenced music”. Rhythms
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SIME
Sime Nugent’s most recent focus has been his work with three-time ARIA nominated band The Wilson Pickers and as half of indie folk duo Sweet Jean. He’s also a skilled craftsman, sculptor, and occasional music festival director. Sime has also had a long time love of songwriting.
In 1988, Sime Nugent found an old cassette recording of his Irish parents’ last party with family in Dublin before immigrating to Australia in 1969. On the tape his father’s five siblings all sang immaculate harmonies around the family piano. For Sime, who’d just written his first song, the cassette was a beguiling piece of a puzzle.
By 2000, Sime Nugent began playing and releasing music under his own name. He’d spent the previous decade learning about singing and harmony singing with the much respected trio, Acapelicans, who maintained a busy international touring schedule off the back of their four albums.
Sime had also spent the 90’s getting a degree in sculpture, developing a passion for outsider art and learning about songwriting via his Melbourne band, Sedan, whose regular shows and two albums where local favourites.
In 2000, with six albums already published, Sime Nugent started again.
Sime Nugent and the Forefathers ( with Steve Hesketh, Roger Bergodaz and Amos Sheehan) released ‘More About the Benefits of Hindsight’ in 2002. The album explored a kind of wide-screen pastoral storytelling that sat in it’s own lane in Australia at the time.
The debut was followed by ‘The Undertow’ in 2003, ‘Broke and Banned Songs of Sime Nugent’ in 2005, ‘Happy Hour’ in 2007 and ‘Ten Years At The Table’ in 2010. With each new album Sime explored different facets of subject, arrangement and production and each release was punctuated with shows and festivals throughout Australia.
During this period of time there was a solo tour of East Timor, a collaboration with Angie Hart (Frente) in LA, the co-founding of the Castlemaine Music Festival at Lot 19, and sculpture shows, photography and furniture making.
In 2009 Sime Nugent joined The Wilson Pickers. The band was intended as a side project for Andrew Morris, Danny Widdicombe, Ben Salter, John Bedggood and Sime, but the Wilson Pickers have since gone on to play most major festivals in Australia, and receive ARIA nominations for each of their three studio albums – ‘Land Of The Powerful Owl’ 2010, ‘Shake It Down’ 2011 and ‘You Can’t Catch Fish From A Train’ 2016.
In late 2010 Sime started indie folk duo, Sweet Jean with Alice Keath. The duo has built a reputation for their evocative songwriting and razor-sharp harmony singing. Paul Kelly described their debut album as “two distinct voices and strong songwriters make a combination greater than the sum of the parts. Dreamy, epic, wry, tender, straight-shooting. This record deserves to be heard far and wide.”
The pair’s two studio albums – ‘Dear Departure’ 2013 and ‘Monday to Friday’ 2016, and mini album ‘Greetings From Goodbye’ 2015, have taken them around the country and the world with shows in all states of Australia as well as Europe, Canada and North America.
In the last seven years while predominantly writing and working with Sweet Jean and The Wilson Pickers, Sime has also designed and built a theatre set for ‘The Funeral’ which appeared at Melbourne Festival, Brisbane Festival and Dark Mofo in Tasmania. Sime built Union Street Studio in Melbourne with Roger Bergodaz. He designed and built the music library at Melbourne radio 3PBS. He has also designed and built a restaurant, a bar, a boutique a tea-house, a product called The Natural Table and a range of custom-built furniture.
The strongest through-lines in Sime Nugent’s music work have been an enduring engagement with song writing at its highest level and a truly disarming voice. He brings a level of craftsmanship to everything he does. Sime Nugent travels with an extensive repertoire as a soloist, collaborator, band leader, band member and songwriter.
