Regional touring company Festival of Small Halls to tour WA with guests Iona Fyfe and Colin Lillie

Iona Fyfe and Colin Lillie will feature as part of the Festival of Small Halls’ autumn return to WA in May. Trekking through Bridgetown, Porongurup, Torbay, Quindanning, and Pingelly, the tour makes its way through the South West, Great Southern, Wheatbelt and Goldfields, to end in Lancellin. Borne from an idea to bring performance arts to regional Australian towns, the folk festival’s 34th instalment will bring the fantastical sounds of the Scottish mountains to WA’s wheatbelt. Mr Lillie settled in Australia in 2005 after previously visiting and travelling parts of the country. He fell in love with the vast space of the Australian outback and settled in Alice Springs, after a long road trip from the Gold Coast to Alice Springs in 2004. Before putting roots down in Alice Springs, Mr Lillie had never sung in public before and hadn’t thought he would be able to play and evolve his music. “I’d never sung in public before, and settling in Alice Springs made me discover a new calling,” he said. “Alice Springs gave me the opportunity to be who I wanted to be, an opportunity I hadn’t been given before.” Mr Lillie has previously recorded a single with DIESEL and recently released his album Shades of Love in 2022. He’ll be back in the studio soon enough with a new single scheduled in the near future and sights set on Kansas City to record his next album, after being inspired by the Americana genre while previously touring through the USA. The Festival of Small Halls is set to tour through the Wheatbelt in April after previously being scheduled for 2020. “I love the regional spread of the festival, I think it’s really great that we get to expose different music to the rural places, and I’m so excited,” Mr Lillie said on what attracted him to tour with the festival. Never having visited WA before, he’s certain he’ll love the outback and is on board to tour with Small Halls again in future. The Festival of Small Halls will bring their autumn tour to Quindanning on April 29 and Pingelly on April 30. Tour information and tickets can be found at festivalofsmallhalls.com.