The Waifs’ Donna Simpson on Bob Dylan, London Still and the e-scooter accident that tore her life in two

Donna Simpson, one-third of the much-loved West Australian band The Waifs, is a little teary. Nothing terrible has happened, but right before she jumped on the phone to PLAY, Simpson was busy writing up a blurb about Bob Dylan for a concert she’s putting together with a bunch of her musical mates, paying tribute to the legendary songwriter. “I pulled out some of his quotes, oh! It just got me!” she laughs. “Why am I sitting here crying?” Simpson says she and her sister and bandmate Vikki Thorn grew up in Albany listening to Dylan. His songs were some of the first they learnt to play when they first picked up a guitar. Which made it feel all the more surreal when they ended up touring with him during the height of their fame as The Waifs. “We opened for him in Australia,” Simpson recalls. “One day he came in to the dressing room and said” — she adopts a Dylan-esque drawl — “‘Hey! Can you meet me in Texas in three weeks?’ I said, ‘I’ll ask me Dad’. He just laughed and walked out. We got along, we had a really good rapport and three weeks later we were in Austin. It was the greatest experience of my life. “I think he just saw us as normal people. Fisherman’s daughters, unwavered by the everything of being on stage. Someone he could tease and make fun of. Like the fact we wore the same clothes every night until he went out and bought us some clothes.” She cackles with laughter at the memory. “He bought us some country shirts, he said, ‘Go take a look in your dressing room. Don’t you ever wash your clothes?’” she laughs. “We just saw him as an old fisherman mate, I suppose. When he first walked out of the shadows and said, ‘Hey, I’m Bob’, I said to him, ‘Can you give me five minutes? I just need to pack away my guitar’, so I sort of shooed him away. And I didn’t jump up and get all sweaty even though inside my heart was jumping.” That was back in 2003, when The Waifs — Simpson, Thorn and Josh Cunningham — were riding high on the success of their fourth album, Up All Night. It reached double platinum in Australia and included the breakout hit London Still, an anthem for homesick Australians that still has a place on any Aussie bar playlist from Clapham to Camden Town. Not to mention any listicle of classic Australian songs. “I’m incredibly grateful and stoked,” Simpson says of the song that catapulted the band into the mainstream. “I really, really am and I love that people are still travelling and are still taking that step to go to London to do the Europe thing and do their gap year and that song still comes through their head. “I wrote it in all of 10 minutes or something, it wrote itself really. I can’t take much credit for it.” Up All Night might be the album they are best known for, but The Waifs were no overnight success story. They toured relentlessly throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and by the time they were playing to massive crowds they had the performing chops to make them one of the country’s best live acts. By the late Noughties the band all found themselves living in various places in the US — Simpson was in Minnesota, “the worst place for a sea (person), I was landlocked,” she says. Thorn was in Utah and Josh was, Simpson says, “cruising around California”. “And then we all decided Australia is home,” Simpson says. “We’re all very much back here at the moment.” Last year the band hit the road for a national 20th anniversary tour of Up All Night. The tour was almost derailed, however, when Simpson suffered a horrific electric scooter accident in Broome. It’s an experience that she says “put a big crack in my life”. “I was just cruising along the bike path, really slow, really gently, respectfully. A backpacker came towards me with headphones on. I said, ‘Can you keep left, move out of the way?’ He didn’t get it, so I virtually went down to a stop and went straight into the sand. “Scooter fell, the handlebars were sticking straight up. And the handlebars went through me. Collapsed lungs and six broken ribs, internal bleeding. It was horrendous, traumatic. I had to breathe like a goldfish for six weeks. I was airlifted out, I was told I wasn’t going to make it. “I woke up in Royal Perth with 10 days missing from my life and the grand final was on the screen. And I’m a big Collingwood supporter and Collingwood were playing! I came out of this coma going: ‘what the f...?’” she laughs darkly. “I missed the bounce-off and the build-up to the grand final!” Simpson turns serious again. “It was a really, really traumatic experience. It was life and death . . . it f..... me up.” The band was forced to postpone a number of shows until Simpson was well enough to get back on stage. It’s perhaps no surprise she is not a fan of electric scooters. “If you have a kid that has an e-scooter and it gets stolen, let them have it. It’s like taking a loaded gun off someone,” she says. “I see it all over Facebook: ‘my kid’s e-scooter got stolen! I’m like, ‘Yay! Let the thief have it’.” Also last year, before the accident derailed everything, the band recorded a cover of I Was Only 19 to mark the 40th anniversary of the song, alongside the track’s songwriter, John Schumann. What prompted them to get in the studio for that particular song? “Being asked!” Simpson says. “I’ve known that song for as long as I can remember. I have been singing that song around the campfire to the Vietnam vets who were part of the salmon fishing team we grew up with, a lot of them got sent to Vietnam and they would always say, ‘Hey kid, play play that song’ and —” she breaks off. “Oh, I’m going to cry. I’m going to cry! F...! What’s wrong with me today?” she laughs. It was a rare new recording from the band, whose last studio album, Ironbark, was released in 2017. Simpson says the band don’t often get together to play, but with more than 30 years of history together, it’s not hard to reignite the spark. “That’s the beauty of this band. That’s the alchemy,” Simpson says. “We get an Airbnb together and we rock up and go, ‘Right, whose got a new song?’ It’s like a family holiday but you leave your kids behind. We come together and roll through the songs and talk and cook and jam. That happens once a year. “And then if we go on tour we start testing those songs in soundcheck and we’re either loving or hating them and yelling at each other and then the fights come and then we cry and make up. I’ve often said we’re quite Fleetwood Mac. Vik and Josh were together for 12 years and they are the best of friends and I’m Chrissy, I’m the third wheel.” WA audiences will have an opportunity to see The Waifs live for free this weekend at the WA Day Festival. The band is playing tomorrow at the festival held at the Optus Stadium precinct, part of a line-up of all Australian acts. Simpson says while she has mixed feelings about the history behind WA Day (it marks the founding of the Swan River Colony in 1829), she hopes the festival can celebrate the diversity and unity of the State. “A lot of people won’t leave their doors to celebrate Australia Day or WA Day and I get that, I totally get that,” she says. “I want people to know that I acknowledge that. “I think a lot of diverse acts from different cultures will hopefully be a celebration of the fact we can all be here together. “It’s lovely that it’s a free gig. It’s a part of giving back, and the last time I was there I met some amazing people backstage, really, really lovely people who I had never met before, young musicians, and you feel like quite a senior of the backstage these days. You see these kids walking around all shy with their passes not knowing what to do. I love it. “I love that we’re still going.” The Waifs play the WA Day Festival at the Optus Stadium precinct tomorrow at 3.20pm. Entry is free. Public transport to the festival is also free. A Day Of Dylan, with 20 artists, including Donna Simpson, each playing three Bob Dylan songs, is at Freo Social on June 16. Tickets via Moshtix.