Photo by Julia
October 2002. Three years after the last Humpback Oak album and nary a whimper from the band. Have they broken up? Then a solo Leslie Low reappears in public and presents a new song at the old Substation garden that couldn’t be more appropriately titled…
Leslie eventually records “Time of Rebirth” with his present band The Observatory and it appears on their demo (2003) and first album (2004), but here is the song as some of us first heard it: the delicate picking, the comfort croon, collected wisdom in a guileless lullaby. This is music that quakes with such quiet fragility that just as the man begins playing, a motorcycle passing by on Stamford Road threatens to swallow him up in its gaping roar– instead, through some fortuitous twist of shape, human and machine weld in respectful accommodation. On this bootleg, the souped-up engine sounds like the reverberations of an anxious snare drumming up a lead-in to Leslie’s first words… “Count the mistakes… the chances we take…”
Two months later, The Observatory is unveiled at the inaugural Baybeats Festival as a trio consisting of Leslie, Vivian Wang and Dharma.
mp3: Leslie Low – Time of Rebirth (live at I’m Not Kylie Minogue, Oct 5, 2002)
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UNITY SONG 
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