Blues singer and guitarist from the far north of Australia, where the rainforest meets the reef and where there are only two seasons (wet and dry). He was first drawn to the Irish-based traditional music of his homeland, but the Blues, when he found it, was stronger and darker, and ultimately held more fascination. He hit the road at 18 in the late 1970s at the peak of the Barbary Coast days, where the entertainment was either learn how to fight or play well enough to please fishermen, canecutters, miners, bikers and other desperados, when Cairns was a sugarcane town at the end of the road on the east coast of Australia. 'When I had thirty songs together I went and found myself a gig. I debuted solo at the roughest pub in town, the Oceanic Hotel.' Cairns had a thriving live music scene, and Collins put together the Lake Street Sheiks and other small groups, with harmonica player Steve Gilbert and Jules Williamson on 5-string banjo. We did lots of jug band stuff in the Sheiks and I used to play mandolin and kazoo. But it was the Barron River Drifters, a cowboy/jazz sextet, that appeared all over the far north, in constant demand from 1987 to 1992. 'Right from day one that band just took off...I went from doing a couple of gigs a week to up to six or seven a week for about five years. I did my apprenticeship in the music business with this band.' But wanderlust kicked in, and Collins went to Europe in 1992, where he performed solo under the name of Black Cat Tail. He also sta