James Reyne On Moving Forward and Not Looking Back
James Reyne has been there, seen it and got the t-shirt. Ahead of his national tour next year, the famed singer-songwriter spoke with The Note about his disdain for reality singing competitions, his love for Australian Crawl songs and why emerging musicians should move overseas.
Interview Emily Wilson // Image Kane Hibberd
James Reyne wants people to “get over it.”
If he’d had it his way, that is, in fact, what he would have titled his upcoming tour, inspired by the derailment of iconic rock outfit Australian Crawl. It has instead been dubbed Fall of Crawl, for commercial and diplomatic reasons.
“It’s been 40 years since the band split up, get over it!” he jokes over a Zoom call. He is currently holidaying in Thailand and grappling with the loss of all of his luggage.
James Reyne - who is so revered that he possesses the distinction of an Order of Australia - first achieved fame in the late 1970s as part of Australian Crawl, but has since enjoyed a thriving solo career.
“There’s a total separation,” he says of his relationship with the previous output of Australian Crawl. “Some of those songs, I wrote them when I was nineteen. That’s a long time ago.”
He is looking forward to this impending Australian Crawl-heavy tour, but his excitement is not uncomplicated. “I love these songs and they’re fun to do, but you sort of get defined by stuff you did when you were a teenager. And sometimes you want to go, ‘Great, thank you, but there’s also all this other stuff!’”
The sprawling Fall of Crawl Tour will begin in January and will carry on until the end of April.
Reyne promises that across the tour, he will stay “fairly true” to the original Australian Crawl songs. “It’s a great band around me, it’s a great rock ‘n’ roll show. I have love-hate relationships with some of the songs,” he admits. “Sometimes I go through periods where I think a certain song is silly and then I realise it’s not too bad. You find things in the song to make them fresh for you.”
His latest single ‘Going Back To Nashville’ is, as the title suggests, a country rock anthem. The song was inspired by Reyne’s relationship with country icon Tony Joe White.
“The first time I went to Nashville to do some songwriting, I worked with Tony, who lived there,” he explains. At first, Reyne didn’t enjoy the setting. “So I rang Tony and he drove me around Nashville, showing me all the country star’s houses.”
“I’ve been a fan of a certain kind of country music since I was at school,” he says. I used to listen to John Prine and Townes Van Zandt. That’s the kind of Country music I like. They invented the form.”
The dream has always been to follow in Prine and Van Zandt’s footsteps. But in the 1980s, when he first decided that he wanted to make a country record, everyone was aghast. He decided to stick to the genre anyway.
Reyne has managed to forge a successful and multi-faceted career in music - an industry that is famously fickle and challenging. Things are vastly different to when he first began.
READ MORE: Victor & Roy Wooten: Survival, Soul and the Sound of Unity
“I was trying to explain this the other day to our lighting guy, who’s 27,” he says. “It’s a totally, completely, utterly different paradigm universe. You can’t compare it. When I was starting you had four television channels. You probably had two major radio networks, but they were all localised, which was how local bands used to break out.”
Reyne gets lost on a quick tangent about current radio shows where the hosts are always “laughing at nothing all the time. Shut up!” He expresses a disdain for government handouts and artist grants. He then delves into his deep, burning hatred for reality TV singing competitions, such as The Voice or The X Factor. “Don’t go on these singing shows. That’s just depressing. It teaches you bad habits and will blow smoke up your bum. Even if you win the thing, you’ll have a bit of a profile for a few months and then it’s all over.”
He does eventually get back on track. “There was no internet, there was no computer, there were no phones. And we would tour and play five or six times a week because there was no other form of entertainment. People would go out five nights a week to their local venues. People would buy music. Record sales was how you made your money. But now it’s changing, you’ve got to make your money from touring because you can’t make it from streaming, and the radio doesn’t play Australian stuff anymore. It’s a whole different world.”
He considers what advice he would give to emerging musicians.
“If you’re young and you want to do it, just form a band with your friends and really go us-against-the-world mode,” he says. “And get out there and play. Just play gigs wherever you can. Get out there and get in front of people and start singing and playing and writing your own songs and you learn by doing it. And if you persevere something will happen at some point.”
He then settles on his final, most important piece of advice: “While you’re young, get out of Australia. If you can, move yourself to London or move yourself to America and start there. Because the scope’s bigger. I mean, I love Australia, I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, but if I was twenty, I would be going, ‘maybe we should try to live in London’. The market’s just bigger.”
A surprising - but understandable - contribution from a man who made his fortune in a band called Australian Crawl. But he sends his luck to all those who want to grab a guitar and make noise on stage, and he hopes that, eventually, people will get over the fall of Australian Crawl.
Catch James Ryene performing at Hindley Street Music Hall on Friday 6 March. Tickets on sale now via moshtix.com.au.
