James Reyne: “The ARIAs are for wankers, the Logies are rubbish”
JAMES Reyne has firm opinions – the ARIAs are for wankers, the Logies are rubbish, but rock ’n’ roll is a craft that matters.
JAMES Reyne, Australian Crawl frontman, solo troubadour, the most handsome man in Aussie rock, is in big trouble.
He’s in the dark post-gig carpark of a regional Victorian pub, and he’s surrounded by six burly blokes. They’re pissed, in both the Australian and the American sense of the word, and Reyne figures he’s probably only seconds away from receiving a ham-like fist to that good-looking face.
“How dare you,” they growl. “Who do you think you are?”
Reyne’s crime? He neglected to include the 1980 Australian Crawl hit The Boys Light Up in his set. He just didn’t feel like playing it, and the fact that he could hear people in the crowd constantly yelling for “BOYS” made him perhaps even more determined to leave it out. These people couldn’t tell him what to do.
Except they could, and they were, and Reyne now had to think fast if he wanted to save his teeth.
“These guys are like, ‘I drove a hundred f…ing kilometres to hear that f…ing song!’ They were gonna kill me. I was packing my guitar into the car, so I whipped it out and did a quick, impromptu version of The Boys Light Up, right there in the carpark,” he laughs.
It’s a classic James Reyne story, told over a bowl of pappardelle with pork and wild mushrooms at Georges on Waymouth. The 61-year-old singer doesn’t hold back, he’s candid in the extreme. He names names, pokes fun at sacred cows, takes the piss. It’s just rock ’n’ roll, he clearly thinks, when did everyone get so serious? Take the ARIA awards, Australian music’s night of nights, the pinnacle, the red-carpet shindig where music’s biggest names get together to recognise – and be recognised for – their art. It is, according to Reyne, “an absolute joke and a waste of time”.
“They’re all wankers and it’s a joke and it means nothing,” he says. “I mean it’s almost as bad as the Logies. I have a Logie and an ARIA, so I can say this. I won a Logie for best new actor and I was embarrassed! I left the country. Nobody wants a Logie. It means you’ve crossed over and joined the dark side. We used to have a joke that said, ‘win a Logie and you’ll never work again’, and that seems to be true.
“I’m not allowed to watch the ARIAs at home because I throw stuff at the TV. First of all, we’re not talking about art here, we’re talking about a craft. Now, some people are good at that craft, but I’ve done this for 30-something years and only now do I feel like I’m becoming an OK craftsman.
“Yes, some great songs are written every year, but when you start handing out awards, I just … I just want to push them all over in a puddle. And when they act like they don’t want to be there! I mean, if you don’t want to be there, don’t f...ing be there you stupid little pricks! And if you do want to be there then dress properly and speak properly or bloody stay home and smoke your bongs and watch it on the TV like I do. Except I have a wine these days. Or 50.”
Reyne maintains that he “chucked his ARIA out”, and the Logie ended up as a doorstop in the toilet of his Melbourne house, later turning up in a tabloid magazine piece entitled “I found James Reyne’s Logie”. In print Reyne can come across as abrasive, even grumpy, but it’s all said with a grin and a twinkling eye and he’s happy to turn it all back on himself.
Take Australian Crawl’s induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1996 – “It didn’t mean a thing, didn’t change my life a single bit!”
Or the “ridiculous” concept of mixing music with sport. “OK, yes, I’d play the Grand Final,” he concedes. “But only if they paid me what they paid Meatloaf.”
Reyne’s happy to poke fun at the rock ’n’ roll industry because he’s both entrenched in it and outside of it. On one hand he’s a cocky frontman with 40 years’ experience who’s never had a day job (“not yet, anyway”). On the other he’s a regular bloke with a couple of kids (teenage daughter Molly and son Robbie, a singer and actor) who can see how silly the whole shebang is and how lucky he is to have never had to dig ditches for a living, unlike good mate Daryl Braithwaite.
The Sherbet singer famously spent time on a council road gang between the breakup of his band and his successful solo career. And if Reyne can’t get away with not playing Boys Light Up, imagine the uproar if Braithwaite didn’t play Horses, the Rikki Lee-Jones penned song that’s become a pseudo national anthem and earned the singer a whole new legion of fans.
“I do wonder if he’s sick of it,” Reyne laughs.
“I tease him and say things like, ‘Remember when you were known for that song? What was it called? Howzat!?’ I love him dearly, he’s a great friend. Now every spring racing carnival, he gets 84 bloody gigs and the song’s not even actually about horses!”
Reyne keeps looking forward though, and he’s just got back from a writing and recording session in Nashville with producer extraordinaire Nash Chambers, brother of Kasey. “We put down some demos,” he says. “We may or may not release those – he’s busy, I’m busy. He’s working on them though. I don’t know what’s going to happen to them, but I am going to make a new album at some stage in the next year or so.”
But Reyne’s not holding his breath in the hope that it’ll be picked up by radio. He gave up on that years ago.
“I don’t struggle to get my new songs played, they simply don’t get played,” he says with a resigned shrug of the shoulders. “That’s the dilemma of what I do – you get better and better at your craft, but people are less interested. Radio is like, he’s that guy – we don’t play him. We play this other guy.
“I just get annoyed as I get older because the places are run by idiots. If I was 20 again, forming a band, I don’t think our music would go on high rotation.”
Algorithms and computerised playlists, Reyne says, have stripped radio of its personality and left emerging artists at the mercy of consumer surveys and program directors.
“That’s why we were so lucky to grow up in a time where a local DJ in Adelaide could just decide to play Australian Crawl simply because he loved it,” he says. “That’s impossible now.”
Not that any Adelaide DJs actually did that, with Reyne insisting that the City of Churches was one of the last places in Australia to embrace his old band. We were too enamoured with our own heroes – Cold Chisel and The Angels – to pay much attention to some “snotty little surfie kids from Melbourne”.
“Yeah, Adelaide was funny,” Reyne says. “The local band would come on and everyone would go crazy, then we’d come on and everyone would be like (folds his arms and scowls).” They won us over eventually. They were always going to with their storytelling and their irresistible hooks. It’s these songs – Reckless, Downhearted, Beautiful People – and Reyne’s solo hits like Hammerhead, Fall of Rome and Motor’s Too Fast, that allows the singer to string together a 90-minute gig where most people know every word.
“I’ll chuck in a couple of new ones to mix it up, but I know what people want to hear.” After all, he doesn’t want to meet anyone in the carpark.
James Reyne’s Reckless Tour is at Thebarton Theatre on December 8. Book at Ticketmaster