‘We did the show 65 times, and we killed them every time’: Bill Murray

If 2018 feels a world away, a time when pandemics were mere plot points in multiplex blockbusters, Bill Murray remembers it like yesterday. That November, the Hollywood star toured Australia with German cellist Jan Vogler to perform their New Worlds show at the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne’s Plenary Theatre.

The gigs – a bizarre part-live music, part-spoken word departure for the beloved onscreen actor – were part of a massive world tour which culminated in a gig at the Acropolis in Athens, which has been turned into the unlikely concert film New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilisation, now screening in cinemas.

Bill Murray and German cellist Jan Vogler. The pair’s friendship developed into the hit tour, New Worlds.

“We did the show 65 times, and we killed them every single time. Did we not, Mr Vogler? Did we not kill them every single night?” Murray excitedly asks his maestro over Zoom. “Every single time we killed them. Every. Single. Time.

“And yet, every single time, 15 or 20 minutes into the show, people were like, ‘Well, I don’t know just yet ... ’ But we knew! And we threw all our energy at it.

“I was happy to see the film,” Murray continues, “because I finally got to see what the other people were doing. The rest of the time I’m just another schmuck on the stage, but watching Jan play or watching Vanessa [Perez, pianist] play … We’d go on a roll for, like, 35 minutes, just pounding [the audience] over the head with incredible music and lyrics, and all of a sudden they’d go, ‘Oh my god.’

“You’d feel the energy change. It was almost orgasmic the way they’d get their heads cracked open. And then they were on the ride.”

Far from the reticent interviewee of legend, I’ve caught Murray in a gregarious – and punctual – mood. “Wow, Bill’s here, on time completely, wow,” Vogler exclaims when Murray joins the Zoom call.

Dressed in a bowling shirt and a pork-pie hat, he’s seated in a dim hotel room in Cleveland where he’s been staying ahead of the NBA’s All-Star Weekend, roped into doing “funny things for tech-y folks” at one of the weekend’s satellite summits by his close friend, former NBA Inside Stuff host Ahmad Rashad.

”I met the – what do you call it? – the platform man from TikTok,” Murray says between sips from a mini-bottle of Patron and mouthfuls of clementines. “And there were a bunch of famous folks, basketball player types. I dunno, we were just supposed to be funny, and the tech people thought we were, so...“

The New Worlds gigs weren’t Murray’s first time in Australia. He’d previously visited Sydney decades ago where he holed up at The Boulevard Hotel on William Street.

“I had a good time in Sydney,” the 71-year-old recalls. “I saw a Komodo dragon in that little zoo across the bay. Went to the beach at Bondi Beach. I did go to a pyjama party, but that’s a long story that I really can’t tell you.”

Bill Murray on stage in the concert film Bill Murray’s New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilisation.

Well, now I want to know the story.

“I’ll have to run into ya,” he says. “We’ll have a couple drinks, we’ll talk about the pyjama party. But it was a good one.”

Although Murray had sung in rock bands in high school, and maybe more famously as Nick the Lounge Singer on Saturday Night Live, the anarchic, sardonic character that first marked him as a breakout on the sketch show, the New Worlds tour seemed an odd departure to his fans.

But his collaboration with the East Berlin-raised Vogler developed organically. The pair first met at an airport, when Bill questioned how Jan was going to take his cello on the plane. They struck up a friendship over their shared interest in American literature, which led to an impromptu performance at the New York Yacht Club in 2016, which then led to the tour which ran almost three years. Their natural camaraderie is apparent in the film.

“Jan keeps working, he’s got a job, I can’t account for this guy,” Murray jokes of their relationship since the tour ended. “He acts like the Communists are gonna come and take all his money or something, so he works a lot. I don’t understand it at all.”

“I’m just an immigrant,” Vogler laughs.

“Yeah, that’s it,” says Murray, “he’s a hardworking immigrant, the kind of people that built America … and Australia, for that matter.”

The building of America is one of the show’s preoccupations, a seemingly grab-bag of spoken word recitations from Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox, along with musical numbers like Gershwin’s It Ain’t Necessarily So from Porgy and Bess and Tom Waits’ The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me).

“The material was assembled by Jan to make a sort of picture of America,” says Murray, “his picture of America, which jived with my picture of America, and Vanessa and Mira’s [Wang, violinist] as well.”

A West Side Story medley including I Feel Pretty and America, which Murray performs with outlandish mayhem, speaks to Vogler’s immigrant experience in the US but was also a rebuke to the political landscape the show debuted in, in the midst of Trump’s presidency.

“It was an interesting time to be performing those songs in America, because the politics … It was so extreme and there was so much vitriol about who was what,” says Murray, recalling the gross disinterest with which the US government met the twin catastrophes of Hurricanes Maria and Irma that befell Puerto Rico in 2017.

“There’s a line in America that goes, ‘Nobody knows Puerto Rico is in America’. During those years, [Puerto Ricans] weren’t really taken care of by the United States like they should’ve been, we really left them to struggle. So when we’d sing that line at the shows, you’d hear a roar from people, like ‘Yes, goddamnit!’” he says.

“You had this sense of satisfaction that you were saying something that was already powerful in the ’50s when Sondheim and Bernstein wrote this song, and it still had that same power and melancholy, like why don’t we take better care of our people?”

There are also personal flourishes, such as Murray’s performance of the Van Morrison deep cut, When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God, from his 1989 album Avalon Sunset, which quickly became New Worlds′ stirring emotional heart. Murray says he discovered the CD in an old car he took for a trip across the California desert.

“It had been a very unusual summer that year, there was lots and lots of rain, and the desert that was usually completely bone dry was covered with flowers; it was a very rare thing. I drove near the divide, and all of a sudden there were lots of people who had come out to look at the flowers and the sunset, and I just saw the sun hitting their sunglasses and this song was playing, and I thought, this is an incredibly powerful moment.”

He was so affected by the song, he urged composer Stephen Buck (Perez’s husband) to “arrange it in a way so we can play it with our funny little band”.

“It’s just an amazingly powerful song, and there was no amount of energy that was too much to throw at it,” says Murray.

“We put it in a point of the show that, in the theatre it’s called the ‘8.40 number’ – it’s the moment where you’re like, ‘Well, this has either gotta get a whole lot better right now or people are gonna start walking’, so you’ve gotta take it to another level. That song is so much emotion, the power of the lyric and the intensity of the feeling, and the force and madness of the strings, it just sort of blasts the whole room with this feeling.”

”That was really Bill’s song,” adds Vogler. “Many people have said they’ve heard Van Morrison’s original and they like our version better. But it’s very much Bill’s thing – the subject, the way he sings it – and it was very much a success story, this song.“

New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilisation is in cinemas now.

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