Concert review: Russell Crowe resuscitates his music career with Indoor Garden Party
As an actor, Russell Crowe’s work has long since achieved a timeless quality. What he’s aiming to accomplish through his attempts as a musician, however, is far less certain.
“What we do in life echoes in eternity,” said Russell Crowe in his most famed film role, playing Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator.
As an actor, his work has long since achieved that timeless quality. Alternately radiant, raging, magnetic, wounded, tender and charismatic, his best performances on the silver screen will endure as long as we retain a fondness for watching stories.
What he is aiming to accomplish in his sideline career as a musician, however, is far less certain.
On Thursday night in Brisbane, Crowe and nine fellow musicians gave a performance that was never less than polished and professional, yet only occasionally offered a glimpse beyond the quotidian into something approaching greatness.
Billed as Russell Crowe’s Indoor Garden Party, this motley crew is nearing the end of a 17-date tour of eastern capital cities and regional centres.
At the first date of a two-night stand at The Triffid, one of the Queensland capital’s best rooms for viewing live music, about 200 payers brought their sense of curiosity to see and hear what was on offer.
This was far from the New Zealand-born performer’s first attempt at seeking an audience for his music. As a singer-songwriter, he has plenty of runs on the board: his rock band Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts operated from 1992 to 2005, and released three albums.
Its latter years coincided with the peak of Crowe’s Hollywood stardom, including a string of career-defining roles in L.A. Confidential (1997), The Insider (1999), Gladiator (2000) and A Beautiful Mind (2001).
He retained the TOFOG acronym with another group, The Ordinary Fear of God, which released an album in 2005. Led by Crowe’s sonorous voice, the modus operandi for both acts was stirring, heartland rock ‘n’ roll coloured by acoustic guitars, horns and occasional folk music influences.
Few heard those songs on release, though, and fewer still are listening today: combined, those two former bands attract about 4200 monthly listeners on streaming service Spotify.
A collaborative album with Canadian musician Alan Doyle followed in 2011, with Crowe’s then wife Danielle Spencer singing on most of its nine tracks.
Since 2017, Indoor Garden Party has been his occasional musical outlet, with one album release to date. According to Crowe in the publicity materials for this tour, it’s “an event, a band, a happening. It’s fluid. The personnel changes, but it’s always big. It’s like a festival where I gather people I admire, musicians and storytellers, and we put on a show.”
The current tour is his biggest tilt with this group to date. Having not performed music in Australia since 2014, Crowe has been heavily promoting these concerts on his social media accounts to several million followers.
Booked as underplays in small pubs and clubs, many of these shows have sold out, giving the impression of a rebuilding musical buzz about the jobbing actor, now 59.
Enough Crowe musical trivia: how was the show?
Perhaps you are expecting, even hoping, to read that it was somewhere between a torrid debacle, a self-absorbed trainwreck, an obnoxious waste of time, or one man’s misguided yet ongoing attempt to divert public attention from his considerable talents in one art form into another. Perhaps all of the above.
It was none of these things.
Instead, it was weirdly compelling, and not always because of the music. Across 110 minutes, Crowe and co delivered a collection of original songs and covers, with few dips in energy or enthusiasm.
The average age among punters was north of 40, and without being unkind, many of them seemed as though they didn’t get out to many gigs. Accordingly, a Thursday night in the company of a celebrity while watching him do something for which he’s largely unheralded had a unique appeal.
It’s tough to imagine many in attendance leaving with a feeling of being short-changed, for the entire production – lights, sound, performance – shone as brightly as most other acts who visit this room in any given year. Nobody was being swindled, and there was no dishonesty emanating from the stage, only a bunch of music lovers giving their best efforts.
A five-piece band was flanked by four female vocalists, and when Crowe strode out at 8.30pm with slicked-back hair, a silver beard and a black blazer, he didn’t so much light up the room as saunter on in a low-key fashion, almost as though he was suddenly shy about the idea of being the centre of attention.
It was a curious introduction, as though he had made a decision to dismiss the idea of attempting to win over the crowd from the first note. There could be no mistaking that his star power was the key attraction, but it took a while for him to warm up to adopting a showman role, as he found a rhythm between singing and talking between songs.
Among the originals, he debuted several unreleased Indoor Garden Party songs and spruiked a forthcoming album release. Like much of what he has issued since the TOFOG days, these songs – occasionally autobiographical, he confessed – were sturdy without being flashy.
On stage, Crowe’s favoured stance is to grasp the microphone in his right hand and grip the mic stand with his left, at hip height. Invariably, he closed his eyes while singing, and favoured the lower end of his register, where he found a highly credible Leonard Cohen impression during a cover of Take This Waltz.
It was near the end of that song, 35 minutes into the concert, that he moved into a higher register for the first time, and the shift was genuinely surprising. His voice nearly frayed at the edges, lending a sense of drama to the occasion.
The Cohen song suited him much better than the cover of Dire Straits’ Romeo & Juliet that arrived later in the set, where the sparse backing of a lone keyboard player revealed his vocal limitations.
The musicians all came across as well-drilled and tight, as expected after a dozen dates in quick succession. Perhaps the smartest choice the band leader has made is to surround himself with talented players, as there was no weak link to be seen or heard.
The most effective musical moment was a cover of an Amy Shark single from 2018 titled Psycho, with Irish singer Lorraine O’Reilly taking on Shark’s part while she strummed an acoustic guitar. Their two voices blended well, and several other voices joined them as the song reached its climax, creating a pleasing multi-part harmony.
An hour in, Crowe offered the choice between a song and a story; we asked for and received the latter, so he told us about an experience filming a 1995 comedy called Rough Magic, which he described as a little-seen “piece of shit”.
A key scene involved the actor lying perfectly still during repeated takes, as a live tarantula crawled up his chest and into his mouth. His telling was practised but loose, with a well-earned punchline, and the break in musical proceedings was appreciated as he slipped into a different kind of acting, if only for a few minutes.
The one and only time he strapped on an electric guitar was in the encore, when the band kicked into a rocking alternative version of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. It followed an upbeat, danceable arrangement of Nick Cave’s Into My Arms, which sounded much better than it might on paper.
The crowd had halved to about a hundred devotees by that point, yet the band worked steadily toward a peak for a final cover, Amy Winehouse’s Valerie, before the house lights came on and a mild stupefying spell was broken.
Will any of what we heard from Crowe’s mouth on Thursday night echo in eternity, like that artfully powerful line he delivered in character as Maximus?
Probably not, but nor will most of the music that’s being played and covered by performers of all shapes, sizes and styles every night in this country.
Only one band touring Australia today is led by an Oscar-winning actor, and if nothing else, the man’s second attempt at artistic timelessness is to be admired, for there can be no doubting his commitment to the part.
Russell Crowe’s Indoor Garden Party tour continues in Brisbane (Friday), followed by Australia Zoo, Beerwah (Saturday, 12pm), Canberra (June 6) and Sydney (June 9-10).
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