Music and Movement Escape at Elements of Byron resort with Pete Murray and Benny Owen
Pete Murray, his fitness guru and Byron Bay: Can a $3500, four-day music ‘wellness’ retreat really whip you into shape?
Pete Murray doing push-ups in the setting Byron Bay sun, glistening like he always does because the guy’s basically James Taylor had he been born on the planet Krypton. The Byron Bay song man, the sun child, writer of the music in my head. “Hold on now your exit’s here,” he sings inside my melon. “It’s waiting just for you.” Killer lyric. It’s from that song of his, Opportunity. That line, he told me over beers last night, is about how there’s always a way out of whatever mess you’re in.
“Thirty seconds,” hollers Benny Owen, our great ringmaster. “Hoooooold.”
Hold the body in a planking push-up position then move into “Superman”, repeatedly lifting limbs from the ground, right hand, left foot; left hand, right foot; and hold. Twenty like-minded men and women of all ages and shapes doing core body fitness on this headland overlooking a section of Byron Bay beach with sand so pure and white it’s hard to spot the coin-sized translucent ghost crabs burrowing into it.
We’re here for the inaugural Music & Movement Escape, a four-night wellness retreat at the luxury Elements of Byron resort. The retreat, with its focus on health, fitness and the profound soul-shaping wonders of making and listening to music, means long and glorious days training with Byron fitness guru Benny Owen between surfing lessons, horse rides through scrub and along endless beaches, and bushwalks through towering emerald rainforests where we eat natural berries and plums and edible leaves like we were the first upright mammals that ever walked into this celebrated bay, 200,000 or so years before Chris Hemsworth did.
When we’re not training, playing or eating five-star dinners at the resort, we’re hanging out in Pete Murray’s Byron Bay recording studio, sitting at his mixing desk as he plays us unheard tracks, deep cuts, B-sides, alternative versions to the massive ARIA chart blitzers of his career.
“Twenty seconds,” hollers Benny on the headland. “Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen …”
An older participant — clever bloke, huge Pete Murray fan — assesses my “Superman” technique. “Mate, you look like a cow pissing on a wall!” he says. It took exactly one punishing 60-minute cardio fitness session for this group to shift from a bunch of polite strangers to firm friends sharing recovery drink rounds at the resort pool bar.
Here’s me now doing push-ups, dying-dog-panting like I always do, choking back vomit next to Pete Murray, searching for my exit, wondering why I don’t just go ahead and have “Darrell Lea” tattooed across my knuckles if I love his evil chocolatey wares so damn much. Maybe I can get a box of Barbecue Shapes tattooed across my right shoulder blade, a Caramello Koala across my left. Oh, the wicked things I’ve tossed down my gullet. Curse you Cadbury. Damn you Doritos. “Ten seconds!” Benny hollers. “Nine, eight, seven …”
This morning Benny gave us a workshop on healthy living. My instinct has always been to lump “wellness” experts in with members of the Manson family and other sadists but there’s something straight-down-the-line about Benny; zero “BS”, zero hard sell. He can talk about his extraordinary journey from a hard-drinking rock drummer with a belly the size of his kick drum to an 85kg iron machine without it sounding like one those 1990s health videos. He builds a trusting atmosphere among the group. He asks gentle questions. Such as: “What does your current lifestyle look like?”
“That bit in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s house goes up in the twister.”
“Do you feel your current body is a fair representation of your lifestyle?”
“Yes, and also a fair representation of a sliver of pork chop fat sliding slowly down a wall of Jaffas.”
I want to come clean, and not just about the minibar chocolate — a Rocky Road monstrosity the size of a newborn baby — I slammed down before training. “My name is Trent Dalton and I’m addicted to hot chips. My habit was learnt. My father liked hot chips, like his father before him. My friends in high school had dreams about Pamela Anderson. I had dreams of fat potato sticks bubbling in Supafry. Don’t look at me. I’m hideous.”
But Benny only ever smiles supportively: he’s been there a hundred times before. And he eventually found the exit that was waiting just for him. Quit sugar. Eat more veg. Go run up a Byron Bay mountain with your mate Pete Murray. Somewhere along one of those runs, the pair started unpicking a neat idea of Benny’s. What if they could host a retreat where music fans got fit and healthy in paradise while also getting unprecedented access to one of their favourite musicians? Pete Murray for one retreat, Bernard Fanning for the next. Kasey Chambers. Missy Higgins. Paul Kelly …
“I’m in,” Pete said. Which is how he came to be on this resort beachfront on Valentine’s Day, this glorious bastard who God thought deserved a knockabout likeability and a gentle kindness to go with his talent and his James Bond looks and his biceps like magnified macadamia nuts.
“You guys having a good time?” he asks from a makeshift stage where he’s playing a special sunset Valentine’s Day gig just for the retreat participants, half of them mums who sit in beach chairs swooning because they’ve never been in a setting more beautiful. There’s one woman in our group who weeps when Pete plays one of his new songs; she recently lost her brother, who was a huge Pete Murray fan. She wanted to come here in his memory, she will later tell Pete.
“You guys like Wolfmother?” Pete says into the microphone. We all holler, and the wildly talented Andrew Stockdale — lead singer and guitarist with that band, and a mate of Pete’s and Benny’s — ambles on stage. In a surreal moment of just-for-the-hell-of-it wonder, he howls soaring and note-perfect versions of Wolfmother classics Joker and The Thief and Woman.
Pete returns to the mic and makes some knowing gags about the journey we’ve all been on, learning about health and muscles we never knew we had and having the time of our lives along the way. The sun sinks over Byron Bay and the stars come out over our heads and we toast the sky and everything beneath it. And Pete Murray sings his final song, his great ode to taking chances, trying new things, doing things a little differently and changing your life in the process.
“Hold on now your exit’s here,” he sings. “It’s waiting just for you.”
Music & Movement Escapes, from $3445 per person, include four nights at Elements of Byron, meals, airport transfers, daily fitness sessions and activities such as surfing lessons and bushwalking. musicandmovementescapes.com; elementsofbyron.com.au