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Photo by Kane Hibberd

James Reyne has been a stalwart of the Australian music scene for more than 40 years, we caught up to him in Brisbane ahead of his show in Cairns as part of the Way Out West tour with Ella Hooper in August.

N - Hi, James How are you this morning?

J- I'm doing fantastic.

Where are we talking to you today?

J- I am in Brisbane today, we played a show last week and we had to reschedule a show, so we're doing the second Tivoli show this Friday, which should have been last Friday, but there you go.

I saw on Facebook you broke your ankle, and that didn't look like such an awesome experience. How did you manage that?

J-  I was just walking and tripped and rolled my ankle.

And then you had to wear your moon boot for, what, six or eight weeks or something?

J- Yeah, I had to wear the boot for six weeks, that's now six, seven weeks ago now, I took some time off and since then, I've just been doing rehab and lots of physio and I'm back. I'm walking around completely normally and I go for long walks in the morning and I go to the gym and I'll be back running next week, so I'm fine.

That's great. You've released twelve solo albums and a number of live albums, a lot of musicians to talk about their albums as, like, children. So I was wondering, do you have a favorite child there? Do you have a disappointing child there?

J- I don't really, I mean, if I do think about them I think about what was happening when I made the album, that I did it for this reason. I work with those particular people for that reason, that means I was hanging around with those people at the time. So I worked with them at that time. So the albums just remind me more of a time in my life, if I think about them at all. Once it's done, it goes out into the world and it does what it does. And I've moved on to the next thing, usually.

I guess you play your songs, but you wouldn't be playing whole albums very often, you'd just be selecting songs from particular albums.

J- Yeah, well, what we do in our shows is we play songs from across my career, I am in show business and I think you give the audience what they want. So when we do our shows, it's like 90 minutes of all the stuff that people expect to hear from me. It's lots of crawl stuff, lots of my solo stuff that was played on the radio. You know, that's why it's been great, because everybody knows all the songs and they really get into it.

J- So that's what we do live. I mean, occasionally, really occasionally, we might throw in something from a more recent record, but the bulk of the show is stuff that everybody knows. Give the people what they want. That's show business. You’re crazy not to, they pay their money, they want to hear certain songs, you play those songs.

J- I mean, if I buy a ticket to go and see somebody I like, I want to hear the stuff that I know that they did.

So Australian Crawl was formed in 1978, and you were in a little band before that, so your career stretched for more than 40 years. It's a pretty long stint as a performer. What do you see as some of the highs for you over that period of time?

J-  The biggest high is the fact that I'm still doing it on the level that we do it. We do it on a really good level in this country and we pull really good crowds and there's an eight piece band and we do shows fairly consistently.

J- I like to say we're the best band in Australia, we are, it's just a great band. And I think, if you keep your mind open and you keep yourself, your healthily, it's not self critical, but you're constantly learning about the craft, the craft of what we do, so you're only going to get better.

J- My analogy is, if I'm building a house, I would rather get someone that's been building houses for 30 years than someone's been building houses, for one. People say, oh, you've been doing this for 40 years, as if to say you wouldn't. So I think we're getting really good at what we do because we know what we're doing, because we've been doing it for so long.

I saw you with the Red Hot Summer Tour last year, and the the thing that came across to me, and I've seen you a number of times throughout the years, is you still look like you love doing it, mate.

J- I do. I love doing it more than I ever have and am constantly learning, Like a science. Everybody knows everybody in the band is really good at what they do individually, and they all do other things musically apart from this band. So they're just people who are really good. Yeah. I love it. I really enjoy it.

How have these shows been a little bit different to those Red Hot Summer shows that you played last year.

J- The Red Hot Summer shows have a lot of bands on the same bill and it's outdoor shows where this is just our shows.

We're doing them with Ella Hooper, who's our special guest, and I guess they're indoor and more intimate.

But these would be longer sets?

J- Yeah, because on the Red Hot Summer, we do probably an hour, and then these are 90 minutes, an hour and a half, and they're our shows, I think it's not like we're just part of a whole bunch of other people. This is us.

You mentioned that you're touring with Ella Hooper. How did that come about, that you two teamed up for this tour?

J- She is fantastic, and I've known Ella as an acquaintance and as a friend for quite a long time. She made a record about a year ago. Small Town Temple which I liked.

J- You plan these tours a year before you actually go out so over a year ago, Ella was sort of a special guest. It just seemed like a good idea. Her music kind of is not too far away from mine and it fits the sort of thing I do.

I'm looking really forward to seeing both of you play together. Not together at the same time, but like, seeing her set and then seeing your set because I think they tie together quite well.

J- Yeah. They sort of complement each other, and we  rerecorded a version of the song Way Out West. So she comes on stage with us, and we sing Way Out West together. So we do that together. But yeah, you have Ella’s set and then short break, and then we come to our set.

So have you played up here in Cains at the Tanks Art Center before?

J- Maybe not the art centre, but I've played Cairns many times.

Are you working on recording or writing anything at the moment?

J- Well, I am always writing yeah, I've got songs. I mean with streaming I don't know about putting albums out. You know, it might be one of those things where you just put out songs every few months.

J- I mean, since I broke my ankle, I couldn't really get about. But now that I'm up and about and once we finish this tour, I'm probably going to go back in the studio with a friend of mine called Tim Henwood and probably start recording some songs.

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned streaming there, and it just seems like it can be such a good thing, but it's such a disaster for musicians. Because I think back when I was a kid, you had to buy CDs of all the music you liked, $25 a shot. Now my children can listen to any song ever recorded, pretty much for free.

J- Yes, exactly. Look, I know exactly well, I won't bore you with my rant, but yes, suffice to say, it's a completely different landscape. Not just in the music business, but in every business.

J- I think it's just a completely different technological, corporatized landscape, and I think you've just got to learn how to move with the changes. I think, like every business, there are just changes in everything. And I think you have to understand it's a completely different model and landscape, you've got to work your way, you've got to find your place within it. You’ve got to navigate and work your way within it.

J- I mean, now the difference for me is you make your living by playing live. Whereas it used to be you could make a living from album sales, you're living by playing live and from record sales. But now, as you say, the record sales part of part of it has been kind of taken out of the picture, by and large.

J- So, yeah, you just got to work your way around the changes.

I always like to ask songwriters what their songwriting process is, and I read online that I think it was an interview with The Music that you've said in the past, the time it takes for me to write a song sometimes can be the actual length of the song. So I was just hoping you could tell us a little bit about your process for writing songs.

J- Sure. Yeah. It wasn't like that with all my songs but with that particular song, Reckless, the story is that I just started messing around with these chords, and I was just playing them, and it was in a completely formed and I was just singing these sort of noises, which often happens, you just sing phonetic noises along.

I think I was probably playing it and noodling with it for a while, and then suddenly I started with these words that started kind of coming out that kind of matched the phonetic noises I was making. And I remember writing it, and it just didn't seem to take that long. It wasn't like playing it once. It just fell out. But, I mean, you play it a few times, you just started making I didn't really think about it. It just happened to the point where when I finished, sort of finished, I thought, okay, well, I don't know whether that's any good.

J- I didn't think it was that good, because I thought lyrically, it didn't make any sense. Nothing. It didn't hang together, so I never thought it was that good.

J- So I didn't play it, then one day I was making these very basic demos on it, like reel to reel, working with a guy called Bob Starkey. Bob was the first person I knew who had a kind of reel to reel recorder where he lived. He was the first person that said, what's that song? I Said, that's a bit of thing, bit of fluff. He said, no, you should have put that down, That's pretty good.

J- So we did a demo of it and then we were recording an album. Australian Crawl was recording an album, and as we often used to do, at the end of it, someone says, has anyone got anything else? Because you used to have B sides for singles so it would be just some bit of fluff that somebody had and go, I'll just chuck that on the B side.

J- I played Reckless and again, I can't take credit for it, but the other guys said, no, we should record that. That's not bad, I was like really? Okay.

J- So we recorded it and it turned out to be that song. It was one of those songs I thought, one day I'll fix up the lyrics but I’m lazy, so who knows what it means? But it seems to have mean something to a lot of people. So that's good.

I think it's actually a really beautiful song. And I really struggle to go to Circular Quay in Sydney and not think of that song, and they're getting rid of those old manly ferries, were you living at the time when you wrote that?

J- It was a long time ago but  I remember I was sitting somewhere and I could see them and I said, the pontoon where people catch the ferry, I am not sure if they still have them, but they were kind of floaty. Sort of floating pontoons

Yeah, they still float. They're still there.

J-  I remember seeing them and saying pontoons bump and sway. I meant just lines like that. They just popped out because I think I was looking at a pontoon. These really weird little things that happen by coincidence, these things happen and you just write you just think of that. Yeah. Anyway,

Such a great song. Thanks for sharing that story with me and thanks for your time this morning, James. I really look forward to seeing you up in Cairns in just a few weeks time.

James Reyne and his band, with Ella Hooper (Killing Heidi) Play The Tanks Arts Centre on Saturday The 12th of August. Tickets are available from Ticketlink HERE