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Keith Urban loves a drunk crowd · The Front

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  Speaker 1: You can listen to the Front on your smart speaker
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  Speaker 2: Just say play the news from the Australian. From the Australian,
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  Speaker 2: here's what's on the Front.
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  Speaker 1: I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, September twenty first pages now
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  Speaker 1: walkie talkies. The militant group HESBLA in Lebanon is reeling
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  Speaker 1: from another Israeli attack on the low fi technology Hesbella
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  Speaker 1: was using to avoid Israeli intelligence hacking into its smartphones.
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  Speaker 1: The remarkable spycraft behind the Mossad strike is live now
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  Speaker 1: at the Australian dot com dot au. Keith Urban is
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  Speaker 1: the country music superstar who's most famous in this country
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  Speaker 1: for being married to Nicole Kidman and being recovered from
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  Speaker 1: substance addictions. But he's revealed in an interview with The
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  Speaker 1: Australian he'd much prefer to play to drunk crowds than
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  Speaker 1: sober ones today. Why Urban is not the artist you
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  Speaker 1: think he is. There are some super famous amendments to
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  Speaker 1: the US Constitution, the right to bear arms.
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  Speaker 2: The freedom of speech.
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  Speaker 1: But if you keep going down to the twenty first Amendment,
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  Speaker 1: you'll find the repeal of alcohol prohibition back in nineteen
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  Speaker 1: thirty three, ending thirteen.
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  Speaker 2: Years of supposed sobriety.
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  Speaker 1: That ended the federal ban on booze, but states can
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  Speaker 1: still make their own rules, and there are still more
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  Speaker 1: than five hundred counties across the United States that are dry.
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  Speaker 1: According to country music superstar Keith Urban, it's a real
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  Speaker 1: vibe killer.
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  Speaker 3: You know they have dry counties in America, places with
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  Speaker 3: their own secret grow so you boot grounds, like for Jesus,
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  Speaker 3: would you guys got to do something to signing.
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  Speaker 1: Urban spoke with The Australian's music writer Andrew McMillan on
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  Speaker 1: a recent trip back to his home state of Queensland,
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  Speaker 1: where he was promoting his new album Hi. This is
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  Speaker 1: the same Keith Urban, by the way, who is mainly
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  Speaker 1: famous in Australia, at least for being a recovered addict.
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  Speaker 1: His alcohol and cocaine addictions played out in the public
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  Speaker 1: eye over many years before he famously checked into rehab
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  Speaker 1: not for the first time.
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  Speaker 2: In two thousand and six.
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  Speaker 1: Less than four months after his marriage to actress Nicole Kidman,
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  Speaker 1: country singer Keith Urban has checked himself into a rehab center.
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  Speaker 2: Urban says he's been clean ever since.
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  Speaker 3: Over the years, I've talked very very little to not
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  Speaker 3: at all about it, mostly because I never want people
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  Speaker 3: thinking I'm against grog or drugs, which I'm not at all.
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  Speaker 3: I'm just allergic to them and seid so not good
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  Speaker 3: for me, good for other people. I love playing to
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  Speaker 3: a drunk crowd, trust me, They're way more fun.
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  Speaker 1: Keith Urban knows a thing or two about crowds. Over
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  Speaker 1: the past twenty years, he's played more than a dozen
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  Speaker 1: headlining tours around the United States, where he's lived for
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  Speaker 1: three decades, and the globe, but recently he's been getting
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  Speaker 1: a little closer to the fans.
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  Speaker 3: The sheer, simplistic joy of playing that isn't about numbers
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  Speaker 3: or visual effects sort of anything.
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  Speaker 4: It's right back to the very very foundation of it.
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  Speaker 3: Make sure it's solid, make sure the players are good,
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  Speaker 3: the songs are good, everything's solid, and then we can
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  Speaker 3: start putting all.
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  Speaker 4: The whipped cream back around it.
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  Speaker 1: Andrew McMillan experienced it up close and personal.
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  Speaker 5: It was hell at a place called left His Music
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  Speaker 5: Hall in Brisbane, which is a smaller room about three
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  Speaker 5: hundred people capacity. It's the sort of room that I
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  Speaker 5: very rarely go to because hardly any national touring act
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  Speaker 5: book it, let alone international stadium level headliners like Keith.
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  Speaker 5: So he clearly booked it as an underplay kind of
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  Speaker 5: show because he's the kind of guy who regularly sells
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  Speaker 5: out ten thousand capacity venues across town. And I just
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  Speaker 5: love the fact that this massive artist wants to do
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  Speaker 5: these kind of club shows, as he calls them regularly,
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  Speaker 5: just as a way to stay hungry and to remind
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  Speaker 5: himself of what he used to do and what he
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  Speaker 5: loves doing. What he does at the small scale and
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  Speaker 5: the large.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and who's the crowd? Is it kind of your
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  Speaker 1: classic country fan?
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  Speaker 5: He seems to reach across generations, across genders. He is
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  Speaker 5: the rare artist, i'd say, who's kind of for everyone,
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  Speaker 5: and that's probably something he's lucked into rather than tried
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  Speaker 5: to do. He writes this big anthemic choruses which sound
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  Speaker 5: great sung in a crowd of three hundred or ten thousand,
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  Speaker 5: as it turns out. But at his core, he's a showman,
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  Speaker 5: an entertainer, and seeing him in that tiny venue, either
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  Speaker 5: solo or with his three piece band behind him, he
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  Speaker 5: owns the room. He has this incredible charisma, presence and
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  Speaker 5: ability to control the crowd and to defeed off their
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  Speaker 5: energy and to send it back to them. So I
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  Speaker 5: think he's one of the most extraordinary performers that Australia
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  Speaker 5: has produced.
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  Speaker 1: The gig at Lefties was a return to his roots
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  Speaker 1: in more ways than one urban joke that he probably
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  Speaker 1: wouldn't play the crowd's requests, but he still had a
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  Speaker 1: crack at a handful of rock classics.
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  Speaker 5: He is the rare performer who has his own chart
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  Speaker 5: topping hits, particularly in the country realm when the country
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  Speaker 5: charts in the US. He's had many chart toppers there,
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  Speaker 5: but he's not afraid, ashamed or embarrassed to go back
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  Speaker 5: to his roots, which in his case involved playing the
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  Speaker 5: likes of Cold Chisel's Flame Trees or the Angels, Am
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  Speaker 5: I Ever Going to See Your Face Again? Songs which
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  Speaker 5: he no doubt played when he was coming up as
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  Speaker 5: an emerging anonymous beer garden covers band performer here in
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  Speaker 5: Brisbane before he moved to the US in the early
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  Speaker 5: nineteen nineties.
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  Speaker 4: So he threw in those kinds of songs.
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  Speaker 5: As well as things like Bad Habits by Ed Sheeran
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  Speaker 5: and a pub classic staple like five hundred Miles by
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  Speaker 5: the Proclaimers.
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  Speaker 1: A bit of Tom Petty too, which is, you know
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  Speaker 1: that's a song that you need to be a great
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  Speaker 1: singer to sing free Falling, don't you.
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  Speaker 4: That's right. It's a big open melody.
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  Speaker 5: It's the kind of song that people love to sing
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  Speaker 5: along to at all by the crowds. Actually, when I
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  Speaker 5: interviewed him the morning after, we spoke a bit about
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  Speaker 5: the notion of the singers getting older, and he said
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  Speaker 5: that Mick Jagger is someone that he admires. But Mick
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  Speaker 5: Jagger's vocal range or his recordings have been quite limited.
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  Speaker 5: He's almost talk singing throughout a lot of the Rolling
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  Speaker 5: Stones catalog, where someone like Paul McCartney, who is also
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  Speaker 5: eighty one, I think, the same age as Mick Jagger.
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  Speaker 5: He's someone who has his big open melodies in his career,
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  Speaker 5: and yet he continues to perform and to sing those
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  Speaker 5: big melodies at the same key that he recorded them
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  Speaker 5: in sixty years ago, which is extraordinary. So Keith is
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  Speaker 5: a kind of guy who admires those older performers and
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  Speaker 5: he hopes to be on himself, I think. But he's
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  Speaker 5: only fifty six. He's got a few more decades together
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  Speaker 5: before it's up to their age.
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  Speaker 1: At that Brisbane gig, Urban donned some lefties merch, joking
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  Speaker 1: between songs that he'd taken up a second job as
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  Speaker 1: a bartender.
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  Speaker 2: It's an unexpected.
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  Speaker 1: Gag coming from someone who's been sober as long as
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  Speaker 1: he has. Was he comfortable talking about that topic with you?
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  Speaker 4: He was, And he made the analogy to guitar.
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  Speaker 5: Guitar repairing has got to such a point where sometimes
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  Speaker 5: if you snap the neck off a guitar, he can
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  Speaker 5: now glue it back together and it becomes stronger after
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  Speaker 5: the break, which I think is a great metaphor for
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  Speaker 5: what recovery can be for some people if they have
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  Speaker 5: the willingness and the support and the love around them,
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  Speaker 5: which Keith appears to do.
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  Speaker 1: I loved his line too about he doesn't really like
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  Speaker 1: playing to sober crowds.
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  Speaker 5: Yeah, that was a quite a revealing comment, I thought.
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  Speaker 5: I mean, it was a very unrehearsed and unstage managed
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  Speaker 5: kind of comment because he's got a big crowd. And yeah,
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  Speaker 5: he does occasionally play in these dry counties in the US,
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  Speaker 5: and he says that he'd rather play to the drunk people,
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  Speaker 5: And I guess that's also a straight line connection to
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  Speaker 5: what he did when he was a jobbing musician in
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  Speaker 5: Brisbane in the early ninety nineties. He was playing to
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  Speaker 5: a lot of people who probably didn't give a shit
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  Speaker 5: about the guy singing playing guitar in the corner. But
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  Speaker 5: he hit the right song, whether that was five hundred
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  Speaker 5: Miles or Flame Trees or whatever else is popular at
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  Speaker 5: the time, they could suddenly find something to love on.
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  Speaker 4: This guy.
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  Speaker 2: Coming up. Why you should be a Keith Urban fan?
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  Speaker 1: So we chipped away in those bars in Brisbane, and
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  Speaker 1: then he started chipping away in the same kinds of
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  Speaker 1: bars in Nashville, and then he broke through in an
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  Speaker 1: absolutely massive way. So why why Keith Urban?
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  Speaker 5: I think we shouldn't actually skirt over how long and
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  Speaker 5: hard that road was, because that's something I was really
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  Speaker 5: fascinated to find when researching him ahead of our interview.
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  Speaker 5: He spent about eight years in Nashville where he was
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  Speaker 5: just another guy with a guitar. He can play guitar
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  Speaker 5: really well, but he was kind of a nobody for
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  Speaker 5: a long time. And it takes a lot of grit,
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  Speaker 5: guts and determination to stick it out and to try
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  Speaker 5: to make that dream of reality. But he just had
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  Speaker 5: an idea of what he wanted his sound to be,
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  Speaker 5: and I guess just hope that his songs would eventually
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  Speaker 5: connect with an audience, and through sheer persistence, perseverance, and
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  Speaker 5: raw talent that eventually became the case.
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  Speaker 1: He's released an eleventh studio album, and it feels like
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  Speaker 1: everyone's going a bit country these days, from Beyonce to
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  Speaker 1: post Alone Andrew. What has Keith Eban got to say
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  Speaker 1: in this eleventh album that's new or that's different, either
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  Speaker 1: for har or for country.
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  Speaker 5: He's been an experimental country artist for longer than most
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  Speaker 5: people give him credit for. I think I think it
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  Speaker 5: was about ten years ago. He started going beyond the
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  Speaker 5: realms of traditional acoustic guitar drummers with a bit of
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  Speaker 5: electric guitar and banjo to move into like electronic music production,
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  Speaker 5: hip hop style beats, incorporating female vocals, regularly guest stars,
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  Speaker 5: like on his last album he had Pink on this one,
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  Speaker 5: he has Laney Wilson, who is one of the younger
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  Speaker 5: emerging superstars of American country. So he's the kind of
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  Speaker 5: artist who is very much willing to collaborate with others.
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  Speaker 4: He doesn't want him to play by himself in a
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  Speaker 4: room somewhere.
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  Speaker 5: He gets energy and inspiration from working with others and
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  Speaker 5: he translates that into his songwriting.
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  Speaker 1: If you were going to persuade someone to give Keith
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  Speaker 1: Urban a go, you know, to listen to him and
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  Speaker 1: understand why he is this influential and long standing artist
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  Speaker 1: of great success.
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  Speaker 2: What would the song be like. What's the song that
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  Speaker 2: sums up Keith erbin.
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  Speaker 4: Somebody like You.
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  Speaker 5: Like You, which was one of the last songs he
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  Speaker 5: played at that tiny gig at Lefties the other week.
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  Speaker 5: It's got a beautiful, open single, long chorus, it's got an.
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  Speaker 4: Incredible vibe and beat to it.
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  Speaker 5: It's one of his biggest, most popular songs, and it's
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  Speaker 5: a really upbeat, rocking song, and it's the one where
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  Speaker 5: everyone gets their phones out and lights up the room
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  Speaker 5: at the end of a Keith Urban gig, and they
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  Speaker 5: probably have for the last almost twenty years. So that's
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  Speaker 5: the one that I think, if you haven't heard him
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  Speaker 5: or taken him too seriously, give Somebody like You I'll go.
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  Speaker 1: Keith Urban's new album High is out now. Killed tour
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  Speaker 1: Australia's East Coast in mid twenty twenty five. Andrew McMillan
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  Speaker 1: is a music writer with The Australian. Thanks for joining
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  Speaker 1: us on the front this week. Our team is Kristin Amiot,
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  Speaker 1: Jasper Leek, Leathan mcglue, Tiffany Dimmack, Joshua Burton and may
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  Speaker 1: Claire Harvey.