If anyone knows about the touring lifestyle, it’s Pratt.
Madonna, Michael Jackson, Womack & Womack, David Coverdale, The Pretenders, Tina Turner, Sophie Ellis Bexter, Elton John, Natalie Imbruglia, Jimmy Page, Roxy Music, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smiths, Tears For Fears…we could be here all day and that’s just some of the names session bass player Guy Pratt has worked with.
Initially coming to international attention as a teenager with the band Icehouse, Pratt was soon touring the world, including playing support for one of David Bowie’s European tours in the early ‘80s. Since then he’s toured with Roxy Music, Robert Palmer, David Gilmour, and in a couple of world tours playing bass for Pink Floyd.
So if anyone knows about the touring lifestyle, it’s Pratt.
He’s performing his show, Guy Pratt’s Wake Up Call, as part of this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The most obvious question that needs to be asked is how does an internationally touring musician make the transition to performing in a comedy festival? “Because all musicians have a great font of funny stories. All musicians are funny – except singers, obviously,” he deadpans down the phone line from Adelaide, where he has been performing his show that is part stand-up, part storytelling. “That’s why musicians are funny, so they can deal with the singers.”
He continues, “I’ve had such a mad career for about 20 years and I’ve got all these stories that I love telling, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got a choice: you can either be that bloke down the pub, who everyone just says, ‘Don’t get him started…’ or you can try and tell them in front of an audience’,” he says. In August 2005, Pratt’s one-man music/comedy show, My Bass & Other Animals, debuted in Edinburgh. A book based on that show was then published in 2007. A second stand-up show, Breakfast Of Idiots, followed and now he’s touring the world again in a show that’s about touring the world.
“People seem to really like it, because it’s everything they kind of hoped was true,” he says of his tales about life at the pointy end of the music business, and the madness that comes with breathing the rarefied air of the superstar.
“Just really insane behaviour,” he says is what most of his stories are about. “Most of it is my own, I’m kind of careful about that; the person who ends up looking a twat in most of my stories is me,” he says. Although he says his previous shows were more autobiographical, this latest one sees him “branching it out” and, in some parts, he does name names. “’Wake Up Call, it’s very much about touring life, and the madness that just comes with living in hotels for months on end. And I’ve actually started to slip in other great stories I’ve heard about other people,” he says with a mischievious laugh.
In that way, he says, the show should appeal to a broad range of people. “Anyone who’s got any sort of remote interest in music at all, even in the most casual sense, or anyone who enjoys a funny story or anyone who’s ever travelled or has ever stayed in a hotel for more than one night will understand this. There’s something about hotels, good and bad, that brings out the inner-Madonna in everyone”
Guy Pratt performs Guy Pratt’s Wake Up Call at The Hi-Fi from April 12 – April 14. It’s at 7pm Tuesday – Saturday and 6pm on Sundays. Tickets are $22 – $29.50 and available through TIcketmaster online, 1300 660 013 and at the door.
