Reyne has recently announced a new endeavour, The Magnificent Few, his first band project to not feature his name in the title since Australian Crawl. “The band I play with are a great band and we always have a lot of fun playing together, and I’ve always got songs I want to record, so I thought, ‘Why not do it as a band, recording as a band would, with everyone having a piece of the record?’ I’ll play the songs on acoustic guitar and work it up from scratch. Every time I make a record, I want to put it out under a band name. It might give it a sense of identity, so I can differentiate between me doing what I do and something new. And god forbid, we might get away with playing something new live,” he laughs.
Maintaining a balance between furthering his craft with new material and pleasing crowds hungry for Crawl classics has been a tricky prospect for Reyne to navigate in the past, finding things more manageable with his current run of dates under the banner ‘James Reyne performs Australian Crawl.’ “It used to be more difficult, but it’s not so difficult anymore. The realities are, that when we do shows, most people aren’t aware that every few years I put out a new record. That’s alright, I understand why, I’m not played on the radio. There is a core of fans that keep up with what I do. I accept that’s what people expect to hear. As I get older, I realise if you spin these things, give it a title like me ‘playing the songs of Australian Crawl,’ for instance, people can come and see that… then when I do my own shows, I can play Crawl stuff as well as solo stuff, and you can get a few new ones in. With the Magnificent Few, if we do shows, because we haven’t recorded anything yet, people can come along and hear what this band does, the songs we’ve got on record. It’s tricky; you want to be someone living in the present looking towards the future. It can be a bit frustrating when you’re constantly defined by what you did when you were essentially serving your apprenticeship. But that’s alright, I’ve come to terms with it.”
At his live shows, there’s a sly, distinctly Australian, strain of self-deprecation as Reyne performs certain selections from Australian Crawl’s back catalogue. Is there a love hate relationship with these songs? “Not at all. I like a lot of the songs, I’m happy to play them. I understand why people want to hear them. We do acoustic shows with them, we do all sorts of different things. But I certainly don’t live in that era. The songs of mine I listen to are the ones I’m working on during that particular time,” he states. “It’s like those weird lists, the Top Ten albums or Top Ten songs. They’re always pointless and silly, it’s not a competition. A couple of my songs never used to be on those lists, but I suppose if you stick around long enough they start giving you that stuff,” he laughs. “They seem to be gaining some sort of credibility over time.”
As time moves on, there are ebbs and flows in terms of appreciation for Reyne’s work as younger generations enter their musical discovery. “I’ve seen that happen to some of my songs. My daughter is a teenager, and she and her friends have picked up on some of them. It’s seemed to have come around again, I don’t know why… I’m lucky, I’m grateful. But I don’t know how it works. It just seems to happen. But I’ll take it.” The most obvious example of that generational gap bridging came in the form of Vance Joy and Bernard Fanning performing Reckless at the recent triple j Beat The Drum concert. “I didn’t know until the day, when someone told me,” he says. “It was Dave Faulkner who told me. I did some gigs with Hoodoo Gurus and Dave played the triple j show I think. It’s always flattering when someone does your song.”
Australian Crawl disbanded over half Reyne’s lifetime ago, though it’s not a timeframe he bothers to rationalise. “I don’t think about it, I try to live in the present… It doesn’t feel that long, it feels like I’ve been doing it for three years, it’s just flown by,” he reasons. “[The industry’s] been polarised with the internet and social media having a huge effect on it, both good and bad. It allows good people to get stuff out there that may not have had an opportunity before, but it also allows an enormous amount of crap to get out there that shouldn’t have the opportunity,” he laughs. “But you have to accept that. You move with it… You just try and carve out your own little niche and go along with it.”
BY LACHLAN KANONIUK
