James Reyne's Fall of Crawl tour kicks off with two shows at the Prince Bandroom this month before returning to Victoria in March.
It’s common for musicians to dedicate tours to significant anniversaries, be it a record release date or the year of a band’s formation. But James Reyne’s upcoming national tour marks a less auspicious milestone: 40 years since the “derailment” of Australian Crawl, the band he led from its founding in 1978 until its split in 1986.
“Last year, I might have done an interview or something where all the person did was go, ‘Australian Crawl, Australian Crawl,’” says Reyne. “And I probably got off the phone and said to my manager, ‘Do they realise it’s 40 years since that band split up?’ And he goes, ‘I tell you what, when we do a run next year, we should remind people it’s 40 years since the band split up.’”
James Reyne
- Fall of Crawl tour
- 23 Jan – 24 April
- Tickets here
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
James Reyne hasn’t stopped touring over the last 40 years, and his solo catalogue is now far more expansive than that of his former band. It’s been a while since he’s had a hit to rival enduring Crawl songs like Boys Light Up and Oh No Not You Again, but he’s still reaching younger listeners. Case in point: last December, Reyne was on the lineup for the punk- and metal-oriented Good Things festival.
“I didn’t really know what to expect and I tell you, it was so great,” Reyne says. “Bands like Machine Head and all these sort of bands, they were so nice. I didn’t know how the crowd would be, and the crowd was so good to us. It was a great experience to me.”
Reyne’s Good Things setlist was largely composed of songs by Australian Crawl. He’ll be playing all the Crawl’s biggest hits on the upcoming tour, as well as staples from his solo repertoire, such as Fall of Rome, Hammerhead and Motor’s Too Fast.
“I’ve got a song out at the moment called Going Back to Nashville, I’ll probably throw that in,” Reyne says. “But other than that, it’s 90 minutes of stuff they know. Crowds love it. They forget about some of the songs – some of the songs you start playing and you hear the whole crowd going, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember this one.’”
Several Australian Crawl songs, such as Boys Light Up, Reckless, Errol and Oh No Not You Again, have embedded themselves in Australian music culture. But Reyne has resisted becoming a nostalgia act.
“The weird thing is, if you write songs, it’s a craft, you know? The more you work on your craft, the better you get. And I just think I’m a better songwriter now than I was then,” he says.
Some of Australian Crawl’s best-known songs weren’t written by Reyne – notably Oh No Not You Again and Downhearted, which guitarist and occasional lead vocalist Guy McDonough wrote.
“Downhearted, Guy wrote with a guy called Sean Higgins,” Reyne says. “This was before Guy was in the band. I shared a house with Guy and I knew Sean, and then they started a band called The Flatheads. But I remember them playing me that song and I’m going, ‘It’s a fucking great song.’”
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McDonough died in 1984, shortly after the band signed a US record deal with Geffen Records. Reyne thinks of McDonough every time he performs Oh No Not You Again.
“I know exactly what it’s about. I know who the girl is that he wrote about. It’s not about what I imagine people think it’s about. And I remember the first time he played it to me and going, ‘That’s a really good song,’ because it says so much in a simple way. It’s very hard to say a lot in a simple way in a song.”
McDonough also sang lead vocals on Errol, a song that he and Reyne wrote together. The chorus, “Errol / I would give everything / Just to be like him”, is a nod to the pair’s mutual fascination with Australian-born Hollywood actor Errol Flynn.
“I’d read a book about Errol Flynn and I was going through a period of watching all his old films,” Reyne says. “I remember giving Guy the book and saying, ‘You should read this.’ We liked those sort of guys, the adventurers, and we just had a little fantasy.”
Four decades after Australian Crawl split up – and nearly 50 years since the band formed – Reyne is still finding new things to latch onto in the band’s songs.
“It’s like a football team: you rest a couple of them for six months and then you go, I’ll put that back in the set because I quite like that bit, I understand why that bit resonated with people.”
Find all James Reyne’s upcoming tour date here.
