Regional centres are getting some much-needed attention on tour of intimate venues, and Murray admits he’s falling back in love with gigging. It’s all in honour of his latest release Blue Sky Blue – The Byron Sessions, which sees him revisit the 2011 album with a host of new interpretations. It may seem like a who’s who of Australian music but almost everyone on the album is a good friend of Murray’s (Bernard Fanning, Katie Noonan, Darren Middleton, Ash Grunwald and Scott Owen); it just so happens his friends are pretty damned talented.
Natalie Pa’apa’a (who wrote the rap for the title track but according to Murray was “too shy to perform it”) is the only contributor Murray hadn’t met personally. Although this release has evolved into an entire reworking of Blue Sky Blue, the project didn’t consciously start out that way. “Myself and my management were talking about doing something different this time round, and we thought I’d maybe do a solo tour, which I’ve never done in this country,” Murray says. “The song Blue Sky Blue we sent off to Natalia, so she wrote the rap on that and it was great, we were really into it. We didn’t know if I was going to do a few new songs with a couple of old ones or how we’d do it, but one thing that I did not want to happen was to do a Greatest Hits.”
Now on the road, Murray is essentially playing a solo show with the help of a few key players. “I’m not doing the exact same versions that are on the album,” he explains. “What I’m doing on tour now is playing stomp box, acoustic and harmonica. My support act does beat box and slide guitar so he jumps up with me, and my guitar tech is my bass player in my band so he gets up and plays bass as well. The sound, particularly with the beat boxing, is really fresh and acoustic and I’m just really enjoying [it].”
Playing to tens of thousands of people in a gargantuan venue may seem like a dream for some people but the heart and soul of connecting with an audience can be lost when performed on such scales. “Every crowd has been incredible [on this tour] and they’re so pumped up because I’m playing such small venues, and the crowd are a part of the show; I’m making it really interactive,” he says.
With such an impressive list of friends on the album, Murray assures that audiences will get to see a lot of those guests on his tour. He does, however, hold back on being too specific. “Pretty much 95 percent of the people involved with the album will play at some point on the tour,” he says. “Busby Marou have already played with me in Fremantle, Darren Middleton is going to come and play some guitar at The Corner Hotel and that’s probably all I should say apart from, yeah, there’ll be people popping up at a lot of the shows.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
