If He Can't Take The Piss Out Of It, Who Can?

James Reyne has cast a huge shadow over the Aussie music scene for some 35 years now, first adding his distinctive voice to the legendary Australian Crawl before embarking on a storied solo career in the late ‘80s that has so far seen him rack up some 13 albums under his own steam. 

An avid songwriter, Reyne is instinctually always surging forwards, however the massive musical legacy that he’s left in his wake over the years means that he’s obliged to pay his respect to his past as well solely due to massive demand. Accordingly, right now he’s not only presiding over a career retrospective tour titled ‘All The Hits: Solo, Crawl & More’, but also putting out a brand new eponymous six-track EP by his current project, James Reyne & The Magnificent Few.

“It’s nice to make a band record — I love playing in this band,” the affable Reyne smiles. “A couple of us have a long history; [former Australian Crawl member] John Watson plays drums and he and I have played together for 30 years or something. But we all enjoy playing together, so I thought, ‘I’ve got some songs, let’s make a band record!’ Everyone ‘came with their A game’, as they say. I think everyone got really involved and feel a sense of ownership of it, which is great — I was hoping that would happen. Everyone really cared about it and was in the studio all the time and putting in, it was really good. 

"If anyone thinks something’s crap they just go, ‘That’s crap’ and we can all handle it."

“And it sort of takes the pressure off me — not that I ever really feel any pressure, but it allows everyone to throw all of their ideas in, and as we all know with a collaborative process so often you can have 15 ideas and hopefully most of them are all really fantastic ones. But we all know each other so well that if anyone thinks something’s crap they just go, ‘That’s crap’ and we can all handle it because we all get one well so it’s fine. It’s a good dynamic.”

Reyne explains that whilst most of the tracks on James Reyne & The Magnificent Few are of recent vintage, they weren’t necessarily penned for this specific project.

“I don’t know if I write for projects, I just write songs all the time,” he tells. “I’m always fiddling around with something. But there’s a song on there called Suckerville and the actual guitar part — which is in an open E tuning — when I first went to university in 1975 I lived in a house with a guy called Mark Hudson, and he and I co-wrote [Australian Crawl’s 1979 debut single] Beautiful People, and the acoustic guitar part in Suckerville is something that Mark had so that’s from 1975! The basic essence of it comes from back then and then I sort of made it into a song, so that certainly wasn’t written for this. I’d always had ideas for that, thinking, ‘Surely I can turn that into something?’ and it so happened that it came out on this record. In 1975 I was seventeen or eighteen and Mark was one of the first proper guitar players that I knew well — I had friends who could play the guitar really well, like Brad Robinson and Dave Cahill who I went to school with — but Mark was the first real rock’n’roller that I knew and he taught me about open tunings, I didn’t know anything about that. That was the first thing that I knew how to play on an open tuning on the guitar, so I guess that’s why it stuck with me.”

The new EP features a strong batch of easy-flowing lyrics, but Reyne believes he’s been in pretty good form in that regard for a while now.

“I’d like to think that the last six albums have been the best stuff that I’ve ever written in terms of lyrics,” he attests. “I enjoy writing lyrics, I enjoy writing… poetry’s probably being a bit too pretentious, but you want to make sure that if you read it on a page that it stands up. So I spend time making sure that I’m happy with the words, and I really enjoy that process — I really like doing that. It’s something that I’d get a great deal of satisfaction out of even if no one ever read it, I just like doing it just for myself. It’s just a good thing to do.”

Of the new tracks What A Pain In The Ass It Is… is awesomely scathing, although Reyne has no intention of unveiling just who might be the song’s unnamed protagonist. 

“When it started off there was someone who inspired it, in the beginning, but not really,” he chuckles. “It quickly becomes just the usual amalgam of stuff and then you make up stuff, and then it just becomes a matter of playing with the words — you start enjoying yourself just playing with the words to make little twists and turns and rhymes and things like that. But there’s a rough basis in something, although I don’t want to say who it is obviously. And I wouldn’t want to qualify the person. 

"There’s no way that the guys in Guns N’ Roses were sitting around with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a bag of smack, going, ‘Let’s listen to Australian Crawl again, they’re cool!’"

“But then some of it’s a bit more general — I’m not complaining, but the amount of people who come up to me and say something like, (adopts yobbo voice) ‘Mate, remember back in 1981 and we had that huge night and we were talking at three o’clock in the morning!’, and I have to say, ‘Ah, no I don’t remember that, I have no idea whatsoever. If it was three o’clock in the morning in 1981 I’d probably had a lot to drink and I’ll be honest with you — and sorry if you think I’m a horrible person — I have no recollection of it’. And they’ll be like, ‘What do you mean?’ Some of it comes out of that.”

Another strong new track is I’d Still Be In Love With You, a collaboration with Mia Dyson which finds their voices intertwining to great effect.

“It’s such a beautiful voice she’s got,” Reyne enthuses. “The first time I met her was when we did [TV quiz show] Rockwiz together, and then I think I ran into her at the airport a couple of times — that’s our friendship. But she’s a lovely girl and a great singer and a great guitar player, and I thought that her voice would be perfect for this — I didn’t think for a second that she’d say yes, because she lives a lot of the time in Los Angeles now. We just put the feelers out thinking that she’s probably be too busy or not interested, but she was keen which was great, good on her.” 

Reyne has done some cool vocal collaborations over the years — 1985’s R.O.C.K. with Lin Buckfield and 1992’s Way Out West with James Blundell spring to mind — does he enjoy singing alongside others?

“Yeah, I do,” he tells. “If you get the right person and they embrace the thing and really like it and want to do it then it’s great fun, it’s fantastic. And it’s flattering — if you think of someone for a song and ask them and they say ‘yes’, that’s also flattering. That’s not why you do it, but it’s nice. And [Mia] sang the shit out of this, it was awesome. I’d sent her demos of the girl’s part to Los Angeles and I’d sung it differently, so when she sent it back she said, ‘Ah, I’ve sort of changed it, I hope you don’t mind’, but I think she’s just made it better — she made it much better than what I did.”

Reyne and his bandmates are playing launch shows in Melbourne and Sydney to introduce James Reyne & The Magnificent Few, and he explains that these shows are a completely different proposition to the more extensive ‘All The Hits’ run.

“Yeah, they’re totally different,” he continues. “What we’re doing with those shows is we’ll play all of the songs on the EP, and then we’re going to do a whole lot of songs which are my stuff but songs that we don’t often get to do in my normal gigs. Because ‘All The Hits’ is all of the hits — all of the Crawl stuff and my stuff and some [early-‘90s project] Company Of Strangers stuff — but that’s a good ninety-minutes-plus of all hits; all killer, no filler as they say. But this is totally different, and it gives us an opportunity to play the new stuff and things we don’t necessarily get to play often like album tracks.”

Given that he’s sung on close to 20 albums now once you add all of his career threads together it must be great to have the chance to stretch out beyond his many radio songs occasionally.

"A couple of the songs I got to take the piss out of with a big smile on my face, but I’d still play them."

“Yeah, and I do love doing the radio songs — which is a great way to put it,” he laughs. “‘All The Hits’ is all the radio songs, and [the other launches are] the stuff that doesn’t get played on the radio that we love playing. Although we’ll probably throw in a couple of the popular ones anyway for the all the people who didn’t read the poster and yell out for Boys Light Up.”

His last major tour was 2014’s self-explanatory ‘James Reyne Plays Australian Crawl’ — this trip down memory lane was a huge win from the punters’ perspective, did the singer have fun it as well?

“Yeah it was great, I enjoyed it,” Reyne admits. “I really rediscovered some of those songs which was nice, and people really embraced it so it did really well. Everything about it was fun and positive. A couple of the songs I got to take the piss out of with a big smile on my face, but I’d still play them; like, ‘Listen to this one, this is awful – but we’ll play it’. People seemed to take that in the spirit with which it was intended. If I can’t take the piss out of it I don’t know who can.”

It must feel more rounded now for Reyne though doing ‘All The Hits’ rather than just visiting that early portion of his career?

“Yeah, it does. It also helps remind people that it wasn’t just the Crawl and that there was all of this other stuff that went on. It feels more rounded, and you can maybe see a bit of a progression in the songs or the songwriting or performances — they didn’t so much get better as developed how they developed. So I’m looking forward to it and hope that this will be fun too.”

During last year’s tour Reyne playfully mentioned the similarity to Guns N’ Roses’ classic single Sweet Child O’ Mine when introducing Aussie Crawl’s (earlier) single Unpublished Critics, a cause that was later picked up by the media and hyped to the point where former Gunners bassist Duff McKagan was forced to issue a denial. This must have been a rather surreal chain of events no matter how one spins it?

“Yeah, it’s funny — all it takes is the media to jump on it and suddenly it’s a ‘thing’,” Reyne offers. “For years people have been talking to me about the similarities and I’d go, ‘Oh yeah, I suppose. Okay, whatever’. Then suddenly it’s become a media issue and people are ringing me for comments. I’ve got to be careful about what I say, but legally… there are so many examples, and if anyone sat down and really tried you can find so many songs that are just complete lifts of other songs, it’s just going to happen. Then there are the ridiculous examples like the poor Men At Work situation, which is just outrageous and ridiculous, and that gets through while so many others that should don’t. I’m not saying that this is one of those — there are certainly similarities, but so there are with many other songs.”

And it is hard to imagine the members of Guns N’ Roses sitting sound in the studios back in the late-‘80s poring over a copy of Aussie Crawl’s Sirocco album (from which Unpublished Critics came).

“That’s what I kept saying to people!” Reyne laughs. “I bet you that there’s no way that the guys in Guns N’ Roses were sitting around with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a bag of smack, going, ‘Let’s listen to Australian Crawl again, they’re cool!’ No way!”