WEBVTT - Keith Urban loves a drunk crowd 0:00:06.840 --> 0:00:09.240 You can listen to the Front on your smart speaker 0:00:09.360 --> 0:00:12.360 every morning to hear the latest episode. 0:00:12.640 --> 0:00:21.560 Just say play the news from the Australian. From the Australian, 0:00:21.680 --> 0:00:22.760 here's what's on the Front. 0:00:22.880 --> 0:00:31.840 I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, September twenty first pages now 0:00:32.000 --> 0:00:36.120 walkie talkies. The militant group HESBLA in Lebanon is reeling 0:00:36.159 --> 0:00:40.000 from another Israeli attack on the low fi technology Hesbella 0:00:40.200 --> 0:00:45.040 was using to avoid Israeli intelligence hacking into its smartphones. 0:00:45.680 --> 0:00:50.200 The remarkable spycraft behind the Mossad strike is live now 0:00:50.240 --> 0:00:56.520 at the Australian dot com dot au. Keith Urban is 0:00:56.600 --> 0:01:00.840 the country music superstar who's most famous in this country 0:01:01.120 --> 0:01:04.760 for being married to Nicole Kidman and being recovered from 0:01:04.840 --> 0:01:08.640 substance addictions. But he's revealed in an interview with The 0:01:08.640 --> 0:01:12.560 Australian he'd much prefer to play to drunk crowds than 0:01:12.640 --> 0:01:17.160 sober ones today. Why Urban is not the artist you 0:01:17.240 --> 0:01:30.240 think he is. There are some super famous amendments to 0:01:30.280 --> 0:01:33.679 the US Constitution, the right to bear arms. 0:01:33.520 --> 0:01:34.560 The freedom of speech. 0:01:35.120 --> 0:01:37.920 But if you keep going down to the twenty first Amendment, 0:01:38.280 --> 0:01:42.640 you'll find the repeal of alcohol prohibition back in nineteen 0:01:42.720 --> 0:01:44.919 thirty three, ending thirteen. 0:01:44.560 --> 0:01:46.880 Years of supposed sobriety. 0:01:47.640 --> 0:01:51.320 That ended the federal ban on booze, but states can 0:01:51.400 --> 0:01:54.400 still make their own rules, and there are still more 0:01:54.440 --> 0:01:58.160 than five hundred counties across the United States that are dry. 0:01:58.880 --> 0:02:02.160 According to country music superstar Keith Urban, it's a real 0:02:02.480 --> 0:02:03.120 vibe killer. 0:02:04.080 --> 0:02:07.400 You know they have dry counties in America, places with 0:02:07.480 --> 0:02:12.840 their own secret grow so you boot grounds, like for Jesus, 0:02:12.840 --> 0:02:15.440 would you guys got to do something to signing. 0:02:17.919 --> 0:02:21.040 Urban spoke with The Australian's music writer Andrew McMillan on 0:02:21.080 --> 0:02:23.480 a recent trip back to his home state of Queensland, 0:02:23.760 --> 0:02:27.880 where he was promoting his new album Hi. This is 0:02:27.919 --> 0:02:30.200 the same Keith Urban, by the way, who is mainly 0:02:30.200 --> 0:02:34.120 famous in Australia, at least for being a recovered addict. 0:02:34.720 --> 0:02:37.880 His alcohol and cocaine addictions played out in the public 0:02:37.919 --> 0:02:42.120 eye over many years before he famously checked into rehab 0:02:42.480 --> 0:02:43.440 not for the first time. 0:02:43.680 --> 0:02:45.239 In two thousand and six. 0:02:46.320 --> 0:02:49.320 Less than four months after his marriage to actress Nicole Kidman, 0:02:49.520 --> 0:02:52.799 country singer Keith Urban has checked himself into a rehab center. 0:02:53.960 --> 0:02:56.320 Urban says he's been clean ever since. 0:02:57.760 --> 0:03:02.320 Over the years, I've talked very very little to not 0:03:02.400 --> 0:03:07.080 at all about it, mostly because I never want people 0:03:07.360 --> 0:03:11.400 thinking I'm against grog or drugs, which I'm not at all. 0:03:12.280 --> 0:03:15.720 I'm just allergic to them and seid so not good 0:03:15.720 --> 0:03:19.080 for me, good for other people. I love playing to 0:03:19.080 --> 0:03:21.880 a drunk crowd, trust me, They're way more fun. 0:03:25.280 --> 0:03:29.119 Keith Urban knows a thing or two about crowds. Over 0:03:29.120 --> 0:03:31.560 the past twenty years, he's played more than a dozen 0:03:31.680 --> 0:03:34.960 headlining tours around the United States, where he's lived for 0:03:35.040 --> 0:03:39.080 three decades, and the globe, but recently he's been getting 0:03:39.160 --> 0:03:40.880 a little closer to the fans. 0:03:42.160 --> 0:03:45.720 The sheer, simplistic joy of playing that isn't about numbers 0:03:46.600 --> 0:03:48.440 or visual effects sort of anything. 0:03:48.920 --> 0:03:51.480 It's right back to the very very foundation of it. 0:03:51.720 --> 0:03:54.240 Make sure it's solid, make sure the players are good, 0:03:54.480 --> 0:03:57.680 the songs are good, everything's solid, and then we can 0:03:57.720 --> 0:03:58.400 start putting all. 0:03:58.360 --> 0:03:59.600 The whipped cream back around it. 0:04:01.800 --> 0:04:04.840 Andrew McMillan experienced it up close and personal. 0:04:06.240 --> 0:04:08.120 It was hell at a place called left His Music 0:04:08.160 --> 0:04:10.920 Hall in Brisbane, which is a smaller room about three 0:04:11.000 --> 0:04:13.560 hundred people capacity. It's the sort of room that I 0:04:13.760 --> 0:04:16.839 very rarely go to because hardly any national touring act 0:04:16.920 --> 0:04:20.400 book it, let alone international stadium level headliners like Keith. 0:04:20.560 --> 0:04:22.599 So he clearly booked it as an underplay kind of 0:04:22.680 --> 0:04:25.679 show because he's the kind of guy who regularly sells 0:04:25.720 --> 0:04:28.960 out ten thousand capacity venues across town. And I just 0:04:29.000 --> 0:04:32.360 love the fact that this massive artist wants to do 0:04:32.440 --> 0:04:35.080 these kind of club shows, as he calls them regularly, 0:04:35.120 --> 0:04:37.880 just as a way to stay hungry and to remind 0:04:37.920 --> 0:04:39.919 himself of what he used to do and what he 0:04:40.000 --> 0:04:43.320 loves doing. What he does at the small scale and 0:04:43.360 --> 0:04:43.800 the large. 0:04:44.440 --> 0:04:46.840 Yeah, and who's the crowd? Is it kind of your 0:04:46.839 --> 0:04:47.839 classic country fan? 0:04:48.680 --> 0:04:53.559 He seems to reach across generations, across genders. He is 0:04:53.600 --> 0:04:56.400 the rare artist, i'd say, who's kind of for everyone, 0:04:56.920 --> 0:05:00.600 and that's probably something he's lucked into rather than tried 0:05:00.680 --> 0:05:04.359 to do. He writes this big anthemic choruses which sound 0:05:04.360 --> 0:05:07.400 great sung in a crowd of three hundred or ten thousand, 0:05:07.600 --> 0:05:11.560 as it turns out. But at his core, he's a showman, 0:05:11.640 --> 0:05:15.200 an entertainer, and seeing him in that tiny venue, either 0:05:15.360 --> 0:05:17.839 solo or with his three piece band behind him, he 0:05:17.960 --> 0:05:21.520 owns the room. He has this incredible charisma, presence and 0:05:22.000 --> 0:05:25.760 ability to control the crowd and to defeed off their 0:05:25.839 --> 0:05:28.120 energy and to send it back to them. So I 0:05:28.120 --> 0:05:30.760 think he's one of the most extraordinary performers that Australia 0:05:30.760 --> 0:05:31.360 has produced. 0:05:32.240 --> 0:05:34.719 The gig at Lefties was a return to his roots 0:05:34.760 --> 0:05:37.680 in more ways than one urban joke that he probably 0:05:37.720 --> 0:05:40.880 wouldn't play the crowd's requests, but he still had a 0:05:40.920 --> 0:05:43.480 crack at a handful of rock classics. 0:05:44.200 --> 0:05:47.200 He is the rare performer who has his own chart 0:05:47.240 --> 0:05:49.680 topping hits, particularly in the country realm when the country 0:05:49.760 --> 0:05:51.880 charts in the US. He's had many chart toppers there, 0:05:51.920 --> 0:05:56.480 but he's not afraid, ashamed or embarrassed to go back 0:05:56.480 --> 0:05:59.560 to his roots, which in his case involved playing the 0:05:59.680 --> 0:06:11.720 likes of Cold Chisel's Flame Trees or the Angels, Am 0:06:11.760 --> 0:06:13.880 I Ever Going to See Your Face Again? Songs which 0:06:13.920 --> 0:06:16.240 he no doubt played when he was coming up as 0:06:16.320 --> 0:06:20.919 an emerging anonymous beer garden covers band performer here in 0:06:20.960 --> 0:06:23.599 Brisbane before he moved to the US in the early 0:06:23.960 --> 0:06:24.799 nineteen nineties. 0:06:25.160 --> 0:06:26.839 So he threw in those kinds of songs. 0:06:26.600 --> 0:06:29.440 As well as things like Bad Habits by Ed Sheeran 0:06:30.200 --> 0:06:33.560 and a pub classic staple like five hundred Miles by 0:06:33.600 --> 0:06:45.920 the Proclaimers. 0:06:41.279 --> 0:06:43.600 A bit of Tom Petty too, which is, you know 0:06:43.640 --> 0:06:45.640 that's a song that you need to be a great 0:06:45.680 --> 0:06:47.320 singer to sing free Falling, don't you. 0:06:55.040 --> 0:06:56.880 That's right. It's a big open melody. 0:06:56.960 --> 0:06:58.400 It's the kind of song that people love to sing 0:06:58.400 --> 0:07:01.680 along to at all by the crowds. Actually, when I 0:07:01.720 --> 0:07:03.880 interviewed him the morning after, we spoke a bit about 0:07:04.320 --> 0:07:07.080 the notion of the singers getting older, and he said 0:07:07.080 --> 0:07:10.520 that Mick Jagger is someone that he admires. But Mick 0:07:10.640 --> 0:07:14.560 Jagger's vocal range or his recordings have been quite limited. 0:07:14.560 --> 0:07:16.600 He's almost talk singing throughout a lot of the Rolling 0:07:16.600 --> 0:07:20.400 Stones catalog, where someone like Paul McCartney, who is also 0:07:20.520 --> 0:07:22.520 eighty one, I think, the same age as Mick Jagger. 0:07:22.840 --> 0:07:25.680 He's someone who has his big open melodies in his career, 0:07:25.720 --> 0:07:28.880 and yet he continues to perform and to sing those 0:07:28.960 --> 0:07:32.240 big melodies at the same key that he recorded them 0:07:32.280 --> 0:07:35.080 in sixty years ago, which is extraordinary. So Keith is 0:07:35.080 --> 0:07:38.480 a kind of guy who admires those older performers and 0:07:38.520 --> 0:07:40.200 he hopes to be on himself, I think. But he's 0:07:40.280 --> 0:07:42.680 only fifty six. He's got a few more decades together 0:07:42.680 --> 0:07:44.080 before it's up to their age. 0:07:46.560 --> 0:07:50.720 At that Brisbane gig, Urban donned some lefties merch, joking 0:07:50.760 --> 0:07:53.160 between songs that he'd taken up a second job as 0:07:53.200 --> 0:07:53.880 a bartender. 0:07:54.520 --> 0:07:56.560 It's an unexpected. 0:07:55.880 --> 0:07:59.240 Gag coming from someone who's been sober as long as 0:07:59.280 --> 0:08:03.240 he has. Was he comfortable talking about that topic with you? 0:08:04.160 --> 0:08:07.040 He was, And he made the analogy to guitar. 0:08:07.480 --> 0:08:10.040 Guitar repairing has got to such a point where sometimes 0:08:10.160 --> 0:08:11.800 if you snap the neck off a guitar, he can 0:08:11.880 --> 0:08:15.000 now glue it back together and it becomes stronger after 0:08:15.040 --> 0:08:16.920 the break, which I think is a great metaphor for 0:08:17.000 --> 0:08:20.040 what recovery can be for some people if they have 0:08:20.120 --> 0:08:22.880 the willingness and the support and the love around them, 0:08:22.920 --> 0:08:23.920 which Keith appears to do. 0:08:26.080 --> 0:08:28.040 I loved his line too about he doesn't really like 0:08:28.080 --> 0:08:29.480 playing to sober crowds. 0:08:31.120 --> 0:08:34.000 Yeah, that was a quite a revealing comment, I thought. 0:08:34.040 --> 0:08:37.720 I mean, it was a very unrehearsed and unstage managed 0:08:37.800 --> 0:08:40.920 kind of comment because he's got a big crowd. And yeah, 0:08:40.920 --> 0:08:43.960 he does occasionally play in these dry counties in the US, 0:08:44.120 --> 0:08:46.680 and he says that he'd rather play to the drunk people, 0:08:47.200 --> 0:08:49.600 And I guess that's also a straight line connection to 0:08:49.679 --> 0:08:52.000 what he did when he was a jobbing musician in 0:08:52.040 --> 0:08:54.800 Brisbane in the early ninety nineties. He was playing to 0:08:54.840 --> 0:08:56.520 a lot of people who probably didn't give a shit 0:08:56.520 --> 0:08:59.520 about the guy singing playing guitar in the corner. But 0:09:00.320 --> 0:09:02.400 he hit the right song, whether that was five hundred 0:09:02.480 --> 0:09:05.520 Miles or Flame Trees or whatever else is popular at 0:09:05.520 --> 0:09:08.360 the time, they could suddenly find something to love on. 0:09:08.400 --> 0:09:08.920 This guy. 0:09:12.800 --> 0:09:16.000 Coming up. Why you should be a Keith Urban fan? 0:09:31.360 --> 0:09:33.960 So we chipped away in those bars in Brisbane, and 0:09:33.960 --> 0:09:36.480 then he started chipping away in the same kinds of 0:09:36.559 --> 0:09:40.360 bars in Nashville, and then he broke through in an 0:09:40.440 --> 0:09:44.720 absolutely massive way. So why why Keith Urban? 0:09:45.600 --> 0:09:49.000 I think we shouldn't actually skirt over how long and 0:09:49.040 --> 0:09:52.120 hard that road was, because that's something I was really 0:09:52.120 --> 0:09:54.920 fascinated to find when researching him ahead of our interview. 0:09:55.280 --> 0:09:58.960 He spent about eight years in Nashville where he was 0:09:59.440 --> 0:10:02.000 just another guy with a guitar. He can play guitar 0:10:02.040 --> 0:10:04.480 really well, but he was kind of a nobody for 0:10:04.520 --> 0:10:07.000 a long time. And it takes a lot of grit, 0:10:07.200 --> 0:10:10.560 guts and determination to stick it out and to try 0:10:10.600 --> 0:10:14.480 to make that dream of reality. But he just had 0:10:14.960 --> 0:10:17.040 an idea of what he wanted his sound to be, 0:10:17.160 --> 0:10:19.800 and I guess just hope that his songs would eventually 0:10:19.840 --> 0:10:24.839 connect with an audience, and through sheer persistence, perseverance, and 0:10:25.200 --> 0:10:27.559 raw talent that eventually became the case. 0:10:28.360 --> 0:10:32.720 He's released an eleventh studio album, and it feels like 0:10:32.760 --> 0:10:36.200 everyone's going a bit country these days, from Beyonce to 0:10:36.400 --> 0:10:40.000 post Alone Andrew. What has Keith Eban got to say 0:10:40.120 --> 0:10:43.000 in this eleventh album that's new or that's different, either 0:10:43.040 --> 0:10:44.120 for har or for country. 0:10:44.960 --> 0:10:48.920 He's been an experimental country artist for longer than most 0:10:48.920 --> 0:10:51.120 people give him credit for. I think I think it 0:10:51.200 --> 0:10:53.600 was about ten years ago. He started going beyond the 0:10:53.640 --> 0:10:57.400 realms of traditional acoustic guitar drummers with a bit of 0:10:57.440 --> 0:11:01.720 electric guitar and banjo to move into like electronic music production, 0:11:02.320 --> 0:11:07.720 hip hop style beats, incorporating female vocals, regularly guest stars, 0:11:07.880 --> 0:11:10.360 like on his last album he had Pink on this one, 0:11:10.400 --> 0:11:13.600 he has Laney Wilson, who is one of the younger 0:11:13.640 --> 0:11:17.199 emerging superstars of American country. So he's the kind of 0:11:17.240 --> 0:11:20.680 artist who is very much willing to collaborate with others. 0:11:21.040 --> 0:11:22.640 He doesn't want him to play by himself in a 0:11:22.720 --> 0:11:23.240 room somewhere. 0:11:23.240 --> 0:11:26.920 He gets energy and inspiration from working with others and 0:11:27.000 --> 0:11:28.920 he translates that into his songwriting. 0:11:29.920 --> 0:11:32.480 If you were going to persuade someone to give Keith 0:11:32.559 --> 0:11:34.360 Urban a go, you know, to listen to him and 0:11:34.440 --> 0:11:39.720 understand why he is this influential and long standing artist 0:11:39.800 --> 0:11:40.760 of great success. 0:11:40.840 --> 0:11:42.640 What would the song be like. What's the song that 0:11:42.720 --> 0:11:44.160 sums up Keith erbin. 0:11:44.600 --> 0:11:45.680 Somebody like You. 0:11:52.000 --> 0:11:57.040 Like You, which was one of the last songs he 0:11:57.040 --> 0:11:59.760 played at that tiny gig at Lefties the other week. 0:12:00.400 --> 0:12:03.640 It's got a beautiful, open single, long chorus, it's got an. 0:12:03.600 --> 0:12:06.200 Incredible vibe and beat to it. 0:12:06.200 --> 0:12:08.840 It's one of his biggest, most popular songs, and it's 0:12:08.840 --> 0:12:12.679 a really upbeat, rocking song, and it's the one where 0:12:12.920 --> 0:12:15.000 everyone gets their phones out and lights up the room 0:12:15.080 --> 0:12:17.040 at the end of a Keith Urban gig, and they 0:12:17.040 --> 0:12:19.760 probably have for the last almost twenty years. So that's 0:12:19.800 --> 0:12:21.840 the one that I think, if you haven't heard him 0:12:21.960 --> 0:12:25.240 or taken him too seriously, give Somebody like You I'll go. 0:12:45.080 --> 0:12:48.400 Keith Urban's new album High is out now. Killed tour 0:12:48.440 --> 0:12:52.760 Australia's East Coast in mid twenty twenty five. Andrew McMillan 0:12:52.880 --> 0:12:55.439 is a music writer with The Australian. Thanks for joining 0:12:55.520 --> 0:12:58.440 us on the front this week. Our team is Kristin Amiot, 0:12:58.520 --> 0:13:02.520 Jasper Leek, Leathan mcglue, Tiffany Dimmack, Joshua Burton and may 0:13:02.679 --> 0:13:03.360 Claire Harvey.