THE REALITY OF MUSICAL GRUNT

Russell Crowe talks to Michael Smith December 1998

"The great thing about playing with musicians that are not session musicians and are not mercenaries, they're there because they love the songs and they love the music."

And that's the whole point about 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts for Russell Crowe, the band's singer, guitarist and one of the songwriters of this humble musical collective. Most readers will be more aware of Crowe in his other guise, as an actor, and more on his thoughts about that later, but for him, this is the real deal, the thing that roars quietly away in his spirit, the reality that gets him through the unreality of his '"day job". And it's not easy keeping a band together with that sort of day job.

"We have our conversations, we really do. And funnily enough it always comes out when we've had a really powerful night in a rehearsal room. The more we play together, year in year out, sometimes we go into the room and just casually start something and at the end of it we'll be looking at each other going, 'F--k.' There's a certain connection that we have when we play together, its indefinable. So we do ask ourselves where are we going to go with this -- what I say is it'Äôll be whatever you want it to be. And I can understand the difficulty for these guys who are so passionately involved in music having to basically put it on the shelf but I have to do the same thing. When we come together, this is the real point in our otherwise unreal existences."

Their debut album, Gaslight, is a mix of live and studio recordings from a variety of sessions both in Australia and overseas, and while there are 11 tracks credited, you actually get 14, so there are surprises throughout the listening experience.

"Actually it came from Dave (Kelly) and Garth (Adam) sitting around having a chat about how many hits we were getting on the Internet. We recorded two shows at the Esplanade last year, so we had these two 24-track digital recordings, and Garth's idea was to put a live EP together because everyone was getting a bit restless on the Internet ' 'cos they hadn't had anything new lately. So that's what we intended doing but as we were talking, we've got so many songs recorded because we've been playing together over such a long period of time, that it kind of gets in your way when you start thinking about what you're going to do next. Though you've been writing new songs you start feeling a bit crowded, so I said we've got to let some of the kids go, we've got to let them out of the house and let them live their own life. So it went from being a live EP to a live and studio album that people on the Internet could access. That allowed us to be a little retrospective as well and bring some songs onto this album -- things like Eternity and Wendy -- which we may never get back to as a band in terms of recording." Even so, the version of something like Wendy in particular is one that you wouldn't expect to hear from any band let alone this one, recorded as it was on 8-track in an apartment in Los Angeles with about 30 people sitting around on the floor.

The fact that there are live tracks on there too allows Crowe to present another aspect of what makes this band tick, the Spoken Word introduction to The Legend Of Barry Kable, epitomizing the storytelling approach to the songwriting.

"All the songs come from some real point. Sometimes you combine characters, as any writing does, but it's about personal experiences. What I do in my day job is I take on somebody else's life and I project their thoughts, emotions and feelings and their time and place and geography, through dialogue and costume. But that's a performance. It really has nothing to do with me. It is me, physically, and it's me driving the train, but I don't live in 1952, I wasn't born in a computer, I''ve never been a neo-Nazi skinhead. But these songs, these are about my life, about things I have experienced. Not that I really believe anybody should give a shit, but I do and the way I express the things that I have seen personally is songs. It's an absolutely valid creative expression, and it's of no greater or lesser importance than any performance I do as an actor. These are all reality-based stories."

Since 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts don't have to answer to anyone but themselves as artists and their fans, the way they make music and the way they've made this album hasn't been compromised by any commercial consideration or company pressure.

"A lot of people have questioned the way the album runs. I didn't want it to be comfortable. I get so sick of buying an album where the first three tracks you already know, and then it's so f--king safe and if there'Äôs anything a little untoward or extreme, they put it at the end. I thought you start off with Circus and then you go totally south by going to something like You Treat Me Like Chocolate, which a record company would probably encourage you to hide if not drop all together, but that's a very sensual piece of music. From there you go into the middle of a room with 500 people! I wanted the feel of it to keep changing, so it's an album that you have to get used to, that you have to know to enjoy. You can't put it on as background music."