Few pop legends of the ‘60s and ‘70s are still winning ARIA Awards more than 45 years later. Russell Morris is an exception.
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“It’s a great feeling because you tend to think you’ve had your time in the sun and you’re living on the past, when all of sudden you do an album and it’s the biggest seller of 2013. Most of my contemporaries are desperate to have a contemporary hit,” says the now 70-year-old.
The ARIA Hall of Fame inductee says he’s been “extremely lucky”. At my protestation he gives me this analogy: “It is luck because what happens in the music business is; you like to dance, you go to a place and perfect this dance and people say ‘that’s great’. But after a while people stop watching it, even though you might be doing it the better than you ever did. Music has become a consumer commodity instead of an art, and they may not like the next dance.”
Morris says he has to please himself foremost. “I do something that’s credible in my mind, and worthy, but if people don’t like it, I can’t change their perceptions. When I did the blues albums, I did what I love about music.”
He says the album trilogy of Sharkmouth, Van Diemen’s Land and Red Dirt, Red Heart, was a risk. “I didn’t sit down and say ‘what’s going to work for me’, but once I’d written Sharkmouth, a neon light went on.”
On the road it was hard for a while. “People did come along and want to hear all the old stuff, but I would say ‘I am going to sing you some new stuff’ and I would tell the story first.”
Morris will perform some of his new songs on this tour. “I don’t know where this new stuff came from. After I finished writing the last one, I thought ‘my mind is blank, I don’t know if i’ll ever write another song’. Three months went by before I squeezed one out like juice from a lemon. Next thing I knew I’d written 26 songs in 10 months.
“They just seemed to come out a little bit different. There’s just faint echoes of the last three albums. Being an artist is a risk. You become stagnant if you don’t take risks. It’s lovely when people like it. But you can’t expect success, even if you think ‘gee this is great’ otherwise you are dancing with the devil.
“When I was younger it was a different kettle of fish. If I recorded a song, I could go to a radio station, knock on the door and ask to see the program director. He’d listen and say ‘yeah I love it, it’ll go on the playlist next week’, or ‘no I don’t think it will go with our sound’.”
So what’s next for The Real Thing singer. “I’ll do this album and probably do smaller tours – like blitzkriegs. It’s fun, it’s like a job sometimes, but others it’s like the best fun I ever had.”
Also on the bill are the brilliant Bondi Cigars along with local duo Ghost Road.