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I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, September twenty first pages now walkie talkies. The militant group HESBLA in Lebanon is reeling from another Israeli attack on the low fi technology Hesbella was using to avoid Israeli intelligence hacking into its smartphones. The remarkable spycraft behind the Mossad strike is live now at the Australian dot com dot au. Keith Urban is the country music superstar who's most famous in this country for being married to Nicole Kidman and being recovered from
substance addictions. But he's revealed in an interview with The Australian he'd much prefer to play to drunk crowds than sober ones today. Why Urban is not the artist you think he is. There are some super famous amendments to the US Constitution, the right to bear arms.
The freedom of speech.
But if you keep going down to the twenty first Amendment, you'll find the repeal of alcohol prohibition back in nineteen thirty three, ending thirteen.
Years of supposed sobriety.
That ended the federal ban on booze, but states can still make their own rules, and there are still more than five hundred counties across the United States that are dry. According to country music superstar Keith Urban, it's a real vibe killer.
You know.
They have dry counties in America, places with their own sea of grow So you boot grounds, like for Jesus, would you guys got to do something to signing.
Urban spoke with The Australian's music writer Andrew McMillan on a recent trip back to his home state of Queensland, where he was promoting his new album Hi. This is the same Keith Urban, by the way, who is mainly famous in Australia, at least for being a recovered addict. His alcohol and cocaine addictions played out in the public eye over many years before he famously checked into rehab not for the first time.
In two thousand and six.
Less than four months after his marriage to actress Nicole Kidman, country singer Keith Urban has checked himself into a rehab center.
Urban says he's been clean ever since.
Over the years, I've talked very very little to not at all about it, mostly because I never want people thinking I'm against grog or drugs, which I'm not at all. I'm just allergic to them and said so not good for me, good for other people. I love playing to a drunk crowd, trust me, They're way more fun.
Keith Urban knows a thing or two about crowds. Over the past twenty years, he's played more than a dozen headlining tours around the United States, where he's lived for three decades, and the globe, but recently he's been getting a little closer to the fans.
The sheer, simplistic joy of playing that isn't about numbers or visual effects sort of anything. It's right back to the very very.
Foundation of it.
Make sure it's solid, make sure the players are good, the songs are good, everything's solid, and then we can start putting all.
The whipped cream back around it.
Andrew McMillan experienced it up close and personal.
It was hell at a place called left His Music Hall in Brisbane, which is a smaller room about three hundred people capacity. It's the sort of room that I very rarely go to because hardly any national touring act book it, let alone international stadium level headliners like Keith. So he clearly booked it as an underplay kind of show because he's the kind of guy who regularly sells
out ten thousand capacity venues across town. And I just love the fact that this massive artist wants to do these kind of club shows, as he calls them regularly, just as a way to stay hungry and to remind himself of what he used to do and what he loves doing. What he does at the small scale and the large.
Yeah, and who's the crowd? Is it kind of your classic country fan?
He seems to reach across generations, across genders. He is the rare artist, i'd say, who's kind of for everyone, and that's probably something he's lucked into rather than tried to do. He writes this big anthemic choruses which sound great sung in a crowd of three hundred or ten thousand, as it turns out. But at his core, he's a showman, an entertainer, and seeing him in that tiny venue, either solo or with his three piece band behind him, he
owns the room. He has this incredible charisma, presence and ability to control the crowd and to defeed off their energy and to send it back to them. So I think he's one of the most extraordinary performers that Australia has produced.
The gig at Lefties was a return to his roots in more ways than one urban joke that he probably wouldn't play the crowd's requests, but he still had a crack at a handful of rock classics.
He is the rare performer who has his own chart topping hits, particularly in the country realm when the country charts.
In the US.
He's had many chart toppers there, but he's not afraid, ashamed or embarrassed to go back to his roots, which in his case involved playing the likes of Cold Chisel's Flame Trees or the Angels, Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again? Songs which he no doubt played when he was coming up as an emerging anonymous beer garden covers band performer here in Brisbane before he moved
to the US in the early nineteen nineties. So he threw in those kinds of songs as well as things like Bad Habits by Ed Sheeran and a pub classic staple like five hundred Miles by the Proclaimers.
A bit of Tom Petty too, which is, you know that's a song that you need to be a great singer to sing free Falling, don't you.
That's right. It's a big open melody.
It's the kind of song that people love to sing along to at all by the crowds. Actually, when I interviewed him the morning after, we spoke a bit about the notion of the singers getting older, and he said that Mick Jagger is someone that he admires. But Mick Jagger's vocal range or his recordings have been quite limited. He's almost talk singing throughout a lot of the Rolling Stones catalog, where someone like Paul McCartney, who is also eighty one, I think, the same age as Mick Jagger.
He's someone who has his big open melodies in his career, and yet he continues to perform and to sing those big melodies at the same key that he recorded them in sixty years ago, which is extraordinary. So Keith is a kind of guy who admires those older performers and he hopes to be on himself, I think. But he's only fifty six. He's got a few more decades together before it's up to their age.
At that Brisbane gig, Urban donned some lefties merch, joking between songs that he'd taken up a second job as a bartender. It's an unexpected gag coming from someone who's been sober as long as he has.
Was he comfortable talking about that topic with you?
He was, And he made the analogy to guitar.
Guitar repairing has got to such a point where sometimes if you snap the neck of a guitar, he can now glue it back together and it becomes stronger after the break, which I think is a great metaphor for what recovery can be for some people if they have the willingness and the support and the love around them, which Keith appears to do.
I loved his line too about he doesn't really like playing to sober crowds.
Yeah, that was a quite a revealing comment, I thought.
I mean, it was a very unrehearsed and unstage managed kind of comment because he's got a big crowd. And yeah, he does occasionally play in these dry counties in the US, and he says that he'd rather play to the drunk people, And I guess that's also a straight line connection to what he did when he was a jobbing musician in Brisbane in the early ninety nineties. He was playing to a lot of people who probably didn't give a shit
about the guy singing playing guitar in the corner. But he hit the right song, whether that was five hundred Miles or Flame Trees or whatever else is popular at the time, they could suddenly find something to love on this.
Guy coming up. Why you should be a Keith Urban fan?
So we chipped away in those bars in Brisbane, and then he started chipping away in the same kinds of bars in Nashville, and then he broke through in an absolutely massive way. So why why Keith Urban?
I think we shouldn't actually skirt over how long and hard that road was, because that's something I was really fascinated to find when researching him ahead of our interview. He spent about eight years in Nashville where he was just another guy with a guitar. He can play guitar really well, but he was kind of a nobody for a long time. And it takes a lot of grit, guts and determination to stick it out and to try
to make that dream of reality. But he just had an idea of what he wanted his sound to be, and I guess just hope that his songs would eventually connect with an audience, and through sheer, persistence, perseverance, and raw talent that eventually became the case.
He's released an eleventh studio album, and it feels like everyone's going a bit country these days, from Beyonce to post Alone Andrew. What has Keith Urban got to say in this eleventh album that's new or that's different, either for hear or for country.
He's been an experimental country artist for longer than most people give him credit for. I think I think it was about ten years ago. He started going beyond the realms of traditional acoustic guitar drummers with a bit of electric guitar and banjo to move into like electronic music production, hip hop style beats, incorporating female vocals regularly guest stars, like on his last album he had Pink on this one, he has Laney Wilson, who is one of the younger
emerging superstars of American country. So he's the kind of artist who is very much willing to collaborate with others.
He doesn't want him to play by himself in a room somewhere.
He gets energy and inspiration from working with others and he translates that into his songwriting.
If you were going to persuade someone to give Keith Urban a go, you know, to listen to him and understand why he is this influential and long standing artist of great success.
What would the song be like. What's the song that sums up Keith erbin.
Somebody like You.
Like You, which was one of the last songs he played at that tiny gig at Lefties the other week. It's got a beautiful, open single, long chorus, it's got an.
Incredible vibe and beat to it.
It's one of his biggest, most popular songs, and it's a really upbeat, rocking song, and it's the one where everyone gets their phones out and lights up the room at the end of a Keith Urban gig, and they probably have for the last almost twenty years. So that's the one that I think, if you haven't heard him or taken him too seriously, give Somebody like You I'll go.
Keith Urban's new album High is out now. Killed tour Australia's East Coast in mid twenty twenty five. Andrew McMillan is a music writer with The Australian. Thanks for joining us on the front this week. Our team is Kristin Amiot, Jasper Leeg, Leathan mcglue, Tiffany Dimmack, Joshua Burton and may Claire Harvey.