Larry Schwartz
He’s stood onstage before tens of thousands and sung his songs from Tamworth to Nashville, Tennessee.
“It’s pretty much the big adrenalin rush,” James Blundell says. “No matter how inured you get to the ups and downs of performance, you never get totally comfortable with people dismissing it.”
He once played to a crowd of 85,000. But he says he found it both more daunting and more exhilarating to stand alone with his guitar and busk in Portobello Road, London.
The 34-year-old singer-songwriter was one of Australia’s biggest stars when he dropped from sight to journey about Europe in a white, ’79 VW Kombi, playing his guitar to make ends meet.
He didn’t keep a log but he believes he covered 25,000 kilometres “and didn’t get a flat tyre in the whole thing”, selling the vehicle for the $4000 he had paid for it in Tottenham at the start of the adventure.
“I went busking… because it had all got too serious at home and I’d lost my sense of humor,” he has said. His marriage had failed and he was so run down by both private and professional pressures that he lost his voice mid-performance at Tamworth in 1995.
Balding, sturdily built, with an open-necked yellow shirt revealing an ornamental ivory seahorse he bought in Thailand, Blundell is in good humor and eager to talk when we meet at EMI’s South Melbourne offices. He enthuses about a Suze De Marchi show the previous night. He talks with
great gusto about love, religion and, of course, busking.
“I had this beautifully naive plan that it would pay for our food on the way around Europe,” says Blundell, who has returned from his two-year odyssey with a strong, new album and renewed interest in his career. “We were very, very thin by the time we got back.”
He strummed and sang on the streets of UK, Ireland, Spain, France, Montenegro and the Greek islands. The most he received in a day was $100.
He travelled with a close friend, Lydia, whom he subsequently married. They have a four-month-old son, Briar. The couple interrupted their travels to spend time with her family in the former Yugoslavia.
“I lived in Belgrade for five weeks in ’96 and now its getting bombed,” Blundell says. “It’s like seeing Brisbane getting bombed. I find it nearly unbelievable that in 1999 there can still be a unified allied air strike against another civilised city. I find that beyond comprehension…”
En route, he found a particular fondness for the Dutch city, Amsterdam, where they boarded in an attic room of a building near the central station. Two prostitutes worked from rooms on the ground level. “It’s just so refreshing,” Blundell says, “because they were so blase. Totally happy. If
you went past and the curtains were closed… no dramas. If they were open, they’d be sitting there waving. Have a cup of coffee and a schnapps and blah blah.
“On the first floor was this really eccentric old guy with a pile of books. I’d love to pick his brain…”
Such is his affection for the city, he celebrates it on a new album, Amsterdam Breakfast, singing on the title track of “strolling through alleys/ of red lights and glass/ cobblestone back roads/ that echo the past…”
He hopes to return there for at least a year some day. “When you hit that city, your shackles fall away,” he says. “It’s a really liberating, adult city… There’s so much going on and so much history.”
The album is his first in four years. On the cover, he sits in lordly fashion on an ornate arm-chair, in a dark suit and ruffled white shirt with cravat. The image has been superimposed on a photograph he took of pigeons in the cobbled Dam Square, the old Gothic Nieuwe Kerk in the
background.
It is an image that will confront his narrow typecasting in some quarters as country music’s heir to the likes of Slim Dusty.
“This is not a country record,” Blundell says. “It’s miles from it.” He describes it as “roots folk-rock” and “songwriter-driven”. “Someone said the other day, philosophical pop, and I kind of like that.”
He concedes that there is a darkness about the album. “Looking back, some of it is pretty bloody desperate,” Blundell says. “Long before a marriage breaks up, the things that happen are in place and you are slowly getting squashed in by it.”
But he says there’s a difference to previous works. “The point of any darkness on this is to show you that, yeah, s… really does happen. But if you allow it to flow through your life – you don’t just freak out and suicide or say, ‘I can’t cope’ – inevitably on the other side there’s an air of
enlightenment which helps you cope.”
The album cover puts him in a context that is a far cry from the family farm in Queensland from which he emerged in the late 1980s to become one of the most celebrated talents in Australia.
Blundell’s first, self-titled album not only sold gold here but won him a coveted Nashville record deal. “If a generation of Australian city kids could out-rock the Brits,” Patrick Carr, editor of the Illustrated History Of Country Music has written, “why shouldn’t
a country boy from south-eastern Queensland be able to teach American singer-songwriters a thing or two? Blundell sure can.”
But the promise of success in America was not fulfilled. “I firmly believed that I was an Australian with a culture that created my music,” says Blundell. “The exercise of throwing that aside and joining in the American slipstream was completely nonsensical to me. I felt strong enough about
it to walk away from a North American record deal that was reasonably rare.”
The younger of two sons of a sheep and cattle farmer, he was four years old when he first rode a horse. At eight, he was helping his father muster. “You grow up in nature,” he says, “watching the animals procreate, gestate, breed and die. All those mysteries are stripped away fairly fast. You
understand how a mammal works.
“…The negatives are that you’ve got no insight into human nature at all. If you’re brought up with honest creatures like horses and dogs, humans have got some pretty nice little side moves that they can blindside you with instantly. You’re left with a lot of naivety.”
He was four when he first wrote a tune, for his mother. By 16, he’d written a first song with a complete lyric. It was called Silvery Shadows and was “mindlessly embarrassing because it’s about the first broken heart”. “Hopefully it’ll stay hidden for ever and ever and ever,” he says.
Blundell’s family has been on the sheep station since 1932. His paternal grandfather played a fiddle and loved theatre. His grandmother had dreamed of a career onstage “but in her day it was unseemly for a young woman”.
Her mother had been a chorister in her native England and studied English literature before marrying and migrating here. The Blundells would take part in local productions of Paint Your Wagon or Carousel. Blundell was seven when first cast as a pageboy in The Gondoliers.
“Dad’s a walking contradiction in that he’s happiest on his horse chasing his cows or his sheep. But when he’s out there he’s thinking about the world. He was brought up Church of England. You can still shock him by saying, ‘I think there are some problems with fundamental religions.’ He’ll
go, ‘But what about ours?’ You’ll go, ‘That’s the problem. You’ve just put your finger on it.'”
His father was a little unsettled to hear of his strong interest in Buddhism. “I was telling the old man this when I came back. His brother became a Seventh Day Adventist priest… So Dad, was going, Christ, you’re going to do it too.”
He is impressed with the fact that Buddha is not treated as a deity. “He said, all I’ve really done is, by using my God-given talents, achieved a sense of peace and understanding of the world that works for me.”
Single-minded and independent, Blundell has little regard for Australian music that seeks to conform to American styles or adhere to too-rigid a notion of what homegrown music ought to be.
Will the prodigal return to Tamworth? “I will, but unfortunately it will have to be very much on my own terms,” he says. “There’s a thing up there: If you’re here with us you’re one of the family and you must do what you’re told. That bridge is well and truly behind us.”
It was not easy to get off the treadmill. “I’ve always had a strong work ethic,” he says. “So the necessity for work was deeply ingrained and taking a break was terrifying. But by the same token, thankfully, the overriding psyche was saying, ‘You have to do this as a creative writer.’ It’s really
important that you stop and reabsorb as opposed to continually putting out.”
The Sunday Age, 06th of June 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 