By Larry Schwartz
HE was a local hero, feted for his dazzling play. But somewhere along the way, the music lost its thrill. Tommy Emmanuel wearied with his lot in Australia, so he packed his guitars and his amps and went to London.
“I felt almost overexposed and I felt that I needed to go and find myself again,” he says of the relocation.
“I think that I got lost for a while, like a dog chasing its tail. I just kind of ground to a halt. I thought, `I’m not inspired. And I need to be. My life needs to be full of inspiration’.”
After two years away, Emmanuel is back in town to play at Crown Casino tomorrow night. He’s just finished a tour of Germany, Scotland, Italy, France and the US to promote his new album, Only. But what he won’t be doing is playing at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
“How they can have a ceremony like that and not have my song The Journey in it is beyond me,” he recently told Sydney’s Sun-Herald. “Hasn’t anyone heard it? It’s so perfect for the Olympics you’d think I’d written it for them.”
Clearly, Emmanuel still thinks of himself very much as an Australian. He’s even made it part of his image. “When I play in America,” he says, “I tell the story of Waltzing Matilda and of course most of the people know it and they sing along.”
He is not alone, of course, in both loving and leaving his homeland. Australian performers and artists have been doing it for decades.
In his case, it was prompted by the need to escape the comfort zone. “As a writer and as a performer and as a person who deals in a spiritual nature, which is what the music is, it needs to be completely inspired.
“Otherwise you’re just playing the stuff and it’s not a true experience. I needed to go and find that again. You can only go a certain distance here.”
He cites the example of Savage Garden as a sort of inspiration. “They had to do it overseas first. It’s something about our culture. We have to prove ourselves somewhere else first. Which is what I’m doing now.”
Emmanuel says he turned down a lucrative American offer when he decided to call England home – a six-album world deal with Warner that included the promise of a TV special with PBS as an added lure.
“To an average Joe that would be an unbelievable offer. The problem for me was that I’d just been in a long contract with Sony and I wanted some freedom. So I turned this offer down.
“My manager was flabbergasted. I said: `I don’t want to go that road. I want to do an album of all my solo pieces and just go out and play the guitar without any whistles and smoke machines. Just let the music do the talking’.”
He knew the US contract would come at a price. “They wanted to dress me in a tuxedo and have me learn all these classical pieces and become a famous classical player. And that was like, `What are you talking about? I don’t even play classical music. I love it and I listen to it, but …”
Emmanuel’s wife, Jane, is Danish. They toyed with the idea of settling there but decided against it because he can’t speak the language.
Their daughter Amanda is 11. Their second child, Angelina, is just over a year old. She, too, is a product of the relocation.
“We had tried for years to have another child and it just never happened,” says Emmanuel. “As soon as we moved over to Europe, I had a month off. We had time to become a family again and get back together again and my wife fell pregnant.”
Emmanuel’s own father was a musician who took his four children on the road through outback New South Wales, touring as The Midget Surfaris.
Tommy was just four at the time. He played rhythm guitar. His older brother, Phil, who has settled near Coffs Harbor, NSW, played lead.
Theirs was an unsettled life. Only after his father’s death, from heart disease at just 49, did the family settle down to a more conventional life in the town of Parkes.
Emmanuel was 15 when he left home to begin (or resume) his musical career in Sydney. “The only time I felt `damn I wish I had a father’ was when I was about 18,” he says. “I went through a period of that and I think it would have happened to anybody.”
Emmanuel was tempted to settle in Nashville, home of the legendary player Chet Atkins, with whom he has recorded an album, The Day The Fingerpickers Took Over The World.
“It’s as close as a father and a son could be,” he says of his relationship with the ailing country picker and producer. “That’s what it is. I speak to him every second Thursday. He’s not that well and he’s not leaving the house. He doesn’t play.”
They performed together last July. “We did a show together in Nashville. It was a wonderful night but he could only play a few songs. He’s had this brain tumor. His motor skills are gone now.”
Atkins has enthused that Emmanuel is “without doubt one of the greatest guitarists on the planet”. Another veteran country player, Jerry Reed, has threatened in jest to break Emmanuel’s fingers and steal his guitars “because he’s just entirely too good to be allowed to play”.
But despite – or because of – that foreign acclaim from his peers, Emmanuel is all too readily dismissed at home. “It’s very strange,” he says. “If you’re entertaining, they think you have no credibility. (That) there’s a lack of soulful musical content. Which is completely wrong.
“You won’t find a more soulful player than (jazzman) James Morrison or a more soulful person. But because he’s very entertaining and he’s funny and he’s carefree out there, people take that as just a show. It’s quite the opposite.”
Still, he doesn’t like to dwell too much on the knockers. “I don’t listen to them,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned I don’t have time for negative people.
“If I want constructive criticism, I’ll go and ask someone I think who knows. In the meantime, I think I’m my best critic. I know what it is that I do best and that’s what I home in on. If I don’t play well, I’m the first person to know it.”
Emmanuel says he will remain based in London for the foreseeable future. He is, he says, increasingly aware that his audience lies outside Australia.
“Absolutely,” he says. “There’s 66 million people in the UK alone. There’s 46 million in France. There’s 60 million in Germany. And even if you get a tiny bit of that, it’s going to be incredible.”
The last time he toured Australia, he stopped off in his old hometown, Parkes, but he’s in no hurry to revisit the past.
“I feel I’ve got to keep moving forward and I’ve got a lot to achieve overseas,” he says. “It’s going to be my biggest market over there.”
The Sunday Age,10-Sep-2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 