James Reyne Channelling Elvis

James Reyne this week released his latest album TCB, a collection of covers of songs made famous (and some less famous) by Elvis Presley. It is an album that could have gone quite wrong (in which case we probably wouldn’t have heard it) but it didn’t. rather than try and imitate Elvis, something that no-one should do except in an ironic way, Reyne has decided just to sing the songs and try to distill their essence – whatever that essence may be.

He does a very good job of it and the result is a really enjoyable record.

The release of the album will be followed by a couple of great concerts where reyne will perform the album live. It’s all part of keeping it interesting both for reyne and his loyal audience.

HHMM :  I guess the first question is “How Dare You?”

JR : Exactly! Look, they are good songs, so why not? It’s a commercial exercise and I had the idea for a while. Charles Fisher had a similar idea and  he really liked it.  In a way, if it is presumptuous it may as well be really presumptuous! It puts a bit of a target on my back but as long as you make a good record and choose some fun songs and don’t try and imitate him then its worth doing.

HHMM : When asked about influences people of your genre and generation inevitably come back to the Beatles, The Stones and maybe Creedence but Elvis often doesn’t get mentioned. But clearly he is a big influence.

JR : You gotta realise that. I mean you go to Beatles, Stones and Creedence and you talk to John Fogerty and he’ll say Elvis is an influence. They’d all say Elvis had something to do with them. So we are getting Elvis second generation or something. It was not as if I was an obsessive Elvis fan or anything. I was only as much of a fan as the next guy and I knew all of the hits. Like all of us I sat through all the bad movies on a Saturday afternoon at one time or another. We choose some of the songs from those movies and there was some quite good songs in those really bad movies!

It was certainly a commercial exercise in one sense. A  lot of the infrastructure and the apparatus of the music industry is closed to people of my generation or my ilk shall we say, so you have to look at ways of  re-inventing yourself or maintaining your career or raising your profile somehow. You don’t have radio any more.

HHMM : That raises an interesting question. At what point during do you realise that  “this is what I do”,  this isn’t on the way to something else, this is actually what I do”

JR : Funnily enough I did that to myself quite a few years ago. “This is what I do”. This is what I always wanted to do. I never thought of having a career. I was always a big fan of rock music and we had a band with some mates that almost by accident got really well known and I managed to parlay that into a solo career that did really well until radio chose to close their doors to people like me. And I’m not moaning about that, they had their reasons and good luck to them.

But there is a point where you say “this is what I do” and therefore to do this I have to do certain things to maintain this, like anybody in any other career. You’ve got to make career decisions and job decisions to keep yourself going and to keep the bread and butter going.

In show business there is always that sub-conscious thing that “I’m on the way to something really amazing here”. I think that why people stay in show business, because of what’s around the next corner.

HHMM: I guess the alternative is getting a real job.

JR : It depends what that job is. What I find interesting now, having kids who are going through school is that now a career in show business is considered legitimate. When I was a kid if you had said “I wanna be a rock star” or “I wanna be on tv”, they wouldn’t have taken you seriously or said you have to have something to fall back on. Now I look at kids in my daughters school they have three rock bands in the primary school! And in secondary school you can learn to be a recording engineer and be taken seriously. It’s a different world.

HHMM : So is doing this album another step in keeping itn interesting for yourself, keeping it interesting for the audience or just keeping it interesting?

JR : Both, everything, all of the above. You’ve gotta keep it interesting and you’ve got to try and maintain some level of good workmanship I think. I think I haven’t done that as well as some and a I’ve done it better than a lot of others. I still write lots of songs and in fact I’m half way working through another record with Scott Kingman. I have lots of ideas for other projects but you do have to keep it interesting.

HHMM : I listen to a song like Kentucky Rain on the album and I find myself wondering what Elvis was actually thinking when he recorded that song. Not “what was he thinking”, but what was he actually thinking about?

JR : From my point of view that was the very first song that I wanted to do when we talked about doing this. It’s an extraordinarily well written song but its got these weird musical choices. Eddy Rabbit wrote it with someone else. But the song is musically extremely well written. Lyrically its just so cheesy. In that world they probably thought it was a bit of a stretch on the “my baby left me” genre but I look at it and think, ” oh its so cheesy”. It’s an interesting one to try and get lost in lyrically

HHMM : Listening to these songs it struck me that Elvis really had an ability in “inhabit” songs that you have picked up on really well. That really was something that he had about him.

JR : Yeah, he was extraordinary. One of the things I learned about him when I started listening to a lot of Elvis stuff, especially the early things, was that he was instinctively an extraordinary performer, singer. He just had this extra gene.

HHMM : Songs like Bossa Nova Baby, Little Egypt and Good Luck Charm may not be amongst the biggest or the most iconic Elvis songs but I think you have correctly identified that rhythm is the key to those songs and that “rhythm” is often the forgotten word in “rhythm & blues”.

JR : Yep, that’s very true and I was drawn to those because I didn’t want to do the super-iconic ones because you make more of a target of yourself.  But I found myself naturally being drawn to the more swinging, rhythmic ones and the band he had played that so instinctively well. It must be a southern thing that comes out of country music and the blues. They just know how to swing.