This Crazy Life tour: Troy Kemp

Very few Australian country music fans would be unfamiliar with Troy Kemp. Known as a solo artist and as one half of McAlister Kemp, he is a force to be reckoned with - and he's joining The Wolfe Brothers on their This Crazy Life tour from early October.  

You are joining the Wolfe Brothers on tour and they are a relentless touring machine between their dates with Lee Kernaghan and their own tours. What sort of training are you doing to keep up with them?

[Laughs] I’m on a really strict health regime right now of no food, no alcohol, no anything, and I’m just surviving on air and doing as much exercise as I can. [Laughs] No, it’s good. I was in McAlister Kemp for seven years so I know how hard it is – I know a lot about touring and the rigours of the road. But it’s amazing – it’s the best job in the world and it’s good fun. I’m pretty seasoned with that stuff, so I’m excited to get out with the boys and finally do some touring with them because I know they work hard and they deserve this, so it’s going to be great to be out with those guys. They’re not only a great band, they’re good friends, so I’m looking forward to it.

When you’re not on the road, do you get itchy feet?

When you’re having a break – when I’ve had, like, six months off – I just want to get back out there. But when you’re out there, the first little while is the exciting part but as the tour kicks on and gets longer, towards the end of it you’re really starting to hurt a bit, you just feel like being at home and chilling out a bit. It’s just that – you just get tired out there. People always say to me, ‘When are you going to get a real job?’ If they knew how hard we work. For the one and half hours on stage you might do on tour, you’re travelling, you’re sitting in airports for the other 23 hours a day. You’re up early, you’re up late. If you do these shows you talk to fans sometimes until one or two in the morning, and then you’re getting back to bed. You get back to a motel and you’ve got six bands hanging around, or god knows how many. There’s all these band guys who just want to kick on and party and I say, ‘I’ve got to rest my voice and take care of myself’, because I know that tomorrow morning we’re up at 7 a.m. to do it all again and go somewhere else. It’s a funny lifestyle. But I’m always keen to get out and tour – I do get itchy feet – and I’m really looking forward to getting out with these guys in October.

I guess when people see you on stage they think that it’s only that period of time that you’re working – but there’s also the amount of energy that goes into being on stage. There’s all that physical preparation – moving from town to town – but there’s also something that’s hard to quantify because you can’t see it: the stuff you need to do to get yourself ready to be on stage. And that’s a lot of effort too.

It really is. The whole thing can be really exhausting, and you have to be careful. Sleep’s the most important thing, I think – you’ve really got to try to get six to eight hours’ sleep. That’s where I work best. As a singer, I need that for my throat just to be able to get through the next night. It is a lot of hard work and staying fit – doing push-ups in your motel room [laughs]. Whatever you can to try to stay alive and make sure you eat well. That’s another thing: eating well on the road. We always end up at McDonald’s.

Probably because it’s open when you need it to be.

Exactly – they’re clever, the old McDonald’s. But there’s a lot of hard work involved: it’s rehearsing, and learning songs, and getting band members organised, trying to organise rehearsals. There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes. It feels like a 24-hour job. When you live this you just really live it. It’s not like a 9-to-5 where you switch off at five o’clock and go home and watch telly and have dinner. You’re thinking about it until you go to bed, you’re working on it in your bedroom, in your studio – thinking about it and driving your partner crazy because she’s, like, ‘Can you just switch off?’ ‘No, I can’t.’ [laughs]

Are you taking your own band for this tour or are the Wolfes going to be your band?

I’ve been led to believe that there’s a band being organised to play behind. The Wolfe Brothers are going to play on their own and Gord Bamford, I believe, will have the Wolfe Brothers behind him, but I think all the other acts – myself, Caitlyn, Jody Direen, Craig and Christie – I think we’re going to have a house band, so to speak, that they put together for us to use. I don’t actually know at the moment who the guys are but I’m sure it will be a Class A band and I’m looking forward to seeing who I walk into rehearsal with in a couple of weeks. Each artist has been asked to send all their songs to the band and then they’re going to have the painstaking task of having to learn five artists’ songs, and hopefully it all comes together on stage. I’m sure it will – the country music musicians in this country are amazing.

The downside for you, I guess, is that there’s not the flexibility there of changing your set list, as you might with your own band. You have to stick to what you’ve told them.

Exactly. We’re doing five or six songs each a night so once I give the guys my songs, they’re my songs for the tour and that’s what I’ve got to be happy to live with – so I’ve got to make sure I pick the right ones, as will everybody.

When were you asked to join this tour?

I got a call from Steve White [tour manager] about two months ago, and I may have been one of the last to come in. I was really excited to be asked. At the moment I’m out as Troy Kemp solo, representing myself, self managed, I’m my own agent, so I’m constantly trying to get work and picking things up along the way. The back half of this year has been a bit busier for me, which is great, so to get a call from Steve to say, ‘Do you want to be part of this tour with all these great acts?’ was amazing. It’s a chance to be out doing my thing and to be seen to be doing something, and giving me a chance to sell my CDs and merchandise at gigs. I’m really pumped about it. I think we’re doing eight shows.

You mentioned earlier about staying behind and talking to fans, which is such a big part of country music. How important is that to you, that personal connection with fans?

I think it’s one of the most important things in the whole business. The country music fans are so loyal – it feels like one big family. Once you’ve got a country music fan they’re with you for life. No matter what you do they seem to love it, which is lucky and appreciated on our behalf. I think it’s a great thing and you see it more in country music, I think, than any other genre – the artists come out and talk to the fans after the shows and sign things, sign their hats, sign their T-shirts, have photos. It’s just that personal touch that a fan can go home with and say, ‘We had an amazing night and we got to meet the band’. They feel like they know you a little bit, they’ve got a photo to hopefully show off or throw darts at. It just makes for a really good feel.

You’re from the Newcastle area and there is a Newcastle date for the tour – is there a difference playing for a hometown audience.

We’re playing at West New Lambton in Newcastle on the 22^nd of October – that’s a Saturday night – and I love playing to a home crowd. I play round the local area a lot – luckily I’ve got a good following. I hope most of those people are going to come out and make for a big night in my home town – hopefully I get the biggest applause that night too [laughs].

Well, those Wolfe Brothers can’t get everything all the time.

They deserve it, they’re amazing. It should be fun. It’s nice to be able to have this show in my home town because it will be great to be seen to part of the show in my home town, for a start, and there’s artists from all over the place in this tour so I’m sure there will be other places we go that will be the home town of someone else in the tour. That’s always going to be a bonus to the show. It’s going to be a great thing. It’s a great idea from Steve White – he’s got seven acts from three countries, they’re promoting it as a mini-festival, hot new wave of country music. I think it’s really cool. There’s a new breed of country music coming through that needs to be heard – it’s had a bit of a stigma about it. You say the words ‘country music’ and people say, ‘I don’t like country and Western’ – but it’s not Western any more. The modern country is almost like pop country, and if people hear it they’ll go, ‘Wow, I like that.’ Modern country is progressive, it’s sounding so cool, it could fit on any commercial radio station these days and people don’t know it. People just think [country] is about the tractor breaking down and the dog dying, that sort of thing. I just hope people get out and support this tour, because there’s a real great new sound in country music that needs to be heard.

Part of my interest in covering country music, which I’ve done for the last five years, is that what I see in Australian country music is an incredible level of professionalism. I put it back to Tamworth existing – when you all go to Tamworth, there are so many artists competing for attention that the standard has become incredibly high. So even someone just starting out knows they have to be extremely good to get anyone to listen to them. What that’s meant is that across the board in Australian country we have this incredible music – people like you who put on a terrific show, put out great albums, you’re total professionals. I hope other people start to recognise that because if you’re someone looking for a night out, going to this tour, the standard is going to be so much better than other things they could see that it would be well worth their time and money.

Exactly. Everything you just said was bang on [laughs].

But it’s true! The standard is so incredibly good in Australia.

It is, and the testament to that is when these big American acts come over for these big CMC Rocks festivals, I sit back and watch it and I can see the Australians holding their own against the big American acts. And I think we do compete with these guys, we are as good as these guys, you know, but we just don’t have the market here that the Americans have got – those big superstars who sell millions of albums. We’ve got a pretty small country music market here ... [But] there is a standard now, the bar’s been set really high, everybody’s getting better. The new acts coming through are amazing. As a seasoned artist now I think a lot of us who have been in the industry a while need to watch ourselves, because there’s some young guys coming through who could knock us off the block any old time. That keeps you on your toes as an older artist, and it’s exciting to see the young guys coming through. I always do my best to help those guys and write songs with them, and do whatever I can to help their careers as well.

That’s another aspect of Australian country that I see as being really significant: there is that sense that age doesn’t matter, gender doesn’t matter – everyone is there because they love music, and that creates this rich pool of songs that come out. Partly why I think a lot of the punters don’t necessarily Australian country music as being good or important is that we still have a bit of a cultural cringe about anything to do with Australia. So I hope that over the next few years, as we start to lose that cultural cringe more, Australian country – which is our national body of song, really – starts to get the attention it deserves.

Exactly. I think it’s moving in the right direction, and I think everyone banding together and helping each other, the whole thing is going to get better. And it’s tours like This Crazy Life are going to start to change the perception of what country music is. And hopefully as the years kick on we can all do better out of it and there’s still a country music audience too.

With my last question I’ll ask you about Tamworth next year – what are your plans?

I’m going to head up on the last weekend. I’m away playing guitar for the Viper Creek Band on an American cruise around Mexico at the start of January, which is going to be amazing. I get back for the second week of Tamworth. I’m going to try to hit the Fanzone on the Thursday or Friday – the 26^th or 27^th – and I’ve got a midnight show at the Longyard with Christie Lamb, on the Friday night. It will be a two-and-a-half or three-hour show. It’s going to be late but it will be a party. That Friday night on the last weekend in Tamworth is always huge. And hopefully we’ll get a Golden Guitar nomination and go up and cross our fingers.

And the Viper Creek Band are very lucky to have you playing guitar for them, I’d suggest.

Thank you very much. They’re a great band, they’re good friends of mine from Newcastle, and they have a new album out called Just Press Play. We’re excited to get back on that cruise – we did it last year and had such a great time, and it was such a great opportunity to meet some amazing American artists. It’s a good job when it falls the right way – it’s amazing.

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THIS CRAZY LIFE TOUR DATES

Friday 7 October 2016 | 8pm

Wrest Point Entertainment Centre, HOBART TAS

1300 795 257 | www.tixtas.com.au

Saturday 8 October 2016 | 8pm

Hotel Tasmania, LAUNCESTON TAS

1300 795 257 | www.tixtas.com.au

Friday 14 October 2016 | 8.30pm

Kay Street Entertainment Complex, TRARALGON VIC

(03) 5176 0463 | www.kayst.oztix.com.au

Saturday 15 October 2016 | 7.30pm

The Palms at Crown, MELBOURNE VIC

136 100 | www.ticketmaster.com.au

Friday 21 October 2016 | 8pm

Evan Theatre, Penrith Panthers, PENRITH NSW

(02) 4720 5555 | www.penrith.panthers.com.au

Saturday 22 October 2016 | 8.30pm

Wests New Lambton, NEWCASTLE NSW

(02) 4935 1200 | www.westsnewcastle.com.au

Friday 28 October 2016 | 8pm

Twin Towns Services Club, TWEED HEADS NSW

1800 014 014 | www.twintowns.com.au

Saturday 29 October 2016 | 8pm

Empire Theatre, TOOWOOMBA QLD

1300 655 299 | www.empiretheatre.com.au

Album review: Against the Grain by Troy Kemp

Troy Kemp will be familiar to many Australian country music fans. He was one half of McAlister Kemp, who re-created country rock in their own image (and arguably made it easier for The Wolfe Brothers to follow). Before that he had a solo career, and now he has returned to that path. He's still country rock, but his new album, Against the Grain, is toned down a little from McAlister Kemp's party-hearty vibe (although there's a bit of that in songs such as 'Whiskey Woman', 'How We Roll Around Here' and 'Crazy As You Want to Get').

Many of the songs on Against the Grain lyrically fit the country canon, like the title track and '100 Years of Pride'. Kemp also does a lovely ballad, as in 'The Ones I Love', and the rock ballad 'If I Had My Time Over'. In sum, this album offers familiarity to McAlister Kemp fans and also gives Kemp the opportunity to explore some stories and themes his way. Kemp always sounds like he's in control of his songs - this is, literally, the voice of experience, and he knows how to make a song listenable over and over again. 

There was also a bit of a revelation for me on this album. On first listening it seemed that Kemp's voice fits the country-rock genre: he can belt out a tune, for sure, and he sounds like he's enjoying himself doing it. But it's on 'A Little More Country' that his voice sounds truly right: smooth, easy, direct, with an edge in the right places. So maybe Troy Kemp is more country than rock 'n' roll, and if anything I wish the songs on this album were more of the former than the latter. Maybe next time.  

Against the Grain is out now through Social Family Records.
troykempmusic.com

Interview: Troy Kemp/McAlister Kemp

Along with Drew McAlister, Troy Kemp is one half of McAlister Kemp, the Australian country rock duo who have climbed to the top of the Australian country music industry in just four years. McAlister Kemp will release their next album, Harder to Tame, during the 2014 Tamworth Country Music Festival but they are whetting their fans' appetites with the title track now released as a single. The track makes reference to a particular animal that can't be tamed, so when I interviewed Troy recently I started by asking him whether it's he or Drew who is the untamed horse ...

'That's a great question,' Troy said, laughing. 'You know what, I think we’d both say me. Mind you, Drew can be wild, don’t you worry, but yeah, I’m generally the one that’s just a little bit more off the hook. He keeps me a bit more level headed.'

When asked if he's always been wild or if his mum would say he was a good kid, Troy confessed with a laugh, 'My mum would say I’m a good kid 'cause I totally had her fooled. I think every kid has their crazy streak and I definitely had mine. I got around surfing and playing guitar. I was always around crazy guys and doing crazy things.  But that’s huge and even getting older, just being in music and then doing what we do, I think it just keeps you young and young minded and I just think it’s a lot of fun.  I love my life, my career and everything and everything I d.  Outside of my life I still love to surf. I love to get outdoors and do all sorts of stuff, so, yeah, I’m not really a couch potato and let’s just say it’s good fun. [A] wild and untamed existence.'

Being a musician playing live on a regular basis seems like a great job for someone who’s a bit on the wild side, but Troy and Drew also have the structure of having to turn up to record and write and rehearse  so there must be a part of Troy that likes a little bit of order.

'Yeah, there’s definitely a discipline there that needs to be sort of adhered to as well,' Troy said. 'For every crazy horse, it’s got to have a calm side as well, and we’ve got that.  We’re very serious about what we do.  We always lock in together and we write these songs together and we talk business, and it’s really a business at the end of the day.

'So we can be out there presenting as the crazy wild country music stars, but at the end of the day, behind the scenes, there’s a lot of thought and effort that goes into it that sort of makes it what it is, and a great management team and an agency and a record company and everyone getting together and banging their heads together to make McAlister Kemp, keep it staying afloat. But, again, you balance it all.  You have fun with it and for all the hard work you put in behind the scenes, you then get to go out on stage and rock out and pretend you’re a rock star in front of a bunch of people who sing all your words back and they throw their hands in the air and drink Bundy and party with you. So it’s good fun. How could you not want to do that?'

When I put it to Troy that we should hope there are no teenage boys reading this interview, lest their parents think he's encouraging them into the life of a touring muso, Troy responded by saying, 'Well you know what, my parents gave up trying to make me a banker years ago. My dad would say to me constantly, “When are you going to get a real job?” But I said, “Dad, this is my real job now, like it lump it.” So I think he’s quietly happy that I finally have sort of gone on and started to have a career 20 years later, so he’s finally getting some sleep, I think. He’s getting sleep at night and I think his hair’s not turning as grey as fast as it could have, so that’s good.'

Listening to Troy talk about the business of McAlister Kemp, it strikes me that that’s something that very valuable for up and coming musicians to hear because – or even musicians who are kind of mid-career and wondering why things haven’t taken off the way they wanted them to. Although it doesn't sound very 'arty', when a career in music is approached as a business, the musicians understand that they're there in a large part to serve their audience, because they're thinking, What’s the best way I can set this up so that my audience gets what they came for?  


Troy agreed with this impression, saying, 'We're always sitting back and analysing [our] core audience, so to speak ... With our style of song, people between 18 and 35/40 are probably going to be the ones that really dig our stuff. We know we’re not doing Slim Dusty, John Williamson-type songs. We’re not as laid back as Troy Cassar-Daley. We’re putting on a pretty energetic country rock show. We love bands like Big and Rich so we wanted to be the Big and Rich of Australia type of thing – a bit more rowdy and fun.  So we have to really sit back as a business and go, “How are we going to appeal to these people? Not only visually, what we sound like, but how are we going to market our merchandise to those people who might want to buy it?”All these different things you have to think about all the time.

'And constantly trying to stay ahead of the game so that you stay at the forefront of the industry and you’re always being talked about. What are we going [to do] on our next video clip to keep them cool and cooler than the next person’s video clip?  Unfortunately, sometimes in Australia we work within budgets that don’t allow us to sort of have these big fully blown American-style video clips which we’d all love to do. In America the record companies control million dollars of a video clip, but in Australia we’re lucky if we get ten grand, so how are you meant to compete? So you do what you can and you keep your head down. I think the harder you work the more chance you’ve got of luck finding you.  So that’s pretty much how I look at it.'

Of course, the best publicity is word of mouth, so if McAlister Kemp put on a great show and people have a good time and leave feeling upbeat and positive and that the band has been professional, that’s the best possible advertisement they're probably going to get. 

'That’s exactly right,' said Troy.  'We’ve worked really hard over the last four years to make our live shows as entertaining as possible. We don’t want to be a band that gets on stage and looks at our feet all night and doesn’t interact with the crowd. We want everyone involved.  We want them throwing their hands in the air. We want them singing the words back at us. We want to give them a rock 'n' roll show that gives them their money’s worth, because concerts aren’t cheap these days, so you want people to leave going, “Wow, I definitely got my money’s worth out of McAlister Kemp. I do want to see those guys again.” They wait in these merchandise lines to line up and meet us and have photos and get things signed. Even right there, you have to give them as much love as you can in the minute that you get with them ... Whatever we can do we do it, because everyone is so important to us. We don’t take that for granted.'  


Troy revealed that, early on, he and Drew had a bit of help from an industry stalwart and that this help has inspired them to do the same for other artists coming through.


'[W]e had a lot of guidance from Adam Brand,' he said. 'Adam really gave us a start and got us out there on tour with him and helped us with lots of ideas around building a career, not only live shows, but how to deal with fans, how to do this, how to do that. Not to say that we didn’t have any idea and we were totally dumb to it, but anything you can pick up along the way from anybody is obviously very valuable information and Adam is a master of it and he got a good career out of it. He probably watching someone before him doing it, you know what I mean?

'Hopefully we’re setting a good example for somebody else coming through, and if we can pay it forward and give other people advice as we move forward and help them out, then I sure as hell am going to be doing that myself and helping someone else because I just think it’s fair. I want to see everybody do well in this business because it’s really tough, and I think everybody deserves a shot.  If they’re prepared to pick up a pen and paper and a guitar and try their guts out to do a good song to make people feel something, then I think everyone deserves a shot.  So as we move forward, hopefully we can be Adam Brand to somebody else.'

McAlister Kemp are unapologetically 'country rock' as opposed to traditional country - which is not always an easy thing in a genre that is known for having some rules - and they take their roles as entertainers very seriously, ramping it up a notch in their shows, which feature four backing dancers and four backing singers in addition to the band members.  

'Essentially we’ve sometimes got 14 people onstage and it looks like a circus, but that’s how we want it to look,' said Troy. 'Sure, we’re shaking it up a little bit and we probably get frowned upon by some of the people in the industry or the older country music fans, but you know what?  Country is changing and moving forward and you can see that coming straight out of America ... Luke Bryan and Jake Owen and Blake Shelton and all these guys who are doing their shows, and Miranda Lambert – whoever you are, you can‘t deny that this style of modern country is coming through and we love that. That’s what Drew and I listen to ourselves, and not to say we don’t love Slim Dusty and John Williamson and all those guys. These guys are our history in country music here and thank God for them, but people have to accept that country music is moving forward. 

'I personally think it’s getting a lot cooler and tougher and I think the more people can hear it, particularly the younger generation, and even half of Australia doesn’t even know McAlister Kemp exists or that country rocks like it does. And then you say "country" and people say, “Oh, you play country and western.”  I say, “No, we’re not western.” It’s country rock. We don’t do the western thing ... It’s just trying to get that awareness out there right across Australia so that we might have a John Farnham career rather than a smaller thing. Who knows? I think anybody who loves Cold Chisel and 1927 and Noiseworks and all those people are going to love McAlister Kemp.' 

Troy was very generous with his time during this interview so I ended up with enough material to make a very long interview. So I'm going to keep it in reserve for when the album comes out ... McAlister Kemp fans, you'll just have to wait! In the meantime, there's the single to keep you happy.

The new McAlister Kemp album will be released on 17 January 2014.

www.mcalisterkemp.com