SINGING UP A STORM

Actors becoming rockstars, it’s one of the oldest cliches in the book. When you hear of an actor wanting to release a single, the typical response is to roll your eyes whilst conjuring up images in your mind of Russell Crowe and David Hasselhoff.

Like numerous Australian actors before him, Ex-Neighbours star Guy Pearce, really wants to be a musician.

The difference between Pearce and his fellow castmates, Kylie Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia, Natalie Bassingthwaighte and Craig McLachlan (amongst others), is that he has been writing songs since he was a child and has been recording  and producing his own music for over twenty-five years.

His career as an actor has seen him take on roles such as Memento‘s Leonard, who can’t remember what he did five minutes ago to a lip-syncing female impersonator in Priscilla, with hundreds of characters in-between. One thing he’s never played is a rock star, in fact, Pearce has been adamant in the press that his music is ‘personal’ (that old chestnut) and would never be released.

That’s all about to change with the his first single Storm being released later this week and the November release of his follow up album Broken Bones, which he wrote and produced.

The actor told News Corp, “I’d gotten into such a routine over the last 25 years of telling journalists ‘I’ll never release music, I don’t want to inflict it on the world, nobody wants to hear another actor making music, I’m sorry I even mentioned I play music’,” Pearce says. “I structured this very convenient story for myself that I could continue on making music but keep it buried. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 25 years reflecting on how important in the music inside me is without thinking about how it’s received publicly.”

The actor finally decided to unleash his musical passions on the world after meeting New Zealand musician Michael Barker, who told him his music was too good to be kept secret.

“Michael said `F — the critics’,” Pearce says. “I’d heard that before but it’d never really resonated before. Michael told me `There’s plenty of music out there lots of people don’t like. If they don’t like it it’s not for them’. Michael gave me a confidence I didn’t have before, he was very encouraging.”

“He made me realise getting the music out, either out of my head or out publicly, was really important for me to move on, instead of going back to old stuff. I write songs all the time. It’s a great form of therapy, a great way to balance out my life. But the only way to force yourself to walk away from it is to release it publicly. I don’t want to be an 80 year old man going ‘I’ve been working on this song for 42 years, what am I going to do with it?’ If people don’t like it, fine. I don’t care. I’m at that point now. I want people to like it obviously, but I don’t care about my reaction if they don’t like it.”

The actor’s music has been compared to Neil Finn, while vocally his breathy performance is said to sound “like a deeper, more matured Jeff Buckley before soaring upward through his registry to an (almost) Thom Yorke falsetto coo” (source). We can hear a bit of Tex Perkins influencing his voice and style.

You can decide for yourself if you think he’s talented or not, by listening to his first single Storm below (more samplers can be heard here).