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From Drum Media ("Sydney's Largest Circulating Free Music Publication,"), December 13 issue

He's No God-Fearing Man - Russell Crowe interview by Christie Eliezer

There are enough people who dismiss Russell Crowe's music as the indulgence of a rich actor. But some musicians don't agree. Billy Bragg wrote to him about his song "Raewyn," how hearing it for the first time "brought my morning to a halt, leaving me gazing out at the winter sun on the ocean," and adding, "It's a beautiful, intimate song."

An avid Bragg fan whose records he learned from as a songwriter, Crowe admits, "that was a special moment for me." They'd once tried to write a song together, but Bragg was too jetlagged.

Crowe and Sting have exchanged emails in recent years. "But our friendship went into a different place," he says, after Sting wrote to him about the song. "You're a very enigmatic man. This is not what I was expecting. Your song is a royal gift to [Crowe's son] Charlie, beautiful photographic images, a surprisingly tender voice..." Sting asked rhetorically "But will it get on the radio? Not a chance mate."

Crowe's old band "Thirty Odd Foot Of Grunt" plodded a bit and dumbed down his songs. But Crowe didn't twig until their tour in 2003, when he'd given up drinking.

"We'd slotted into a comfortable stage," Crowe agrees. "We hadn't written a song together for quite awhile and I realised something had to be shaken up. You do something in the same context for a long time that you start crimping your edges. Sometimes Thirty Odd Foot would get into a groove and not necessarily finesse it into a complete idea. That's the major difference between them and this album where the songs were lovingly nurtured."

His new band, which has some members of Thirty Odd, is "The Ordinary Fear Of God." Don't read too much into it. It's got the same TOFOG initials, which saves a fortune in re-stencilling tour cases.

Making films doesn't give Crowe the chance to interact with his audience the way his music does. At recent club shows to promote his solo album "My Hand, My Heart," he joked, lit fags, swore, urged people to sing along and dance, explained the stories behind the songs, and threw in a version of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues."

The band includes singer-songwriter Alan Doyle, of the Canadian Celtic rock band Great Big Sea who co-produced the album, long time friend Dave Kelly, Stewart Kirwan, Paul Berton, former Midnight Oil bassist Bones Hillman ("I knew him way back in the Auckland days when he was a bouncer at Liberty Stage where you went on Sunday nights to hear new bands") and Stuart Hunter. The energy they put on stage is totally different to Thirty Odd Foot, says Crowe.

"There's significantly less anxiety," he counts off. "Functionally there's more listening going on, both in the room and to each other. These are pretty tricky songs to stand up in a pub to do a complete song with in a concert, there's nothing to drown out the punter if they don't want to listen. So performing them as musically correct as we can is the goal. The harmonies are quite intricate, so everyone's got to be on their game. Having said that, it doesn't create any anxiety because the personalities [in the band] are together, there's a confidence in the material that wasn't there before. We've done half a dozen shows, man, and the leap between the shows was encouraging."

Music, he says, is not about selling units. It's about collaboration. He rejected the advances of major record companies who wanted to sign up Russell Crowe, the celebrity, and instead sells the bands records through a website (www.myhandmyheart) or via the indie Df'rent label.

So does Crowe's fame get in the way of the music? "It creates a huge amount of problems with the music [laughs], there's nothing I can get away from it. There are theories you can do it anonymously but it doesn't hold water. People have to accept I have a complex life that has nothing to do with being an actor or a famous person. But you know, I'm still doing it. People tell me not to do it or they try their best to denigrate it. I stand back and think, 'It's just a fucking song, mate!". There may be a time when I don't want to do it any more. But at the moment this is the most effective means for me to express myself creatively.

"Being an actor is one thing and it's satisfying within what it is. But these [songs] are stories that come from my inquiry into life."