To say there’s a general feeling of ambivalence towards actors embarking on music careers is a massive understatement. Scarred by one too many self-indulgent (30 Seconds To Mars) or purely superfluous (Scarlett Johansson’s record of Tom Waits covers) projects, news of a screen star’s transition into the world of song commonly garners a collective cringe.
Australian actor par excellence Guy Pearce will release his debut LP Broken Bones this week. Pearce has been writing and recording music for more than 25 years. However, the prevalent actor-cum-musician stigma stopped him showcasing this side of his personality until now.
“I think any doubts that I had about my music were amplified by the sheer fact that I only ever seemed to receive cynicism,” Pearce says. “Whether that was people saying, ‘Aren’t you famous enough?’ or ‘We don’t want another bloody actor out there releasing a single’ or ‘Oh right, you’re just cashing in, are you?’”
Pearce’s musical proclivity hasn’t exactly been a closely guarded secret. Over the years he’s occasionally been cast in musical theatre productions, and back in 1991 he penned multiple songs for Australian director Frank Howson’s film Hunting. Despite this, when the 47-year-old acting maestro dropped the single ‘Storm’ in August, it came as a surprise to just about everyone.
“I kept coming back to my thoughts and feelings about it all the time,” he says. “I would go, ‘Look, releasing it’s not important, it’s really just about the making of it and the playing of it. People are right, I don’t need to be in the public eye any more.’”
Pearce’s initial breakthrough was in the mid-1980s, when he took the role of Mike Young on classic Aussie soap Neighbours. A number of his onscreen comrades would soon cross over into mainstream pop music, most notably Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan. Fear of looking like yet another one in the pack dissuaded Pearce from making his music publicly available.
“I buried myself into a bit of a fearful hole,” he says. “So I promptly took myself out of that equation and said, ‘Sorry. Don’t worry, I won’t do that.’ And I just never had the confidence to come back from that.”
It’s 26 years since Pearce’s stint as a soap star. In the ensuing period, he’s become one of the most versatile and reliable actors this country’s ever produced. Track nine on Broken Bones,‘Someone Else’, wasactually conceived in his career’s nascent period, but the record’s stylistic persuasion shows that scoring a gig on Top Of The Pops has never been the motivation for his songwriting.
Across ten thoughtfully constructed mid-tempo rock tunes, Pearce proves he’s an eloquent melodist with a husky vocal timbre, recalling the likes of Mark Lanegan and Stereophonics’ Kelly Jones.
“[Songwriting] just means so much to me. It’s really powerful,” he says. “I was going to say it’s therapeutic, but that makes it sound like you just turn to it when you need some therapy. But it’s always been a really strong driver in who I am.”
Indeed, even though Pearce once decided against sharing his compositions with the wider public, that didn’t stifle his creativity. To compile Broken Bones, he scoured through an extensive song archive, amassed over the last three decades.
“It’s just something that comes out of you that you can’t stop,” he says. “I’ve just carried on making the music, but no-one’s ever heard it. I kept it to myself, really. As important as acting is for me, as far as expressing who I am and what I get to investigate – as far as behaviour and personality and psychology – music’s equally, if not more, important.”
In a certain respect, the common dismissal of actors’ musical projects implies a belief that just like we’d prefer rappers to keep rapping, painters to keep painting and plumbers to keep fixing toilets, actors should continue to focus on acting alone. Pearce admits he’d internalised this attitude.
“As you mature and go through things, you realise all those habits that you have that mean you’re stuck in this psychological place as a 12-year-old and you’re stuck in this psychological place as a 15-year-old. You spend your life trying to get yourself unstuck from those things. This was just another one of those things that was keeping me stuck in a certain place.”
So what was the turning point? Broken Bones was recorded in two stints. The first was in 2011, at drummer and producer Michael Barker’s New Zealand studio. Pearce then completed the record over the last couple of years, in between film projects, at his Melbourne home studio.
Pearce met Barker (who’s drummed for John Butler Trio and the reunited Split Enz) in 2009 when they were both working on the Melbourne Theatre Company production Poor Boy. It was Barker’s influence that allowed Pearce to overcome his longstanding apprehension.
“Michael said to me, ‘You’re actually doing yourself damage by repeating this story that you don’t need to get this music out. What’s the worst that can happen?’ And I said, ‘That everyone’s going to look at me and go, “Oh, this is awful, why did you do this?”’ And he said, ‘Well if people don’t like it, it’s not for them.’
“He made me realise that all of that was kind of bullshit, which was very gratifying and hard to hear and made me nervous about the prospect.”
Broken Bones out Friday November 7 through MGM. Catch him withDancing Heals and Emma Anglesey atThe Basement onWednesday November 19, tickets online.
