Welcome to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Hey, thanks for your company today. I’ve got a question for you.
Can you guess the group? They formed as the Farris Brothers in 1977 in Sydney and rose to become one of the world’s biggest bands with a series of hit recordings in the mid to late 80s and early 90s. They’re still one of Australia’s highest selling music acts of all time and their charismatic lead singer dated Kylie Minogue, Helena Christensen, Belinda Carlyle, Kim Wilson and Bob Geldof’s ex, Paula Yates, before losing his life at the age of 37. Did I hear you murmur in excess? Well, if that’s what you’re thinking, you’re right.
And today’s special guest is the band’s bass player, Gary Gary Beers, who now stars in a new band all his own called Ashen Moon. No, I don’t have a stutter. Gary really does have two Garys in his name.
And if you know anything about me, you’ll know I just had to ask him about this before going anywhere else. I guess it’s Gary Gary because I started a bass company that’s Gary Gary Beers basses, so GGB basses. So I guess it’s now done a full circle back to Gary Gary Beers.
But born Gary Beers, became Gary Gary Beers on the first album cover. That’s sort of stuck. Why? My then girlfriend, Rebecca, did all the hand-drawn credits on the first two albums.
And she was writing Gary Gary as a joke because Michael’s then girlfriend used to call me Gary Gary. So she was just playing with her pens and wrote Gary Gary and it got printed that way. So that became my name.
And you were happy with that? I guess you would have never imagined it would have stuck. No, I was fine with it. I mean, it was kind of a bit of a stage name.
My mother was not impressed because she’s like, well, it’s not your name, but, you know, whatever. It was fun. What did your parents think of your job as a musician? Not much.
I mean, they’re always trying to talk me out of it. I mean, Dad was a truck driver. My mom did odd jobs.
And they’re always like, you know, there’s no future in it. Until we started playing shows and they came to shows and went down the front going, that’s my son. That’s my son.
And all of a sudden it was a full circle. So you were a black sheep until then? Pretty much so. I mean, I was the only, I probably still am.
I was the only person that ever played music in my family on both sides. First person that ever got into music. I don’t know why, but we just weren’t into music.
So how did you catch the bug? Just being alive at the right time. I mean, The Beatles, Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Queen, all the great bands were coming out. ACDC played at our school dance.
I mean, you couldn’t really avoid it. And then I just got the bug. I just wanted to be a guitar player.
But then I was so bad at guitar, I lost a bet and had to buy a bass. Tell me a little bit about that bet. With my two mates at school.
We decided we wanted to be a band just before I met the Farris brothers. So we, you know, the new thing was everyone has to have a bass guitar player. So, you know, the three of us, we all play guitar.
And it was like whoever knew the least chords would lose the bet and buy a bass. And that was me. So I went out and bought a cheap bass and became like the only other bass player in the area.
Besides the bass player that was at the time playing with Tim and Kirk in their band Guinness. And Andrew Farris heard about me with my bass and we met. And the next day I’m jamming with him and John and joined the fledgling Farris brothers.
Things I do. But you know I got a little lovin’ for you. It’s all the same.
This was long before the band became to be known as InXS. Even before the Farris brothers. I mean, I jam with John and Andrew.
John then went off with his band. And then Andrew and I just sat around writing and formed our own band called Dr. Dolphin. And Michael came back from L.A. and joined that band.
So the first band, real band I was in was Dr. Dolphin with Andrew and Michael. I’ve got to ask about that name. Where’d you get that? I don’t know.
Probably too many bags of green stuff probably. You were all Sydney boys. You were surrounded by water.
I suppose dolphins were around at the time too. Perhaps that had an influence. Yeah.
I guess so. All the names made no sense back in those days. So it seemed like a good name that made no sense.
Yeah, right. So what happened then when you met Andrew Farris? I actually met him at a surf dance at Bogola Surf Club. I didn’t know him.
I went to school with his big brother Tim. And Tim played in a band with Kirk. And I walked over to, it was in the dark, the band that we went to see, I went to see and he went to see separately.
It was setting up and no one could find the lights. So he was sitting over in the dark. And I thought it was Tim.
So I went over to say hello. And he goes, no, I’m Andrew. I’m his brother.
And you’re Gary. You just bought a bass. And I’m like, yeah.
Are you psychic? And I said, next day, we hit it off. And next day I’m jamming with Andrew and John. John, who was like 12, I think, at the time, on drums.
There’s a certain personality type around bass players. Did you fit them all? Perfectly, yeah. I mean, I don’t know whether bass makes you the personality or you just, I think it’s it, yeah.
You just gravitate towards what you feel good with. And I’ve always, bass players are always pretty laid back and reliable and pretty good with arrangements and the lyrics and remembering all the parts. And I had a van.
I was a good driver. I mean, besides all that, I wasn’t the greatest bass player when I started out. But I guess we all kind of learned how to play on stage together anyway as a band.
You also have to have a pretty good memory as a bass player, don’t you? And I believe you possessed one of those. Yeah. I mean, I guess in the heat of the moment, the pointy end, as I call it, like the singer and the Tim and Kirk on the guitar players, either side of him, we call them the pointy end and me, Andrew and John with the engine room at the back.
The engine room can’t make mistakes. I mean, you’ve got to be on the ball. And quite often in the heat of an important concert or just a crazy night, Tim would turn to me and go, what’s the next chord? Or Michael would go, what’s the next lyric? And I’d just mouth the lyric or show Tim the chord or the next note.
And off we go. They always knew they could look to me and I’d give them the pointer. Bass is a pretty wonderfully simple instrument.
Four strings and your job, especially in a band like with two, sometimes three guitar players, is to hold it down and be simple. And I’ve never been one to show off. I can, but I don’t really choose to.
I’d rather just be solid and be tight with the drums and tight with Andrew as the other part of the engine room and just make this enormous sound that we used to make as a team. And then that lets the guys out the front do their thing, be the showman out front. So, yeah, my part was very important.
I think everyone appreciated that, especially later on, just as things got bigger, that my part was just as important as anybody else’s part. So you started out as a band making music together. You found that you had chemistry between you and the sound coming out of you really worked.
When did it really start taking off? It took forever. I mean, it’s just so funny because, yeah, Kick was obviously our biggest album. That was our sixth album.
And these days you don’t get two releases, let alone six albums. So, yeah, we were kind of fumbling around musically and stage-wise. We’re all sort of energy and legs and arms and not really combining it.
But I guess when we sort of found something when we were working with Richard Clapton on the second album, Underneath the Colours, songwriting-wise, I think working with Mark Opitz really helped us gel as a band and realise that we actually weren’t that bad. We were pretty good. And the other songs were starting to flow.
I mean, when Andrew and Michael wrote The One Thing, I was like, wow, that’s pretty good. We’re heading somewhere now. And then Don’t Change came out of that album as well, Shabu Shabar.
So I think probably Shabu Shabar and that tour is when we realised that we were really onto something. Well, you and me are slippery on the night Just like the waves and that’s the day You know we are the brightest There’s no place in here Were they the sole songwriters? No, we all wrote. I mean, everyone had a bit.
I think by the time we did Listen Like Thieves, the album before Kick, I wrote the title track. I wrote the music for the song Listen Like Thieves. Kirk wrote some.
John wrote some. Tim wrote some. And I love the album for that.
But I think the last song written was Andrew and Michael needed a hit and they wrote What You Need basically in a day. And we recorded it in an afternoon and that was that. So we had a top five American hit.
So the next album, Chris Thomas is like, well, can we just do all that? So can we have an album full of what you need or hits? So we’re like, okay. I thought it was pretty big of the rest of us to step back and say, sure. Let Andrew and Michael write the whole album.
So they did and they did a magnificent job. So what does that say about your personalities and your egos then that you were able to step back and let them write? And how had that songwriting process worked until that point? Andrew was always the more concentrated writer. Like he’s always been able to sit and really write and, you know, he plays all the instruments and, you know, he’s kind of born to be a songwriter.
And Michael obviously felt very comfortable putting lyrics and top lines on Andrew’s music, even though he did it with ours as well. I just think that the two of them together, you know, it was pretty obvious that they were writing stuff that was better than ours. I mean, you know, like different.
We’d write stuff that would still fit in in an album format, like Listen Like Thieves. Andrew couldn’t have written that, the actual song. I mean, I wrote it and Andrew helped me arrange it.
Michael did the vocals. Without Andrew and Michael, it wouldn’t be what it is. But without me, it wouldn’t be what it is either.
So it fits in really well with the rest of the album. As far as what’s to say about the band, I think it shows that we’re a family that really put the band before egos, before individual egos. We’re loving it.
We love playing together. I mean, there’s three brothers and three best friends of the brothers. So in the end, it was just a very easygoing thing.
I mean, no egos. No one complained about it at all. And then we reverted back to getting more involved with the writing after Kick.
And then from X on, we all had a hand in writing again. But the thing is, we’re all part of the writing in a way because our parts are on the songs. I mean, Andrew and Michael wrote Never Tear Us Apart, but the rhythm section, playing and sound is very, very important to the overall what everyone remembers in the song.
And Kirk’s back solo. And we worked out a long time ago due to Chris Murphy, the late Chris Murphy, suggesting that we had a publishing split that looked after the ones who didn’t write but were there for the entire tour, like touring an album for a year or a year and a half sometimes, promoting a record. They deserve to get part of the record.
So we worked out a fair split. So we were all looked after anyway, whether we wrote or not. Everyone was happy.
Way to go. Chris had pointed out in his previous experience as a manager and an agent that bands broke up over songwriting. Yeah.
And that’s historical, but we just, you know, he suggested a split that looked after us and it’s fine. It’s great. Yeah.
Gary, where did the name come from? NXS. We were going to be signed by Gary Morris, who was managing the oils. He actually squeezed us all into his HR Holden to go for a drive.
We thought to have lunch and chat about management. And he literally drove from one driveway to the next driveway up into a car park behind an industrial building. Literally drove 40 feet and then just stopped the car, turned around and started talking to us about being the world’s biggest Christian band.
And we were not expecting that. It wasn’t anything what we talked about. So we’re like, thanks, but no thanks.
And then we were about to go on tour for two weeks or three weeks with the oils. And he basically disappeared and kind of quit managing the oils and they blamed us. So we had supported him for weeks.
It was a very cold atmosphere because they blamed us for their manager disappearing. But he just had some kind of spiritual awakening and took to the road and less travelled. He just went to some big, I don’t know, saw God and went to some Christian camp.
And then he asked Chris Murphy to come and look at us because he couldn’t manage us.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Gary Morris had always been referred to as Midnight Oil’s sixth member.
He’d been managing them since the late 70s and was credited with accelerating their climb to international success throughout the 80s. Out where the river broke the blood to save our ship. In the end he came back and the oils took him back, of course, but it was a very funny tour because the oils were mates later when it was all sorted out, but on that tour it was very, very odd because why is this young bunch of upstarts supporting us when they poisoned our manager, so to speak.
We learnt so much from the oils from that two or three weeks in the pubs. My God, we learnt how to grow up very fast on stage. Tell me about that.
What did you learn? Pubs in those days were hardcore. The fans were just insane. Sweat boxes where everyone’s hammered, drinking beer and throwing, and if you don’t play well they throw, you’re going to wear a beer.
And I think the last gig of that tour was in excess the oils and the angels. The stage door tavern, which holds about 1,500 people, was packed. It took us half an hour to get to the door to get to the dressing room and wear the opening band, and then to stop people coming in they padlocked the doors from the inside.
Thank God there wasn’t a fire, but that’s what it was like in those days. It was just hardcore. Do you think that’s uniquely Australian behaviour or was that a sign of the times everywhere? I think we all talk about the Australian pubs.
I think the Australian pubs were definitely on the whole they were all the same. They were all tough sweat barns and you had to be good. You had to really turn the guitars up and get people moving their arses.
So we played in places similar in England and bars in America, but nothing’s like the Australian pubs. That’s why we’re all deaf today, right? Huh? That’s why we’re I know. You got me.
No, it’s true, but it was just a real lesson in how to toughen up your act and play as a team. Were you already in Excess at the time? No, we were Farris Brothers, but Boris wanted to call us in Excess and then he disappeared, so we kept the name thinking that we’ll go back to Farris Brothers, but then the name seemed to stick by the time we finished touring with the Oils, seeing the posters up and started to know us as in Excess, so it kind of seemed silly to go back to being the Farris Brothers. Given that there were more than just the Farris Brothers out there anyway, you didn’t mind being part of the Farris Brothers and being unnamed? No, to be honest, again, it just didn’t bother me.
I mean, I went to school with Tim, first band was with Andrew, and Andrew was kind of my best friend and we had a musical. I mean, I just bought a bass, so my musical discovery was with Andrew Farris. We’d sit and he’d play guitar or piano and I’d sit and bass and then we’d just write stuff, just the two of us.
So that’s where my real love of music, we’d just listen, get stoned and listen to music all the time, drive around, listening to music. It was just great. So where had Gary plucked in Excess from? Did it have any special meaning or where had he found that name? I guess at the time IXL made Jam, Fruit Jam, and XTC were a big band.
I think everything was just abbreviation, letters. He just grabbed that, wrote it down, that was that. So I don’t think he was exactly not stoned at the time either, so there was a lot of that going around.
But yeah, he just came with that and we went, okay, we’ll give it a go and the Farris Brothers, Tim played more percussion than guitar. So all that went out the window pretty quickly when we became in Excess and started playing the pubs. We had a very rude awakening.
Before we did that tour with the Oils, we did one show with the Angels and we were still wearing vests and playing congas and it was, we were lucky to get out of the, was it Narrabeen? Luckily we had a lot of our family and friends there from work to help us not get killed. But we realised pretty quickly that let’s get rid of the percussion. We’re a funk band in many ways, let’s put the funk into the guitars and the rhythm section and just maybe leave out the percussion.
So that’s what we did. So you kind of had to fit into the mould of those heavier bands that you were a support act for? Yeah, well people wanted, especially if you’re supporting a band like the Angels or the Oils, they’re guitar bands and we were also supporting Dragon and Rose Tattoo and all these amazing Australian bands. And then eventually Cold Chisel, we went on tour with Cold Chisel and became great mates.
And also Richard Clapton, we supported Richard Clapton around. And just all these bands were heavy on guitars and all really good players. So we had to just more concentrate on guitars.
And Andrew was like, everyone says he’s our keyboard player, but he’s also one of the main guitar players, because he’s really the funk guitar player in the band. And Tim and Kirk’s got his Kirk style, which I call more sort of esoteric and atmospheric and Tim’s, I call them meat and potatoes. Tim and I on our side of the stage just played the riffs as loud as we could.
So it all blended together. So you had to change direction as you went along, that’s not, you didn’t set out to be a heavy band from the beginning, did you? No, no, we were enjoying playing some like funk and we used to do bass solos and drum solos and you can still hear it on the first album that Andrew’s doing amazing synthesizer solos and all that sort of stuff we kind of started losing and started putting in more guitar solos. But I think generally it was just a necessity.
And also I think we really enjoyed playing the heavier stuff anyway, because the job is really to get people moving and have a good night. And we had more of a groove in our rock than pretty much all the other bands in Australia that weren’t playing fusion or funk. Because still today funk’s a really huge, I really don’t understand it, 80’s funk is still so popular.
I mean it’s still going but we had a fair bit of that but we just toughened it up and just changed our groove to more of a band overall groove and John and I would have some fun with the rhythm section. You really found your own niche there that you had no competition in? No, no it’s funny because everyone was saying the rock funk thing and we were like, okay makes sense, that’s what we sound like. We didn’t really think about it, we never as you say, we didn’t go out and we’re going to play like this.
We developed on stage, I mean we didn’t even rehearse that much to be honest. We’d go out and just jam it out on stage. So you were knocking them dead at all the pubs that you were playing at as support acts for a while with those heavier guys.
When did you start headlining yourselves? Well we’re still doing, every time we do a tour with a big act we’d still be doing our little shows at corner pubs and we had a couple of local gigs that we were doing as the Farris Brothers that we kept going with in excess, taverns, and our friends and family would come along to that and then eventually it just kept getting bigger and bigger and we’re playing all of a sudden we’re headlining those big pub venues. So you’re growing this live fan base and then you sign to a record company you start recording. What happens then? That’s exactly how it worked out.
It was good to sign with somebody but we definitely signed with the wrong label for the first two albums. We signed to Deluxe Records, which was anything but, and we were part of a package deal of three bands and the guy just took us because he wanted the other two bands. And in the end we became the biggest band on his label and then we opted out of his label to go with a real label like Warner Brothers.
But yeah, we just got signed and given no money for the first record. I became a handyman with a soldering iron and tools because we’d have to do two, sometimes three gigs a night and then go to the studio and then have to pull the speaker boxes apart and fix what was broken so you can go in the studio without sounding like crap. And then walk out of the studio at daylight, do the laundry.
You were always really good with your hands, weren’t you, in terms of woodwork? I did woodwork at school, yeah, and I’m not really good at it but I know what I’m doing. But I do know my way around tools and I did electronics for a couple of years after school. That was going to be my vocation but music took over.
But you weren’t building your own guitars at that point? No, I was pulling guitars apart and changing pickups and rewiring this and pulling frets out and just changing all the time and doing, you know, it was just you got a whole day to fill and you’re buying all I could afford myself were really cheap Fender copies. So you’d try and make them sound better. You certainly managed to do that.
NXS was becoming one of the biggest bands in this country. You had huge following everywhere. Did you manage to keep your feet on the ground, all of you, at that time or were your egos starting to run away with you? You know, we had it in check.
I mean we’re a family. I mean we all looked after each other. We all got along very well.
So we had our own little Australian footy team that we’d go around the world with and the crews and we’d all have our own little bubble and we kind of joked that we’d have our own language. We’d talk in fluent Australian and no one would know what the hell we’re talking about. We just looked after each other.
I mean there’s no real maybe it might have been a night here and there but no ego horror stories like you hear about all the time. If any person should have, it would have been Michael because everyone was trying to drag Michael out as the lead singer and we actually turned down a Rolling Stone cover because they wanted just Michael, not the whole band. So who turns down a Rolling Stone cover? We did.
And Michael was fine with that. Michael enjoyed being in a team and knowing that we had his back rather than being a front guy, even though the most brilliant front guy in the world. Had you known that about him when he first joined the band? Did you see it immediately? No.
He obviously had something with girls etc. He wasn’t a great singer. He just wrote poetry.
It took him a while to turn that into lyrics and he just stood there and sang. Again we all sort of grew together. The most talented guy in the band at that time was probably John, the 13 year old drummer.
14 year old drummer he was always amazing. And then probably Andrew and Kirk. As I said we just all fitted in with our parts and Michael’s part was just to sing.
And Kirk sang a lot of the songs as well because Kirk was the lead singer of the school band Guinness that was our school band that Tim and Kirk were in. He was actually at that time a better singer than Michael. Pretty special then that he didn’t mind that Michael had taken over completely as the lead.
Kirk didn’t want to be a front man. There is a difference between, as I said, the pointy end. Kirk liked singing and also pretty early on he realised that the two of them together sounded great.
Just their two voices just blended. Kirk just really wanted to concentrate on guitar and then sax and we call it Kirk’s world. He’s always in his little Kirk’s world of his sounds.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Australia was still very much the flavour of the month in America in the late 80s.
In Excess toured there several times, slowly building audience through college campuses and criss-crossing the country continuously. We really earned our success. And while working in America, we’re still building in England.
It never became too much of a grind, because we were always going up a step. It was always going somewhere, and we always had Australia, which was always open to our music. Like the swing with Burn For You and all those songs was massive in Australia then.
It’s no use pretending that I understand The hide and seek we play with facts A change is on demand Tip my hat at the sun And the shadows they run dark Learn me and I’ll burn for you And the love song never stops That was always great to go back home, even though we suffered from the tall poppy syndrome quite a few times. What do you mean by that? Australians and the tall poppy syndrome, I guess it’s an Irish thing we got from them, but they just don’t like people having success in many ways. So we’d go back, and even your friends are like, well, gee, how is it in America? So we learned to go back to Australia and not talk about, well, we sold out seven nights at Wembley Arena.
We’d go home and feed the dog and go surfing, and we’d all just keep it to ourselves, because there was this thing that Australians love picking on things that are successful. That’s a terrible thing. When you look at it in hindsight, it helps keep you grounded, because we could have easily gone home and said, well, we don’t give a shit about Australia anymore.
But we did. What our friends thought about us mattered, and also more so what they thought of us as people rather than as some massive band. And let’s not forget, back in those days, the internet wasn’t around.
There was no social media or YouTube or anything like that. So you’d have to actually make telephone calls to talk to people. So people would not really know unless they read the paper or saw something on the news about things that happened overseas to people like us.
So it wasn’t hard to keep it quiet. Don’t ask me what you know is true Don’t have to tell you I love your precious heart I was standing You were there To watch the lighting And they can never tear us apart Some of us don’t know why NXS keeps growing. It keeps hitting number one everywhere in the world.
In 1989, you took a break from the band. How come? I was actually just interested musically in doing something else. The band was taking a break anyway, and I think that was when I did Abstinent Friends.
I’ve always been mates with Sean Kelly from The Models. We did so many shows together. We stayed in touch, which was kind of rare because the whole Sydney versus Melbourne thing was always very strong.
You’ll have to explain that. There are people listening here that know nothing about that rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney. Yeah, I guess it’s a matter of Melbourne always, because it’s more of a college-university music circuit, that they always thought, I think the preconception was that Melbourne bands were smarter than Sydney bands and Sydney bands were more fun rock and roll, which in some ways is true, but not across the board.
So a lot of Sydney bands got snubbed in Melbourne and a lot of Melbourne bands were snubbed as being too intellectual in Sydney. It was something that always seemed to be prevalent until it’s not. I mean, Sean and I became friends and we just started writing and then NXS was having a break after Kick, which in hindsight wasn’t a very smart move, to be honest.
But I mean, we just did. We needed a big break from a massive amount of touring and I threw my writing into Abstinent Friends. It was a really fun side project.
And what happened to NXS then after that? We just got back in the studio and did X and off we went. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ It came to a fast end when Michael lost his life. 1997.
Were you shocked? Yeah. I still am. An accident gone wrong? I don’t know.
I don’t really want to know. I mean, I don’t think it’s healthy for me or his family or fans for me to have an opinion either way. I mean, I just know that I miss him every day.
I know that if circumstances were different, he’d still be here. So, yeah, he didn’t get to watch his daughter grow up. I hazard a guess that if he was around, we’d still be making music together.
It’s just one of those horrible things in life that happen and there’s no point trying to analyse it. Got to grieve a bit and then move on. Now, did you deal with it, all of you as a band? There was pretty much time.
I mean, and we had a lot of things like as a business. Chris Murphy, our manager, had moved on from years before. Michael was living in south of France at the time.
So as a band, as a business, it was a mess. So we had to clean that up. So that really became a focus, which is probably a good thing to distract us that, you know, obviously fans have to grieve too and they all want to chat about it and have their opinions on it and sometimes you don’t want to listen to it.
So I had to make a couple of acres up north of Sydney and I just went hiding for a while. And what took you to Los Angeles to live, Gary? We were here doing the TV show, The Rockstein Excess Show, and on a rare night out, I’d been surfing that day and I went, Andrew Ferris wanted to go to this bar. So I accompanied him to this bar and this beautiful young lady walked up and said, hi, I love your TV show.
You know, we were both separated and then we started dating, fell in love and I moved to LA. I know that in late 2015 you formed a band called Stadium with Irish singer Kieran Gribben who actually sung out front of In Excess for a while after Michael had departed, didn’t he? Mm-hmm, yeah. It was really good fun.
And then Kieran left and I met Toby around that time at a party and we started writing. So we thought, well, it’s a whole new thing anyway. So we went through the whole process of a million pieces of paper with names and one night we were walking out of my studio from recording at my house and there was giant bushfires in LA and we walked out and in my backyard there was a big full moon and it was covered in smoke and red and so we were like, oh, ash and moon.
So we called it Ash and Moon and we’re about to bring it to Australia. There’s something outside that has happened a lot for me And I don’t want to face this anymore Standing on the ride, the devil’s clutching the sides of me Counting all the turns, can we set the score? I’m longing to be free I’m seeing black and white Slowly dying in grey That’s your latest band, Ash and Moon, and the Toby you talk about, of course, is the lead vocalist, Toby Rand. Tell us a little bit about Ash and Moon.
It’s more rocky than what I’m known for. Kind of Zeppelin-y because that’s still one of my favourite bands of all time. Jeff Buckley, one of my favourite artists of all time and Toby and I kind of write what we feel.
There’s two songs that we released this year, God Tank and Stargaze, that I actually wrote in 1998. God Tank was the first thing I wrote when I picked up a guitar after Michael’s death. About a year later, after we lost Michael, I thought it’s about time I get back in the studio so I walked in and wrote God Tank.
And it’s been sitting on tape all this time until Toby heard it and went, let’s finish that off. Welcome to God Tank Yeah, the time has arrived Who knows where we’ll sleep tonight But you’re in my arms for life And I’ll leave the girl’s soul with love So shed your skin Face your God You’re never far from you You were born with a new love A mirror’s fault This song’s been sitting around forever, 30 years, so having watched Andrew and Michael with a little bit of jealousy with their connection, it’s fun to have my own songwriting partner. Oh, that’s fabulous that you found it.
And obviously nobody can keep a guitar out of your hand for very long. Yeah, pretty much so, yeah. Ashen Moon’s been playing around America too of late? He did some shows.
And then our guitar player, Yo-Hai Portal, had just joined the band and he got a brain tumour so he ended up being benign and fine but all the surgeries really knocked him around so he was recovering for a year and a half so we just waited. Now you’re ready to rock again. What are audiences here going to see with Ashen Moon on stage? Well, it’s a four-piece so it’s like Yo-Hai’s an incredible guitar player.
I’m having a lot of fun being in a band that’s stripped back so I can really feature the bass. We have the amazing Jackie Barnes playing drums with us and I’ve not played with Jackie before. I’ve heard such great things about him.
All conversations so far, he’s a real sweetheart too, like his dad, like Jimmy. So we’re going to have a really good time and we’ve got all our originals. We’ll probably throw a few other songs in there that I might be known for here and there.
We’re just going to come out and show what we can do because we’re pretty good. Awesome. Hopefully the tall poppy syndrome will not exist anymore and people will be able to give you the accolades that you richly deserve.
You’ve lived an amazing life, Gary Beers, with all the music that you’ve given everyone right around the world from such humble beginnings in music to such heights of success and you keep doing it. We can’t wait to see you playing here. Is this your first time back to Australia in some time or do you make regular trips here? It’s the first time I’ve been playing there for 11 or 12 years.
I was back I guess a year ago and that was the first time I’d really been back for more than two nights in 10 years. So I don’t get back much. There’s been not really much need for me to go to Australia.
I’ve just been busy here doing the bass company, being a dad, all that sort of stuff. But it’s very overdue, put it that way, and I can’t wait to get there and show that I’m still alive and still playing and bring a new band because I really, really excited about Ash and Moon. Gary, thank you so much for joining us today.
It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you and I’m glad you haven’t forgotten about the land down under because we certainly haven’t forgotten about you. Thanks, Anne. No, it’s great.
As I said, can’t wait to come back. Bit of a homecoming. All fails and mistakes Streets are blue Almond bloods That chill in the vine Some silken moment Goes on forever And we’re leaving broken hearts Behind Mystify, mystify me Mystify, mystify me I need perfection Some twisted selection That tangles me Mystify They were a great band, weren’t they? In the 80s, we all watched In Excess go from fledgling Australian pub rockers to global superstars.
They finally called it quits in 2012, but they still remain hugely popular today. Don’t forget to check out Gary Gary Beer’s new band, Ash and Moon, whenever they’re playing near you. Thanks for your company today.
I hope you’ve had a really good time. I’ll see you same time next week. Bye now.
It’s a beautiful day You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Beautiful day Oh, baby, any day that you’re gone away It’s a beautiful day