{"id":906570,"date":"2026-09-26T19:48:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T19:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/906570\/"},"modified":"2026-09-26T19:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T19:48:14","slug":"james-reyne-reflects-on-australian-crawl-ahead-of-reunion-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/906570\/","title":{"rendered":"James Reyne reflects on Australian Crawl ahead of reunion tour"},"content":{"rendered":"

The forthcoming “reunion” of legendary rock band Australian Crawl has been anything but smooth sailing.<\/p>\n

In March, founding frontman James Reyne and guitarist Simon Binks filed an application to the Australian Federal Court challenging the acquisition of Australian Crawl trademarks<\/a> by Bill McDonough, the band’s drummer from 1978 to 1983.<\/p>\n

\"Australian<\/p>\n

James Reyne, Simon Binks and David Reyne\u00a0in the 1980s. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

Three months later, a version of Australian Crawl announced its first Australian tour since splitting in 1986. Reyne and Binks would lead the charge, with former drummers David Reyne and John Watson also onboard.<\/p>\n

In September, the ship took on water: Binks bailed, saying he couldn’t fit these gargantuan outdoor shows into his schedule.<\/p>\n

“No hard feelings but life has merely moved on from the early eighties,” the guitarist wrote in a statement.<\/p>\n

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None of this surprised anyone who’d followed the band’s four decades apart, when frosty relationships, and at times outright animosity, were the norm. A reunion was never going to be simple.<\/p>\n

Oh no, not you again<\/p>\n

Reyne has never been his band’s biggest champion, and often regards the songs he wrote as a teenager \u2014 even classics like Beautiful People and The Boys Light Up \u2014 with a kind of personal cultural cringe.<\/p>\n

“Even back then I thought some of the songs were pretty clunky,” Reyne says.<\/p>\n

“There’s a song called Hoochie Gucci Fiorucci Mama. I mean, I wrote it when I was 17 or 18 or something. It’s really clunky, lyrically especially. It’s a young guy trying to be smart. It’s just not smart.”<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Australian Crawl, seen here performing on Countdown, released a string of multi-platinum albums in the early 1980s before splitting up. (ABC)<\/p>\n

Four decades on, that tension lingers. He’s grateful fans still cling to these songs; he just doesn’t quite get why.<\/p>\n

“As I’ve got older, I find it incredible and quite gratifying to be able to do what I do at my age on the level that I get to do it,” he says. “We pull big crowds and I go, ‘Really?'”<\/p>\n

“There’s a song called Reckless that’s become quite well known. The crowd will sing every line, and they’re louder than the band.<\/p>\n

“Recently, I’ve just gone, ‘That’s beautiful. I really like that’. I get these genuine, emotional responses to it. Whereas before I used to go, ‘Oh, that’s some silly old song I wrote when I was a kid’.”<\/p>\n

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Now 69, Reyne has decades of life and musical experience under his belt and feels more confident for it.<\/p>\n

“I knew nothing then,” he says. “I don’t know anything now, but I know a lot more now.”<\/p>\n

The Australian Crawl album James Reyne doesn’t hate<\/p>\n

It was all happening for Aussie Crawl in 1983. Bill McDonough left the band, and Angels drummer Buzz Bidstrup stepped in to ensure the band didn’t lose any momentum.<\/p>\n

A new deal with Geffen Records in America dangled the prize that had eluded peers like Cold Chisel and Mental As Anything: genuine American success.<\/p>\n

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It never came. But the pressure forced rare discipline on the band and produced the one record Reyne still rates.<\/p>\n

“We made an EP called Semantics, Reckless being one of the songs on that,” he says.<\/p>\n

With The Boys Light Up, Sirocco and Sons of Beaches already hits in Australia, the band cherry-picked their finest moments for American ears.<\/p>\n

“We re-recorded six songs that we’d already released in Australia and added the four songs of the EP to that as an album for America,” Reyne says.<\/p>\n

“We’d been playing so much by then, that was when we were most cohesive musically.”<\/p>\n

To Reyne, it’s the strongest case for Australian Crawl as a world-class rock’n’roll band.<\/p>\n

“That’s about the only record of Australian Crawl’s I could probably listen to now,” he says. “I just think it’s well done.<\/p>\n

“It’s a band that was actually pulling together, because we had this deal and we were smart about it for once. We sat down and thought about it, rather than going, ‘let’s go and get drunk and do a vocal’. We knew a lot more about being in the studio.<\/p>\n

“This was probably the first time we really pulled together as a band and were quite mature about it.”<\/p>\n

It was a long way from the band’s humble beginnings on the Mornington Peninsula.<\/p>\n

“The first record we ever made\u2026 I can’t listen to it now, it’s awful,” Reyne says.<\/p>\n

“I’m not talking about the band, I’m talking about the singing. It’s just barely controlled yelling. I didn’t know what I was doing.”<\/p>\n

Things seem to be going right<\/p>\n

There will be Australian Crawl shows around Australia starting in October. The rocky road back is, in a way, true to form.<\/p>\n

“I always called Australian Crawl my apprenticeship,” Reyne says.<\/p>\n

“The personal dynamics of being in a band that every band goes through\u2026 They can get tricky and they can be interesting and they can be wonderful and they can be supportive\u2026<\/p>\n

“It’s like having fights with your brother. Sometimes you have a fight, but you would fly in front of a bus for your brother.”<\/p>\n

Speaking of brothers, David Reyne, better known for The Flying Doctors, Sweet and Sour and The Chantoozies than his brief Crawl stint, returns on percussion and backing vocals.<\/p>\n

“My brother was the original drummer in the band, he left because he got accepted into film school in Melbourne when the band hadn’t done anything, I don’t think we’d even made a demo,” Reyne says.<\/p>\n

“His role is just to come out and have a whole lot of fun.”<\/p>\n

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The rest of the band will feature members of Reyne’s solo band \u2014 Watson, Brett Kingman, Josh Owen, Andrew McIvor, Sean Johnson, Melinda Jackson and Nicole Kurta \u2014 who have been playing Australian Crawl songs for years.<\/p>\n

All but three of the initial dates have sold out, with tens of thousands of eager punters ready to use Aussie Crawl as their early soundtrack for summer.<\/p>\n

No one is harder on Australian Crawl than James Reyne, but even he has caught the fever surrounding these shows.<\/p>\n

“Usually I’m a bit cynical about these things,” the frontman says. “But I genuinely feel excited about it.”<\/p>\n

The shows will also honour absent friends: guitarists Brad Robinson and Guy McDonough, Bill’s brother.<\/p>\n

“I really want to pay credit to Brad and Guy, who unfortunately are no longer with us. I just really want to pay total respect and credit to them.<\/p>\n

“No bullshit, no agenda. Let’s just have a lovely time with some of these funny old songs and let’s just really enjoy them. That’s my attitude towards it.”<\/p>\n

Above all, Reyne wants to offer a few hours’ reprieve from the doom scroll.<\/p>\n

“The world is inundated with bullshit from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to bed. This is hopefully just a really honest experience: you come along and go, ‘That was a great thing. I could forget about all this rubbish for a while’.”<\/p>\n

Australian Crawl’s tour begins in Toowoomba on Saturday October 17, before shows around the country throughout October and November.<\/p>\n