2018 has been a very busy year for Jon Stevens. The ex-Noiseworks, INXS & Dead Daises front man has been on the road on an extensive run of shows highlighting his incredible career in the form of his Best of Tour. With such a huge songbook to choose from Jon has been able to please almost all of his fans with a bit of something and everything so to speak. The tour has also taken Jon back out into regional Australia during the year and it’s his time away from the city lights where the plight of the drought affected areas have hit home. With this at the forefront of Jon’s mind, he is releasing the charity single “Rain Down On Me” on Friday 26th October, with all proceeds going to Rural Aid. Add to this, an appearance at Hay Mate: Buy A Bale – A Concert For The Farmers with the likes of John Farnham, Daryl Braithwaite, Guy Sebastian & Andrew Farriss also all lending their time, you can see how much it hits home, having grown up in a small farming community back in New Zealand. The Rockpit managed to catch up with Jon to discuss the new single, touring and about the various chapters in his illustrious career.
Jon: Hey Sean, how are you doing?
Sean: Great thank you Jon. We really appreciate your time for a chat here at The Rockpit. It’s unusual to get to talk to someone at the end of a tour, as we normally get to speak before everything kicks off. Beginning back in February at The Palms at Crown in Melbourne, it must be nice that it all winds up back at the same venue on November 10th. Nearly all the hard work is down now, so how has it all been going?
Jon: It’s been fantastic and one week has just blended in with the other with so much travelling. So at times it’s been hard to keep up. I’m home in Melbourne currently and it’s the first time I’ve been able to sleep in my own bed for three nights in a row [laughs]. But like I say it’s been incredible and great fun.
Sean: I saw your appearance on the Footy show recently and although we only got to see a short medley, everyone sounded in fantastic form.
Jon: Thanks mate. Yeah, the guys I’ve got in the band are so committed to their craft and they are just such a pleasure to work with. Not only are they great musicians, they are great human beings too. When you spend so much time on the road with people, you need to have people that are compatible and that you can hang with – we laugh our arses off nearly 90 per cent of the time.
Sean: And that so important because it rubs off on the audience too. We’ve all been to a gig where you can tell the guys on stage, for whatever reason, just don’t want to be there or are there for the wrong reasons.
Jon: Yeah and the same for us – it’s important to us that we are enjoying it too. I’ve been in bands where one or two members have had a bad day that day, or you can’t see eye to eye on anything and it does rub off. That’s the best thing about being a solo artist – I get to hand pick my musicians and certainly they have to have two things; the first is to be committed to their craft, and the secondly understand the reality of touring life and working in a collective with others. Oh… and having fun [laughs]. I’m the youngest of eleven children, so I’m used to having a lot of people around and not really used to having disharmony. My family would have fights & disagreements but we were staunchly loyal and fierce. And that’s how my band is… staunchly loyal & fierce… and that’s us [laughs].
Sean: With such a wide ranging career, spanning so many chapters, how hard has it been to construct a set list for this tour?
Jon: I’ve always been of the mindset to go forwards, so it’s been quite different for me to step backwards into my past. I’ve always made a record and I’m already writing the next one before the last one is released. I’ve always tried to stay creative, keep the forward momentum going all the time and do things that make you happy – saying that, it just seemed the right time to do this tour. The Best Of set has a lot of songs that I haven’t played for years. People are always asking me to play INXS or Noiseworks songs… there is just so much stuff. So it’s was really picking the singles from all the different incarnations of things I’ve been involved with from Noiseworks, INXS, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Dead Daisies, the solo things too. So initially it was difficult but yes, nearly every song is or was a single.
Sean: Also, this weekend you have the Hay Mate Concert (27th October) in Tamworth to help raise much needed aid for the farmers – a fantastic cause with a great line-up of stars giving their time and craft to help those in drastic need of support.
Jon: It’s one of those things that you don’t even hesitate to put your hand up to do whatever you can to help people in need. It’s something us musicians and entertainers do to help galvanize people together. So, for me, it’s an absolute honour to be able to contribute in some small way.
Sean: And it nicely coincides with the release for your next single “Rain Down On Me” which is out on Friday 26th October with all proceeds going to Rural Aid, the charity to help these farmers in desperate need. How did the track come about?
Jon: Well, I wrote it back in January and it had nothing to do with the drought or the plight of the farmers, so when I got asked to do Hay Mate I remembered I had this song I had written. So I went back and re-jigged it and re-recorded it and as you kindly pointed out, all the proceeds will go to the drought relief fund. At the end of the day it’s not getting behind the song, it’s about getting behind the farmers. I think it’s a great song that tries to encapsulate the hardship that people go through in life… not just the farmers, but people in general. There are no hard copies of it, only via download so get onto iTunes or Apple Music and grab a copy because every cent goes their way.
Sean: I hope it’s well supported and I can’t wait to have a listen later. No rest for the wicked as 2019 sees you out on two legs of the Red Hot Summer Tour. Sadly, we won’t get to see you here in WA but you will be here, there and everywhere with some cracking artists alongside you on Series 2 & 3 of the tour.
Jon: Yeah, looking forward to both legs – I was already asked to do the Farnham one and then they asked me to jump on the Suzi (Quatro) leg as well. I’m pretty chilled when it comes to these festivals and don’t care where I play… I’ll even come on first because I love them. I’m so stoked to be a part of it… to be honest I thought I’d missed out on them. I was like “Hey, I thought I was available for these shows!” [laughs]
Sean: As we started by talking about The Best of tour, do you mind if I take you back through some of the chapters? Looking back now, could you ever have imagined that those Noiseworks songs like No Lies & Take Me Back would have stood the test of time and become almost iconic rock anthems?
Jon: No, not at all. Those two songs, No Lies & Take Me Back were written in the same week. It was kinda weird. It was the early 80s and funnily enough when I presented them to Noiseworks they didn’t really want to record them because I’d written them with a mate of mine from New Zealand. It was our manager, Michael Browning, who managed AC/DC and discovered INXS, thought they were great, called us all idiots and then told us we were going to record them [laughs]. So those two songs in particular were recorded under duress [laughs]. It’s quite funny how thing work themselves out I suppose.
Sean: I’m so glad you managed to squeeze Hot Chili Woman into the Footy Show set too…
Jon: Funnily enough I was in two minds to do that show because they wanted me to do a medley of four songs in six minutes and I felt it would bastardize my songs… I said three songs at very best. I’m glad we did it in the end though because it went well and I love it when it’s live, live, live. What you didn’t see, was when they were about to introduce us and we still couldn’t get the keyboards working – we’d had trouble firing it up for about 30 minutes before hand. So I turned to the guys and just said they would just have to jam it out and start “Touch” – it was one of those classic fly by the seat of your pants live TV moments. After all that, the keyboards started up right on cue and no-one noticed a thing [laughs] and everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Sean: INXS next, who I got to see in ’93 in Fremantle and was lucky to witness the amazing Michael Hutchence close up. How did it feel to get up there and be the front man for such a globally recognised band?
Jon: To be honest it felt very natural to me. I was good friends with Michael & knew the rest of the guys. We all admired each other’s work. It wasn’t till three or four years after Michael had passed that the guys called me and said they wanted to do something. It started as a one off gig – and that was all it was going to be… just to blow the cobwebs out and get out there [laughs]. We had one rehearsal and we did 23 songs – I knew them all anyway because I was a big fan, just not all the words. Roll forward a year and we’d played all around the world and the guys asked me when was I going to throw the lyrics out and I said “when you guys rehearse”. We had so much fun. They were a fantastic band with fantastic music. Michael was amazing and it was never me trying to be Michael… I was just being me. When we were overseas I sometimes got asked “Who are you? Why you?” And I’d say Michael did duets with Ray Charles, Jimmy Barnes, Chrissy Hynde and me, so there you go. There was history between us so I was a natural fit. I’m actually looking forward to seeing Andrew (Farriss) at the Hay Mate gig so hoping to play a couple of songs together for the first time in fourteen years.
Sean: I was late comer to The Dead Daisies so I’ve only really listened to the first two albums, but that debut release is an absolute cracker. ‘Lock n Load’ is a fantastic track. How did Slash get involved?
Jon: Thanks mate, yeah well Slash and I worked together in the late 90s and we’d written a bunch of songs and one of them was ‘Lock n Load’ which we wrote in ’98 or ’99 I think it was. Like most songs they find a home or they sit in the bag. Roll forward to 2012 and David Lowy, who plays a bit of guitar in his spare time [laughs], asked to get together and offered to play some guitar with me. So, I basically said if we can write a song together we may just have somewhere to go with this. So we worked on some bits and ended up flying to LA to see my mate John Fields who worked on my ‘Testify’ album with me. We stayed in LA for two weeks and wrote the whole album. We weren’t even called the Dead Daisies at this point – it was just song writing. I threw ‘Lock n Load’ in there too and told Slash about the project and said if he approved then great… but if he said no then it would never see the light of day again. Slash loved it but I had recorded it here in Australia already with my band. I sent it to him and I really wanted him to play on it. When he heard someone else playing his guitar parts he immediately said he wanted to get on the track so he got into the studio and laid down these incredible guitar parts on the single, which ended up becoming a #1 hit in the UK. It was funny because we still didn’t have a name – I had the skull in my house – but I’d been writing down all these names but kept coming back to The Dead Daisies and the skull as a merch symbol. We were nearly called The Happy Accidents. David hated the Dead Daises thing with the skull motif – he wanted just The Daises. So I kept going with it. I remember once lying in a hospital bed for a month and the Doctor saying to me “Jon, you should be pushing up daises mate but your still here”. Then it was down to putting the band together so I just got my phone book out [laughs] and then everyone wanted to join – at one point we had most of Guns n Roses in the band [laughs].
Sean: Incredible album and so is the EP that followed. This kind of brings us up to your solo stuff now and I’ve got to say, what a fantastic album ‘Starlight’ is. And so many wonderful musicians joining you; with the likes of David A. Stewart (Eurythmics) & Ringo Starr…
Jon: Thanks so much mate. Yeah I know. It’s hard to believe because even now Ringo doesn’t play on other people’s records. But he and Dave are best mates so we got to hang out and all got on famously. We’d get the guitar out & have a sing along and then got invited to his birthday and asked to sing with him, which I said yes of course. It started from there and Dave & I had written a song and we both said, “This sounds perfect for Ringo. Reckon he’ll play on it?” So Dave said let’s ask him – he loved the song and loved what we were doing. If you don’t ask you don’t get I suppose. And working with David A. Stewart… well, he’s no slouch. Dave had heard my previous album ‘Woman’ from 2016, and immediately called me and asked when we could work together. So that’s kind of how Starlight happened really, which we recorded at Paul Allen’s house, who has sadly passed away recently – he was such a lovely guy that man.
Sean: Wow, that’s pretty cool. I can’t let you go without asking you about my one of my favourite shows of all time – Jesus Christ Superstar. People will remember you for the 1992 tour & cast recording with John Farnham (Jesus), Kate Ceberano (Mary) & Angry Anderson (Herod) and of course your portrayal of Judas, Arena.
Jon: Ah awesome. Yeah well that was originally all put together by Harry Miller, who’s no longer with us, God rest his soul. It was the first time a theatre production had been attempted in and arena, anywhere in the world. So it was ground breaking from that point of view but also for the fact that Harry chose who was in it, not Andrew Lloyd Webber. He was not involved in it, which I believe upset him. Tim Rice did come out and hung out and he was a wonderful guy. But Lloyd Webber didn’t even really acknowledge it even though it was the biggest show in the world at the time and even now holds all the box office records in all the entertainment centres in Australia. Harry wanted and eventually put together a cast of rock singers – it’s a rock opera so he wanted rock singers – he wanted people who do this shit for a living rather than a theatre actor. You mentioned the cast just now, there was also Anthony Warlow who was going to be Pilate, who’s a very famous Australian opera singer – sadly about a week after the cast announcement he got diagnosed with cancer and had to pull out. So we got John Waters in his place, who was a renowned actor, singer & performer – his John Lennon: Looking Through a Glass Onion was brilliant. So it was amazing to be involved but it seems so long ago – you’ll be happy because I do a couple of songs in The Best of show [laughs]
Sean: I was lucky to catch the 2013 touring version where you played Pontius Pilate, alongside Tim Minchin & Melanie Chisholm at Perth. How did it feel to be asked back after all those years?
Jon: Mate, I was super chuffed…. You know, I could do it standing on my head.
Sean: No that was one of the lines in Herod’s song… [laughs]
Jon: [laughs] ah yes it was – very good. They brought the whole of the UK cast & set out here, with only me and Andrew O’Keefe who played Herod, being based here. So it was nice to get asked and different to get to play Pontius Pilate – less work and more time in between songs, which is always dangerous wondering when you’re on next [laughs]. And Tim Minchin’s interpretation of the Judas role was incredible – the whole production was fantastic.
Sean: We have a production here in Perth in the next few weeks at a gorgeous outdoor venue, The Quarry Amphitheatre… and my wife is in the cast of many, so she is super excited. It’s funny because when I took her to the arena show in 2013 she wasn’t a big fan. Now she’s in it she loves it and kind of gets it.
Jon: [laughs] Oh wow. Yeah it has that effect. I still think it’s the best rock stage show/ rock opera every written. Please wish them all the best from me. It can be quite an emotional journey for some and some say it’s still the biggest story of our time.
Sean: I like to finish with a few quirky & quick fire questions if that’s ok with you. You can invite three guests from the music world, dead or alive, to join you for dinner for two hours – who would you pick?
Jon: Ah, John Lennon for a start. Ray Charles would be great too – I love Ray Charles. Probably my third would be Jim Morrison – he’d lead us all astray [laughs]
Sean: I’ll ask the restaurant to grant you guys extended hours [laughs] – great table though. And two new names I’ve not had before with Jim & Ray. Next up, what was the last album you listened to?
Jon: Oh, I’ll have to think about that – I think it was one that I hadn’t heard for many, many years and that was Bob Dylan’s Infidels. It was produced by Mark Knopfler and at times Bob almost sounds like Sting. It’s a fuckin’ great record.
Sean: We reach the final question – from all the sings ever written, which one song would you like to be credited with writing
Jon: ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon. And if I had a fall back song it would be ‘What a Wonderful World’ by Louie Armstrong because growing up as a kid I used to hear that song a lot and you can really hear the pain and the emotion in there – it’s amazing – an incredible moment in time that was captured on a recording. That’s what it’s all about. And that’s what modern music doesn’t have – it doesn’t capture moments in time, it’s just candy floss a lot of it. There are still a lot of people out there that understand the golden rule; create the image and capture the moment.
Sean: Jon that is such a fitting end to such an incredible insight into just some of what you’ve been involved it over the years. I can’t wait to see the show in Melbourne on November 10th. Thanks so much for taking the time for the chat and we wish you all the best for the rest of the tour, the Red Hot Summer Tour & Hay Mate as well as the new fund raising single.
Jon: Thanks mate. Hope to catch up in Melbourne. Good on ya Sean.
