Now I know Keith Urban (the singer, not the artist…) is, technically, a Brissie boy, and I know he’s had some personal problems, what with not understanding that, when Audrey Hepburn said she never started drinking before six o’clock, she meant 6pm, not 6am (although, the dear little lady then added the rider that it’s always six o’clock somewhere in the world, so maybe Keith was thinking of Audrey when he popped the cork, and lord knows, he married a woman who thinks she’s audrey but is sadly mistaken, but that’s a whole different topic…) … given all that, and given that many people claim to find his brand of moosic congenial, we need to cut a bit of slack over his “big announcement” to all of Australia, which, transcribed to include the lad’s ummings and ahhings, went something like this: “Hi everybody in Australia, it’s Keith here. It’s the 3rd of February today and we’re on the set shooting a video for our new single called I Told You So. We’re in, (pause), I don’t know if you guys can see any of this, but we’re in Studio City, California, Los Angeles. And um, I just wanted to take this moment to say hello and tell you guys that I’m psyched that I’m coming back home finally. It’s been, uh, several years I think since we got to come down and play. So to everybody in “Brissy”, my hometown, Sydney; and we’re gonna come to Melbourne, Adelaide and we’re coming to Perth.”
Ain’t that somethin’?! Innit it beaut that he remembers us? And can there be a duller lad in Caboolture than our Keef?
He goes on to thank us all for “hanging in here with us and supporting us through all of this strangeness that we’ve been through in the last bunch of months” (“bunch of months”???? cute, eh), and then signs off with this: “Very happy to be coming home finally, so um, til we talk again, take care and bye for now. As Tony Barber used to say, bye for now.”
Til we talk again !!!!! Look here Keith, sweetie. You’re famous, you’re wealthy, you’re married to a someone even more famous and even more wealthy, you are hounded by media-persons keen to pass on every hiccup and burp to hordes of fascinated fans: we are not going to talk, not now, not again, not ever… AND YOU KNOW IT.
I read a very interesting review of Cate Blanchett’s performance in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Hedda Gabler, which played in New York last year, and the reviewer suggested the reason our Cate didn’t nail the role was that she seems to be believing her own publicity. Fame is like that: if you start to believe in it, you lose yourself in it. And for an actor, that’s going to intervene between your talent and your performance.
Keith sounds, from this naff announcement, as though he’s lost in the cotton-woolly wasteland called “believing your own publicity”.
