James Reyne

Every Man A King

James Reyne can't help himself. In the street, the bar, the hotel foyer, he's never off. He's watching the guy in the airport lounge, in the beachfront real estate office; the girl in the sunglasses, the dufus on the TV chat show. It's a non-stop carnival of human comedy. Or maybe it's tragedy. Who can tell anymore?

"If there's any theme to this album it's people being easily impressed. This silliness that they aspire to, the lives they read about in magazines. Their obsession with trash culture, the bizarre values we seem to live by. It's all just endlessly and perversely fascinating to me."

EVERY MAN A KING closes a 30-year circle since James first led Australian Crawl into the front line of the Oz rock boom. His eye and pen grew sharper through a platinum-lined solo career, but never have his wit and poignancy been on more consistently solid musical ground than they are here, on his eighth solo album.

Check out the gut-wrenching anguish of Stop Draggin' My Name Around, the freight-train rock-radio hooks of I'm A Man and Light In The Tunnel, the masterful sonic atmospheres of Cry Baby Killer, Lapis Lazuli and the raucous white funk of Sammy and Dufus and Our Man In New York. They compare, at every deftly crafted turn, with the very best of James Reyne's vast canon.

"EVERY MAN A KING was a phrase that (radical populist politician) Huey Long used when he was Governor of Louisiana in 1930," he explains. "He used it in a literal sense. Here it's more ironic. If you apply it to this country, and the world at the moment, every man is struggling to be a king and certainly every man is not. A lot of them think they are. And they're not either."

So it appears, in the devastating lead track. Little Man You've Had a Busy Day is a master class in the seasoned songwriter's craft, a touching scene of human endeavour that pulls out like a camera shot to join the personal and political: a suit on a train platform, a kid playing cowboys, some guy on the deck of a warship -all details in the same, wide-screen story. There are other folks you might recognise here: the high-flying man of mystery James coyly refers to as Mr International; the everyday shark recalling the tale of the frog and the scorpion in Cry Baby Killer; the starlet with a dirty video leaked on the Internet in Broken Romeo.

They're all "no-one in particular," James insists. Their genius is that they could be nearly anyone. Maybe most gripping of all are the songs in which the writer'sunflinching eye is in the mirror, as reflected in the satiric self-deprecation of Stop Draggin' My Name Around and the resolute piano ballad, Superannuated Idol. "That's what I am," James says with characteristic bluntness. "It doesn't mean I'm gonna stop."

Good call. EVERY MAN A KING finds James and his close musical allies of the last decade at the top of their game in every way, from the imaginative co-production and versatile guitar work of Scott Kingman and James to the backing vocals of Tracey Kingman: check out her star turn as the deluded teen angel in Sammy and Doofus.

John Watson played some drums, Andy McIvor some bass, Chris Hawker the evocative slide guitar on Little Man. "Otherwise it was pretty much me and Scott,"

James says. "Between he and I, we covered everything so maybe that's partly why it's a more cohesive album overall. I think we set our goals higher this time....." From his delicate incisions to the heart to his playful pop sensibility, to the increasingly deft wordplay that propels his unmistakable scatting and crooning vocal approach, James Reyne has never sounded more comfortable, more in command, or more insightful about the world he continues to explore in ever finer detail.

"I tried to raise the bar on myself as a lyricist, perhaps be more reflective of what I see and sense going on around me," he says. "I think the ideas are more thematically in tune with each other than perhaps ever before."

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