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 GEARED calls Australia’s Got Talent winner, JOE ROBINSON. The 17 year-old guitarist is driving, by himself, from Newcastle to Sydney. Solo tour indeed.
GEARED: Before you got on Australia’s Got Talent and everyone saw how good you were, what was your life like?
JOE ROBINSON: Ever since I was about 12 years old I’ve been playing pretty much professionally – I used to do gigs all the time. I had a band when I was 12 and we used to play three times a week. So it’s always been busy I guess, I’ve always been playing music somewhere but the show really gave me a big boost financially and ever since then I’ve been as busy as I’ve ever wanted to be, so it’s been great.
G: So it was just a logical step up for you?
JR: Yeah it was just a really good boost at a good time.
G: You say you had a band at 12 … how early did you learn to play guitar?
JR: I started playing guitar when I was 10 and around the same time there were a few kids at my school [who played instruments]. I went to a school with 60 people attending and in the school band there was a kid who played a bit of drums and a kid who played a bit of saxophone and a girl who played a bit of bass. So we started jamming together and eventually we decided to put a band together and entered band competitions and those type of things. It was just a great thing to do because every weekend we’d rehearse and just kind of share musical ideas, which is a great thing for such young people.
G: What was the initial drive to play guitar? Did your parents just want you to play something and that’s what you chose?
JR: Both my parents are amateur musicians – my mum plays drums, and my father plays a bit of guitar, a bit of banjo. So there was always music around the house and I was always interested in it. They actually started me on piano, because they thought the piano was a good instrument to start with. I didn’t like it at all and when I was 10 I asked "Please can I start to play the guitar, because that’s what I always wanted to do". And they let me, so I guess it worked out great. I had the foundation of the piano, but then going to the guitar it seemed like a much more fun instrument.
G: Especially when you’re a kid, you need something that’s going to drive you to pick it up everyday.
JR: That’s right, you need something to keep you interested and to motivate you to practice.
G: What keeps you interested now? Touring around is fun and everything, but it must get tiring?
JR: It does get exhausting, the travelling wears you down, but playing every night … I just can’t get enough of playing. Playing with different musicians, being able to jam with different people and absorbing different styles of music is what keeps me interested. I’m always trying something new. The travelling wears me out, but the playing never does.
G: You went to Nashville and recorded with Frank Rogers ... why Nashville? It seems like something a lot of guitarists do.
JR: Nashville is basically the kind of town where everybody is a musician. So there’s a real collective, creative bunch of people there. Everybody’s a tourist, everyone who’s lived there for less than a year, so it’s just a bustling town and there’s a great, great music scene there. A lot of people associate Nashville with country music and there is a massive country scene there but there’s also a great rock scene, a great jazz scene and basically just heaps of great musicians, which is why I love it. I can just interact with the best people.
I met some really powerful people over there, like Frank Rogers who invited me back to record. So that’s really just the way it panned out.
G: How was seeing the rest of the world as a young artist?
JR: Absolutely amazing, the fact that the European tour was so successful was just a great, great thing. A bunch of my shows sold out and I was playing to bigger crowds there than I am here. I’m planning on spending a lot more time in Europe and America, just because there are so many opportunities there, and I’m very, very excited about all the possibilities.
G: Europe is so hypnotic for Australian musicians because – as you say – you can go over there and there’s so many more people that just by sheer probability more turn up to your shows.
JR: The European culture is: they go out and see a concert, people just do that. Whereas it’s a great festival scene in Australia but as far as sit-down concerts go it’s not quite as good as it is in Europe. The countries I was most impressed with were Holland, Germany and Finland. (England was great, but England is just like a little Australia, in a lot of ways.) The non-English-speaking countries especially, they just loved it.
G: Finally, do you have any advice to young musicians perhaps a little daunted by all the great players out there?
JR: The secret to reaping the rewards of success is really just doing the hard work. I’ve seen a lot of people who have had overnight success from TV shows. Now this may seen hypocritical me saying this, but a lot of people who have not worked hard at their craft and experience an immediate success, it’s really short-lived. My whole thing is I just love to play the guitar, and I love to improve the guitar, I don’t like the showbiz side of things at all. Becoming successful is a really rewarding thing because of the hard work. My advice to young musicians is just to get good and keep improving and love improving and enjoy the journey of becoming a better performer and keep absorbing as many styles as you can and love it.
JOE ROBINSON plays Bon Amici’s, Toowoomba, Wednesday May 20; and Brisbane Jazz Club, Friday May 22. Check out www.joerobinson.com for more information.
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