The Palms at Crown in Melbourne is playing host to the legendary ARIA award winning hard rock band, Dragon on Saturday 20th June.
Iconic rockers, Dragon is celebrating 30 years of Body and The Beat album with a special Melbourne show. As well as playing their biggest hits, Dragon will perform the album in its entirety. This platinum selling record dominated the charts in Australia and overseas during the mid 80’s and is still proving immensely popular amongst the younger generation today.
The current line up of founding member Todd Hunter bass, Mark Williams lead vocals/acoustic guitar, Bruce Reid electric guitar and Pete Drummond on drums have been touring to sold out gigs for the past several years while continuing to delight faithful fans and gaining new supporters along the way.
Says Hunter, “It’s enjoyable performing all our old hits again cause in the past we couldn’t play them due to time restraints. We’ve been working on replicating the original parts and harmonies so there will be a lot to recognize. Our drummer has kind of backward engineered a lot of the songs and broke them into parts and sound designed them so they now sound huge when played in a big arena. Palms at Crown will be a perfect place to really hear their amazing sound. Drummond is a real boffin when it comes to this sort of thing. So far it’s been a blast giving these songs a run for a change.”
Hunter is no stranger to the film and television world either. His many credits include writing the music score for the film The Girl Who Came Late and TV series Heartbreak High. His many collaborations with his extremely talented partner Johanna Pigott, ex vocalist/guitarist of 80’s Sydney punk band XL Capris, have written and produced some incredible scores over the years, including songs for ABC TV series Sweet and Sour, BBC/Southern Star TV series Out of The Blue (in conjunction with Stephan Rae), and composed the music for the series Pride of Australia.
In Hunter’s words, “If you want to be a working musician then you do whatever you can and what you enjoy cause there is always something to do. We play everywhere and are booked out every weekend until mid 2016. We like playing the weekends as we all enjoy doing other stuff during the week and it’s a really good balance. We meet at the airport and fly somewhere different each weekend. The crazy touring days are over, he laughs. Last weekend we were at Albury and the weekend before that in New Zealand and its fun.”
We got around to discussing systems and programs and Hunter says he’s got a good set up in his home studio now and uses Pro Tools, which allows him to record a lot of stuff acoustically then mix it by incorporating other suitable programs to get his desired sound. However, Drummond, his drummer uses logic 10 and really loves it. This makes it harder to decide for people like me in that horrid place of whether to use Logic 10 or Pro Tools for their mixing. And to make matters worse, Hunter claims Ableton is great too. Arrrr!
Since Dragon’s new line up of ten years ago, the guys have done over 660 shows and are still going strong. Hunter is inspired by being a working musician and has rediscovered playing live again. “I’d forgotten I was a bass player as I’d just been doing sound track work for the last ten years. Coming back to it is so immediate, and clichés like ‘it only ever happens on that night’ is right. You get this huge feed back and see people singing your songs right back at you, and it’s completely thrilling, and I never get over that. Seeing like 40,000 to 50,000 people singing our songs and when you can’t see anyone over 25, well that’s pretty wild.”
Hunter definitely gets into that special place when writing and says you have to get all the details of your life out of the way, turn off face book, your email, and all the rest of it and enter some place where it just flows through you. “It’s like fishing, you know you’re setting up the bag, rod and so forth, and you’re sitting around waiting, and when you get a nibble, you think ‘yeah that could be something’. Writing and creating music for me, is a bit like that. It’s not something that I know how to do. I mean no one knows how to write a hit song, otherwise there would be only hit songs.”
Head wise, Hunter is very much back into playing live again and really enjoys it. He’s started writing for the band again and has got some tracks down with new songs in the making. The cool thing for him is he really enjoys working out the technical aspects of the song, length of the song, what its about and what it consists of because everything has changed nowadays. “You’ve got Spotify that only plays a song for two minutes, so what really is a song now. I love the deconstruction of it all.”
“I guess when it comes to song writing you never write with anyone else in mind, the only thing you do in music is to please yourself. And if you are lucky you might please a few people along the way. But if you try and please other people then forget it, it just can’t happen.”
I asked Hunter if he’d ever experienced any amazing, or what he would deem mystical experiences that have influenced his work, considering he’s travel all over the world? “Not one-to-one things like that, its more like stuff that you assimilate and evolve over a long period of time, and you become the sum of all those things that have happened to you. I look at it as a very long process over a very long period of time.” I interject and say its probably called wisdom isn’t it, and he says well yes, like osmosis or something and its what you end up as. And you really have to keep this in mind otherwise as soon as you feel I can do this then it stops being fresh.
Todd Hunter’s approach to his rekindled popularity and fame is laced with wisdom, insight-fulness, and clarity. I guess rekindled is not the best word to use, because his creative ingenuity and musical flair has been prolific in other areas for many years. Reemerging publicly probably aptly describes where Hunter as the founding member of Dragon is at right now. All those gigs performed over the last several years has paid off by engaging the younger generations who have and still are discovering and delighting in him as the face of Dragon; getting a blast from their popular musical bent through existing Dragon songs and new creations being played.
Hunter sums it up with final wise words by saying the format of how music is delivered is all changing with the use of computers and latest technology that allows anyone to create music then upload it on the net. “Maybe in the future people just won’t be buying music anymore.”
He’s got a point there, but when you’ve got iconic bands like Dragon still rockin’ the stage, then maybe people might just want to go see live gigs instead.
Catch Dragon’s ‘Body and The Beat’ 30th Anniversary Tour Saturday 20th June at Palms At Crown in Melbourne.
For bookings go to www.crownmelbourne.com.au/events
For info on Dragon go to
www.dragononline.com.au