Aussie singer-songwriter Pete Murray hasn't always been a musclebound hunk with a legion of fans and a lap-of-luxury lifestyle. Okay, he's had the distracting pecs and bottomless blue eyes for a while, but the path to the top has been anything but smooth. At 18, Murray was competing in the national athletics championships when his father died of a heart attack: devastated, Murray pulled out. At 19, the champion rugby player and swimmer injured his knee, which wiped out dreams of a sports career. A decade later (following travel, sports-science study and a smattering of small gigs with his band The Stonemasons) he moved from Brisbane to Melbourne to try to make it in the music world. "It was hell. I oculdn't afford to buy lunch and I was getting anxiety attacks; I'd hate going to sleep because I knew I'd wake up at 3am sweating and thinking 'I'm 32 and where's my life going?'" Now 38 and one of Australia's best-selling singers, Murray - who dropped into New Zealand last week for the release of fourth album Summer at Eureka - looks back on that time in Melbourne as though he can't quite believe everything's worked out.
Just as he was about to call it quits with music and return to Brisbane and the sports-science study he'd pressed pause on, Murray got an inkling things were "picking up". He turned up to a larger-than-normal-capacity gig to see a crowd spilling down the street. "I remember thinking 'What else is on here tonight?'. Thousands of people couldn't get in and for the first time I heard the crowd sing all the lyrics from start to end. It blew me away." As it did when Sony BMG called - and shortly afterwards signed him. Since then, Murray and his folk/rock/pop sound have had a meteoric rise. His two albums Feeler (2003) and See the Sun (2005) both reached number one on the Australian charts, Feeler sales reached platinum six times, and Murray's already been nominated nine times for the Arias (Australian Record Industry Association Awards). And it's not just Australia that's got Murray mania: in fact, for the past two years he's been so busy touring offshore, most recently across Europe, that he has rarely played back home. That recent lack of local exposure, and a newly shaggy mane, meant Murray was finding it easier to walk the streets unnoticed. Well, sort of. "A lot of people come up and say 'You're a dead ringer for that singer Pete Murray', and I say 'Yeah, I get that all the time'." But now he's promoting and touring again in Australia, he can no longer feign being his own doppelganger. He admits yes, a few female fans have batted their eyelashes at him. "It's fine," he smiles. "My wife Amanda finds it a bit hard." Understandable, given her husband was voted among the world's 25 most beautiful people in Who Weekly in 2004.
