AUSTRALIAN ROCK COLLECTIVE’s: KRAM Speaking words of wisdom for emerging musos By Alice Worley Australian Rock Collective are back with another ‘Beatles installment after two sold out circuits of Abbey Road - Live. This time around they’ll be celebrating the final ‘Beatles album; Let It Be. Here’s a brief bit of background for you. While recorded predominantly before Abbey Road, Let It Be was released in May 1970, almost a month after The Beatles had broken up. As with Abbey Road, this was an album The Beatles never fully got to celebrate and tour themselves. So ARC are here to do just that. To refresh your memory, Australian Rock Collective is made up of Kram of Spiderbait, Darren Middleton of Powderfinger, Davey Lane of You Am I, and Mark Wilson of Jet, and as with their last circuit, they’ll be joined on stage by a bunch of other lovely guest musicians to help them bring Let It Be to life. I don’t know how many of you reading made it to the Abbey Road tour, but even as someone that’s not a hardcore ‘Beatles fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The show PAGE 24
had so much soul and love and care put into it. You could tell everyone on that stage had such a pure admiration for the band they were paying tribute to; every one of them shaped by those albums and songs they grew up with. My personal favourite performance from that night would certainly be Kram singing I Want You (She’s So Heavy). That final build of the drums rumbling towards the song’s conclusion was felt in every cell. I do believe my sister and I looked at each other with tears in our eyes at the end of it and just said “Wow”. It was a dopamine roller coaster. Speaking of the Spiderbait drummer, I got to have a chat with the wise and charming Kram about the Let It Be tour and the ARC’s motivations for hitting the road once again. So, with Abbey Road done to great success, what was the purpose of doing another album when the first tour seemed perfect, and was such a well rounded project? Well, Kram and the others don’t think you can really do this album without the other. “We were gonna do this show last year, and we kinda made the decision that if Abbey Road went really well then we
