TACTICS
A THEORY: back in high school, you wouldn't have wanted to compete with a teenaged Pete Murray for the same girl's affections. Imagine your rival. Decentlooking kid. A footy player, also smart and good with words. Friendly manner. In touch with his feelings. Solid values. And the finisher? The quality that threatened to putyou firmly in the shade? He was musical, equipped with a husky whisper of a singing voice he could casually roll out late on a Saturday night when everyone was happy and uninhibited, and possibility hung in the air.
In fact, it would be several years after he finished high school that Murray first strummed aguitar or thought about writing his own songs. But the force that would later hit the local music scene like a summer storm was taking shape.
It's been 20 years since Murray released Feeler, an acoustic pop album that slow-burned its way to No. 1 on the Australian charts and stayed in the Top 100 for two-and-a-half years. Feeler's melancholic ballads, in particular ‘So Beautiful’, drove much of that success, though just as integral was Murray's laidback, faintly retro persona. While it's widely assumed that Feeler was his debut album, it was actually his second: two years earlier, in 2001, he released The Game, a self-funded project that convinced Sony Music to take a punt on this dreamer from Chinchilla in rural Queensland.
Murray arrived as a grown-up fellow traveller who'd known love and loss, his voice conveying arresting tinges of disillusionment. With Murray, there were no flashy clothes or theatrics; he was an everyman in jeans and T-shirt singing from the heart but also the more reflective regions of his brain. While Feeler altered the course of Murray's life, it was only the beginning. He's since released six more albums (three of which reached No. 1 in Australia) and garnered 17 ARIA nominations. He's also one of a select group of local artists who's amassed more than a million album sales.
It's a truism that every successful musician takes the same four-stage trip - the struggle, the stratospheric rise, the crash, the renaissance. To this rule, Murray is no exception. Now 53, he's ridden life's rollercoaster like the rest of us,).
