The song that changed Russell Crowe’s life: “Exploded in my imagination”
Russell Crowe is certainly not the only Hollywood actor to leverage his fame to follow a musical passion, but to give him his due, he has done it with some success.
Alongside the likes of Jared Leto, Keanu Reeves and Johnny Depp, Crowe formed his own band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunt, more than three decades ago and has been singing and playing ever since.
The Gladiator star was the frontman for the Aussie rock band which came together in 1992 and put out three studio albums over the course of the next ten years. The early days of the group came before Crowe had become an established household name, although he had some fame that same year when he played the lead in the racially-charged drama Romper Stomper.
He made his way to Hollywood and over the next few years popped up in some fairly successful movies like Virtuosity with Denzel Washington, but nothing truly groundbreaking until he played police officer Bud White in 1997’s LA Confidential, a film which swept the board come awards season. That was followed up with a role opposite Al Pacino in The Insider, before he took the life-changing part of ‘Maximus Decimus Meridius’ in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, one of the most successful movies in history and one that earned Crowe a Best Actor Oscar the following year.
It led to Crowe becoming one of the most famous men on the planet, and that was enough for the seeds of a break-up of his band to be sown as the other members struggled to cope with their lead vocalist’s new profile. They eventually went their separate ways in 2005, but it wasn’t the end of Crowe’s musical efforts as he took a couple of his old bandmates to form a new band, The Ordinary Fear of God, releasing their first album that year. He continued to record as a solo artist and just this year released a fairly unwise cover of ‘Just Breathe’ by Pearl Jam in conjunction with ‘now there’s a name I’ve not heard in…’ Italian singer Zucchero, who amusingly looks like Russell Crowe in fancy dress.
Crowe, who had periods of time when he came under heavy criticism for his behaviour off-screen, believes music was a genuine saviour for him. He told writer Mark Guarino: “You know, I was just thinking… how could I turn away from music when music saved my life? When you say that sort of phrase it’s (describing my) twenties, when music was seriously life changing.”
And in terms of influences, he outlines the likes of Irish rock band The Boomtown Rats as a band who made a real impression on him as a child growing up in New Zealand. He added, “…when I was a kid. Songs with a narrative, something as eclectic or as left field as ‘Rat Trap’ by the Boomtown Rats, exploded in my imagination. I could see the whole picture of what was being talked about in the narrative of songs.”
Fronted by charity obsessive Bob Geldof, the Boomtown Rats formed in Dublin in the mid-1970s and had a string of hits in the UK. ‘Rat Trap’ hit number one in the charts, ‘Like Clockwork’ was another top ten, and their most famous song ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ was a worldwide hit on release in 1979, topping the UK charts and going Gold in the UK and Canada. It was written by Geldof after he heard about a 16-year-old girl who committed a mass shooting in Cleveland, Ohio, and when asked why she did it, she replied simply, “I don’t like Mondays, this livens up the day.”
Crowe, meanwhile, is entering one of the busiest stages of his career: He has some nine different projects in development, including a reboot of the time travel classic Highlander and playing Nazi Hermann Göring in Nuremberg alongside Rami Malek.
