Post by Inside Australian Idol on Jun 28, 2004 0:36:10 GMT 10
Second best
June 27, 2004
Shannon Noll performing at Crown Casino.
Picture: Jesse Marlow
In the space of 12 months, Shannon Noll has gone from being a droughtstricken farmer to a fully fledged pop star. So, how's the transition been? Karl Quinn finds out.
Shannon Noll takes the corner seat in the booth at the rear of Greasy Joe's in St Kilda, a spot from where he can watch every point and every person in the room. You can forgive him for wanting to see who's coming; these days he meets a lot of people who promise the world if he;ll just pop around to their place for a barbecue.
"Leos, we call them," Noll, 28, says. "For Leo Getz, as in, 'I can get you a new car, I can get you a contract, I can get you whatever you want'."
The "Leo Getz" line came from one of his brothers, he says proudly (actually, it's from Lethal Weapon 2). They're both older than Noll, and they share a line in hairstyle (none on top, goatee down below) as well as the burly builds of the footballers (league on Saturday, rules on Sunday) they were before music and a TV show changed everything.
Back in the days before Australian Idol, the three Noll boys used to play together in country pubs as an acoustic-guitar-and-harmonies trio called Cypress (named for the fact that they rehearsed in a timber mill).
Now Damian, 32, is the drummer in the band that backs his kid brother — the other six players are seasoned and slick session musos — while Adam is a sort of unofficial management liaison person.
"But on the road," says Shannon, "he's just my brother, which is the best thing about it."
The waiter brings Noll's lunch of steak sandwich and fries to the booth. As the piled-high plate touches down on the scarred pine tabletop, Noll tosses off a gravelly "That's what I'm talking about".
It must be the 12th time he's uttered those words — which are both a personal catchphrase and the title of his debut album — in the past hour. He's like Bart in that episode of The Simpsons in which he becomes so famous for his catchphrase "I didn't do it" that it ends up being the only thing people will let him say.
(Before) I was sorta just pokin' about, y'know? Now you're in a plane here and in a plane there and in a studio here and back and you don't even know what day it is because it's all going on.
Noll laughs at this. He's not afraid of being trapped by a smart line. He’s seen off a few already in his short stint in the public eye. He was the boy from the bush on Australian Idol. He was the bloke who scaled, with a a complete lack of irony, that cheesy mountain of a song What About Me? He was the man who finished second.
That should have been the end of him, but it wasn't. It was just the beginning. While Guy Sebastian, winner of Australian Idol's first season (its second begins next month), has sold more records, there is about Shannon Noll the air of something quite inevitable.
He's the working-class man we had to have, the heir to the Farnsey-Barnesy beerbarn crown. It may not be cool, but the sort of ballsout rock-pop-ballad that populates Noll's album is a sound that many Australians want to hear.
The record has sold more than 300,000 copies since its February release. On the day we meet, Noll is midway through a tour that will see him do 39 shows in 40 days. Tonight he's doing the first of two dates at the Mercury Lounge at Crown, to a crowd of about 1000 a night. They each pay $35 a head. You do the maths, and it's hard not to conclude that he knows exactly what he's talking about.
Shannon Noll feels like a man reborn. "It just feels like I've had two lives now," he says. "Everything seems like it was somebody else's life before."
The days before Idol were, in fact, increasingly idle, as Noll and his brothers tried to wait out the drought on the family property in Condobolin, just over the border with NSW. They ran sheep and cattle and grew cereal crops, but without water or money, there was little they could do.
"Normally in a drought you do all the jobs you don't ordinarily get a chance to do, fixing fences and all that," Noll says. "But we didn't have any sort of dough to buy materials to fix fences. So I'd do maybe one day a week at a mate's place and go out to me grandad's and do any jobs he needed doing. I was sorta just pokin' about, y'know?
"Now you're in a plane here and in a plane there and in a studio here and back and you don't even know what day it is because it's all going on."
It's been going on for Noll since May 2003 when he first auditioned for the show, but it's been going at full speed since late last year. There was the countdown to the November final, then the tour featuring the 12 finalists, then his first single — the chart-topping cover of Moving Pictures' 1980 hit What About Me? — then his own tour, the album, video clips, more touring. It's been relentless.
"On the farm, when the times are good, you'd have two months where you'd be going all the time to get the job done. But you could see the end, and that's what kept you going. Whereas this, you're finished doing something like a promo tour or something, and three days later you've got a concert tour starting. So you're spinning around, going, 'Shit, I'm off again'.
"I said to Rosh, 'It won't always be like this, this hectic'."
Rosh is Rochelle Ogsten, Noll's partner of seven years. She's a petite and pretty blonde whose parents live in Taylors Lakes. She was a track worker until a fall from a horse broke her back. They met at a footy club party in Condobolin where Noll was singing and Rochelle, whose father was an AFL umpire, was a guest. They plan to marry in October, and they have two young boys — Cody, 3, and Blake, 18 months.
In the past few months, Noll feels he's had far too little time with his family.
They moved to a small rented terrace house on Sydney's North Shore earlier this year and are looking for a place of their own with more room for the children. One day he'd like to grow vegies, too.
"I feel it sometimes when I've been away," he says. "Cody, the big fella, is a bit distant. He just doesn't know if I'm staying or not. Even if I'm asleep on the lounge, even if I'm not giving him anything, he's just content because I'm there."
It's hard on Rochelle, too, he says, "because they're very strong-willed boys. The worst part is I can't just walk in the door and give them a slap on the backside if they've done something wrong, because then they won't want you to come home."
con't
June 27, 2004
Shannon Noll performing at Crown Casino.
Picture: Jesse Marlow
In the space of 12 months, Shannon Noll has gone from being a droughtstricken farmer to a fully fledged pop star. So, how's the transition been? Karl Quinn finds out.
Shannon Noll takes the corner seat in the booth at the rear of Greasy Joe's in St Kilda, a spot from where he can watch every point and every person in the room. You can forgive him for wanting to see who's coming; these days he meets a lot of people who promise the world if he;ll just pop around to their place for a barbecue.
"Leos, we call them," Noll, 28, says. "For Leo Getz, as in, 'I can get you a new car, I can get you a contract, I can get you whatever you want'."
The "Leo Getz" line came from one of his brothers, he says proudly (actually, it's from Lethal Weapon 2). They're both older than Noll, and they share a line in hairstyle (none on top, goatee down below) as well as the burly builds of the footballers (league on Saturday, rules on Sunday) they were before music and a TV show changed everything.
Back in the days before Australian Idol, the three Noll boys used to play together in country pubs as an acoustic-guitar-and-harmonies trio called Cypress (named for the fact that they rehearsed in a timber mill).
Now Damian, 32, is the drummer in the band that backs his kid brother — the other six players are seasoned and slick session musos — while Adam is a sort of unofficial management liaison person.
"But on the road," says Shannon, "he's just my brother, which is the best thing about it."
The waiter brings Noll's lunch of steak sandwich and fries to the booth. As the piled-high plate touches down on the scarred pine tabletop, Noll tosses off a gravelly "That's what I'm talking about".
It must be the 12th time he's uttered those words — which are both a personal catchphrase and the title of his debut album — in the past hour. He's like Bart in that episode of The Simpsons in which he becomes so famous for his catchphrase "I didn't do it" that it ends up being the only thing people will let him say.
(Before) I was sorta just pokin' about, y'know? Now you're in a plane here and in a plane there and in a studio here and back and you don't even know what day it is because it's all going on.
Noll laughs at this. He's not afraid of being trapped by a smart line. He’s seen off a few already in his short stint in the public eye. He was the boy from the bush on Australian Idol. He was the bloke who scaled, with a a complete lack of irony, that cheesy mountain of a song What About Me? He was the man who finished second.
That should have been the end of him, but it wasn't. It was just the beginning. While Guy Sebastian, winner of Australian Idol's first season (its second begins next month), has sold more records, there is about Shannon Noll the air of something quite inevitable.
He's the working-class man we had to have, the heir to the Farnsey-Barnesy beerbarn crown. It may not be cool, but the sort of ballsout rock-pop-ballad that populates Noll's album is a sound that many Australians want to hear.
The record has sold more than 300,000 copies since its February release. On the day we meet, Noll is midway through a tour that will see him do 39 shows in 40 days. Tonight he's doing the first of two dates at the Mercury Lounge at Crown, to a crowd of about 1000 a night. They each pay $35 a head. You do the maths, and it's hard not to conclude that he knows exactly what he's talking about.
Shannon Noll feels like a man reborn. "It just feels like I've had two lives now," he says. "Everything seems like it was somebody else's life before."
The days before Idol were, in fact, increasingly idle, as Noll and his brothers tried to wait out the drought on the family property in Condobolin, just over the border with NSW. They ran sheep and cattle and grew cereal crops, but without water or money, there was little they could do.
"Normally in a drought you do all the jobs you don't ordinarily get a chance to do, fixing fences and all that," Noll says. "But we didn't have any sort of dough to buy materials to fix fences. So I'd do maybe one day a week at a mate's place and go out to me grandad's and do any jobs he needed doing. I was sorta just pokin' about, y'know?
"Now you're in a plane here and in a plane there and in a studio here and back and you don't even know what day it is because it's all going on."
It's been going on for Noll since May 2003 when he first auditioned for the show, but it's been going at full speed since late last year. There was the countdown to the November final, then the tour featuring the 12 finalists, then his first single — the chart-topping cover of Moving Pictures' 1980 hit What About Me? — then his own tour, the album, video clips, more touring. It's been relentless.
"On the farm, when the times are good, you'd have two months where you'd be going all the time to get the job done. But you could see the end, and that's what kept you going. Whereas this, you're finished doing something like a promo tour or something, and three days later you've got a concert tour starting. So you're spinning around, going, 'Shit, I'm off again'.
"I said to Rosh, 'It won't always be like this, this hectic'."
Rosh is Rochelle Ogsten, Noll's partner of seven years. She's a petite and pretty blonde whose parents live in Taylors Lakes. She was a track worker until a fall from a horse broke her back. They met at a footy club party in Condobolin where Noll was singing and Rochelle, whose father was an AFL umpire, was a guest. They plan to marry in October, and they have two young boys — Cody, 3, and Blake, 18 months.
In the past few months, Noll feels he's had far too little time with his family.
They moved to a small rented terrace house on Sydney's North Shore earlier this year and are looking for a place of their own with more room for the children. One day he'd like to grow vegies, too.
"I feel it sometimes when I've been away," he says. "Cody, the big fella, is a bit distant. He just doesn't know if I'm staying or not. Even if I'm asleep on the lounge, even if I'm not giving him anything, he's just content because I'm there."
It's hard on Rochelle, too, he says, "because they're very strong-willed boys. The worst part is I can't just walk in the door and give them a slap on the backside if they've done something wrong, because then they won't want you to come home."
con't
i had to laugh!
It was a great read.
