In all his years off the stage Moving Pictures frontman Alex Smith never stopped dreaming of the road.
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The band which coined the quintessential Aussie battler song will headline the Red Hot Summer Tour January 2018 alongside Suzi Quatro, The Angels, The Screaming Jets, Chocolate Starfish and Baby Animals.
What About Me still makes “every molecule in my body vibrate”, Smith says.
“On nights when I sing it really well it’s fantastic, it can’t be beaten, and then you’re standing in front of 12,000 people and they’re singing back at you louder than the PA system it’s like sticking your finger into an electric socket.”
Moving Pictures reformed in 2011 for the thirtieth anniversary of their debut, Days of Innocence.
Six years before the full line up reformed Smith, Moving Pictures keyboardist Charlie Cole and their friend Dave Carter, toured Queensland and New South Wales as an acoustic trio.
“I came out in 2005 and I did the first Countdown Tour and I thought ‘who was I?’. I was some guy working in schools in London and I walked on stage and everybody stood up and it was overwhelming,” Smith, who now lives in Italy, says.
“In all the years I wasn’t on the road all my dreams were about being on the road and then suddenly, there I was standing in the middle of the maelstrom again, that unbelievable song that came out of those guys.”
You’re standing in front of 12,000 people and they’re singing back at you louder than the PA system, it’s like sticking your finger into an electric socket.
- Moving Pictures frontman Alex Smith
Smith moved to London in the early nineties where he became a music teacher working with children with complex learning difficulties. His televisual teaching aid, This Way Into Music, will launch later this year.
It wasn’t until he got the call to reform that he learned his contemporaries had returned to the circuit. Red Hot Summer Tour is like a “high school reunion”.
“We hadn’t played together for a long time and when we got back together we suddenly realised how much fun it still was, how emotional it still was for us and for people who come to see. We suddenly realised we could grow old disgracefully.”
The Red Hot Summer Tour is on Saturday, January 27 at North Gardens with Suzi Quattro, Baby Animals, The Screaming Jets, The Angels, Moving Pictures and Chocolate Starfish.