‘They all went rocketing straight to the bottom of the charts.’
– Russell Crowe
As a youngster, Russell would strum along to popular songs on the radio with a tennis bat, sweeping brush or his imagination doubling up as a guitar. At nine, he would write songs about ‘love and all that sort of stuff’. His role model and inspiration? ‘It’s really fundamentally boring, but it was Elvis.’
Russell had been brought up immersed in the world of acting so he had also seen the hard work that went into achieving the results seen on TV or heard on radio – as well as the dogged efforts needed to make yourself seen or heard.
In the case of music, it was through the scores of live bands that would play at his parents’ pubs. There he would see them trying their luck at entertaining the crowds, and he would be enthralled at how they used their audience to their advantage. One act in particular that he enjoyed watching was rock ‘n’ roll singer Tom Sharplin – and the young kid full of ambition bemused the musician. He returned the compliment by encouraging the teenager to try his hand at forming his own band.
Plucking his band members from his school, all with dreams of making it big as music superstars, was the easy part. How would The Profile stand out from the millions of kids who do it every day? Russell being Russell, he would do it the same way that he seemingly does everything – with an unwavering self-belief and refusal to make nice for the sake of it even if, in this case, the talents didn’t quite match his expectations.
They would turn up at school talent shows, placing themselves in the front row and antagonistically turning their backs on other bands when they began performing.
Despite spending hours performing mod songs in either Russell’s garage – which would normally see his dad pop his head round the door, offering words of encouragement – or in bandmate’s Mark Staufer’s house, they would soon split up. But unlike most school bands, where members leave the music behind and take on normal jobs content in the knowledge that at least they gave it a shot – Russell would persevere.
A fear of failure drives him as much as the need for success, and he was firmly aware that, with a brief excursion into punk with the band Dave Deceit and the Interrogatives aside, he was leaving school with a burning ambition to stand out but nothing as yet to show for it.
An insurance company was one of the first places that Russell found work, but it was merely something to tide him over as he tried to get his foot in the music industry door. Again, as with the acting world when he was a youngster, he got a break through connections.
Sharplin, who remembered offering advice to Russell when he had performed at his father’s bar, was keen to help him. ‘He didn’t know the meaning of no,’ he recalled. ‘He’d constantly be asking advice, not just about the music, but the mechanics of show business.’
Sharplin’s bass player, Raymond Eade, remembered, ‘When I saw Russ, I thought “There’s something about this guy.” I thought he was obviously going to get somewhere. He used to come into the dressing-room and chat with us. He was a nice little kid, I thought. Then I found out he was very interested in the music and very interested in the show.’
Sharplin’s club King Creole was where the 17-year-old Russell was ever-present – and where he would perform DJ duties as well as immerse himself in music and the tricks of performing on stage.
Despite revelling in his new surroundings as a DJ – a plum job for a teenager who was overjoyed at being the star of the show for a brief moment and reaping the rewards of female attention – it was clear to many that DJing was not going to be a long-term career for Russell.
‘I don’t think he particularly wanted to be a DJ,’ Eade remembers. ‘He just wanted to be in show business of some sort. That was an opening, because he couldn’t get a job in a band.’
Graham Silcock, a guitarist in Sharplin’s band, added, ‘He used to watch Tom playing at King Creole’s. He was DJing and I used to see him standing at the side, just looking. That look as if, “Some day, man.”’
Sharplin was fully aware of Russell’s ambition, and did his best to help by lending some of his band members to help him on his way. His first song would be called ‘I Just Want to be Like Marlon Brando’. As song titles go, it was hardly subtle, but his short-lived solo music career was his first proper acting gig as well – because what was his bizarre alter ego Russell le Roq if not a performance?
His new moniker came from a nickname given to him during his time as a DJ. Russell le Roq was a heightened, if at times sometimes accurate, version of the Russell Crowe we know now. Wearing his self-belief proudly on his clothes – in this case literally with his leather jacket bearing the name Russ emblazoned on the back – he was a cocksure, confident and sometimes embarrassing persona.
Terence O’Neill-Joyce, boss of Ode Records who signed him, remembered, ‘[He had] more confidence than the rest of the people I was dealing with put together.
‘He had an innocence about him… he was just a nice person.’
Despite his confidence, Russell’s debut single didn’t scratch, never mind dent, the music charts. Only played twice on local radio, it went on to sell just 500 copies.
Adding new members to the band, including Graham Silcock, they were soon called Russ le Roq and the Romantics. The new extended name followed another single, ‘Pier 13’ – which only sold 100 copies.
Their next single, ‘Never Let Ya Slide’, saw Russell’s alter ego turn from brooding Brando wannabe to a more jokey persona. On the back of the sleeve, the handwritten note read, ‘This is Roq & Roll music. It is not a rock ‘n’ roll revival disc. Anyone caught saying it is will be murdered by death, or shot by hanging or… forced to play session on my next record!!!’
This single too failed to make any impact, so Russell decided to seek out a member of The Car Crash Set, Trevor Reekie, to produce his fourth song, ‘Shattered Glass’. Russell felt the band’s sound wasn’t dynamic enough to capture a bigger audience – hence the need for Reekie, who overhauled the band’s sound with a funkier beat.
‘We tried to jazz this piece of shit up and it didn’t work at all,’ Reekie remembers. ‘It didn’t work at all, but he was a laugh. He was so uncool that he was actually cooler than most of the so-called cool people. He was kind of a freak, but he used to get away with it. It was a bullshit time and Russ was for real. He used to walk around with this jacket that had Russ on the back. He had so much bottle.’
Russell’s parents gave as much as they could to help him, offering their savings to help his quest. But it was clear that even with his self-confidence, the band were surely consigned to nothing more than a footnote in New Zealand music history.
‘He used to say he was doing really well,’ Silcock said, ‘and the other guys and I looked at each other – “If you say so, great.” If we were doing that well, we never made much out of it. We used to see the records in these old bins for 50 cents. My friends used to remind me of that.’
Russell now decided to invest in a different enterprise – an under-age night club in Auckland called The Venue. Despite trouble from youths who were moved into the area from nearby Aotea Square by police, he was convinced the club would be a success – a place that the coolest bands would attend.
Reekie remembers, ‘We used to rehearse there with the Car Crash Set sometimes. It was an under-age nightclub and it was in the wrong part of town, so cool people didn’t go there. It must have been hard work. I doubt if he made any money out of it.’
Youth magazine Rip It Up reported in 1984 that the venue was closing down, writing, ‘Financial problems have caused The Venue to go under, nine months after it opened … le Roq said lower than expected numbers caused initial problems in covering overheads and when The Venue had to close down for two weeks in August, because of violence from outsiders, it dealt finances a death blow – not a pleasant experience.’
Reluctantly giving up his dream of owning music venues, Russell was briefly an entertainments officer at the Pakota Island resort in the Hauraki Gulf – a stint that didn’t last long after he was fired for livening up the bingo call with the words, ‘Number one: up your bum.’
Another attempt at conquering the pop charts, with a guitarist named Dean Cochrane on the song ‘What’s the Difference’, would see him failing again to become a music star.
A break arrived when two stage producers turned up in Auckland looking for actors to add local flavour to their production of the Rocky Horror Show. The cult production was big news in the stage world, offering an open invitation to the audience to join in with the flamboyant, camp atmosphere by dressing up in suspenders and ghoulish make-up.
Wilton Morley and Peter Davis were delighted with its success after buying the stage rights in the 1980s and, while retaining the same actors for the main parts, they were always on the lookout for new blood in the supporting roles. ‘We found Russell in a band in Auckland and hired him,’ Davis remembered.
So Russell got the part and discovered, for the first time in his life, that acting could be a legitimate career move. ‘I’m fundamentally quite shy,’ he said, ‘so that thing of taking on another character is quite a liberating thing to do, because within that character framework you can now go to all these other places. And I never found another job that I was actually that good at.’
Talking about the show, he added, ‘It’s high camp, absolutely. But if it’s played without reality it’s completely meaningless – it’s just people grinding away in stockings.’
Russell still hadn’t given up his dreams of being a pop star just yet – forming Roman Antix with guitarist Cochrane and his Rocky Horror Show co-star Mark Rimington. He struck up a relationship with Rimington after they both jumped queues at the Rocky Horror audition.
The Russell Crowe that Rimington met was blessed with a raw but obvious acting talent – he ‘couldn’t sing to save himself. But he had great presence. He was unbearably arrogant and rubbed people the wrong way. He was so determined to become somebody.’
The band would tour their local areas playing new songs and old. ‘I had to shadow-sing him when we were doing the tour, to keep him in tune,’ said Rimington. ‘He never said he was a great singer, but he was a great front man. He knew how to do a show.’
Despite their close time together, Rimington’s memory of the actor paints him as ‘driven’ and ‘arrogant’. He added, ‘Whatever he was focused on, it was at the expense of anything else. The women fell by the wayside pretty quickly. If people had a use, he would certainly find it. I wouldn’t describe him as the most caring person in the world.’
Morley came to see Russell following an impressive start on Rocky Horror. It was there that Morley convinced him that he should give up his music dream and focus on honing his acting talents. ‘[He] suggested that I was wasting my time in New Zealand,’ Russell said. ‘He told me, one, stop playing in a band and concentrate on acting and two, come to Australia where he would have employment for me.’
And so Russell headed back to Australia with dreams of making it as an actor.