Davey Lane on the tour that saved his soul

There are plenty more stories like this. Pete Townshend relating his hairy Chapel Street brawl from the Who’s tour of ’68. The gruff pep talk from Roger Daltrey at Sydney Entertainment Centre (“Listen, it’s not an easy gig, openin’ for The ’Oo.”). Sitting at a piano with Neil Finn in Auckland, going over harmonies for a run of “30 or 40” global arena dates.

They’re snapshots from a rock’n’roll life as charmed as any kid from Melbourne dares imagine. The springboard with You Am I – he was a big fan, they needed a fourth man – whisked him out of his teenaged bedroom onto the front line of Australian rock in 1999. The gun-for-hire jobs with Barnesy, Crowded House and more followed with rude haste.

His own albums, either with his band the Pictures or as Davey Lane, have obviously been low-key by comparison. He also agrees, with hindsight, that they’ve been less remarkable for their content than for the flawless Anglophile pop-rock forms that he learnt from the Beatles and Kinks and Who albums that shaped the world he was born into.

His new one, Don’t Bank Your Heart on It, is different. The “seismic shifts” of a long-term relationship collapsing, followed by a bad rebound love affair and “a long period of really intense depression” have brought these songs the hard way.

“I’ve always been very aware of my lack of life experience hindering my ability to write lyrics, outside of anything that was just gobbledygook or that phonetically sounded good,” he says. “Which is fine to a point. I mean, John Lennon and David Bowie certainly didn’t have any problems [doing that].”

The default references to rock idols that pepper his conversation are logical in Lane’s case. The supporting players on the new record, a concept album of sorts about negotiating the troubled waters of the heart, is an A-list of mates including Barnes, Tommy Stinson of American indie heroes the Replacements, English psychedelic legend Robyn Hitchcock and septuagenarian US pop wizard Todd Rundgren.

The latter connection recalls one of the greatest Australian tours of 2018, in which Lane assembled a crack local house band to back the American studio explorer’s spectacular return on an escalating run of pub dates. It also symbolises a key moment in his emotional journey.

“Being able to play music in that time kept me going,” he says. “I was at my lowest [when] Todd came out and I did that tour with him, which was so great. I mean, for a time when inside I’m just feeling completely done and disillusioned with everyone and everything, to be able to do something like that, where you’re playing this incredibly joyous, euphoric music. That was a real lifeline for me.”

Other lifelines on the album, which ranges over Lane’s accumulated history from Beatlesque ballads to psych punk to lush symphonic rock, include Vika and Linda Bull, the Living End’s Chris Cheney, Grinspoon’s Phil Jamieson, King Gizzard’s Stu Mackenzie and, in suitably climactic position, his “best mate” Tim Rogers of You Am I.

The band that kickstarted his remarkable rise has been taking advantage of lockdown, he says, by long-range demos of a swathe of new songs. He’s done his parts here in his grandparents’ old house, where he’s reconstructed a teenager’s bedroom of guitars, gizmos and wall posters of the friends/heroes who have paved his way.

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“I was kind of terrified most of the time,” he confesses, looking back at that first You Am I tour of ’99. “I mean, I’d never played in a band outside of the school quadrangle at lunchtime! I grew up with this band I’d only seen a small handful of times because I wasn’t 18, so being on stage with them was just like being in the eye of this f—ing hurricane. It was kind of intense until I learnt to let myself go with the centrifugal force of it all.”

Despite the effortless, swashbuckling rock prince persona he’s projected all these years, you get the feeling his feet have only just touched the ground. Another watershed moment he recalls was just last year, staging the Who’s Tommy in its entirety, with Rogers on vocals at the Memo Theatre in St Kilda.

“It put things in perspective,” he says. “I’m not comparing my record to Tommy in the slightest, but at the age of 39, I feel like I’ve made a record that at last I can be proud of. Proud of the things that I’m able to say in it. That said, Pete was f—ing 23 when he wrote Tommy.”

Don’t Bank Your Heart on It is out now. Davey Lane performs at the Esplanade Hotel, St Kilda, on December 9 and 10, and the Oxford Art Factory, Sydney on December 16.