MySpace a place for friends

Leo Sayer possesses one of the most distinctive and celebrated voices in modern popular music.

Leo Sayer’s remarkable career has spanned almost four full decades and some 15 albums. Along the way, Leo has created a long string of iconic international chart-toppers, classic songs for the ages, from his first worldwide hit in 1973 with “The Show Must Go On”, right through to the dance remix of “Thunder On My Heart”, which topped the UK charts as recently as 2006. Plus a dozen other major hits in between – some of the most enduring and beloved popular songs of all time.

Now, coinciding with the great artist’s 60th birthday, Universal Music Australia is proud to present Leo Sayer’s all-new, first locally-recorded studio album – DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW.

DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW is Leo Sayer as no-one has ever heard him before.

DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW is Leo revisiting a selection of milestone songs from across his career, not just the hits but a dozen of the singer/songwriter’s most important tunes, deconstructed and recreated in an entirely new, emotion-packed musical environment. Classic songs including “One Man Band”, “Orchard Road”, “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”, “Long Tall Glasses” and many more, all reinterpreted and reborn.

DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW is Leo Sayer stripped back, his songs stripped bare, but definitely not unplugged.

“I never did like the concept of ‘unplugged’,” Leo explains. “I still love the richness of an atmosphere. If you’re going to record something, then record it properly. Why should you record a little if you want to get a lot? So the idea came to find a setting for the songs.”

By Leo’s own description, DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW is like a musical auto-biography that almost defies genre. A lot of the songs have something of a jazzy feel, backed by an upright bass and moody guitar, a little bit of electric piano and sax. But it’s not quite jazz.

Also throughout the album, there are constant flourishes of lush, big, rich strings that sound like they’re come straight out of a symphony, but you’d never call DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW a classical album. Or a lounge album. Or easy-listening either.

“It’s not quite any of those but it’s all of them,” says Leo. “The idea was: ‘Let’s find the setting that brings out the voice in the words.’ That’s what it’s really all about. I’m a troubadour. These are troubadour songs. I’m just a storyteller who happens to find that the best way to tell his stories is not in books or paintings, but in songs.

“What I love about the setting of this record is that it’s so naked, so honest. The songs cannot be anything else but honest. You can’t pull punches when you’re in this kind of setting.”

The recording of DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW was actually the brainchild of another music icon, an Aussie music icon in Garth Porter, one-time member of Aussie supergroup Sherbet and, in more recent decades, a celebrated record producer (most notably for his work with country superstar and recently anointed Australian of the year, Lee Kernaghan).

It was, most appropriately, during the recent national Countdown arena tour that Leo and Garth renewed a friendship which dated back to the original Countdown TV show of the 1970s, back when both of them were young, bonafide, satin-wearing pop stars, making young girls swoon.

“Garth came up with the plan,” Leo recalls. ‘He said, ‘Why don’t you take the songs and delve into the beauty of the lyrics. We can take all the shouts and the screams and the trying-to-make-a-pop-record out of it and just perform the songs.’

“We wanted to take every song on a journey, arrangement-wise and even genre-wise, move them into different areas. So that ‘One Man Band’ becomes a swing song, ‘Orchard Road’ almost becomes like a jazz ballad. Every single chord has changed, every voicing has changed.

“A song like ‘The Show Must Go On’, we’ve slowed it right down. It’s no longer this frenetic: ‘I’ve got to tell my story before I die in three minutes time!!!’ It’s 35 years later, so those lyrics take on a whole other meaning. I’m no longer someone at the start of their career, but I still hate show business,” Leo says with a big laugh. “And I still want to get out, I still feel as though I’ve got tomatoes thrown at me at the gig, I still feel as if I’m starting out, I still feel I’ve got something to prove.”

Since relocating his life to Sydney in 2005, Leo’s career hasn’t slowed down in the slightest. In fact, quite the opposite. He and his local band have performed over 100 live shows in Australia alone. Leo is also regularly invited to be the star attraction at gala and high-profile public events. He’s also still constantly flying around the world, performing shows back in his old country in the UK and countless other territories, where those timeless hits have made him an eternal star, including the US where Leo was a repeated chart-topper throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

“I am still of an international mind,” says the celebrated singer/songwriter. “In a lot of ways, my speed and my motivation is very Australian – I’m going to be come a citizen next year – but my mindset is still European, a little bit American maybe as well.”

For the recording of DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW, Garth Porter convinced Leo to temporarily replace his regular live outfit with a supergroup of local and international session musos, who could help completely reinvent his famous songs. Strings come courtesy of the world famous American arranger William Motzing (who lives in Australia) and were recorded by the famed former Beatles’ engineer Richard Lush (another long-time Aussie immigrant).

The end result of all this collaboration makes for a breathtaking musical journey. DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW finds Leo Sayer in very fine voice and this new recording is set to instantly earn its place up alongside the finest work of his incredible career.

It’s an emotional, celebratory, revealing and often surprising ride, filled with moments that feel so familiar, and many other moments that are completely new. “It’s a little bit like driving a different car, but going to the same place,” Leo says with one of his trademark smiles.

DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW is an adventurous and beautiful new recording from one of the greats of modern popular music, and will no doubt bring much joy to Leo’s fans everywhere, old and new.

DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW is out now.