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He was named Rome’s Ambassador to the world in 2022, awarded as a “Global Icon” by GQ magazine, but he was also barred entry from a suburban Japanese restaurant in Melbourne for not wearing the correct attire, on a Friday, at lunchtime, in 37° heat, after tennis. A non-story that became global news. In February 2024, he shaved for the first time in five years, which created another non-story printed far and wide from page six in New York to Vanity Fair. Whether he’s telling the story, or people are telling a story about him, life’s always interesting if you’re Russell Crowe.
Starting in Rome at the Coliseum in June 2024, he’s on the road again playing music, and he’s bringing his Indoor Garden Party back to the UK and Ireland for the first time since 2017. An “Indoor Garden Party” is, he says, “an event, a band, a happening. It’s fluid. The personnel changes, but it’s always big. It’s like a festival where I gather people I admire, musicians and storytellers, and we put on a show.”
The concept started in 2009 in a pub outside London owned by the chat show legend, Michael Parkinson, and it has kept going in a haphazard, ad lib way ever since. With this configuration, Crowe brings to the foreground The Gentlemen Barbers, who he has been quietly tinkering with for the last four years.
“There’s an attitude about this band. It’s got a groove. We do a lot of story songs, but we also know we are here to blow out the cobwebs and give the audience a good night” Russell adds.
Grabbing time between the shoots of films like Unhinged, Thor: Love & Thunder, The Pope’s Exorcist, and this year’s marquee Marvel release, Kraven the Hunter, the band have been gathering, sometimes for weeks at a time just playing, recording, talking, gelling. In 2023, they got out of the studio and onto the stage with an extensive tour of east coast Australia at iconic gigs like the Espy in Melbourne and the Sydney Opera House. Drop-in artists for those shows included Michael Bublé, Rita Ora, and RZA from the Wu Tang Clan. Then the band hit Europe playing in Malta, Italy, and ended the tour in front of 15,000 people in Karlovy Vary, Czechia.
The relationships within the band go back 30 years. Dave Kelly (drums) and Stewart Kirwan (trumpet) were members of Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts, as well as playing with Crowe in The Ordinary Fear of God, which included Stu Hunter (piano), and in its touring form also included Chris Kamzelas (guitar). James Hazelwood (bass) has fit right in and shares friendships within the band that go back decades.
