One of the real success stories to come out of Queensland in the last decade is The Ten Tenors. While pop and rock bands often struggle to make an impact at home and abroad, The Tenors are consistently touring the globe.
Along the way they're filling concert halls and giving century old standards a contemporary twist. Sometimes, they'll do the opposite and take a relatively contemporary song and arrange it in a manner befitting something more ‘classical'.
Heading home for a series of shows to promote their new album, Nostalgica. The boys were in Florida when we caught up with vocalist Steven Sowden.
"We're coming to the end of our US tour which has been really, really, enjoyable for us," he explains. "We're really looking forward to coming home and seeing wet, wet soggy Brissie."
The band barely has time to take in the sights either at home or abroad. Once a gig is over, it's back on the tour bus. Already in 2009 the troupe have "been all over Europe, Germany, Austria, France, South Africa and all around the US and Canada." And that's since January.
Not surprisingly, Nostalgica is doing just as well overseas as the concert dates are.
"We're really ecstatic with the response it's been getting," confirms Sowden.
"We started the original Nostalgica show about six months ago and there's been some little tweaks here and there. We really feel like we got it right for this upcoming Australian tour and we're really happy with the final product of it. We're chomping at the bit to get back and see some Australian audiences."
"We've been mixing some of our solos around, and tweaking some of the lighting and some of the staging so it complements the show."
Much of the recording on Nostalgica was done while the band was on the road. Studios were used in Europe and The United States.
"That was interesting, a really big challenge and something that we haven't done before," continues Sowden, "but we were very happy with the results."
The group used the City of Prague Orchestra for much of the recording.
"We had one of our musical arrangers [Steven Baker] that lives in London do a lot of the final orchestral arrangements for the album. He flew over to Prague and oversaw that few days of recording. So we were really lucky to have someone like that over there."
Sowden admits that choosing material wasn't easy and led to a healthy debate in the ranks.
"It was really tough," he admits. "It's a combination of hundreds of songs that were suggested to us by our fans and is sort of a greatest hits of the twentieth century. So you can imagine how many songs we had to pick from, so we really had to whittle it down to songs that we really enjoyed singing and would sound really good on an album. They had to be songs we could put a Ten Tenors' little operatic twist to. It was a very hard process, so there were some very long nights around the discussion table."
A highlight of the live show is a Sowden favourite, ‘Granada'.
"I guess having been to Spain and singing it in front of a Spanish crowd really hits home what a special song it is to them. I guess ‘Over The Rainbow' would have to be one of my other favourite arrangements. I was able to do a solo on that so, of course, that's one of my favourites."
Tickets are still available for their Brisbane show and fans can expect to hear songs from the new album along with previous favourites.
"There's a whole bunch of songs from the album," admits Sowden, "there's a bunch of our favourite pieces we're going to be doing like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody', ‘The Boxer' from Simon and Garfunkel, as well as our favourite operatic numbers, so there's a little bit of something in there for everyone."
"We're really looking forward to the upcoming show and tour. We love coming home and it's always just an awesome time."
Nostalgica is out now through Warner Music.
The Ten Tenors play The Gold Coast Arts Centre 29 June 2009 and the Brisbane Convention Centre 2 July 2009.
I HAVE SEEN THEM 2DAYS AGO IN MADRID. AWESOME GUYS