always a winner!

Pete Murray @ The Entrance Leagues Club, Bateau Bay NSW Australia 20/07/2018 written by Brendan Lewis.

In the dead of the cold winter’s night when your heartbeats start feeling disconnected, you’re starting to feel not so beautiful anymore and you fear you’ve lived all your better days, Dr Pete Murray is here to help! Pete Murray is the only one with the skills to mend your winter woes, and with the help of his band of class A musical surgeons, are taking the opportunity tonight to treat his patients to an evening of heart-stopping acoustic renditions of all Pete’s musical lines, in conjunction with his latest not so acoustic single ‘Heartbeats (Pete Mayes Remix)’, that will surely set his patients free!

Instruments, check! Band, check! Audience, check! Let’s begin…

To alleviate any nerves in his musical operating room, Pete greets us casually before starting this evenings’ procedure with the first three songs. Just like how you never really quite know exactly in detail what a surgeon does once they cut you open, there’s no setlist available for this show and seeing as I can’t name every song title from memory, you’ll just have to figure the song titles out for yourself. The first of which, eases us into the show steadily with only Pete’s vocals and some assistive backing vocals, before the bass and beat from Pete’s stomp box arrive after the first chorus, in an alluring steady pulse. In the second song, the bass transitions to a funk, walking around the beat pumping life into the song while Pete plucks his guitar strings, seemingly swift and delicately as the heart strings of the audience. The crowd now get more excited (that’s the morphine talking), in the third song, with its faster beat and Pete’s guitar playing changing to a strum of quick precision. In the songs’ bridge section, Pete shows he can multitask as he chats to the audience while strumming, then prompts us to sing along in the songs’ final chorus, like a head surgeon instructing his interns. You know when you go to get a blood test, and the ships scared out of you from the needle, but then the nurse does a brilliant job to your relief? That’s what the sound mix is like tonight, I don’t even need my protective ear plugs shockingly! All the sounds so far are clear and complementive to the other sounds, while letting Pete’s signature warm-hearted vocals take the lead.

Moving on in this procedure, in the next song we’re all anesthetized by Pete’s fingers performing heart-stopping surgery with his wild guitar plucking and veins of funky hooks throughout the song….. Wait, isn’t surgery supposed to start the heart not stop it? Regardless, our hearts are all then zapped with a shot of adrenaline from a rush of electric guitar in the 4th song.

The rest of this musical surgery on our senses is pumped with heart-warming chats from Pete between songs, Pete’s vocals pulsating throughout each song in delicate serenity, then brings us to life with a blast of stimulant as he raises the dynamics in his voice. In some songs, Pete’s voice feels like a refreshing cool breeze over the top of warm crisp electric guitar, and in others, his voice along with a light yet complementive and entrancing beat, differing between Pete’s stomp box and a light electronic beat is intoxicating and rather seductive (in a totally manly way)…. Ah, that’s what they put in my cannula drip!  And just when you thought you could kick back and relax, the beat creeps up with Pete’s voice becoming more confronting to deliver a dance-provoking anthemic vibe that shoots life into the veins of the set, pulsating harder in different intervals, like one’s heart beat when you’re ha…. Happy to see someone. Regardless of the song or sound, Pete’s vocals are true to the recording and the sound mix is quite complementive to his perfectly performed voice, and pumps each instruments sound around Pete’s voice evenly like a healthy heart pumping blood throughout the body. Finally, to close the set off superbly, Pete warms us all up with a humble chat about how this next song saved a man from the depths of depression when he needed it the most, and upon hearing that gave Pete the most amazing sensation which we all shared with him in the audience…. Ok, it might’ve just been the morphine talking, but still, ‘Better Days’ finishes the night off perfectly!

The end, time to wake up in recovery and let the anesthesia wear off… Oops! Forgot to put the heart back in your chest, back in we go! Just when you think the surgery’s over, Dr Pete comes back out onto the stage of the musical operating room for an encore, which is good, because the crowd have loved this surgery so much, their intoxicated hearts (literally) are aching for a bit more. I for one am quite pleased that there’s an encore because I may not be good with song titles, but I know that ‘Always A Winner’ and ‘So Beautiful’ were previously absent… any guesses what two of the three songs are in the encore? Unfortunately, the crowd are well and truly loving every second, which is making them quite loud and won’t shut up while Pete’s trying to operate in the first delicate palate cleansing song! Luckily though, ‘Always A Winner’ is up next, and it’s roots swagger guitar plucking and anthemic guitar hooks and riffs keep the crowd occupied/singing along. And now, the heart’s back in the chest, no complications, and everyone’s feeling amazing, so ‘So Beautiful’ being last is just that and gets the crowd singing along in an echoing symphony with Pete. This is the perfect finish to a serene evening of musical indulgence!

Post op report; The procedure went smoothly without a hitch and we were able to repair any wounds in the audience. Dr Pete and the sound mixer did the procedure absolutely perfectly without fault which went hand in hand with each other. And the crowd responded quite positively to the nicely flowed energy and without-fault sound.

Doctors instructions; repeat process on a regular basis and as soon as possible to ensure an optimum well-being…. Doctors words, not mine!.