Read this to get up to speed about Mr Urban, who was a vaguely familiar name for many years prior to becoming Mr Kidman. There were the appearances in the BRW Entertainers Rich List a few years ago – but before that apparently he was a frequent guest on variety shows like Hey Hey It’s Saturday, Midday and Steve Vizard – and you know what, thinking back I think I remember him. Urban got a lot of PR for being a spunky Aussie country artist, at a time when such a thing was rare (James Blundell did a similar thing). Before that he was in Rusty and the Ayers Rockettes and was even a Westfield Junior!
It’s hard to begrudge Urban his success – he knew what he wanted from an early age and worked like a dog to get it. He left school early, put in serious hard yards. He was spotted as someone with star potential quite early – he made a debut album back in the early 90s – but took a long, long time to really get going. There was a lot of rejection and even a drug habit. But once he did he was totally ready – once he made it, he really made it, becoming one of the most successful Australian artists on the world stage ever (“world stage” is probably not quite right – American country music doesn’t seem to travel far outside America). Even the drug habit proved useful – it proved Urban was a survivor and gave him something interesting to write about.
This is a pretty decent book; it has to draw on secondary sources a lot and people no longer close to Urban, but the story is so interesting that doesn’t really matter. I hope it works between him and Nickers, but honestly… they don’t seem to have that much in common. I guess after Tom Cruise, a bogan from Caboolture seems like a breath of fresh air, but one day she’s going to want to talk about a book she’s read or a foreign film she’s seen and then there’s going to be trouble.
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