Start Again Conrad Sewell Features in What Movie

Conrad Sewell is pushing his sleeves upwardly to show me his tattoos.

To be fair, I did inquire him, as they are not the usual musician's carry-on, only images of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus of Prague. Not quite rock'north'gyre, more your Lord's day best.

Conrad Sewell was nearly brought undone by drugs and booze but the vocalist is ready for a second chance. Credit:Wolter Peeters

"Dominicus for me was at church with my family," he says. "I went to an all-boys Catholic school, it was only a part of my upbringing. It gave me some kind of moral compass in life, which later shifted a little flake."

Well, we've all got to start somewhere.

"Simply it gave me a good set of rules to alive by," he says, laughing.

Sewell is sitting in the offices of Sony Music in Due east Sydney serving out his penance in an endeavour to correct a music career that has tipped off residuum.

At 31, the Brisbane vocalizer has a string of successful singles to his name, including the 2015 ARIA song of the year Offset Once again and Firestone, the "tropical house" (a strand of house music, not a fern) nautical chart-stomping collaboration with Kygo. He's played Madison Square Garden, Coachella and Glastonbury, toured with Ed Sheeran and Maroon five, too, but despite these outward markers of success, things haven't quite gone to program.

There was heavy drinking and drug use, and he is now on his third record characterization. A particularly bad bough ended with his mum on the phone in tears begging Sewell to pull himself together.

And so he has, later a fashion - he calls himself a work in progress - and it's now, almost four years since that ARIA award, that he finally has a full-length studio anthology to his name and questions to answer.

Usually, those questions are about the drinking and drugs - and you lot can meet him tense upwards because he knows they're coming - so we'll start somewhere else: religion.

"My grandfather, who was sort of the leader of the family unit, he was the most religious out of everyone, so when he passed away I got my showtime tattoo, which was this i," Sewell says pointing to a picture on the inside of his left wrist.

"My granddad always used to attach a prayer, the Divine Mercy, to all my birthday cards, and then that's sort of like an ode to him. Information technology's a Les Paul Gibson guitar, which is the beginning guitar I ever got, and the Divine Mercy and affections wings to guide me through my music career. I got that when I was 17."

He now has 12 tattoos on his arms, including images of the Immaculate Medal, which he also wears strung around his neck, and his patron saint - the Infant Jesus of Prague.

"For me, information technology's reminiscent of family," he says. It'southward not that I agree with everything the Catholic Church building does, this is my family. It's like when people go tribal tattoos."

Like anyone who has grown upward Catholic, Sewell'southward upbringing has the familiar markers of church on a Sunday, convoluted confirmation names (take a jiff for Conrad Ignatius Mario Maximilian Sewell) and hymns stuck in your head a decade after you last sang them at Mass (his go-tos are The Lord is My Shepard or Shine Jesus Shine).

Surely he was in the church choir then?

"I was in the school choir," he says. "At church building we would stand at the back. It wasn't very cool to be in the church choir, information technology wasn't a very skillful church choir.

"Information technology definitely wasn't American gospel standard, which is all I wanted to sing in, so we would sit at the back of the church and effort and outsing the choir - me, my sis, my brother and my mum - and get in trouble from my dad for laughing at the back of church building."

Music runs in his blood - his grandparents toured with the Bee Gees and younger sister Grace had a hitting in 2015 for her encompass of the Lesley Gore song You Don't Own Me - and it was mum who got him in a recording studio when he was merely 10 years old.

"We recorded this crude demo and started sending them out to label people," he says. "We didn't really get whatever reactions, it was more and then I had my voice on record and an experience of being in the studio," Sewell says.

"I think I [originally] told that story considering I was trying to explain from solar day ane, I wanted to be a stone star. It wasn't only singing for me, it was, you lot know, earth domination of the music charts."

That'due south quite a lofty ambition for anyone, permit solitary a 10-year-old.

"Well, aye," he says. "That was the kind of thing my mum instilled in me and my family unit. I believed straight away that I was capable of winning a Grammy one twenty-four hours."

OK, so that hasn't happened. But here'due south the thing about Sewell, for all his swagger - and at that place is a lot, which he checks ofttimes with asides such as, "This is going to be most big-headed article I've ever done" - he is very self-aware, of his place in the music industry and in the public centre.

He'southward happy to admit most people probably don't know his name, fifty-fifty though they'd recognise his music and that he is, substantially, pressing the reset push button on his career.

Conrad Sewell on stage in Madrid while on tour with Kygo.

"I'm yet at a edifice phase, which is what makes me hungry for and then much more," he says. "It likewise makes y'all question yourself at this point: 'Why hasn't it happened all the same? Am I withal the just one who believes information technology's going to happen now?' Merely that's just me being an creative person and being insecure most things."

So what happened?

He moved to the U.k. later on a failed audition for flavor two of Australian Idol and spent time in Stockholm and Berlin working with songwriters. He then started a band, Sons of Midnight, but afterwards some moderate success in Europeand tales of epic hijacking-limos-in-Paris levels of partying, they disappeared after one album.

"I was travelling the world with my four best mates," he says. "We thought we were the Rolling Stones - rock'n'scroll, drinking, partying - and so we would be like, 'Let'southward blast every beer on the rider and then go out at that place and play.'

"And and then I did that for so long, that information technology started to affect me. I didn't realise information technology was. Then I moved to LA and that brought a whole load of other things into information technology and … you know."

While the move to LA brought him the kind of recognition he had been craving - the 2014 striking Firestone and 2015'south Commencement Again saw him touring worldwide with a profile to match - but, again, the drinking was catching upwards with him.

"The thing with me was that I could always get away with information technology, considering my voice was resilient and I was used to drinking all weekend and then singing at the pub for three hours, even if I'd just vomited around the corner an hour before," he says.

"So for me to get upwardly and sing Firestone at Madison Square Garden, f---ed up, was a pretty easy thing for me to practise."

Does he call up the gig?

"Yes, I killed it," he says, laughing.

It was the eventual pleadings of those closest to him that made him reconsider what he was doing.

"My girlfriend really helped me and I don't similar to talk most her too much, because she remains a secret," he says.

"She saw me in states - she was arguing with me at Madison Foursquare Garden, she was with me on the road when I couldn't get up for shows, she saw everything - and I recall she saw how great I could exist and she saw me ruining that, and eventually I lost her."

His female parent, for so long his champion, was non happy either.

"And so my mum was the aforementioned affair. I only remember thinking afterwards - I'd had an episode where I'd done as well much blow … is this Dominicus paper appropriate?"

Well, I think it'due south amend if you're honest.

"Just don't say blow."

I have to say something.

"I was on one and I ended upwards not well. And I remember coming out thinking it could, you know, somewhen end your life. It could get that bad.

"And talking to my mum and her just beingness in tears and beingness similar, 'Just realise what you lot're doing to yourself. You're going to lose the i affair that y'all love more than anything and that'south your vox. God'south going to have that gift away from y'all, boy.'

"And I realised that she was right."

Although he still drinks, he says is now aware of his excessive tendencies and can keep himself in check, Sewell has taken his therapist's very LA advice and now does what makes him happy: singing, playing five-a-side soccer and hiking.

"Playing shows is fun to me," he says. "I don't play as much equally I want to play. That's what's the best thing in the world to me is. It was never that I needed to drink because I didn't get fun from anywhere else.

"I would rather play a show than drink a bottle of whiskey, it was just that when I wasn't playing a evidence, the only thing that would make me experience as good every bit if I was playing a evidence was a bottle of whiskey."

Sewell's renewed focus on his career is starting to pay off. The long-awaited debut anthology, Life, is released on May 17 and the reaction to early singles - the confessional Come up Make clean and the catchy gospel-inspired Healing Hands - has been positive, with Sewell receiving an APRA popular vocal of the year nomination for Healing Easily.

His honesty in person is reflected in his songwriting, besides, where he openly discusses his battles with drugs and alcohol. Was it cathartic putting it all down on paper?

"I knew I wasn't going to get asked crazy questions about maxim, 'If I come home in the nighttime, after getting drunk in the park' - Ed Sheerhan would say that, that wasn't a thing - but when I said the word cocaine in Come up Clean, that was when I was similar, 'OK, people are going to ask most this now,'" he says.

"Especially considering I'k not some hip-hop dude who can say whatever I want, parents heed to my music, and then information technology's going to bear upon things.

"But I didn't realise how much it was going to become a thing."

Does he e'er regret his honesty?

"No, I don't regret telling the truth," he says. "Everyone has a story and I just hope it'south not such a big office of my story that it becomes a thing, because it's not the thing. The thing should be my voice and that's what people should talk about."

And his hopes for Life?

"The album is a bang-up torso of work and I recall if enough people hear it it will spread considering the songs are classic and existent and it doesn't actually audio like annihilation else out at that place at the moment," he says. "It's unapologetically me and it may not be the coolest f---ing matter in the world, just information technology'southward the truth."

And if there is ane affair Catholic schoolboy Conrad Ignatius Mario Maximilian Sewell should know, information technology'due south that the truth will set you gratuitous.

Conrad Sewell plays the Eatons Hill Ballroom, Brisbane, on May 31; the Enmore Theatre, Newtown, on June 1; and the Forum, Melbourne, on June 7.  Life is released on May 17.

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Source: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/i-don-t-regret-telling-the-truth-conrad-sewell-faces-his-demons-20190509-p51lsh.html

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