For all Russell Crowe’s career highlights — and there have been many — one moment truly juts out.
Crowe has played them all, from a neo-Nazi (Romper Stomper); a whistle-blower (The Insider); a brilliant and troubled mathematician (A Beautiful Mind); superheroes from both the Marvel and DC universes; biblical characters (Noah), and, of course, multi-layered men of action, the kind that have seen him collect the highest honours in the film industry.
The Australian film great also plays a rock star, only it’s no act.
As frontman of Indoor Garden Party, Crowe embarked on tours in 2023 and 2024 that would make many rockers weep. Along the way, Crowe and his bandmates treaded the boards at Piazza del Campo in Siena, the Colosseum in Rome, and Glastonbury, the granddaddy of British music festivals.
Crowe isn’t the first major film star to lead a rock band — Juliette Lewis, Keanu Reaves and Johnny Depp have all done it. But how many have won an Oscar and played Glastonbury?
“What the fuck,” is his immediate reaction to the experience of playing at Eavis’ world-famous dairy farm in Somerset, England. It’s a fair response to seeing 200,000 people in a field, and doing so from the vantage of a stage.
Playing alongside headliners SZA, Coldplay, and Dua Lipa, the show “was jam packed, and, you know, every single thing that can go wrong at a festival, from an audio perspective, happened. My mic drops out, the keyboard drops out, but we just kept charging through,” he recounts. “And that’s the thing about this particular band. We’ve got a lot of road miles under our feet, man. We dig it, and nobody in the audience would have known the sort of problems we were having.”
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Indoor Garden Party have chalked up those road miles with dates across Italy, France, Malta, Czech Republic, Ireland, on both sides of the Atlantic, and, of course, Australia, with a special homecoming date to come in the lead-up to Christmas.
Making movies and music, those “two things were always simultaneous for me and always sort of interconnected,” Crowe tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ in a Zoom from southern Spain. “One feeds the other. That immediacy of live performance is such a comfortable place for me. You can get so internalised in my other job, because everything is micro detail. That thing of being able to walk on a stage and, and it explodes your energy. It’s a great thing, it’s great for balance.”
Crowe first picked up a guitar aged six, and appeared on the screen in the same year. From 16, he was performing live, working in clubs, pursuing two goals at once. Acting won, but Crowe kept his music ambitions alive with 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, which was activated in 1992 and “went away” in 2003, before formally disbanding in 2005.
Indoor Garden Party was formed following a chat back in 2009 outside a London pub owned by the late talk show host Michael Parkinson. The band last year released a second full-length album, Prose and Cons, a set steeped in rock, with country in its veins. A debut full-length collection, The Musical, dropped in 2017.
“30 Odd Foot of Grunt was a great band,” he says, “but it was much maligned, and it got to a certain point where you can spend all your energy fighting against that or you can just save your energy for a different battle. Because not every battle’s worth fucking fighting in life, mate. And that’s one of the things that you learn as you go along as well.”
Indoor Garden Party are worth fighting for, Crowe insists, and worth showing off. The band will swing into Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on December 20th for a special, one-off event.
“One of the things that happens with the Indoor Garden Party is that wherever we are in the world, there’s always somebody that I know that says, ‘Hey man, I should come and get up and do a song.’ Over time, we’ve had Elvis Costello, Sting, Michael Buble, RZA from the Wu Tang Clan, Rita Ora,” he remarks.
Confirmed musical guests on the night include longtime collaborators Marcia Hines and Troy Cassar-Daley, plus rising American artist BRAKE, Lorraine O’Reilly, and Crowe’s ex, Danielle Spencer. “It’s going to be a big night, man.”
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Russell Crowe’s Indoor Garden Party
Saturday, December 20th
Enmore Theatre, Sydney, NSW
