James Reyne can’t help himself. In the street, the bar, the hotel foyer, he’s never off. He’s watching the guy in the airport lounge, in the beachfront real estate office; the girl in the sunglasses, the dufus on the TV chat show. It’s a non-stop carnival of human comedy. Or tragedy. Who can tell anymore? “If there’s any theme to this album it’s people being easily impressed. This silliness that they aspire to, the lives they read about in magazines. Their obsession with trash culture, the bizarre values we seem to live by. It’s all just endlessly and perversely fascinating to me”.

EVERY MAN A KING closes a 30-year circle since James first led Australian Crawl into the front line of the Oz rock boom. His eye and pen grew sharper through a platinum-lined solo career, but never have his wit and poignancy been on more consistently solid musical ground than here.