A TASTE of Things to Come

By Dan Hutton on July 28, 2016 in Arts

Reformed 70s rock legends TASTE have recently released a new album, Life On Earth, and they’re just about to hit the road to promote the hell out of it with a show scheduled at Sydney’s Frankie’s Pizzeria on July 14. We caught up with TASTE lead vocalist and keyboardist Ken Murdoch during the month…

If we had to describe our sound in one sentence… Brian Mannix once said, “If Queen and Metallica had a bastard baby, it would be called TASTE”. I guess that’s our sound, with a lot of Led Zeppelin thrown in.

My first memory of music is… The Beatles’ Abbey Road. The radio station played the entire album at midnight the night it was released. I was in bed as I was so young and I wasn’t allowed to stay up, but I snuck in the radio to listen to it.

Growing up my parents listened to… all Irish music.

If you come to see us play, you can expect… a very dynamic show with big chords, big harmonies, big drums, and big trouble. In the live arena we have a lot of improvisations and virtuosic playing. We try to deliver a stadium gig no matter the size of the venue or audience.

There was one time when we were starting out… when we had a driver who was on LSD. It was raining and horrible and he was all over the road. We were convinced he was going to kill us. Unfortunately we weren’t on drugs, otherwise it would have been fine. We convinced him to pull into a service station and when he got out, Michael, who didn’t have his licence yet, jumped in the driver’s seat and we took off.

If we could have chosen one song to have written it would have to be… Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who. Lyrically it spoke about how I felt and musically it was like a tornado hitting my radio speakers.

Our favourite song to perform would have to be… ‘The Fatal Shore’. It’s the one song that we play around with most on stage and it can go for up to ten minutes sometimes.

One person I’d still really like to record with is… Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, because he invented rock and roll and no one plays piano like him. He even makes me drive faster when his music comes on.

Our biggest fan has got be… this guy who is always down the front with his TASTE bandana and cap on backwards. We don’t know his name, but he has never missed a show. Our most famous fan would probably be Brian May from the Queen orchestra. He said he liked our guitar songs, actually.

We knew we’d made it when… we stopped having sex for money. Seriously though, it was when we stopped sleeping in the back of a two-tonne truck on top of our equipment and we were allowed to fly.

TASTE will be playing one Sydney show on July 14 at Frankie’s Pizzeria. To find out more about TASTE, please visit www.taste-music.com.