Matt Breen is telephoning from Australia, for some that might not be the biggest thing in the world, in the days of mass communication, of easier ways to keep in touch, making a call from one side of the world to other is not considered to be a huge event. Yet strip away the thought of ease in the modern age, take away the simple act of dialling a number and what you are left with is deep symbolism, a connection between two people that isn’t hindered by the sterility of a text message or the flatness of an E-mail, it is the sheer effort that goes into co-ordinating an encounter that meets with both time and expectation.

Matt Breen is one of Liverpool’s young guard, a young lad who many were first introduced to via the superb Monday Night Club ran by Liverpool legend Ian Prowse. Talented, awe inspiring and able to blow the socks of the biggest cynic that might have wandered in off the street as the colossus took shape. Yet like many others, Matt has found fame at a distance, the city of Liverpool loves its own, especially in the arts but regretfully it seems at times the city cannot cope with all the emerging flair coming through and sometimes to be heard, you have to play several thousand miles away. It worked for The Beatles, it can work for anyone.

The phone goes, bright and breezy and full of the joys of the Australian Summer, he puts the craggy and miserable cold far behind him but down the line the sound of a lad who grew up beside the tidal range of the River Mersey is never too far from being heard. He is phoning ahead of his gig at the Walrus Club in Brisbane, a place I’m assured has the feel of the Cavern Club, Matt calls it a “Speakeasy” and noticing the parallels between the comfortable laid back conversation that follows and his imagery, it’s hard to anything but agree.

It is the second time Matt has been out to Australia in the last couple of years, a far cry from bumping into each other on a wet night in the centre of town just down the road from The Unity Theatre and he obviously enjoys the lifestyle.

“Well, you know it’s always been a place I’ve always wanted to go but I guess its fate playing into my hands. I met this bloke who has played harmonica with some big Australian acts – Colin Hay from Men At Work for one, when he came over to Liverpool for his dad’s funeral. My dad said he knew his dad and the gentleman who passed away, Ronnie Mac, his son plays harmonica and he is in the radio industry in Australia and he’s here, so we should bring him out to the Clove Hitch on Hope Street where I was doing this open mic run. So we brought him down and when you first hear that someone can play an instrument you think oh yeah as a musician, you can play an instrument but then this guy blew me away, this is crazy, this guy can really wail! So we got talking a lot on Facebook and he went back to Australia after a few weeks and came back for Christmas that year.”

Sometimes fate takes you by the hand, it is not only Time that can be cruel and forgiving. Fate is the art of having the surprise and allowing it to run in the right direction, no matter what the outcome. It is a fate that Matt seemed to respect.

“When he came over for Christmas, I took him out to a couple of my gigs and he heard Not Guilty which most of the local acoustic music scene know me for and he said on hearing that song, “I’ve got to get you out to Australia” so he took me out last year and his mum bought me the flight and I managed to pay her back obviously. I was just doing a couple of gigs, paying my way and then I just had to go out again, just the lifestyle and the treatment you get in Australia is – there’s a few pubs that I’ll play in Liverpool that will treat you with a lot of respect and I’ll treat them with a lot of respect as well. Obviously every city in the world has its number of idiots but out here everyone is so chilled and laid back and not many people have a bad word to say about each other. It’s a completely different pace and different scene.”

It’s hard, even at six thirty in the morning when you’ve struggled to find the right words for a poem not to be drawn in by the exuberance and passion of Matt’s words. The elegance of youth that is allowed to fade by the jaundice approach of middle age, arguably a symbolic theme that runs between Australia’s and Britain’s differing outlooks on life. It is a theme that Matt explores.

“If you wanted to get into local press or whatever, it’s an easy task to undertake or to get into radio. In the U.K., it’s become really monopolised, so I came out here and I just saw how easy it was to get known, it’s a small market, there’s only 20 million people living in Australia. If you appeal to a certain demographic, you are appealing to a large number of people no matter what. Although there’s 20 million people, it’s such a closed industry out here, what I mean by a closed industry is that if you appeal to a certain demographic, they will be able to listen to you on radio because you will be able to get onto radio. We started recording the album in June, July and we went through each track and we decided we weren’t going to do it as cheaply as possible but try and make it the best quality we could so we went into the studio each day at 6pm, sometimes we’d get in at 9pm and stay until 2am! So this was all pretty much late night stuff and I’m sure you’ll be aware as a creative man yourself and as creative people do, it’s a lot easier to get those juices flowing of a night”. No one had heard me play electric guitar before out here and I think they were a little bit shocked at what I was doing because I’ll they’d seen me do was play acoustic guitar and we went into the studio and did all the lead parts for Not Guilty as you’ve heard. We went in and the solo you hear on the track is the first take we did of it, we finished the solo and they hit stop after it was recorded it and the Producer Rick – Richard Parker turned round and said it was just f*****g beautiful! The funniest thing ever! He’s just listening to this thing over and over again, and we’re asking do you want another take? Yeah sure, so we did another but it just wasn’t the same.

The conversation turned slightly, the juices were flowing and still it was hard to believe that someone I knew would bother ringing up from Brisbane just to tell a series of anecdotes. When you know someone for many years, you do tend to get to know the brightness and the dark moments in equal measure, we are all human after all, we deal with each up and down because we must and whilst mistakes are made, some more serious than others, if you love a person’s company you will do all you can to protect their life or at least their soul.

“I came back home for a while and I fell into a massive depression, ups and downs and swings and roundabouts because when I was out here in the winter in June and July, I made a couple of really good mates and I went back to England and I found I just didn’t have that bolt hole with a group of people because it was a shared house that they lived in, which incidentally is the house that I’m living in now. I got back to England, I was sticking around the house and because I’d had so much independence, going out and doing my own thing and stuff, that I wasn’t used to telling my mum or dad exactly where I was going and what time I’d be back and it got me down really quickly and I went through a break-up while I was in Australia and I was fine when I was out there, but when I got back to reality, I was really sort of lonely but that’s not the word, I’m always needing companionship. It’s not a necessity but it really helps me as someone who gets down a lot, you know, it’s sort of like a crutch to lean on. Reality hit and I fall into this massive depression and it got really bad for a while and my manager found out about it out here and he was like you’re coming back out here. All of the money put forward for the album came from my manager’s pocket, there’ was no outside support, it’s all been independent thus far. He’s like, “I’ve sunk a lot of money and my savings into you, you can’t be this down like it’s just going to be a waste if something happens to you”. It was a really fair point and I ended up coming back out.”

In Manchester Airport there is a piano just waiting to be played, it is an open invitation to someone who can play to while away time perhaps, for some catching up on reading is enough as the planes fly in and out to various locations on Earth, yet put a piano anywhere and someone will tentatively prove that music can exist anywhere. It can also bring out the human in the faceless supporters of law and order.

“I was sitting down at this piano just playing a bit of Billy Joel and Jerry Lee Lewis, some Beatles stuff, Paul McCartney, Wings, John Lennon and I’m there for about a hour. This is 8.30am and I’ve just got through security desk as it’s just opened and as soon as you walk through it there’s a piano there. As most musicians know, it’s hard to walk away from an instrument and I just sat down at this piano and I was told if you play you would get free food and drink, so obviously as I like food and drink and free I just had to sit down – starving artist, you know what I mean?

I started playing a few songs and I was playing Benny and the Jets and I’m sitting there and I feel this thing touch my back and I turn around and it’s a policeman with a gun. This is before Paris and when terrorism had reached a new height in Europe, so these guys were just chilled and this guy starts singing Benny and the Jets and I said I don’t really know this, I’m just jamming it! He said do you know any Happy Mondays? I said no not really, I’m a Scouser and then I said I know some Oasis songs if you want to join in with them? He said yeah, sure so we start singing Don’t Look Back In Anger and three people started to record it and there’s three different angles on it. I didn’t realise it was being filmed, I looked round and spotted one person and that was the person from the café filming it, the other angles I’ve not seen, like I didn’t see at the time, so we’re getting really into it and we finish the song and he says like thanks so much and everyone in the airport was giving us a standing ovation, giving us a huge round of applause, especially for the cop, he’s got some balls to get up and do that without thinking I could get into trouble for this, which he did, very briefly.

When I got back, the video didn’t’ go viral until three days after I got here, I didn’t set my phone up, I got here on a Friday night, Brisbane time, Saturday and Sunday I didn’t have my phone set up and I had two gigs to do on both days. Then it got to Monday and I had set up my phone and I get a call from my manager Jamie and he said you’ve gone viral and I said you what? You’ve gone viral he said, I said no I haven’t! So I looked on Facebook and that video’s got 50,000 odd views at the time. This is before it was shared in England, this is crazy. You don’t expect this to happen and all of a sudden, all systems go, we’re going to release a single soon on the back of this.

So this is all in the space of about five days and at this point, I’m thinking this is just ballistic, I’ve never experienced anything like this before and two weeks later, Michael Matthews,(Savage Garden’s publicist) has arranged five radio interviews a week give or take across two weeks. So I’m round the house, picking up the phone every hour or two across Australia, the song was uploaded to PLAY MP3 which is what all the Australian radio stations download from, we were picked up by the ABC Network which is the national one and picked up by Esteria which is a privately run establishment which has the triple NNN – which is a bit like the Radio Two of Australia and ABC picked it up and I got picked up by about 83 stations in Australia and I’ve been played by 60 of them so far.

It’s been absolutely mad! It’s bizarre, this wouldn’t have happened if I’d have stayed in England, it’s all to do with fate, coincidence and destiny I guess, I’ve become a very spiritual man over the past two years and ever since coming out here, I’ve realised all the wrongdoings in the past I’ve done, with girlfriends and being a bad person to people and coming out and meeting people who are older than me but who haven’t done as many things as I’ve done in terms of experience and things and realising that I’m a really lucky kid.”

To hear the exuberance, the joy come back to Matt’s voice makes the early morning worthwhile but something is nagging at the back of my head. As someone like Matt who travelled to distant lands when they were younger and who felt apart from others that had been left behind or even those who I had met on the road who had never even left their home town, I had to ask him about recommending any other young artist leaving the safety of Liverpool and heading to lands unknown.

“I think if you’ve got the determination and the patience, you can do anything. To quote the great movie Back to the Future, which has some great lines in it: ‘If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything’ and if you’re struggling to make it in Liverpool or London or Manchester or wherever it is, you’ve got to start looking in other places, you can’t spend your whole life in one city trying to be the best. You’ve got to get out there and see the world and meet people who can help you. This is something I’ve learnt from being out here, it’s not about doing everything for yourself, it’s give and take. There’s a perfect amount of give and there’s a perfect amount of take and if you take too much you won’t get given anything again and if you give a lot, people are going to give a lot back to you. It’s a really fickle industry to get into and if you get into it and make all the right moves and you do all the right things, then it’s going to be great for you.

If I didn’t persevere through the dark times when I went back to the U.K., I probably wouldn’t be here now in many senses of the word. I’ve been quite lucky to have such supportive parents and such amazing friends, even the people out here, the people who believe in me, there’s probably about ten people who would support me, two of them being my parents and you guys support me in everything that I do and if you could get that level of support somewhere else as well, then you’re going to go far. You just need to surround yourself with positive people, positive attitudes, positive mentalities and positivity breeds positivity. That’s the key, if you’re feeling down, like most musicians and creative people they are going to get down, you have to be strong and positive. If I hadn’t had tried this, I wouldn’t be here now, if I hadn’t given this a shot last year, I wouldn’t have come back this year. It’s all chance, it’s all fate, it’s all destiny but destiny doesn’t come to your doorstep, you have to go out and find it.”

In the background I can hear an alarm, the ringing of a bell many thousands of miles away can still sound ominous and it is with reluctance that I let Matt get to his gig, after all the stage always beckons and music from Liverpool must always be heard.

Ian D. Hall