Ian Hunter, Mott the Hoople
Newsboys make headlines abroad
Saturday Nov 19, news.ninemsn.com.au
They have sold six million records, headlined festivals attended by more than 100,000 people and are high on the list of Australia's top earning entertainers.
But former Sunshine Coast band Newsboys remain better known in Nashville than Noosa.
A national homecoming tour, which will see them play Australia's biggest Christian music festival at Toowoomba next Easter and Sydney's massive Hillsong church, could change all that.
The five-piece outfit, which started in an egg carton-lined garage in Mooloolaba almost 20 years ago, will be the main attraction at the Australian Gospel Music Festival (AGMF), which is expected to draw up to 40,000 people.
For Newsboys frontman Peter Furler and drummer Duncan Phillips, who grew up together on the Sunshine Coast, the show will be the first real opportunity to show a big Aussie crowd what the Yanks have been lapping up for years.
Newsboys, which has a rock sound with flavours of U2, Midnight Oil and INXS, has been one of the unsung export success stories of Australian music.
The band has had six gold records in the US with sales of more than 500,000 copies each, and has been nominated as many times as Olivia Newton John for a Grammy award.
Last year, Newsboys again made BRW Magazine's rich list of Aussie entertainers after raking in $3.8 million - the same as Australia's top band, Jet.
Speaking from Nashville, Furler said he was particularly looking forward to playing at AGMF after hearing so many good things about the fast-growing festival headlined by Australian Idol winner Guy Sebastian two years ago.
"This will be our first major national tour in Australia in about seven years so we are really looking forward to coming home," Furler said.
While Newsboys has played in front of 400,000 people at a World Youth Day attended by the Pope, Furler said some of his best memories were of shows in front of pumped up Australians.
AGMF event director Isaac Moody said securing Newsboys was a huge coup.
"As one of Australia's most successful music exports, Newsboys are in enormous demand internationally. We've been working to bring Newsboys to our festival for years now and after months of negotiation we are honoured to announce that Newsboys will be the headline artist at AGMF 06.
"With over 40,000 people in attendance, AGMF is a fitting event for a band of the Newsboys calibre.
"We expect thousands of interstate and international punters to attend AGMF specifically because Newsboys are headlining."
Furler, who also has his own record label, said Australian artists like Grammy winner Rebecca St James and Hillsong Church's Darlene Zschech were also selling millions of records in the US.
"Aussie music is gaining a lot of respect here," he said.
Newsboys has produced 13 albums and is working on its first double album which is due out about the same time as the Aussie tour which will take in Adelaide on April 13, Toowoomba on April 15, Melbourne on April 21 and Sydney on April 22.
Like U2's Bono, Furler is using his following to raise the profile of the world's poor.
The band recently donated all of its takings from one of its biggest shows to Hurricane Katrina victims. And in August, Newsboys joined 1,000 young people in Baja, Mexico, to build houses for the poor.
While the band has a message of hope, Furler says he's never been one to use his platform to preach.
"If we are doing any preaching - it is preaching to ourselves."
He said the secret of the band's success was learned in the early days of dodging beer bottles in Sunshine Coast pubs - play great music and "never try to sound like anyone else".
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