Australia’s guitar wizard, Diesel, extends his Sunset Suburbia tour to include a run of regional and rural towns across Australia. Marking some new territory for the ARIA and APRA winning artist and some old favourites including the Gateway Hotel in Geelong on Friday 21 February 2020, Mark Lizotte, better known as Diesel, is excited to extend touring gaze.
“It’s a big country so it shouldn’t be any surprise that you can spend a lifetime sifting through it, it’s massive,” Lizotte laughs.
Titled ‘Greatest Hits & Sunset Suburbia’ Solo Tour, the tour is fairly self-explanatory. It will see Diesel take to the stage on his own for a no smoke and mirror performance of his greatest hits from his colossal nearly four decade spanning career, snaking tracks off his last 2019 double EP releases, ‘Sunset Suburbia Vol I and II’.
“I guess the show is stripped back because it’s only one person on stage but it’s a pretty full noisy sort of show [laughs] because I make a lot of sound with the guitar and I’ve grown into the idea of pushing it more and more and more. When I started doing solo shows I was like, ‘well how does this work’, ‘do I sit down?’, ‘do I play an acoustic guitar?’ but actually I feel more comfortable standing up than this whole sitting down thing, and making it more laid back and introspective, that’s not me. I want to just do my thing. It’s almost like how I played in my room when I was 13, like standing up and imagining that I was in a band and I had an amplifier that my brother gave me so I played really loud,” Lizotte explains.
“But it’s very exposed. People have actually said after a show that they didn’t know what a lyric was but now they do because it’s stripped back and can actually hear what I’m saying. It’s an interesting and raw experience.”
Narrating his experience growing up in suburban Perth and Sydney, the poignant lyrics within Sunset Suburbia that are centred around family should be heard as they will surely resonate with the regional audiences.
“As much of it is about my life and growing up in the suburbs – there’s definitely an element of that in the album – but there are other things too that have just happened recently like using my own family and kids as a muse as well, and my travels and seeing them going through things that I have been through but their doing it in their own way – that’s inspiring to me.”
Sunset Suburbia was originally a trilogy series, recorded over 4 sessions throughout 2019. With the two volumes out into the music universe to a fan frenzy reception, Diesel and his team decided to roll the third instalment into an album instead. That album is due out mid- 2020.
While an album is forthcoming, the airy process for recording around an EP series resided with Lizotte more so than the pressure of album recording and it seems like he rediscovered his creative flow.
“I did, and it definitely became more normal with this I guess pulling things out of thin air approach,” he says. “Having done albums the other way which is going in and doing the whole thing in one row, I’m not saying I won’t do that again or I don’t like that but I sort of prefer having the breathing gaps in between I have to say.”
See their Sunset Suburbia songs in their full glory alongside the hits of Diesel at The Gateway Hotel, Geelong next Friday!
Tickets at dieselmusic.com.au/
Written by Tammy Walters