Sitting in the backyard of his Yokine home, Rick Steele tells me that he plans to keep on playing music for as long as he can and laughs as he says that one of the songs he is working on for his new album is called, ‘I’m Too Old To Be Retrained’, a semi-comedic song about heading into life’s more mature age bracket. “That’s another thing, you have to have a good sense of humour to last in this industry.” With over thirty years experience in the music industry, Steele  has established himself as one of Perth’s most prominent personalities.

Whether playing solo or with the Hot Biscuit Band, he describes his songs as ‘back porch’ music and delivers a distinctive live set that is personalised and interactive with his audience, with a mix of Steele originals and well-loved classic covers.

As President of the Perth Blues Club, Steele has been instrumental in developing the blues community in Perth and has shared his wealth of knowledge with many musicians over the years. While he has lived much of his life in Perth, Steele originally heralds from the land of the Kiwis. Born the third child of Harold and June Steele in 1948, Steele grew up in the suburb of Otahuhu in Auckland, New Zealand. Life was good and as a child he dreamt of playing cricket for New Zealand, yet he says his game wasn’t sharp enough for the professional league. The son of a preacher and a piano teacher, Steele grew up with music in his life. “My mother was a housewife who taught piano from home and she was in the church choir because my Dad was a preacher. He enjoyed singing too, you could hear him in the Church, but it wasn’t like ‘Hallelujah brother’, I mean this was the Church of England in the 1950’s.”

He says that while he enjoyed singing in the choir, it was the music of Elvis and The Beatles that set in motion the Rick Steele we know today. “I was about twelve and I wanted a guitar. I had to buy it myself because my mother wouldn’t buy it for me. She wasn’t keen on Elvis at all. She thought he was a bad influence on me. She said ‘I won’t buy you a guitar, I’ll buy you piano lessons or a violin, but not a guitar’. I thought bugger you and I got a job.” So he got a job helping out in a local shop and bought his first guitar for around eight pounds. His older brother John also had a guitar and along with some other kids from church they taught themselves how to play. “We had a youth group and after church we’d kind of tie off and come back to our house and listen to the Goons and someone would play their guitar and we would all pick up little bits off of each other.”

Steele’s passion for music grew during his teens and he met like-minded souls while attending boarding school in the 60’s. “When I got to boarding school I met a couple of guys who could each play a bit on their guitars. When The Beatles came out we would all try and work out the new Beatles songs. I remember we were all sitting around the radio in boarding school and trying to tune into Sydney radio on the short wave. We knew that ‘Ticket To Ride’ was being released and Sydney was getting it first and then it was coming to us. There was about six of us sitting around bloody trying to hear this Beatles’ song. It was a big deal, we were all really keen to hear it. That’s the amazing effect that music had at that time. Even my sister brought home an Elvis record, it was ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ or something like that. Made my mother even worse.”

After high school Steele went to work in a shop over the summer while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He worked in the record department, tuning guitars and occasionally selling a fridge. “It was one of those stores that sold everything. People like Dinah Lee came in and the guy that ran the record department was also a compare, we didn’t have DJs back in those days, and all these different people came into the shop. It was pretty cool bananas, you would be mixing with recording artists and people in the business.” Steele was offered a job working at the shop after holidays had finished, yet he declined because he didn’t want to be in the shop day after day. So he decided to become a teacher. “Teacher’s college looked good to me. Teaching is in the blood, it’s in the family, my mother was a teacher and my sister was a teacher. Preaching and teaching go together really, and I was interested in girls and holidays and training school had both.”

While at training school he joined The Vision, a four-piece band that included John. “We were a bit like the Seekers I guess in that we had a female singer and we used to sing in harmony and all that. We were all trained in the choir. We’d do things like balls and we were a bit of a floorshow. We played big venues with up to 500 people.” In 1969, The Vision reached number nine in the New Zealand charts with the Carl Perkins song ‘Daddy Sang Bass’. The band had half an album ready and were to support Shirley Bassey when their female singer fell pregnant. They replaced her, yet Steele says that as far as his brother was concerned the band had finished. With the band broken up and teacher’s college finished, Steele decided he was going to travel the world, starting with Australia. Making a pit stop in Melbourne to visit John, he continued on his way to Perth, taking the train across the Nullabor. With only enough money to last him a couple of weeks, Steele figured he had to get job quickly. He made a visit to the Department of Education and got a job at Eden Hill Primary, which lasted for eighteen months.

Almost instantly he also started picking up gigs around Perth. With favourites from Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Elvis amongst his set list Steele picked up a spot playing the Sunday session at the old Norwood Hotel, which led him to scoring a regular gig every night at the Perth Concert Hall tavern. It was here that Steele saw Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. “I had the Concert Hall job for two years and one of the benefits was that you got to know the usherettes and they told me that there was this blues duo coming to town. So I got to sneak up in my break. I was thinking, I knew I was never going to be a fantastic guitar player, just my fingers, I knew. So I needed something else, and the harmonica always interested me, so you go and see the best and they were a blues duo. It must have been just before Christmas, because I went and bought a harmonica and I got the bloody thing home and I needed a holder. So I made one out of a coat hanger, which I also had to do when we did the concert down at Fremantle this year. But from there it was just progression. I went and brought a Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee album and started learning a couple of their songs and worked out what fit in where and what they were doing.”

With his harmonica and guitar on board, Steele also began to write his own original songs. By 1976 he had made a demo of his original songs and had sent them to his ex-manager in New Zealand, who didn’t really like them. “I was here in Perth, waiting to hear from him. So I said to this guy, how did you like my songs? Has Glen got them yet? Glen was the guy that owned the studio. He said, ‘I didn’t like them so I didn’t give them to Glen’. I was ready to jam the phone down the line. I said you bastard you were supposed to pass them on and that he bloody better give them to him. As soon as he gave them to Glen, he said, I like it, I like the idea, I like the concept, when can you get here? We’ll finance the album, we’ll organise photography and all you have to do is get your ass over here to New Zealand and look after yourself.” But it wasn’t just himself he had to look after. By this time he had met and married Liz. “We just bought this place in ‘76 and we had been here about four months and I said to Liz, I’ve got the chance of a lifetime to do an album with my on songs. I’ve gotta go.”

So the Steele’s packed up and moved to New Zealand. In 1977 Steele’s debut solo album, ‘Take It Or Leave It’ was released. It was a mix of his original songs with a few covers chucked in for good measure. One of them was Kris Kristofferson’s ‘I Dig Hank Williams’ a song that Steele still plays, except he now sings, ‘If you don’t like The Sleepy Jackson/Little Birdy, honey, you can kiss my ass’. So with the release of the LP, Steele’s music career was back on track. He released a few singles and in 1979 he appeared at the second Nambassa Festival with the Hot Biscuit Band, alongside New Zealand favourites Split Enz. “Nambassa was a big festival, The Lakes, our festival that we are running now is modelled on it. 70,000 people rocked up to this concert over three days. I mean it was the biggest festival of its kind in New Zealand back then, probably still is. I estimate that at least 45,000 of the 70,000 were there when we played. You never forget a show like that. We had a good band and we put on the performance of our lives.”

Around this time Steele also released the single ‘Arthur Allan Thomas’. Similar to Bob Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’, the song was about Thomas, a New Zealand man framed for the murder of two people. Police had falsified evidence and imprisoned Thomas for ten years before the injustice was corrected. “That record actually got banned and had to be totally destroyed because at the end of it, I’m singing, ‘the man’s been framed, Arthur Alan’s not to blame, the man’s been framed’. And because he was still in jail when it came out, that was against the law of the land. They said you’re criticising the government. It was a big thing. The government rang up the record company and said you have to take that record off the shelves, it’s libel.”

By 1980, Steele had just finished an album for K-Tel in New Zealand and his first two children, Jesse and Luke, had been born and Liz was becoming home sick. Steele felt that it was an end of era and it was time to move on. Back in Perth Steele initially played Mr Mum to Jesse and Luke. “Liz got a day job and I had these two kids during the day. Which was tough, you know going from being a pop star and going out every night, to . . . for a little while I got really quite depressed and angry. This isn’t fair, I’m a rock star. I don’t want to be sitting at home with the bloody kids all day. Then somebody, whether it was God or whatever, spoke to me and said you are so lucky, don’t you realise how lucky you are to watch your children grow up? So it hit me like a tonne of bricks to just enjoy it. So we got this routine going, we waved goodbye to Mum in the morning, we’d go have breakfast, sit down and watch a bit of Sesame Street, go for a walk with the dog and tire them out a bit and then it was lunchtime.”

Steele picked up night gigs, one being his long running stint at the Indi Bar. He also taught singing at Tranby Primary during 1989 and 1990. He continued his gigs and in 1994 Steele and the Hot Biscuit Band released the ‘Fire Don’t Burn’ album, written after Bob Hawke’s “No Australian child will live in poverty by 1990” speech. Two years later the successful ‘Valiant’ was released. Steele was kept busy playing gigs with the band and running the Perth Blues Club. As President, Steele has been at those Tuesday night gigs at The Charles Hotel since the club was founded in 1992, and incidentally it was at the Charles Hotel that the 2001 CD ‘Rick Steele and the Common Man Band’ was recorded. Steele says the trick to the Perth Blues Club’s longevity and the increasing interest amongst the public is that it keeps things varied and production on the night is top rate. In the Club’s constitution it says that aims to promote and foster musicians in the blues community. Steele describes it as a community service where musicians can get together and make contacts.

In his own right Steele has had a hand in getting together extraordinary talent. It was through him that Trevor Jalla and Danny Loong from the Universal Blues Band met and to reward him for his services, Loong got Steele on the list to play at the UBlues Festival in Singapore in 2002. In his first gig that wasn’t in New Zealand or Australia, Steele played with the Blue Shaddy Band. He then decided to take up an old friend on offer to visit Switzerland and flew straight there after Singapore. Staying in a remote village, Steele integrated himself into the local community and ended up scoring a gig in one of the bars. He played a few shows and made enough of an impact to get invited back again in 2004. “Liz came the second time and it went even better in the sense that I played all over the ski fields. I know everyone in the village and I have made so many friends. I’m a household name in a Swiss village. It’s like a dream. I can’t wait to go back again. These sorts of things have come late in life and out of the blue. It’s all just through passing on knowledge. It’s like they say, life is stranger than fiction. You’d never think it was going to happen. Somehow when it does, it’s . . . good.”

Another unexpected turn in Steele’s life has been his kid’s involvement in the music industry. “I never dreamt they would end up in music, I certainly didn’t encourage it. But I guess when you grow up with it around you some of it has to rub off. There’s definitely no Hollywood in this. It wasn’t like I said, son I want you to get into music and I will buy you a guitar and you go home and you better practice. It’s a bug.” The bug has definitely bitten all his children. Luke has found international success with his band The Sleepy Jackson touring the world, and has just finished recording their second album. Older brother Jesse plays the drums and has played with both The Sleepy Jackson and the Hot Biscuit Band. Now living in Dwellingup, Jesse is working for the Waroona Shire in river and land management and occasionally joins his Dad on the road. Katy has been busy touring with Little Birdy and writing new material for their second album, while her twin brother Jake has just formed his own band, Injured Ninja. In a recent benefit gig for Amputees in Action, the Steele clan took to the stage together to sing a few tunes. “Yeah, there is something really great about playing music with your children, it’s exciting.”

The excitement will continue on Steele’s new album, which is currently in pre-production. The plan is to record both in Perth and at Sydney’s BigJesusBurger studios and there may be tracks featuring each of the Steele children, although Steele says, “only if it fits though, we’re not the Partridge family or anything”. Steele says he is also working on a track with Ryan Narkle, a longtime friend and the only West Australian to play the didgeridoo at the concert in Denmark for Princess Mary’s wedding. Also keeping Steele busy is his Wednesday night gig at Blue to the Bone and a Sunday afternoon set at the Dianella Hotel. There is also the Steele-run The Lakes Festival in Gingin coming up which will be held on November 14 and 15. Modelled after Nambassa, this year The Lakes will be one of Jake’s first gigs with Injured Ninja. Steele says that the event will still follow the same format, with workshops, performers and kid’s area. Steele says that the main emphasis of the festival is the atmosphere, and whilst there may not be international headlining bands, the main aim is for people to come and have a good time and relax in beautiful surroundings while watching some damn good bands play.

Every new gig for Steele is a new adventure, and while his days of being a pop star may be over, he is content with his life. “Well you can’t really be a pop star all your life. You can be a musician all your life if you’re good enough and prepared to take the knocks. It’s like any job, there have been winter nights when it raining and raining and you’re driving in the car and you know when you get to the bar it’s going to be a quiet night. But one of the good things about my job is I have seen most of the state. I used to say to the guys in the back of the Valiant, if this is as bad as it gets, then this is alright.”