Life's a sweet thing

Keith Urban with his wife actress Nicole Kidman. Photo / AP

In an edited extract from his new biography, Fortunate Son, Jeff Apter charts the rise of the boy from Whangarei.

Keith Urban had good reason to look satisfied. The New Zealand-born singer and guitar-slinger was on stage at Sydney's cosy Metro Theatre, a 900-odd-capacity venue that's more likely to host indie rock acts than your everyday, 21st century country-pop superstar.

And the Metro was positively Lilliputian in comparison with the concrete super-bunkers Urban's been packing with bottom-line-pleasing regularity over the past half dozen years, right across the country music heartland of America.

But Urban didn't seem to mind this temporary downsizing. In fact, he seemed pleased that, just for once, he could actually see the people as he gazed out from behind his trademark floppy fringe, rather than merely glimpsing them somewhere off in the distance, their mobile phones held aloft, blinking in the night.

The concert was Urban's first concert Down Under since his high-profile, paparazzi-heavy Sydney wedding, on June 25, 2006, to Australia's queen of Hollywood, Nicole Kidman, after a relatively swift romance and the usual round of denials.

But the confetti had barely been swept off the steps of the stately Cardinal Cerretti Chapel when word started circulating that there was trouble in paradise.

Urban, ensconced in the studio, working on the album that was intended to firmly establish his multi-platinum stardom and extend his empire beyond Middle America, had fallen off the wagon with a sickening thud.

In fact, he didn't so much fall as stumble off the wagon, bottle in hand, which resulted in a one-way ride all the way back to rehab. (Urban had done an earlier stretch in rehab, for cocaine use and abuse back in 1998, and had allegedly relapsed in 2001.)

Keith Urban once co-wrote a song entitled Who Wouldn't Wanna Be Me and, from the outside looking in, it's not hard to understand what he was getting at.

Multi-platinum sales, sold-out arena shows, a Grammy, even an Oscar-winning Hollywood star for a wife - it all seems to have come just a little too easily.

The standard Urban media profile runs something like this: guitar-slinging country music lover is raised in rural Queensland, learns to ply his trade in various dingy dives, sets his sights on the country music heartland of Nashville, Tennessee, and then shifts Stateside to achieve his goal.

Along the way he learns to cope with such inconveniences as a drug and alcohol addiction, failed relationships and the usual vicissitudes of the music industry - fairly typical prices to be paid for the success he has achieved. But the truth, as is so often the case, is a little more complicated.

IT WOULD be a massive stretch for the 50,000 or so citizens of Whangarei to claim that their town was some country music ground zero.

The North Island's most far-flung city, whose temperate yet soggy climate has led locals to christen the area "the winterless north", it does have its share of famous prodigals: various well-known hockey players, funny man Billy T James and one-time political agitator Winston Peters are all locals.

But, apart from a couple of members of the little-known rock band Steriogram, not many players and pickers can call this place home.

To be totally frank, the area is better known these days for its large indigenous population and equally prominent crime and unemployment problems than for being a hub of musical creativity.

Yet it was in Whangarei that Keith Lionel Urbahn entered the world, kicking and screaming, on October 26, 1967. He was the second and final child of Bob and Marienne Urbahn; their first boy, Shane, had been born two years earlier.

Keith was named after iconic Kiwi race caller Keith Haub, a larger-than-life man of the track known for his razor-sharp wit and colourful personality. Haub is Keith's godfather. (His middle name, Lionel, was taken from one of his mother's brothers.)

During the 1950s, while still in their teens, Haub and Bob Urbahn played in a covers band, pounding out a set-list that encompassed pretty much everything that was big in the day, including the songs of Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and Bill Haley and the Comets.

"As the 1960s rolled around," Urban recalled, "my dad went more the country route than the rock and roll route, and has remained a fan ever since."

When asked about Haub, Urban once said: "My godfather is New Zealand's best race caller - and he'd kill you if he heard you say that." They remain close some 40-odd years down the line.

Urban would also joke about how his father played the drums until "he had to get a real job".

With the exception of watching his bandmates mow a few lawns in Nashville during the 1990s, and some time spent with a lighting company, this was a burden that was never imposed on Keith Urban.

Interestingly, those of the family who stayed behind in the Shaky Isles, such as Bob's brothers, Brian and Paul, have hung on to the original spelling of the Urbahn name, but Keith shed that bothersome "h" on the road somewhere between Whangarei and Nashville.

He and his family weren't long for Whangarei anyway, leaving and settling in Brisbane, Australia in 1969.

WHILE MUCH of the Western world was in the midst of an LSD- and Woodstock-fuelled revolution by the time the Urbans reached Australia, the same couldn't really be said for Brisbane.

It was essentially a large country town ruled, like the entire state, by an influential peanut farmer, Joh Bjelke-Petersen - also a New Zealand expat.

Country music, sometimes called the white man's blues, seemed a natural fit for a state as pale-faced and conservative as Queensland. It had no more logical heartland than Queensland, especially under the tightfisted rule of Bjelke-Petersen.

As recently as 2001, Keith Urban passed judgment on his adopted hometown's nature, saying: "It still feels like a country town and I love that about Brisbane."

Urban also gives Brisbane due credit for his relatively unaffected, bullshit-free demeanour, and it should be said that despite the star-making machinery that now surrounds him, there's still a hint of Brisvegas hanging about the guy.

This may also account for his apolitical nature; Urban (unlike peers and friends the Dixie Chicks) has opted to offend nobody. When Urban was growing up in Queensland it was best not to make any kind of political statement, apart from ticking the box next to Joh's name on the ballot.

As for Urban's father, Bob, country really was his genre of choice. Like his pal and former bandmate Keith Haub, Bob would become something of a colourful local figure, given to sporting large moustaches and equally large cowboy hats, and driving anything gas-guzzling and American, ideally a Pontiac.

There was a lot of music to be heard in the Urbans' Brisbane HQ: Bob was mad for Dolly Parton, Charley Pride and Don Williams; Marienne, the rock of the Urban household, favoured the smoother sounds of Neil Diamond and the Everly Brothers.

"My folks' record collection has been the main influence on what I've done musically," Urban admitted in 2000. "You can't help being influenced by your surroundings."

But equally important to their second son was Bob's all-encompassing love of American culture, something which seeped into Keith's subconscious.

"I inherited this kind of love for the American dream," Urban has admitted. "I fell in love with the music, the cars," - and, crucially - "the whole idea of America".

Bob and Marienne remained keen gig-goers, often dragging their barely school-age sons along to shows.

"I would curl up under a table and go to sleep," he recalled in 2004, "with the bass drum and the bass guitar pulsing through the carpet. In hindsight, it was terrific training for me - great rhythmic influences."

It was only natural that Urban's nascent love of music would lead to him trying out an instrument. But his first weapon of choice was hardly the stuff of musical legend: at the age of 4 he fooled around with a ukulele, a gift from his parents.

It didn't really fill any holes in his soul, although his folks did notice how quickly he learned to strum in time to what he was hearing on the radio.

The stars he idolised all wielded "real" guitars - so he dreamed of doing likewise.

Fortunate Son by Jeff Apter (Random House, $37.99)