Austen power

>> Today’s most happenin’ hipster is a middle-aged lounge crooner named Louie

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

You can’t keep an irrepressible character like Louie Austen down. Halfway through my hour-long chat with the Austrian hotel-bar crooner turned electro-pop sensation, he’s being pulled over by the Gestapo for yakking on his cell phone while driving. Game over? Hardly. Ten minutes later, he’s back on the line, cracking jokes about getting the beat-down from the boys in blue and further expounding on his magnificent life of 55 years.

That’s right, 55, and he’s the it-boy of the moment, lending his velvet voice to Deutsche disco-punk jams and steaming up the studio booth with hormonal hotcake Peaches. This from a cat who kicked off his career with a Rat Pack jones and rigid classical training.
Upon graduating, Austen discovered that real life comes in two flavours, bitter and sweet, often at the same time. Here’s how Austen tells it: “I told everybody, ‘Heeeey! I’m now a professional singer!’ And they said, ‘Who cares?’ Hello? I studied eight years in the fucking school and nobody cares? So I saw an ad in the paper—for $500, I could immigrate to South Africa. Okay, let’s go. But I didn’t like it there—it was the mid-’70s, the government down there was incredibly dumb and they were all racists. Most of my idols were black, and I wasn’t even allowed to talk to blacks there. I didn’t like it.”

Next stop, Australia. Nice beaches, but musically, a dead-end backwater. “So I came back and said, ‘Hello! I’m back!’ And everyone said, ‘Who cares?’ Okay, so let’s go to America.”

Room service

That’s when the Austrian pigs stepped in, so I’ll fill the blanks in here. Austen spent the ’70s singing for his supper in dingy Manhattan dives, soaking up the jazz and blues, getting hitched and pitching dinner-theatre variety shows in Pittsburgh. It was also there that Austen perfected his American accent—so perfect it’s like, über-American. But around ’80, Heimweg (look it up) brought our boy back to Austria, landing a gig with a nice paycheque at a Hilton hotel in Vienna. “When I started, it was half an hour of me singing and some old guy playing piano. The bar closed at 10 o’clock—I’ve never seen that in my whole life.”
Enter an unpronounceably-named Hungarian classical concert pianist on the skids, with a repertoire of 4,000 songs—“classical, jazz, boogie woogie, blues, everything.” The new partnership had the right je-ne-sais-quoi, it seems. “After a couple of months, they couldn’t close up before 3 o’clock. They were making 10 times as much sales as ever before. They had to enlarge the bar four times, because it was always packed, with a line-up outside. There was a real renaissance of hotel bars in Austria.”

But such heady days of hotel-lounge hijinx could never last forever. “In the early ’90s, the business was going slower—because there were some economical changes in the world economy. I decided I had to do something new.”

Building something new

Who better to build something new with then a guy named Neugebauer? Uh, German joke. Forget it. Anyway, a chance encounter at a voice-over studio with Mario Neugebauer, of the electro-dance label Cheap, initiated Austen’s neo-hipster makeover.
“Two years later, I met him again at a gym, because he’s a karate pro and I was trying to get rid of my belly. He said, ‘Louie, I’ve produced a song for you.’ I said, ‘You did? Okay…’
This first track became ‘Remember,’ and thus did Austen hook up with Neugebauer’s electro-dance label Cheap. “As a classical musician, the first time you listen to Debussy or Ravel—this was the same thing. For me, it was like, ‘Wow, man, this is great!’ I’d never done this before. The beats were not really in time, all the sounds around that—it was an interesting concept. I felt immediately an emotional reaction to that. It fit like a glove. I was so thrilled by all the possibilities.”

More tracks followed, leading to a CD EP, Consequences. “The media reaction was terrific, and Mario said, ‘Hey, Louie, what about house?’ I said, ‘What house? What are you talking about?’ That led to the track ‘Hoping.’ All of the sudden, we were number one on the charts. The DJs played that up and down. The reaction was amazing, so Mario said, ‘We’re doing a full album. We’ll do two-step and garage.’ I said, ‘I don’t care where you produce it!’”
Since then, Austen’s been touring the world and blowing minds young enough to be his grandkids. “At first, they’re thinking, what is this guy doing? But after two bars, everything is settled. I think the most wonderful remark I hear after every concert is, ‘Louie, now that I’ve seen you, I’m not afraid to be 55 years old.’” :

With Mocky and the World Provider at la Sala Rossa on Friday, March 8, 9pm, $10