Bringing down the curtain

The once outspoken and often outrageous Tom Scott declares his new album is his most personal - and might well be his last.

- BY CHRIS SCHULZ

About two years ago, Tom Scott finished work on a new album. Called “Average Man”, it was to be the first released under his own name. The award-winning and outspoken front man for Home Brew, @Peace and Avantdale Bowling Club believed he’d captured the kind of raw, unfiltered snapshots of the life he’s become known for. When he played it to his manager, the late Lorraine Barry, she told him he’d made a masterpiece. “She was like, ‘This is the greatest,’” Scott says.

Then Scott played it to someone else. At the time, Scott’s relationship with his wife, the mother of his two sons, was in trouble. His new album addressed what they were going through, making constant references to the mistakes he’d made. “It was these love songs, not just singing, but a bunch of shit about infidelity, trauma, holding the relationship together,” he says. Scott’s wife had a different opinion to Barry’s. “She was like, ‘I [don’t want] to hear that,’ and rightfully so,” Scott says.

Out of deference, Scott put the album on hold. Then he embarked on the hardest two years of his life. His marriage fell apart. He got sober. He started seeing a therapist and began to unravel his past, learning why he was the way he was. Along the way, he realised his ex was right: the album he’d made “wasn’t done well”. It didn’t capture what he’d really been through, and what he’d learned over the past two years. Now, he says, he’ll never release it. “It let heaps of people down [but] at least it didn’t shit all over my ex,” he says.