Human Nature is bringing their Motown classics to Canberra.

The band will hit the Llewellyn Hall stage at ANU on 17 October to celebrate 20 years since Reach Out: The Motown Record, their first venture into the genre, was released.

Bandmember Andrew Tierney said the show would also include himself alongside his brother and fellow bandmate Michael, as special guests in between sets.

“We will do it in the middle of the show — we’ll open with Human Nature and the opening of the second act will be Mike and I — I think it’ll work well,” he told CD.

“It’s 20 years since that first Motown record so we are mostly doing that catalogue of songs… and Human Nature original stuff from the 1990s and 2000s, the original hits.”

Tickets for the Canberra show are available at: llewellynhall.com.au/events/human-nature-motown-20th-anniversary-regional-tour

What will be your favourite song to perform on this tour and why?
One of my favourites we put into this show is Easy, the Commodores song — it’s from our third Motown record and we haven’t sung it for a while. We’re more known for the up-tempo Motown stuff, Reach Out and Uptight (Everything’s Alright), so it’s nice to have a slow ballad like that.

What do you remember about the time 20 years ago recording Reach Out: The Motown Record?
I remember this real sense of we didn’t know what to expect. We thought it could be a really bad decision. We just weren’t sure because the album before that, Walk the Tightrope, didn’t do as well as we thought it would. We were not sure how our career was going. We decided to do Motown and didn’t know if people would like it, but the tour itself was fun. We had this kind of uncertainty about that album. We weren’t sure it would be a big success or if people would not like us doing that music. It came out and blew our minds and expectations and we were completely taken aback at how successful it was.

Our career has kind of been in two halves — the boy band/pop songs and Motown. Telling Everybody was big. We wrote for a while, then Motown was even bigger than our first albums. We’re blessed to be able to blend the genres together.

What are you most looking forward to celebrating that album with this tour?
It’s great to be doing those songs again, and the moves. It’s good to be performing with Phil (Burton) again because he lives in Australia and we — the Tierney brothers and Toby Allen — live here (in Las Vegas). I think just the opportunity to get to places we haven’t been for a while. We did the capital cities in March. This tour goes up to Cairns, New South Wales, etc. We didn’t go to Canberra on that national tour. We’re excited to get to the towns where fans love to see us sing. We feel very welcomed when we tour regionally.

What has kept the band in Vegas so long to perform and what do you love about performing there? Are the audiences mostly Australians or Americans and international visitors?

All in total across the three venues we’ve played, I believe we’re the longest-running Australian residency in Vegas. Keith Urban and Kylie Minogue have done residencies, but as far as an act, we’re the longest. We started in 2009, we came and first played at the Imperial Palace, The Venetian, and now South Point.

I think because we’ve been here for 15 years we’ve built up a reputation as Human Nature, particularly in Vegas. There are lots of locals coming. Usually some audience members are ex-pats or visiting, we’re not sure. We do ask the audiences how many are from Australia. Definitely the crowds here know us for Motown and haven’t experienced the 90s and 2000s hits. It’s a different energy. They’re kind of learning about us. With the Australians, everyone knows the full story. We’re grateful that we can still perform here and split our time between the two countries. Hopefully people in Australia don’t get sick of us because we like to come back. But these US shows do sometimes include Human Nature tracks. We do them in the middle of the songs, we say we’re one of Australia’s biggest boy bands, then we prove it to them, the audience, with Everytime, Whisper Your Name, we give them a taste of that catalogue as well, so it’s kind of fun.

Human Nature has performed in Canberra many times. What do you love about visiting and playing in the nation’s capital?

We’ve done Canberra in both versions: regional and national/city tours — this worked out with the routing better than the original city run. We’ve done Christmas shows and been able to play in Canberra a lot. Toby’s mum lived in Canberra before she passed away, so we’ve got that connection we really like.

We have two rules in this show: when we sing, the audience has to sing, and when we dance, the audience has to dance.
We try and direct the audience, some people get up of their own accord, there’s definitely a time we get people to stand up. There will be a moment when everyone can dance, even if they don’t want to, they have to. Dancing keeps you young.

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