Keith Urban is famous for the twang he gets out of his beloved Fender Telecaster, “Clarence,” and his nearly two dozen hit songs, including the chart-topper “Fighter.”
But as he reveals, before he got turned on to country, he was a committed heavy metal guitarist.
It took a chicken-pickin’ virtuoso to turn his head around — and one countrified guitar solo to get him bounced out of his heavy metal band.
“When I was about 15, I was in a band called Fractured Mirror, which was a heavy metal band,” he tells Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett on his Shred With Shifty podcast. “So we were doing Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Whitesnake songs.”
Urban’s gear choices reflected his commitment to the music.
“I had a Strat, I put a DiMarzio humbucker in the bridge, got a Marshall stack, and here we are playing full-on Judas Priest,” he says. “They had a lead singer, so I was just playing guitar.
“But,” he explains, “I discovered Ray Flacke at the exact same time.”
Flacke was a Telecaster player and session pro from England. By the time Urban was 15, in 1982, Flacke had carved out a reputation for his chicken-pickin’ antics with country artists like Emmylou Harris, Marty Stuart, Patty Loveless, Ricky Skaggs and Travis Tritt.
Through Flacke, Urban became enamored of country and began incorporating elements of the guitarist‘s stylistic flair in his electric guitar work. Needless to say, it didn’t go down well with his bandmates.
“I was in this band for one year,” Urban explains. “We're playing a gig, they throw me a solo, and I bust out this chicken-pickin’ solo. I remember vividly the lead singer looking at me, like, What the fuck are you doing?
“And they fired me!”
Urban had the last laugh, of course. Less than a decade later, he released his first of 12 studio albums and took his first steps to becoming a serial Grammy winner.
“We're playing a gig, they throw me a solo, and I bust out this chicken pickin’ solo. They fired me!”
— Keith Urban
Even so, at that moment, he was at a musical crossroads.
“I had an identity crisis right then and there,” he says.
His teenage love for heavy would later see him dropping serious money on a 1950s Fender “Nocaster” with ties to glam-metalers Cinderella, an instrument he says possesses “the most ferocious, dynamic pickups I've ever heard in a Telecaster.”
Meanwhile, he’s continuing to work on his first signature guitar with PRS, having stepped away from Fender after challenging Paul Reed Smith to make him a Tele-type guitar that could put up a fight.
Further details of the guitar-in-progress have since emerged, with Urban explaining which part of the instrument they haven’t got right yet.
