RURAL BRITISH Colombia is not the place you'd expect to find the owner of one of the most distinctively sweet pop voices of the past three decades. Its rugged terrain, harsh winter weather and tough living is the sort of environment you'd associate with a country crooner or a disaffected rocker cut loose from the fast city life and getting back to nature. But it's in the wild wastes of Canada's most beautiful state that we find former Bread frontman David Gates wintering ahead of an Asian tour that will bring him to Hong Kong for the first time in more than six years. Unfortunately for the man possessed of a voice like honey and a pop sensibility more suited to love ballads than logging-country blues, his winter plans are quickly running afoul. 'You have to excuse me, only I'm having to board up the windows and check the power. We have a storm coming in and the electricity is about to blow,' says Gates over the phone from what sounds like the middle of a force 10 gale. This mountain life is not what you expect from the man who penned some of the most instantly recognisable and catchiest soft-rock songs of the 1970s. I Want To Make It With You, If, Guitar Man and the many other hits that Gates wrote with his chart-storming band, Bread, were such smooth slices of 1970s LA pop that they could only have come from hearts that had never had to rough it in the woods. They were lovers' songs, not loggers' songs. But 30 years has changed Gates. After the tour-record lifestyle ended for him when the band split in 1973 (before reforming and splitting again in 1977), Gates moved out of the city and found a place in the country. 'I took up golf, gardening and farming and still do that to this day,' says the Oklahoma-born singer in a southern drawl that betrays none of the perfect treble range that made Bread distinctive. It's a far cry from the heady days of the early 70s, when Bread were the pop band that others were judged by. Gates had been a session player for years and had guested on a couple of minor hits by such tin-pan alley stars as the Murmaids before he teamed up with friend and fellow session man James Griffin to form Bread at the end of the 1960s. They became the first pop band to sign to Elektra, an underground label whose previous hit-makers had been The Doors, and immediately built up a following behind their melodic, well-crafted, Gates-penned tunes. Their big break came in 1970 with their second album On The Waters. Spawning hits such as I Want To Make It With You and Look What You've Done, its luxurious arrangements and easy but melancholic pace made it the perfect antidote to the 60s hangover. Its gentle blend of pop, country and folk also helped usher in a musical style that became known as the West Coast sound, paving the way for such giants as The Eagles. Following the splits, which were prompted by the inevitable musical differences, each band member went his own way. Gates carried on recording and had another hit with the theme to the movie The Goodbye Girl. But by the end of the 70s, punk had rendered Bread's style of music irrelevant. 'I don't crank out the albums any more like I used to, but I do keep writing. It didn't upset me at all to know that our day had gone,' says Gates, who happily admits that these days he relies on his back catalogue when playing live. 'To tell you the truth, I know that when I get up on stage those people want the hits that gave them the magic years ago and to be honest I would want to hear the hits if I were them, too.' Gates turned 63 last month, and while the songs remain the same, he admits time has taken a toll on that pristine voice. He says he still possesses 95 per cent of the range he had in the 70s, but he has lost the top couple of notes in the higher octaves. 'There are a couple of songs where I can't get up to the very high notes anymore: If and Everything I Own I now sing a little lower and I have changed the arrangements a little to suit them,' he says. 'But by and large, the songs still sound the same.' Gates last played here just after the handover, when he reformed Bread for a world tour. 'We put the band back together just to play in those places we couldn't have played before - places like Asia, Australia and parts of Europe, where we'd been popular but because of economics at the time and so on, we couldn't.' The reunion was short-lived and this visit finds Gates playing solo in a short Asian and Australian tour he's put together as a kind of thankyou to the region for consistently being the biggest buyer of his music. 'I do know that my songs are very popular from the sales - I have more record sales and airplay per capita in Asia than anywhere else in the world, except for maybe the US in the early 1970s. Even then that's a maybe.' The gigs, he promises, will blend golden oldies with new songs that he reckons will raise a few eyebrows. 'I feel I can still write as well as I used to. A new song Find Me is among the best I have written. It has a melody that always gets the audience and it will only take a record company to pick it up for it to run. It really does get a great response when I play it live.' David Gates, Jan 12-13, 8.15pm, Queen Elizabeth Stadium. $280-$780 Urbtix. Inquiries: 2734 9009
