You can probably correct me if I'm wrong, LITS.
Pearl Jam used this song occassionaly in their live gigs (This song is "our song" for my wife and I). Eddie Vedder had great respect for Mark Seymour and his music, and flew him over just to do this with them live. At the time, Mark Seymour had given up music, and gone back to teaching. Apparantly this respect shown by Vedder and Pearl Jam inspired Seymour to get back into music!
That sounds familiar, I think I have an interview somewhere from Mark Seymour talking about that night somewhere... I'll have a look for it.
Edit... Here it is, it's from 4 years ago... Pretty cool stories from Mark.
I saw the video where you played with Eddie Vedder, which must have been a bit of a thrill for you?
It was good, yeah it was good. It was really off the cuff. For some reason people think it happened in America because of the label copy, but actually it happened in Perth. We were over there doing a North Perth City council event on a lawn somewhere and I went to a radio station to promote the show that afternoon and the presenter said did you know that
Pearl Jam were playing at the Burswood Dome? I didn’t know that. Then he said did you know that
Eddie Vedder does a version of “Throw Your Arms Around Me” and I’d kind of vaguely heard that. “He’s been playing it all around Australia, are you going to get up?” “Well I hadn’t really considered it.”
My manager was standing in the room and he rang up Frontier Touring and said is there any way we can make this happen? But he didn’t tell me. Five o’clock the next night I get a call that I’ve got to go to the stage door and I’ve just turned up; I’ve never met the guy before in my life. We got let in and I had to stand side stage for 30 or 40 minutes. No dialogue, literally the only time I got to speak to
Eddie Vedder was when I was on stage with him. Then we left and that was it. It was great, just completely surreal.
You could see a lot of magic in the video clip.
It was very special. I think the fact that it was so unrehearsed helped a lot, really spontaneous.
It must be validating having someone like that appreciates your music.
Absolutely. An interesting story about him; when
Hunters and Collectors were in the States about ’82 or ’83 and we’d finished the American tour and we were in a club in San Diego and the band was on the cusp of breaking up and shortly after that a couple of the guys left the band, it was a cast of thousands in those days so they kind of just left, but there was this whole thing going on in the band room with some guys in one part of the room and a whole lot of guys on the other side of this door, and the security guy knocks on the door and says there’s this bloke outside that wants you sign a record. I was not really interested, but I went out, it was a student gig so there were a lot of kids there. So a kid was there holding a record and said he was a big fan and asked if I could sign a record, pre
Jaws of Life, I think it was the first album, and it was
Eddie Vedder, but he was just a kid. The album goes right around, everyone in the band signs it, I pass it back to him not knowing who it was and years later the rest is history. He was just a fan. He told me that story. He worked in some oil refinery and he was a budding musician just working part time.