Australian pop singers Toby Allen, Phil Burton, Andrew Tierney and Michael Tierney are well-known in their homeland with several hit albums and sold-out tours, but now the quartet, also known as Human Nature, has crossed the pond and set up shop as a Motown act on the Strip.

Human Nature has been headlining the showroom at the Imperial Palace for the last three months to great success and rave reviews. The show’s presenter, legendary Motown artist Smokey Robinson, lends credence to the performances, which pay homage to some of the greatest songs in music history. Together, Allen, Burton and brothers Andrew and Michael Tierney sing and dance their way through the Motown songbook in a nightly tour de force performance that has audiences on their feet.

Human Nature recently spoke to Casino Connection about their new album, song choices and performing on the Las Vegas Strip.

Human Nature performs Saturday through Thursday at the Imperial Palace. Tickets range from $49.95 to $59.95.

Casino Connection: First, the question on everyone’s minds—how did an Australian Motown group become headliners on the Las Vegas Strip?

Andrew Tierney: We formed as a group in high school, and a lot of the groups we looked up to were the Motown groups. We’ve had a career in Australia; we’ve been going now for 20 years. We just decided to do an album four years ago of the songs we loved from Motown in a tribute to the groups, and that was a huge success in Australia. The record was massive back home.

Then we put a show together around that record. We loved doing the show, and it was something audiences loved as well, and that’s basically the show that we brought over here. It kind of came from doing that record. Through doing further records in Australia as well, we actually got to work with Smokey Robinson. He fell in love with us, so the partnership is kind of what brought us here to Vegas.

How did you land a contract at the Imperial Palace?

Allen: We’d been working with a couple guys here in Vegas—one Australian guy, Billy Cross, who’s in partnership with Adam Steck from SPI Entertainment. Billy actually saw one of our shows in Australia and had already sort of spent a lot of time in Vegas, and he thought it would just be fantastic here in the American market. We’d been working closely with them.

They actually got us a contract; we did a couple of months in Atlantic City, at the Tropicana there, in the beginning of last year. It was great for us to get in front of an American crowd and see how they’d react, and the reaction—it was miserable in the middle of winter in Atlantic City—their reaction to the show was fantastic. It gave us a lot of confidence about how we might do here in the States, particularly in Vegas.

Since then, we’ve just been plugging away trying to get a deal. Eventually, Adam and Billy landed us the deal here at the IP. We’ve got a 12-month contract. All of Harrah’s has been so supportive.

How did you pare down the Motown songbook to come up with the setlist for the show?

Michael Tierney: It’s sort of been over all the shows that we’ve done, because we did this original Motown show back in Australia. I guess through picking out favorites and songs that we can really feel that audiences love, we’ve been able to put together a show that there’s no slow points or dead moments in the show. There’s just the great songs of Motown. We’re lucky that we’ve been able to perform the show so much before we got here, and get it to a point where we’re so happy with it.

Do you plan to add new songs as the show continues?
Allen: If we’re going to be doing this particular show or a Motown show for awhile, then I think we’d probably want to change other production elements as we go along, and that might influence song choices that we might put in. There are quite a few songs that we don’t do in the show that we’ve done quite a bit before. There might be room for some of them back in the show. We may look at changing it as we go.

The Imperial Palace Showroom seems perfect for a show like yours—it’s very intimate, and allows for audience participation. Has this space affected your performance?

Burton: I suppose it just makes us feel more comfortable to know that you’re in a good-quality room. We look around and we think this is probably the best thing about the Imperial Palace is the showroom. It’s just really great for our show.

To perform to too many people takes that intimacy away, but our show is kind of big in some ways, so you don’t want to have just 100 or 200 people and that’s it.

I think it’s probably just added to the comfort on stage and have that match, that the size of the show works with the size of the room.

Andrew Tierney: Because the crowd is so close, you can literally see people’s reactions straight away. It’s probably the most up close and personal we’ve been with an audience. The audience actually touches Toby. We get to go out in the crowd and perform in the crowd, which is great. We have changed the show because of this room, because it’s so close. But we could do that at the Colosseum, too.

The Motown catalog still resonates with so many people. Do you think you’re reinterpreting these songs for a new generation, or are you trying to remain faithful to the originals?

Michael Tierney: I think it’s a little bit of both. We feel we’re putting our own flavor into these songs, but at the same time, we love the original music, so we didn’t want to stray too far from the energy those songs had when they first came out. We were really careful when we were making the records and with the show, we wanted the songs to feel like they had that energy that people felt when they heard them for the first time. I guess it’s just brought them into today. We want people that love the songs to still love them, but also new people to hear these songs in a fresh way for the first time.

So you’re not going to change the arrangements of the songs?

Andrew Tierney: We definitely have. We’ve done our own versions of certain songs. One of the songs, one of the highlights of the show, is our version of “Ooh Baby Baby.” Our arrangement’s structurally the same as the original, but a traditional arrangement—it’s a cappella. It’s very different from the original. So we haven’t been scared to do that, but I think we wanted to keep the magic of a lot of the songs.

We were kind of worried about that at first, what the original artists would think of our versions, and that’s one of the amazing things about having Smokey involved. We automatically feel comfortable about what we’re doing with the songs, because he loves what we’ve done with them. It’s taken that uncertainty away from us.

Have you heard any feedback from other Motown artists who have seen the show?

Andrew Tierney: We teach the audience to do our moves to “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and [former Supremes singer] Mary Wilson was in the crowd. She said, “Those aren’t the moves. Those aren’t the moves that I do to ‘Stop! In the Name of Love.’”

We were teaching the audience our moves, but Mary wasn’t having a bar of that. She did her moves. But she was cool; she said, “You do the guy version; I’ll do the girl moves.”

What is your favorite song to perform?

Burton: I think we all have different ones, but as Andrew said, because it’s so different, “Ooh Baby Baby” is always great. It sort of strips it right back to just the four of us. There’s no band playing; there’s no big lighting effects or anything like that. It’s just real simple, us standing around one microphone.

Andrew Tierney: I kind of like doing “Please Mr. Postman.” That’s a new song that we’ve kind of put in this show that we didn’t have in our Motown show back home, but we just do it with the piano player and the four of us. For me, it’s hard to remember the original because we do it quite differently. It feels quite unique the way we do it. I like that one. And we don’t have to dance. It’s nice to change it up every now and then.

How do you keep the show fresh each night? Does it ever get boring?

Michael Tierney: I’d say it’s the audience, because it’s a different audience every night. Different things happen; you get different responses to different songs. Some nights, there’s a point where we get someone up on stage—Andrew does, in “My Girl”—and that plays out differently every night. Sometimes it’s fantastic. With any live show, it’s that element of you never know what might happen. Something might go wrong. It keeps you on your toes.

What can listeners expect from Reach Out, the new album you released this month?

Andrew Tierney: To a lot of people, it probably seems that the album is after the show, but actually the album inspired the show. We’re doing it the wrong way around in America. It’s kind of cool, because we feel so great about the album. We’re so proud of it. It’s not just the live version of the show—it’s the reason the show exists.

By Caitlin McGarry