TROUBADOUR REUNION TOUR- compte-rendus videos photos

'WE ARE playing for each other," James Taylor says; a sentiment Carole King echoes more than once. It's something they want to emphasise — the straightforward, unalloyed pleasure of sharing a stage together, as they will for the next few months, taking their music on a world tour that begins tonight in Melbourne at Rod Laver Arena.

They have called their show the Troubador Reunion Tour, the acknowledgment of a connection that goes back decades. They first played the Troubador, a legendary West Hollywood venue, in 1969 and 1970, when Taylor was in the early stages of his career and King was starting out as a solo artist after writing a string of hits for other people.

They struck up a friendship and musical partnership and worked on each other's second albums. By the time they next appeared at the Troubador, they were both household names. By 1971, Taylor had a No.1 hit with a King song, You've Got a Friend, and their albums had set the mark for what it was to be a singer-songwriter in the 1970s.

Taylor's Sweet Baby James was a runaway hit that landed him on the cover of Time; King's Tapestry was a fixture in the charts for more than six years.

They might have become instant classics, staples of every share household in the '70s, but they had their dissenters; most famously, the late critic Lester Bangs, who fantasised about heading off to Carolina with a broken Ripple beer bottle and "twisting it into James Taylor's guts until he expires in a spasm of adenoidal poetry".

When the Troubador celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2007, Taylor and King again played there together. And now they are setting off on a reunion juggernaut that will cross Australia and go to New Zealand and Japan before travelling across the US and perhaps coming to a halt in the middle of the year.

The scale of this enterprise, King admits, can be difficult to manage. "What it means," she says, "is that we have to work a little harder to protect what we have, what's great for us and what I think people are coming to see — the intimacy and the joy we feel playing together."

The reunion aspect goes deeper still. They are joined by musicians who played with them in those early days, among them a combo known as the Section: guitarist Danny Kortchmar (a childhood friend of Taylor, whom King also worked with separately), drummer Russ Kunkel and bassist Leland Sklar.

It's a combination that I can remember first-hand; I saw them all in 1971, in England, when they played the Festival Hall in Croydon. I remember a pin-drop intensity in the audience that night and the intersection of Taylor's laconic, wry confidence and King's fierce, joyous attack.

I mention that I saw them all those years ago and their response is quick and enthusiastic — it's almost as though I were a member of the reunion tour, too.

King's touring life began in earnest in those days, she recalls. She suffered from stage fright to begin with but says it swiftly disappeared. "I was so loved and supported by James and the band — and by the audience, too."

A tour, Taylor says, can be a regimented business but that's an element of its appeal; its enforced discipline simplifies things. Everyone is part of the same process.

"The baffling confusion of civilian life," he adds, "can make you long for the road."

His wife Kim Smedvig and their nine-year-old twins will accompany him on tour, at least to begin with.

King, whose four children are well and truly grown, says she will very likely have something else with which to occupy herself, if she doesn't get distracted — her autobiography, the first draft of which is close to completion.

And maybe there will be other things to work on. Taylor says it has occurred to both of them that they could write songs together. But it's not as though they are short of material; deciding what to play from decades of familiar songs and audience favourites is a pressure they are well aware of. After all, Taylor is quick to say: "Carole could play three separate shows with her material alone."

Every time you look back at the songs King wrote, the list seems to get longer. She began in the late 1950s with a Brooklyn high-school band called the Co-Sines. When she joined forces with lyricist Gerry Goffin in her teens, it was to help him write a musical about the Beat era in Greenwich Village but the partnership soon shifted to pop.

She and Goffin married in 1960; by the age of 18, she had a husband, a daughter and a songwriting career. Their first No.1 song was Will You Love Me Tomorrow, for the Shirelles, an evocation of female yearning and desire with an almost confronting directness. The songs kept coming, ranging from the upbeat (One Fine Day ) to the melancholy (Up on the Roof); from a novelty hit (The Loco-Motion) to a song used on the soundtrack of Easy Rider (Wasn't Born to Follow); from a number for the Monkees (Pleasant Valley Sunday) to a hit for Herman's Hermits (I'm into Something Good).

They divorced in 1968. With Tapestry, King entered a new era, reclaiming songs she had composed for others (Will You Love Me Tomorrow and Natural Woman) and creating new ones (It's Too Late and I Feel the Earth Move). Nothing has quite matched the impact of that album but she has continued to perform and write and has written hits for, among others, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey. She has also thrown her energies into politics and environmental activism (spurred by her move to the Idaho mountains in the late 1970s).

She entered the consciousness of a new generation of young fans via the much-loved TV show Gilmore Girls; she and her eldest daughter, Louise Goffin, sing the title song and she has made several guest appearances.

Taylor, meanwhile, has continued to play, compose and record, finding inspiration in an increasingly wide variety of sources. Years ago, he expressed ambivalence, to say the least, about the pressure to perform his greatest hits but now he seems utterly at ease with it. And in any case, songs have a knack of making their own way in the world: Fire and Rain, for example, has, over time, accumulated new meanings — a personal account of loss has become a kind of communal elegy.

He has wrestled with personal traumas, with the pressure of celebrity, with addiction — a drug habit he acquired at 18 was finally shaken in 1983 — and has emerged as a kind of elder statesman of popular music, without ever losing his dry wit or lightness of touch.

To perform live, Taylor says, "is about as real as it gets for us", and "there's nothing abstract about the immediate feedback.

"I remember my grandfather would put a symphony on the record player and sit in a chair and listen to it. But people don't listen to music like that these days. Now, you have your iPodor your stereo on in the background while you are doing two or three other things."

So a concert, "a two or three-hour period of time when everyone is there dedicated to making or listening to the music, sharing and communicating ... that's a vital thing and something to hold on to".

The Troubador Reunion Tour is at Rod Laver Arena tonight and tomorrow.