This is an essay that I wrote as part of my BMus at NMIT this year.
Sadie, the cleaning
lady
With trusty scrubbing brush and pale of water
With trusty scrubbing brush and pale of water
‘Sadie (The Cleaning
Lady)’ – Johnny Farnham (1967)
Home, Home, goin' alone
to the sound of the military brass
Home, home, lovin' alone, layin' on Arkansas grass
Home, home, lovin' alone, layin' on Arkansas grass
‘Arkansas
Grass’ - Axiom (1969)
He bought his first
dope outside the South Yarra Arms
‘Toorak Cowboy’ –
Skyhooks (1975)
It is a widely held view that Robert Menzies was the most
ardent anglophile to ever lead this country. His first visit to England
at age 41 was said to have been a profoundly emotional experience, prompting
him to exclaim that he had finally come “home” (Maloney 2007). Indeed sections
of his 1963 speech during a reception for the Queen at Parliament House such as
describing Her Majesty as "the living and lovely centre of our enduring
alliance" and the reading from the work of 17th-century poet Thomas Ford
("I did but see her passing by/And yet I love her till I die.") are
an entrenched part of Australian political folklore (Bryant 2011).
When viewing the black and white promotional film clip for
John Farnham’s 1967 monster hit ‘Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)’ (Uptight 1967) through modern eyes the
first thing one is struck by is its (in the most clichéd sense of the term) ‘Englishness’
- there’s the accent in the vocals, there’s the George Formby arrangement, not
to mention the terminally polite (some would say ‘quaint’) persona that Farnham
presents here.
However, I would argue that on closer inspection several
things reveal themselves: the English accent actually comes and goes, giving
the vocal performance a tentative quality - it is the sound of someone ‘hedging
their bets’; the all-smiling politeness reveals itself to be closer to a sort
of desperate obsequiousness. Rather than the ‘cheeky Cockney chappie’ that
Farnham seems to be going for here, he comes across more like a bashful
choirboy too eager to please. In short, this is not what Englishness looks
like. This is what someone aspiring
to Englishness looks like. Even though he was a year out of office by that
stage it is easy to sense the spectre of Menzies and his perception of British
superiority (the Australian-born and bred PM also famously announced that he
was “British to (his) bootstraps”) looming large here.
(I am aware that the preceding example could possibly be
clouded by the fact that John Farnham was born in England, but I would submit
that as an artist he has always identified as Australian and was indeed ‘crowned’
Australian Of The Year in the nation’s bicentennial year no less)
Fast forward to the mid-seventies. And Skyhooks make their
first appearance (playing ‘Horror Movie’) on the newly-minted pop TV show Countdown (1975). Much has changed. In
fact we’re now Alice through the proverbial looking glass: black & white is
now colour (‘75 marked the introduction of colour television in Australia);
Farnham’s forelock tugging has been replaced by a palpable irreverence or, to
use Australian vernacular, ‘piss-taking’; ‘smart’ suits have been replaced by
garish faux-glam garb; naiveté replaced by a worldly, sneering cynicism; and
the innocuous (a less charitable onlooker might say ‘vacuous’) lyrical content of
poor old ‘Sadie’ replaced by socio-political comment by way of a simple yet
stunningly effective ‘horror film equals television news’ metaphor (“Horror
movie, it’s the six thirty news” is, as the cliché goes, more relevant now than
ever).
Looking at this performance in a bit more detail one’s
attention is drawn to the following: in lead singer Graeme ‘Shirley’ Strachan’s
facial expressions and general demeanour there’s more than a hint of ‘I could
take it or leave it’, in fact at times, as Peter Wilmoth (1993, p.120) observed,
Shirl here gives the distinct impression that he would rather be surfing (there’s
also the (not so) small matter of the ludicrously large outstretched hand painted
on the crotch of his tight satin jumpsuit); the gladiator’s hat worn by drummer
Imants ‘Freddie’ Strauks; the black lipstick, white make-up and long black hair
on Bob ‘Bongo’ Starkie, ensuring that he bears more than a passing resemblance
to a pantomime Lady MacBeth; and of course Redmond ‘Red’ Symons who, with his
blood-red Elvis cape and sub-kabuki make-up, is a remarkable combination of
ingénue, geisha and the devil himself.
‘Horror Movie’ was written by Skyhooks’ bassist Greg
Macainish (who wrote most of the band’s material). Authenticity was a primary
concern in his song-writing: “They (the songs) had to be about places I'd
actually been to. I was a bit sceptical about Arkansas Grass by Axiom
because I'm not sure any of the guys had been to Arkansas.
And the song's about the American Civil War and I was sure they hadn't been to
the war." (Jenkins 2004)
Billy Pinnell, a 45 year veteran of the Melbourne
radio scene, says that Macainish’s songs
“exploded the cultural cringe” and in the process “legitimised Australian song-writing”
(Jenkins 2004).
Freddie Strauks also alludes to a ‘cultural cringe’ when he
mentions that up until the period under discussion “Australian musicians had an
image of themselves as being less than good” (Wilmoth 1993, p.125). In plain
terms, what we are talking about here is an old-fashioned inferiority complex.
So did this new attitude, this newfound pride in being an
Australian musician emerge out of a vacuum or was there something going on in
the broader socio-political arena that helped create the conditions in which a
band like Skyhooks could flourish? What was happening?
Gough Whitlam was happening, that’s what. First coming to
power in 1972, Whitlam (1985, p.553) himself states that his first task was to formulate “an
acceptable philosophical basis for a major government commitment to the arts
and cultural activity, something more than the provision of additional funds”.
Implicit here seems to be that over and above simply throwing money at the
problem, Gough sought to somehow instil in Australians an outlook that would
help the arts to flourish. And, as he lamented at the time that “many of our
finest artists are working overseas”, it could be assumed that
addressing/redressing the infamous ‘cultural cringe’ would have formed at least
some part of that “philosophical basis”.
Red Symons makes explicit the connection between this
governmental mood-setting and Skyhooks’ success: “The national pride that Whitlam
had encouraged meant that we could suddenly be proud of ourselves as
Australians.” (Wilmoth 1993, p.126)
The Oxford Dictionary (2012) defines
a ‘revolution’ as a “dramatic and wide-reaching change in conditions,
attitudes, or operation”. Under that definition, a strong argument could be
made that in the mid-seventies Skyhooks with the Whitlam-led change in
conditions and their new attitudes and modes of operation were spearheading
nothing less than a revolution.
Every revolution needs a manifesto.
And for Skyhooks it came in the form of their debut album ‘Living In The
Seventies’. It’s their Das Kapital (or Little Red Book at a pinch); and it sets
out their agenda over the course its ten tracks. Three of the songs name check Australian
locales (in fact, in all three cases you don’t even have to wait until the
lyrics kick in as the references are in the titles themselves): ‘Carlton (Lygon
St Limbo)’ chronicles the “spaced out faces” in and around the “pizza places”
along the strip close to Melbourne University - students of which made up a
fair slice of Skyhooks’ audience at least in the early days (Nimmervoll n.d.);
‘Toorak Cowboy’ takes a shot at the rich and the aimless with specific place
references coming thick and fast (“He gets his hair cut at Marini's, and
he drives a Lamborghini”; “He bought his first dope outside the South Yarra
Arms”); and in ‘Balwyn Calling’ the hapless narrator tries in vain to fend off
unwanted advances from a girl who lives in, you guessed it, Balwyn (“Well you
thought she would be a one nighter, But now she wants to squeeze you tighter,
Cos you ain't safe when you get home, She's gonna call you on the telephone,
Hey boy that’s Balwyn calling…”). There’s also the curious
case of Red Symons’ ‘Smut’ which paints a rather seedy picture of a night out
at the ‘cinema’ and has the main protagonist deploying a packet of Twisties (an
Australian brand) in a way that I’m sure that the original makers could not
have (and would not want to have) predicted.
By 1977, however, the revolution was
over. The less arts-focussed Malcolm Fraser had deposed Whitlam as PM (in
controversial circumstances which won’t be discussed here) and was firmly entrenched
in the lodge (Whitlam (1985, p.555) claims that Fraser had the lodge’s music
room converted into a ‘second toilet’). And Syhooks’ own bête noire Sherbet had
well and truly taken over the mantle of ‘Australia’s biggest band’ with their massive
hit ‘Howzat’ (Sherbet’s days as a force were numbered too as it turns out, but
that’s another story).
But in a sense the ‘damage’ had been
done. Skyhooks may have lost the fight but, due to the huge influence they had
on subsequent Australian songwriters, they won the war. Indeed we can see their
influence everywhere: in Australian Crawl’s hit ‘Beautiful People’ in which
James Reyne sings about (beautiful) people “going out tonight to get their
Bombay rocks off” (the Bombay Rock being a notorious beer barn on Brunswick’s
Sydney Rd), as well as the Reyne-penned ‘Reckless’ which talks about watching
the Manly ferry cutting “its way to Circular Quay”; in the way Stephen Cummings name checks the Russell Street
Police Headquarters in The Sports’ ‘Boys (What Did The Detectives Say?’; in the
songs of Cold Chisel’s Don Walker such as ‘Flame Trees’ (his ode to Grafton),
‘Home And Broken Hearted (“hiked up to Sydney in the week before Christmas, it
was 38 degrees in the shade, bought a second-hand Morris for a cheap 220 and I
drove it down to Adelaide”), the blistering travelogue of ‘Hound Dog’ (“Ride
the line to Hornsby station, find my circus animals again”), as well as
‘Saturday Night’, a song about Sydney which shares its name with a Skyhooks
song about Melbourne; and it is relatively easy to draw a line back to Skyhooks
when hearing Paul Kelly’s now-iconic opening lines to his song ‘Leaps And
Bounds’ (“I'm high on the hill looking over the bridge, to the MCG, and
way up on high, the clock on the silo says eleven degrees”).
Whitlam’s legacy endures too, with
programs initiated by his government such as the recognition of China, Legal Aid, Medicare, and even the national anthem (but
unfortunately not free tertiary education) still with us to this day in one
form or another.
One of the more successful recent chroniclers of the
Australian urban experience by way of Skyhooksian place name checking is Newtown
song-writer Tim Freedman. Songs of his that reference Australian places
include: ‘Melbourne’ (“walking around the rainy city when there are things to
do at home”); ‘Love This City’ (“holding court on Taylor
Square”); and ‘God Drinks At The Sando’ about the
Sandringham Hotel in Newtown. The
debt that Freedman owes to Skyhooks was made relatively clear when in 1999 his
band released a cover of Greg Macainish’s ‘Women In Uniform’ (Skyhooks’ last
top ten hit in 1978 before the almost-novelty comeback single ‘Jukebox In
Siberia’ in 1990). And the name of Freedman’s band? The Whitlams of course.
References
Maloney, S 2007, ‘Robert Menzies & Winston Churchill’,
The Monthly, April (Issue 22), accessed 23 October 2012, <http://www.themonthly.com.au/print/486>
Bryant, N 2011, ‘What Do They Think Of Us?’, Correspondents
Report, ABC Radio National Transcripts, accessed 27 October 2012, <http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2011/s3351297.htm>
Uptight 1967, ‘Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)’, YouTube video,
posted May 2009, accessed October 1
2012, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0c55lXRAeg>
Countdown 1975, ‘Horror Movie’, YouTube video, posted September
2008, accessed October 1 2012,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7l8rlnMpCI>
Wilmoth, P 1993, Glad
All Over: The Countdown Years 1974-87, McPhee Gribble, South
Yarra
Jenkins, J 2004, ‘Songs of Melbourne’, The Age, 28 August,
accessed 1 October 2012,
<http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/27/1093518069546.html>
Whitlam, G 1985, The Whitlam
Government: 1972-1975, Penguin Books, Ringwood
Oxford Dictionaries 2012, USA
online version, accessed 28 October
2012, <http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/revolution?q=revolution>
Nimmervoll, E n.d., Skyhooks Biography, AllMusic, accessed 28 October 2012, <http://www.allmusic.com/artist/skyhooks-mn0000748978>
