Richard Clapton is a much-loved legend of Australian music, the performer and songwriter of many iconic Australian hit songs: ‘Deep Water’, ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’, ‘Goodbye Tiger’, ‘Glory Road’, ‘Lucky Country’, ‘I Am an Island’, ‘Trust Somebody’, ‘Capricorn Dancer’ and ‘Girls on the Avenue’.
As a producer Richard worked on the second INXS album, Underneath the Colours (1981), which included the first two hit singles that launched the band’s rise to international fame. To date he has released nineteen albums, many of which have achieved gold or platinum status.
Australian rock music historian Ian McFarlane has described Clapton as ‘one of the most important Australian songwriters’. On 12 October 1999, Clapton was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame. In 2014 he celebrates 40 years in the music industry.
www.richardclapton.com
This book is dedicated to my daughters, Montana and Saskia.
All attempts have been made to trace and acknowledge the owners of copyright material.
If you have any information in that regard, please contact the publisher at the address below.
Photography credits
Author’s collection: pages 1, 15, 31, 45, 59, 73, 85, 93, 123, 137, 147, 159, 177, 219 and 245;
Tim Bauer: pages 209 and 279; Patrick Jones Studio: page 267; Bob King: page 167;
Wendy McDougall: page 305; Philip Morris: page 105; Philip Mortlock: pages 191 and 231;
Marcus Tomlinson: page 293; and Graeme Webber: page 257.
First published in 2014
Copyright © Richard Clapton 2014
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Contents
1 Lucky Country
2 I Wanna Be a Survivor
3 Burn Down Your Bridges
4 Southern Germany
5 Prussian Blue
6 Down the Road
7 Last Train to Marseilles
8 Girls on the Avenue
9 Need a Visionary
10 Goodbye Tiger
11 Deep Water
12 Out on the Edge Again
13 Hearts on the Nightline
14 Ace of Hearts
15 Dark Spaces
16 I Am an Island
17 The Best Years of Our Lives
18 Katy’s Leaving Babylon
19 Solidarity
20 Glory Road
21 Distant Thunder
22 The Underground
23 Emperor’s New Clothes
24 Up Where the Angels Fly
25 Here Inside of Me
You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone
Discography
It was 1966 and Sydney was bathed in the brilliance of summer. Black and white television had only been introduced to the suburban masses a few years earlier and, as I recall, when I was a little kid, programs like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best were already designing a rough sketch which would fast become the tapestry of our lives in much the same way as The Kardashians and other gaudy plastic TV soaps have become the blueprint of the current generation of Australians.
I grew up with the Leave It to Beaver generation. Beaver Cleaver’s family would have been a mighty fine role model if only they and the world they lived in had been real. Alas this was not the case, so the rather gawky Australian attempts to emulate these TV fantasies only resulted in a homogenised culture that didn’t even belong to us.
As for cutting edge music, Australia in the sixties was a bit of a wasteland. The only incident of note during my school years that had real impact on my music career was spending a day with the Rolling Stones in 1965, when I was in my late teens. A kid called Ross was my best friend at school and figured prominently in my life during the sixties. We had another friend at school, David, who had been forced to leave school early—I think his single mother could no longer afford the fees. Anyway, David went to work for Movietone News, the newsreel company, which we thought was fantastic. What a job! All that money and independence and an elite gig with the media as well.
The Rolling Stones had long been established as our demigods. At school, because Ross and my other friends were ‘day boys’, they would buy me the Rolling Stone Monthly, a little glossy fan club magazine published in Britain. We would endlessly discuss every minute detail about the Rolling Stones.
When the Stones arrived in Sydney for their 1965 tour they hit town big time! The establishment was totally outraged that this group of antichrists had even been allowed entry into Australia. The Beatles had caused enough of a stir, but they were such wimps when compared to the Stones.
David used his pay cheque to procure a room in the Chevron Hotel in Potts Point, where the Stones were staying, and his Movietone News journalist’s pass helped us move around the hotel without suspicion. Security was very tight, because fans would go to any lengths to get near the band. Girls were found crawling up air-conditioning chutes and hiding in laundry baskets.
Anyway, despite the security, no one ever questioned us. We took ourselves up to the next floor, and immediately found Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones, sitting playing a zither on his bed, the door wide open. I’ll never forget how sad he looked. Brian just sat there idly strumming his zither with the most tragic, faraway look in his eyes, seemingly oblivious to Ross and me. (Looking back on this, I do concede that it was possible the poor guy just had a shocking hangover.) Oddly, he turned out to be perhaps one of the nicest and most generous human beings, spiritually speaking, I’ve ever met. He actually seemed relieved, maybe even elated, by our presence. I do re
call him trying to describe to us the disorientating and unnatural experience of being part of a famous rock group touring the world. Brian was not handling it at all! Quite frankly, he was a mess, and I felt great sadness for him. Experiences like this at a formative stage of your life really stay with you.
Let me briefly describe the rest of my day with the Rolling Stones. I made off down the hall to find guitarist Keith Richards, and find him I did, with no difficulty. Keith was a much more exuberant character than Brian, full of life, the happiest person in their entourage. I’m sure this is why Keith is still alive today, despite all the drugs. I chatted to Keith for hours about my aspirations to become either a graphic designer or a rock musician in London. I had brought along a pencil sketch I had drawn of the Stones; Keith said he thought it was great. (I’m not so sure about that, but as I said, Keef was a real gentleman!)
Later that afternoon, I bumped into drummer Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, their bassist, also absolute gentlemen. I was stunned at how completely unaffected these guys were. (I have since learnt that successful people don’t need to prove anything.) Charlie Watts was such a regular kinda guy, I can’t even remember what we talked about. But I do recall that he took a real shine to Ross and me, and invited us to hitch a ride to that night’s gig at the Sydney Showground in his limo. Fantastic.
The plan was this: we were to go up to Charlie’s room at eight o’clock and then he’d accompany us down to the basement where a fleet of limos would be waiting to ferry the Stones to the gig. Ross and I were just on our way back downstairs when Mick Jagger returned from a shopping trip in the city.
‘WHO ARE THESE LITTLE FUCKERS?’ he screamed upon sighting us.
‘Excuse me, Mick, could I get an autograph?’ inquired Ross, a tad naively.
‘NO! FUCK OFF!’ Jagger yelled back. ‘Get these little fuckers out of here and go find me harps!’ screamed Jagger, referring to his harmonicas.
Keith and Brian both sprang to our defence, but it made no difference: there was absolutely no doubt who was the bossy boots of this seemingly autonomous band. We left and decided to stay invisible for a while.
We returned at around 8 p.m., regardless of Mick, and Charlie was genuinely glad to see us. We took the lift with Charlie and Bill, but alas, we stopped a couple of floors down, the doors opened and in stepped Mick Jagger.
Ross, for some reason, decided the time was right to ask Mick why he recorded two versions of the song ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love’. I felt acutely embarrassed. Jagger mercilessly ridiculed us, and we were abruptly turfed out of the lift on the ground floor, and had to go to the gig in a taxi. Looking back, I’d have to say that Mick Jagger is the most obnoxious rock star I have ever met, whereas the other four Stones must have been among the nicest people I have ever met.
Regardless, at the Showground that night I had one or two experiences I shall never forget. American crooner Roy Orbison was the support act and performed impeccably, as one would expect. I found myself seated next to a gorgeous teenage girl, who squealed rather impishly at the Big O, but once the Stones broke into song this nubile nymphet lost control. When Jagger bounded onto the stage a little after the rest of the band, this vision of loveliness grabbed me around the neck and dragged me down onto the floor of the venue.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there was a tiny but very loud group of Australian rock bands making a nuisance of themselves, despite the establishment’s disdain and attempts to gag these enfants terribles. They had such cool names: The Easybeats, The Wild Cherries, The Loved Ones. I had led such an isolationist life, shut away in an Anglican boarding school, cut off and ‘protected’ from such decadence, apparently for my own good.
My first memory of seeing the legendary Easybeats was at an archetypical teenage nightclub in the centre of Sydney—complete with a huge spinning mirrorball. To me, it was total adolescent exhilaration. This was the life for me! I immediately fell under the spell of the ‘cool’; we all wore long hair and dressed ourselves in ‘Britpop’ Carnaby Street clothes (or second-rate imitations). It was also mandatory to adopt a fake London accent. Fortunately, because of my schooling, I was able to actually speak with a London accent. This was way cool!
Back then, there were two main opposing gangs, the ‘sharpies’ and the ‘long-hairs’. The feuding between these two factions was ugly and frequent and bloody. I remember going to see Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs at Surf City, a cavernous beer barn at the top of Kings Cross, where you’ll now find the Crest Hotel. I had gone into the gig with my schoolmate Ross. A sharpie girl deposited herself firmly in my lap and began running her hands through my hair and making obscene suggestions. Suddenly, she changed into a vixen, whacking me over the head with her bag and screaming to her sharpie boyfriend that I had tried to molest her. It was an ambush, a set-up!
In the ensuing pandemonium, Ross was held down by five or six sharpies and kicked repeatedly in the ribs, the back, the kidneys and the teeth—which cost his parents a small fortune to have repaired. I was being held by a few sharpies myself; I distinctly remember screaming that there were almost twenty of them against two of us. I was terrified. Very real damage was being done to Ross and myself. The bouncers were MIA. I broke free, picked up a heavy metal chair and went into a frenzy, flailing the chair at literally anything or anyone that moved.
When I was a teenager, I had the shit kicked out of me more times than I care to remember and I can tell you that the feeling of some bastard’s steel-capped boot connecting with your bloodied lips and crashing into your teeth, or some other cretin threatening to end your life with a bowie knife, ain’t no fun. There is no honour—no machismo—just a lot of unbelievable pain. In a fleeting moment of madness you can inherit a lifetime of medical problems. Then again, I presume that if more people had their faces smashed in at an early age, there may be less violence in the world now.
I never did get to see Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs that night; the last thing I remember was Ross and me being chased out of Surf City by half a dozen bouncers.
I have so many recollections of Sydney nightlife in the late sixties; most of it is pretty nasty. The sharpies ruled, and the establishment backed them to the hilt. There were numerous incidents in Sydney (and Melbourne, for that matter), where long-hairs were regularly, brutally bashed and the police and judiciary would simply turn a blind eye. In the courts of ‘justice’ the pillars of the community convoluted the truth or just blatantly condemned long-hairs as aliens who had no right to co-exist with the rest of the ‘respectable’ community. One judge ruled that a sharpie who had brutally murdered a long-haired boy outside a city nightclub was far too respectable looking to have been guilty. The judge consequently let the murderer go free, despite damning evidence. (As I recall, the media discovered that the victim was actually the son of a Methodist minister; he attended church every Sunday and never touched alcohol or any other drug.)
I learnt to play ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones before even buying my first guitar. My close friends from school had long dreamed of forming a band, becoming lifelong compadres and ‘serious’ musicians. We had been weaned on a rather elitist diet of black music: the blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon, then later, the pure soul of Curtis Mayfield, The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. I was more obsessed with music than my friends, however, so I soon found myself with an imaginary ban
d—if you know what I mean.
My group of friends, including my schoolmate Ross, had a fantastic notion of the ‘beatnik’ lifestyle, which we associated with artists of all genres. So, almost immediately upon escaping school, we moved en masse into a rat-infested dump of a flat right at the hub of Kings Cross, just near the El Alamein fountain. We soaked up the reckless decadence of the Cross like sponges. We thought it uncool to bathe, or wash our hair or clothing, so we didn’t! We drank cheap spirits every night, played the first album by Americans The Byrds very loudly and partied hard and fast. We loved the numerous bohemian haunts in and around the Cross, places like the Trocadero jazz club, where I used to marvel over local jazz greats John Sangster and Judy Bailey. There was a fantastic coffee house not too far down William Street, a spawning ground for academics and intellectuals. I was in the thick of it.
Probably the most significant milestone of the time was my bumpy introduction to Bob Dylan. As I have already said, I had developed fairly sophisticated musical tastes by the time I was fifteen or sixteen. Ross’s older brother returned from a couple of years of postgraduate study in Europe, bearing a few Dylan albums. I think I had heard Dylan’s music but had been singularly unimpressed. Ross and I were a little drunk when Allan came down to his parents’ recreation room bearing the LP Bringing It All Back Home. Ross and I were reeling in horror at Dylan’s voice—after Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye, this Dylan guy really was too much. Allan forced us to sit through the song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, and suddenly something clicked for me; it was like I was rebirthing. I still vividly remember the tidal wave of emotion that snuck up and swept me right away. I became an obsessive Dylan addict for many, many years after that. A couple of years later, when I was in London, the only panacea for sleep was to put both sides of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde LP on a self-changing record player and drift into a deep sleep to the epic ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 1