WHAT COMES TO MIND … RICHARD CLAPTON AND A YEAH HUP!
- Bernard Zuel
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical. It might be short and brutal, long and precise. But it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, Richard Clapton in the breeze.
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IT IS NOT A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY acknowledged, but one that I would fight to the death to defend, that there aren’t wrong choices in music. Well, except maybe those people the morning after the Grammys or the ARIAs or Hottest 100 who like to say “I don’t know any of these people, so modern music is rubbish” or “they’re not a patch on the artists from my day” – they are stupid and very very boring. Yes, I mean you.
That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of choices that I would think are poorly judged, odd or at the very least open to reappraisal with more time or information or exposure to things that actually were, well, good. Lord knows decades on I still cannot understand people who think the milquetoast recordings of Eva Cassidy are revelatory or divine when I think the technical term for them is dull as dishwater.
But hey, if you play Cassidy and Vance Joy at home, or Kid Rock and Nicki Minaj during the Super Bowl half-time, or Royel Otis and Morgan Wallen in the car, that’s not guilty pleasure, that’s just pleasure. Go for it. Sure, I’ll be over in the corner judging them, but so what?
What I do find interesting is not what you like but the things that you miss, and here I mean music you saw/heard but never made the leap to connection with. Not intentionally, maybe not even consciously, but importantly, and sometimes irrevocably.
For me, the two prime examples are Richard Clapton and Radio Birdman, the mere mention of which I know must be accompanied by a group chanting of “blessed be their names” if two or more of us are gathered. Amen.
Technically, both hit their prime just as I was seriously getting into music in the mid-‘70s. Practically, while not purely “of Sydney”, they were so representative of aspects of my city that they were regarded within and without as the definition of a Sydney. Historically, their influence extended into areas that would define me at the very least, whether it was seemingly every second band I saw play at the Strawberry Hills or Trade Union, or every second writer I read in RAM.
So, they’d have to be important to me, right?
I knew the drill. I knew the explanation that Birdman created an atmosphere of power and unity that coalesced kids from the ‘burbs and art school types, people who recognised the symbolism, people who liked the volume or the uniforms, and those who just liked screaming “yeah hup yeah hup” over and over. (And hey, if you never had a chance to join the marines or the Hitlerjugen or the school cadet corp, where else could you yeah hup without embarrassment? I feel you my brothers.)
Of course – hey, I wasn’t an animal! – when Double J played them I was there echoing “book ‘em Danno, murder one”; when You Am I and Silverchair closed out the ARIAs one year doing their New Race, I was on my feet loving it; and when I eventually got my own copies of key Birdman influencers, MC5 and Stooges, I was already primed.
Late, but primed. Not in uniform, but primed. Possibly too old to be screaming “kick out the jams motherfuckers” as enthusiastically as I did, but, yes, primed.
Likewise, when it came to the man who wasn’t actually born to Richard Clapton but rather thrust it on himself, I could tell you that some sucker had scrawled “I’m an island” on a city wall, and both of us knew that this was different to some idiot scrawling “Clapton is God” on a London wall. Why? Because the local Clapton could never be as boring as the English one. And I was well sympathetic to the notion/advice don't you slip in love with the girls on the avenue, even if where I grew up we didn’t have avenues, as that was for the posh eastern suburbs. Looxury!
Admittedly his name only really registered when I saw that he was the producer of the second INXS album – that was pretty cool – but while I lived many miles from a wave and many lifetimes from being someone who would venture out the back of one on anything smaller than a Manly ferry, Deep Water still felt like some natural inheritance that even this Mauritian was entitled to.
Speaking of inheritance. Part of the dowry when that girl from the northern beaches moved into my place, led me on to what Richard C had told me was the tropical zone where the sun keeps laughing down on me, and thankfully never left, was The Very Best Of Richard Clapton* and support for Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles. O would eventually pick up a second-hand Goodbye Tiger, along with the ability to call Avalon “the village”, and anything further than Narrabeen “the west”.
(*Duran Duran’s debut came too, though she likes to point out, if I was ever tempted to mock this – Mock? Moi? – that I briefly owned Rio, which I maintain to this day came home accidentally from my Mobydisc DJ box. Yes, Mobydisc, a job that paid for lots of gigs and records, ok? No, I didn’t have to wear a bowtie, smartarse. So I’d ask you to stop laughing. Rude!)
So yeah, I could explain to you now why they mattered, especially to a bunch of people about half a generation older than me, and in some cultural context beyond them. I can nod with appreciation when friends or acquaintances tie their personal landmarks to individual Birdman shows or Clapton songs that “spoke for me, man”. I get it.
But while there are scores of artists from that period, contemporaries of note and lesser knowns mostly forgotten, who I am passionate about and scour second-hand stores for – for example Renee Geyer or Allman Brothers Band, Gil Scott-Heron or Dragon, Joni Mitchell or Alice Cooper, Split Enz or Linda Ronstadt, or David Ackles – the chance to fall for, to really care about Radio Birdman or Richard Clapton, seems to have passed me by.
It’s not wrong. But it kinda feels like it is. Kinda feels like someone who owns an original pressing of Radios Appear and the 50-year-old scars from Paddington Town Hall, is about to shout into my face “really gonna punch you out”. A state of existence which has helped make me more sympathetic.
So you Vance Joy fans? Go nuts while you can, Royel Otis types? Revel in those rich boys all you want! Eva Cassidy lovers? ….
….
…. look, let’s not push it too far.
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