Steyn's Song of the Week
Down Under
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ShareMy sell-out Oz tour 2012 came to a close with my stop in Adelaide, for a rollicking good time on the ABC's Q&A and a final Free Speech gig for the IPA where I was introduced by Isobel Redmond, the Leader of the Opposition in the South Australia parliament, and thanked by Senator Cory Bernardi, both of whom are great warriors for sanity in Aussie politics. It was a great tour - standing room only in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, and a few moments in between to catch up with old friends like John Howard and Alexander Downer. We've posted a few pictures over at the SteynOnline Facebook page, and we'll dig out some more in the days ahead. In the meantime, here's the last of our Aussie encores from the Song of the Week archives - the Number One record on Australia Day 30 years ago, and a song we couldn't leave out:
Do you come from a land Down Under
Where women glow and men plunder?
Good question. Men At Work came from a land Down Under and in January 1983 they were on top of the world: "Down Under" was Number One not only in Oz but also in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and to this day Men At Work are the only Australian band to have topped simultaneously both the British and American singles and albums charts. A lot of the pop songs from that period you'll still hear on the Eighties oldies stations: in America, Men At Work were succeeded at the top of the Hot One Hundred by Toto and "Africa", which is pleasant enough in a bland sort of way; and in Britain they made way in the Number One slot for Kajagoogoo and "Too Shy", and gosh, it's years since my fingers have had cause to type the word "Kajagoogoo" and even then it was as a punchline for a cheap gag. But "Down Under" transcended the passing fancies of the hit parade and has become an Australian anthem. There have been other international Oz hits, of course, notably Rolf Harris' classic recording of "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" - and, as we always have to point out whenever the subject arises, a truly great novelty song like "Tie Me Kangaroo" should never be confused with a truly atrocious one like Charlie Drake's "My Boomerang Won't Come Back".
But "Down Under" has become a kind of musical shorthand for contemporary Australia - you'll recall it was used on the Kangaroo Jack soundtrack, the trailer for Finding Nemo, etc - in part because of its most famous couplet:
I said, "Do you speak-a my language?"
He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich
- which is a truly atrocious rhyme but, at least for a while, did wonders for Vegemite sales in the northern hemisphere. I can't speak for Aussies but I think what the rest of the world likes about the song is that it captures Australians as most of us first encounter them - the backpacking globetrotter in a bar in Earl's Court, or Dublin, or Hong Kong, or Vancouver or Delhi or a thousand other spots. I did my share of traveling in my youth and, like a lot of folks, I was always glad to find myself on a barstool next to an Australian: wherever you're from, they never seem that foreign to you, if you know what I mean. And, if you don't, well, see for yourself. They're out there, all over the map:
Traveling in a fried-out combie
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She took me in and gave me breakfast
And she said:
Do you come from a land Down Under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover...
The song was born in ten green bottles, more or less. Ron Strykert, the guitarist of Men At Work, was at home and at a loose end and decided, as one does, to fill various wine and beer bottles with different amounts of water and then give 'em a thwack and see what kind of tune emerges. That's the origin of the opening of "Down Under". Next up came the chorus. In 1978, two years before the first record of the song was released, Strykert's fellow band member Colin Hay was out in the car, when the muse descended. He was driving down Power Street in Hawthorn in the Melbourne suburbs, when "it just popped into my head". The verses popped up a day or so later, all in about half an hour.
Hay was the only band member not to come, originally, from a land down under. He was born in Scotland and his family emigrated to Australia when he was 14, so he brought to the song not just a genuine love for his new home but also an ability to see what it was about "the lucky country" that so tickled the outside world. If the chorus is almost ingenious in its simplicity (how come no-one ever cottoned on to "Down Under" as a song title before?), the linking quatrains give the piece a structure and a story. "The verses were more the Barry McKenzie aspect of the song," Hay recalled, referring to Barry Humphries' popular cartoon strip in Private Eye in the Sixties, "and that thing where it's almost a rite of passage for young Australians to travel through Asia and India, and go back to find out where their families come from in England or Ireland or Scotland":
Lying in a den in Bombay
With a slack jaw, and not much to say
I said to the man, "Are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?"
And he said...
'Tempt me"/"plenty"? Nobody turns to rock for pure rhymes or for Cole Porter literacy. Nonetheless, even Eighties pop needs a little linguistic distinction. Simon Climie once told me about writing "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)", which eventually was a Number One for Aretha Franklin and George Michael. As originally conceived, it ran:
When the river was deep
I wasn't worried....
He chanced to run it past our mutual friend Don Black, writer of "Born Free" and "To Sir With Love" and "Diamonds Are Forever" and much else. And Don said, "'I wasn't worried"s very weak. You need something stronger - like 'I didn't falter'." Well, he was right, and it makes the song: "Falter" is an especially good Aretha word; she infuses it with a real gospel quality that you couldn't wring out of "worried". Colin Hay pulled off something similar in the chorus of "Down Under". What does the title rhyme with? Well, "thunder" you'd expect, but I love this:
Do you come from a land Down Under
Where women glow and men plunder?
That's such a great word for a pop song, and it captures all the buccaneering swagger of Oz. But then the guys manage to better it in the second chorus:
I come from a land Down Under
Where beer does flow and men chunder...
"Chunder"? That's Australian for what men do when the beer flows too readily: vomit. There's all kinds of stories about the origin of the word. It's First World War rhyming slang based on a boot-polish advertising character called Chunder Loo of Akim Foo - ie, "chunder loo"="spew". Alternatively, it's what queasy emigrants to Oz in rough seas used to shout to the chaps on the deck below before they let fly: "Watch under", or "'chunder". That sounds a bit too neat to me, though Barry Humphries, who helped popularize the expression, still subscribes to it. Still, how many Number One songs mention vomiting? And how many manage to rhyme the sentiment? It's that kind of attention to detail that gives "Down Under" its distinctive flavor, so to speak.
As for the Vegemite, that too is drawn from life. Colin Hay had a friend who'd walked into a bakery in Brussels and attempted to order in French. At which point the bloke behind the counter announced he was from Melbourne. Hence:
Buying bread from a man in Brussels
He was six foot four and full of muscles
I said, "Do you speak-a my language?"
He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich...
I have an American friend who has an entire thesis premised on the theory that the British Empire declined because, unlike American boys, it raised its youth on Vegemite and Marmite rather than peanut butter. This isn't the time or place for a scholarly refutation thereof, or for an exploration of the intra-Commonwealth disputes regarding the comparative merits of Marmite and Vegemite. Or even to discuss the alleged banning of Vegemite by US Customs in 2006. The point is Vegemite is as Australian as ...er, Vegemite - even though it's currently owned by Kraft. It's part of the vernacular, for everything from a happy person (a "happy little Vegemite") to a gay person (a "visitor to Vegemite Valley"). That last one comes from another Barry Humphries character - Sir Les Patterson, cultural atache to the Court of St James's - and it's unclear how many non-fictional Australians have actually used it. But even invented slang has to have a crude plausibility, and Humphries certainly has an ear for it.
Men At Work had a strong local following through their resident gig at the Cricketer's Arms in Melbourne, and in 1980 Hay, Strykert and the rest of the band got together enough dough to finance a single - "Keypunch Operator" on the A-side, and an early version of "Down Under" on the B. It was a simpler arrangement back then - just flute and guitar. When they signed with Columbia, their producer Peter McIan felt it needed a bigger, more commercial sound. So he brought it more instruments and gave it that Eighties ska-revival semi-reggae feel. On the other hand, there's still plenty of authentic Australiana in there: the flute motif is based around the tune of the children's jingle "Kookaburra".
Joe Stein, the librettist of Fiddler On The Roof, once told me about being at the Tokyo premiere of the show and a Japanese theatergoer expressing amazement to him that the musical had ever been a hit in America "because it's so Japanese". Stein loved the story because it illustrated what every artist aims for: you do something highly specific, and it turns out to be universal. Likewise for "Down Under": Almost immediately, the song got taken up by Jewish wedding bands. "Apparently," said Colin Hay, "it has a very similar structure to a lot of Jewish folk songs." Eventually, Yossi and Avi Piamenta wound up setting traditional Hebrew wedding lyrics to the tune. In South Korea, the song became a favorite of parodists because, to the Korean ear, strange words like "Vegemite" and "chunder" sounded less like English than Korean.
In the end, though, it remains the one great international pop hit that, to the rest of the planet, encapsulates Australia. In true rock'n'roll fashion, no sooner had they had their great success than the band became riven by "musical differences", split rancorously, and have spent most of the last two decades insisting to rock journalists that they're not "bitter". Colin Hay started calling himself Colin James Hay and made an album called Man At Work. Not only wasn't he on speaking terms with much of the old band, he wasn't even on speaking-about-them terms. If any interviewer raised the subject of the good old days, Hay would refer to his old comrades Jerry Speiser and John Rees not by name but only as "the drummer" and "the bassist". As for his songwriting partner, by the Nineties Ron Strykert had been jailed in Montana for owing child support and joined the Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious sect eagerly awaiting Armageddon from their compound near Yellowstone National Park. It seems safe to say he's doing less chundering than he used to, or, if he is, it's not because of the flowing beer.
But so what? Even though enough Men At Work put the rancor on hold to get enough of the men back to work for a magnificent performance of "Down Under" at the close of the Sydney Olympics, it's not about them anymore. The song's wiggled free and escaped into the great beyond. You know who should do it? The guy who did "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport". Rolf Harris did the all-time greatest version - on his didgeridoo - of "Stairway To Heaven", and if any song's crying out for the full Rolf it's this one. Like the man says:
You better run, you better take cover.
Happy Australia Day!
from Song of the Week - Aussie Encore, March 7, 2012
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The Steyn Oz tour moves on. We had another capacity crowd in Brisbane, where I was introduced by the shadow Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis, who turned out to be a big fan of Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. I spent two minutes on the Queen Street Mall, scene of Kevin Rudd's famous walkabout last weekend, where, on the basis of his attracting two dozen semi-curious passersby in the course of a two hour stroll, he was deemed by his fawning Oz media to be a "rock star". In about two ...
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We had a great night on Wednesday night in Sydney - another capacity crowd, standing room only. This time I was joined by Tom Switzer from the Aussie Spectator, John Roskam of the IPA, and The Australian's Janet Albrechtsen. I believe the event will be broadcast on the ABC. John Howard, former Prime Minister and doughty warrior of the Anglosphere, and his wife Jeanette were also in attendance, and we repaired for a very convivial supper afterwards. Old friends like the Sydney Telegraph's ...
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I'm currently Down Under on my 2012 Oz tour, and very happy to be here. The formal events started with a big dinner at the Athenaeum in Melbourne hosted by Michael Kroger and featuring me plus scourge of the Eurocrats Daniel Hannan, fellow freespeecher Andrew Bolt, The Australian's Janet Albrechtsen, and the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition Tony Abbott. You don't have to be that loyal compared to a government party tearing itself apart over the Julia Gillard/Kevin Rudd feud. Anyhow, it ...
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Steyn's Song of the Week ran every Monday from 2006 to 2012, and was a favorite of many SteynOnline readers. The series is currently taking a break, but many of Mark's most popular Song of the Week essays are anthologized in the handsome hardback book A Song For The Season. From "Easter Parade" to "Jingle Bells", "Summertime" to "Autumn Leaves", via songs for Groundhog Day and Labor Day, Mark's musical year roams across two centuries of memorable music. You can order your personally autographed ...
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