It's still Australia Day in my non-Australian corner of the world, but it's no longer Australia Day in Australia itself. Still, it's the Australia Day weekend so I thought I'd keep the party going with an hour of musical guests from the Lucky Country.
By way of preface, I confess I get mildly irked at being thought of as a 24/7 showtune queen – even by close followers of this website. For example, Mark Steyn Club member Stephen Kitsko begins:
If you ever choose a rock song for your Song of the Week feature, I would suggest John Mellencamp's...
Hmm. Are you trying to suggest I'm not butch enough to rock it up? Fellow Steyn Club member Wayne Murphy:
Mark, you're my hero politically. As far as your music goes, well...
My tastes typically range from Motown to Motorhead.
In fact, I've played both Motown and Motorhead on the radio over the years. And John Mellencamp was a guest on my show many years ago. So I thought for this Oz special I'd focus on (for the most part) a couple of Melbourne musicians a little outside my comfort zone. You can't do an Australia Day special without playing Men at Work's "Down Under", and from the Steyn archive we'll hear the late Greg Ham talking to me about the band at the height of their global success - and I'll explore that song's fate in the Australian courts. Aside from rock, we do less classical music than we should at SteynOnline, so we'll also feature a Melbourne man who's been called the most technically accomplished guitarist in the world, John Williams. And even if you don't dig the baroque, if you've seen The Deer Hunter or A Fish Called Wanda, you'll know the sound of John's guitar. He was also a big part of the Anglo-Australian progressive rock/classical fusion combo Sky. And we'll round things out with a tip of the hat to a sometime Melbourne disc-jockey and a peerless Melbourne vocal group.
So some retro pop, classical guitar, prog rock and reggae-meets-rock, plus the inevitable Aussie opener (with a difference) – but not a showtune in sight. To listen to this special Australia Day edition of On the Town, simply click above. If you like it, we'll do it again next year with some more Aussie popsters from my archive - the late Peter Allen, the great Billy Field and more.
~We treasure all the many Australian members of The Mark Steyn Club, and I hope to see you Down Under very soon. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, see here - and don't forget our limited-time Gift Membership, which includes a personally autographed book or CD set from yours truly.
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24 Member Comments
Great to hear you are coming down soon. Please give plenty of notice Mark!
Haven't listened to this yet but wanted to say you can't do an Aussie music segment without mentioning Kevin Johnson, a giant of the 70s (Rock and Roll I gave you all the best years of my Life, Sh'es Leavin and many other excellent songs). How about it?
...All bound for Morningtown, many miles away.
I know this song, sung by Raffi. I had never heard it sung by anyone else. Still, I'm getting teary-eyed, missing my sweet, happy, three-year-old boy who used to love to hear that as he dropped off to sleep. When did he become 27? Well, maybe someday he'll have a little tyke to rock, and sing away to Morningtown.
Mark, what a lovely hour. Thank you.
Hope very soon doesn't mean you'll exchange your beautiful New Hampshire winter wonderland for our stinking hot 110 in the waterbag Australian summer.
More Re: classical music , Mozart's Clarinet Quintet wouldn't be a bad start. Oh , too long , maybe one movement
Hope you won't be too disappointed with things here . I'd say we're level pegging , at least, with Canada in the new adventures in a reformed Stalinism ,which is so fashionable right now.
Heard a cove on the radio the other day say Tony Bennett was miles better than your Sinatra ; he seemed pretty cluey.
Love the picture. A little RCA dog vibe thing going on.
Greg Ham should have sued the Australian Government for all the pain he was put through. 'Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree' was taught to every kid who went to school in Australia in the 50's and 60's and is probably still taught to this day. It was often chosen for 'singing in the round'. If there's a musical version of brainwashing that would be it. Once learned, the music and words are 'in there' forever. No-one escaped the tune or the 4 simple lines, as parents who sat through endless school concerts could attest.
Intentional or otherwise, it was touch of genius to throw the riff into a song about 'Down Under'. Discovering it was copyrighted would have been as unexpected as hearing that someone owned 'Old Macdonald had a farm'.
That's an interesting perspective, because I actually can't hear that much of a parallel. It never even occurred to me before the legal case was brought against them, and I'd be interested to hear more of the detail of Mark's opinion on this.
As familiar as I am with both songs its still hard for me to pick the bits that are 'the same'. Incredibly, the Men at Work song (with the disputed riff) had been a hit for over 25 years before the copyright action was commenced.
It wasn't just Australia. Plenty of us American schoolkids learned that song by heart too in the 1970s.
I'd say "Cavatina" sounds closer to "What a Wonderful World" than does "Down Under" to "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree".
Butch enough for me, brother. A doctor friend of mine kids me about the fact that I love show tunes. We laugh at that and then I tell him: A person doesn't have to be "gay" to like show tunes. He gives me a big "whatever" and we laugh again. So, go ahead, Mark, have at it, as you like to say!
Re: classical music, you know more than I do, considering that I've got a gazillion classical CDs and you still keep flummoxing me with your musical choices on "Tales For Our Time" ... my husband guessed Tchaikovsky for the Gogol one, but I'm not sure ...
If you want more classical, I suggest Monteverdi. Or Uccellini, or Matteis. (I'm a big fan of ground basses, if you couldn't already have guessed. We made here, maybe twenty years ago, a disc called "Chaconne Till You Moan." One copy of which was stolen from a Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra member's car in Germany. I wonder what the thief made of it.)
Mark replies:
Re Gogol: Close but no sigara, Michelle. It was Glinka.
Glinka is a generation before Tchaik, so not even close. Though, again, it explains why neither of us could guess correctly. Do you make a practice of catching us out with these choices, or is it just accident? :-)
On second thought, it wasn't "Chaconne Till You Moan" that was stolen; it was another Thomson Household production called "Lift Ev'ry Voice And Quack," consisting entirely of popular classics rendered via duck calls. We put it on once in the presence of a Carmel Bach Festival cat named Finnegan, who went absolutely nuts at the first treble notes of the Pachelbel Canon.
No, really. You need to hear this album. "Scooter" gets off a couple of great numbers, and Francesca Anatra a couple more. Then there's "Flight of the Bumble Bee," as performed by the Russian Muscovy Duck Large Chorus ... you get the idea.
Thanks, Mark, for a superb musical tribute! "Men at Work" have endured across the decades with that Number 1 anthem, so it was amazing to listen to your archival interview with Greg Ham; their hits are truly timeless and distinctive (with no detectable trace of plagiarism in that famous flute rift.... I think I remember your column on "Down Under"), and Colin Hay has such a wonderful Caledonian voice. (He has a solo song, "Waiting for my real life to begin", that was used to great effect in an unusually poignant scene in the TV series "Scrubs", in which he made a cameo appearance.)
Great to hear from "The Seekers" too: they were remarkably unchanged— including Judith's beautiful voice—and as memorable as ever on their Golden Jubilee Tour.
Look forward to your review of that other famous and inspiring (Qantas) anthem, Peter Allen's "I Still Call Australia Home", on a future January 26th, assuming we're still celebrating it then! (It appears he didn't believe in Global Warming, so not sure if those lyrics are in the process of being appropriately revised.)
I attended a wedding lat summer and the dance floor was off to a very slow start. Once "Who Can It Be Now" was played the floor was instantly packed and the dancing went on happily from there. A classic, at least for weddings and other parties.
I can picture that! Their music really does have universal appeal and remains timeless; for a song that's nearly 40 years old, there is nothing "eighties" about "Down Under". "Overkill" is another great song to lift a group mood- despite being quite melancholy- and there's a great informal choir version on YouTube.
What is incredibly disappointing (I overlooked to mention in the earlier comment), is that Colin Hay just last week joined a line-up of music industry celebrities denouncing the use of "their" hit songs in an "Australia Day Top 100" play list which was organised by a conservative politician- Cory Bernadi- to replace a longstanding national radio "Hottest 100" countdown broadcast tradition (which was cancelled as part of the "change the date" furore). Colin Hay and many others basically made clear that "conservatives" were not welcome to use their music to celebrate January 26th! The moral lectures by some of these "artists" on Twitter were truly nauseating. (Fortunately, "The Seekers" didn't object to being on the countdown list; one member of the group- Athol Guy- actually served as a (conservative) Liberal Party MP in Victoria in the 1970s.)
So another rift (supposed to be "riff" in the previous comment!) involving Men at Work. Such a shame. Looking forward to Mark's classical music Culture Club tutorials though; as an aside, his accent has noticeably changed since the days of the Greg Ham and Paul Simon interviews!
A few thoughts on a most excellent audio post....
Ah, childhood memories. A tear to my eye for "Morningtown Ride". I'm dreaming of a time when it was most important to help children get a good night's sleep within the comfort and safety of a loving family and not traumatize them about gender fluidity.
Australia Day vs. Canada Day. Canada's PM Justin Trudeau has promised to legalize marijuana on July 1, 2018. July 1 is Canada Day so he will effectively be making it Cannabis Day instead. There are already "Cannabis Day" t-shirts available with the image of Trudeau sparking up a fattie. It's disappointing to think of Canada's national "Day" hijacked to celebrate drug use. However if this promise is like 99.99% of his other promises, it will not come to pass in time. Still, it seems egregious to legalize on July 1. Pick another day, any other day.
For a song of the week and another flautist, how about something from Jethro Tull/Ian Anderson? The band has had several hits but are quite polarizing - love 'em or hate 'em, no middle ground. Anderson has done classical work as well as guest appearances on recordings with other musicians. He also supports some non-political charities with worthy causes, and never asking people to tell politicians to donate tax dollars (seems odd even typing that), a la Bono and others.
I have some thoughts on Wagner, as I'm sure many do, but I'll leave them for another time.
Thanks for this post Mark. Love your dulcet tones in the interviews.
Mark replies:
Thanks, PK. Actually I did interview Ian Anderson once upon a time, so maybe we will dig that out.
I like these audio music roundups. If you ever decide to spin them off into another subscription service, Mr. Steyn, I'd pony up the money for it.
As to Jethro Tull ... You can love them (Songs from the Wood) AND hate them (Warchild). I'd definitely be interested in an Ian Anderson interview.
Mark replies:
Thanks, Randy. We're using our audio specials to try out a few different things, so no plans to paywall them just yet (but thanks for the generous offer).
Speaking of showtunes and queens reminds me of Mark's story about his encounter with Rob Halford -- a straight guy into showtunes being hit on by a gay guy into heavy metal. Funny story!
However, it also reminds me of my grievance against Halford and his band. That'd be the song "Another Thing Comin'". No, no, a thousand times no. The saying is, "if you think that, you've got another THINK coming". Thing doesn't even make sense in this context, yet the saying seems to have become the Judas Priest version. If you think that's right, well....
Thoroughly enjoyed every bit of this, especially the discussion with Men At Work and hearing the varieties of their best known song, which has always sounded like an Australia anthem to me. I reach for the volume when it comes on the radio. Your resurrected interviews are priceless. I expect to make a first trip to Australia next winter, so this is especially meaningful. Thank you!
"He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich."
Ugh. Vegemite. That's as bad as the caviar trick.
tah
Haven't thought back on timing of these songs, but the versions of Down Under are great and put me in mind of some of the Reggae Bob Marley used to do. The simplicity works.