Joy Minter interviews Richard Clapton as he prepares for his ‘Lonesome Voyager’ tour-
I had the pleasure of seeing Richard Clapton perform a couple of weeks ago at his annual State Theatre gig in Sydney, which was a fantastic show. While he prepares to tour ‘Lonesome Voyager’, songs and stories from ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ I took advantage of the chance to talk music, politics and Nashville with the Aussie rocker.
Joy) You write in your book ‘The Best Years of our Lives’ that though you performed in several folk clubs in the early seventies, you yearned to be a rock singer. Plus you list musical influences such as James Taylor, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. I’m curious, were you influenced at all by the American rock figures from the 50s and 60s at all, like Elvis and Buddy Holly?
Richard) I was too young for the Fifties, so the first record I can remember was “Runaway” by Del Shannon. In the Sixties I was firstly into Marvin Gaye and Willie Dixon etc which led me to the Rolling Stones. Probably the most seminal moment in my own musical genealogy was the release of The Byrds first album in 1965. And then came Bob Dylan.
Joy) After Gough Whitlam’s passing last October, he was lauded at his memorial as a saviour to the arts. You mentioned in the book that post-Menzies, when Whitlam came into power it was a very exciting time to be in Australia. Is it a leap to conclude that if it weren’t for the changes that Whitlam and his government effected, you may have returned overseas a long time ago, on a more permanent basis?
Richard) As a matter of fact, after Whitlam was illegally deposed in 1975, my return visits to Berlin grew longer and more frequent. However, a very vital and important sub culture was growing in Australia in the late Seventies, and this became increasingly appealing to me, and I really wanted to be a part of it, so I worked hard to establish a solid foundation to my life here. That surfer hippy culture of the Seventies is the only organized religion I’ve ever wanted to be part of and Australia came very close to becoming Nirvana.
Joy) You’re off to Nashville later this year, have you been there before? Will you be working with a new producer there? Do you think the Nashville sound will come through in the music that you lay down there, or have you already written a lot of it?
Richard) I have already written the material for the album and the producer, Mark Moffat is very happy with the songs I have submitted. However, I will inevitably co-write with people in Nashville to see if it will work, so there is a possibility that some co-writes could end up on the album. Mark is originally a Queenslander who worked on the Dark Spaces album with me in 1980 but has been based in Nashville for many years now. He has been urging me to get my arse over to Nashville for quite a few years now, but career obligations in Australia always seemed to cut across our bow. So this time I just informed everyone that I was drawing a firm line in the sand and going to Nashville for a couple of months no matter what. This will not however be a country album – it will simply be an album made in a Nashville studio with Nashville musicians, so it might be more like Dark Spaces.
Joy) I guess with a new album coming out there will be another tour, (here’s hoping). When do you think that might happen?
Richard) Oh, I think there will be a lot of touring for me in 2016. I am currently touring “ The Lonesome Voyager” up until November 7th and will start planning next year’s touring later this year.
Joy) You made a comment about music being made in the last 20 years or so being homogenised by the false principles of the system. What did you mean by these ‘false’ principles?
Richard) In the late Sixties I lived in London and would go to gigs in sweaty pubs 2 or 3 times a week and I witnessed the greatest music the world has ever known. The bands in those days just lived to play music – it was their raison d’etre plain and simple. Then the corporate record companies seduced these bands and took them to a whole new world where they amassed fortunes, lived fabulous decadent lifestyles and eventually many of them lost their way and the soul and spirit of their music became homogenized. Over the next couple of decades, artists started producing formula music where often, every track on an album sounded the same and the lust for money and fame became paramount.
Unfortunately, this brought us to a point where now too much music has become a mere vehicle for wannabe kids who just wannabe rich and famous. But I’ll admit that statement is rather a sweeping generalization on my part.
Joy) Who is, or has been, your dream to work with, of all musicians, be they dead or alive? What would the theme of the project be?
Richard) Fortunately, Jackson Browne is still alive and kicking. There are so many great singer songwriters who have enriched my life so much, but Jackson Browne is the songwriter who has set the benchmark for me. One would presume that if I had the opportunity to work with J.B. it would predictably have quite a definite socio-political theme, but I’m not so sure about that.
Joy) Your music means so much to so many people, especially here in Australia. How does it make you feel, to know how your music has affected people deeply?
Richard) I am profoundly grateful that my fans have allowed me to become a perennial artist, and that my body of work now spans a lifetime not just for me but for my audience. I reckon I’ve probably been a strange and difficult artist to understand and for people to really get their heads around the songs I’ve been writing. But for those who stuck with me I think they are now finally getting it. I probably seem like a crazy eccentric at first, but like I said in my song “Diamond Mine”, “if you keep on digging deeper, there’ll be diamonds down the mine.”
Joy) Would you consider moving back overseas on a permanent basis, or is Sydney more or less home now?
Richard) That is a very good question! Oh I dunno – I’m a Sydney boy born and bred so I can’t see myself wanting to stray too far, but I would like to be able to work in other countries as well.
In Richard Clapton’s current tour he will be playing almost a dozen acoustic appearances with guitarist Danny Spencer, and a few others with the full band. For details of his tour, see:http://www.richardclapton.com/gigs/
Joy Minter reviews Richard Clapton’s memoir, ‘The Best Years Of Our Lives’
Of the several rock star and actor bios that I have read over the last few years, some with much anticipation, all have been curiously bland. I know I have lamented this fact before now, so I will be brief on the subject. I suspect this bland-ness is the result of several factors, chiefly because a) rock stars and actors who write (or have bios ghostwritten) are nervous about reactions from their children, spouses, and exes; and b) publishing house lawyers become extremely nervous about warts and all confessions in these litigious times that we live in.
Clapton is prepared to own his past, but even so, we still get a fairly watered down version of that past, as I guess not all of the former bad-boy artistes that he partied with are keen to have their exploits revealed. Or perhaps he really doesn’t remember – ‘I have no recollection of sleeping with that women’ is not just the cry of the politician, but many an artist as well. In this case, however, Clapton often just plain doesn’t have any recollection of much at all after many years of being one of the chief rabble rousers at the party that never ends.
Though Clapton’s book was published last year, I only recently got around to reading it. There were about a couple of dozen stories of hard partying, sometimes not in the circumstances that you would expect. He partied pretty hard with former radio man and Austereo owner Rod Muir at Muir’s opulent Darling Point apartment drinking lots of French fizz, but details of on the road partying with band mates are scant. We read between the lines (the lines on the page, that is) to fill in the gaps. I liked a comment Clapton made of being a member of The Party Boys – the Australian supergroup that consisted of musicians from leading bands such as The Angels, Status Quo, Skyhooks and Australian Crawl, who were on down time from their own projects. Clapton replaced James Reyne on vocals when Reyne left in 1983, but Clapton disliked performing covers of other people’s music, and found that they always recorded in a key that he wasn’t used to singing in. The result? He ended up sounding like Mickey Mouse or Satan.
After Clapton’s success with first hit ‘Girls on the Avenue’ in 1975, he became a fixture on the Aussie rock scene. Like fellow rocker Jimmy Barnes of Cold Chisel, Clapton tried repetitively to get his career off the ground in the US, with little success. The revolving door frequency with which Clapton returns to LA and other overseas destinations to meet with record execs proves to be largely futile, with those markets having no appreciation for the talents of the Australian rocker. It was a great disappointment for Clapton that his career never took off in the lucrative US market, but I think (very selfishly) that this was perhaps Australia’s gain.
It was just a shame that Clapton left so much of his personal life out of the mix in the book , we arrive in his life at the age of about sixteen, and there is no mention of his parents. Clapton’s parents are a rich and curious source of material that he prefers to leave out, in fact his narrative soon takes the reader out of Australia altogether, when Clapton sails to England in the late 60s, not quite twenty.
After many years of making music and producing for others like INXS, partying, then marriage and the birth of twins Saskia and Montana; the story winds down rather quickly. At least there is plenty of material there for another volume in a few years, even if life did slow down considerably after becoming a father.
The Best Years of Our Lives has been published by Allen & Unwin, 2014 rrp: $32.99
The interview was originally published on Joy Minter’s website The Buzz From Sydney. It has been republished with her kind permission.