Richard Clapton Reflects On A Career Spanning Fifty Years
Richard Clapton as one of Australia’s foremost singer/songwriters, paving the way for subsequent generations of songwriters to write about the experience of being Australian. He grew up in Sydney in the 1960s before hopping a plane for London, and then later to Germany, where he wrote a first album, Prussian Blue (1973) which was one of the first major Australian “singer-songwriter” albums. 1975 was a career defining year releasing the highly acclaimed number one hit Girls On The Avenue changed Clapton’s career trajectory. It has been a stellar career spanning fifty years seeing a string of hits including the perennial favourites Capricorn Dancer, Deep Water, I Am An Island, and many more. Hi Fi Way talks to Richard about his career and the origins of Girls On The Avenue.
Are you looking forward to playing in Adelaide at the Woodville Town Hall tonight?
Absolutely. I’ve been coming to Adelaide for a long time.
Celebrating fifty years, do you get a gold watch or have something else in mind to celebrate the milestone?
Am I old as the kids say? Ha! Gold watch you’ve got to be kidding! When you talk about the music business it’s amazing but it’s also quite daunting realising how fast time flies. It just doesn’t feel like fifty years.
You have proven to be a survivor in a tough and fickle business.
Undoubtedly it it’s probably the toughest industry. It amazes me how many people throw themselves at the music business wanting to be pop stars and stuff. I don’t think they realise how tough it is to be a survivor. It’s tough and it’s really complex, you’re kind of going through this labyrinth. If you put a foot wrong it can really set you back, so you have really got to be on your game. My favourite answer to a question is from Jerry Garcia where he said well, this is what I do. I think all of us have that had this existentialist answer about music and while we’re still doing it like after fifty years, it’s because it’s what I do.
Do you remember the early stages of your career when Prussian Blues came out and those stand out moments from that period?
I think in the 70s probably what I’m most proud of is the fact that I wrote a bit more than half of Prussian Blue when I was still living in Berlin and brought it back here. I was so poor when I got back here. I was just crashing out with people. You know, like strange days in Chippendales because I was crashing out at this guy’s place in Redfern. I was just really playing for free beer. Prussian Blue got released and it got really good reviews. I don’t have it anymore, but the Rolling Stone review of Prussian Blue was great and I was proud of the album. But Rupert Murdoch owned Festival Records and so the bean counters ruled. Despite the really good response to Prussian Blue it didn’t sell all that many. I think it probably wasn’t even five thousand copies that it sold and so I was given this ultimatum of I either come up with a radio friendly hit single or they’re going to drop me from the label after my first album.
I moved into a place in Rose Bay in Sydney. The reason for that significant is because I lived on the street called Chaleyer Avenue and the next street a long is called The Avenue, which becomes significant because I moved in the house with the A&R guy from Festival Music Publishing (Colin) and I was getting really stubborn because I was still really young and rebellious. I just kept saying, well, this the music business and if I’m going to be forced in to being a pop star, I don’t want to know. Even at that early stage I thought maybe I should go back to Germany and start all over again. However, Colin kept imploring me to just make this compromise. He kept saying to me, look, just make this one compromise and then if I have a hit that’s going to enable me to make another album and another album and hopefully forge a long-term career.
For weeks or months, I just stubbornly dug in and said I don’t want to be a pop star. Then Colin and I went out one night to this wine bar called Frenches. Anyway, there’s a house of three girls, pretty girls who lived on The Avenue in the next street a long in Rose Bay. Now that’s literally what the song is about. Colin and I had a few black Russians at the wine bar. We got home, we walked past the girls on the way home and I sat down and wrote Girls On The Avenue. When I wrote it, I had a few drinks before I started writing it. I didn’t do it for any ulterior motive. Going back to what I said earlier, that’s just what I do. I wrote Girls On The Avenue because it was just what had happened that night.
That’s the way I often write songs about my immediate environment. However, then we went in and the producer, Richard Batchen, I had at the time was really on side. He went into bat for me and now with these reissues that we’ve been doing and I when I listened to some of his work, he was a pretty amazing producer for his time. For Girls On The Avenue, I think Richard fancied himself as being Phil Spector, he wanted to come up with big wall of sound. Festival Records had the first twenty four track, so as I recall, I played seventeen guitars on Girls On The Avenue. When I say that it was mainly acoustic guitars, just stacked one on top of the other, time and time again and there’s no such thing as tuners or metronomes or anything like that.
Everything had to be done totally manually, so I would do a take and then I have to go back and tune because he was a perfectionist. Anyway, we were so proud of it, and we spent quite a bit of time on it. Then at Festival every Tuesday they had what they called the A&R selection committee, which is artist repertoire selection committee, where they decide what releases would be done the next week, and they kept rejecting it on the grounds that they didn’t understand what the song was supposed to be about. They kept rejecting it and then Colin ultimately got himself with the job as the first music programmer for Double J and he started playing Girls On The Avenue on the hour, every hour in the first few weeks of transmission. All those stations had been monitoring Double J, all their music programs heard Girls On The Avenue loved it, and they started flogging it and it got to number one with the b-side on it because Festival still regarded as a throwaway.
Are you looking to play for three or four hours to fit an entire career in to your show?
I generally do like a thirty to forty minute purely acoustic set without the band and then there’s an intermission and then we come back and the last couple of hours of just pure rock with the band. This year part way through the acoustic set I had these fanatical farms yelling out for pretty obscure songs. The one I remember most is Dark Spaces. I’m playing the acoustic set and people in front of me are yelling out for Dark Spaces so fans saw this as an opportunity for me to play obscure songs that I hardly ever play and in many cases never play. It’s mandatory to have for those shows to have a twenty five minute intermission, that’s the venue rules. So, I’ll come back for the second set and I got on the mic and I said, look, you’re all yelling out for these different songs. I’ve just been backstage, I got my calculator out and if I roughly working on say five minutes a Richard Clapton song, I’ve recorded two hundred and sixty-four songs it would take me two point nine days to play them all. Two thousand people go beauty let’s go! I said no! They’re talking about Please Come Home and Goodbye Barbara and blah, blah, blah. Literally every song!
Nowadays it it’s getting so difficult. I’m really glad I don’t really get any flak from fans, but now I’ve released twenty three albums, but trying to trying to squeeze in the hippie songs in to my set is getting harder and harder. All I say is that I do my best to I don’t give a good cross section and if you know if you consider Prussian Blue right through to House Of Orange, it’s very diverse material. I mean it’s hard to believe all those songs came out of the same person because it’s a pretty eclectic mix. I just try and make up the best set I can. My audience gets disappointed nowadays if I don’t do Ace Of Hearts, Glory Road and Distant Thunder. So I mean, because I started winter time there start start now I get a lot of requests for that and they’re like. There’s all these titles I’m pulling at you, it’s hard to believe that it all came out of the same person. Rest assured, I do, do my best to play all the hits.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch Richard Clapton at Woodville Town Hall on Friday 2 August, tickets HERE…
