The Singers And The City

The Age

Saturday August 28, 2004

Shaun Carney

Flat, dowdy, grey, conservative. Beaches like bathtubs. A river that's really a creek flowing upside down. Too cold in winter and too hot in summer. Let's face it: Melbourne isn't beautiful or majestic.

That's why so many of us love it, of course. It's what's inside that counts. In Melbourne, you learn to make your own fun. That's why artists going all the way back to the Heidelberg school have found it inspiring. Their paintings were mostly of mundane scrub or creek banks, but it was one detail - the light - that rendered the place special.

Urban, contemporary Melbourne, with its long, stretching vistas of suburbs and bitumen, a burgeoning and seemingly unstoppable leisure diet of coffee and focaccia, and a music scene that remains lively in the face of television, videos, DVDs, the internet and the iPod, is a place that more than any other Australian city has found its way into popular song.

But the sentiments of these songs are not sweeping celebrations. There is no "Melbourne, you're a rollicking town, I want to see your glistening bay and your Station Pier" lyric. Instead, it's the little pieces of life in the city that have occupied our songwriters since it became OK to talk about our own town in song.

One man more than any other made it possible. Greg Macainsh's time at the forefront of the public imagination was brief. After four years at or near the top of the charts with his band Skyhooks, the hits - and Macainsh's unique well of creativity - pretty much dried up.

But with little more than half a dozen songs, including Balwyn Calling, Carlton and Toorak Cowboy, all on Skyhooks' first album released 30 years ago almost to the day, Macainsh managed to achieve something that most artists can only dream of.

He claimed his hometown as an interesting, amusing and, most important of all, acceptable lyrical subject, and in doing so opened the way for an entire genre: the Melbourne song.

In itself, this was a revelation. There had previously been a few attempts at songs employing local themes. Col Joye's backing band the Joy Boys scored a hit in the early '60s with an instrumental named after the interstate train the Southern Aurora, and pioneering Melbourne rocker-turned-country artist Johnny Chester used the Hume Highway as an escape route from bad love in 1969's Highway 31.

One tongue-in-cheek piece by a male vocal group in the late '60s that got a little radio airplay had compared Melbourne's attractions with Sydney ("Sydney's got its harbour but we've got Melbourne Bitter") and in 1972 a comedy song about the Dandenong Ranges had made the lower reaches of the charts ("I go way up, up Upwey").

But until Skyhooks' arrival, there was a sort of unease about whether local place names were cool enough to use in song. In 1972, Brian Cadd was one of Australia's biggest artists and the opening line to his hit song Ginger Man - "She wrote to me from Texas" - caused a good deal of controversy.

Why, some music writers asked, did he place his songs in America? Cadd, who had already penned several hits as part of the Groop and then Axiom, whose first hit was Arkansas Grass in 1969, defended his choice of American localities on the grounds that Australian place names, such as Wagga Wagga, did not sound right when laid over a pop melody.

Macainsh got around that problem by making his Melbourne songs social documents about specific aspects of the city. He dwelt on the details and as a consequence introduced a genuine folk element into Australian rock.

In Carlton, he wrote of "pizza places" and the "spaced-out faces" of the suburb's student population. In Toorak Cowboy he parodied aimless rich loafers and reported his first purchase of marijuana in 1968 - a whole matchbox-full outside the once-trendy South Yarra Arms hotel.

A few years later, James Reyne followed Macainsh's lead by name-checking one of Melbourne's premier music venues, Bombay Rock in Brunswick, in Australian Crawl's first hit, Beautiful People (he also spoofed the beautiful people in Toorak for being excessive by riding $200 bikes in the park, which tells us something about inflation).

And so it goes: Stephen Cummings reminds us that Russell Street used to be where all the detectives worked in (Boys) What Did The Detectives Say?; Paul Kelly moves the locale of To Her Door from Brisbane to Melbourne by placing a character in a Silver Top taxi.

If pop music has any real, lasting value beyond the ephemeral and passing pleasure it can bring, it lies in its ability to hold up a mirror to its devotees, to reflect the world in which the singer and the listener live.

The songs listed here will take you from Maroondah Reservoir to Flinders Street Station, through Albert Park to St Kilda and across to Footscray, then down a series of back lanes and even to a suburban home where the phone has a seemingly interminable connection to a young lovelorn woman in Balwyn.

Melbourne, they're playing your song.

RODGER CUMMINS took the photographs of Greg Macainsh, James Reyne, Billy Miller, Mark Seymour, Johnny Chester and Charles Jenkins for this series; Paul Kelly picture: DOMINO POSTIGLIONE; David Bridie picture: CRAIG SILLITOE; Stephen Cummings and Mick Thomas pictures: CHRIS BECK