Entertainment
22 January, 2025
Richard Clapton to play CPAC’s stage
FROM ‘Girls on the Avenue’, to ‘Goodbye Tiger’, Richard Clapton’s songs have played on repeat in the heads of teenagers since the 70s, and next month Cairns audiences can re-visit those magical years.
The Australian singer-songwriter-guitarist will bring his music to the Cairns Performing Arts Centre (CPAC), teasing out timeless songs from across the decades.
“What I’m going to play, I honestly don’t know, but fortunately for Cairns there’s quite a few gigs before I get there, so I can refine,” the ARIA Hall of Famer said last week, as he prepared for this latest tour.
“According to APRA (Australasian Performing Right Association), I’ve recorded 264 songs. It gets harder and harder every year to decide.
“I can’t play every song, but they’ll hear the old and the new,” he promised. “I have a nine-song handicap, which is songs that have charted, so I cannot do a show without those songs.”
Will be entertaining
What Cairns can expect is a lengthy and entertaining night, where Clapton plays some acoustic, then brings on the band, whose members have worked with him across his career.
Songs will be interspersed with anecdotes about his colourful journey through the heady Australian rock scene of the 70s, 80s and beyond.
It began when a young Clapton, disillusioned with the political landscape and the barren wasteland of music in Australia, moved to London and then Germany in the late-1960s and early 70s, living the troubadour life. It was also where he penned his first album ‘Prussian Blue’.
But after reading about “a young man called Gough Whitlam”, he said Australia was “looking better and better”. On the voyage home, he also learned of recent Australian music including, he said, one of the best songs he’d ever heard, ‘Eagle Rock’ by Daddy Cool.
It was not long before Clapton was signed by a subsidiary of Festival Records and released Prussian Blue. But while the album received solid support over years of sales, as well as establishing him as a musician’s musician, it was not a chart topper and Clapton was under pressure to have a hit.
One night in Rose Bay, where he lived with friend Col (and festival employee), the two were walking home from a wine bar and “three pretty girls were calling out and waving to us” from their balcony. They lived on The Avenue.
Girls on the Avenue
“I got home, I’d had a few drinks, and wrote Girls on the Avenue quite quickly believe it or not, I even amazed myself.”
But not all was right. Enter the wicked Richard Clapton anecdote.
“Festival had this committee ... to select that week’s releases, and they kept rejecting ‘Girls on the Avenue’. Colin was getting increasingly agitated,” he recalled.
“Meanwhile unbeknownst to Festival, Colin was going to lunch with Ron and Marius who founded Double J. One fateful day, they got rotten drunk, Colin came back to Festival, had a big altercation and quit.
“He became the first music programmer on Double J,” Clapton laughed.
Played over and over
“Colin played Girls on the Avenue every hour and the major radio stations heard it and picked it up and there you go. It went to number one. It’s sold hundreds and thousands of records, over 40 years or so.”
As for the belief that it was a song about working girls, Clapton only realised that was the interpretation when he was mobbed by a fan group of working women after a gig in Adelaide.
“That urban myth stuck until this century,” he said.
The song launched him into the thick of the Australian music scene at a time when legends were emerging across the country: Kelly, Cave, Sunnyboys, INXS, Cold Chisel, the Oils, Dragon, the list goes on.
He agreed those day-long outdoor concerts and pub gatherings had a sense of unity for bands and crowds alike. The bands were all mates, not the rivals the record industry would foster, and life-long friendships were made.
Great camaraderie
“The camaraderie from those days was just unbelievable,” he said.
An example was when INXS approached Clapton to produce their second album, in Underneath the Colours, which included the seminal single, ‘Stay Young’.
“That was the start of a 45-year friendship with John Farris,” he said. (Farris produced Clapton’s 1987 album, ‘Glory Road’.)
The cross-pollination of band members in Clapton’s music was a who’s who of leading Australian musicians. He happily spilled the beans on a last century secret now out in the open – Cold Chisel featured across songs on his album ‘Great Escape’ in 1982.
I Fought the Law
“Ian Moss loved ‘I am an Island’ and wanted to play on it. All those guitars on the album, they’re mostly Mossy. Jimmy did vocals on I am an Island, and Don Walker played piano on ‘I Fought the Law’,” Richard said.
“Chisel’s manager called (the record label) and demanded their contributions be removed from the album.
“Paul Turner (head of the label) said ‘over my dead body ... it sounds great,’ and they had a big falling out.
“The compromise was to recall all of the album covers back from the printers, and take Cold Chisel’s names off the album,” Richard continued chuckling.
“Mossy was upset with me when he saw he had no mention until I told him to go talk to his manager.”
It’s been 50 years since Richard Clapton released Girls on the Avenue.
He will be returning to the Far North on February 8 to perform at CPAC.
Tickets are on sale now at Ticketlink
