By Larry Schwartz
ERIC Bogle thought he was writing a song about the cold, bright July morning the ship that brought him from Scotland entered Sydney Heads more than 40 years ago.
“I remember standing at the rails just watching the harbour and the city unfold in the early morning sunshine and thinking, oh my, this is gorgeous,” the Adelaide-based folksinger remembers that day in 1969.
But Bogle says he “got diverted” and, though he had no intention of doing so, ended up writing the song about the December 2012 massacre of 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six staff members instead.
“I thought I’ll leave that alone,” he says of the last song for a new album, A Toss of the Coin. “But then I made the mistake of reading one of these conspiracy blogs on the Internet that had no less than 11 million hits.
“There were all these people claiming that Sandy Hook hadn’t happened. It was all actors and it was (a ploy by) Obama’s government to limit their right to be armed and all that shit. I just lost my temper, to be honest, and ended up almost against my will writing about the kids.”
At 68, the veteran folksinger, some of whose best known and much recorded songs are a response to the futility of war, has not lost his fire. But though he’s articulated strong views over the years, he has no illusions about the impact. “I’d love to think that things I write could change things,” he dismisses the notion. “But I’m not that stupid.”
Interviewed at the recent Port Fairy Folk Festival, where he played on the back of a truck at the inaugural event nearly 40 years ago, he laughs mischievously at times and speaks with refreshing candour.
Bogle says the “body count” is high on the new CD but fans are used to his accounts of violence by now. He has set John McCrae’s World War 1 poem for a fallen comrade, In Flanders Field, to music and written seven tracks for the album, for which long-time accompanist John Munro contributed two songs.
He hadn’t written a song in a year so. His interest was renewed while grieving after Ranger, one of his two miniature schnauzers, was knocked over and killed by a car. “I just got thinking about loss and love… nothing staggeringly original.”
The first song, Ashes, was inspired after visiting a small Victorian community, after it was devastated by the February 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. “John and I visited Strathewen 10 weeks after the fire to do a concert for the people there and it was pretty confronting.”
Everything seemed green until a local fire officer took them to the top of a hill. “We turned the corner and there it was,” he says of the charred landscape. “It slapped me in the face.”
Another song tells of a cradle once owned by Australian actor Reg Evans, who died with his artist partner, Angela Brunton, in the fires at St Andrews. “Most newborns spent time in that cradle,” Bogle says. “It was a tradition.”
The cradle was thought lost in the fires but a survivor told Bogle her son had taken it to Canberra at the time so that he could place his newborn inside it.
The former accountant says he’s been “shoved in the old farts locker”. “Society always values angry young men,” he says. “Angry old men are a f—–g embarrassment.”
His songs have been recorded by artists including The Pogues, Mary Black, Donovan, Billy Bragg, the Dubliners and the Fureys, which had a big hit with his No Man’s Land, retitling it The Green Fields of France.
Bogle has his favourite – English folksinger June Tabor’s acapella version of his early 1970s And The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda, in which he tells of the ANZAC experience of the Battle of Gallipoli.
“And I don’t mind (The Pogues’ Shane) McGowan’s version to be honest,” he says of the song. “I think he sings it with a broken despairing voice. So the song suits him.”
Did he ever think, oh god, they’re murdering my song? “Oh yes. First up, Joan Baez did a crap version of No Man’s Land which disappointed me…”
He’s taken to introducing himself in song onstage as “a grumpy and squat, red-faced balding Scot.” He has an ailing twin sister and other close relatives in Scotland and carries two passports but says he’d retain the Australian if forced to relinquish one or the other. “I owe this country a debt of gratitude.”
After decades of international tours, he restricts himself to Australian gigs. His last performance in Scotland a few years ago was in his old hometown of Peebles, south of Edinburgh. “It was quite an emotional night,” says.
“There were about 500 people at the concert. It was at my old high school hall. I got expelled twice from the school and there I was returning in triumph.”
Appeared in Big Issue
Larry Schwartz Writer 