By Larry Schwartz
RICHARD CLAPTON calls himself “the bum of the family”, the black sheep who set out to become a rock star rather than study medicine as his father, a surgeon, had hoped.
“We never did reconcile this thing,” says Clapton, whose own parenting fears are allayed somewhat by the fact that
one of his nine-year-old twin daughters recently nominated his Glory Road as her favorite song.
Clapton’s father died last year, which means he missed out on his son’s induction last Tuesday into the ARIA Hall of Fame. It was a special moment for the Sydney-born singer-songwriter, whose work includes such tracks as Girls on the Avenue, Capricorn Dancer, Down In The Lucky Country, Goodbye Tiger and The Best Years Of Our Lives
“I’ve got holes in my pocket,” Clapton sang on a song called Everybody’s Making Money (Except Me). “You can feel my naked leg/Every time I reach for money/Makes me wish that I was dead.”
Now that track is among those included on a compilation album, Richard Clapton: The Definitive Anthology. The record is a welcome reminder of his talents, and a return to visibility. “Much to my surprise,” Clapton says, “since this thing’s been available, a lot of my mates in radio have been
raving about this song … (saying) this should be the new national anthem.”
The album is Clapton’s first since Angeltown in 1996. But it’s unlikely to be his last. He says he has 12 new songs in the bag and plans for an album of fresh material. “Quite frankly, this album is designed to make me some money,” he says. “`It’s certainly not a swansong.”
But for all the renewed promise in his 50th year (his 27th in the music industry), there is a lingering sense of disenchantment. Clapton says he has twice failed to secure Federal Government funding in recent years, and charges the Australia Council with an “obsession with the classical arts
and complete rejection of contemporary artists, in music anyway”.
“I applied for two grants with a friend of mine who’s an author and made a really good submission and they just weren’t interested,” Clapton says. “In other words, they don’t regard me as having any cultural validity at all. We just got a blank response. Well, no response, really.
“We had a meeting with them and I could tell they weren’t familiar with my material. Nor did they want to be. It was like, `you’re a pop singer; why would you want to be here?”‘
Not so, says Lancia Jordana, the Australia Council’s public affairs manager. She believes Clapton applied for the highly contested $60,000 annual music award – which attracts up to 1000 applicants – in years in which it was awarded to jazz saxophonist Bernie McGann and classical composer
Brenton Broadstock, who was writing for big bands.
She denies any reluctance to look at funding of popular music. “Our music fund funds all types of music,” she says, “all genres.” She says the likes of Max Sharam, Regurgitator, Christine Anu and Yothu Yindi have benefited from Australia Council grants. “We do fund rock and pop as well
as classical and jazz and whatever.”
Jordana adds that Clapton is “considered very highly and so were his applications. He’s obviously an outstanding Australian contemporary musician who’s had a long history of contribution in his field.”
In the West Melbourne offices of his label Warner, Clapton settles back behind a desk. He’s a small man with a mane of black hair. He’s wearing a black singlet beneath a black leather jacket, but as the photographer begins to click he makes a minor adjustment. “Sorry, I must put my shades
on, otherwise no one will recognise me.”
The voice is deep and as dark as his get-up. When we last spoke three years ago, he’d installed recording equipment in his Queensland home, found 20 investors to finance Angeltown and arranged to have it distributed through Village Roadshow. It was a bold attempt at a different kind of
independent music, a bid to reach a broad audience without a label, but it wasn’t a success.
“There’s no Australian musician young or old,” he said back then by way of explaining his motivation, “or you can count them on one hand, who are actually earning any kind of living … I’m just scraping by week to week. And, being married with children, it makes life almost impossible.”
Now he thinks he was a little naive to believe he could operate outside the industry. “Had this been the ’70s,” he says, “I’d be freaking out about Angeltown because I am fiercely proud of that album. I think some of those songs are the best I’ve ever written. But in my mature years, I can see
that this is just the way life is. You can paint your masterpiece, but if you don’t have the business side of things and the commercial considerations together, well, forget it.”
Still, it comes as a surprise to hear, just days before the ARIA awards, that he has been trying to persuade his record company to buy him a suit for the occasion.
He subsequently decided against a suit, but Clapton thinks it would have been a nice gesture all the same.”Because, say, for example with Girls On The Avenue, from 100 per cent they (the record company) deduct 10 per cent for packaging the vinyl. So then I was on five per cent (his royalty)
of 90 per cent. And that ain’t a lot of money. Not in Australia.”
There’s a certain logic in Clapton’s concern for the nexus between art and commerce: he once intended to become a commercial artist. “I wanted to be a graphic designer. I went to London. I got myself a job in arts studios there as a junior artist. I’d go to school at night.”
But somewhere along the line he developed a different passion. “I was becoming more and more obsessed with Bob Dylan’s music,” he recalls. “I used to have one of those old-fashioned record-players and I’d just put myself to sleep with Blonde on Blonde. It just totally swept me away. After
being quite determined that I’d chosen my vocation in life, I found myself losing interest in my day job and I started mucking around.”
Clapton cites the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Poco as influences. (He’s been told he sounds like Van Morrison, but while he had enjoyed the Belfast-born singer’s early work with Them, he didn’t hear his solo albums until the late 1970s.)
Clapton fronted rock bands in England and Germany before returning to Australia in the early 1970s. He’d come back almost penniless. The only work available was as a solo performer on the folk circuit.
He released his first album, Prussian Blue, to critical acclaim in 1972. “However, despite all my great reviews, that album did about 2500 units and then I was read the riot act. That was my first lesson about art and commerce. `Either you come up with a hit single or we’re going to pull the
plug on you, boy’.”
One way or another, it’s a lesson he’s never stopped learning.
The Sunday Age, 17th of October 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 