Larry Schwartz
He’s been abused and derided for years. So why does Kamahl still call Australia home? KANDIAH KAMALESVARAN glances up at the rear-view mirror. “What are you laughing at?” the bass baritone voice demands of a club stage manager in the back seat. The question is uttered without
malice or anger.
At the wheel of a large white sedan, cruising from his Gold Coast hotel into the Queensland night, Kamahl is careful not to over-extend the vocal chords that have brought him celebrity, wealth, accolades from royalty and adulation, if not always the acceptance he craves.
Ever wary since a scare in 1992 when he thought he might never sing again, he has little to say as we make our way towards the industrial town of Ipswich. He will sing for charity at a mayoral function in a civic centre, a far cry from the spotlight that has bathed him at the London Palladium,
The Talk of the Town and New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Though he excused himself from conversation in the car until after the show, the Malaysian-born singer of Sri Lankan descent cannot resist dipping into his past, back to the early years in Adelaide where a pharmacist uncle sent him to complete his schooling in 1954.
“I think the Australians at the time, they looked at Asian students as aliens. We could have been Martians. They hadn’t seen anybody like us.”
At the mention of the word “martians” Brian Lloyd, a stage manager seated in the back, laughs, prompting Kamahl to ask what is so funny.
He saw no humor then. He sees none now.
The laughter stops. Kamahl continues: “… Especially the Sikh students with the turbans. We created a lot of interest. We used to go into the city on weekends to play cricket or hockey and people would just stop and stare.”
The son of a Kuala Lumpur railways clerk, he would delight his Adelaide friends by singing at parties, though he was so shy he had them switch off the light before he would start. He remembers the taunts of children who threw stones at the dark youth he was then. “I mean, kids would do
it even now if something very foreign appeared all of a sudden. Then, they would hide behind fences and throw.”
Nor has he forgotten stilted conversations with shop assistants.
“People used to gesture words thinking that I couldn’t understand.”
There was a back-handed compliment when an elderly woman told him after a show a few years ago that she was glad to meet him because her son-in-law was Malaysian: “In other words, there is a possibility of being intelligent or reasonably intelligent. She feels secure that we didn’t come
off the trees or something.”
Then there were the professional jibes. “They never expected … I never expected to enjoy the kind of success that I have enjoyed both here and overseas. It’s the Australian way. They have to knock it.
They have to make a joke about it. They would put an Indian accent on or they would use black jokes and, like with `The Elephant Song’ (his 1975 hit), they would make jokes about elephants.”
Also travelling with him to Ipswich is pianist and musical director Mike Harvey. “He is unique, an icon,” says Harvey. “There is probably no one in Australia who doesn’t know who Kamahl is. There’s not many entertainers you can say that about.”
At the Civic Centre in Ipswich, Kamahl is the big star on a bill that includes prancing schoolchildren in tights and tassels, cowboy hats and skin-tight skirts. There’s a less than convincing Elvis-and-others impersonator, a tweed-jacketed bard reciting a modified `Man from Snowy River’.
Veteran showbiz identity Issi Dye sings while a dance duo whirls.
So that he can get away early, Kamahl has asked to close the first half. Because the show is running late, he gives an abbreviated performance. At first, the microphone won’t work. When it does, the majesty of a voice that years ago made the finals of an opera contest, fills the hall.
He is introduced to the crowd at the Ipswich Lord Mayor’s Command Performance as a “national ambassador” for the Variety Club, which is to benefit from the event. It is just another in a long association with charity work around the country.
During the performance, he tells the audience he is an “FBA” – A Foreign-Born Australian – and dedicates a song to the “FDAs” in the audience – the Fair Dinkum Australians.
It is an arguably trite but no doubt sincere paean to his adopted country. Its “proud and smiling faces”, the “g’day and the handshake”, the sense of freedom. The words of Banjo Paterson, Dorothea Mackellar and Henry Lawson. The achievement of Robert de Castella, Sir Donald Bradman.
“Yes I love the sunburnt country, so vital young and free … that’s Australia to me.”
After the show, a teenage girl comes to tell him she shed a tear or two at a monologue called `To a Sleeping Beauty’, in which an anguished father watches his daughter reach adulthood. Did he have Rani, his daughter, in mind? Yes, of course. Well-wishers fill the tiny dressing room. Then
it’s time to embrace the family of a retired boxer who wept when he heard Kamahl sing `Danny Boy’ here 23 years ago and has come to every show since.
IT has been a long day. That morning in the Seagulls rugby club’s Stardust auditorium, Kamahl got his biggest laughs when jesting about the color of his skin. “Don’t get nervous,” he tells his crowd after suggesting an old hit would be a great anthem for the environmental
movement. “I’m not here to solicit support for the greenie movement.
I have enough problems being a brownie.” (Lots of laughter.) He recalls being asked to sign his name alongside other celebrities at a function some years ago to open Sydney’s Pier One. “I looked at some of the previous people. They were lords and ladies and knights of the realm. And putting
just Kamahl there looked so naked. So I put Kamahl OBE, Ordinary Brown Entertainer.”
Later, in the dressing room he would dismiss the greenies-brownies jest as “maybe a Freudian release”. “It’s like when I was in Adelaide they used to call me Persil, a white soap powder. Oh sure it cuts deep. But it’s there. You carry on. I mean, you don’t carry a chip on your shoulder.”
An Australian icon, Kamahl nevertheless comes across as a man caught between the cold shoulder and the warmth of the national embrace.
Delighted to receive an Order of Australia this year, he is still hurt over the rejection of two songs (and with it, his participation) by the organisers of a Bicentenary concert in 1988. “The producer wrote back and said that it was a parody and they didn’t need anything like that.”
BUSLOADS have converged on the Stardust auditorium and club officials put the attendance figure at 1100. Predictably for a morning show, most are elderly. “God’s waiting room,” a staffer mutters.
In a sense, the entertainers are live bait, drawing crowds to the poker machines, where attendance has fallen since pokies were introduced in Queensland over a year ago.
The $5 show has two sets and brackets an hour-long break when some head for the pokies, some remain in their seats and others queue at a bistro. The lucky few have pink carnations handed out by the singer.
What do they think of Kamahl? “A very sincere man” (Mrs Melva Tyler, from Bordertown, South Australia, here with retired builder/carpenter husband, Max, both in their 60s). “He’s very well-groomed and speaks very beautifully” (Mrs Moya Hayes, in her 70s, from Mermaid Beach).
“A sensational voice” (Mrs Ruby Johnson, of Broadbeach, also in her 70s).
“I’d go a long way to see and hear him,” says retired gardener John O’Connor, from Beechworth, Victoria, with his wife, Lorna. In their mid-60s, they have a bush band at home.
A 48-year-old woman who attends every show she can, travelled on an overnight coach for six hours from Bundaberg to Brisbane, then another two hours to Tweed Heads. “I think it’s his total sincerity,” says the woman, a nursing sister, who also listens to Rolf Harris and Danny La Rue. “He
believes in the songs he sings.”
The singer’s style is closest to the cabaret of 1950s crooners made to seem irrelevant by the force and aggression of rock’n’roll. Once caftaned and barefooted, he goes through a succession of wardrobe changes. Italian jackets by Trussardi and Zegna. Crimson ‘kerchief in the pocket. A sterling
silver English bowtie. Australian-made shoes by Bernard. Stones sparkle on a K-shaped ring on one finger. During the break, he dons a brightly colored silk mini-caftan he says retails for about $2500.
Kamahl is well aware that his deep-voiced mix of oldies and didactic, spoken lyric on themes including the virtues of enduring love, marriage, nationalism and fatherhood present only a stylised, partial view of the world.
“I think there are two worlds. One is an ideal world where we should all have the communistic principle to share. The level playing field and help the have-nots. The other is the real world which is a really cruel, ugly world. In many respects it’s a beautiful world but cruel in many aspects.
And it is survival of the fittest with greed and hunger for power.”
By his own admission, he embodies in his shows a perfect, harmonious idyll of local, domestic romance. The show climaxes with a stirring `The Holy City’ with the audience joining him in song. “Jer-oo-salem, Jeroo-salem.”
For a moment it seems as much a religious event as cabaret. “Music can bring out the best and the worst in people,” he says in the dressing room afterwards. “You have examples of that in modern-day pop music. You have destructive elements that lead you to tear up and destroy. At the
same time, it can lift you out of this world into a better world.”
He puts his own work in the latter category: “It’s kind of a dream time, you know.”
To outsiders, this onstage dream may seem to tally with the life we imagine he leads. At home in a blue-ribbon suburb on Sydney’s North Shore, he has a Seychelles-blue Rolls-Royce. In the garden is a white magnolia tree, the title of one of the spoken songs he intones. But he was never
handed this world on a platter. “Who is it that said that between five and 15 is the crucible of your life? Everything else is an outcome of that. In that case, I had not a happy childhood.”
Close to midnight in the car heading back to a plush hotel room, he muses, “I think in some ways the environment that I grew up in handed me a lemon and I found a peculiar way to make lemonade out of it”.
Kamahl has been in the studio recording a double CD including six new songs, tentatively called `The Platinum Collection’. Most of his 33 albums have gone gold or platinum though, he says, it’s vulgar to talk of this. He’d rather think in terms of the people who listen to his songs, he says.
A small group of women wait after the show to buy a 25th anniversary video of their star, wait for autographs and snapshots in the dark auditorium. Backstage, he had been given a teaspoon as a gift.
Unsolicited and sometimes extravagant gifts from fans include a candelabra valued by Christies at 20,000.
ASK him about his relationship with his son, Rajan, 25, and 23-year- old daughter, Rani, and he relates it to an old Harry Chapin song about a father too busy for his son. “Later,” the father says when the son wants his time. “Later,” says the son, by then a young man, when the father at last
has time.
“The kids missed out a lot when they were growing up because at that period he was travelling a lot more than he is doing now,” says his Fijian-born wife, Sahodra, a nursing sister who has taken time to be with her husband on the Gold Coast, though
she rarely attends his performances.
“I get nervous. When he’s travelling on tours there’s so much pressure all the time that I can’t relax.” She believes some fans would rather she was not around. She tells of a dinner held by a fan who had become a friend. “She started introducing Kamahl to everyone.
Someone said, `What about Sahodra?’ She said, `She is only his wife.”‘ Over room-service snacks at his hotel, Kamahl explains how an exclusive deal to sell through BP service stations helped the 1970 record, `Peace on Earth’, on its way to 15 gold records in three weeks.
Disappointed in the early 1970s at a lack of interest, despite an appearance on a TV show hosted by Harry Secombe, he would spend more than 20,000 of his money a few years later to hire the London Palladium. The gamble paid off. Soon afterwards he was hired to play the Talk of the Town
and won several engagements in Europe.
`The Elephant Song’ topped the charts in New Zealand and several European countries including Holland (for six weeks). “When it was number one the first week, second week, third week, I used to rush out and get the Dutch newspapers to see how it was
doing,” he tells the morning crowd. “I’d see the song was number one. Underneath it was Rod Stewart. Elton John. The Rolling Stones. Those were the days, huh?” He has been on a Bob Hope TV spectacular and the comedian is a friend.
There was a 1982 performance for the Queen, appearances at Carnegie Hall, tours of America and Canada. “A truly great entertainer,” says a revolving sign in the entrance to the New South Wales league club hosting him for the third time in 12 months.
Earlier this year, he was surprised that a Labor Government would award him the Order of Australia because, he says, he has been “painted with a Liberal brush”. While almost every other entertainer came out in favor of Gough Whitlam in 1972, he says that, naively motivated by a friendship
with Sir William and Lady McMahon, he lent his voice to Liberal rallies. He says party politics are divisive.
Kamahl includes among his friends Rupert Murdoch, without whose intervention he says he would probably have been deported in the early 1960s because he had outstayed a student visa. He says Sir Joh Bjelke- Petersen, who regularly attended Brisbane shows, once promised him a
knighthood if he would make Queensland home. He has maintained a warm correspondence with Sir Donald Bradman in recent years.
At times, there seems a sense of wonder at the success that has come his way since he came here 40 years ago. He laughs at the irony of being welcomed as an entertainer in an exclusive club in Kuala Lumpur in the early 1980s where he could not set foot as a boy. He marvels that he sat
drinking tea in a palace last Christmas with the Netherlands’ Prince Bernhardt “and he is almost like a friend”.
However humbling some of the venues, and even though his schedule is less hectic than ever, he feels compelled to perform. “It is the feeling that you belong and somebody wants you.”
He says as a child he felt second-class as a Sri Lankan in Malaysia.
To make matters worse, he fell for the colonial rhetoric he cites, that to be born British was to have “won a first-class ticket in the lottery of life”. The singer talks of “a deep layer of insecurity and inferiority complex”.
To sit among the crowd at one of his shows and hear the loud applause, you might think he has all the reassurance he might want. Not quite, says Kamahl. “The kind of childhood I had, there is an almost underlying but overwhelming desire to be accepted. I don’t think anybody rejects that.
But we have different amounts of what we want.
Enough is not enough. Plenty is not enough sometimes.”
THE SUNDAY AGE, 21st of August 1994
Larry Schwartz Writer 