Braithwaite rises again
KATHY MCCABE IN the middle of singing The Horses at a university gig last week, Daryl Braithwaite placed his hand on the head of a female student in the front row and her friends screamed.
The ear-piercing reaction was a scene the 68-year-old had seen play out at every Sherbet gig through the 1970s and early 1980s.
But it has become familiar again in the past decade as Braithwaite enjoys a renaissance afforded rock’n’roll survivors whose hits have stamped themselves on the DNA of Australian music fans.
Like John Farnham’s The Voice and Jimmy Barnes’ Working Class Man, The Horses has become Braithwaite’s talisman, a song which continues to bring him good fortune 27 years after it made its way to No.1 on the Australian charts.
That song, along with solo hits including Rise, One Summer, As Days Go By and Higher Than Hope, is the impetus behind Braithwaite’s induction to the ARIA Hall of Fame on Tuesday, 27 years after Sherbet were accorded that honour.
Braithwaite doesn’t know why teenagers and twentysomethings now make up a sizeable proportion of the audience at the 140 gigs he performs each year.
But there they are, singing their lungs out in the pubs and clubs, or at the Cox Plate, where he has become a fixture, or the Parliamentary Friends Of Music gig in March when MPs and staffers lost their proverbial when he performed.
Braithwaite loves it. He kids his younger audiences when he introduces that other big gun in his setlist, Sherbet’s Howzat, that none of them were born when it came out in 1975 on “a big black bit of vinyl that you put on a record player”. It’s that classic rocker dad joke.
His appeal with the millennials has been confirmed with his name on the bill for the annual Falls Festival over the New Year in Byron Bay, Lorne, Marion Bay and Fremantle.
The reaction to Braithwaite playing Falls was almost universally positive on social media, with many of the young festivalgoers nominating it as one of the sets to watch alongside Flume, Peking Duk, Angus and Julia Stone, Alex Lahey and the Jungle Giants.
“All I pick up from them in the 30 to 40 minutes that we play is interest, which is the No.1 thing,” he said. “They are engaged. And they look really, really happy,” he said.
“When I get them to sing, put the mic out to the crowd, they love that during One Summer or As Days Go By. I think they love the competition of it or something like that.
“And then of course you hit The Horses and that’s when it’s total engagement. And that’s their reward. They look really happy hearing it and singing it, some had their phones going but others were just singing. You can’t ask for more.
“I tend to think the audiences sing more now than in the Sherbet days. I remember they did sing songs then but they probably did get in a scream over it. Now they probably scream because they think I am being stupid.”
There was a huge appetite for Braithwaite as a solo artist even before he left Sherbet – his debut solo single You’re My World hit No.1 in 1974 – and he hit the ground running when the band split with the Edge album in 1988 and then Rise in 1990, the biggest-selling album in Australia that year.
But his career was derailed in 1992 when his managers, Simon Fenner and Nathan Brenner, took him to court claiming he owed them $600,000 in fees.
The case went for seven weeks, and while the compensation was whittled down to $60,000, Braithwaite was cleaned out by the legal costs.
It is the only regret of his career but a lesson learnt.
With the assistance of his agents, Frank Stivala and John Starr, Braithwaite managed to resurrect his fortunes as a touring act, growing his audience. And those corporate gigs where even he is shocked people will pay “thousands and thousands of dollars” to hear him perform one or two songs.
Braithwaite will undoubtedly play The Horses to mark his Hall of Fame induction at the ARIA awards in Sydney on Tuesday.
He regards the honour fondly and jokes it is bestowed on singers by their peers in recognition of ‘‘you’ve done enough ... and you’ve been around long enough”.
“I’m appreciative of it. It’s still the people that I love. I see people who went to Sherbet shows are still coming to gigs and they sing it loud and then I see the 30 and 40 year olds who have filtered the love of these songs down to the twenty-somethings,” he said.
“I see that and it’s ‘Oh my god’. I picked the right profession and it’s all a bit of a fluke I reckon. And that probably applies to a lot of us. I’ve been fortunate.” Braithwaite’s greatest hits album
is out now. The ARIA Awards are broadcast on Nine on Tuesday from 7.30pm.