Nick Ryan: Why I’m bucking the trend on Daryl Braithwaite’s Horses

When it comes to our strange fondness for belting out Daryl Braithwaite’s Horses, Nick Ryan prefers to buck the trend. Do you agree it’s our worst Aussie ‘anthem’?

It’s hard to pin down the notion of nations, that intangible bond that links disparate people and tells them they’re countrymen. In some places it’s a bond forged by historical hardship, in others it’s adherence to a big political idea.

In Australia it’s an inexplicable fondness for cheesy soft rock.

And it’s got to stop.

Can we please, PLEASE, stop with all this Horses rubbish. It never was a good song and it’s certainly not improved by mass-scale choral conformity.

One voice belting out Horses is an abomination. Thousands belting it out is a crime against humanity.

Horses mania reached its apogee recently when Harry Styles decided to play the song as part of his Hormone Overload Australian tour.

Harry Styles and Daryl Braithwaite in Sydney.

You can just imagine the conversation with his minders when that decision was made.

“Hey Harry, sure, the stadium is full of teenage girls who adore you but if you sing this confected piece of crap written long before any of them were born, they’ll absolutely lose their minds.

“And if you wheel out the old bloke who originally sang it, a guy these girls’ grandmothers thought was a hunk of spunk, you’ll get blanket coverage in every newspaper in the country because the weird Australian obsession with this song has become a bit of a thing.”

Horses mania is the most significant outbreak of a peculiarly Australian need for collective connection through rubbish songs.

Like everyone in the pub dropping their daks when Eagle Rock comes on the jukebox, or mobs of boozed-up blokes belting out the lyrics to a song about a Vietnam veteran with PTSD and a penchant for Chinese prostitutes.

The desire for connection is fundamental. Our brains need it and our hearts want it. In Australia we use our tin ears to get it.

The great mystery is why this bobbing turd of a tune brings so many people together. Pedants love to point out Daryl Braithwaite’s recording of the song is actually a cover of Rikki Lee Jones’ original.

Now if we’d co-opted her best tune, Chuck E’s in Love, this might all be different. But instead we bellow Horses, a tune Jones co-wrote with Walter Becker. Becker was in Steely Dan and for those lucky enough to have no idea who they are, imagine cocaine transformed into soundwaves played through a 1970s hi-fi while you sit in a beanbag filled with pellets of self-loathing and regret. That’s Steely Dan.

Some call Becker a genius. I don’t, but he may have stumbled on a songwriting technique that taps directly into brains of drunken Australians and their need for repetition, affirmation and instruction.

From its halfway point Horses is nothing more than a chorus repeated five times. It doesn’t take a lot of mental capacity to remember that.

Especially when most of it consists of just shouting “Yeah, yeah”.

And then, when the drinking that led to the singing finally knocks you off your feet, the song directs your companions to “Lift you up”.

This is what some are calling our de-facto national anthem. But even that tedious dirge of an official anthem has to be better than this.

These Horses need to go to the knackery.