Nathan Davies: Daryl, it’s time to put The Horses out to pasture

Somehow a song with nonsense lyrics about flying horses is an Aussie anthem, but it’s nowhere near as good as Khe Sanh or You’re the Voice. Let’s retire this tune once and for all, writes Nathan Davies.

Makybe Diva, having won three Melbourne Cups, is loving retirement in a green paddock outside of Scone in the Hunter Valley.

Black Caviar, undefeated in 25 races, likewise spends her days eating grass and producing the odd expensive foals.

There is one Australian equine icon, however, that refuses to gracefully retire and that’s Daryl Braithwaite’s pseudo national anthem The Horses.

On Monday night the ABC dusted off Daz for yet another rendition, this time to see in the new year.

They’d put the midnight song out to popular vote, and would have barely hesitated to bet my house on the fact that the good people of Australia were gonna tick the box for The Horses. It’s the Songy McSongface of Oz rock.

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Daryl, who virtually everyone agrees is one of the nicest people in music, barely even bothers to sing it these days, preferring instead to point his microphone at the Iron Jack and chardonnay-fuelled crowd and let them karaoke the crap out of it.

Now I’m no Horses hater, it’s an undeniably catchy little pop song, but how on earth did it become our national song and is it time for Daryl to Makybe Diva that thing and put it out to pasture? (A: I’m not sure, and B: definitely yes.)

Daryl Braithwaite’s hit The Horses was voted in as the song to be played at midnight as the new year ticked over. Picture: supplied

First, a little history lesson. The Horses was written by Rickie Lee Jones, the US singer most famous in Oz for AM radio standard Chuck E.’s In Love, and Walter Becker from Steely Dan, possibly the only mainstream rock act named after a sex toy.

Appearing on Jones’s 1989 album Flying Cowboys, The Horses was never released as a single but it did find its way onto the soundtrack of Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire (“who’s coming with me, show me the money, did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?”)

It also found its way onto the CD player of one Daryl Braithwaite, former frontman of Oz pop heroes Sherbet.

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The singer was enjoying a massive comeback after a post-Sherbet slump that at one point had seen him working on council road gangs.

When he heard The Horses he heard a potential hit, something that could be given similar production to One Summer or As The Days Go By.

And he was dead right, with The Horses going straight to number one in 1991, aided and abetted by a film-clip featuring model Gillian Mather in a clingy white shirt lip-synching the backing vocals actually recorded by Kiwi-born singer Margaret Urlich.

Audiences are now providing the majority of the vocals every time Daryl Braithwaite sings his equine hit. Picture: supplied

So Daz gets a number one, Rickie and Walt get cut a massive cheque and the world moves on. Except it doesn’t.

For some reason, more than 20 years after its release, the song is adopted by Hawthorn Football Club.

Hawks coach Alastair Clarkson says: “It really tracks back to Goo (Brent Guerra). We had a really stirring victory here (Perth) in early 2013 and it was Gooey’s favourite song so he belted it out after the game and it’s become a little bit of a tradition when we have a really good interstate win we get Horses going.”

From there it re-embeds itself firmly into the Australian Zeitgeist and becomes a singalong anthem for self-conscious mock bogans (fauxgans?) to half-ironically/half-seriously belt out at the races before they sober up and realise they’ve blown the rent money on a longshot in race nine and half a bag of fake cocaine.

Before Horses you could probably argue John Farnham’s You’re the Voice was our pseudo anthem. Like Horses it has a lighter-aloft singalong chorus, but unlike Horses it has reasonably meaningful lyrics.

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Daryl Braithwaite singing The Horses at the Moonee Valley racetrack. Picture: Lawrence Pinder

Before You’re the Voice it was Chisel’s Khe Sanh, a song that doesn’t have a chorus at all but is certainly worthy of anthem title thanks to Don Walker’s incredible writing.

Even Daryl seems perplexed by the rise and rise of The Horses, recently saying, “It’s been smouldering I think for the last 10 years that I’ve noticed it, but there’s no rhyme or reason as to why, I don’t know.”

He’s also hinted that he’d like to move on.

“I still love it, and I still love performing it and the reaction that it gets,” he said after releasing a hits compilation last year.

“I just wanted to take the pressure off it [The Horses] a little bit. Hopefully, now this album’s out, I can look ahead to doing something new or something a little different. I’ve gotta make sure that I don’t get caught resting on my laurels.”

Good mate James Reyne agrees. “Every spring racing carnival, he gets 84 bloody gigs and the song’s not even actually about horses!”

Daryl, we love you. We loved Sherbet, we loved your solo stuff and we love you as a bloke. But next time somebody rings up and says, “can you come along and play Horses?” just say no. Tell them Horses is in the good paddock, where it should be. Play Howzat instead.

Nathan Davies is the music writer for The Adelaide Advertiser.

@nathandavies1