Daryl Braithwaite reflects on his millennial fans and his greatest regret ahead of ARIA Awards
HE’S a rock survivor who’s seen it all. Now, as Daryl Braithwaite prepares to join the ARIA Hall of Fame, the music legend looks back on his career — and reveals his biggest regret.
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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, originally recorded by Rickie Lee Jones, 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, are 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 twenty somethings now make up a sizeable proportion of his 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 for the past five years or so where he has become a fixture. Or at the Parliamentary Friends Of Music gig in March when MPs and staffers lost their proverbial when he performed.
He has no clue why there was a social media campaign earlier this year for him to perform The Horses as Australia’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest.
His 32-year-old son Oscar has a theory. He tells his father he is a meme sensation courtesy of his “Oh what a feeling!” style jump on the beach during the song’s unforgettable video.
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.
“We did two gigs that night, one for a corporate thing and the other at a hotel in Collins St for Monash Uni. It didn’t start until 10.30pm. At 10.15pm, no one is there, 10.20pm people start to walk in and by 10.30pm, there was about 400 and they were all about 18 to 20 and listened to 40 minutes of us, songs like Howzat,” he says.
“By the time we got Horses, it was nuts. I saw this young girl up the front, taking photos and texting or posting them and I touched her on the head and all her girlfriends screamed. Oh my god. It was funny and really endearing.”
After more reflection, Braithwaite suggests this new generation of fans have joined his staunch constituency of 60 and 70-year-olds, faces he recognises have been in his audience since the halcyon days when Sherbet was the biggest band in the country, because they love to sing.
And his shows make them happy. Simple as that.
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. They are not talking backwards from the stage, 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 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 playing packed houses almost every weekend.
And those corporate gigs where even Braithwaite is shocked people will pay “thousands and thousands of dollars” to hear him perform one or two songs.
“The court case was really sh ... y. It was unexpected and a bit of a soul destroyer in the end and a lot of money went out to the law fraternity,” he said.
“I’ve got a criminal barrister friend who says they sometimes still bring up the case in discussion over beers: ‘How did it go for seven weeks?’ Seven weeks.
“I’m still friends with Simon Fenner. Nathan Brenner, I’ve had nothing to do with him since then. That was a lesson learnt and since then, I haven’t entertained the thought of management … I don’t think I’ll go there. I have two agents who are very good who I trust.”
Braithwaite laughs when asked if he regrets the infamous Lewis Morley shot of Sherbet in 1972 in the nude.
It is most definitely meme worthy 45 years later.
“I thought you’d forgotten about that,” he said.
“People on my Facebook keep finding it and posting it. ‘How good is this?’ ‘Do you believe they did this in the nude?’ Of course I’ve seen it so many times.”
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 years old who have filtered the love of these songs down to the 20 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.”
His greatest hits album Days Go By is out now. The ARIA Awards are broadcast on Nine on Tuesday from 7.30pm.