Still riding high at 71, Horses legend Daryl Braithwaite will kick on … Reyne or shine
Daryl Braithwaite has been flogging The Horses since 1991 — now the singer has a popular new hit in Love Songs, his first single in seven years.
When Daryl Braithwaite’s iconic 1991 hit single The Horses made an appearance in the grand finale of Nine Network talent show The Voice at the weekend, younger ears could be forgiven for thinking that the veteran Australian singer’s career began and ended with a song that pivots on an irresistibly equine refrain, little darlin’.
Such a naive condensation of a life’s work would do Braithwaite a massive disservice, of course: his work with rock band Sherbet spanned 1970 to 1984, while as a solo performer he has notched up seven full-length releases, including his most recent album, 2013’s Forever the Tourist.
Newer hits had been hard to come by, though, until his recent single Love Songs: since its release in early June, the hook-laden track — said to be originally intended for US pop singer Pink — has amassed more than half a million plays on Spotify alone, and also found airplay on commercial radio. Not bad for a bloke who hadn’t released new music in seven years.
Still, the remarkable staying power of The Horses — written by US musicians Rickie Lee Jones and Walter Becker — exemplifies the fickle nature of pop culture, where certain songs can spark so bright that they can outshine all that came before and all that might come after.
Braithwaite himself does not bemoan how the chips have fallen: better to have one massive hit than none at all.
Its enduring popularity has undoubtedly helped keep him in the public eye: in November 2017 he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame — guess which song he played at the ceremony? — and at the end of the same year he was booked to play at the youth-centric Falls Festival across NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, alongside much cooler acts such as Flume, Glass Animals, Liam Gallagher and Vince Staples.
In concert, The Horses has been known to balloon well beyond the four-minute running time of the studio version, a fact which has not escaped the attention of the singer’s friend and fellow performer James Reyne. “I once gave Daryl an hourglass because I clocked The Horses at 17 minutes one night,” Reyne told The Australian. “Come on — that’s just outrageous. I had to get a broom and start sweeping the stage while he was doing it.”
Braithwaite loves this sort of cheeky banter; the pair also have a running joke of phoning each other whenever they hear each others’ songs while out in public, such as at the supermarket, to reinforce the fact that the other bloke’s career is now over.
“He’s the only one ever to have called it absolutely shameless, what I do with that song and how I get people to sing,” said Braithwaite with a laugh. “And so, over the last couple of years, I’ve cut it back from the longest version, which I think was 12 or 13 minutes. Since he berated many times over the last couple of years, I’ve cut it back to about five minutes, so I’ve taken that on board and the shamelessness has disappeared.”
“He just takes the piss out of me mercilessly,” he said with a laugh. “At the Caloundra Music Festival, I was on stage and James was up in the high-rise building where the artists were staying, and I could see him looking at his watch, tapping his wrist and going, ‘Come on!’”
At 71, and with a new hit under his belt in Love Songs, Braithwaite is certainly giving the impression that wild horses couldn’t drag him away from giving his many fans one more chorus refrain, for old time’s sake.