Adam Briggs on taking the shot to pay tribute to Archie Roach

With The Children Came Back, hip-hop artist Adam Briggs wrote the chapter that followed Archie Roach’s landmark 1990 Stolen Generations song.

Author, hip-hop artist and actor Adam Briggs. Picture: Jane Dempster

In the Spotlight section of this edition, I interview hip-hop artist and actor Adam Briggs, whose debut children’s book, Our Home, Our Heartbeat, is based on the lyrics to a song he recorded in 2014. When we spoke this week, I asked what spurred the original idea for the track, and Briggs replied: “Triple J’s Like A Version [series], for real. The conventions of that is you get contacted maybe a couple of weeks in advance and asked if you can do it, then I had 10 days to write a song. It was NAIDOC Week, and I wrote The Children Came Back as a compliment to Archie Roach’s [1990 single] Took the Children Away, because at the end of the song he says ‘the children came back’. So I wondered what the next song – the sequel – would be.

“And also, I was real mindful that people don’t normally get the roses while they can still smell them,” Briggs continued. “I really wanted to make sure that Archie knew how important his song was for helping people heal. How do I take this song, compliment Arch and put some light on him, and give NAIDOC Week a bit of an anthem? There wasn’t just formalities, flag-raisings and luncheons; there was something a bit more tangible for kids to enjoy. At that point, too, I don’t think I’d ever done a song without swearing in it, so we were all learning that week.”

As for showing The Children Came Back to Roach before it went live on national radio, and on YouTube shortly thereafter? Briggs didn’t. “I decided to go out on a limb here: either he’s going to love it, or I’m going to beg for forgiveness,” he said with a laugh. “I think I can do this justice, and have it pay off. It was a buzzer-beater: we had to knock this shot down in two weeks.”

There’s no doubting that Briggs and his collaborators – including his late friend, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, who played guitar and sang on the original Like A Version recording and the 2015 single release – hit that shot. Evidently, his response to the 1990 song made an impression on the original songwriter, as Roach made a complimentary guest appearance on the opening track of Reclaim Australia, the award-winning 2016 debut album by A.B. Original, a hip-hop duo composed of Briggs and Trials.

As for when that duo might re-emerge with new music? “We have stuff in the bank, but it’s just not right yet, and we’ll know when it’s right,” Briggs told me. “The last one happened by such an accident. We just don’t make stuff because we have to put out an album to follow up that album – f..k that. We put stuff out when we feel like it; when we’re making something that says something. That’s what A.B. Original is about.”

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