Joe Camilleri: ‘I didn’t even know what racism was’
Confessional Q+A: The ARIA Hall of Fame-inducted frontman of The Black Sorrows on joy, vegetarianism, money and good luck charms.
Joe Camilleri, 76, is an ARIA Hall of Fame-inducted singer, songwriter, saxophonist and frontman of blues-rock band The Black Sorrows, who has recently released his 55th career album.
My good luck charm… is a honky tonk piano that’s been with me for 40 years. I will never tune this bloody piano; it’s brought me a lot of luck, so every time I move house, it gets a little bit worse, but I just won’t do it. You hear those stories about people not changing their undies while they’re playing the grand final and that kind of nonsense? It’s kind of a dumb-arse thing, but the piano has that for me.
The first money I ever earned… was at the slaughter yards, aged 12 and a half. Imagine this: you’re really small and really thin, got no hairs on your balls, and you’re doing a man’s job. All of a sudden you’re getting man’s wages, and they give you clothes with boots every morning of every day, and you do what you’re told to do: washing down things, putting meat in packets and boxes, and cutting off bits from dead animals, and packaging it up. And you have to deal with all the racism that went with it; I didn’t even know what racism was. You’d have to physically fight for your spot, and there was no mercy there. You didn’t need no education for that job. That was my introduction to work, and I did that for about two years.
Did it affect my attitude toward eating meat? Not really. I’ve been a vegetarian, and I’ve been a non-vegetarian; I just seem to like non-animal products more. But as a 76-year-old, I realise now, your muscles are shrinking, and therefore you’ve got to think about how you get your protein. I was a vegan for about four years, but I found there was a lack of energy for me, for what I do. I’ve started introducing meat in my diet again, just to get all the nutritional values that I need for whatever’s left of my life.
My philosophy on money… I respect money on different levels. It can do a lot of things, but it can’t bring joy if you don’t have joy. You’ve got to have joy inside you. The record I’ve just made cost me quite a lot of money, because I always do everything the right way: I pay people properly. I pay for everything that comes with it, and you’ve got to earn it. I understand the value of things, but I don’t worship it. In fact, I hate talking about money. It’s not an attractive subject for me. Some people think that that kind of power gives them a certain kind of right, and that f..ks me up. I wish we could do better things without it.
The hardest thing about juggling parenting and a career in the performing arts is… That I didn’t know how to do it. It’s one of my sad things in life, really. I was going to be nothin’, but you when you get a shot of being somethin’, or somebody, you have to sacrifice a whole bunch of different things, and you don’t know how to do it properly. I just wish I could have been a much better dad when I was younger. I’m a great dad now, but I’ve got five kids, and I know I could have done a lot better. But you’re learning on the job, and the thing about success is that it can be quite evil, because everybody wants a piece of something that’s going forward – and then all of a sudden, you realise you’ve created a whole bunch of carnage that perhaps you could have avoided.
If I get to one of our gigs too early… It freaks me out. First of all, you don’t want to hear the band that’s on before you – because if they’re better than you, it rubs you up the wrong way a little bit. ‘Oh man, they’re on the money; we sound like a wedding band all of a sudden!’ (laughs)
As the frontman on stage… You feel like a dog pissin’ on everything. You’ve got to break the spell. It really comes to that: you’ve got to have all eyes on you. Of course, if you’ve got a fistful of great songs and a lot of hits, it’s going to be a slightly easier opportunity for you to do that. But we all don’t have that, and so you need to be able to come out and say, ‘Hey, you’ve seen that – have a look at this!’
When I’m offstage… I think I’m pretty much the same geezer. It feels slightly different; you become sort of electrified (on stage), and you say and do things, and make certain suggestions about what you’re doing, which you don’t do in normal life. I’ve got enough people to say, ‘Hey, what are you f..king doing, you idiot? Get back to the real world, son!’ I’ve always had enough of that; you know that pulling of the ear that your mum and dad used to do, to bring you into line? It’s still there.
When I wake up… I don’t wake up thinking that I’ve had a lot of hardship; I always wake up on the up. I keep believing that it could change today. I wake up tired and exhausted and all the rest of it sometimes, but I never wake up thinking that I’m done. I always think about the good foot. You want to call it ‘optimism’? I don’t know to spell ‘optimism’! (laughs)
The Way We Do Business is out now via ABC Music. The Black Sorrows’ tour continues in Meeniyan (Saturday) and Yarram (Sunday), with 29 more dates through to March 30 (Castlemaine). Tickets: theblacksorrows.com.au
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