Troy Cassar-Daley on musical therapy, personal crises and Daphne, the car that keeps him young
Australian country music’s most awarded Golden Guitar winner on musical therapy, personal crises and the ‘Fight Club car’ that keeps him young.
Everywhere Troy Cassar-Daley goes, his Daphne turns heads. On the wet streets near his home in Brisbane’s eastern suburbs.
Across the span of the Gateway Bridge, dodging semi-trailers and toolbox-laden utes. Idling at red lights beside newer, flashier models – and especially when parked inside Tino’s Classic Car Garage.
Sitting pretty under cover, Daphne’s unexpected appearance at this shed in Brendale, 20km north of the Queensland capital, prompts a random bloke to run in from the pouring rain, all but elbowing aside the famous musician stood beside her so as to better eyeball every centimetre of her beautiful body.
Grown men regress into teenage boys at the sight of her because Daphne is a 1964 EH Holden, and there’s something about her retro look that gets the blood pumping to all male extremities in an age where automobiles are becoming quieter, less obtrusive and more fuel-efficient.
Daphne – named for a shade of blue in the colour scheme of guitar manufacturer Fender – is none of those things. That’s part of her pure vintage charm.
You simply can’t miss her, and that’s a commonality she shares with her owner – because if you’re at all familiar with, and conversant in, Australian country music across the past 30 years, you simply can’t miss Troy Cassar-Daley.
He’s a singer-songwriter who tucked a guitar under his arm as a boy, began amassing a swag of songs, and eventually worked his way through a tight scrum of artists to stand taller than them all, alone holding 40 Golden Guitar Awards, two more than both Slim Dusty and Lee Kernaghan.
He’s also a car guy, through and through; not only fond of driving them, but of getting his hands dirty with the inner workings, too. No sooner had he acquired his first sedan at age 18 than an uncle was on hand, rolling up his sleeves, ready to impart life-shaping know-how.
“He said, ‘Right, the first thing you’re going to do is get yourself a whole bunch of imperial spanners, and then we’re gonna go all the way over the car and I’ll show you what most of it does’,” Cassar-Daley, 54, tells Review.
“He wasn’t a mechanic, but he was a bush mechanic. I learned to appreciate what a half-inch spanner does.”
While attempting to piece together a regular income as a jobbing musician, Cassar-Daley also learned to lean heavily on a mechanic mate and his workshop.
“I spent so much time going there and scabbing his hoist, just to do stuff that I couldn’t afford to do with anyone else, because I had no money,” he says.
“It’s a crazy thing to be in that position, but you have to be resourceful. It was a great way to save a bit of money while we were doing gigs, because the gigs weren’t really paying that well, but the car would get you from A to B. That was the battle; it was surviving, and these cars allowed us to survive, because they were cheap to run and keep on the road.”
Many years have passed since those hard-scrabble early days of scabbing hoists and wielding half-inch spanners through necessity. Country music hasn’t always led to comfort for its practitioners, whose earthy, relatable narratives are often earned through hardship.
But Cassar-Daley has attained more comfort than most, through sheer bloody-minded effort and by writing songs that speak directly to Australians living on and off the land.
Among country folk he is revered, and when he pops up unexpectedly – as he did at a Kasey Chambers concert at Tamworth Town Hall in January, during the annual country music festival – a wave of universal respect and admiration sweeps across the room.
Chambers lends her distinctive vocal cords to Let’s Ride, the lead single from Cassar-Daley’s 12th album Between the Fires. It’s a romantic song of adventure and escape replete with automotive imagery, in the vein of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. In its soaring chorus, he sings:
Turn that motor over
Let’s get of here
This thing’s a ticket out
Baby we can disappear
Into the night
Past the city limit signs
Put it into drive
Baby let’s ride
Of Chambers, says Cassar-Daley: “I love her so much. She’s been such a good old friend, and her voice on Let’s Ride elevates that song so much. It’s exactly what you hear on it; she was in the back of my mind, and I thought, ‘I’ll just send it to her and see if she’s up for it.’ The week after, she’s in the studio and done it. She’s a good egg. She always brings it, Kase.”
His reputation extends far beyond the stage and the studio, too: widely known as one of the most decent, honest and friendly musicians you’ll find anywhere, his DNA contains no traces of the poisonous gene that can work its way into an artist’s bloodstream once they find success and wealth.
As a culture, we Australians have the unfortunate trait of delighting as we lop heads off tall poppies, but there’s something about Troy Cassar-Daley that keeps those snip-happy scissors sheathed.
When Review’s photographer (and fellow car guy) Lyndon Mechielsen arrives to scope out Tino’s Classic Car Garage for our cover shoot, he says to the group, “Don’t you find people f..k their cars up with modern wheels?”
This provocative question prompts the sound of men furiously agreeing: Troy, Tino and automotive electrician Les Duncan, traditionalists all.
“The bigger the wheel, the more Hot Wheels it’s going to look, like a Matchbox car,” says Cassar-Daley, followed by more nodding from the foursome.
For the photo shoot, the singer-songwriter dons a cream-coloured hat and pulls out a Fender Stratocaster, cracking jokes all the while, alternately hopping in the driver’s seat and sitting on the concrete floor, up against the front wheel.
He’s casually at home as the centre of attention in Mechielsen’s lens, while the two vehicular experts busy themselves elsewhere in the shop, which is packed with cars adept at turning heads – just like Daphne.
It’s such a jocular scene, and a thoroughly unusual morning for Tino and Les, that it’s easy to overlook the serious lyrical subject matter that underscores the very reason why we’re here on a rainy Wednesday in late March.
That all snaps into focus once Cassar-Daley pulls out an acoustic guitar, props himself on a high chair in front of the freshly chamois-wiped Holden, and begins playing a couple of songs from Between the Fires, filmed exclusively for Review.
First up is Let’s Ride – a fitting ode to turning wheels and wide open roads, given today’s locale – but it’s the second song Some Days, co-written with Kevin Bennett, that draws the listener in with its plaintive opening lines:
Some days are better than others
Some days I miss my mother
Some years make me feel like I’ve lived ten
We get through the Christmas cheer
And think of who we lost that year
The whole damn thing rolls round again…
In the space of seven minutes and two songs, Cassar-Daley’s warm singing voice and delicately picked guitar notes turn the garage into a makeshift concert hall, complete with decent acoustics offered by the high roof.
He plays unselfconsciously, without a warm-up, in the manner of a performer accustomed to sharing his music with audiences small and large across the decades. It is impossible not to be impressed by his abundant talent and the ease with which he carries it.
During the final bars of Some Days, when workers at a neighbouring business chuck something heavy into a skip bin across the way, he is unfazed and doesn’t skip a beat. At song’s end, he peers across the driveway toward the crash. “Dunno what that was,” he says, then cackles. “Let’s get out of these fellas’ way!”
The key to Between the Fires lies in the second line of Some Days, noted above. When his mum, Irene Daley, died in her sleep in July 2022, aged 73, it left the singer-songwriter without both parents, having previously lost his dad, Tony Cassar, to suicide in 2019.
Grief and loss are the twin engines that power the 15-track album, which was written and recorded at the home at Halfway Creek, NSW where Cassar-Daley grew up, 39km southeast of Grafton – a house in the middle of 90 acres that his mum bought for about $15,000 when he was nine, and where she lived her final days.
Its title track, though, refers to a thorny patch in his long relationship with radio and television presenter Laurel Edwards. The pair married in 1996, but like many couples, they went through some rough stuff in recent years that nearly severed their connection for good.
“The reason that I named the record Between the Fires is because, for the 18 months after losing mum, I felt like I was living between the fire down there at Halfway Creek, and the fire that was about to go out at home,” Cassar-Daley told Review, as he steered Daphne toward Tino’s Garage.
“There were some confronting things that were happening between Laurel and I that I just couldn’t say,” he said. “I didn’t know how to articulate it, and so I thought the best way to do it was to write a song about it.”
That song is a seven-minute, old-school country song called Congratulations. It’s a slow-burn of a strummer, coloured by pedal steel guitar, where the singer unhurriedly unpacks the feeling of watching his marriage circling the drain. In its chorus, his voice is weary and resigned as he sings:
So congratulations
You won the prize
We both saw it coming
But we kept right on running
Such a brilliant disguise
You begged for forgiveness
But you couldn’t change
So congratulations
You finally pushed me away
Edwards knows well the feeling of sharing her life with a songwriter whose eyes and ears are always searching for material, but even she was taken aback by the bluntness on display in Congratulations, which is the album’s 14th and penultimate track.
“She said, ‘Is that what I did to you, is it?’, and I said, ‘No – that’s what we did to us’,” said Cassar-Daley. “It’s not a tit-for-tat; it’s a situation we were both in.”
There’s a happy ending here: they came out the other side of the thorny patch, and that’s captured in a song, too, titled Thankful.
“That was the other end of it for me, because I think after a while, we realised that we had something to save – and if you think there’s something worth saving, then you go for it; you give it a shot,” he said.
“But it was a tricky time, brother, I’ve got to say,” he said, as he reached forward to the dashboard periodically to engage the EH Holden’s windscreen wipers. “It was a tricky time for me emotionally, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt such grief. My mental health really got a real bashing in that 18 months.”
“The music in this record actually was the best therapy I had,” he said. “I got a little bit of therapy, as well – but I think the music was the cherry on the cake for me: I felt like I was able to walk out of the fire by writing the songs.”
After the pit stop at Tino’s Garage for the photo shoot and video performance, Cassar-Daley fires up the engine once again and casts his mind back to his first time driving Daphne, after paying $11,000 to take her home from a bloke in Caboolture about 15 years ago.
That day was “like Christmas”, he says, as he points us back toward Brisbane. “That smell? That’s vinyl you smell, and it’s petrol – and that’s my youth, in a car.”
And his middle years, too, as it turns out. “Middle age?” he replies. “Oh man, I’m there. I’m totally there. It’s too late for me to even have a midlife crisis. It’s more along the lines of, ‘I’m just gonna have a crisis!’”
He gives an explosive cackle, then turns serious again. “My whole thinking was: you only live once,” he says. “Losing people around me; I’ve lost a stack of good people this last 18 months. It made me realise that everything I did up on this thing (Daphne), or the joy it brings me when we go to Manly for a walk – it’s worth it.”
He loves this car because she’s a reminder of certainty in an uncertain life: no matter what else is happening in his life, her presence in his driveway always makes him smile, even if she occasionally draws his blood while he’s tinkering to make repairs.
Some days are better than others, like he sang at Tino’s earlier. Some days he wakes up feeling like shit because he misses his mum, and he wishes he could call his dad. “I just am not afraid to have a bad day if I need to,” he says. “It’s a great philosophy, because it allows you some slack.”
Some nights he watches his beloved South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league team – currently performing poorly, and sitting at the bottom of the NRL ladder after eight rounds – and feels the sting of disappointment. But even within that dark cloud lies a silver lining if you’re looking with the right kind of eyes.
“The sort of hole that we’re in now? We’re rabbits; we belong in the hole,” he says.
“This has not been a good start, and it was a terrible end to the year as well. I keep saying to people, we may be in a bit of a slump here, but let’s not lose hope. They’re still our team, and our saying is ‘South Sydney ‘til I die’ – so let’s get serious here and just keep barracking for them until they start winning again.”
He and Edwards are now empty-nesters, meaning they both miss their kids: son Clay lives elsewhere in Brisbane, while daughter Jem Cassar-Daley – a fellow singer-songwriter whose track King of Disappointment was recently named Song of the Year at the Queensland Music Awards – is now based in Melbourne.
But the married couple of 27 years have relit their collective fire, and it’s their story of triumph over adversity of which he remains buoyantly proud.
“We both needed our own space to get better; to be better people,” he says.
“And I hate that f..king ‘living my best life’ saying – but if you can get close to that, I think you’re halfway home. We find joy in so many different things.”
They have agreed, however, that some things are best kept off-limits. Like Daphne.
“Laurel and I don’t talk about the car, because we don’t want to have any arguments,” he says.
“So we call it the ‘Fight Club car’. The first rule of fight club is: don’t talk about fight club. So we don’t.”
“We drive in it, and we enjoy each other’s company in it – but we don’t talk about the costs,” he says with a laugh. “They’re many and varied, when they come in at different times; when you do something stupid to it.”
As his eyes follow the blacktop, and he sits behind the wheel of the car he loves, pointed in the direction of the home he shares with the woman he loves, the next two sentences spoken by Cassar-Daley neatly summarise his open-hearted view of the road ahead.
“But that’s life, mate,” he says. “I love it.”
Between the Fires will be released on Friday, May 10 via Sony Music Australia. Troy Cassar-Daley’s 36-date national tour begins in Pomona, QLD (May 23) and ends in Anglesea, VIC (November 24). Tickets: troycassardaley.com.au
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