Sharkmouth puts Russell Morris back in the charts

AFTER decades in the wilderness, Russell “The Real Thing” Morris is back with a platinum blues album about Aussie crooks.

MUSICIAN Russell Morris was flicking through a copy of The Weekend Australian Magazine on a flight in 2009 when he happened across a story about small-time crooks in Sydney during the 1920s.

Morris, who had had an international hit with The Real Thing in 1969, was trying to write a blues album at the time, and failing.

“The songs I had written were bad copies of American blues,” he says. One of the characters in the magazine story, Thomas “Shark Jaws” Archer, seemed to be suggesting a solution.

“I knew that I had to write a song about him,” Morris, 66, says. “It was almost as if he spoke to me, as if Shark Jaws was saying, ‘If you are going to write songs about the blues, you gotta write about me. Tell people I lived and breathed.’”

Morris fashioned a suite of songs around Archer — recasting him as Sharkmouth — and other figures, good and bad, of the era: boxer Les Darcy, feared Melbourne gangster Squizzy Taylor, Arthur “Mr Eternity” Stace, and Phar Lap. The response was remarkable. Few people had bought a Russell Morris record since 1973. But Sharkmouth has been the number one or two best-selling jazz and blues album in the country for almost two years (late last month it was number three). As well as Morris’s first gold album (it has since gone platinum), it won an ARIA last year for best blues and roots album, and was nominated for an APRA award.

Even in the annals of pop improbability, the resurgence of Morris as a blues artist singing songs about a between-the-wars Australia is just about unimaginable. “I know how Moses felt after he came out of the wilderness after 40 years,” he says.

Read Alan Howe’s full feature about Morris’s winding road from success to wilderness and back tomorrow in The Weekend Australian.