MEN AT WORK – “Down Under”
A curious feature of Britain’s number ones is how they mirror the history of global travel: “Summer Holiday” in the 50s, Demis Roussos in the 70s, and now Men At Work’s paean to the Australian diaspora, spreading back along the old hippie trail and into Europe. “Down Under” is a song for anyone who’s ever felt the happy shock of familiarity in a strange place.
You could make a strong case, of course, that familiarity is precisely not the point of travel in the first place. Imagine an English-abroad version of “Down Under”, in which a laddish singer expresses his intense relief at finding someone who not only speaks the Q’s E but has fish and chips on hand too. “Down Under”’s cameraderie is built on – and has contributed to – an idea of Aussies abroad as an ever-jovial brotherhood of chunderers on the rampage: an image which, I’d guess, annoys more travellers than it empowers.
But even if every Australian backpacker in the country bought a copy of “Down Under”, it wouldn’t have topped the charts without crossing over. Its cause was surely helped by the Police being on holiday – Men At Work’s take on pop-reggae is a cruder, bouncier knock-off of Sting’s, albeit with a bizarre Ian Anderson style flute break shoved in the middle.
The flute helps take the edge of the chorus’ unsubtlety. and there’s a taut and well-practised new wave group in here somewhere – but in the end “Down Under” lives or dies by how well you can cope with its high-participation afterlife.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 2,773 views • Share/Save
Rosie #64 – Waldo has asked me to ask you whether the show to which you refer also featured “Tinger and Tucker the two little bears”?
Is this a wind-up?
#76 Tinga and Tucker were two koala bear puppets who appeared on a 60s kids programme with the host Auntie Jean. The show also featured Willy Wombat and something called the wibbly-wobbly way. I don’t recall the kookaburra song on the show – I remember it from school music lessons.
i associate tinga and tucka (and the kookaburra song) with rolf harris — am i confusing all australian high culture with itself?
I was a member of the official Tinga And Tucka Club, and hence the proud owner of my very own “Boomerang Woomerang”. This might have been an early attempt to wind up my mother, who thought that the show’s puppet-based dramatisations of Bible stories were in poor taste. (The show’s whole premise was a religious soft-sell, as I recall. So you’d get T&T putting on head-dresses and pretending to be King David and the Pharaoah of Egypt, stuff like that.)
And nowadays we get the Koala Brothers! (Only parents of current tinies may understand this)
There is – of course! – a Wikipedia category for “fictional koalas”…
omg “the magic pudding”! i remember this book as clear as day yet i never owned and don’t know where i read it! (best tbook-itle ever incidentally)
Tingha and Tucka certainly set some bells ringing but I don’t think that was where I encountered Shirley Abicair. For one thing, Wikipedia tells me that the show didn’t begin until 1962, by which time I was fairly au fait with, and enthusiatic about, the top ten and Radio Luxembourg. For another, watching ITV was mostly (ie with the exception of Coronation Street) a no-no in our household. I think my encounter with Shirl was rather earlier.
The song “wibbly-wobbly way” I’m pretty sure was a taunt used by my sister’s boyfriend, eventually to become my brother-in-law-whom-I-hate – because him singing it was guaranteed to set me off in uncontrollable giggles.
I too was/am? a member of the Tingha and Tucker club which according to wikipedia had 750,000 members. Perhaps like the Manchurian Candidate we will have been programmed to respond to a Woomerang Boomerang broadcast that will see us rise up to introduce a new world order.
#82 ‘The Magic pudding’ gets a mention in Peter Carey’s ‘Theft: A love story’ which is how I’ve heard of it. It is a great title. The author was the basis for the film ‘Sirens’ featuring Sam Neill and several nekkid ladies.
as i recall the pudding wears its bowl as a hat, has legs which it runs around on, and gets grumpy when you eat a slice of it, even though this in no way diminishes it
Willie Wombat! I probably haven’t thought about him since I was about 4 and probably forgotten about since the age of about 8 – another one of those memories which the internet miraculously rediscovers in some dimly lit recess of my mind…
Willie Wombat! I probably haven’t thought about him since I was about 4 and probably forgotten about since the age of about 8 – another one of those memories which with the help of the internet I miraculously rediscover in some dimly lit recess of my mind…
Watching the ‘Down under’ video yesterday I experienced a Proustian rush equal to memories of Tingha and Tucker when I saw ‘Tanelorn rules’ on the front of the VW combi. It brought back memories of devouring Moorcock books in my early teens – probably while rocking out to Yes and Hawkwind on headphones. According to the wikipedia entry for Tanelorn:
The music video by Men At Work of the song Down Under shows “Tanelorn Rules” on the front of a van,perhaps referring to the Tanelorn Music Festival, held on the October Labour Day holiday weekend in 1981 near Karuah, north of Newcastle in Australia. This festival was subsequently regarded by some as being the ‘end’ of the age of Aquarius, as subsequent Australian outdoor festivals such as Narara ’85 had much of the atmosphere of an outdoor ‘beerbarn’, dominated by pub rock.
I’m still hoping that Martin will revive his Sci-fi authors thread – maybe looking at Moorcock?
Ronco alert: opening track on Chart Runners (part 2) followed by:
Tunnel Of Love – Fun Boy Three
Sexual Healing – Marvin Gaye
Hold Me Tighter In The Rain – Billy Griffin
Cry Boy Cry – Blue Zoo
Breakaway – Tracey Ullman
Endlessly – John Foxx
Let’s Forget – White & Torch
European Female – The Stranglers
♯89 ‘Let’s forget’ has lived up to it’s title
..and seems like someone else made the Kookaburra connection:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8175974.stm
Kookaburra’s writ in the Old Bai-ley,
Merry, merry king of the flute is he,
Laugh, IP lawyers, laugh, IP lawyers,
Pay for you must we.
#61 Davey – re the appearance of Colin Hay on Scrubs – yes, I got quite excited by that, especially as he plays the far superior (to “Downunder”) song “Overkill” in that episode. I’d long forgotten MAW at that stage, and rushed out to buy Cargo on CD purely for that track! Sadly “Overkill” is the only track on the album worth having.
Whoops.
“A big win for the underdog” where “underdog” = “a publishing company that saw an opportunity to buy a song copyright off the Girl Guides”!
Bah. Hope the damages make up for all the biscuit sales they’ll lose… although who knows, maybe the nation will side with the Guides.
Writing songs with a mate down under,
Looked around for some riffs to plunder.
Said to him, “Do you think we’ll risk it?”
He just smiled and handed me a Girl Guide biscuit.
And I said, “Ohhh! ‘Kookaburra’ is huge down under,
And one man’s ‘quote’ is a judge’s ‘blunder’.
Can’t you hear the reporters thunder?
We better run, we better take cover.”
Cos the flute ‘riff’ is the bit everyone remembers…
The band should be compensated for the free publicity they gave Vegemite. How many non-Australians had heard of it before 1983?
Wow, the trilling flute phrase is just a bar or two (albeit repeated), so a 40-60% share of profits seems utterly insane on those grounds alone (settlement for 5% would be more like it in my view). Also, since it’s the rhythm of the trill that’s the ‘tell’, it should be material that essentially the same rhythm (in upper registers) is *all over* versions of the trad. hymn, Gloria in excelsis Deo, including Vivaldi’s. (I imagine that the original girl guide author would concede that, of course, she was building on trad, hymns, were she here.) My money’s on a vigorous appeal followed by settlement at a more reasonable figure.
@Rory. ‘Laugh, IP layers laugh.’ Brilliant!
I can’t believe how annoyed this has made me. As you say, swanstep, the riff is a tiny quote within “Down Under”, so minor that the connection had never occurred to me before this story broke last year; and I’m guessing I’m one of the last generation of Aussie kids who would have grown up singing “Kookaburra”. Its key line is “Laugh, kookaburra, laugh, kookaburra, gay your life must be”, and I can’t see that getting much air post-1970s – not out of rampant homophobia, but out of embarrassment over the double entendre, which is so easily avoided by not teaching the song to littlies in the first place.
So if the 1970s were more or less “Kookaburra”’s last laugh, even that tiny quote would be the only way anyone nowadays would hear anything from it. “Kookaburra”’s author died in 1988, so her only immortality is in the memories of middle-aged-and-above Aussies like me… and in those few notes in “Down Under”.
So even if it was a conscious rip-off (which I’m not convinced it was), I don’t care. I don’t want to see Hay and Strykert bankrupted for the benefit of a copyright that has long since left a dead songwriter’s ownership, which sixty percent of megabucks of long-spent royalties could easily do. In the grand scheme of things, “Down Under” matters more to Australia than “Kookaburra”, the legal wranglings of lawyers looking for their “My Sweet Lord” moment notwithstanding.
(“My Sweet Lord” mattered more, too.)
The issue of copyright seems to be a ticking timebomb these days. What with the clumsy and unweildly Digital Britain bill (clause 17 is an attempt to future-proof the legislation, but looks like some kind of draconian measure dreamt up by George Orwell) being read in the Lords, and these occasional plagiarism cases that crop up from time to time…
…we should be asking in the context of the current climate, just how artists should be paid, and more importantly who should be paying them?
Is the current copyright law adequate? And can publishers and distributors force internet providers to cut off an entire household’s broadband, with total impunity?
The riff wasn’t even incorporated into the song by Hay and Strykert, but by the band’s flautist Greg Ham.
I bet that the Wikipedia entry that Davey noticed up-thread (before the lawsuit arose*) was what tipped Larrikin off that they had a potential goldmine on their hands. They’ve owned “Kookaburra” since 1990 and the similarity only occurred to them now? After a bit of hunting through the Wikipedia page’s edit history, the claimed similarity with “Kookaburra” appears to have been added on 31 October 2006 by an anonymous contributor (and completely unsourced, at that). I hope 210.10.994.244 is proud of themselves. Their only contribution, yet!
*Horrible thought: given the delay between 31 October 2006 and July 2009, perhaps this thread was what actually tipped Larrikin off.
We can rest easy: Larrikin launched their proceedings in 2008. But that Wikipedia entry is still in the frame.
Colin Hay’s response deserves attention.
I wonder who was using 210.10.199.224 on 31/10/06. (I miscopied the IP address above, for some reason.) It just resolves to an Australian ISP, so the trail goes cold.
Justice Jacobson said that Hay’s admission he morphed the two songs during some concerts in 2002 helped make his decision. “Perhaps the clearest illustration of the objective similarity is to be found in Mr Hay’s frank admission of a causal connection between the two melodies and the fact that he sang the relevant bars of Kookaburra when performing Down Under at a number of concerts over a period of time from about 2002,” Justice Jacobson wrote.
Gah! Bono morphed “Electric Co.” into “Send in the Clowns” during the Red Rocks concerts, but that didn’t make them the same or even similar.
re105 any legal proceedings by Steven Sondheim against Bono would be warmly welcomed in these quarters though
That case was settled long ago, lonepilgrim – it’s why my US-purchased CD of Under a Blood Red Sky doesn’t have 30 seconds of my old LP. (To the great annoyance of early-’90s me who foolishly sold the old LP before listening to the newly purchased CD.)
“…a 40-60% share of profits seems utterly insane on those grounds alone (settlement for 5% would be more like it in my view)…”
The way these things normally go, IIRC, is that the litigants ask/demand a ridiculously unrealistic sum, then the lawyers for both sides haggle it down to something more appropriate – the thinking is usually that if you start big, there’s the occasional chance you might finish big.