Playlist: Australian 80's

I realised something a few years back. While as you might suspect, a decent proportion of my music collection comes from the UK and USA, a surprising amount of it is Australian - and 1980's Australian more specifically.

Now for many people of my generation, Australian musical output in that decade started with Men At Work and finished with Kylie and Jason. But there is so much more in between, although we will be including one of those acts in this playlist (I'll let you guess which one).

There is representation here from not just some of the best Australian albums of the 1980's, but the best albums anywhere that decade. So, fire up the barbie, crack open a cold one - and any other stereotypical reference you can think of - because that's not a playlist, this is a playlist! And mostly, enjoy these twelve (yes, I couldn't stick with ten for this one) wonderful tracks...

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1. Men At Work: Down Under

There was some momentary debate as to whether I should go for something less obvious than this, but heck no, this is a classic and we’re using it! This song first cropped up as the B-Side of Men At Work's first locally recently released single, Keypunch Operator, in 1980. That first version was a little slower than the one which eventually came out at the end of the following year, once they had signed with Columbia Records. It was written by Colin Hay and Ron Strykert and was the second single from debut LP Business As Usual, becoming a bit of a worldwide smash - it topped charts in Australia, NZ, Canada, UK and eventually the US (where it would sell 2 million copies), as well as Denmark, Ireland, Italy and Switzerland. While many viewed it as a bit of a patriotic Australian anthem, Hay would later recall, “The chorus is really about the selling of Australia in many ways, the overdevelopment of the country. It was a song about the loss of spirit in that country. It’s really about the plundering of the country by greedy people. It is ultimately about celebrating the country, but not in a nationalistic way and not in a flag-waving sense. It’s really more than that.”

Men At Work: Down Under (Official music video)

2. Midnight Oil: Power And The Passion

While globally, Beds Are Burning remains probably the best known Midnight Oil track, Power And The Passion was another of their big early tracks. Coming out early in 1983, it contains lots of varied twentieth century cultural references - former Australian PM, Gough Whitlam, the controversial Pine Gap spy base, a Big Mac, and even paraphrases Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, with the line, “It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

Midnight Oil: Power And The Passion (Official music video)

3. Hoodoo Gurus: What's My Scene?

Hoodoo Gurus lead singer-songwriter-guitarist, Dave Faulkner, said of What’s My Scene?, “Whenever I’m asked to name a favourite of my songs, I usually choose this one, not because I think it’s the best, but because it best captures everything I try to do when writing any song. I wouldn’t change a note or a syllable of this one and I’m especially proud that it has two different choruses when one is usually enough.” This is a heck of a catchy little number from third album, 1987’s Blow Your Cool!, a number two record, which has a strong American connection, featuring backing vocal contributions from all four Bangles (on two songs) and also Steve Wynn and Mark Walton from Dream Syndicate (one one song).

Hoodoo Gurus: What's My Scene? (Official music video)

4. The Church: Reptile

Reptile followed on from breakthrough hit Under The Milky Way and The Church’s most commercially successful LP, Starfish (which clocked up an impressive 600,000 sales). While the album came from a nickname given by Steve Kilney to fellow musician Donnette Thayer, Reptile was actually about a real life animal encounter. The lyrics, by Kilbey, followed an experience he had in a young ladies hotel room, where he discovered a large lizard behind the shower curtain! The song as a whole though was credited to all of the band and is based on a big guitar riff built up by Marty Wilson-Piper and Peter Koppes.

The Church: Reptile (Official music video)

5. The Triffids: Trick Of The Light

Released in January 1988, Trick Of The Light was a single from The Triffids fourth record, Calenture, produced by Gil Norton (Pixies, Bunnymen, Foo Fighters). The song, written by lead singer David McComb, provided the band with a second UK ‘hit’, when it squeaked in at number 73. McComb could recall that it was written in the woolshed where they had recorded previous album, In The Pines, but he conveniently (or otherwise) said, “I can’t for the life of me think what it’s about.”

The Triffids: Trick Of The Light (Official music video)

6. Paul Kelly: To Her Door

Paul Kelly is perhaps not all that well known outside of Australia, but certainly in the 1980’s and 90’s, he was definitely a big deal in his homeland, racking up half a dozen Top 40 singles and about a dozen Top 20 albums. To Her Door, an incredible pot-pourri of pop, rock and country, was a Top 20 hit there, won an ARIA award for the music video, and was listed as one of the Top 30 Australian songs of all time by the Australasian Performing Rights Association in 2001. The song itself is about a young married couple whose relationship hits the skids, they separate, and the song ends with a teaser on whether they are about to reunite. 

Paul Kelly: To Her Door (Official music video)

7. Hunters & Collectors: Throw Your Arms Around Me

Lyrically, this might have been a song that Neil Finn was envious of, and perhaps that is why Crowded House often covered this tune in their live shows - that and the fact that Hunters & Collectors lead singer Mark Seymour is the older brother of Crowdies bassist Nick. Its deceptively simple writing portrays a passing love - “And we may never meet again, so shed your skiing and let’s get started.” It is also a song with enduring legacy down under - released in 1984, it was ranked second best Australian song of all time on the legendary Triple J radio station’s Hottest 100 in 1998 - and when they did the chart again this year, it was still ranked at number 25.

Hunters & Collectors: Throw Your Arms Around Me (Live at the MCG, 2009)

8. Crowded House: I Feel Possessed

There is some debate about whether you can truly call Crowded House an Australian band - as I am occasionally keen to point out, lead singer and songwriter Neil Finn is most definitely a New Zealander - but for the purposes of this list, two of the three original members were most definitely Australian, and so they are in…. After the success of their eponymously titled debut album, they stuck with Mitchell Froom to produce the follow-up, Temple Of Low Men. Finn had written all ten tracks for it in the two years since that debut record, but the record company pressure to replicate that initial success led the band to joke that this LP would be called Mediocre Follow-Up. But mediocre it was not. It is possibly their best record (and perhaps I am slightly biased, as this was my gateway record for them, as a young fan in the late 80s), with AllMusic referring to it as a “darkly difficult album” - and I Feel Possessed leads the way, full of a dark, almost suffocating atmosphere as Finn seems to struggle both with himself and with a relationship with someone else.

Crowded House: I Feel Possessed (Official music video)

9. Icehouse: Icehouse

Somewhat confusingly, for their first LP, called Icehouse (1980), Icehouse were actually called Flowers, only changing their name to Icehouse in 1981 because of a potential legal issue with a Scottish band called The Flowers! Icehouse, the single, would be credited to Icehouse, the band, by the time it was released in the US and Europe. The song comes from front man Iva Davies’ experience of living in old, cold flat in the Sydney suburb of Lindfield, which he later learned had once been part of a halfway house for psychiatric and rehab patients. The song has a great, dark electronic atmosphere to it, kind of painting a bit of a Gary Numan type sound, but with Davies’ slightly Bryan Ferry-esque vocals on the top.

Icehouse: Icehouse (Live in Sydney, 2012)

10. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Tupelo

We could have gone way back to Nick Cave’s first band, The Birthday Party, but instead we go with his celebrated work with The Bad Seeds. Tupelo was in fact their second single and the only one to come from their second album. The track uses biblical imagery to describe the birth of Elvis Presley, in Tupelo, Mississippi, during a raging storm. They used the John Lee Hooker song of the same name as a loose basis, while also bring in another blues reference, “looky, looky yonder” which is taken from a Lead Belly song. 

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Tupelo (Official music video)

11. The Go-Betweens: Was There Anything I Could Do?

Photo: EMI Records

Yet again, The Go-Betweens entered 1988 thinking this would be the year and the album that would give them the hits that their songwriting prowess (and love from the critics) suggested they should get. Was There Anything I Could Do?, after some debate, became the second single released from 16 Lovers Lane. Penned by Grant McLennan, it was a driving three minute pop gem, with his customary gift for nifty little lyrical couplets. It did reach the pinnacle of 16 on the US Modern Rock chart and then… then, nothing else - it failed to enter the main charts anywhere. Having flogged themselves in London, producing great records like Liberty Belle and Tallulah, with not much in the way of chart placings to show for it - they had headed back to Australia for the making of this album. Having spent five years in a London they felt was full of “blackness, darkness, greyness and poverty” - McLennan compared that to being in Sydney, where they could “go to the beach in ten minutes”. Co-leader Robert Forster said the resultant LP was “the perfect combination between London melancholy and Sydney sunshine.”

The Go-Betweens: Was There Anything I Could Do? (Official music video)

12. INXS: Don't Change

This song would probably be there or thereabouts in my all-time Top 10 on most days. This was perhaps the song that launched INXS's long pathway to selling millions of records and playing stadia around the world. Don’t Change was the headline moment on the promising third album Shabooh Shoobah, and made the Australian Top 20 in 1982. Producer Mark Opitz brought along some of the big guitar and drum sounds he had developed working with rock bands like AC/DC and Cold Chisel, to add to their existing funk sound.