A new book titled Aussie Rock Anthems unpacks an iconic list of legendary Australian tunes and the narratives behind them. This edited extract takes us through the epic 1991 hit cover song made famous by Daryl Braithwaite…
Daryl Braithwaite never really wanted to work a day job. He grew up in South Yarra in Victoria and went to school with someone named Olivia Newton-John, before the family moved to Sydney’s northern suburbs. He finished school there, and music really started to get its hooks into him.
Finishing school in Year 10, his dad pushed him towards a fitter and turner’s apprenticeship on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. That didn’t go too well, as he tended to take a day off to go surfing whenever the waves were good. His eternally patient boss realised the kid wasn’t interested in the job, so they came to an agreement: Braithwaite got his papers saying he had finished his apprenticeship and the boss got to hire someone who would actually turn up for work.
He was gigging in local bands when he got his big chance in 1970, when Clive Shakespeare from a band called Sherbet asked if he wanted to join. They’d just released their first single, which went nowhere special, but big things were afoot. Two years later Sherbet had charting hits, appearances on Countdown and screaming teenagers everywhere they went. Oh, and there was also a lot of chest hair and satin jackets.
However, the good times didn’t last forever: the screaming teenagers grew up and their tastes changed, while their younger siblings weren’t interested in a hand-me-down pop band because they wanted their own stars to scream at. That and an abortive push into the US market that saw them change their name to Highway signalled the end of Sherbet.
In the 1980s, with a wife and child to support, Braithwaite was on the dole for a while before he found a road-working gig at the local council. “I was quite nervous fronting up to Bulla Shire Council and saying, ‘Hi, I’m Daryl Braithwaite, I’m meant to report here and go to work,’” Braithwaite said. “I can remember the guy looking up at me and going ‘Right, okay.’” Oddly enough, it gave him the impetus he needed to get back into music again.
His fellow roadworkers recognised the guy from all those Countdown appearances and asked him what the hell he was doing there. They had to take this job but Braithwaite had a talent, yet there he was spinning a stop-go sign. That led to him working on an album that became Edge. Released in late 1988, it didn’t race up the charts – in fact, it took six months to get to No. 1 – but it ended up going triple platinum, sold more than 250,000 copies and spawned five singles. Braithwaite was back.
His big moment was still to come, via a song that almost didn’t make it onto his follow-up album Rise. Near the end of the recording session a friend tipped him off to Rickie Lee Jones’s Flying Cowboys long player, an album that opens with a song called “The Horses”. That’s right: it’s a cover version, a fact that still seems to surprise some people. “I remember going home after being in the studio. I got the CD out, put it on and the first track was ‘The Horses’ and I thought, ‘My god, how good is that?’ as soon as I heard it.”
Album producer Simon Hussey had to do some work to turn it into a ‘Daryl song’. He added an intro and marimba-like sounds and tightened it: Braithwaite’s version is around one minute shorter than the original. Hussey also felt it needed a female backing vocalist and called in New Zealander Margaret Urlich. The idea worked so well that Hussey chose to cut out Braithwaite’s vocal at some points so Urlich’s could shine, turning it into more of a duet.
“The Horses” was the second single released from Rise – you never go with a slow song as the first single – and Braithwaite was sent up the New South Wales coast to Sandbar Beach to film a video. One of the things Braithwaite remembered most about the shoot was that he wore a jumper tucked into his pants, which he mentioned in several interviews, but the most unusual thing about the video is that the woman ‘singing’ isn’t Urlich. She was over in London recording and didn’t want to fly back for the shoot, so to fill in for her the video maker nabbed model Gillian Bailey and got her to lip-synch Urlich’s parts. Given the ongoing popularity of “The Horses” it may surprise some to know it wasn’t an immediate hit.
Released in January 1991, it didn’t crack the top 100 until 10 February, when it snuck in at No. 99. Then, rather than disappearing, “The Horses” kept on hanging around and by April had made its way into the top 10. It slowly made its way along until it got to the No. 1 spot in May, where it stayed for two weeks.
It spent 23 weeks in the top 50 and 30 in the top 100, became the fifth-highest-selling song that year and helped take Rise to No. 3 on the album charts and go four times platinum, selling 300,000 copies. That was probably when most people expected “The Horses” to slowly fade away, becoming the sort of song that might get the occasional spin on a hits and memories FM radio station, but around 2004 something happened.
It’s hard to say what it was, but that was the year Google showed two huge spikes in people searching for Braithwaite’s cover version. Braithwaite himself noticed something special was happening with “The Horses” at that time.
“We first started to notice it four years ago in Perth,” he told the Cairns Post in 2009. “We did this gig and the first 100 people down the front were all aged between 18 and 25 and we thought, ‘God, what’s going on?’ They sang all of the songs off Edge and Rise, and when we played ‘The Horses’ the whole place erupted.”
The horse-racing community grabbed on to the song, getting Braithwaite to sing it at the W.S. Cox Plate for several years, although there were ructions when some complained that the crowd singalong spooked the horses. In 2013–15 “The Horses” rode on the back of Hawthorn’s three-peat as AFL Premiers, and during the first season it became the team victory song.
The resurgence of “The Horses” was enough to see Sony, which had ditched Braithwaite a decade earlier, re-sign him in 2013. In 2017 he was ushered into the ARIA Hall of Fame for the second time; he was already in there as a member of Sherbet. That same year he also got to sing “The Horses” with Jones during her Australian tour, when all he wanted to do was say ‘Hi.’
“I would have been happy just to have met her,” Braithwaite said. “I was not expecting to sing with her. She said, ‘Maybe you take the second verse because I will be playing guitar and I am a bit clunky.’” The performance wasn’t the best, in part because they were singing Jones’s slower and longer version and not Braithwaite’s. In the online video footage Braithwaite seems awkward, as though he’s trying to predict the tempo of the song and work out where he’s supposed to come in.
Watching the video of that performance online, it’s conclusive proof that Braithwaite’s version of “The Horses” is much better.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Glen Humphries is a journalist with the Illawarra Mercury, a chunk of that time as the music writer. He has written several books on the Wollongong music scene and his previous books for Gelding Street Press include Biff: Rugby League’s Infamous Fights, Jack Gibson’s Fur Coat and Sticky Wickets: Australian Cricket’s Controversies and Curiosities.
AUSSIE ROCK ANTHEMS: THE STORIES BEHIND OUR BIGGEST HIT SONGS by Glen Humphries (Gelding Street Press, $39.99rrp) is available at BIG W all good bookstores
By GLEN HUMPHRIES
