Plain and Fancy: Richard Clapton - Goodbye Tiger (1977 australia, stunning singer songwriter, 2024 remaster)

Thursday, October 17, 2024

Richard Clapton - Goodbye Tiger (1977 australia, stunning singer songwriter, 2024 remaster)

From where we sit today in the 21st century, 1977 seems like another world, another lifetime ago.The Whitlam Experiment was over and Australia appeared to be heading back to the conservative dark ages. The most popular shows on TV were Number 96 and The Box. On Sunday nights, Countdown celebrated the Australians stars of the era: LRB, Sherbet, JPY and Dragon.

It was into this space that a young artist by the name of Richard Clapton dropped Goodbye Tiger, this most enigmatic and mysterious of Australian Rock Classics - an album suffused with bitterness and sadness, with loss and resignation, with righteous anger and acerbic disdain.

Richard Clapton was always an outsider - a young man keen to reject almost everything about his family, his upbringing and his culture. With his curtain of black hair and his dark, introspective songs, Clapton was in so many ways out of step with his time and his place, travelling a very different path to his contemporaries.

Yet despite this, or perhaps because of it, his music found its audience almost instantly. Whatever Australia was in those days - a sunburnt country of proud sportsmen, suburban values and narrow thinking - Richard wasn't buying it. Never comfortable in his country of birth nor, indeed, in his own skin, he turned his back on the parochial materialism of his homeland and wandered the world in search of a place that felt like home.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knew the artist as a young man that he found that place in Northern Europe - and in particular the edgy, nerve-damaged mean streets of West Berlin. Richard returned to Australia with a brace of incredible songs and gathered a band with the intelligence and technical ability to realise them. In a state of siege with both his producer - Richard Batchens and his record company, Richard Clapton went into the Festival Studios in Ultimo and created Goodbye Tiger.

Goodbye Tiger was a kiss-off letter to Australia and everyone that lived there. And even now, more than 30 years later, it remains strikingly relevant and brutally on-target. Listening to the album today with fresh ears, I'm struck by it's unique perspective. Although the songs were written by a young man in the prime of what was already a successful career, it's suffused with a sad, reflective disappointment and an appreciation of some of life's inevitable certainties: hopes fade; dreams shatter. The past is another country and you can never go back. The entire album is a meditation on the very nature of reminiscence and regret.

It's a poignant and expertly crafted album from a man jaggedly out of step with his time and place, unsure how he got there and even less certain of his desire to remain. Drunk., alienated and angry, the artist stands apart from his own life and examines it with bitter clarity.

If you're reading these liner notes you've almost certainly had the good taste to purchase the album, and you'd be entitled to form your own interpretations of the songs. Suffice to say that of the eight songs here - four per side, as one did in those days I'd suggest that at least five are stone-cold classics. From the ironically upbeat opening salvo of "Lucky Country" to the strangely peaceful melancholia of closing track "Wintertime in Amsterdam", this is an album of untold riches.

"Deep Water" was the "hit" from the album - he even got to perform it on Countdown - and it still sounds fantastic with it's sparring themes of faded glory and drunken alienation. But for this writer, at least, it's the title track that leaps off the disc. "Goodbye Tiger" - written in a moment of desolate, hung-over reflection after fleeing Australia spontaneously is a deep musing on all that was and never will be again. A fond but unsentimental farewell. And one of the greatest Australian songs ever written or committed to tape.

So, music lovers, it is indeed a very long time since 1977. For all of us who were there all those years ago, it's been a long strange trip. I first met Richard Clapton the very month he released this album, and we've been friends ever since. Goodbye Tiger stands as a shining example of all that great songwriting can be and should be: it's personal, it's universal, it moves you and it makes you think. It hasn't aged one bit, unlike the rest of us. So this note's for you, Richard, with all my love. Never say Goodbye to a friend.

by Ed St John, Sydney, June 2009