Legend: Richard Clapton plays on Geelong’s waterfront this weekend.
ERIN PEARSON
Good rock music comes from bad influences, according to legendary Australian singer-songwriter Richard Clapton.
“Charlie Sheen’s got nothing on me,” he joked to the Independent ahead of this weekend’s show in Geelong.
“I don’t want to promote or advocate this but all the drunken benders we had created angst and from angst you get the good songs. Those poets’ decades ago had their muses and that (benders) is why artists of my generation have anthems.”
“But rather than grand standing and preaching, I preferred to make music more subliminal. People have been listening to Deep Water thinking it’s lovely all these years but I wrote it after a drunken bender in the studio, which resulted in a fight with my girlfriend followed by my car breaking down.
“Music needs hooks.”
In between packing boxes to move house, Clapton said he feared contemporary music had become “pasteurised”.
“Music’s becoming a pop sausage factory,” he said.
“Those anthem-like songs don’t seem to be happening any more.”
Australian rock music historian Ian McFarlane has described Clapton as one of the most important Australian songwriters of the 1970s.
With albums of hits including Diamond Mind, Capricorn Dancer and Girls on the Avenue, Clapton was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1999.
Clapton grew up in Sydney during the 1960s as part of a dysfunctional family. His parents separated when he was aged two.
From then on he had no contact with his father, a surgeon, until his mother’s suicide when he was 10.
Clapton said he chose to use his struggles as “fuel to his fire”.
He has since worked with some of the country’s most respected musicians and bands, including INXS and Cold Chisel.
“I’m trying to set examples,” he said.
“I’d like to think we’re all part of a subculture. Music can make a really, really strong connection.”
Clapton will perform at Geelong’s Waterfront Cafe on Sunday.
