I love a good list. No matter the subject – I’m there. Lists aren’t meant to be definitive – they’re meant to inspire conversation, if not debate. Who amongst us has not reacted to a list of the ‘greatest movies ever made’ by querying the presumably accidental omission of anything from the ‘Police Academy’ franchise, before going on to debate in which order they should appear? (Is Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol a superior piece of work as against Mission to Moscow? It’s a line ball.)
When ABC launched its ‘Hottest 100 of Australian Songs’ I was excited. I instantly started jotting down a list with songs by Nick Cave, You Am I, The Fauves and the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band before I caught myself – ‘these are the artists that everyone will nominate’.
It’s one thing to be popular. It’s another to be stubbornly unpopular and forgotten by history. Anyone can put their hand up to support ‘Holy Grail’ by Hunters and Collectors. It takes someone truly special to nail their colours to the mast and push forward ‘Suddenly’ by Angry Anderson. Sometimes you’ve got to take a stand for the forgotten no matter how much they deserve to be so. I wanted to be inclusive and select songs that no one else would dare suggest. It was then that I thought of soap operas.
There was a moment – albeit fleeting – in which actors in soap operas thought they should release truly miserable music. Largely, this was Kylie’s fault. Her peers looked on aghast at her extraordinary success and wrongly attributed it to the fact that she was in a soap opera, overlooking the fact that she had tonnes of talent and the kind of steely determination that can make tides roll back and empires crumble. ‘If Kylie can do it, so can I’, they reasoned. They were wrong. Dead wrong.
I’ll be voting for ‘Don’t It Make You Feel Good?’ by Stefan Dennis. Granted, the answer to the question is a swift and extremely firm ‘no’, but as songs go, this one’s a burger with the lot. Slap bass, roaring guitars and plinky plonky synths supported by confounding chord sequences. It’s peak 80s. As for the video, it’s nothing short of a masterpiece – shadows, darkened alleyways and chainmail fencing are in abundance and people – including the singer himself – are in an inadvisable state of partial undress. By dent of either a miracle or a software malfunction, this song reached number sixteen on the UK Singles Chart. It’s time for a comeback.
Deep down, everyone thinks they can rap. Including Bruce Samazan. In soapie terms, Bruce Samazan is a triple threat, having appeared in holy trinity of soaps; Neighbours, E Street, and Home & Away. Just as those who’ve won an Emmy, Tony, Oscar and Grammy are said to be an ‘EGOT’, Bruce is NESHA. Or, as he forgettably once said, ‘I am NESHA’.
Bruce’s music career was much like a comet – it came blazing into view before landing somewhere in the Indian ocean, never to be heard from again. It was both prophetic and a relief that his single was entitled ‘One of a Kind’. The rhymes are terrible. The video is awful. The music sounds as though it may well have tumbled out of a cereal packet. It peaked at number eighty on the Australian Singles Chart, presumably because all the other songs called in sick that week.
But those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, and I feel that if we don’t recognise ‘One of a Kind’ as a disaster of Hindenburg proportions, we’re not really being honest with ourselves. It’s time to face up to our history – the good, the bad and the Bruce. But of all the forgotten songs of the past, my favourite was performed not a soapie actor, but a footballer.
This feels like precisely the right moment for a Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson renaissance. Granted, this may be the only time that the words “Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson” and “renaissance” have been used together in a sentence, but I strongly feel that we could all do with some cheering up. His song, ‘I’m An Individual’ is, shockingly, unavailable on Spotify and Apple Music, which is an absolute shame. For all its faults (and there are many) it’s a song that couldn’t have come from anywhere else. Jacko doesn’t let an inability to sing stand in the way of a great single that’s delivered with energy and no small amount of wit. That’s why I’m voting for Jacko as my number one pick.
Get cracking. By all means, vote for the great, the awesome and the profound. I, on the other hand, will throwing my support behind the forgotten, derided and the dark recesses of the Australian musical landscape. Why? Well, I could give you some made up reason that sounds particularly grand and noble but I won’t. Instead, I’ll content myself to quote Jacko and simply say, well, because I’m an individual.