In which Australia’s first international success story comes from the most unlikely pop stars the nation could possibly create
I’m about to make a claim that might give some readers pause, but here goes: the Seekers were our Beatles.
Yes, the Easybeats were cooler, had the closest thing we ever got to a Lennon/McCartney partnership in Vanda and Young, and made records that didn’t sound like soundtracks for a wholesome church group frolic, but the facts speak for themselves: the Seekers were higher selling, more popular internationally, and even got in early with the whole unexpected-break-up thing.
The numbers are astonishing. At one point their biggest seller, ‘The Carnival is Over’, was selling more than 90,000 copies a day in the UK, for a total of 1.41 million copies.1 They were worldwide-million-sellers at a time when Australia barely registered in the global consciousness. They gave Paul Simon his first hit and saved his stillborn musical career.2 They were the first artists to put Aussie music on the international map.
Even so, it’s hard to get away from the fact that the Seekers were so uncool that they never even became cool by virtue of not ever trying to be cool. They posed for photos in sensible knitwear; they kept their hair short and tidy, as though concerned that they might have to go in to work the next day; and they sang close-harmony folk songs that would shock and horrify absolutely no-one’s parents. For freak’s sake, their debut single was a cover of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. As a representation of Australia under Robert Menzies, they were perfect: sexless, unthreatening and snowy white.
Even their split was undramatic: singer Judith Durham told the rest of the band—double bassist Athol Guy and guitarists Keith Potger and Bruce Woodley—that she was quitting for a solo career and they, well, agreed. Even then she gave them six months’ notice, lest it be too great a shock.
So drama-free was their ascent to stardom and convivial split that the writers of Georgy Girl, the Seekers’ jukebox musical, were initially hindered by the fact there was no story worth telling. In the end librettist Patrick Edgeworth created a Durham-focused Cinderella story cribbing elements from the story of the song in lieu of anything remotely controversial.
But if ‘Georgy Girl’ is arguably their best-known song, ‘The Carnival is Over’ was the one that made them superstars. It was a #1 hit in Australia, Ireland and Britain and very nearly in the United States, stalling at #2 on the Billboard charts. And, like almost all of the Seekers’ material, they didn’t actually write it. The music came from a Russian folk melody, while British singer Tom Springfield wrote the lyrics.3 Tom, the brother of Dusty, was pursuing a rather less immediately successful solo career after the demise of their band, the Springfields, when his path crossed with the newly arrived quartet. He soon became their main songwriter, giving them the hits ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’, ‘A World of Our Own’ and, with lyricist Jim Dale, ‘Georgy Girl’.
But the stately pace and close harmonies of ‘The Carnival is Over’ conceals the song’s excitingly vicious past. The tune’s origins are unknown, beyond that it was sung in the Volga region perhaps as early as the fifteenth century, but the poet and cultural ethnographer Dmitry Sadovnikov wrote new lyrics for it in 1883 that told the tale of Cossack commander and folk hero Stepan Razin, the leader of a peasant uprising against the tsar in 1670. In Sadovnikov’s version, the lyrics tell of Razin returning from another successful military campaign with a captured Persian princess, whom he promptly murders by throwing her into the freezing depths of the Volga River. The reasons for his sudden enthusiasm for princess-drowning vary between different versions of the song, but most seem to indicate Razin did so to prove his manliness after his soldiers accused him of going all soft and non-murdery after enjoying a night of passion.4
It’s not entirely clear how Springfield would have become aware of what was, after all, a pretty geographically specific Russian folk song most popular in the 1890s, but a decent guess would be via another archivist of folk music traditions: the US singer Pete Seeger, who recorded an English language cover of it in 1953. Springfield wisely chose to leave out the whole murdering-a-prisoner-of-war plot line and instead told a more generic tale of a love torn apart by, um, a literal carnival being literally over. This presumably means that the narrator is a carnie, which makes it even weirder. After all, what sort of true love can be torn asunder by the relentless responsibility of manning the Tilt-a-Whirl?5
Whatever the interpretation, the song clearly resonated with audiences and traditionally was used to close Seekers gigs—and became so closely associated with finales that it became the default song to close pretty much every single Australian event, from agricultural shows to sporting carnivals to official functions. Predictably, the Seekers were to perform it at the end of the closing ceremony of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney on 1 October, but Durham broke her hip and the band was forced to pull out. Appropriately, they did end up performing the song at the Paralympics later that month, with Durham singing from a wheelchair.6
It’s a song that has also enjoyed more bizarre cover versions than most. Fellow antipodean Nick Cave covered it in his typically stentorian fashion on the Bad Seeds’ Kicking Against the Pricks covers album in 1986, while German disco stars Boney M did a version of it in 1982 that sounds precisely like you’d imagine a Boney M cover of ‘The Carnival is Over’ to sound.
Despite becoming the first global Australian superstars, the Seekers called it a day in 1968 following a farewell concert that was broadcast around the world and viewed by 10 million people. Durham’s solo career enjoyed solid success in Australia, as well as intermittent international attention. Guy had a brief stint as a TV host before entering Victorian state politics, where he served three terms as a Liberal member of the uncharacteristically progressive government of Premier Dick Hamer. Potger put together the squeaky-clean New Seekers, who had a huge hit with the Coke ad jingle ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’. And Woodley made children’s toys and enjoyed a moderately successful career as a songwriter and a less successful one as a solo artist, although he did co-write the much-broadcast ‘I Am Australian’ with Bushwackers frontman Dobe Newton for the Australian bicentenary. Durham would later cover the song.
There were also several Seekers reunions, with and without Durham (with lead vocals handled by Julie Anthony and former Young Talent Time star Karen Knowles during the non-Judith years). So while the rock’n’roll explosion was creating a wave of social change and youth-led upheaval in the mid-sixties, Australia’s biggest band was making music that grandmothers could enjoy.
That would not remain the case for long, mind, because there were some long-haired teenage types who were set to change everything.
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1 According to the Official Charts Company in 2012 ‘The Carnival is Over’ was the thirty-sixth highest-selling single in Britain of all time, beaten by the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ but edging out Coolio’s ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’. Given the way sales have declined in the years since, that result is unlikely to change. Sorry, Coolio.
2 They covered his ‘Someday One Day’ after meeting him in London, where he was licking his wounds after the comprehensive failure of Simon & Garfunkel’s debut album Wednesday Morning, 3AM to light up the charts.
3 More importantly, though, Tom’s real name was Dionysius P.A. O’Brien, which is inarguably the greatest name in the entire history of everything.
4 Um…leaving aside the ‘murder by drowning’ bit, a night of passion between a military leader and a captured prisoner is, at the very least, unlikely to have been entirely consensual. Bizarrely, ‘The Carnival is Over’ still regularly comes up in online lists of Songs For Weddings, proving that the internet is basically one giant prank.
5 Actually, there’s one other odd thing in the lyrics, specifically that the song claims that the joys of love are fleeting ‘for Pierrot and Columbine’. These are two stock characters from the commedia dell’arte—Pierrot the sad clown, Columbine (or Columbina) a servant girl who is also Pierrot’s faithless wife. So presumably there’s some adulterous business going on in there with Harlequin that’s ended this particular carnival. See, Mum? That Bachelor of Arts degree is still paying off.
6 An Olympic-closing Seekers performance of ‘The Carnival is Over’ was considered such a foregone conclusion that the final episode of the John Clarke/Bryan Dawe/Gina Riley satirical comedy The Games—written and filmed months earlier—ended with the trio (and Nicholas Bell) forced to impersonate the band performing the song.