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ROLF HARRIS

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Central to a life that has seen him become one of the world’s most readily recognised Australians, that has see him enjoy acclaim and enormous affection as a painter, television presenter and constant champion of children, animals and the arts, has been music.

It was music that took Rolf Harris professionally beyond these shores and enabled his unique and irrepressible character to find an audience - a following both loyal and ever-accommodating. It was music that enabled him, along with Slim Dusty, Frank Ifield and actor Chips Rafferty, to establish a visible and viable northern hemisphere identity for Australians beyond the sporting realms.

As a chart hit entity, his achievements are greatly impressive. Rolf is the only Australian-born singer who has been in the British Top 10 in the 1960’s, the 1970s and the 1990s. He was the first Australian-born pop performer to reach the American Top 3. In Australia he has had number ones a decade or more apart (a rare feat shared with John Farnham, Col Joye, Slim Dusty and, in varying group guises, Glenn Shorrock).

Though he played piano at the age of nine, growing up in Perth, this grandson of a portrait painter focused first on art. After leaving Perth Modern School he studied at the University of Western Australia to be a teacher but drew and painted in every spare moment he could find. At the age of 22, with the proceeds of four exhibitions of his work, he traveled to London and enrolled at the City & Guilds Art School, financing himself by doing regular illustrations in the weekly London Mystery Magazine and notably illustrating magician Robert Harbin’s Paper Magic in 1956. Rolf had paintings accepted and hung in two consecutive years in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.

It was during his art endeavours that Rolf accidentally came upon the musical instrument that will forever be associated with him. When drying a freshly-painted sheet of hardboard, (prepared incidentally for a portrait of Robert Harbin that he intended to paint), he discovered this brand new instrument. He had heated it almost to burning point, and when propping it between his hands and fanning it to cool it down, he was amazed at the regular ‘woop woop’ sounds it made. He instantly dubbed it the Wobble Board. Many a sheet of masonite has been converted to the tuneful task since.

Said board, actually credited on the disc label, would render irresistible the song he recorded in 1960, upon his return to Perth, in the studio of TVW-7 while working on the state and station’s first locally-produced show, Spotlight. His song, Tie me Kangaroo Down, Sport, originally titled Kangalypso and inspired by Harry Belafonte’s calypso-styled hits, was penned by Rolf as early as 1957. When he finally got to put it down, standing beneath a single microphone at the station, he was assisted by the Rhythm Spinners, four local musicians who declined ten percent of the royalties in favour of a session fee of 28 pounds because they believed the song would be a flop.

It proved to be anything but. Sent to EMI Records in Sydney, it found release on their Columbia imprint, and by May 1960 it was No. 1. By July it was in the UK Top 10. Three years later, released in the US by Epic Records, it was a Top 3 on Billboard (and No. 1 on its Adult Contemporary listings). Before 1960 was over, Rolf had two more Australian hits – the Top 40 The Big Black Hat and Christmas classic-to-come Six White Boomers.

Rolf took to recording with alacrity, incorporating an array of unusual instruments including the didgeridoo, jews harp, stylophone and, on the mesmerising Sun Arise, four double basses. This, his first American hit and actually a bigger UK hit than Tie Me ...., reaching the Top 3 there in 1962 (though never a hit in Australia), came about from his friendship with naturalist Harry Butler (later known for his TV series In The Wild), who introduced him to strains of koori music. As Rolf would write in his 2001 autobiography Can You Tell What It Is Yet?, “The lyrics of the song came from a story Harry told me about Aboriginal beliefs. Some tribes see the sun as a goddess. Each time she wakes in the morning, her skirts of light gradually cover more and more of the land, bringing back the warmth and the life to the earth.”

That song, like Rolf himself, reached into a lot of corners. By the time The Beatles had arrived in British life, Rolf was again living in England and the Fab Four declared themselves admirers. Rolf was on the first episode of their BBC From Us To You radio shows, enjoying their backing vocals on a customised version of Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport that included such re-written lyrics as "Cut yer hair once a year boys/Don't ill-treat me pet dingo, Ringo". Rolf then took the stage at the Finsbury Park Astoria as host of the run of The Beatles’ Christmas Shows with Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas, Tommy Quickly, Cilla Black, Fourmost and Barron Knights. Earlier that year he’d had a moderate British hit with Johnny Day and by the end of it he was as famous in Swinging London as any young pop star.

Throughout the 1960s Rolf had various hits in various territories – Nick Teen and Al K. Hall in America (where his novelty single Ringo For President was well received), Court Of King Caractacus, Big Dog and Jake The Peg in Australia, and Bluer Than Blue in England, while albums continued to appear. During the decade he developed a strong television profile in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and his homeland. In 1967 he hosted the BBC's A Song for Europe contest and provided UK commentary at that year's Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna. Effervescent and indefatigable, he let no aspect of his talent lapse.

It was in 1969, during a return home, that Rolf traveled to the Northern Territory and stayed with bush singer Ted Egan, (then working in Aboriginal Welfare). Egan sang him a song he’d learned from his mother when he was a four year old. The song, apparently inspired by the book Jackanapes by Victorian children’s writer Juliana Horatia Ewing, had been written by Theodore Morse and Edward Madden and was turned into a popular music hall song by Scottish tenor Harry Lauder. Back in England, Rolf pitched Two Little Boys to the producer of his BBC variety show but then realised he’d lost the rough tape he’d made so he rang Egan in Australia and had him sing it to him over the phone. Released as a single at the end of the year it spent 7 weeks at No. 1, becoming the UK’s last No1 of the sixties and the first of the seventies, and was the UK’s biggest selling record of 1969. Rolf’s rendition, also a smash in Australia, became part of British life, touching everyone from Margaret Thatcher, who declared it her favourite song on Desert Island Discs, to Splodgenessabound, who took their version of it into the British Top 30 in 1980.

Though Rolf recorded throughout the 70s and 80s, his dazzling multi-faceted career – with television, art and public-spirited campaigns (such as seal hunt opposition) to the fore – kept him phenomenally busy. For the 1982 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in Brisbane he once again re-wrote Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport to suit an occasion, singing behind a huge winking roo “Let me welcome you to the Games, friends, welcome you to the Games. Look, I don't know all of your names, friends but let me welcome you to the Games.”

By the early 90s Rolf very likely thought that he had finished with the pop charts. But they had not finished with him. As with Sun Arise and Two Little Boys fortuitous intersections came to bear on him in a most remarkable way. Invited by Andrew Denton to perform a version of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven on his live television comedy show The Money Or The Gun, Rolf joined 27 other acts in rendering the epic rock work. His treatment was after the style of Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport, with wobble board, an ‘altogether now’ chorus and didge. Released in the UK as a single it made Top 10. Some were amazed, some were appalled but, in gentle rebuke to those who accused him of undue irreverence, or even labelled his a comedy recording, he pointed out that he had never heard the original, having initiated his performance from the sheet music. He enjoyed a minor follow-up hit with his own take on Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and later revisited a theme by rendering the Divinyls’ I Touch Myself, with just wobble board, for Andrew Denton’s Musical Challenge on the Triple M Network.

Rolf Harris, MBE, OBE, CBE, AM (and 1975 King of Moomba!) has found his way into the annals of popular music in ways known and unknown. He has been a star performer at four Glastonbury festivals and has played didgeridoo and sung on Kate Bush albums. Always on the lookout for unusual sounds to use in his songs, it has been documented by one keen website, “he became something of an accidental pioneer when he was given a prototype electronic instrument, the Stylophone, and quickly became its most notable champion, recording demos and endorsing it. Tinny though the stylophone was, it did much to feed the imaginations and ambitions of a generation who would grow up to become the pioneers of synthpop and even techno. A little-known fact is that Rolf Harris and David Bowie shared a sound engineer at the time who, having heard Rolf playing the instrument, suggested to Bowie that a stylophone was just what was needed to make Space Oddity sound all other-worldly.”

Rolf seems to come at us from every direction. In September 2006 the Royal Australian Mint launched the first of the new 2007 Silver Kangaroo Collector's Coin series. Harris was commissioned to design the first coin in the series. For the third year running, he designed and painted the official Children In Need Christmas card in the UK.

The reach of the man, particularly in Britain, is hard to fully comprehend, even for his countrymen. In 2001 Rolf’s BBC TV series Rolf on Art attracted over 24.5 million viewers over a period of four weeks, gaining the highest ratings ever for a programme on the visual arts in the history of television. His celebrated 2006 portrait of the Queen came to life on the small screen and was exhibited at Buckingham Palace and on a tour of public galleries in the UK. (His grandfather had once painted a portrait of the Queen's grandfather, King George V, while he was inspecting the troops in the first World War). The series Star Portraits with Rolf Harris has also broken TV records.

Oh, and apart from all that, as an adolescent Rolf was also a champion swimmer. He won the Australian Junior 110 yards Backstroke Championship just up the road here in the Brunswick Baths in Melbourne in 1946, and was Western Australian state champion over a variety of distances and strokes between 1948 and 1952 when he set off for England and a whole new life.

All together now ...........