Listening to this disc
of mostly satirical songs from the early
sixties to the early seventies, I was
left wondering how Derek Strahan (born
Malaysia, educated in Australia and
England) seemed to have passed me by
at the time. As well as the tunes and
the wit, there is some powerful stuff
here and the intervening thirty/forty
plus years has not blunted its impact.
Not for me anyway, but then, being of
that era, I suppose I’m ready-tuned.
My first reaction was
to recall the songs of Tom Lehrer, the
American maths lecturer who started
to become famous (or notorious) in the
1950s. He and Strahan were part of a
singer/writer/composer/performer tradition
that coincided with the post-war satirical
movement. Whereas Lehrer accompanied
himself ably on the piano, Strahan uses
guitar and usually additional forces
with occasional harmonica interpolations
à la Bob Dylan. Their
songs are mostly of verse/refrain structure.
Both employ the technique of writing
jolly little tunes to act as vehicles
for their blackest humour, the irony
of which adds to the bite of the satire.
In style and content
Strahan is more eclectic than Lehrer,
betraying influences that range from
Noel Coward to sixties pop. He adjusts
his delivery according to content, by,
for example, assuming suitable accents
such as Irish for "The Ballad of
Joking Jesus" with its James Joyce
text. Pompous English is assumed for
his three 1960 satires on contemporary
Britain. Brit-bashing was a popular
Aussie pastime then and these songs
do sound a trifle dated. Otherwise there
is little that is not relevant to the
present. A few things are a giveaway
to the past, such as the use of the
word "gay" to mean "jolly",
and a younger generation may not pick
up the political allusion in the Domino
Rag. This song is a penetrating
comment on what was the then high-profile
domino theory which declared that if
one "free" country just outside
communist borders fell to Marxism, then
the next one would tumble followed by
others like a row of collapsing dominos.
The theory, which generated much paranoia,
dominated American foreign policy, led
to the Vietnam war and persuaded many
Australians that if Vietnam went down,
Malaysia and Indonesia would soon follow.
The lumbering jauntiness of the music’s
refrain, "We’re all doing the domino
rag", exudes a general mocking
while the text goes so far as to give
Johnson, Agnew and Nixon specific mention.
This was courageous satire in 1970.
Tom Lehrer would probably never have
got away with this sort of thing in
the States.
Overall I found this
a hugely entertaining disc. The sound
is fresh thanks to some clever digital
remastering that adds some special effects
(wittily demonstrated in the opening
Take me to your leader) as well
as extra melodic and percussion forces.
It is unremittingly tuneful and funny
but when it ventures into serious black
satire it does, within the genre, border
on timeless genius.
The song that moved
me most, and chilled me most, was It’s
All Happened Before. It begins deceptively:
If you had a little boy
What would be his favourite toy -
A working model – oh how nice –
An anti- personnel device.
If you had a little son,
Would you teach him to hold a gun,
And when he grew bigger
Would you teach him to pull the trigger.
The refrain gathers more meaning after
each biting verse:
It’s all happened before,
It’s all happened before
And it mustn’t happen any more,
But it’s still happening now
Yes, it still is happening now
And we’ve got to stop it somehow, somehow…
-the last line sung not with feeble
optimism but with a sense of pragmatic
impotence.
Here’s part of a later verse:
Children play at tit for tat
And we tell them off for that;
When grown-ups play that kind of game
It doesn’t turn out quite the same.
A choir is gradually added over the
last refrain, sounding increasingly
and ironically celestial
I was listening to
this at a time when major powers have
taken to the gun as a problem-solver
of first resort. Opposing groups continue
with relentless tit-for-tat killing
as if that would solve anything. Against
this backdrop I thought the 34 year
old song a most telling, concise elaboration
of the philosopher Hegel’s observation,
made in 1837:
What experience and history teach
us, however, is this, that peoples
and governments have never learned
anything from history.
John Leeman
Derek Strahan: voice, guitar, harmonica, keyboard
for virtual bass and additional virtual instrumentation.
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