By TANIA PHILLIPS
HE’S one of the great survivors of the Australian music scene – and with more than 40 years in the industry you’d think Richard Clapton had been there and done that.
But now, in his sixties, life is more exciting than ever.
Inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1999, Clapton will be bringing a show with a difference to The J on Friday, 18 September.
“It’s totally different to anything I’ve done before – it’s a very cool tour,” he said.
With the amazing response to Richard’s recent memoirs, “The Best Years of Our Lives” and after an appearance at the Byron Bay Writers Festival earlier this year – guitar in hand – it occurred to him that audiences might just appreciate a hybrid show featuring not just the music, but all the crazy and often emotional stories behind the music.
The shows on the forthcoming tour will be in intimate mode – just Richard and country Victorian Danny Spencer, who has been touring with him for more than a decade. Danny, on guitar, has become a well-established part of Richard’s musical DNA.
The tour memoirs are something he’d talked about for a long time and finally achieved. Rather than bow to the pressure of getting a ghost writer to help him to put the tome together, he wrote it himself. Something different for a man known for his song-writing, not as an author.
The result, he says is a book covering his career from the halcyon years of the late ’60s in London to the ’70s and ’80s in the Australian music scene – all written in Richard’s own style and voice.
“It came out last September and was received amazingly well,” he said.
“I did a tour to promote the book – talking for an hour on stage. And then at the Byron Bay Writers Festival I was asked to bring a guitar.”
The germ of the tour was formed and after two impressive shows in Newcastle and Sydney he knew it was something he, and it seemed audiences, enjoyed.
And while this tour is something new and exciting for Richard, it’s just the start.
He is currently crowd-funding a trip to Nashville to record a new album with well-known Australian producer Mark Moffatt now based in the US, and president of the President of the Americana Music Association. The pair worked on several albums together in the ’80s.
