Richard Clapton is one of Australia’s foremost singer/songwriters and paved the way for three generations of songwriters to write about the experience of being Australian.
When Richard Clapton began his recording career in 1974, Australia was still in the vice-like grip of the cultural cringe. He plunged into the “deep water” and legends like Skyhooks and Paul Kelly, Cold Chisel, INXS, Midnight Oil, and hundreds of others, followed in his wake.
Clapton’s songs are still omnipresent on the radio to this day, his records charting the political landscape of the nation and the turbulent lives of two generations.
Clapton grew up in Sydney in the 1960s before hopping a plane for London, and then later to Germany, where he wrote a first album, Prussian Blue (1973) which was one of the first major Australian “singer-songwriter” albums.
Fast track to 1975, Clapton had the critics on side but his label at the time, Festival Records, insisted on a hit single. However, it was the song they picked as a B-side called “Girls On the Avenue” that reached #1 on the national charts and put Clapton at the top of his class. Like Americans Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen, Richard Clapton developed a sound based on melodic rock while his lyrics were poetic musings on his state of mind or the state of the nation.
By 1975, Clapton had set the themes he was to explore for the coming three decades. There were frequent escapes to his spiritual second home in Berlin to recharge and get a fresh perspective on Australia; there was Clapton’s love/hate relationship with the pop music culture; his often-tormented sense of growing up and his eye for the political landscape and how it affected Australians.
In the 1990s Richard continued to write and record and tour and his 1990s songs reflect a hard-won maturity. Indeed, Richard counts 2003’s Diamond Mine as amongst his best albums – and the critics unanimously agreed.
Since his first album in 1974, Richard has shown no signs of slowing down. He has released over 20 albums which have cumulatively sold over one million copies. He is the only rock artist to have received an Australia Council arts grant from the government which enabled him to travel around the world and write the songs for “Goodbye Tiger”.
In 1999 Richard Clapton was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.
In 2015, Richard travelled to the U.S. to record a new album with acclaimed producer Mark Moffatt. This had come to fruition after a few years of Moffatt urging Clapton to get over to Nashville and record with the finest musicians available. Moffatt (originally from Queensland) had by this stage been living in Nashville for over twenty years and had become an integral part of Americana Musicfest (held in Nashville every year).
Richard Clapton has never been rich. He has never had the pleasure of passing through life in a luxurious rock star bubble. In a career that now spans over 40 years he has battled everything from bad managers and capricious record companies to debt, taxes, personal tragedy and a thousand room service dinners. The fact that he’s come through it all with his sanity intact surprises all who know and love him. But survive he has, with a tale to tell.
