Almanac Music: Australian Songs of Spring – Name a Personal Favourite
The Pleasure of Your Company, the 1983 album by Models. The song ‘No Shoulders No Head’, referred to below, is on it. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
Australian Songs of Spring: Name a Personal Favourite
Well, spring has sprung, to use a popular expression. Now is the time for Almanackers to put forward a favourite Australian song that mentions spring in some meaningful way. As indicated in my previous posts about summer and winter songs, New Zealanders can be considered as part of the Australian music scene for the purposes of the exercise, as, in a very real sense, they are anyway.
My personal nomination is ‘No Shoulders, No Head’, written and performed by Models, and released as a single in December 1983 from their album The Pleasure of Your Company. The song is dominated by a heavy, tribal, hypnotic beat, and is brooding and dark in tonal terms. The lyric is poetic and, initially for me, anyway, was hard to fathom. The first verse and chorus contain almost all the lines used in the song:
See my battle dress describe the
Spring where I lie, I lie rotting
In my autumn I drank spirits
Don’t wait, mother of my visits
For me to come home again
No shoulders, no head
No shoulders, no head
No shoulders, no head
And farther to the thought …
When I first listened to the song way back, it mainly struck me because of its powerful musical qualities and unusual title. Really, I had no clear sense of what the lyric was getting at until I recently revisited the piece on YouTube and one comment underneath the clip said something along the lines of ‘I always thought it was about war.’ For me this was the eureka! moment. My interpretation is that the song is basically a powerful anti-war one, in which the singer assumes the part of a headless, shoulderless soldier’s corpse rotting in a field and being reclaimed by the earth: See my battle dress describe the / Spring where I lie, I lie rotting.
In the next three lines the soldier recalls being alive in autumn – In my autumn I drank spirits – then tells his mother that he will no longer be coming home: Don’t wait mother of my visits / For me to come home again.
The first three lines of the chorus (which is basically a chant) No shoulders, no head / No shoulders, no head / No shoulders, no head are therefore self-explanatory, and while And farther to the thought obviously indicates a reflection on the nature of thought, beyond that I’m not certain about this line.
‘No Shoulders, No Head’ did not chart in the Australian Top 50 when released, but for me its quality endures, and I consider it a minor Australian classic.
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About
Kevin Densley is a graduate of both Deakin University and The University of Melbourne. He has taught writing and literature in numerous Victorian universities and TAFES. He is a poet and writer-in-general. His fifth book-length poetry collection, Please Feed the Macaws ... I'm Feeling Too Indolent, was published in late 2023 by Ginninderra Press. He is also the co-author of ten play collections for young people, as well as a multi Green Room Award nominated play, Last Chance Gas, published by Currency Press. Other writing includes screenplays for educational films.
KD- while it’s obvious I think it stands up- Come On Spring by Antennae. A short-lived band from the 90’s with Dave Faulkner and Kim Salmon, the song used to get frequent airings as a grab on Sky Racing!
Many thanks, Mickey, for getting the ball rolling, in relation to Australian spring songs.
I like ‘Come On Spring’ a lot – it has a sensual, languid, Indie feel about it.
I’m a big fan of Dave Faulkner, too, in general.
Big fan of early Models KD and you’ve plucked out a diamond in the rough – sounds a bit dirgey at first, but it does build up to something quite catchy despite the dire subject matter.
Go-Betweens’ Spring Rain comes readily to mind as anotheree.
And, by definition, Billy Thorpe’s It’s Almost Summer qualifies.
Thanks, Swish, for these – and I really like the way ‘It’s Almost Summer’ gets a guernsey; of course, if it’s almost summer, well, it’s still spring!
Maybe it’s proving to be not that easy to come up with a sizeable list of Australian songs of spring … let’s keep on thinking about it.
In order to keep the ball rolling, though, another lovely Australian spring-related song, a mixture of the cruisy and the melancholy (if that’s possible) is ‘Spring To Come’ by the John Butler Trio, from the 2014 album, Flesh and Blood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiBxYDyyb14
Swish has stolen my thunder, but for me the quintessential Australian song of spring
is “Spring Rain” by the Go-Betweens.
Soft, whimsical, musically simplistic but with brilliant drum fills by Lindy Morrison.
Kev I always see Spring as unsettled weather as opposed to Autumn particularly in Melbourne which is calmer so on that premise it would be Ed Kuepper’s Electrical Storm. We just returned from Tassie and saw some incredible examples of just that.
Two fine choices, gentlemen:
Smokie – I particularly love the catchy chorus, and Lindy’s fine drumming in your choice;
Ian – moody and evocative are the first two adjectives that spring (pardon the pun!) to mind after listening to Kuepper’s excellent song.
Thanks for the input!
You’d have to have any tune by Rick SPRINGfield included in this group.
On a different note,literally, ‘The Springtime it brings on the shearing’ is an old folk song with Gary Shearston recording a more modern variant in 1965.
Glen!
HI Glen!
Yes, Rick SPRINGfield – fair enough!
I know of the shearing song you mentioned, too – wonderful! Many of the sheep around my way have that freshly shorn look as I write this.
It’s almost summer, Billy Thorpe. Nothing else ‘springs to mind’.
Great choice, Tony! “Almost summer” – it’s certainly spring!
Simple Song of Spring features on arguably one of Australia’s greatest prog-rock albums A Product of a Broken Reality by the brilliant Company Caine released in 1971.
Thanks so much for this one, Richard – something a bit left-of-centre, a kind of time capsule, and a reminder of how much the early seventies were a ‘peak’ in terms of Oz rock.