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How many songs have been inspired by our marvellous Melbourne with lyrics about suburbs, place names and objects?

Anyone growing up in Melbourne remembers Balwyn Calling by Skyhooks but how many other songs are there?

Articles in TheAge and HeraldSun show there are many great songs that fit the bill so the quest begins: Songs of Melbourne

The songs of Melbourne

Cities start with grids, development, and economics but the places that become something more, the cities that have a cultural history and shared outlook, eventually require chords, melodies, and lyrics. Songs are how a metropolis shares tales of itself, criticises the urban experience, or reminds citizens of what they're a part of. A city with a thriving music community, as Melbourne has enjoyed for five decades, has a distinct voice.

The songs that have come to define Melbourne can be social commentary or joyous anthem, melancholic remembrance or daft punk (hello to TISM). What they share is an ability to cut across the lines that divide us, helping each generation understand their predecessors or revealing lives that were shunted aside. They're also satisfying to sing along with.

With Melbourne Music Week, the annual celebration of the city's music scene, beginning on Thursday, here are five songs that have come to epitomise life in Melbourne, each recalled by a songwriter or performer integral to those chords, melodies, and lyrics.

SKYHOOKS: Balwyn Calling (1974)

"A brick veneer prison is waiting for you ... "

Skyhooks' debut album, Living in the 70s, was ground zero for songs that spoke to Melbourne's identity. Before it was released by Mushroom Records on October 28, 1974 the image of the city was a cultural identikit. After the release Melbourne had a new topography of glam riffs, sardonic social critique, and sexual specificity . It was a youth revolution with wild outfits that helped shape a new national identity.

"In theatre, in newspaper, in writing, there was a sense of Australia becoming itself rather than a colonial offshoot," says the band's guitarist, and future Melbourne identity, Red Symons. "People started talking differently on the radio. They stopped using a BBC accent to make themselves sound posh. If something followed from that with other Australian bands it wasn't that we invented it. We simply opened the door."

The track titles alone script a scene: Toorak Cowboy, Carlton (Lygon Street Limbo), and Balwyn Calling. The latter was a tale of modern attraction and thwarted commitment written by the band's chief songwriter, bassist Greg Macainsh. The lyric begins casually at a party but escalates to describe marriage and moving to the sleepy suburbs.

"I can't think of anybody who was writing about Melbourne in rock'n'roll bands until we did," says Symons. "I suspect it's a recurring theme in Greg Macainsh's lyrics, a desire not to be anchored down. When you're in your early 20s you haven't figured which direction you want to strike out in."

While Balwyn Calling was one of the few songs on Living in the 70s not banned from airplay by the Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters due to sex and drug references, it was still both frank and euphoric, with complementary guitar parts that surge forward. Youthful decisions have rarely sounded so urgent, or particular to Melbourne.

"There was a curiosity about who it was about, if it was a particular person. To this day none of us really know but that's not important. If the audience like it without knowing who it's about that's the important thing," Symons says. "I, for one, did not end up in Balwyn."

PAUL KELLY AND THE COLOURED GIRLS: Leaps and Bounds (1986)

"I remember, I remember, I go leaps and bounds ... "

Now one of Paul Kelly's signature songs, with its transcendent evocation of traversing Melbourne on a chilly winter day, Leaps and Bounds was begun by a pair of aspiring songwriters - Kelly and his friend Chris Langman - fresh from Adelaide who shared a succession of apartments in the late 1970s at either end of Melbourne's most unyielding arterial road.

The first was on Hoddle Street, Collingwood, near a busy intersection then without traffic lights where tow trucks inevitably arrived at 4 o'clock every afternoon, while the second was to the south and even noisier on the hill in South Yarra where Punt Road heads down to the Yarra River.

They were constantly writing songs, Langman remembers, mostly instigated by the already accomplished Kelly, but one track was a shared tale of wonder for their new home.

"At first it was a much more general song," says Langman, who subsequently has enjoyed a long career as a screen director. "Paul always says the song is about nothing, but I kicked it off and it was really a joyous time - if there's anything joyous about Hoddle Street - where you're just walking down the street with your feet off the ground. You just couldn't do that the same way in another city."

There was a punk version of the original collaboration recorded with Sports frontman Stephen Cummings producing, but Leaps and Bounds lived for years anonymously on a cassette in Kelly's possession.

He rediscovered it in the mid-1980 s, while living in Sydney and preparing to record his breakthrough double album Gossip.

"Paul said to me, 'Sorry, I had to change some of the lyrics' and, of course, the words he changed are now all the ones people know," Langman happily admits. "For example, 'the clock on the wall' became 'the clock on the silo' . I always liked the song, but people have come to love it. I was at the [AFL] grand final this year and Paul singing it was the best thing about the day."

CROWDED HOUSE: Four Seasons in One Day (1991)

"Even when you're feeling warm, the temperature could drop away ... "

"Melbourne is a city of secrets. There's a feeling in the air that not everything has to be said or spoke or made apparent. Songwriters love that," says Tim Finn. "You don't want to talk about your feelings, but you've got this great opportunity to sing about them. Other cities are in your face and obvious, but Melbourne's not like that."

The New Zealand singer-songwriter would know. Melbourne was a "refuge' ' for Split Enz in 1975, after a disastrous relocation to Sydney, and Tim Finn would live here for many years, including a stint beginning in 1989 when he resided in Caulfield . His younger brother, Neil, was based in St Kilda East with his young family, trying to satisfy an American record company unhappy with the direction of his band, Crowded House. Spontaneously they began writing songs together - including the masterful Four Seasons in One Day - which became Crowded House's third album, the brilliant Woodface.

"Because we were living very different lives it was very interesting for each of us to be with the other one," recalls Tim Finn, who plays the Queenscliff Music Festival later this month. "Neil and his wife, Sharon, were expecting their second child, and he was in a very stable and healthy relationship, while I had been through a couple of very unstable and unhealthy relationships."

Suffused with bittersweet acoustic textures, the song uses Melbourne's mercurial weather as a metaphor for the emotional shifts that punctuate the everyday. Neil's lead vocal, with Tim's harmonies, reveals a duality both undeniable and unbearable: "finding out wherever there is comfort there is pain" .

"I'm pretty sure that was Neil's line," Finn says. "We were sharing with each other as songwriters do - there's no conversation, but it wells up and suddenly you're singing about yourself. Because we were brothers, with this huge tide pool of memories between us, we could be honest and raw without having to spell anything out."

And does Melbourne really experience four seasons in one day? "Usually there are two: you can get those heavy spring rains, then suddenly it's warm and sunny," reasons Finn. "But if you add the early morning and late night you'll probably get the other two, so I'll say yes."

FRENTE: Accidently Kelly Street (1992)

"Throw away those keys start walking, and watch those tiny things go by ... "

At the start of the 1990s Richmond was deserted. The post-World War II southern European migrant families were moving out and gentrification was just a property developer's pipedream. Rundown share houses were full of tertiary students and musicians. Among the latter was Tim O'Connor , born in England and raised in Adelaide, who was the bass player in an idiosyncratic acoustic pop band named Frente that mainly played at then independent music mainstay The Punters Club, on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

"Everyone was broke, but rents were cheap and you could always afford a few beers at the pub," says O'Connor , who now lives in Castlemaine. "For a little while I had a one-bedroom flat in Fitzroy for $60 a week. We knew lots of people in bands and someone would come by and you'd just start playing records with them. Melbourne felt like a breath of fresh air."

When O'Connor had to leave a share house in Clifton Hill, he joined some friends in a Richmond rental sight unseen. He thought it was in Kelly Street, but on the day he hurriedly moved discovered it was actually Kenny Street (Molly Meldrum lived over the back fence). Six months later O'Connor decided to write "a love letter to the inner city" , which complete with a misspelt title that summed up the song's love of happenstance, was titled Accidently Kelly Street.

"I was an Elvis Costello fan, but I decided to write a happy song," O'Connor says. "I wondered what would happen if David Byrne and Elvis Costello wrote a song together. I loved the simplicity in that lyric."

Fronted by Angie Hart's sweetly invigorating vocal, Accidently Kelly Street begins as a description of the Richmond share house before taking to the streets. O'Connor was writing about the possibilities of footpath encounters and shared moments of connection, qualities that have only become vital to Melburnians in the years since. While the song initially had to go through some public satire, it emerged as a celebration of what residents in those now crowded inner-city suburbs value most: a sense of community.

COURTNEY BARNETT: Depreston (2015)

"You said we should look out further, I guess it wouldn't hurt us ... "

Courtney Barnett didn't set out to write a song that would become a touchstone for beleaguered firsttime home buyers, but she hit a nerve with her recollection of leaving her stomping ground in Melbourne's inner-north to accompany her then partner to an open house in suburban Preston. The search for affordable housing took her to "a Californian bungalow in a cul-de-sac" , and some uncomfortable realisations.

"I remember that it came out almost fully formed. I assumed there would be more to it - like a chorus, or some other chords - but the initial part just came together and it just felt right," says Barnett, who has lived in Melbourne for the past decade. "It wasn't my money - I was just along for the story. That's the silver lining for a lot of my life and a great way to look at the world."

The song speaks to inequality and the lack of affordability in housing, but it sneaks up on you. Barnett's tone is conversational, mixing offhand rhymes about saving money for a deposit via a coffee machine ("now we've got that percolator, never made a latte greater" ) and real estate agent observations ("aren't the pressed metal ceilings great?" ).

You can picture every detail in the lyric, and as a slide guitar part adds another layer of regret you realise, along with Barnett, that a deceased estate means more than a buying opportunity. Someone's life was made and lived in the house, with a myriad experiences and emotions, and all that is gone.

"You can see a house as a material object, but then you see the flip side, which is the nostalgic, personal importance that it holds," Barnett says. "A home is so much more than a shelter - people's whole lives are built around their sense of home."

Barnett never did make the move to Preston, and these days she favours Coburg; when she had a week off from touring in Melbourne recently she stayed at a hotel and experienced the city as if a tourist. But Barnett's love for Melbourne hasn't changed. "Melbourne is definitely inspiring," she says. "People for the most part are quite open to an experience and a conversation. They share stories and the moment. They're not too closed off and scared."

Source: The Age Digital Edition: The songs of Melbourne
Tales of the city are a melody built on a sharing community,
writes CRAIG MATHIESON.
This article is from the November 10, 2019 issue of The Age Digital Edition

---

Music greats rally for guitar legend Lobby Loyde
Patrick Donovan
August 26, 2006

SKYHOOKS' Greg Macainsh is credited with being one of the first people to write songs about Melbourne.

He overcame the cultural cringe that had held many songwriters back and proudly placed his hedonistic tales in suburbs such as Toorak, Carlton and Balwyn on the band's 1974 debut album, Living in the 70s.

But Lobby Loyde preceded him by some seven years in the Wild Cherries song That's Life.

"That's Life is certainly the first local rock song to mention Melbourne in the lyrics,"says the author of the Encyclopedia of Rock and Pop, Ian McFarlane.

But Loyde appears to be a reluctant resident in the line: "Melbourne is a big, big city/So it looks like I have to stay."

Loyde, who has lung cancer, may perform the song at his sold-out benefit concert at the Palace in St Kilda on Tuesday. The Wild Cherries are reforming for the occasion, alongside a who's who of Australian rock, including Madder Lake, Wendy Saddington, the Masters Apprentices and Jimmy Barnes.

Loyde was preceded by Frankie Davidson, who mentioned Melbourne in some of his late-1950s recordings and Lucky Starr, who referenced Victorian towns in I've Been Everywhere in 1962. And, of course, there was the theme from the Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck film about the end of the world, On the Beach, shot in Melbourne in 1959.

"With Australian songwriters, you can almost put it into two camps - BM (before Macainsh) and AM (after Macainsh),"said rock historian Glenn A. Baker.

"But in terms of a rock band doing a real rock song without a novelty component, Lobby is up there with That's Life.

"Axiom were another band that put local placenames in unselfconsciously. And there were surf songs, like Stompin' at Maroubra by Little Patti and even the Beach Boys namechecked Narrabeen beach in Surfin' USA in 1963."

But Baker does not believe that songwriters abstained because of cultural cringe.

"I once asked George Young why he wrote a song about St Louis when I don't think he had even been there. He said in his Scottish brogue, 'Because it sings well'. Mordialloc may not 'sing' so well. But in Macainsh's hands, Melbourne placenames sang very well indeed."

Songs of Melbourne - The Age

Who hasn't waited for a loved one Under The Clocks? Who could deny Paul Kelly's genuine Melbourne sensibility? Remember the Kingston Hotel in Richmond in the swinging late-'70s? Or is it best forgotten?

Flat, dowdy, grey, conservative. Beaches like bathtubs. A river that's really a creek flowing upside down. Too cold in winter and too hot in summer. Let's face it: Melbourne isn't beautiful or majestic.

That's why so many of us love it, of course. It's what's inside that counts. In Melbourne, you learn to make your own fun. That's why artists going all the way back to the Heidelberg school have found it inspiring. Their paintings were mostly of mundane scrub or creek banks, but it was one detail - the light - that rendered the place special.

Urban, contemporary Melbourne, with its long, stretching vistas of suburbs and bitumen, a burgeoning and seemingly unstoppable leisure diet of coffee and focaccia, and a music scene that remains lively in the face of television, videos, DVDs, the internet and the iPod, is a place that more than any other Australian city has found its way into popular song.

But the sentiments of these songs are not sweeping celebrations. There is no "Melbourne, you're a rollicking town, I want to see your glistening bay and your Station Pier"lyric. Instead, it's the little pieces of life in the city that have occupied our songwriters since it became OK to talk about our own town in song.

One man more than any other made it possible. Greg Macainsh's time at the forefront of the public imagination was brief. After four years at or near the top of the charts with his band Skyhooks, the hits - and Macainsh's unique well of creativity - pretty much dried up.

But with little more than half a dozen songs, including Balwyn Calling, Carlton and Toorak Cowboy, all on Skyhooks' first album released 30 years ago almost to the day, Macainsh managed to achieve something that most artists can only dream of.

He claimed his hometown as an interesting, amusing and, most important of all, acceptable lyrical subject, and in doing so opened the way for an entire genre: the Melbourne song.

In itself, this was a revelation. There had previously been a few attempts at songs employing local themes. Col Joye's backing band the Joy Boys scored a hit in the early '60s with an instrumental named after the interstate train the Southern Aurora, and pioneering Melbourne rocker-turned-country artist Johnny Chester used the Hume Highway as an escape route from bad love in 1969's Highway 31.

One tongue-in-cheek piece by a male vocal group in the late '60s that got a little radio airplay had compared Melbourne's attractions with Sydney ("Sydney's got its harbour but we've got Melbourne Bitter") and in 1972 a comedy song about the Dandenong Ranges had made the lower reaches of the charts ("I go way up, up Upwey").

But until Skyhooks' arrival, there was a sort of unease about whether local place names were cool enough to use in song. In 1972, Brian Cadd was one of Australia's biggest artists and the opening line to his hit song Ginger Man - "She wrote to me from Texas"- caused a good deal of controversy.

Why, some music writers asked, did he place his songs in America? Cadd, who had already penned several hits as part of the Groop and then Axiom, whose first hit was Arkansas Grass in 1969, defended his choice of American localities on the grounds that Australian place names, such as Wagga Wagga, did not sound right when laid over a pop melody.

Macainsh got around that problem by making his Melbourne songs social documents about specific aspects of the city. He dwelt on the details and as a consequence introduced a genuine folk element into Australian rock.

In Carlton, he wrote of "pizza places"and the "spaced-out faces"of the suburb's student population. In Toorak Cowboy he parodied aimless rich loafers and reported his first purchase of marijuana in 1968 - a whole matchbox-full outside the once-trendy South Yarra Arms hotel.

A few years later, James Reyne followed Macainsh's lead by name-checking one of Melbourne's premier music venues, Bombay Rock in Brunswick, in Australian Crawl's first hit, Beautiful People (he also spoofed the beautiful people in Toorak for being excessive by riding $200 bikes in the park, which tells us something about inflation).

And so it goes: Stephen Cummings reminds us that Russell Street used to be where all the detectives worked in (Boys) What Did The Detectives Say?; Paul Kelly moves the locale of To Her Door from Brisbane to Melbourne by placing a character in a Silver Top taxi.

If pop music has any real, lasting value beyond the ephemeral and passing pleasure it can bring, it lies in its ability to hold up a mirror to its devotees, to reflect the world in which the singer and the listener live.

The songs listed here will take you from Maroondah Reservoir to Flinders Street Station, through Albert Park to St Kilda and across to Footscray, then down a series of back lanes and even to a suburban home where the phone has a seemingly interminable connection to a young lovelorn woman in Balwyn.

Melbourne, they're playing your song. - Shaun Carney

CHARLES JENKINS
Gasworks Park

"We were living nearby at the time,and my wife, Deb, was pregnant with our first boy, Henry, and we'd go for lots of walks.

"With the song, I tried to capture the feeling of Gasworks Park (in Port Melbourne) at night - windswept and cold. "There's a tension there because you don't always feel safe walking through an open space at night."

"When I first came to Melbourne, I wrote a lot of songs about Melbourne, but they didn't end up anywhere. I guess, once you've been in an environment for a while, you start to look for different things besides what initially captured your eye."- Jeff Jenkins

JOHNNY CHESTER

Songs on 3UZ were not awash with local references when Melbourne rock'n'roll pioneer Johnny "Ches"Chester presented their midnight to dawn shifts in 1969.

Country music was more likely to celebrate Australian landmarks in song, and it was in this spirit that Chester started humming a tune on a Saturday night drive to Seymour 25 years ago.

"I was doing a show with my band at the time, Jigsaw,"he remembers. "I was heading up the highway and I started noticing all these '31' signs. By the time I got to Seymour I had this idea in my head, so I sat down outside the hall and scribbled as much as I could on a brown paper bag.

"I did the show, drove back to Melbourne and I still had the melody in my head so I thought, 'That's got to be a good sign.' "

Melbourne isn't specifically mentioned in Highway 31, but if you follow the geography, you can't help but see it in the rearview mirror: "I got a lift to Seymour with a sympathetic friend, I told her that I had no wish to stay."

"It was a fella leaving his lady, taking off up the highway,"Chester says. "It traced the towns on Highway 31 from Melbourne to Sydney."

The song made the Top 40 in Melbourne and Brisbane. "It probably would have in Sydney, too,"says Chester, "except that instead of just playing the song, Lawsy (John Laws) was reading an advertisement over the top of it for a used-car dealer who was on the highway."- Michael Dwyer

STEPHEN CUMMINGS - The Sports 'It's about kids hanging around . . . You would see a lot of the same faces being picked up by the police'
Last House On The Left

"Melbourne is a city divided by a river. The river also divided sensibilities. In the middle '70s, in my mind you either lived in the north or south. Most of my friends lived north of the city - Fitzroy, Carlton, Brunswick. Then I moved to Elwood and St Kilda where the rents were kind of cheaper and the atmosphere was different.

"There was more air, there was a beach, big old buildings. Houses with gardens. So the song is about starting a new life across the other side."

Twist Senorita

The Sports played a lot at the Kingston Hotel in Richmond. It was the scene hotel of Melbourne in the middle '70s. It was an inner city pub where a lot of students, lecturers and art deros, the flotsam and jetsam of inner city life, congregated. At one stage it seemed like every girl in Melbourne had henna-ed hair and bright red lipstick. The song was about just about those girls dancing. A snapshot of the time.

"Six weeks after we recorded and released it they all had safety pins in their noses and ripped jackets and Band-aids across their eyebrows.

(Boys) What Did the Detectives Say?

"It's about kids hanging around the city. You would see a lot of the same faces being picked up by the police. You didn't have to be doing anything. All the cop shows of the day like Homicide and Division 4 featured Russell Street police station so it was a recognised Melbourne landmark. The Sports played in Pentridge a few times where I'd see some of the familiar faces I saw hanging around the steps of Flinders Street or outside the Town Hall. Russell Street was significant because after you'd finish a gig at Bananas or some other hell-hole at 3am, Stalactites was just down the road from the police station and it was the only place you could get something to eat."- Chris Beck

MICK THOMAS - 'Everyone has these places in the heart'

'My girlfriend says to me, 'You grew up in Geelong and the world thinks you grew up upstairs at Young and Jacksons.' I do have this funny feeling about Melbourne. Napoleon was from Corsica and Adolph Hitler was from Austria. They were people who assumed the place. I've been working with the Vandas, a band from Adelaide and they've moved to Melbourne in the winter and they are having the best time. It's like when you go to a place and you love it so much you wouldn't know what season it was. But I also wrote a song called Saturday Night in Halifax, which is set in Canada. It was about if you go out on the grog with your mates in a disco you may as well be in Preston as in Halifax. It's no different. Halifax, for me became synonymous with far-flung just as Under the Clocks became synonymous with home.

Under the Clocks

"My parents had a really loving relationship. They talked about meeting under the clocks a real lot. It's about meeting someone and being happy about being in a place."

Brunswick

"It's just a place in the heart. I moved with my schoolyard sweetheart from Geelong into Brunswick. Everyone has these places in the heart. I just think it was the first place in Melbourne that I came to. My dad used to say, 'Your Auntie Amy used to be a school teacher in Brunswick, it's not a nice place, Mick.' You write about places as they become special to you."- Chris Beck

PAUL KELLY - 'I walked two miles in Melbourne rain, I could have walked 10 more'

The most significant moment in any artist's career is when they cast off the perceptions of others like a suit of old clothes and produce an original work.

I have always fancied that in Paul Kelly's case that moment was From St Kilda to King's Cross. Why? Because, as a song, it's genuinely different. It's not, for example, a pretty tune; it bumps along like the bus trip it describes. The lyrics are specific in their references to place - in my book, always a good sign - and there's an image that's highly poetic but in an appealingly low-key sort of way ("And if the rain don't fall too hard, everything shines/Just like a postcard"). There's also that undercurrent of hardness that distinguishes Kelly's art.

Comparisons are odious but if there is one respect in which Paul Kelly reminds me of Bob Dylan, it's that he doesn't feel obliged to be nice or to forever write about love. This song has a warning about fair-weather friends being the hungriest friends and describes the mysterious way he deals with them. "I keep my mouth well shut, I cross their open hands."The songs ends with the mildly radical assertion that he prefers St Kilda Esplanade to Sydney Harbour. I'm always drawn to artists who resist the epicentres of fashion.

In a recent interview on Andrew Denton's television show Enough Rope, Kelly said songs often come from other songs and cited From St Kilda. His point was that when it comes to songwriting originality is not always what it appears. Nonetheless, when I listen to From St Kilda to King's Cross, I hear a young artist who is on his way. If I had to describe the song in one word, I'd say "virile".

From St Kilda was the first song on Kelly's greatest hits album. Leaps and Bounds, his paean to footy and the MCG, was the second. It's not his only MCG song. Behind the Bowler's Arm is well worth a listen particularly if you, like the singer, have had "a hard, hard year/pushing shit uphill", and want to forget yourself in the excitement of a top game at the G.

But the earlier song is the more complete work, conveying the excitement of a small boy running through autumn leaves to the stadium in a way that's free of sickly sentiment. This sounds like a simple enough achievement but it's not. It requires firm artistic control, a sure touch, a sense of contrast which in Kelly's earlier work was assisted by the hard-edged guitar work.

Some years ago, when asked by a publisher for a few lines about Kelly's work, I wrote: "At its best, Paul Kelly's art is a meeting of opposites, a gift for melody and a gritty sense of reality. It's like seeing ribbons on a barbed wire fence."So much of Kelly's art seems to me to be based on opposites. He's a double-man, the soft presence with the hard truths, the man whose songs express religious meanings and the absence of meaning.

To Her Door, another of his Melbourne songs, is one of his classics. An artist once spoke to me at length about a painting he admired of people observing a 19th-century military engagement, his point being that the painting was about war but there was none of the actual war in it. The same is true of To Her Door. The real story, surely, is what happens when the man gets inside his former wife's door. But that's what we never learn. What we are told about is the character's apprehension as he prepares for the attempted reunion and the background to the break-up.

Kelly has an eye for small but telling details. In Leaps and Bounds, it's "the clock on the silo says 11 degrees". In To Her Door, it's the brand of the cab in which the character makes his nervous journey from Spencer Street station (Southern Cross Station), all the while asking himself, "Did they have a future? Would he know his children? Could he make a picture and get them all to fit?"These are my favourite Paul Kelly lines and not, as some might assume, because of their family feel.

Making a picture - of family, of community, of nation - and getting all the pieces to fit is what some of us are trying to do all the time. It's just that most of us would need an essay to state our aim and he did it in 11 words.

When I First Met Your Ma is a love song with a difference. The passion is heart-felt and could even be described as pure ("I walked two miles in Melbourne rain, I could have walked 10 more"), but the song is not being sung to the woman. It's to the child the woman had with the singer before they parted, thus leading to the refrain: "Love like a bird flies away/you'll find out the only way."The song has not one centre but two.

Paul Kelly's gift to Melbourne has been four of his best songs.- Martin Flanagan

DAME NELLIE MELBA - 'When I stand on the platform of the town hall I shall feel the greatest emotion of my whole life'

A musical trivia question: if the girl born Helen Porter Mitchell in 1861 hadn't later changed her name to Nellie Melba, would her fame still have reached such dizzy heights? Answer: probably, though her international association with her home town - Melbourne - would not have been as strong. Try to imagine Sinatra calling himself Franky Hoboken or The King performing as Elvis Tupelo.

Melba played the patriotic card wisely and well. Despite the best efforts of some local muckrakers she never packed up to live permanently in exile. "If you wish to understand me at all,"she once proclaimed, "you must understand first and foremost that I am an Australian."It was a new country; she was its first star on the world stage.

Her triumphant homecoming tour in 1902 was like Kylie, Nicole and Elle rolled into one. And she milked it for all it was worth, declaring: "I know that when I stand on the platform of the Melbourne Town Hall for my first concert I shall feel the greatest emotion of my whole life."Her appearances were sensations. Her songs ranged from Handel's Sweet Bird, in which she could show off her vocal gymnastics in imitation of a nightingale, to arias by Mozart and Verdi and the mad scene from Donizetti's opera Lucia Di Lammermoor.

But the show-stopper, often the encore, was Home, Sweet Home. Her habit was to accompany herself on piano when she sang it, invariably reducing many in the audience to sobs. It became a signature tune; one of her most common requests. She sang it into a telephone microphone in 1920 for Britain's first international wireless broadcast. It was no accident that Dame Joan Sutherland, her lineal descendant as an Australian diva, also sang Home, Sweet Home as an encore in her farewell shows in 1990.

Melba in Melbourne singing Home, Sweet Home is a masterpiece of programming. But the wonderful thing about the song is that it gets a cheer (or tears) anywhere. Part of Melba's appeal lay in her willingness to perform what people wanted to hear. Her concerts and recordings, by and large, were all greatest hits packages.

She stuck with some songs throughout her long career. Her first recital, at the Richmond Town Hall when she was six, included Comin' Thro' the Rye - a favourite of her father, a whiskery Scot. This - like Home, Sweet Home and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot - became a perennial. But Home was the one she could always rely on.

Although born in Richmond, she regarded Lilydale as home turf. Her father had been a shire councillor and owned the limestone quarry there. In 1909 she bought her property at Coldstream, close to Lilydale.

In 1902, Lilydale had greeted her as "The Divine Songstress whose Magic Tones have attracted a universal admiration and commanded the highest appreciation"- which, to her, was no more than she deserved. Performances of Home anywhere near Lilydale couldn't fail.

One biography describes her spotting a local farmer near the end of a concert at Coldstream. She asked him for a request; he opted for Home. Later, greeting him warmly, she told him: "I thought you'd have blisters on your hands, the way you clapped."

But in some ways it was all a glorious con-job. Lyrics for the song that is now a musical cliche were written by John Howard Payne, an American. Payne was many things: an actor; playwright; and diplomat. But he tends to be remembered, if at all, only for Home, Sweet Home.

Home is wonderfully simple: 11 lines with an elementary rhyming pattern. There's delicious irony in the thought of Melba - feted on several continents, a sucker for royalty and titles, and the proud owner of a country estate - taking a deep breath and beginning:

Mid pleasures and palaces,
Tho' we may roam;
Be it ever so humble,
There's no place like home . . .

It was never really a Melbourne song. But intrinsic to Melba's art was an ability to transport audiences to wherever she wanted them to be. Besides, home is where the heart is. And the former Helen Porter Mitchell always thought of herself as a Melbourne girl. - Alan Attwood is a Melbourne writer. Melba appears in his next novel.

GREG MACAINSH, Skyhooks - 'The songs had to be authentic, they had to be about places I'd actually been to'

"When the sun sets over Carlton
And you're out to make a deal
Check out who you're talkin' to
And make sure they are real"
-- Carlton (Lygon Street Limbo)

When the sun sets over Elwood, the man who put Melbourne on the songwriting map is at home, studying. Thirty years after the landmark Living In The 70s album, Skyhooks songwriter and bass player Greg Macainsh is doing a law degree.

"Really, the Trade Practices Act is just a different form of poetry,"he laughs.

Billy Pinnell, who has worked in Melbourne radio for 45 years, says Macainsh's songs exploded the cultural cringe, opening ears to truly Australian songs.

"He broke down all the barriers,"Pinnell says, "opening the door for Australian rock 'n' roll songwriters to write about local places and events. He legitimised Australian songwriting and it meant that Australians became themselves."

Macainsh wrote about his native land - the suburbs. His songs described the contemporary Australian experience without the obligatory kangaroo or wattle tree. These were songs about Carlton, not Oodnadatta. And they reflected that most of us were riding around in Valiants, not on brumbies.

Macainsh, now 54, says he didn't really know what he was doing. "It just made sense for me to write about the things I knew."

Greg Macainsh grew up in Warrandyte. His father had poems published in The Bulletin. His mother was a librarian. Macainsh was camping at a boy scouts' jamboree in Dandenong when he heard The Beatles' I Saw Her Standing There on the radio. "It was wild stuff, amazing,"he says. "I lost interest in the scouts and concentrated on music. The little tranny had just hit. I listened to a valve radio at home and then to a crystal radio set I made for my bedroom. 3UZ was the station and Stan Rofe was the man."

At Norwood High School in Ringwood, Macainsh was captain of the softball team, "the team for wusses and misfits". He was almost expelled because of his long hair, but he refused to cut it. He bonded with a fellow student, Freddy Strauks, who became the singer in his first band, Spare Parts, and then the drummer in Skyhooks.

Macainsh's first "local"song documented him joining Eltham's version of the Grateful Dead, Reuben Tice. The song was I Went Down To Eltham To Get Me A Job In A Band.

His songwriting heroes were Chuck Berry, The Kinks' Ray Davies, and Bob Dylan. "They could all rattle off a place name, like Memphis or Waterloo Sunset or Muswell Hill. It gave their songs great mystique and the listener a sense of place. Later on, I thought I could do it in the Skyhooks, but it had to be real, it couldn't be twee or folky.

"The only other 'Australian' song I knew at the time was I've Been Everywhere, which had every Oodnadatta/Coolangatta/Wangaratta rhyme. It was a novelty song and I definitely didn't want to go in that direction."

Macainsh wanted to write about places that had "ethos and an atmosphere".

"And the songs had to be authentic, they had to be about places I'd actually been to. I was a bit sceptical about Arkansas Grass by Axiom because I'm not sure any of the guys had been to Arkansas. And the song's about the American Civil War and I was sure they hadn't been to the war."

Carlton, Balwyn and Toorak were the suburbs Macainsh wrote about on Living In The 70s. "They were the places I knew something about,"he recalls. "With St Kilda, I hadn't spent a lot of time there by 1973 and 1974, so I couldn't really write about that."

Skyhooks' first gig was in Carlton, at St Jude's Church Hall in 1973. And Macainsh remembers many early-morning trips from Eltham to Johnny's Green Room in Faraday Street - the only place in Melbourne selling cigarettes at 2am.

Many people mistakenly thought that Balwyn Calling was about Macainsh's girlfriend, writer Jenny Brown, who grew up in Balwyn.

"I had another girlfriend from Balwyn, for a brief moment,"Macainsh reveals. "I think the song speaks for itself. One thing you have to remember is that phone calls back then were far more significant than they are now. And not everyone had a phone. You'd ask people, 'Have you got the phone on?' So a phone call from someone in Balwyn was significant communication."

"Well, she mighta looked like a princess
Why'd you have to give her your address?
'Cause you ain't safe when you get home
She's gonna call you on the telephone"

Toorak Cowboy , meanwhile, which became one of six Living in the 70s tracks banned from radio, was written after one of Macainsh's girlfriends ran off with a guy from Toorak. The song refers to the Trak Cinema's supper show. "You could see a movie at 10 o'clock on a Friday night; it was a very groovy thing to do,"Macainsh recalls. "And get your hair cut at Marini's."- Jeff Jenkins is the author of the Skyhooks' book Ego Is Not A Dirty Word.

DAVID BRIDIE - Let's Go Walk This Town

Born and bred in Melbourne, David Bridie has been acutely attuned to its atmosphere and landscape from Not Drowning Waving to My Friend The Chocolate Cake to his subsequent solo work.

John Cain Avenue and Thomastown are a couple of his most obvious urban references; Here Come the Sirens seems to gasp in the hot wind of summer and Come Around prowls the backstreets of Richmond. He also wrote an instrumental called Jimmy Stynes, after a player from his beloved Melbourne Football Club.

One of My Friend The Chocolate Cake's most recent songs almost offers an aerial view.

"Let's Go Walk This Town is all cathedrals and freeways - and bats,"he says. "I've got this great green couch on the front verandah and the bats fly home right across my place every night. I really like 'em. And I like the fact that they go out and suck on the fruit trees in the eastern suburbs but they don't wanna sleep there."

Like many of Bridie's songs, Let's Go Walk This Town finds beauty and refuge in simple pleasures. With its muted atmosphere and ambling rhythm, the song seems to wear the Melbourne night like a cloak. "I think because Melbourne isn't as geographically beautiful as a lot of other cities, we haven't got the harbour or surf beaches, you tend to find beauty in more subtle things,"he says. - Michael Dwyer

BILLY MILLER - Footscray

"Footscray, oh Footscray, you're the pearl of the south,"Billy Miller sings, "I know cause I heard it from Ted Whitten's mouth. Not a hard place to get to, but hard to get out, I'll probably die here in Footscray."

Whether he's playing guitar in Dave Graney's band or in a Beatles cover band, Billy Miller will always be the guy from the Ferrets, the Melbourne band that had a hit with Don't Fall In Love in 1977.

But even by then he'd written hundreds of songs, great sheaves of them to sit in his piano stool unrecorded until a few years ago. He finally dusted off the best of them for his most recent CD, Elsternwick '69, which aptly describes the time and place of their origin.

"Six O'Clock Train is about a bloke going to meet his girlfriend at Elsternwick Station and he goes through all the stations on the Sandringham line from Richmond.

Me and my mate Gary (Adams) just used to write songs about what we were doing each day."

He dislikes American names in songs. "I remember when Axiom brought out Arkansas Grass. Stuff like that really pissed me off.

"Three ibis are flying down the Maribyrnong,"he sings. "Cars on the Westgate will be home before long. In my backyard I'm singing this song, as the sun sets over Footscray."- Michael Dwyer

JAMES REYNE - 'I was just looking around at people who were putting on airs'

In the mid-1970s, James Reyne was living in a share house on Punt Road, South Yarra. He was a student at Monash University who spent most of his time playing drums in a rock trio called Archie Slammit and the Doors.

In terms of lifestyle, he was living worlds away from the vacuous Melbourne elite that he and co-writer Mark Hudson satirised in what became the first Australian Crawl single, Beautiful People. But the share house was just 200 metres from Toorak Road.

"As I still do when I'm writing, I was just looking around at people who were putting on airs,"he says. "It's pretension. It's everywhere, probably even more now. There's a complete culture surrounding it now, magazines devoted to it. It was a much simpler time, 1975."

Reyne was inspired by Greg Macainsh. But he had also grown up with London's great West End musical comedy duo of the late '50s and '60s, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann.

"That line in Beautiful People 'The garden's full of furniture/The house is full of plants' is a direct rip-off of a song they wrote called Design for Living,"Reyne says. "It's a brilliant song and it still stands up today."

The hip Melbourne venues mentioned in the song are not likely to mean much today, but Bombay Rock was a mecca for rock'n'rollers in the late '70s and early '80s. "We had a real glory period for a while there,"Reyne says.

For Reyne, the perceived parallels between himself and his favourite subject matter would plague him for years.

From the Toorak Road spinster of Hoochie Gucci Fiorucci Mama to the Albert Park peacocks in My Day At The Beach, he's remained within easy swiping distance of Melbourne's rich.

"I went to a private school, I have an Australian-British background, born in Africa, so it reeks of British imperialism I guess. It all adds up to a perception, but because I was exposed to that world I suppose, I never wanted to be part of it.

"And there was also the fact that we came from Mount Eliza, which had the perception of being a Portsea sort of place. Then of course we went and made a video for Errol where we tried to take the piss out of ourselves by making a kind of Coke commercial. That all backfired, 'cause people thought we were serious."

For Australian Crawl, Beautiful People backfired within days of its first public airing on Countdown. For reasons known only to the ABC set designers, the band played draped in Hawaiian chic, on a stage strewn with inflated beach balls.

Reyne remembers Stephen Cummings telling him he thought the song was called Beautiful Beach Ball. But that wasn't the worst of it.

"The next week, we went down the dole office and the woman said, 'Hang on, I just saw you people on Countdown.' So we had to spend the next year paying back all this dole money."- Michael Dwyer

MARK SEYMOUR - This town 'is where I belong'

Film star Ava Gardner was famously misquoted in 1959, when she was alleged to have said "On The Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it".

The invented slur is an entrenched part of Melbourne folklore, so it made a good starting point for Mark Seymour's song about the city's perceived doom - "surely not the place to make a movie/surely not the time to begin again", so goes the downbeat opening of his solo single of 1998, Home Again.

"It was written around '96, in the Kennett years,"says the former singer of Hunters and Collectors. "It was a period of upheaval. We were going through a period of cultural turmoil. Melburnians were very much divided about the direction the city was going in, politically. There was a lot of tension and anxiety in the mood of the city. Things were definitely changing too fast for me."

Born in Benalla, Seymour moved to Melbourne as a 14-year-old. Home Again describes the memory of "perfect open spaces"transformed into a "town of shadows". The song paints an almost Orwellian picture with images of fearful and desperate faces hurrying between "a past that doesn't matter"and a future that's "a closely guarded secret".

The "demolition derby in the garden"is an obvious reference to the Grand Prix in Albert Park. The song's last verse offers the grim prediction that "sudden death is soon to be the biggest game in town", a reference to Crown Casino's advertising line.

"Sudden death is a gambling reference, something you associate with roulette. I actually thought gambling was gonna surpass football, which I don't think it has."
Seymour says he's very aware of how "the geography, the general ambience, the colour and the mood"of Melbourne influences his songwriting. The Hunters' best-known tune, Throw Your Arms Around Me, is about "a pilgrimage across town, running to this girl's house".

Another Hunters' song, January Rain, focuses on Flinders Street station. And Last Ditch Cabaret refers again to Crown Casino "a description of the Melbourne elite at play".

"I don't mind a party myself,"he says, "but that level of narcissistic hedonism gets to me I suppose."

But so far, Home Again is Seymour's definitive Melbourne song. For him, it's an affirmation of the city's essential attraction beneath a changing veneer.

"The way the song is expressed is quite philosophical because I'm basically saying, 'This is where I belong, for better or worse,' "he says. "All of the close, important relationships of my life I've established in this town and they are more important to me than the landscape so I'm not gonna leave."- Michael Dwyer

THANKS TO: BRIAN DE COURCY, BILLY PINNELL, MICHAEL WITHEFORD, JO ROBERTS, IAN MUNRO, GUY RUNDLE, SHANE JESSE CHRISTMASS, SOPHIE BEST, MATTHEW HIGH AND JANE ROCCA

I'll always be a Melbourne girl - Vanessa Amorosi. In August 2002 Amorosi performed Shine I'll always be a Melbourne girl at the Manchester Commonwealth Games Hand-Over Ceremony.

Sounds of our city
The Herald Sun Digital Edition: Cameron Adams
August 26, 2018

Plenty of songs reference our great city and its surrounding suburbs, but here's Cameron Adams' guide to the most Melbourne of Melbourne songs

DEPRESTON - COURTNEY BARNETT (2015)

The Melbourne musician took the slang term for Preston global when her debut album was feted all over the world. Depreston is a modern look at the perils of Melbourne real estate. 'You said we should look out further, I guess it wouldn't hurt us, we don't have to be around all these coffee shops.' After a slight police incident on route, they find a house in Preston that's going cheap because it's a deceased estate. The song's hook runs: 'If you've got a spare half a million you could knock it down and start rebuilding.' This song is three years old, so half a million is already out of date.

ACCIDENTLY KELLY STREET

- FRENTE (1992)

They not only spelt 'accidentally' incorrectly (it was a record company printing glitch, apparently), it was actually about Richmond's Kenny St and songwriter Tim O'Connor got the street name he was about to move to wrong. It became a twee hit that took the band into the mainstream, not to their liking. The fictional Richmond street certainly sounded very pleasant in 1992, a place 'where friends and strangers sometimes meet' . That's something a little more sinister on the backstreets of Richmond these days.

THE BOYS LIGHT UP - AUSTRALIAN CRAWL (1981)

Melbourne was a recurring theme in James Reyne's love of writing what's around him. In The Boys Light Up, he invented the word 'Dorseted' to rhyme with 'corseted' - a shout out to Croydon's Dorset Gardens pub. Reyne would later say that while the song has a more carnal undercurrent, it did touch on the growing middle class with new money in Melbourne at the time. Another Crawl hit, Beautiful People, would parody the posh Toorak set.

BRUNSWICK - WEDDINGS PARTIES ANYTHING (1988)

Another band who wrote about their surroundings, Brunswick sees Mick Thomas sing of missing Brunswick's multicultural residents, the noises of trucks and forklifts and the poignant line 'the footpaths stank with the refuse of overfed Alsatians, the air was rife with Tip Top Bread' . See also Weddoes' songs Grey Skies over Collingwood and Under the Clocks.

CARLTON (LYGON STREET LIMBO) - SKYHOOKS (1974)

The 'Hooks documented Melbourne quite comprehensively on Living in the 70s, from Balwyn Calling to Toorak Cowboy. But they capture a vintage Lygon St here, no hoons, but still pizza places (tick), grey-haired writers and drunken fighters (tick) and night-time junkies (tick).

FOOTSCRAY STATION - CAMP COPE (2017)

This is peak Footscray as the Melbourne trio (currently making big waves overseas) describe the darker side of living out west. 'Our house got robbed again, they stole Tom's bike and a GPS, and I'm running home from Footscray Station, and don't bother stealing my wallet because I'm still earning minimum wage.' It also PAUL KELLY has the line 'ended up outside Franco Cozzo' and a shout out to Peter Dutton.

FRANKSTON LINE - YOUTH GROUP (2004)

The group that gave you that No. 1 cover of Forever Young also summed up the perils of our public transport on the less glamorous lines. 'The Frankston line's full of teenage crime and the cops can't do no more, hooded tops, cigarettes at stops' but notes 'the sea's so beautiful' .

FROM ST KILDA TO KINGS CROSS - PAUL KELLY (1985)

Another man who likes to write about Melbourne (the MCG gets name checked in Leaps and Bounds) but this tackled the Melbourne v Sydney rivalry. It's from a time when there were still things open in Sydney after dark , particularly the now ghost town that is Kings Cross , but PK believes that Melbourne is the book and Sydney is the film . 'I'd give you all of S dne Harbour , all that land, all that water, for that one sweet promenade,' he sings, recalling the joy of watching the sun go down on St Kilda Esplanade. See also When I First Met Your Ma and To Her Door for more Paul Kelly Melbourne love.

MELBOURNE - ALICE SKYE (2018)

FRESH content! Relocated to Melbourne from country Victoria, this promising young singer/ songwriter details getting off the train into the CBD. Look, to be honest, she uses the Melbourne weather as a metaphor for a hot and cold relationship which turns 'from blue to grey' and becomes 'as cold as ice' .

MELBOURNE - THE WHITLAMS (1997)

SPEAKING of falling in love with someone in Melbourne, here Sydneysider Tim Freedman paints the portrait of a girl in our city who 'eats all of the garden' and dodges both fines and cops and how he is 'in love with this girl and her city as well' . It's such a beautiful song we'll let the fact he calls Melbourne 'the rainy city' slide.

MOURNINGTOWN RIDE - TISM (1992)

IT isn't difficult to find Melbourne references in TISM songs, but this is a handy guide of public transport safety with a nod to the Seekers. 'Don't get off the train at Essendon, you'll get attacked for your moccas, don't get off the train at Broadie, petrol heads want your Torana, don't get off the train at Ringwood, goths want your mascara.'

NORTHCOTE (SO HUNGOVER)

- THE BEDROOM PHILOSOPHER (2010)

IF you're going to write a hipster novelty song you base it in Northcote, and throw in nods to the No. 86 tram, Pony bar (RIP) and even Molly Meldrum.

ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER - MIKE BRADY (1980)

FOOTY poet Mike Brady is arguably the only person to mix sports and music not only successfully, but with songs still being sung decades on. One Day in September still sums up the vibe in Melbourne around Grand Final week. He even rewrote a bespoke One Day in October for the 2010 grand final rematch - tough work because it's easier to rhyme 'remember' with 'September' than 'October' and 'footy's almost over' .

THE BOY WHO LOST HIS JOCKS ON FLINDERS STREET STATION - PAINTERS AND DOCKERS (1984)

FOOTBALL, cricket, Four and Twenty pie, the city loop, Preston and St Kilda all surface in this ode to a gentleman who accidentally dropped trousers at our most iconic railway station.

YARRA SONG - BILLY BRAGG (2002)

DON'T we love it when foreigners write songs about our city? British musical icon Billy Bragg even praises our climate in winter, which makes him feel right at home. "Cos it never rains in Sydney and it never rains in Perth, Adelaide's a desert and Brisbane's just scorched earth.'

Know of a song not mentioned above? Contact us and we will add it..

30 Best Songs: HeraldSun

ARE YOU GONNA BE MY GIRL JET (2003)

Back when dance ruled, Jet helped bring back rock. Road-tested at pubs across Australia, this Iggy Pop-meets-Motown beast with squealing vocals and guitar was retro, but also timeless.

BLOOM THE PAPER KITES (2010)

Possibly the best song you've never heard, this gorgeous folkie love song has been used at weddings the world over and streamed over 250 million times and went gold in the United States.

BURN FOR YOU JOHN FARNHAM (1990)

Farnsey is an incredible interpreter of songs, but he wrote the lyrics to this one - an ultra-personal ode to wife Jillian - and how much he missed her doing his night job.

BUSES AND TRAINS BACHELOR GIRL (1998)

A twist on the usual love song lyric, this was singer Tania Doko belting out a letter to her mother full of life lessons. One of the best pop tunes this country has sent off into the world.

CHAINS TINA ARENA (1994)

A global hit for arguably Australia's finest female voice, Chains should be up there with You're the Voice and The Horses as alternative Australian anthems.

DEPRESTON COURTNEY BARNETT (2015)

Indie hero Barnett took this ode to Preston global - it's the tale of looking beyond the inner city to secure a bigger house with a bigger backyard noting "if you've got a spare half a million, you could knock it down and start rebuilding".

DON'T CALL ME BABY MADISON AVENUE (1999)

Created in Frankston, Don't Call Me Baby went on to bump Britney Spears off the UK No 1 position and helped put Australian dance music in the global map. It also still sounds amazing, 21 years on.

FOUR SEASONS IN ONE DAY CROWDED HOUSE (1991)

The most famous Melbourne song? Kiwi Neil Finn was in a band with two Melburnians and took the title from Melbourne's erratic weather. It was written at Murchison Street, St Kilda East - Finn-o-philes believe "the sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the domain"could refer to the Kings Domain at the Botanical Gardens.

FRONTIER PSYCHIATRIST THE AVALANCHES (2000)

A masterclass into how to fashion a song out of samples (everything from Divine in Polyester to old golf manuals the band found in Melbourne second hand record stores) this preloved creation from their classic album Since I Left You was highly inventive.

HOLY GRAIL HUNTERS AND COLLECTORS (1993)

It's a hell of a story - somehow a song that uses Napoleon's march to Russia as a metaphor for the band trying to crack the US market has become an anthem for AFL football. Hasn't hurt the band's bank accounts any, and they have sung it on the MCG multiple times.

THE HORSES DARYL BRAITHWAITE

(1990)

Dazzler's cover of the Ricki-Lee Jones album track was a No 1 at the time, but has had about 15 second winds since, establishing itself as a song that unites generations.

HOW TO MAKE GRAVY PAUL KELLY

(1996)

The US has All I Want For Christmas is You; we have How to Make Gravy, Kelly's take on an Aussie Christmas that has became an annual staple and introduced him to a whole new generation all waiting for Gravy Day.

INTO MY ARMS NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS (1997)

One of the best opening lines of all time: "I don't believe in an interventionist God but I know, darling, that you do."Cave sang this masterpiece, written after a break-up , at his mate Michael Hutchence's funeral.

JANUARY 26 A.B. ORIGINAL (2016)

Rappers Briggs and Trial document the problem indigenous Australians have with Australia Day, with the unmistakeable voice of Dan Sultan guiding the chorus.

MOUTH MERRIL

BAINBRIDGE (1994)

Simple but effective, this quirky tune spent six weeks at No 1 in Australia and then reached No 4 in the US chart. It was such a massive hit, following it up became difficult.

ONE CROWDED HOUR AUGIE MARCH (2006)

Frontman Glenn Richards was inspired by early Bob Dylan and Australian wartime photographer Neil Davis, and came up with his band's triumph - and watched it top Triple J's Hottest 100.

PRISONER OF SOCIETY THE LIVING END (1997)

Straight outta Wheelers Hill, The Living End smashed its way into the mainstream with a roaring anthem that was written when they were nobodies, but wound up uniting thousands together at live shows.

RED DANIEL MERRIWEATHER (2009)

He grew up in the Dandenong Ranges, but Merriweather got noticed overseas by producer Mark Ronson. His debut album (which featured Adele) featured this gorgeous ballad, which showcases his spine-tingling voice. It went to No 5 in the UK, but didn't crack the local Top 50.

ROCK IT

LITTLE RED (2010)

This Melbourne band would reach No 2 on Triple J's Hottest 100 with this wildly infectious tune, however, the band split two years later.

SHINE

VANESSA AMOROSI (2000)

How do you follow global hit Absolutely Everybody? This power ballad (with powerhouse vocals) that was originally titled Die until Amorosi was told it was too bleak.

SWEET DISPOSITION

THE TEMPER TRAP (2009)

First aired in dingy clubs in Carlton, this song, that riff and that voice would take The Temper Trap to festivals all around THE the world. A modern classic, made in Melbourne.

TALK IS CHEAP CHET FAKER (2014)

Nick Murphy went to school in Melbourne with James Keogh - one would become Vance Joy, the other Chet Faker. Talk is Cheap's mix of electronics and wistful soul topped Triple J's Hottest 100 and landed in the ARIA Top 10.

THIS GIRL COOKING ON 3 BURNERS V KUNGS (2015)

A French DJ's remix of a song by Melbourne funk kings Cooking on 3 Burners and local soul icon Kylie Auldist - Kungs didn't need to do much, it was all there. A No 2 hit in the UK, a. European summer smash and Top 30 in the US and still heard on ads to this day.

TOOK THE CHILDREN AWAY

ARCHIE ROACH (1990)

A victim of the Stolen Generation, Roach wrote his history here. It's a harrowing listen - pinballed around foster homes, denying his heritage - but one Australia needed to hear.

WEIR KILLING HEIDI (1999)

Ella and Jesse Hooper grew up in Violet Town and were topping the charts while still teenagers. Weir took them from Triple J to the mainstream, thanks to catchy melodies and youthful energy.

This article is from the October 14, 2020 issue of The Herald Sun Digital Edition.

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❊ Web Links ❊

➼ Songs | Melbourne Lyrics 

➼ Music greats rally for guitar legend Lobby Loyde - The Age

➼ Songs of Melbourne

➼ Songs About Melbourne (Unearthed Special) Triple J

➼ List of songs about Melbourne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

➼ List of songs about Melbourne - Answers.com

➼ Crowded House






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