2009 27
Here’s Kamahl!
Kamahl laughs when I remind him of the reason for this interview, but none of us at Peril knew, long ago when the theme of this issue was chosen, that Kamahl would soon be thrust back into the spotlight.
“Let me tell you the origin of that phrase,” he begins in the voice that made him famous. I could try to describe its depth and resonance, the way it draws you in, but most of Australia, as well as international fans, know that already.
Flying out from Amsterdam from a November 13th birthday reception his record company had thrown for him, he arrived in New York and met Jimmy Bishop, the A&R manager for Sony who had a number of cassette tapes for him to listen to. The one that caught Kamahl’s ear was called What Would I Do Without My Music?. “I kid you not,” he tells me, “when I first heard it, maybe I was tired, I had tears in my eyes listening to it. It was almost like a prayer.” It reminded him of a Schubert Lied that he explained said thanks to music for taking us to a better world.
“But the more I listened to it, then I became slightly critical. The lines were: sometimes I stumble home at night, discouraged, wondering if the battle is worth fighting and why people are so blind? I thought that kindness is more significant than blindness and without consulting the composer, I took it upon myself to change it and to this day, I haven’t been sued!”
Kamahl recorded the song, and performed it on the Bob Hope Show as well as various Australian shows. He can’t pinpoint who it was who did it, but he says the phrase got pinned to him like a donkey’s tail, as a Unique Selling Proposition with its ups and downs, “a handlebar for me”, mostly positive but “every time I see someone young or old, they say, ‘hey Kamahl, why are people so unkind…’”
He brings up Hey, Hey It’s Saturday without prompting but stumbles trying to explain. “Unfortunately, the show has never been to my advantage,” he says finally. “I used them, and they used me. On hindsight, I would have been better without it.”
The Jackson Jive skit was unfortunate for different reasons. “What really got under my skin,” he tells me is that there were two milestones this year, the 50th anniversary on 17 October, 2009 of his first appearance on television, and the 40th anniversary of his first hit record, The Sounds of Goodbye. But there was no media attention or respect. At the same time, everyone was asking Kamahl whether he would appear on the Hey, Hey reunion. He didn’t expect an invitation as he wasn’t part of “that family”, he was a guest performer “more off than on.”
The organisers waited until the eve of the first show to make the invitation, which clashed with a previous commitment to his charity work with the Variety Club. They invited him for the next show, but to do what? “You can sit in the Green Room,” they told him, “after you find your own accommodation and pay your own airfare to get here.” Compared to the respect shown to him through the Variety Club, who had named him one of their 100 greatest performers of the century, it was a poor showing. When the infamous show was aired, he wasn’t even paying particular attention to it. He saw the replay of the Red Faces skit, and was annoyed at the cartoon of him saying “Where’s Kamahl?” but forgot about it. They had done similar jokes before.
Kamahl didn’t think the sketch was really racist, “ it was purely something in very bad taste… a slight lapse of judgement… and also Michael Jackson having passed away a short time ago…”
Then Kamahl got an e-mail from Channel 7 the following morning asking whether he wanted to make a comment. His wife said, “the show was good for you, aren’t you biting the hand that fed you?” He replied, “Frankly, they never fed me, they never promoted my career, they used me to make jokes out of. I don’t think that show ever helped me sell a record.” “Being on television,” he tells me, “people recognise you, but what they think, what their perception is, I don’t know.”
“So, the guy came in for the interview – and I didn’t tell them the real reason why I was disappointed…the guy was trying to get me to say that Australia is a racist country and I was trying to say we are no more racist than anyone else. I didn’t even bring up the point. My wife said a few months ago the Indians were being targeted in Melbourne and I stood up to say that’s not an act of racism, it’s about being in the wrong place at the right time, other aspects… so cut to this, as he was leaving at the door, he said ‘are you going to sue them?’ and I said [in a joking tone] ‘that’s a great idea.’ Front page next day. And with that, an avalanche: some very upset people that I was being a hypocrite and at the same time, a majority of people who said heartfelt things about me speaking up and them never feeling comfortable about [Hey, Hey] taking the mickey out of me.”
I said I can imagine a defense from Hey, Hey saying that they take the mickey out of everyone. But he rebukes me, “Not everybody. They crawl to some. They take the mickey out of who suits them. They never took the mickey out of Jimmy Barnes, John Farnham. That’s not true at all.”
An example: on the eve of his performance at Carnegie Hall in 1984, Kamahl was pelted with a powder puff on a Hey, Hey Saturday show. A friend of his, an Australian living in Nashville, saw this on youtube only last year, and told Kamahl, “I’m ashamed to be Australian. How could anybody treat any of their artists the way they do?”
I press him, “what was it like to be the only splash of colour among a sea of white entertainers?” without realizing how my question echoes the pressure of the Channel 7 reporter to lay claim to being a victim of racism. So Kamahl tells me of an earlier interview where he announced “No one has asked me whether I am racist or not!” He frankly admits as a young Tamil Sri Lankan Malaysian arriving in Australia in the 1950s that he was also a product of his time.
“Til Cassius Clay [aka official website, or check out this interview on ABC’s Talking Heads that tells of his early days in Australia as well as how Rupert Murdoch came to be his sponsor.
About the Author: Andy Quan
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Thanks for sharing the Kamahl Interview with all of us.
by Mobile price in india on April 18, 2010 at 3:39 pm.
” On reality TV stars
The guy who sang Nessum Dorma on English Idol [Paul Potts], he had 58 million hits [on youtube], Pavarotti had 12 million, and [there are other older singers] who sing better, and died a long time ago… Paul is a turkey compared to the others! 58 million hits to listen to a turkey. That’s the sad part. It’s good that that many people were exposed to a better kind of music… but these kinds of things bother me a lot. ”
is very classical in itself as well as being a bit sad in differnt ways for as Kamahl found that black can be beautiful, so beauty is often to be said to be in the eye of the beholder or in some cases the ear and it is often change we can fear.
The internet is one of the buggest changes of our lifetime and Utube part of it, a part I never bother with other than passing glimpse references.
But be it Utube, or the various Idol or Got Talent reality shows, there can be some great entertainers of all streams revealed and perhaps even a Pavarotti would have been discovered if the internet had been there in his formative years and likewise with a Kamahl instead of singing for sandwiches.
I used to watch Hey Hey a bit and yes Kamahl was always introduced in a light hearted way I would say from memory more so than being derided and I doubt that Kamahl would have done return appearances if they had been offensive to him.
But then as he says “Unfortunately, the show has never been to my advantage,” he says finally. “I used them, and they used me. On hindsight, I would have been better without it.”
The show has certainly always had a light hearted strain, the Chainsaw Jimmy Barnes [ with their cartoons ] I recall and of course JF was before Whispering Jack was always on the way back [ with another tour ]but they still had their fun with him and the Mickey was taken out of many regulars and non-regulars on the show, even if done in different styles and I cannot recall the powder puff scene to comment.
Many people probably would not have been too aware of Kamahl if it had not been for Hey Hey and if anything may have broadened the base for his singing audiences so it is a bit tongue in cheek to say “Frankly, they never fed me, they never promoted my career, they used me to make jokes out of. I don’t think that show ever helped me sell a record.” “Being on television,” he tells me, “people recognise you, but what they think, what their perception is, I don’t know.”
Bit oxymoronish taking the whole lot together.
And then Channel 7 is typical of how the media works is it not always on the look out for what will sell or get the ratings.
On generalisations, they can be damming and should be dammed for they too easily put labels on whole nationalities, races and cultures; “My whole purpose of getting into show business was not so much to sing, as it was to communicate, because of my ethnicity, being black in Adelaide in Australia in 1953 and 54, it was a very different experience, not like now. The few of us Asian students at King’s College would be the only few non-white students. It made me extremely self-conscious and shy, and I try to avoid talking about it, but there’s an inferiority complex – you don’t have to be black to have it – even now, if I go into a room of strangers, the old doubts and fears come rushing back…It’s a feeling that as a non-white person, you’re of little or no consequence, and that’s what the Australians thought of the Aborigines 30 years ago, they were regarded as no more important than cattle, and I identified with them. So I have great sympathy for their plight, and I’m sort of caught between them and a white man.”
and though I understand the inferiority and self consciousness along with “” you don’t have to be black to have it “”
Kamahl’s comments about thoughts on aboriginals are somewhat stretched or generalised!
Which Australians does he speak of?
The bulk of Australians may not identify with our indigenous people and that’s nought to do with colour but just a simple fact that most likely have minimal interaction with indigenous peoples, merely because of where most of them live and where other people live.
And whilst there are as many difficulties for indigenous people as there likely numbers of them, to say that Australians considered aborigines as being of little or no consequence and regarded as no more important than cattle is something he may feel a little about what he thought of Hey Hey in hindsight.
by Greg on May 17, 2010 at 3:02 pm.