Richard Clapton - Goodbye Tiger (Expanded Remaster) (2024)

In the notes to one of Clapton's compilation albums the author makes a case for 1977's Goodbye Tiger being the first great Australian rock album. It isn't a a frivolous claim. Australian artists had long proven themselves capable of exceptional songs, but for whatever reasons full-players which held together as convincing, coherent statements seemed to prove elusive. Clapton's masterpiece, mostly written in a blue mood in a northern European winter, shimmered with the heat and bright light of an Australian summer ('Down in the Lucky Country') while at the same time undercutting that halcyon vision with a desperate sense of loss and longing. Deep Water, with it's immortal verse:

Sitting out on the Palm Beach Road
I'm so drunk and the car won't go
My crazy eyes keep looking out to sea
Sunday Drivers are cruisin' round
Wish they'd all go back to town
What do they expect to find?
Sure as hell ain't peace of mind'

(When he sang this on Australia's pop music programme Countdown in 1977, it felt so raw it was like he dropped his trousers on national TV)

There are no weak songs on the album, though the highlights (the above mentioned tracks, plus 'Wintertime in Amsterdam' and the gloriously mournful title track) are almost impossible heights for the other songs to maintain.

Clapton has continued to record great songs and several excellent albums, and if he perhaps came close to this level of greatness at later times (The Great Escape), he so far hasn't bettered this; the moment where he put it all together for the first time.