The Seekers, The Carnival is Over

 

I walked back home via Commercial Road with my new acquisition under my arm and thought I could decipher from the weird sounds of a busker playing an electric violin to a backing track that he was attempting Toni Braxton's Unbreak My Heart and, once I'd understood that, I was glad of it. I thought I might thus add that to my Playlist pieces because it's there in the Soul Show. However, going to You Tube to find it, I accidentally found out that Judith Durham had died last week. And that changed everything. It's not been a good week for wholesome Australian pop singers. Only the other day, it was Olivia who I had to say was 'not as good as The Seekers' but I didn't know then that Judith had died three days earlier.

The first Seekers Farewell concert was July 1968 and televised. It seemed like almost the end of the world even then. But it was only the first Seekers Farewell concert. Maybe Judith had thought she could do even better as a solo artist and not have to share the box office but she was neither the first or the last to find out that it doesn't always work like that. There was a special thing about The Seekers that maybe not even The Osmonds reproduced. One suspects Keith Potger might have been some of the brains behind it; Athol Guy on bass and backing vocals sees off all claimants to 'cool', whether they be Lou Reed, Miles Davis or Prince, and Bruce Woodley was the quiet one, the George Harrison, but they'd have been nowhere near as much without the illuminating voice and presence of Judith Durham, as safe and nice as Doris Day, as moving as Dusty Springfield and perhaps with an innocence that Diana Ross and Shirley Bassey couldn't conjure.

The Carnival is Over was the obvious record to finish the 60's Show of the Playlist with. I've used it to mark other finales, too, in the past but it is the only record to play now even though The Seekers weren't short of masterpieces, from the equally resigned gorgeousness of I'll Never Find Another You, through World of Our Own, Island of Dreams, Georgy Girl and Morningtown Ride. You look them all up and find Tom Springfield, Dusty's brother, was the genius at work behind them. Trying to write pop songs up against opposition like that who had such singers to sing them, one realizes much too late that one never stood a chance.  

For all the devilish claims from artists affecting outrageousness, claiming authenticity or overturning the past in pursuit of short-term notoriety and some fast money, the mainstream will always see them off. Old editions of Top of the Pops never fail to show how the likes of The Seekers still look and sound tremendous alongside acts that seemed so very much of the moment at the time but came and went and are now only bad memories.

As was said about Olivia, nobody could have a bad word for Judith or The Seekers. 

Though the carnival is over
I will love them 'til I die.