The Real Underbelly

In July last year, veteran popster Russell Morris released a new album, Sharkmouth, based on stories from Australia's Depression years and some of their colourful characters, like boxer Les Darcy, “gangsters” of the 1920s and '30s like Squizzy Taylor and, from the '40s, Mr Eternity, Arthur Stace – as well as that horse, Phar Lap. Guest performers included Mark Lizotte aka Diesel, Renee Geyer, keyboards player James Black, country artist Troy Cassar-Daley and blues rocker Chris Wilson. The album became Morris' first to make it into the ARIA top ten, hitting tenth spot in April 2013. The delicious irony for Russell was that he'd originally presented the album to the major labels extant at the time and been rejected.

“I originally did four tracks – Blackdog Blues, Ballad Of Les Darcy, the song about Phar Lap, Big Red and Sharkmouth – and I thought I'd see if anyone was interested, and we did the rounds and went to all the record companies, and all of them said no. So I thought, 'Damn it, I don't care. I really like the project myself so I'll do something that I really want to do'. So I finished it and thought, 'Gee, this is good', so we tried it again. So we went back to them again and this time offered not only the album but also the publishing on the album and my old publishing, on songs like Wings Of An Eagle and Sweet Sweet Love. And they still said no! I thought, 'Oh well, it doesn't matter. This is the state of my career these days'. I've been around, and you sort of become like an old pair of slippers that people are not unkind to – people really like the old pair of slippers – but they don't want to wear them so much. So I thought I'd do it myself, enjoy doing it and sell them at gigs and make some money back. Then [former MD at Warner Music Australia] Robert Rigby, from Ambition [Entertainment/Records], was presented it through a friend of mine, and he said he'd like to take it. We'd already pressed 500 to sell at shows, which he said we could keep for that and he'd take it on from there. Totally unexpected.”

It had been five years since Morris had released his last album, Jumpstart Diary, in 2008, which had, in his words, “been received with a collective yawn” despite it also being the year he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, and that had been his first album of new songs since 1991. Morris seemed to have accepted the fact that his recording career was probably over, though he was still writing songs that perhaps someone from The X-Factor or The Voice might choose to record, and got on with his solid round of gigs, whether solo, with Jim Keays and the late Darryl Cotton, or Brian Cadd. Sharkmouth itself began with a striking photograph of a Sydney “identity”. “I thought I'd like to do a blues album,” he admits. “I'd written three songs and wasn't quite sure where I was heading with it, and then one of those fortuitous things happened. I was up in Sydney looking at the colour supplement in the paper and there was a photo of Thomas Archer, which is the front cover of the album. It almost jumped off the page and grabbed me. I took it back to Melbourne and kept looking at it and thought, 'I want to write a song about this guy'.”