THE SEEKERS

It looks as though I might have lost something in my teenage years. First we had The Searchers and now The Seekers. You would think, when you listen to them, that they are poles apart and yet there are some similarities. I have said before that I like to hear a melody, clearly, and also to be able to hear the words. I felt that was true of The Searchers but even more so of The Seekers. Both groups had something about their appearance which to me said class and I suppose the longevity of their popularity is another reason to see a link.

To give you a bit of a background, The Seekers were, and still are, four Australians who began singing together in the early sixties in the bars and clubs around Melbourne. The group were made up of three guys, who I think had been at school together and a girl who worked in an advertising agency with one of the guys. It was a simple format; two guitars, a double bass and vocals. Athol Guy was the front man in the early days and he played the double bass. Keith Potger and Bruce Woodley played guitar and the vocals, the voice, belonged to Judith Durham. In my humble opinion the clearest, purest voice I have ever heard.

Reading elsewhere on this site you will know I always had a soft spot for Australia, even seriously considering emigrating there in 1968/9 until mother used her considerable emotional blackmailing skills to put a stop to my dream. Therefore, an Australian group was bound to take my interest.

In 1964 The Seekers signed up to be the entertainment on a cruise ship called the Fairsky. In May 1964 they arrived in England, intending to stay for a few weeks but were signed up by the Grade Organisation and by February 1965 they had their first number one. They went on to have five other singles chart in the top three of the UK top ten. In those early days they were very much guided by Tom Springfield, who wrote their first hits. He had been part of a singing trio with his sister, the famous Dusty, and a guy called Mike Hurst. They split up in late 1963 and I suppose The Seekers style was initially a bit of an extension of The Springfields, as the trio was known.

In 1968, The Seekers announced they were splitting up and did a farewell stint at the Talk of the Town and a final BBC TV Show. Over the next 25 years they went their separate ways with the 3 males sometimes getting together as a group with various female singers. Then in 1992 the original four met up, went into the studio, released a new CD, and began a silver jubilee tour which extended from their native Australia into the UK.

They have continued to perform since then and in 2014 did a golden jubilee tour which was slightly postponed after Judith Durham suffered a brain haemorrhage, from which she fully recovered. As you may know if you have read other parts of this website, I was lucky enough to meet Keith Potger in 2005 and he arranged tickets for one of their concerts in Perth. It was a fantastic evening.

I think their golden jubilee tour in 2014/5 was probably unique in that it was the original four members still together. It has been an incredibly difficult task to pick five songs but here goes.

My first choice is their second number one hit and was released in late 1965. Called “The Carnival is Over” the words were written by Tom Springfield who had also penned their first two hits “I'll Never Find Another You” and “A World of Our Own”. The tune was based on an old Russian folk song.

They had now added strings to the simple guitar/double bass sound they had begun with but there was no change in the stunning voice of Judith Durham. I understand that in later years, and maybe even here, Keith Potger did the vocal arrangements.

The words of the song, with their poignant sentiments about never meeting again after a wonderful time, has meant that the song has been played at the conclusion of many sporting events in Australia. The Seekers were meant to perform it at the end of the 2000 Summer Olympics but sadly Judith Durham had fallen and broken her hip so the performance was cancelled. Rather ironically they did perform it at the end of the 2000 Summer Paralympics with Judith Durham in a wheelchair. The Seekers will often close their own shows with the song too. It is said that Tom Springfield wrote the song after a trip to Brazil where he had seen the Rio carnival.

I always found their harmony particularly beautiful. This was also their biggest selling single in the UK, at its peak selling, as it says, over 90,000 copies a day.

This clip comes from that final performance together in 1968, which I remember watching on the BBC. They were the only group of the sixties that my father actually liked. For your information, from left to right as you look at them, Keith Potger, Bruce Woodley, Judith Durham and Athol Guy. To the best of my knowledge, they have always appeared on stage in that order, certainly in recent years.

We've now moved on 25 years from the 1968 break-up and I am driving back from work after a really bad time. I had, for 6 years, been successfully running my own tutoring company and somebody, through very devious means, had just collapsed it. I was also in the final stages of planning my second coastal journey.

Everything was falling apart and, to be honest, I had no one to confide in, seek advice from or even just someone to whom I could talk. It is a very lonely life running your own business and if there is very little support at home, even lonelier. I was seriously wondering what to do. I wouldn't clinically say I was depressed but I was down, I was stressed, I was feeling hopeless.

This song came on the radio. I listened to its tone of hope, of never giving up. At the end, I actually pulled over because I had tears in my eyes. I felt that it was written for me at that very moment in my life and I vowed to keep that dream and keep the “light of everyone's learning burning bright”.

I owe Bruce Woodley, who wrote the song, an awful lot. By the way I think I am right in saying that by now, 1993, all the group members were in their fifties.

This clip is taken from the video made of their 1993 reunion tour.

I thought, when I started planning this, that, excluding the first song, all the others would come from the second coming of the group from 1993 onwards. Then I started looking for the YouTube clips and some of the older ones started to appear, two of which had personal links.

In 1966 they recorded a song by Malvina Reynolds, the lady who wrote “What Have They Done to the Rain”, which I chose on my Searchers selections last time. The number, Morningtown Ride, got to number 2 in the charts. When I rediscovered The Seekers in 1994 or so, I bought the 1993 reunion video and must have played it quite a lot. One day I went to pick up my four-year old son from his nursery school in Broadstairs and one of the helpers said to me how lovely it had been because at break time they had asked the children to sing a song they knew and Tom, my son, had gone through the complete Morningtown Ride. He must have listened to it so many times.

Then in roughly the same year a school in Broadstairs that I was working with had the opening of a new computer suite which had been financed by European Union money. For the opening I penned some words to “Ode to Joy” by Beethoven which was known as the European anthem. The words are shown below. Unbeknown to me, Keith Potger was one of the writers, using a pseudonym, of a song the Seekers did called “Emerald City” to the same basic melody. It was their last Top Fifty chart entry in December 1967.

Not totally sure where this clip came from but it came from somewhere. Maybe somewhere over the rainbow.

This is another Bruce Woodley song and although it is very beautiful with the sentiments of a long distance love affair I have chosen it for another reason. For those who work in a creative environment, producing material for others to enjoy, use, learn from, praise is never the primary reason for our work; well not in my case.

However, when something that we may have spent weeks, months, even years putting together from the moment the idea came to us until its final appearance, to hear someone make use of it at its best is pretty wonderful. I spent many years writing projects for kids to use in their learning and, in 2005, a group of kids in Australia, Busselton to be precise, also spent several months doing one of those projects. At the end they wrote me some lovely emails, thanking me for the work I had done and saying how much fun it had been and how much they had learned.

At the end of this song, and do wait for the very end, Bruce Woodley expresses exactly the feeling I had about my work after seeing the work those kids had done and reading their emails. Just substitute “designing projects” for “writing songs” and “when you see them done so well” for “when you hear them sung like that”.

Another clip from that 1993 reunion concert.

I said earlier I owed Bruce Woodley a lot and this is but one more example. This is an incredible song. It tells history, it's patriotic and, now more than at any other time perhaps, it has total relevance to the world we live in. We are one but we also many. We have evolved over thousands of years to be where we are today and in many cases, that means combining various cultures.

When I was working on that educational project back in the early years of this century, bloody hell that sounds a long time ago, I wrote a song to go with the project and I based the idea around what Bruce had written here.

Instead of the history of a country I went more for a geographical approach and included countries from from each continent in the verses in the hope that could bring all people together. I will upload a new version of that song in a few months time.

This clip is from the golden jubilee tour just 3 years ago, for those reading this in 2017.

On the basis of last week when you got two for the price of one, I thought we might continue that theme this time too. Keith told me in 2005 that Bruce was fiercely protective of this song and so he should be. It would be entirely suitable as the Australian National Anthem, indeed many have suggested it should be so.

On 7 February 2009 the state of Victoria in Australia suffered a series of horrific bush fires. 173 people lost their lives and over 400 were injured. Two weeks later, on 22 February, Australia held a National Day of Mourning. Bruce Woodley penned two new verses to his song and performed the number together with his daughter Claire and two survivors from the Kinglake area which had seen the worst devastation and 120 of those deaths.

If you don't find this whole performance tearfully moving, I suggest you apply for a job as a concrete block. Seriously.