Men At Work’s Down Under a rip-off? Don’t think so.

5 February 2010

It might say something about my ears, but I can’t hear it myself.

A Federal Court judge has ruled that a tiny part of the Men At Work hit actually infringed copyright by incorporating a single bar out of a classic Australian tune, Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree.

People with good musical ears tell me that the line is in there, in a flute part about a minute or so into the song. Maybe why I couldn’t get it is partially because it is a counter melody being fluted under the main tune. Or maybe it’s because my ears are diminished somewhat because of a lifetime of playing drums.

The original Kookaburra tune was composed in the early 1930s by a Melbourne teacher Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides jamboree.

When Men At Work recorded Down Under in 1979 and 1981, it went on to become a huge hit, revived during the America’s Cup yachting campaign in 1983, which Australia went on to win. When I worked in Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympics, the song was heard everywhere. It was huge.

(Colin Hay and his wife with us in happier times)

Yet it wasn’t until 2007, after the alleged similarities were raised on a television quiz program, that the current copyright holder, Larrikin, reportedly realised that the riffs might be the same, and sued.

Yesterday the judge surprised many with his decision that the riff was plagiarised, a decision that leaves Men At Work liable to pay compensation, and considerable legal costs.

Outside the court, Larrikin’s solicitor said the damages could run to 60 percent of the income derived from the song, which would be millions of dollars.

He is quoted on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s newsite as saying the following: “Obviously the more the better, but it depends.”

For what? At most a couple of stranded bars underneath the main tune in a song. You might cheer this decision, believing that this is a strike against people who plunder the music of others. But you might be of a mind to think that this is a terribly unfair decision. This is a song that most probably would’ve been just as strong without the errant bars of flute. I certainly did not buy the song because of a Kookaburra reference. As I said, I didn’t even realise it was there.

If the damages judgement does offer anything like the 60%, then it would be just plain unfair. It would be suggesting that the Kookaburra bars were worth more than the rest of the song.

It isn’t. Not by a long shot.

- Phil Kafcaloudes

Skippy’s dad dies

4 February 2010

If you followed the exploits of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, you’d know that this first Australian superhero lived on a bush park. You’d also know that she had an unique ability to click-click-click her mouth, and all the actors around her would translate this into news that a group of escaped prisoners were in the park and were planning to rob a local bank disguised as Amercian businessmen and using sawn-off rifles concealed inside their overcoats, and that it was due to happen at 2.15 on Thursday afternoon.

But what you might not know was that one of the people behind the series was an Australian actor who was virtually the first actor to make it big on the U.K. stage in the 1930’s.

John McCallum, an impossibly handsome man (even in his latter years, as you could see from the photo above), went to London as a young man, training at RADA, touring in stage productions, starring in film, returning to Australia to fight in the war, and going back to London to continue his career.

He never forgot Australia, and insisted for years that Australia should support its own actors, a prescient view that may have been one of the factors in Australia having so many actors taking over the international film world today (Sam Worthington, Nicole Kidman, Rose Byrne, Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce etc etc).

And Skippy, a true international phenomenon. A good friend of McCallum’s told us today how the wallaby that played Skippy used to be kept in a hessian bag until required to shoot their scene. A fellow actor, on seeing this bag, exclaimed: “If that’s the dressing room for the star, then what will they give me!” As an animal lover, I find the scenario repugnant, but the comment still has to rank as one of the funniest.

McCallum will be missed. Right up to his death he was outspoken, still pushing for a national theatre company which would, he always said, bring actors to national, and perhaps international, prominance.

We need more people like John McCallum. Our thoughts go to his wife of 62 years, actress Googie Withers.

- Phil Kafcaloudes

Keynes versus Hayek, the YouTube sensation

3 February 2010

My, education has come a long way since the days when Mr Keast in 6th class used chalk, blackboards, dusters and a Gestentner copying machine to teach us that Tirana was the capital of Albania.

Mr Keast would never have heard of the internet, nor would he have known of hip-hop.

I’ve got a case here of where the internet and hip-hop have combined to produce one of the world’s most effective and capable teaching tools. U.S. filmmaker John Papola teamed up with economist Russ Roberts to do a rap/hip-hop video called Fear The Boom and Bust, that has become a smash hit, and has the world learning about economics. It scored more than 450,000 views in less than a week. By its second day it been shown in classrooms.

The video shows a rap between two of the world’s most diametrically opposed economists, John Maynard Keynes, the man whose views led so many countries in this economic crisis to make their big stimulus spends, and Austrian school Nobel Prize winner F.A. Hayek, who was against central government action to fix the economy. Two actors, dressed as Keynes and Hayek take to the night-time streets of Wall Street to do their rap hip-hop thing.

The video is smart. It starts with a dark-suited Keynes giving a spirited defence of his spend-to-save-yourself attitude, which is pretty cool and convincing (and when you consider that many countries have become letter day converts to him after placing him in the wilderness for decades). Then we have Hayek taking on some verses, and punching holes in the Keynes argument. It is sassy, bright, deep and thoughtful, and all to a rap tune that is pretty compelling.

Check it out. It’s at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk

Who knows? It might make an economist out of you yet.

- Phil Kafcaloudes

Barack Obama to come to Australia

2 February 2010

One of my most embarrassing moments was on the day after Barack Obama was elected President of the U.S. I was walking in to work early in the morning, bleary eyed after watching the election coverage, and I saw a colleague.

“We’ve got a black President!” I said.

Quick as a whip, the colleague replied, “I didn’t know Australia had a president.”

I wasn’t the only one to get caught up in the story. Opinion pollsters have said that the president is popular here in Australia, more popular than he is in the United States.

This might go some way to explain why Barack Obama has chosen this time to come to Australia. He has been falling in the polls and has been the subject of a vilification campaign by the American Right. They say that he has moved too far to the left in his policies and actions.

All of which baffled one commentator we had on the program this morning. Professor Dennis Altman from La Trobe University and author of a book on Australia-US relations (The 51st State?), says that, if anything, Obama has proved himself to be much more centrist than he appeared at election time.

Professor Altman was also confused about why the president would choose to take an extended overseas trip at a critical time in his term. He has mid-term elections coming up this year, and he really needs to maintain support among Democratic voters if he is to have any kind of power in the Congress and Senate. Losing this power, he could say ta ta to his legislative agenda.

Perhaps it is that the president needs some adulation in this bleak time. He is likely to be treated like to hero when he does the public events Down Under.

Make a nice break for him, so long as Kevin Rudd doesn’t bother him too much with talk about international relations, defence, terrorism, the ecomony. And oh yeah, how to win a second term.

- Phil Kafcaloudes

Haiti Adoption arrests. A Stolen Generation?

1 February 2010

They work fast, these adopt-a-baby people.

Fast, but not necessarily thoroughly.

On Friday, two and a half weeks after the Haiti earthquake, police arrested 10 members of a US Christian group at the Haiti border with the Dominican Republic. It’s alleged they tried to leave the country with 33 children survivors.

On the weekend the five men and five women were charged with child trafficking.

It’s all mistake, the would-be adopters say, but they had no papers legitimising the adoptions, so for all the world they appeared to be a group that has abducted children. Trying to rush them over the border isn’t a good look. Certainly the Haiti government is furious. One government minister called them abductions, not adoptions.

When you learn that some of the children say that their parents are still alive, the arguments of the adoption team seem to weaken further.

The question is: why are people coming into a foreign country and whisking children away? Do they really believe they have a right to do this? Do they really believe this is the right thing for confusedm devastated children?

Here in Australia we have a sad story of governments taking indigenous children away from their parents. The children became known as the Stolen Generation.

Of course the situation in Haiti is a little different. Haiti is in disaster mode since the earthquake. People have been starving, and laws are being flouted. In this situation, it is the vulnerable: children, the sick and older people, who suffer first.

But moving children away from their family networks, and the only world they have known has its own dangers.

Just ask any member of the Stolen Generation.

- Phil Kafcaloudes