Daryl Braithwaite
| Daryl Braithwaite | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | 11 January 1949 |
| Origin | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Genres | Pop, country |
| Occupation(s) | Singer, songwriter |
| Instruments | Vocals, guitar, keyboard |
| Years active | 1970–present |
| Labels | Festival Records, Sony Music, independent record label |
| Associated acts | Sherbet |
| Website | darylbraithwaite.com.au |
Daryl Braithwaite (born 11 January 1949) is an Australian singer. Best known as the lead vocalist of Sherbet, Braithwaite has also sustained a successful solo career, placing 15 singles in the Australian top 40, including the No. 1 hits "You're My World" and "The Horses".
Biography
Early years
Daryl, along with his twin brother Glenn, was born and raised in a working class family in Melbourne, Victoria. His father was a plumber. As a child, he attended Punt Road Primary School in South Yarra, Melbourne and then Christ Church Grammar, also in Punt Road, where he sang in the school choir, and for a time was in the same class as Olivia Newton-John.[1][2] In 1963 his family moved to the Sydney beachside suburb of Coogee, New South Wales where he attended Randwick Boys High until the end of year 10. He then began a fitter and turner apprenticeship, set up by his father, which he completed in 1969, but decided that this was not the career path for him and left home to pursue a musical career instead.[3]
By the time he was in his teens Braithwaite was singing in various Sydney rock groups, his first being Bright Lights, in 1967, then House of Bricks and Samael Lilith. In 1970, at the age of 21, he joined Sherbet, a band that had already released one single. Initially hired as Sherbets' second lead vocalist, within a few months Braithwaite became the band's only frontman when original lead singer Dennis Laughlin left.
Sherbet's second single ("Can You Feel It Baby") featured Braithwaite's gritty-but-polished lead vocals, and became an Australian Top 40 hit in 1971. The combination of Braithwaite's soul-influenced vocal style and Sherbet's pop songcraft was then heard on a series of singles and albums throughout the 1970s, and The Sherbs ended up placing an additional 19 hits on the Australian charts from 1971 to 1979. In the process, Braithwaite rose to national fame as the band's lead singer.
Braithwaite also forged a similarly successful solo career alongside his work in Sherbet. Working in largely the same pop/rock vein as that band, from 1974 through 1993 Braithwaite placed 15 solo hits in the Australian top 40.
Early solo career: 1973–1979
Already a budding star due to his work in Sherbet, in 1973 Braithwaite played the lead role in the Australian production of the rock opera Tommy. The following year, amidst unfounded rumours that he would soon be leaving Sherbet, Braithwaite began his official solo career with a cover of the ballad "You're My World", which went to No. 1 in Australia.
More hits followed throughout the 1970s, including a cover of The Small Faces' "Afterglow (Of Your Love)". An infrequent songwriter, Braithwaite's solo career has been dominated by cover songs.
Curiously for the 'album rock' era, Braithwaite's solo recordings from 1974-78 appeared only on 7-inch singles. A best of solo LP was compiled in 1978, but Braithwaite's first original full-length album as a solo artist (Out on the Fringe) didn't appear until 1979, during a time when Sherbet had briefly broken up.
He was crowned Australia's King of Pop by TV Week over three consecutive years from 1975 to 1977.[4]
Solo career on hold: 1980–1987
By 1980, the members of Sherbet were back together and had renamed themselves The Sherbs. At this point, Braithwaite put his solo career on hold to concentrate on work with his bandmates. However, The Sherbs had only a very few minor hits and broke up in 1984.
For a period of time after the break-up, Braithwaite played regular gigs, but as of 1987, he had left the music industry and was working as a builder of footpaths for less than 200 Australian dollars a week.
Comeback: 1988–1999
In April 1988, Braithwaite began recording his comeback album Edge. This LP featured a somewhat more adult contemporary sound than Braithwaite's previous work, and spawned four hit singles that returned him to the Australian singles charts after an absence of nearly a decade. Two of these hits, "As the Days Go By" and "All I Do", were penned by Canadian songwriter Ian Thomas; a third, "One Summer", was a Braithwaite original.
Braithwaite went on to have a number of solo hits in the early 1990s, including the Australian No. 1 "The Horses",[5] a cover of a Rickie Lee Jones recording written by Jones and Walter Becker. He also made his first US chart appearance as a solo artist at No. 47 with the 1991 single "Higher than Hope", a song he co-wrote with Simon Hussey. By the end of 1991, Braithwaite's Rise album had become Australia's biggest selling CD of the year, and Edge had become the best-selling album ever released by Sony Music Australia to that time.
Braithwaite then worked alongside Jef Scott, Simon Hussey and James Reyne to create the 1992 self-titled album Company of Strangers. Braithwaite sang lead or co-lead vocals on four of the album's tracks, including two Australian top 40 singles: "Motor City (I Get Lost)" (#26,[6] 1992) and "Daddy's Gonna Make You a Star" (#35,[6] 1993).
His comeback success was somewhat derailed by a 1992 lawsuit, in which his former managers sued Braithwaite for back-payment of fees owing. The suit was successful, and Braithwaite essentially had to give up all the revenue he made from Edge and Rise, as well as a portion of the revenue from his next album, 1993's Taste the Salt and after a 1994 'best-of' collection was released, Braithwaite was dropped by his record comp any. He did not record another album for 12 years.
He was a member of A Current Affair's "Kokoda Challenge" in 1996, where he travelled to Papua New Guinea and did a 100-kilometre, nine-day trek of the Kokoda Trail with other celebrities Angry Anderson, Grant Kenny, Collette Mann and Dermott Brereton to retrace the steps of Australian Diggers to mark the end of World War II, 51 years previously. His own father had served in Papua New Guinea during the war and he wanted to experience something of what he had to endure. He stated that it was the toughest test he had faced, "I was determined to make it, no matter what. But it was really, really hard."
In the interim Braithwaite toured regularly, and in 1997 he returned to the musical theatre stage in the Melbourne production of Chess. As of 1999, he also resumed occasional touring with a reunited Sherbet.
2005-present
After more than a decade away from the recording studio, Braithwaite featured on the track "The Euphonious Whale" with James Reyne's album, And the Horse You Rode in On. A new studio album titled, Snapshot appeared later in 2005. It included four songs co-written by Braithwaite including "See You Around Sometime" which was written with Mark Seymour and had been previously recorded by Seymour for his album One Eyed Man.
In 2006, Braithwaite sang on two new Sherbs tracks specially recorded for a greatest hits compilation, Super Hits; they were The Sherbs' first new recordings in 22 years. Braithwaite then resumed his solo career with the 2008 release of The Lemon Tree, an album of acoustic reworkings of both solo and Sherbet hits, and a few covers.
In 2013 Braithwaite re-signed by Sony Music Australia. CEO Denis Handlin said in a statement; “Daryl is an icon of the Australian music industry and we are delighted to welcome him home to Sony Music." [7] He released his first album of new material since 2005, titled Forever the Tourist. It featuring the lead single "Not Too Late". The album peaked at number 47.
Discography
Solo albums
- Out on the Fringe (1979)
- Edge (1988) AUS #1[5]
- Rise (1990) AUS #3[5]
- Taste the Salt (1993) AUS #13[5]
- Snapshot (2005)
- Forever the Tourist (2013) AUS #47[5]
Live albums
- The Lemon Tree (2008) AUS #74[5]
Compilations
- Daryl Braithwaite… Best Of (1978)
- Higher Than Hope (1991) (An international release combining tracks from Rise and Edge)
- Six Moons: The Best of 1988-1994 (1994) AUS #31[5]
- Afterglow: The Essential Collection 1971–1994 (2002)
- The Essential Daryl Braithwaite (2007)
Solo singles
| Release date | Title | Chart positions | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AUS [5] |
United States | UK [9] |
NZ [10] |
NOR [11] |
SWE [12] | ||||||||
| October 1974 | "You're My World" | 1 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| August 1975 | "Cavalry" | 13 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| April 1976 | "Old Sid" | 9 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| February 1977 | "Love Has No Pride" / "Fly Away" (double A-side) |
5 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| October 1977 | "Afterglow (Of Your Love)" | 37 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| June 1978 | "If You Walked Away" | 14 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| January 1979 | "Why Do I Break It Up?" | 35 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| September 1979 | "Love Like a Child" | 69 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| January 1980 | "Prove Your Love" | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| August 1988 | "As the Days Go By" UK release date was November 1992. |
11 | — | 144 | 49 | — | — | ||||||
| October 1988 | "All I Do" | 23 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| January 1989 | "One Summer" | 8 | — | — | — | 5 | 4 | ||||||
| May 1989 | "Let Me Be" | 26 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| July 1989 | "Sugar Train" | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| November 1990 | "Rise" | 23 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| January 1991 | "The Horses" | 1 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| May 1991 | "Higher Than Hope" | 28 | 47 | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| August 1991 | "Don't Hold Back Your Love" | 55 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| January 1992 | "Nothing to Lose" | 100 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| October 1993 | "The World As it Is" | 35 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| January 1994 | "Barren Ground" | 61 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| March 1994 | "Breaking the Rules" | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| October 1994 | "How Can I Be Sure?" | 55 | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| 1999 | "When the Flame Burns" | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| July 2010 | "Beautiful Feeling"[13] | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| September 2013 | "Not too Late" | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||
| "—" denotes the single did not chart or was not released in that country | |||||||||||||
Featured on
- James Reyne, Company of Strangers (group) Company of Strangers (1993).
- Daft Punk, Random Access Memories (2013).
References
- ↑ http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1219832.htm Interview with Olivia Newton-John on Andrew Denton's 'Enough Rope', 18 October 2004
- ↑ http://www.debbiekruger.com/writer/freelance/onj_transcript.html Olivia Newton-John Interview with Debbie Kruger, 30 August 1994, over lunch at Shelley Beach, Ballina, NSW
- ↑ http://www.darylbraithwaite.com.au/SWF/Main%20Page.swf Daryl Braithwaite Homepage Biography
- ↑ http://www.nostalgiacentral.com/pop/kingofpop.htm TV Week King of Pop Awards
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Australian chart peaks:
- Top 100 (Kent Music Report) peaks to 19 June 1988: Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (Illustrated ed.). St. Ives, N.S.W.: Australian Chart Book. p. 45. ISBN 0-646-11917-6.
- Top 50 (ARIA Chart) peaks from 26 June 1988: "Discography Daryl Braithwaite". Hung Medien. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
- Top 100 (ARIA Chart) peaks from January 1990 to December 2010: Ryan, Gavin (2011). Australia's Music Charts 1988–2010. Mt. Martha, VIC, Australia: Moonlight Publishing.
- 1 2 "Discography Company of Strangers". Hung Medien. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
- ↑ "Daryl Braithwaite re-signs with Sony Music". www.beat.com.au. Retrieved 2 March 2016.
- ↑ "Billboard > Artists / Daryl Braithwaite > Chart History". Billboard. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
- ↑ Six Moons: The Best of 1988-1994 liner notes by Daryl Braithwaite.
- ↑ "Daryl Braithwaite". charts.org.nz. Retrieved 1 April 2010.
- ↑ "Daryl Braithwaite". norwegiancharts.com. Retrieved 1 April 2010.
- ↑ "Daryl Braithwaite". swedishcharts.com. Retrieved 1 April 2010.
- ↑ "Beautiful Feeling". iTunes Australia. Retrieved 2 March 2016.
- "Afterglow" liner notes by Glenn A. Baker.
External links
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