The “Golden Hits Of The 60s”
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ROLF HARRIS
“TIE ME KANGAROO DOWN, SPORT
(ROLF HARRIS)”
Epic 9596
No. 3 July 13, 1963
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“The most famous Australian in the world,” said Q magazine of Rolf Harris, in 1995. “Hey, I invented world
music?,” said Harris. “I suppose, in a way, I did. I pioneered world music, certainly.”
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Rolf (b. Mar. 30, 1930, Perth, Australia) was full of talent and eager to gain fame and fortune; won the
junior backstroke championship, when 15 (an achievement he remains most proud of). At the age of 22,
he moved to England and became a TV cartoonist and storyteller. He sculpted, painted, sang, and
pounded musical instruments. In 1956, London’s Royal Academy of Art held an erxhibition of his art
works.
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Whenever he felt homesick, Rolf would visit the Down Under Club. It was there that he began singing his
strange songs and “wobbling” in public. “Wobbling”–to those not in the know–is shaking a warped
Masonite board to produce bizarre rhythmic sounds. It was in large measure this strange sound that sold
the world on Rolf’s kookie “Kangaroo” number; recorded in his bathroom with a tiny tape recorder and
originally called “Kangalpso.” In England, where the tune was a hit three years before its stateside
embrace, the nutty need for record-buyers to create that sound at home became such that Masonite
shipped out 55,000 warped boards.
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“I liked [Harry Belafonte’s] ‘Hold ‘Em Down,’ said Harris to Wacky Top 40 authors, on the creation of his
hit. “There was this line that went, ‘Don’t tie me donkey down there, let him bray, let him bray.’ And I
thought, ‘That’s good. I can change that and make it an Australian calypso. Instead of a donkey, I’ll
have a kangaroo in there somewhere.”
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Rolf’s notoriety has rolled right along in England and Australia, where a number of his fractured follow-
ups have charted. His 1969 reworking of a 1903 anti-war song “Two Little Boys” was reportedly the
biggest-selling disk in the U. K. that year. In the late ’60s, Harris had his own BBC-TV series, “Hey Presto,
It’s Rolf,” and his own wildlife TV series, “Survival.” In 1968, he received a royal accolade when he was
awarded a medal from the Order of the British Empire, an honor he again received in 1977.
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Rolf was the target for life-threatening threats in the early ’90s. “I was touring in Australia,” said Rolf to
Vox’s lan McCann. “There was this TV show called ‘The Money Or The Gun.’ I was asked to go on and do
a musical item of some sort, and they asked me to do ‘Stairway To Heaven.’ I said, ‘I don’t know it’ and
they said, ‘Well, you know of it,’ and no, I didn’t. I’d gotta be the only person in the world who’d never
even heard of it, never mind heard it.”
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It was the policy of the program to every week have some one different do the tune. There’d been an
operetic version, a folk-a cappella…and now with wobble board and didgeridoo (an oversized drone-
making wooden pipe), Rolf Harris’ one-of-a kind rendering. “It was such a namby-pamby bloody
dreadful song,” said Rolf to Q’s Tony Hibbert. An album, Stairways To Heaven–22 versions– was issued
in Australia; Harris’ cut dispensed as a single went top ten. Led Zep fans thought it sacriligious; Rolf fans
went ga-ga.
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Although, totally unknown to his American audience, Rolf operates as a “serious” painter. A 1992,
British opinion poll asking a thousand Londoners to name a famous painter, found Harris mentioned by
38%; beating Michelangelo and Rembrandt. Harris’ latest TV endeavor is “Animal Hospital,” which
reportedly attracts 11 million viewers per episode.
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