Russell Morris: The Life Story Behind the Real Thing Star
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There is a month in Australian music history that belongs to Russell Morris. In July 1969, while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a seven-minute psychedelic record from Melbourne sat at number one, refusing to behave like a pop single. Radio stations were supposed to play songs of three minutes, not epics that changed tempo, piled on sound effects, and ended in a long, swirling fade. “The Real Thing” broke every one of those rules and topped the charts for a month anyway. Morris was twenty years old. He had already been in a band, already had a hit with a cover of “Hush”, and already found a producer willing to gamble on something nobody else would have dared to release.
That gamble could have been the whole story. A young star, one enormous record, and then the slow slide into oldies shows and nostalgia. Morris refused that script. He kept writing, kept recording, and kept touring through decades when the charts paid him little attention. He sang with old friends in harmony groups, re-recorded his early hits with new bands, and waited for a sound that fitted the voice he had grown into. The wait lasted a long time. In October 2012, at sixty-four, he released “Sharkmouth”, a blues album about Phar Lap, Les Darcy, and the Great Depression, and it went to number six, went platinum, and won him an ARIA Award. Two more history-soaked blues records followed, and the second of them reached number four, the highest chart position of his entire career. His biggest album chart peak came forty-five years after his biggest single.
So the shape of this life is not a rise and a fall. It is a rise, a long middle stretch of steady work, and then a second rise that nobody, least of all the singer himself, had planned. Along the way there is a Hall of Fame induction in 2008, a place in the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia register in 2013, and a catalogue that runs from a gentle Johnny Young ballad, twisted into a psychedelic epic, to songs about prison ships, the Eureka Stockade, and paddle steamers on the Murray River. Morris was born in Richmond, Melbourne, on 31 July 1948. He is still performing in his late seventies. This is how a bookkeeping student became a pop star at twenty, a working musician for forty years, and then, against all the odds, a blues storyteller with his best chart results ahead of him rather than behind him.
Richmond, Accounting Books, and a Band at Eighteen
Richmond, the inner Melbourne suburb where Russell Norman Morris grew up, was a working-class place in the 1950s, full of factories, terrace houses, and families who expected their sons to learn a trade. Morris went to Richmond Technical School, and then to Swinburne College, where he studied accounting. Debits and credits, ledgers and balance sheets: on paper, he was heading for an office. In practice, his attention was somewhere else entirely. He was a Bob Dylan fan, a guitar player, and a singer who wanted a band of his own, and in September 1966, at eighteen, he formed one.
The group was called Somebody’s Image. Morris sang lead. Kevin Thomas played rhythm guitar, Phillip Raphael played lead guitar, Eric Cairns played drums, and Les Allan, also known as Les Gough, played bass. They were a Melbourne band in the fullest sense, learning their trade in the city’s venues, building a following among the crowds who packed those rooms on Friday and Saturday nights. Somebody’s Image did not stay unknown for long. Ian Meldrum, then a staff writer for the pop paper Go-Set, noticed them, and Meldrum would matter enormously to Morris’s life: first as a champion in print, then as manager, then as the producer who reshaped his sound.
With Meldrum behind them, Somebody’s Image signed to EMI Records, and in 1967 they released their version of Joe South’s “Hush”. It reached number fifteen on the national chart and number two on the Melbourne chart, a solid hit for a band barely a year old. They followed it with a version of Dylan’s “Baby Blue”, another minor hit, and for a while it looked as though Somebody’s Image might become one of the steady pop groups of the late sixties. But Morris wanted something else. He wanted to sing his own material, to be a solo act, and to make records that sounded like nobody else’s. In 1968 he left the band behind and set out on his own, with Meldrum still at his side. He was twenty, he had a hit record already under his belt, and he had no idea that his first solo single would be the strangest, boldest record of his life.
Seven Minutes That Topped the Charts
Meldrum’s idea was simple and, by the standards of 1969, completely unreasonable. He took a gentle ballad by the singer-songwriter Johnny Young, a song that in its original form was soft and romantic, and he decided to turn it into a psychedelic rock epic. He gathered some of Australia’s finest rock musicians for the session, built the arrangement up layer by layer, and let the record run to nearly seven minutes, more than twice the length of a normal single. The result was “The Real Thing”, released in March 1969. It opened with a slow, dreamy introduction, then surged into a driving beat, then drifted through sound effects and strange, swirling passages before coming back to the melody. It sounded like nothing else on Australian radio.
Radio played it anyway. On 9 April 1969, the single slipped into the Top 40 at number thirty-three, and then it climbed, week by week, until it reached number one. By the time Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July, “The Real Thing” had spent a month at the top of the Australian charts. Morris’s own official biography notes the timing with pride: one small step for a singer from Richmond, one giant leap for Australian music. The record also travelled. Without promotional support, it reached number one in Chicago, Houston, and New York, an extraordinary result for an Australian single that long, that strange, and that far from the pop formulas of the day.
What followed showed that the first hit was not a fluke of novelty. Young wrote Morris’s next single too, “The Girl That I Love”, and it also reached number one, giving Morris two chart-toppers in a row. “Part Three Into Paper Walls”, a co-composition by Young and Morris, shared a double-A-side release with it and kept his name in the charts. Across the late 1960s and early 1970s, Morris collected five Australian Top 10 singles in total, a run that put him among the most successful local singers of the era. “Sweet, Sweet Love” arrived in 1971, and “Wings of an Eagle” in 1972, a gentler, more thoughtful record that showed a different side of him from the wildness of “The Real Thing”. That song, with its image of flight and open sky, drew on Aboriginal mythology in its mood and imagery, and it has stayed one of his most loved recordings. He was twenty-three, he had already lived through the peak of sixties pop, and the seventies were about to ask him a harder question: what does a singer do when the hits slow down?
Bloodstone, the Rubes, and the Working Years
The seventies and eighties did not hand Morris another number one, and that is precisely what makes this part of his story worth telling. He did not stop. He made albums, toured, wrote, and played with whoever was making honest music around him. “Bloodstone” came out in 1971, early in the decade, and further solo albums followed across the seventies as he moved from pop towards rock and towards the singer-songwriter style he had admired in Dylan from the start. The audiences got smaller, the chart positions got lower, and the work got steadier. He was becoming what the music business calls a working musician, and what ordinary people call a professional: someone who turns up, plays well, and gets paid, whether or not the newspapers are writing about him.
In 1980 he formed Russell Morris and the Rubes, and the group recorded “Almost Frantic”, an album that included a new version of “Hush”, the song that had started everything for him thirteen years earlier. The re-recording reached number thirty-five, a modest placing, but the point of the exercise was not the chart. It was Morris reclaiming his own history on his own terms, with a band he had built himself, playing the song the way he heard it in 1980 rather than the way a producer had shaped it in 1967.
The collaborations kept coming. He sang with Ronnie Burns and Darryl Cotton in Burns Cotton and Morris, and with Cotton and Jim Keays in Cotton Keays and Morris, two harmony groups that brought together singers whose careers all stretched back to the sixties. He also worked with Rick Springfield in the Morris Springfield Project. These were not comeback vehicles. They were friendships turned into music, and they kept Morris on stage, in studios, and in front of audiences through years when a solo hit was not on offer. He also married, raised two children, a daughter Jaime and a son Luke, with his first wife Paula, and lived through the ending of that marriage and a second one. The private details are his own, and the public record says little about them beyond the outline, but the outline matters: this was a man living a real life, with its ordinary joys and ordinary failures, while the music carried on alongside it.
The Hall of Fame and the Archive
Recognition, when it came, arrived in two stages, and both of them said something about how Australia had come to see him. On 1 July 2008, the Australian Recording Industry Association inducted Morris into the ARIA Hall of Fame, alongside Dragon, The Triffids, and Max Merritt. Guest musicians joined him on stage for the night, including Steve Kilbey, Tim Powles, Jak Housden, Clayton Doley, and Lachlan Doley, and they performed “The Real Thing” together, the song that had started the whole story nearly forty years earlier. It was a public statement that Morris belonged in the permanent record of Australian music, not as a one-hit curiosity but as a singer whose work had lasted.
Five years later came a quieter honour, and in some ways a more telling one. In 2013, “The Real Thing” was added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia registry, the list of recordings judged to hold cultural significance for the country. The registry also holds John Farnham’s “You’re the Voice”, Archie Roach’s “Took the Children Away”, and Cold Chisel’s “Khe Sanh”. Putting a seven-minute psychedelic single from 1969 in that company was the archive’s way of saying that the record had outgrown its era and become part of the national story. Morris was also later made a Member of the Order of Australia, a recognition of his service to music that sits beside the Hall of Fame induction as the formal bookend to a long career.
Neither honour stopped him working. That is the point that keeps repeating in his life. Awards arrived, and he went back on the road. A registry listing arrived, and he went back into the studio. The honours marked what he had done. They did not finish anything. The most interesting chapter of his career was still to come, and it would begin in a recording studio four years after the Hall of Fame night, when a singer in his sixties found a sound that suited him better than anything he had sung since 1969.
Sharkmouth: Phar Lap, Les Darcy, and the Depression
In October 2012, Morris released “Sharkmouth”, the first of three albums that would change how Australia thought about him. He was sixty-four. The record was a set of blues songs about Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, and its subjects were the people and events of that rough, vivid era: Phar Lap, the racehorse whose death in 1932 still puzzles and fascinates the country; Les Darcy, the boxer who died young and became a folk hero; and the Great Depression, which shaped a generation. These were not pop subjects. They were history, told in the language of the blues, and Morris sang them in a voice that had grown rougher, deeper, and more convincing with age.
The record worked, and it worked in ways that surprised the industry. “Sharkmouth” reached number six on the ARIA Albums Chart, went platinum, topped the blues and roots charts, and stayed there for a year. At the 2013 ARIA Awards it won Best Blues and Roots Album. Think about that for a moment. A singer whose last big chart success had been four decades earlier had just made the most successful album of his career, in a genre he had never worked in before, singing about people who had been dead for eighty years. There is no formula for that. There is only a singer who had spent the quiet decades listening, learning, and waiting for the right material.
What made the album land was its honesty. Morris was not pretending to be young, and he was not pretending to be an American bluesman. He was an Australian in his sixties, singing Australian stories in a blues style that had always suited his voice, and the audience could hear the difference. The songs were full of characters, of gambles and losses, of men and women trying to survive hard times, and Morris sang them like a man who knew something about hard times himself. The blues, as he found it, was not a costume. It was a way of telling the truth about the past, and the past he chose to tell was his own country’s.
Van Diemen’s Land and Red Dirt – Red Heart
Morris did not treat “Sharkmouth” as a one-off. He followed it with a second history album, “Van Diemen’s Land”, in April 2014, and this time he widened the lens. Where the first record had focused on individuals, the second took on larger events: the prison ships that brought convicts to Australia and began the country as a penal settlement, the Eureka Stockade, the union strikes, the First and Second World Wars, and the paddle steamers that worked the Murray River. Breaker Morant and the Sandakan prisoners of war were among the stories he sang about. It was an ambitious record, a sweep across two centuries of Australian life, and it did even better than its predecessor. “Van Diemen’s Land” debuted at number four on the ARIA Albums Chart, the highest chart position of Morris’s fifty-year career at that point, and it was certified gold. It was nominated for Best Blues and Roots Album at the 2014 ARIA Awards, and it went on to win Best Australian Blues Album at the Chain Awards in 2015, with Morris also named best male vocalist there.
The third record in the trilogy, “Red Dirt – Red Heart”, completed the set. It also won the ARIA Award for Best Blues and Roots Album, giving Morris a second win in that category and confirming that “Sharkmouth” had not been a lucky accident. Together, the three albums form a single project: a history of Australia told in blues and rock, from the convict ships to the red dirt of the interior, from famous names to forgotten ones. Morris has described the work as an attempt to save stories that risked slipping from view, and the description fits. These were songs about people and events that school textbooks mention in a paragraph and then move on from. In Morris’s hands, each one got a full song, a voice, and a chance to be remembered.
The trilogy changed his standing in a way that no single hit could have. He was no longer only the man who sang “The Real Thing” in 1969. He was also the man who, in his sixties and seventies, made the best-selling blues records in the country and taught audiences about their own past through music. Festival organisers booked him, younger musicians sought him out, and radio stations that had not played a new Russell Morris record in decades found themselves playing one. A later blues-rock record, “Black and Blue Heart”, followed in 2019, and in October 2023 he released “The Real Thing: Symphonic Concert”, a live orchestral recording that reached number five. The circle was complete: the song that had started everything, played with an orchestra, more than half a century after a seven-minute single had shocked Australian radio.
The Song That Will Not Age
“The Real Thing” is now more than fifty-five years old, and it has not dated the way most pop records do. Part of the reason is the production. Meldrum built the record like a piece of theatre, with a quiet opening, a surging middle, and a long fade that feels like a dream ending, and theatre does not go out of fashion as quickly as a chart sound does. Part of the reason is the song itself. Johnny Young’s melody is simple enough to survive any arrangement, and Morris’s vocal, recorded when he was twenty, carries a confidence that sounds almost reckless. He sings as though he has no doubt that a seven-minute record can be a hit, and the lack of doubt becomes part of the thrill.
The record’s afterlife has been long and varied. It has been reissued, compiled, covered, and played on radio ever since 1969. It has turned up in films, in documentaries, and in retrospectives of Australian music, where it usually stands as the moment when local pop stopped copying overseas sounds and tried something of its own. The Sounds of Australia listing in 2013 made that judgement official. And on stage, it remains the moment every Morris audience waits for. When the opening notes begin, the room knows what is coming, and the cheer that goes up is not only for a song. It is for the memory of a time when a record that long, that strange, and that Australian could reach number one and stay there.
There is a final detail that sums up the record’s place in his life. Morris has spent more than half a century singing it, and he has never sounded tired of it. Singers often grow to resent the hit that defines them, and the resentment is understandable: one song, however good, is a small thing to carry for fifty years. Morris seems to have made peace with it early. He sings it as the opening chapter of a story that kept going, not as the only chapter worth reading. That attitude is visible in every show he plays. He gives the audience “The Real Thing”, and then he gives them the blues trilogy, and the Rubes songs, and “Wings of an Eagle”, and the whole long arc of a career that refused to end at twenty-one.
My Take:
I admire Russell Morris most for the gamble. Think about what “The Real Thing” actually was in March 1969: a seven-minute record, built around a gentle ballad, produced by a man who had never produced anything like it, sung by a twenty-year-old who had just left his band. Every rule of pop music said it would fail. Singles were three minutes long. Radio programmers wanted songs they could slot between advertisements. Audiences wanted choruses they could hum on the first hearing. Morris and Meldrum ignored all of that, and the record went to number one for a month. I keep returning to that decision, because it tells me something about how breakthroughs happen. They do not happen when you follow the rules carefully. They happen when somebody is willing to look foolish for seven minutes and trust that the audience will follow. Morris trusted the audience, and the audience trusted him back.
What I find even more interesting is that the gamble was not really his idea. The song was Johnny Young’s, and the wild arrangement was Meldrum’s. Morris was the voice in the middle, the person who had to sing the thing and make it believable. That is a different kind of bravery from the bravery of a songwriter. A songwriter risks an idea. A singer risks himself. If “The Real Thing” had failed, Young would still have had other songs, and Meldrum would still have had his newspaper column, but Morris would have been the young singer who wasted his solo debut on a record nobody could play. He sang it anyway, and he sang it as though he believed in every strange second of it. I respect that enormously. There is a lesson in it about trusting the people around you, about letting a producer push you further than you would go on your own, and about being the person who stands in front of the microphone when the gamble is on.
I also think about the five Top 10 singles, and about how quickly that kind of success can disappear. Morris had two number ones in a row, and then the charts moved on, as charts always do. The seventies brought new sounds, new faces, and new fashions, and a singer from the sixties had to decide what to do next. What Morris did was work. He made albums like “Bloodstone”, he toured, he formed the Rubes, he re-recorded “Hush”, he sang harmonies with Ronnie Burns and Darryl Cotton and Jim Keays. None of that work made headlines. All of it kept him a musician. I think that is the part of his story that young singers should study most carefully, because it is the part that nobody photographs. The long middle of a career, when the spotlight has moved on and the only thing left is the work itself, is where most careers are actually decided. Morris decided his by keeping going.
The harmony groups matter to me more than they might seem to. Burns Cotton and Morris, Cotton Keays and Morris: these were not glamorous projects. They were three older singers, all of whom had been famous in the sixties, standing together and singing in harmony. There is something generous about that choice. Morris could have spent those years guarding his status as a solo star, playing only his own hits to his own audiences. Instead, he shared stages, shared microphones, and shared billing with friends. That generosity, I think, is part of why he was still standing when the blues trilogy arrived. He had not spent the quiet decades bitter and alone. He had spent them making music with other people, and that kept his ear open and his voice warm.
Then there is “Sharkmouth”, and I have to be honest about how surprised I was when I first understood what it was. A sixty-four-year-old pop star, making a blues album about Phar Lap and Les Darcy and the Depression. On paper, it sounds like a vanity project, the kind of record that gets polite reviews and sells to the singer’s existing fans. In practice, it went to number six, went platinum, and won an ARIA. What changed my mind was listening to what the record actually does. Morris was not dressing up as a bluesman. He was using the blues the way it was meant to be used: as a way of telling hard stories plainly, with a voice that has lived long enough to know what hard means. Phar Lap’s death, Darcy’s short life, the Depression’s long shadow: these are not light subjects, and Morris does not treat them lightly. He sings them with the weight they deserve, and the audience can hear that he means it.
“Van Diemen’s Land” is the record I keep coming back to, because it is the more ambitious of the two. “Sharkmouth” told stories about individuals. “Van Diemen’s Land” tried to tell the story of a country: prison ships, the Eureka Stockade, the wars, the Murray paddle steamers, the strikes. That is a huge canvas for a pop album, and it could easily have become a lecture. It did not, because Morris kept the songs human. Breaker Morant is a man, not a symbol. Sandakan is a place where real men died, not a paragraph in a textbook. The record reached number four, the highest chart position of his life, when he was sixty-five years old. I find that fact genuinely moving. How many singers can say that their best chart result came forty-five years after their first number one? Almost none. Morris can, and the reason is that he never stopped learning, never stopped listening, and never decided that his best work was behind him.
I think about his age a lot in this story, because the numbers are so striking. Twenty years old at number one. Sixty-four when “Sharkmouth” came out. Sixty-five when “Van Diemen’s Land” reached number four. Seventy-five when “The Real Thing: Symphonic Concert” reached number five. Those numbers tell a story that most of the music business does not want to hear, which is that a singer’s best work does not have to happen early. It can happen late, if the singer keeps working and keeps growing. The industry loves young stars because young stars are easy to sell. Morris is proof that the industry’s timetable is not the only timetable. A voice can deepen, a writer can mature, and an audience can arrive late, and the result can be better than anything that came before.
The Hall of Fame induction in 2008 is a moment I keep turning over, because of who shared the stage with him. Steve Kilbey, Tim Powles, Jak Housden, Clayton and Lachlan Doley: musicians from a younger generation, playing “The Real Thing” with the man who first sang it. That image matters. It says that Morris’s music did not belong only to his own generation. It belonged to the musicians who came after him, who had learned from it and wanted to honour it. And the Sounds of Australia listing in 2013 said the same thing in a different language. The archive does not list records because they sold well. It lists them because they matter to the country. “The Real Thing” matters because it was the moment Australian pop stopped being a copy of something else and became itself.
If I have a sadness in this story, it is about the marriages, and about the parts of a life that the public record can only outline. Morris married Paula, had two children, Jaime and Luke, and the marriage ended. A second marriage ended too. I do not know the details, and I should not pretend to, but I can say that a career as long as his, with its touring and its absences and its ups and downs, puts a strain on any family. The fact that he kept working through those years, and kept his relationship with his audience intact, says something about his steadiness. It also says something about the cost of a life in music, a cost that the chart positions and the awards never show.
For a young reader, the lesson I take from Morris is about patience, and about the long game. He did not panic when the hits stopped. He did not chase fashions. He did not retire and live on the memory of 1969. He kept making records, kept touring, kept singing with friends, and kept his curiosity alive. And because he did all of that, he was ready when the blues trilogy came along. If he had retired at fifty, “Sharkmouth” would never have existed. If he had stopped listening to new music, he would never have found the blues. The comeback did not happen by accident. It happened because forty years of steady work had prepared him for it. That is a lesson for anyone who feels that their chance has passed. Your chance may not have passed. It may simply be waiting for you to be ready for it.
I also want to say something about Meldrum, because his role in this story is enormous and easy to understate. Ian Meldrum, Molly to everyone who knew him, was the Go-Set writer who noticed Somebody’s Image, the manager who signed them, and the producer who turned a gentle ballad into a seven-minute epic. Without Meldrum, there is no “Real Thing” as we know it. Morris has always acknowledged that, and the partnership is a reminder that great records are rarely made alone. A singer needs a producer who believes in him, a writer who gives him material, and musicians who can play what he hears in his head. Morris had all of those in 1969, and the record that resulted changed Australian music. I think we should give producers more credit than we do. Meldrum’s gamble was as bold as Morris’s, and it paid off for both of them.
There is one more thing I think about, and it is the title itself. “The Real Thing”. It is a simple phrase, and it has followed Morris for his whole life, in ways he could not have predicted at twenty. In 1969, it was the title of a psychedelic single. In 2013, it was a recording the national archive judged to be of cultural significance. In 2023, it was a symphonic concert. The phrase has come to mean something larger than the song: the idea that there is a real thing in music, a genuine article, and that audiences can tell it from a copy. Morris has spent fifty-five years trying to be that real thing, first as a pop star, then as a working musician, then as a blues storyteller. I believe he has succeeded. The voice is real, the work is real, and the late comeback is real. That is why the song still plays, and why the singer still tours, and why a record made by a twenty-year-old in 1969 can still fill a room in the 2020s.
One more thought stays with me, and it is about the prison ships. “Van Diemen’s Land” sings about the convicts who were sent to Australia in chains, who built a country they had never chosen to live in. Those men and women had no reason to hope, and many of them built lives anyway. Morris, singing about them at sixty-five, was doing something similar in his own small way: taking a history that could have been forgotten and giving it a voice. I find that moving, because it is what music is for. It is not only entertainment. It is memory. It is the way a country remembers who it is and where it came from. Morris understood that late in his career, and the understanding made his last act his best one. That is a rare and wonderful thing, and it is why I will keep listening to him.
I keep thinking, too, about the symphonic concert of 2023, and what it must have felt like to stand in front of an orchestra at seventy-five and sing the song that made him famous at twenty. “The Real Thing: Symphonic Concert” reached number five, which means that more than half a century after the single, audiences were still buying a new version of it. An orchestra changes a song. It gives the quiet opening more space, it makes the surging middle bigger, and it turns the long fade into something grander. But it cannot change the voice at the centre, and Morris’s voice, older and rougher, still carries the record. I like the idea that the same song can be a psychedelic single, a Hall of Fame performance, an archive listing, and finally a symphonic concert, and still be the same song. It tells me that a truly good piece of music does not belong to one arrangement or one decade. It belongs to the singer, and the singer can dress it in any clothes he likes. Morris dressed his in an orchestra’s clothes in 2023, and the song still fitted. That is the mark of a record that was built to last, and of a singer who was built to last alongside it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Russell Morris?
Russell Norman Morris is an Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist, born in Richmond, Melbourne, on 31 July 1948. He began with the band Somebody’s Image in 1966, went solo in 1969, and has worked across pop, rock, and blues for more than five decades. He was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2008 and later made a Member of the Order of Australia.
What is Russell Morris’s most famous song?
“The Real Thing”, released in March 1969, is his signature record. Written by Johnny Young and produced by Ian Meldrum, it runs to nearly seven minutes, reached number one in Australia, spent a month at the top around the time of the first moon landing, and was added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia registry in 2013.
What is Wings of an Eagle about?
“Wings of an Eagle”, released in 1972, is a gentler, more reflective song than “The Real Thing”, built around the image of an eagle in flight and the feeling of freedom that image carries. Its mood draws on Aboriginal mythology, and it showed a softer, more thoughtful side of Morris’s writing. It remains one of his most loved recordings.
What is Sharkmouth?
“Sharkmouth” is a blues album Morris released in October 2012, when he was sixty-four. Its songs tell stories from Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, including Phar Lap, the boxer Les Darcy, and the Great Depression. It reached number six, went platinum, and won the 2013 ARIA Award for Best Blues and Roots Album.
Did Russell Morris make more blues albums after Sharkmouth?
Yes, two more completed the trilogy. “Van Diemen’s Land” came out in April 2014, reached number four, the highest chart position of his career, and was certified gold. “Red Dirt – Red Heart” followed and also won the ARIA Award for Best Blues and Roots Album. A later record, “Black and Blue Heart”, appeared in 2019.
Was Russell Morris inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame?
Yes, on 1 July 2008, alongside Dragon, The Triffids, and Max Merritt. Guest musicians including Steve Kilbey and Jak Housden joined him on stage to perform “The Real Thing” at the ceremony. The induction recognised a career stretching back to Somebody’s Image in 1966.
Why is Russell Morris important to Australia?
He made one of the defining Australian records of the 1960s in “The Real Thing”, a single that proved local pop could be bold and original. He then showed, with the blues trilogy in his sixties, that a singer can produce his best chart results late in life: “Van Diemen’s Land” at number four came forty-five years after his first number one. His trilogy also turned Australian history into popular song.
