Last Day of School

Little Darling: Daryl Braithwaite and The Horses
February 2023
$26 including postage
Last Day of School

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Most musicians only get one chance at fame. Daryl Braithwaite has managed to have three of them. He joined a band called Sherbet in 1970 and, a year later, they had their first hit – and there were an astonishing 19 more to come.

But Sherbet’s fans grew up and moved on so the band folded in the early 1980s. At the end of that decade, Braithwaite found himself with a surprise hit album in Edge. He followed it up a few years later with Rise – the album that included a little tune called The Horses. That song went to No1, but a lawsuit and diminishing sales saw him pushed out of the limelight.

Then, in the early 2000s, something strange happened – kids at gigs started singing The Horses back at Braithwaite. Soon enough, this song that might have otherwise faded away galloped back and became an Australian anthem.

Little Darling looks at the unusual phenomenon of The Horses and offers up an explanation for how it happened.

Read an excerpt from Little Darling

Normally, when people drive by a council gang doing maintenance on the side of the road, they don’t give them a second glance. All they see is the hi-vis clothing and whether the sign says “stop” or “go”.

But just maybe for a short period in the now defunct northwest Melbourne shire council of Bulla, things were a little different. Maybe, when drivers – usually female – went past a certain road gang, they did a double take at one particular worker. “No,” they said to themselves, “that can’t be him. Why would he be out here on a shovel?”.

They might have remembered the face from watching Countdown every Sunday night. Or maybe it was the album covers they remembered. Perhaps their younger self had a poster of him on their bedroom wall.

They drove by sure their eyes were playing tricks on them. Sure that the man in the poster on their teenage wall they stared at while laying on their bed wasn’t the same man they just saw. “It sure was an uncanny likeness though,” they thought to themselves. “He must get told all the time he looks like that singer.”

It wasn’t a lookalike. It was him. And his co-workers on the road gang were just as surprised to see him turn up for work one day, saying the dole office sent him here. Well, the older guys were surprised; the ones who remembered his bare-chested, satin baseball jacket years in the 1970s. The younger ones, well, he had been a bit before their time. And the man himself wasn’t likely to brag about his glory days, trying to big-note himself. For a guy who had spent almost a decade being pursued by hordes of screaming teenage girls he was remarkably grounded.

Those older guys, they ended up helping the guy out. They didn’t have many options other than being out there in all kinds of weather digging holes and laying bitumen. But him, well, he had a talent. The last decade proved that. So they asked him one question – “what the hell was he doing here?”.