Australia's best novelty songs

Amid the glacial synths and earnest ballads of the early ’80s, Joe Dolce’s ode to the tough love of an Italian mama landed like a splash of Bolognese on a shirt front. In this live appearance on The Mike Walsh Show in 1980, we see the essence of the song’s appeal: Dolce’s ability to create a sense of festive, quasi-familial warmth. Performing solo against a bare-bones TV set of steel-grey curtains, he leans into a wedding singer vibe. He singles out members of the audience, milking laughs until the room palpably warms up and everyone is chanting in time.

Mainly spoken-sung in exaggerated broken English, ‘Shaddap You Face’ winks at a string of immigrant clichés – the adventurous son, the self-made man and the mother who always knows best. Although these stereotypes hit differently today, at the time they gave the song international reach as well as domestic success (it’s one of the highest-selling Australian singles ever, and part of our Sounds of Australia collection).

It’s a reminder that the country’s ’80s audiences, while embracing dramatic make-up and power chords, could still be suckers for a ‘smile and be happy’ message with a side of cheese.

Simple, schmaltzy and also cunningly constructed, ‘Up There Cazaly’ features a series of climaxes and a pumped-up orchestration designed for goosebumps. It was written by Mike Brady in 1979 as a promotional song for the VFL, and its repeated use in 1980s ads enshrined it as the ultimate footy anthem.

Although it was recorded by the Two-Man Band (Brady and Peter Sullivan), the rousing kick drum, vocal reverb and crowd sounds evoke the ‘mighty roar’ of a packed stadium. The regular beats and repeated builds are (literally) made for highlights packages, but ‘Up There Cazaly’ did something more than sell football: it positioned the national game as a visceral collective obsession on a heroic scale.

The mutable, controversial band TISM (This Is Serious Mum) occupies a unique place in Australian culture. Lambasting mediocrity and hypocrisy and thumbing their noses at the music industry, its members hide their identities behind a series of masks and give intentionally baffling interviews.

Their cult appeal has rarely translated to chart success, but in 1995, ‘Greg! The Stop Sign!!’ made the Top 10 of triple j’s Hottest 100. Both the song and the clip show TISM at their height of mainstream popularity, deftly combining inflammatory lyrics with a hook that won’t quit. Contradictory elements are mashed up at dizzying pace: the ultra-nihilist lyrics are paired with Beach Boys-style vocals and an EDM beat. Motivational slogans on the walls of the St Kilda Football Club are intercut with scenes from a messy party, while the band perform unison choreography in paramilitary uniforms.  

Part of TISM’s appeal is its planting of local references amidst Dadaist ironies – a nod to The Movie Show via David and Margaret’s star ratings of party scenes complements mentions of the TAC and Dandenong. Swinging between high and low culture, the band offers their audiences a delirious, multi-levelled experience.

You can almost feel the sun and salt air listening to Little Pattie’s 1963 toe-tapper. It took the carefree appeal of US ’50s beach culture – parties on the sand, catching a wave, young love – and repackaged it for local audiences with a titillating reference to the Stomp, a dance craze then sweeping Sydney’s teen scene. Patricia Amphlett (cousin to Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett) was only 14 when she recorded the song, but her clear, soaring voice with its punctuating yelp and that hint of a growl on ‘real gone’ is effortlessly controlled.

Like the 1958 novelty song ‘The Purple People Eater’, ‘Stompie Wompie’ uses a hypnotic repetition of its central refrain as a hook, adding a playful edge to the surf-rock twangs of Little Pattie’s backing band, the Statesmen. Shaking the dance floor with their feet – several venues outlawed the Stomp, fearing structural damage – Australian teens could feel like they were in their own beach-blanket movie.

What did the moment between disco and New Wave sound like in Australia? For Countdown audiences, it was a falsetto voice wailing about a threat from the stars. In 1978, the video game Space Invaders had made landfall on Earth. Its takeover was swift and complete. Such was the Earthlings’ obsession with their new toy that, in 1979, Warner Music in Sydney decided to cash in with a song about the game.  Producers Russell Dunlop and Bruce Brown (recording under the name Player One) were tapped to write it.

Dunlop and Brown mimicked the game’s bass line and recorded shimmering sound effects from it direct – Pavlovian heaven for ‘80s arcade rats. But is something deeper and stranger going on? The lyrics conflate the ‘soldier’ in the game with an addicted gamer: ‘Through dark sunken eyes/I see another pale sunrise ... Oh my hip-pocket nerve is aching again …’ Is it our personal space that’s being invaded? Is that falsetto desperate or exultant? We may never know, but one thing is sure: ‘Space Invaders’ is begging for a K-Pop cover.

The Melbourne comedy trio Tripod was a true triple threat: tight harmonies, anarchic physical comedy and spot-on social skewering. In ‘Gonna Make You Happy Tonight’ (2004), they take aim at an archetypal man-child who’s ready to consummate his marriage – just as soon as he hits the high level in his current game.

The final scenes of the song’s music video are a masterclass in the band’s ability to conjure pop culture tropes with pitch-perfect accuracy while deflating them with satire. Scenes from the perfect rom-com wedding, soundtracked by Tripod’s mock-Motown, come-to-bed vocals, are undercut by the hilarious anti-climax of a wedding night endlessly deferred. As the groom and his mates gloat over the Xbox, we see the games-and-gadgets obsessed Aussie bro culture of the early 2000s folding in on itself.

In 1976, the same year that Jeanne Little won the Gold Logie for Most Popular Female Personality, she took a swipe at her critics in this novelty number. Deploying the creaky dancehall trick of replacing a risqué word with an obvious substitute, ‘Dahling’ is Little’s surprisingly direct commentary on her own novelty status (‘I flutter my lashes and flip my wig…’).

In an era when women on Australian TV, particularly older women, were faced with two paths – be sexy or be zany – Little went large. With a catchcry of ‘Ooh-ahh dahling’, wacky wigs, heavy make-up and a cockatoo screech, she evoked the aesthetics of vaudeville and drag – often raising the ire of ‘chauvinist boars’. In ‘Dahling’, she gives us the sly triumph of a woman playing for laughs while unapologetically demanding space.

The first verse of Slim Dusty’s sardonic country anthem sets up a sliding scale of terrors: wild dingoes and dark nights can’t compete with the awful prospect of a pub running dry. Fittingly recorded on April Fool’s Day, this sleeper hit from 1957 jokes around with the notion of a nation forged on the love of a cold one. Before its release, Dusty had been ignored by mainstream radio stations, who looked down on ‘hick’ music. Nevertheless, ‘A Pub With No Beer’ became Australia’s first gold record and charted all around the world. Musically, the song never breaks out of the amble established by the first verse, and it exults in its own colloquialisms, from stockmen to swaggies. But the humour of its mock lament obviously struck a universal chord.

Comedy trio Axis of Awesome made it big with this brilliantly constructed song, which poses as an exposé of the simple formula behind commercial hits but is actually a celebration of infinite variety. Built around those four heart-pleasing chords, it stitches together over 30 popular songs in a medley that demonstrates how many different moods, styles and melodies can be wrung from the basic structure.

The Sydney band trod a familiar mid-2000s path from a Moosehead Award at the Melbourne Comedy Festival to success at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but after ‘Four Chords’ was played on BBC radio, they took off on the internet. Their YouTube video version used more international songs, but this earlier recording is heavy on Australian artists: ‘Horses’, ‘Fall at Your Feet’, ‘Torn’, ‘Down Under’ and even ‘Waltzing Matilda’ all feature in a whirl of interlocking phrases that get faster and faster as the song progresses.

But no matter the version, the song always finishes with Missy Higgins’ ‘Scar’ – a tribute to the trio’s Australian roots.