If I were making a compilation album of easy-on-the-ear acoustic music of the early Seventies, it would include this melancholy take on Cole Porter by Gary Shearston.
Another of those one-hit wonders of the era, his bio opens with the rather wonderful sentence: “Gary Rhett Shearston was an Australian singer and songwriter and Anglican priest.” Not at the same time, though.
Gazza’s solitary success would find a place on my melancholy mixtape alongside the likes of Gordon Lightfoot (If You Could Read My Mind), Bobby Goldsboro (Summer The First Time), Jim Croce (Time In A Bottle), Harry Chapin (Cat’s In The Cradle), Al Stewart (Years Of The Cat), Clifford T. Ward (Gaye) and Terry Jacks (Seasons In The Sun) alongside your better known James Taylors and Cat Stevenses.
Born before the start of WW2, Shearston grew up in Sydney after his father’s farm was destroyed by a drought when he was 12, and worked in theatre before taking up the guitar and teaching himself the folk repertoire.
He earned his first record deal when still a teen in 1962 and becoming Australia’s biggest folk musician by the mid-Sixties, with his own TV show ‘Just Folk’.
When one of his songs was covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, at their invitation he left Australia to spend four years on the east coast of the USA, before moving to England in the early Seventies, where he made two albums for Charisma.
They made little impression but his strangely deadpan version of this standard, from an album called Dingo, caught the ears of DJs steeped in nostalgia.
Helped no doubt by his razor-sharp cheekbones and sincere, soulful performance, the song became an unlikely top ten hit for him – the only one he would have.
The song, of course, is a standard and has had some other notable covers – not least the rather marvellous work song rendition, transforming it into a spiritual in Blazing Saddles. And the alphabet-based version from Sesdame Street, with ‘Ethel Mermaid’ fighting off sharks as she performs a Busy Berkeley routine with a school of fish while singing I Get A Kick Out Of U.
In the late Eighties, Shearston returned to Australia and became an Anglican priest in rural New South Wales, dying from a stroke in 2013 at the age of 74.