Sydney Identity Warren Fahey wins top music prize

Sydney identity Warren Fahey has been honoured for his 40-year contribution to Australian music with the nation’s top individual prize.

The musician, performer, writer and entrepreneur, who lives in Potts Point, was last week announced the winner of the 2010 Australia Council Don Banks Music Award, which recognises outstanding achievement.

“I’m deeply honoured that the Australia Council to the Arts has bestowed this award on me, because in doing so it also honours not only my work but all the people involved in the music form that I’m so passionate about,” he says.

“It’s the highest award for music in Australia … it’s mainly been [given] to what we would call fine music or serious music composers … so I think I’m a bit of a departure in as much that I’ve smashed the mould and opened it up to other areas of music.”

Fahey fell in love with music at an early age.

“It seems that I’ve always been interested in music,” he says.

“My mother was the eldest of nine and my father was the eldest of about fourteen kids, and they didn’t have a cracker to rub together but luckily they had a piano – so we would sing around the piano all the time.”

He says he was always drawn to folk music.

“I became particularly interested in songs from the Australian story – songs that told our story about the bush, about our maritime history and life in the cities,” he says.

“I started collecting folk songs – we never called them folk songs in the bush, we called them ‘bush songs’ – about 40 years ago and I’ve never stopped.”

Since 1971 he has been keeping the National Library updated with recordings of bush songs as well as broadcasting on ABC radio, writing books and performing concerts.

“Somehow in-between all that I [also] set up some businesses,” he adds.

These included Paddington record shop Folkways, which was famously known for a sign on its awning that read “Real music in a sea of sh__”.

“I had it up there for about 15 years and not one complaint,” he enthuses.

“Even David Bowie came in one day and took a photograph of the window for his ‘Black Book’.”

From the Folkways shop was born Fahey’s record label Larrikin Records, which released over 500 Australian albums before he sold it in 1988.

Larrikin has been in the media recently due to its lawsuit against Men at Work for allegedly using portions of “The Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”, which it owns, in their hit song “Land Down Under”.

“I came into the discussion and suggested that the [Larrikin] Publishing Company consider gifting that song [Kookaburra] to the Australian nation because it’s already in the public domain,” he says.

After 40 years Fahey is not about to slow down.

“The most exciting period and the most productive seems to be right now,” he says.

He is currently involved in several projects, including two new albums to be released this month, a new book slated for release in September, a series of concerts at the State Library beginning in July, a tour of regional NSW as well as a major installation on the history of Cockatoo Island.

“I tell people that I’m getting younger every year,” he jokes.

Lastly, Fahey has some poignant words for Australians to consider.

“Music related to Australian history – all those signposts in our life that have produced songs from the shearing industry, [to] the convict era, the wars that we’ve fought in, the depression … we should value them as the same as we value bricks and mortar,” he says.

“We really don’t treat music or musicians that well in Australia, we undervalue them. I think it’s time we realise that these [songs] are just as important as bricks and mortar, they’re very, very much the expressions of our national identity.”