Music

The Black Sorrows’ fourth compilation album showcases a rich, versatile talent that spans generations. By Chris Johnston.

The Quintessential Black Sorrows

The Black Sorrows in action.

Credit: Tania Jovanovic

I’m getting on, but I’m still too young to have seen Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons at their peak in the late 1970s, probably at Bombay Rock in Brunswick or Martinis in Carlton, near La Mama and The Pram Factory. I regret this. The Falcons back then were dirty and raucous, the storied members playing all kinds of music since the 1960s.

Accidental frontman Joe Camilleri joined his first cover band, The Drollies, at 16 one night in Footscray in 1964, covering The Rolling Stones covering Chuck Berry. He was working in a car factory at the time. He already played bass guitar and willed himself into singing. This was so long ago that Melbourne still had car factories.

In time, Jo Jo Zep stopped and The Black Sorrows started, and they would be Camilleri’s mega-band for 40 years, off and on from the 1980s until now, but more on than off. Camilleri is now 77 and refuses to rest on his laurels. The Black Sorrows released their 20th album last year. The new The Quintessential Black Sorrows is the fourth “Best Of” compilation to bear their name, following The Chosen Ones, The Very Best Of … and The Essential. The band continues to tour relentlessly through Australia’s regions and cities. Last year, they toured Italy. This month, they played at the Mareeba Rodeo.

Camilleri was born in Malta, one of 10 children. His mother called him Zep. After The Drollies, he went to The King Bees singing radio hits and blues with Peter Starkie, the first Skyhooks guitarist. That band morphed into art-rock as Lipp Arthur and the Double Dekker Brothers, with Jane Clifton.

In 1971, everything changed when Camilleri bought a saxophone. He got into hard bop jazz and ended up in an all-star (for the era) hipster Western-swing band called The Pelaco Brothers, featuring Stephen Cummings. By the mid 70s, the Joe Cocker and Little Feat era, he finally formed The Falcons at the behest of Ross Wilson, taking Daddy Cool’s drummer and rocking out in unbuttoned satin shirts and outrageous handle-bar moustaches. Scratchy, archival videos and accounts from old-timers show a rambunctious, sweaty five-piece with a dive-bar Dr. Feelgood vibe and a brusque double-sax attack.

Band booker at Martinis from the time, Adrian Barker, laid it out for me 10 years ago in a piece I wrote about old Carlton. “The Ferrets, Skyhooks … The Sports, Stiletto … Jo Jo Zep played all the time, they packed the place out. Ross Wilson’s Mondo Rock. The Boys Next Door with The Sports as a support in 1978. Mother Goose. Rose Tattoo. Men At Work on a Thursday night.”

These old stories draw colour around Camilleri, his background, his touchstones and ultimately his versatility and old-fashioned musicianship, all of which are openly present throughout Quintessential. He comes from a place where you either paid your dues or nothing, there was no messing about. I’m startled by a YouTube clip of The Falcons in full effect, in 1978. They’re doing a rhythm and blues song from the 1940s by Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers called “The Honeydripper” and absolutely slaying it. Wilbur Wilde and Camilleri are the sax players, Camilleri has a flared white suit and a mullet: “… he’s a solid gold cat, he’s the height of jive, he’s a riffer, the honeydripper!”

The whole thing – perhaps even his whole thing – is more than a Boomer’s delight from the before times. This version online from nearly 50 years ago is all that is left, but it sounds and looks absolutely vital still, Jo Jo Zep an unhinged and slightly demonic blues explosion, as authentic and honest as anything Camilleri did before or has done since.

Just after “The Honeydripper” and before The Black Sorrows, his first minor hits began to appear. “Hit and Run” and “Shape I’m In”, both with a ska feel. Party music. He’s got a flat cap and tenpin bowling shoes on now, a little bit Ian Dury, with a shadow of Mick Jagger and Peter Tosh’s 1978 crossover hit “(You Gotta Walk And) Don’t Look Back” lifted for “Hit and Run”. Camilleri has always been a generous purveyor of roots music. One gift of a collection such as The Quintessential Black Sorrows is to see in context how he has dipped into these deep wells across the music of multiple continents for decades.

When “Taxi Mary” (with Jane Clifton again) was a proper hit, the band started to whittle down until it was essentially just him. He called it quits, worked in cafes and played Latin music with a big band. Then he started up The Black Sorrows.

The Quintessential as a “greatest hits” selection contains many of the same songs as the other three, but includes a selection from the earliest Sorrows records, which were very small, very homemade affairs, often with hand-printed vinyl covers. The first two were recorded live in a few days and both are mainly zydeco, soul and country songs. The first album, Sonola, is named after an Italian accordion and from it Quintessential includes a beautiful guitar-accordion-clarinet version of “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes”, originally written in Spanish in the 1930s and popularised by Dinah Washington in the 1950s. It also has the Sonola version of Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl”, which has become a staple.

Quintessential’s better known big productions sound majestic. This is not unexpected. “Hold On to Me”, “The Crack Up”, “The Chosen Ones” with its gospel sound and widescreen “mission bells” chorus and, of course, “Chained to the Wheel” (“I’ve seen red rivers, fire and steel”), a multi-platinum international hit and a song anyone, anywhere can enjoy. Lyrically, the big stadium songs like this one are written in generalisations and soft metaphors. We know that, but we also know it’s all about the delivery, so thank The Black Sorrows once again for introducing the iconic voices of Vika and Linda Bull. Their song is as familiar as air now but always exhilarating.

I’m also appreciating the lesser lights, the overlooked, the uncompiled. “Wake Me Up in Paradise”, from 2014’s album Certified Blue, has an extraordinary string arrangement by Australian jazz composer John McAll. It’s a quietly moving song in the way Elvis Costello, a kindred contemporary and great supporter of Camilleri’s, might do quiet and moving. “Wake Me Up in Paradise” also appropriates “Sin City”, written by Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman for The Flying Burrito Brothers. It’s a delight and should be on any collection of his best.

“Crazy Look” was only released last year and shows Camilleri’s songwriting (with long-time writing partner Nick Smith) reverting to classic rock with a T-Rex riff and 1970s Memphis sound. Why not? “New Craze”, from 1998’s Beat Club, is a Latin-jazz dancer. “Cold Grey Moon” from the double-album Faithful Satellite in 2016, has ornate strings and is downbeat and weepy. “For Your Love” is brand new, brass, piano and harmonies of concise, everyday poetry – “I’ll always be the one who cries out your name.”

Quintessential tells us this is a voice and a long, rich performance that spans Australian generations through car radios and venues and stereos, across time. I love how Camilleri can now occupy the role of a kind of Soul Man in our music culture. An elder. Maybe he’s even our Springsteen, surrounding himself with the best players and writers he can find, following roots music to the source and singing of big, universal things.

Quintessential also tells us that he never sounds anything but natural. It tells us that Zep can sing anything with ease and honesty. Some witnessed that with “The Honeydripper” in 1978. He can sing Otis Redding: “Security” from Redding’s Pain in My Heart was on Jo Jo Zep’s first album. Who goes around singing Otis Redding? He can sing Aaron Neville, Dylan, Van, Chuck Berry, Bob Marley, Nina Simone. He can sing himself. He brings a life force to all of it.

There’s a great humility as well. A spirit and a work ethic. The Soul Man, the Song Man. Of “Chained to the Wheel”, his biggest hit and most glorious moment, he writes, in the notes for Quintessential, “I love the fire it generates, and I never take it for granted.”

The Quintessential Black Sorrows is out now.

ARTS DIARY

INSTALLATION James Turrell: Unseen Seen + Weight of Darkness

Museum of Old and New Art, nipaluna/Hobart, from October 25

CULTURE Awakening Histories

Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne, until December 6

VIDEO A Conversation with the Sun (Afterimage): Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until February 15

EXHIBITION Shimmer: An Artist in Residence project by Gerwyn Davies

Museum of Brisbane, Meanjin, until March 8

VISUAL ART Acts of Endurance: Sarah Brown

Outstation Gallery, Gulumoerrgin/Darwin, until November 15

LAST CHANCE

VISUAL ART Nature

National Gallery of Australia, Ngambri/Canberra, until October 26

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 25, 2025 as "Soul survivor".

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