What'sa matter you, hey?

What'sa matter you, hey?

http://theage.com.au/news/music/whats-a-matter-you-hey/2005/07/23/1121539192279.html

By Clay Lucas
July 24, 2005


This month marks 25 years since North Carlton musician Joe Dolce recorded Shaddap You Face. Was it just a catchy song or a serious contribution to multicultural Australia?

What'sa matta you, hey!
Gotta no respect, whatta you think you do,
Why you looka so sad?
It's-a not so bad, it's-a nice-a place,
Ah, shaddap you face!

Since May, European mobile phone company Connex has been blanketing Romanian television and radio with ads for its slick new 3G mobile service.

And what catchy little jingle has the phone company employed to flog its wares? For reasons perhaps best understood by Romanian marketers, it is using Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face, the 1980 megahit that sold 4 million copies and topped the charts in Australia, the UK and 11 other countries.

It remains Australia's highest selling single.

Many Australians would recall Dolce's song as even more teeth-grindingly irritating than the tune it replaced as Australia's best selling single — singer and ad man Mike Brady's Up There Cazaly.

But is there more to Shaddap You Face than an annoying pop ditty that only served to egg on Dolce, three years later, to record You Toucha My Car I Breaka You Face?

Shirley Strachan, the late Skyhooks front man, didn't think so when in 1981 he told Dolce he pitied him because his only hit was a novelty song.

"It wasn't a hit. It was a phenomenon," Dolce remembers telling Strachan. "Better to have one phenomenon than 10 piddly little hits."

When Dolce's song came out in 1980, it was an instant singalong classic. But at least one music critic thought it was the phenomenon Dolce had described.

"Shaddap You Face summed up the change in Australia when multiculturalism displaced the derogatory label 'New Australian', when colourful Immigration Minister Al Grassby regularly graced the national stage, and SBS was about to take to the air," music journalist Craig Mathieson wrote in a 2001 attack on the Australian Performing Rights Association. The association's list of the 10 best Australian songs of the past 75 years did not include Dolce's. And as cheesy as Shaddap You Face was, Mathieson argued in an opinion piece for The Age, it was too important to Australian pop history to leave out.

"It's not a perverse critical gambit to suggest including (in that list) what your memory probably places as a novelty song of the late 1970s," wrote Mathieson. "It caught a social current, and gave voice to it in about three minutes."

Everything a good pop song should be. And perhaps the reason Dolce so staunchly defends Shaddap You Face as a great folk track.

Versions of the song have been recorded by a remarkable 37 acts, in 15 different languages (including three in Spanish, two in German, two in French and an Icelandic version). Proof, Dolce says, that it bridges cultures.

And it has been covered in many different genres, from early British dance outfit EMF to US rapper KRS-One. "No one called it a novelty song when he covered it," quips 58-year-old Dolce from his North Carlton home.

If you look past the original recording's ham-Italian accent and limp comedic mandolins, the song speaks of a migrant teenager's battle with his domineering mother, of the new society the family had found itself in, and the struggle of their working-class life.

"People snigger at Shaddap You Face, but it still earns us a lot of money, even today," says Mike Brady, who released the song on his record label Full Moon Records (established with earnings from Up There Cazaly).

Brady also believes the song played a part in the emergence of new attitudes to multiculturalism. "Ethnic Australians finally felt comfortable enough to laugh at themselves."

Many others, of course, just saw it as a chance to laugh at migrants.

Dolce himself believes his song was the start of a rising tide of tolerance in Australia — that ethnic minorities could finally be accepted, and that humour was a way to shimmy them through the door of acceptance, rather than a dour-faced political correctness. His song is as unlikely a place as any to pick up the rich vein of ethnic humour that ran through 20th century Australia.

It began with John O'Grady's 1957 book They're A Weird Mob (written under the pseudonym Nino Culotta), and continued through Wogs Out of Work and Mary Coustas' Effie, to present-day comedians Fat Pizza, Hung Le and Tahir Bilgic.

Dolce himself is an interesting study in multiculturalism. Born in Ohio to an Italian-American family, he came to Australia in 1978 with his Australian first wife, after almost a decade trying to forge a career in the American music scene.

What he found in Melbourne horrified him.

"Back home, to be an Italian entertainer was something to be proud of. In America, Frank Sinatra was the benchmark," says Dolce.

Here, there was barely a mark. There were no Italian entertainers, and people from southern Europe were roundly derided as "wogs" and "dagoes". And they weren't terms of affection.

"In those days, the word wog was like the word c---," says Dolce. "If you said it, you said it low."
He first performed Shaddap You Face at a talent night in 1979 at the long-gone Marijuana House in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

He had recently visited his childhood home in Ohio, and heard phrases his Calabrian and Sicilian grandparents had muttered to him as a child: "What's the matter you?" and "Eh, shaddap". He incorporated them into a song about Italians in Australia, and played the song as the character Giuseppe.

"At the end of the night, I'd sing Shaddap You Face, pass the hat around, and make about $20," says Dolce.

Though it was comedy, Dolce also used the performance to confront racism.

"Giuseppe would get audiences to talk about their idea of a 'wog'. At first, everyone would be silent and embarrassed. Then, with a bit of coaxing, they would eventually start pulling out these foul, repugnant terms for a 'wog'." After a while, everyone would pick up the absurdity of what Dolce was doing and laugh at themselves. "It was kind of like group therapy."

ON JULY 3, 1980, Dolce rented one of Mike Brady's studios and recorded the song. He took it to Mushroom and Festival Records, who laughed him out of the building. He took it back to Brady.

By November, it was atop the Australian charts.

By the end of 1980, even Elton John had recognised Shaddap You Face's selling power. John had heard the song while touring here, and had his manager approach Dolce with the idea of buying the rights for the UK market.

After Dolce knocked them back, John's group immediately contracted Andrew Sachs (Manuel from Fawlty Towers) to cover the track, perhaps in the hope the Australian's lack of knowledge of the European market would allow them to release a slightly altered version (Manuel was to be from a Spanish family).

But Dolce was no bumpkin from the boondocks: an immediate injunction with a British court stopped the release of Sachs' version, and a judgement in Dolce's favour forced the recall of all copies of that version.

But the song stands as evidence of multicultural Australia's new-found ability to laugh at its own ethnic stereotypes, says Dolce. "Australians laugh at Crocodile Dundee," he says. "Barry Humphries magnifies Australian characters. Italians make fun of their characters in the same way."

Once the humour is accepted, so is the minority group, says Dolce. "If you can't really laugh about something, it's still marginalised."

He cites the Koran as a contemporary example. "You can't make jokes about it because you'll be killed. You can't mess with Allah."

Today, much of Dolce's time is taken up writing new material and performing a stage show called Difficult Women with partner Lin Van Hek.

If ever he sings Shaddap You Face it's in an Aboriginal dialect. In the song, he tells the story of a Dreamtime teenager being scolded by his mother. "Noone recognises what I'm doing when I perform it till a few minutes through, because I'm starting off on the basis that, because it's an Aboriginal song, it's a serious song."

Milestones
Name Joe Dolce

Age 57

Lives North Carlton

Born Painesville, Ohio

Famous for Shaddap You Face, which sold 350,000 copies in Australia, knocking off 1979's Up There Cazaly as Australia's best-ever selling single. Cazaly had only recently overtaken Slim Dusty's Pub With No Beer.

First Australian single 1978, Boat People, a protest tune about Australia's shabby treatment of Vietnamese refugees. The song flopped.

Last recording 2003, One Iraqi Child, a protest song about war in Iraq.

Website joedolce.net.au