Joe Camilleri and the Black Sorrows rock the Redlands

Being the youngest child of an immigrant Maltese family in post-war Melbourne wasn’t easy, but it’s a childhood that Joe Camilleri remembers vividly.

“I was beaten up on a regular basis at school; it wasn’t very nice. Fortunately, I came from a loving family, and I had music as my salvation – songs on the Bakelite radio, the jukebox, my mother’s record collection and the songs she sang. Even my father and brother playing the tuba and piano accordion – they weren’t very cool instruments but they were music!”

Joe left school at the age of 13, and worked in the motor industry, a slaughterhouse and the Melbourne Markets. But he’d acquired a bass guitar. The die was cast.

Joe had never envisaged becoming a musician – much less the singer/songwriter frontman of an internationally renowned band, with a career spanning more than 50 years and gaining global popularity – but if you’re a muso, you’re a muso, and there’s no escaping it.

Small gigs with small bands became bigger gigs with bigger bands, including Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons and culminating in the best-known of all, the Black Sorrows. The name was a serendipitous accident; a friend of Joe’s who owned a coffee shop asked him to put a band together to play Sunday gigs there. They were to be billed as the Black Zorros, to give them a dash of continental flair, but the sign’s calligraphy made the Z look like an S – and the rest is history.

Joe and the Sorrows are a dream collaboration, with Joe’s strength in songwriting and singing. His instinctive ability to put his finger right on the pulse of human experiences and emotions and craft them into lyrics that appeal to intuition as well as intellect continues to hold his loyal following and draw in new adherents. The Black Sorrows have had several iterations in their forty years, a core group who come and go as other demands allow plus other specialist musicians drawn in as needed for particular songs or recordings.

“For the song Dear Children we had a four-piece tuba section,” Joe chuckles. “Tubas still aren’t cool, but they were perfect for that song.”

The great news for fans is that the latest CDs are about to roll off the press, and selected tracks will be featured at the upcoming RPAC concert on September 26. For tickets, go to rpac.com.au.