James Blundell - Blue Collar Man: A Crackin’ Campfire Collaboration

An Australian music legend walks into a barn, films a video clip with a couple of young guns who mashed together loads of iconic Aussie tracks, and they call it a song.

It’s an infectious anthem that’s been continuing to blaze on the charts all spring. It’s cool-as-John-Mayer’s-Japanese-denim-collection video clip certainly helps.

Route 33, the duo of Jock Barnes and Trent McArdle, have managed to bake all these hit titles into a tasty, Aussie-earworm dog’s eye (that’s a meat pie, for readers who didn’t grow up here in the Boomer slang era).

‘Blue Collar Man’ is a pat on the back to an array of ocker awesomeness. It’s a 3-minute 51-second crackin’ campfire collection, a great Australian musical show bag.

We talked to James Blundell one rainy Saturday about his role in this track.

“From the moment I heard it I thought it was a fantastic way to acknowledge all those incredible songs because… a song becomes a hit, it gets overplayed, people sort of get tired of it. And for a long time it disappeared into the ether, but now with [streaming], everything's there forever.

“What I think this song does so cleverly is remind people of a litany of fantastic Australian music and leads them back into it, which is really cool. The minute I heard it, I thought, you know, that's so obviously a hit.

“Yes, it has escaped being a novelty song - with real craft they’ve really dug into some great lyrics. It's really good fun to try and name the songs as they come past, ‘cause it's quick. I still haven’t been able to do it!”

The references in the song are incredibly diverse – from Australian Crawl, Cold Chisel, Slim, Cassar-Daley and AC/DC to Silverchair, Divinyls, Hilltop Hoods, and The Living End– which on another level further exemplifies and satisfies the taste of country folk.

“I'm a big Living End fan; Chris Cheney is a friend, so… when I sang that, I thought, ‘yep, I can do that’.

“It's a misconception that people outside the city circle listen to Slim Dusty or Lee Kernaghan [only]. It's a very broad palette out there. I was introduced to Bruce Springsteen via cassette in a stock camp in very remote Western Australia in 1984, came back to the east coast to tell people all about him. He was on his sixth sold-out Sydney Entertainment Centre. . . point being that music penetrates very deeply into the bush.”

James recalls when he toured with Kris Kristofferson for six weeks (2014), and that upon first meeting he told Kris "you just need to know how far your music reaches. I used to shear my horses to ‘The Sabre and the Rose’ under two gum trees on a property in south-eastern Queensland.”

Kris’ response was something like, "God damn, that's like the darkest album I've ever written”, but James continues to insist he loved it, the horses loved it, and “music is a lot more broadly appreciated in regional Australia than perhaps people suspect”.

This is not just a song that feels like a familiar cover, it’s also somewhat of a covers compendium, with a cameo collab including one of the greatest cover collaboration artists in the history of Australian music, while simultaneously including that very song. Of course I’m talking about the two Jameses – Blundell and Reyne – whose track ‘Way Out West’ (originally released by The Dingoes) is appropriately wedged into the 37 Aussie track titles purportedly used here.

That cover is second only to Daryl Braithwaite’s famed effort, obviously. Didn’t know ‘The Horses’ was a cover, originally by Rickie Lee Jones? Now you do – and that’s probably why it might seem like an obvious omission from this song.

Instead, James’ horses ARE included in the video clip. If you like looking at lovely horsies and big trucks, some chopper mustering, a bit of dust, and some sneaky peaks at a slick motorbike: this video by one of our most awarded film clip makers, Duncan Toombs, just might give you something to feel a little… Howzat… Wasn’t It Good… not everything right there on my TV is a Horror Movie…

“Definitely the horses in the clip are mine. El Paso is the grey horse; Serenade the chestnut; then Tonto, bay horse; Artemis, little bay mare; and Zebedee, named after the thing on a spring, who had the answers to everything, and was very cool. And yes, they love music. They really do.

“I performed a song with Chris Cobb, a Papua New Guinean National, wonderful bloke. Great song he'd bought the bones of and we worked on it. It was incredible because we have reasonably high-octane horses and they just drew to him, he was out in what we call the square of the horse yards singing, and they all literally came up and rested their heads on him.

“So the horses do love the music. I do sing to them a lot. I used to sing to cattle a lot, but the cattle used to get confused because at one stage of the game I was singing the entire score of Jesus Christ Superstar to wild cattle in Western Australia. And they were going ‘nope, this cowboy is loco’.”

These Route 33 boys sure know how to wield a lyrical weapon and they’ve delivered what just may feel individually tailored to the streets of your town.

James is stoked this track has found its feet in good time, endorsing it as “a classic beergarden anthem”, ready for this summer.

So if you’re Downhearted, and unsure if anything still resembles the Age of Reason, and you could use something that feels safe and familiar Under the Milky Way, just ask: Who Can It Be Now?

Route 33 and James Blundell, that’s who. 

The DIG 5 with James Blundell

Denim is good because …
it lasts and fades well.

Double denim? 
Yep, but with discretion.

Sunrise or sunset? 
Sunrise

Best meal you've ever had on the road? 
One I had at the Bushman's Retreat Motel in South Gundagai. Dave and Jan, the people who owned it, were ex shearing contractor cooks, and completely unexpectedly, Dave knocked up this amazing meal - part of which was pea and lamb soup as opposed to pea and ham. Amazing food, great people.

City, coast, country or bush?
Definitely… Bush