Ready wears folks down. Not for 5 minutes. For years. The type the place you stand at a counter, cash in hand, and watch the world stroll straight previous you.
That picture sits on the centre of Transferring Photos’ 1982 hit “What About Me”. At its easiest, the music is about peculiar folks demanding recognition in a system that notices them solely when it wants them. There are not any legendary heroes right here. No romance giant sufficient to swallow the remainder of the story. Only a boy who can’t get served and a woman whose goals preserve strolling out the store door. But it grew to become an anthem for individuals who felt like they had been holding the ladder whereas another person climbed it.
The file is big. Large drums. Large refrain. Alex Smith singing just like the partitions are about to come back down. Beneath all of it sits a blunt argument about who will get observed and who doesn’t. “I’ve had sufficient, now I would like my share.” It retains returning to the identical thought. Not as a result of the speaker needs to burn the place down. As a result of he’s uninterested in being informed to attend.
Garry Frost and Frances Swan wrote the music collectively, although the thought got here from a day Frost by no means forgot. He was working with autistic youngsters on the time, years earlier than Transferring Photos discovered their greatest success. Throughout a lunch break within the Sydney suburb of Asquith, he observed a younger boy standing at a nook store counter, repeatedly neglected whereas adults round him had been served first. The picture stayed with him. Later it grew to become one of the recognisable opening scenes in Australian rock.
The second verse is the place the music will get extra fascinating. The particular person behind the counter seems to be ready as effectively. Her goals arrive and depart with out stopping for her. The music retains each folks trapped inside the identical room, however on reverse sides of the counter. The shopper feels invisible. The employee feels invisible. Neither totally sees the opposite, and the music doesn’t ask you to choose a facet.
The bridge cuts away from each characters totally:
“Take a step again and see the little folks…”
Launched within the early years of Reagan and Thatcher, when concepts about particular person success and company energy had been turning into political scripture, the lyric shifts consideration away from the folks on the prime and onto the folks carrying the whole lot beneath them.
Throughout classes for Days of Innocence at Studios 301 in Sydney, Frost and Alex Smith handled it as a facet thought, little greater than one thing to play between takes. Producer Charles Fisher overheard them working by way of it on a studio piano and pushed them to file it correctly. With out that second, the band’s greatest music would possibly by no means have made the album.
A music about being ignored nearly ended up unheard.
Commercially, it grew to become huge. “What About Me” spent six weeks at Quantity One in Australia on the Kent Music Report, completed because the nation’s second biggest-selling single of 1982 behind Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”, and received Finest Australian Single on the 1982 Countdown Music Awards. It additionally reached Quantity 17 in New Zealand, spending a number of weeks within the prime 50 there.
Australia was solely the start. In america, the music reached Quantity 29 on the Billboard Sizzling 100 and stayed on the chart for 26 weeks, helped by common rotation on the still-young MTV. When Geffen Data reissued it in 1989, it climbed to Quantity 46 on a second run, finally accumulating 43 mixed weeks on the Sizzling 100 throughout each releases, tying what was then a Billboard file shared with Smooth Cell’s “Tainted Love”.
In 2004, Shannon Noll’s model grew to become Australia’s biggest-selling single of the 12 months, shifting over 280,000 copies and incomes quadruple platinum certification. Noll had first carried out it on Australian Idol, the place it was one of many highlights of the present’s debut season. Its attain prolonged additional than anybody anticipated. After an Australian DJ started enjoying the observe on Irish radio, demand surged, the preliminary urgent bought out inside every week, and the one finally peaked at Quantity 2 on the Irish Singles Chart. A technology that had missed the primary launch heard the identical grievance yet again.
The music additionally appeared within the 1987 Australian movie The 12 months My Voice Broke, an early signal that it had moved past the charts and into the feel of Australian cultural life.
The music stored turning up in numerous many years. It landed throughout recession anxiousness within the early Eighties. It returned in the course of the company swagger of the late Eighties. Actuality tv gave it one other viewers within the 2000s. As we speak it turns up in conversations about insecure work, stagnant wages and the sense that any person else all the time appears to be additional up the queue. In 2018, Triple M’s Ozzest 100 ranked it Quantity 37 on a listing of probably the most Australian songs ever recorded.
These drums are nonetheless big. The refrain remains to be gloriously extreme. Most energy ballads ask for love. This one asks to be seen. 4 many years later, persons are nonetheless asking the identical query the title does.
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