Seek work, find stardom
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Their carnival’s not over … The Seekers, pictured on their recent UK tour, have been honoured.
Source: Supplied
For 50 years they have shared the world’s stage — their soaring harmonies and timeless tunes selling more than 60 million albums.
Now, as The Seekers — Judith Durham, Keith Potger, Athol Guy and Bruce Woodley — continue their 50th anniversary celebrations, they can add the Officer of The Order Of Australia to their considerable roll of honours.
The four musicians have been recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours as they make their way home after their farewell Golden Jubilee tour of the UK.
Durham said she could never have imagined they would become Australia’s first international pop stars when they left here to perform on a cruise to the UK in 1964.
“We left in the spirit of Aussie adventure as so many did at that time and we weren’t expecting anything to happen, we were just hoping to get a little bit of work,” she said.
“We certainly weren’t expecting to become pop stars.”
A succession of hits including I’ll Never Find Another You, A World Of Our Own, The Carnival is Over and Georgy Girl propelled them into the top of the charts here, the UK and US in the mid 1960s and they were named the Australians Of The Year in 1968.
Their achievement was remarkable for an era when international artists were favoured over local singers on our airwaves.
“We wanted to be ourselves, to sing and speak with our own accent and it was fantastic that we were not asked to change,” Durham said.
As the standing ovations for this much-loved quartet continue, Durham said it has “started to sink in that we are pop stars”.
“I have never really been able to identify with it because I never felt I had all the qualities that stars had,” she said.
“That’s what has always been so surprising for The Seekers — when you think they try to create pop stars in a contrived, manufactured way and we were just four people who just happened to meet and sing together.”
