VALE James McCarthy (1939-2021)

by DrJeff Brownrigg

This is an extract from the full text of the brief obits read at the celebration of James’ life in Sydney early in 2021, a précised version of which was printed in the journal of the Australasian Sound recordings Association, the Australian Sound Archive.

To say that James’ life was many facetted would be an understatement. I expect that others might talk about his childhood and youth, others about his association with Sydney University and a brief appearance (with his own hair, James always noted) in Bruce Beresford’s first film, and still others about his time as music officer, composer and conductor at Film Australia. Then there will be those people who knew him as the musical director of numerous theatrical productions; there are quite a few celebrities whose careers were launched from those ensembles. And after all that, there was the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), as well as various national and international committees.

James became a point of reference for my book about the 1980s and 90s at the NFSA that went off to a publisher last November. At times in the last 18 months or so, I have shared some of the ideas contained therein with James. His energy levels rose and fell as he struggled with himself, the illness that first appeared about a decade ago which, he told me, robbed him of his usual ‘effervescence’. ‘I’m so lazy’, he often repeated. Nothing could be further from the truth, his CV a testimony to his extraordinarily busy mind.

From the time we first met in Melbourne more than 35 years ago, we enjoyed each other’s company, especially our shared pleasure in words and music and the fusion of these two in opera and song. Early last year, we found ourselves, like the two old codgers, balcony-bound in The Muppets, recollecting
W S Gilbert’s words and Arthur Sullivan’s dots. I might have started the singing. We were word perfect for When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls and the bat in the moonlight flies… and quite tunefully musical within the limitations of telephony. Our relationship translated fairly well from face-to-face conversation to nattering on the phone.

The week that the new book went off to Adelaide, James answered my regular call and I was able to read him a couple of passages. In one of these he was the subject. James, I argued, shared and deserved, with David Waghorn and Ken Berryman, the title of the Archive’s best wordsmith. I sent him a draft of the book for comment, inviting him to be savage, a bit too late for it to matter to him as much as it might once have done.

James was often riled by things people said, general silliness or the mannerisms of ‘managerialism’ (his word) being principal reasons for his irritation. Throughout the 1990s he regularly raged about it in conversation and conference papers. It was, he said, an insidious, creeping erosion of the things required to build the curatorial skill essential to places such as the NFSA. The ‘bean counters’ were, he concluded, taking over the world. Excellence was being progressively jettisoned. The result was a ‘dumbing down’ of institutions such as ours; a steady dilution of the ability to properly identify and assess what was needed to build, understand and disseminate the huge collection we were amassing.

And with all of that came an inevitable enfeeblement of the English language. He was determined not to succumb. I wonder how many times I heard him say “Shit! Not again!” when somebody in a learned conference paper used the word ‘ongoing’. “Why the f… can’t they just say ‘continuing’?” Clearly a master word-smith!

There would be a time and other occasions for more elegant expression, but he was not one to hide his passion, feelings most often displayed in his ‘exasperation register’. On at least one occasion (1998) he followed this with a barrage of discontent about what paper-givers were proposing concerning the relevance, significance and aesthetic value of hip hop and other popular forms he thought did not sit well beside the great songs and arias of humankind. (Ironically, James was born in Tamworth in 1939, where he later detected two varieties of American -derived popular music flourishing there: country, and western. These were clearly not acknowledged as a part of his cultural inheritance.) In 2020, I was able to share with him a little recent research which I thought he would warm to. An Australian, who deserves a better press is the London-based poet and music critic W J Turner who wrote, in 1933, before James was born:

A music critic should remain ruthless and aloof and he should be able to say quietly and persistently ‘This piffle may temporarily amuse you, but it is piffle, while this is great and remains great.’

James thought that Turner had nailed it. And after 1998, went on to ‘nail it’ himself in many intelligent, incisive, engaging reviews of ‘great’ music for Limelight magazine, disclosing numerous successes and a few failures.

James was a colleague and a good friend. We mostly knew each other professionally in executive positions for the International Association of Sound Archives (IASA Australia) which became the Australasian Sound Recordings Association (ASRA). And, for a while, the Archives’ regional offices in Sydney and Melbourne were shoved into my management portfolio.

During the 1998 ASRA AGM, when James was ASRA President, the following words were noted in the minutes.

James McCarthy reminded the meeting that due to a failure of the computer during the last AGM, several early motions were lost.

You can, I think, hear James’ voice and his wit in this, the voice and wit that apostrophised the Sydney Opera House for its ridiculously small orchestra pit; a pokey little cavern that he wrote in a letter to the press, made the music sound ‘strangulated’. He felt aggrieved for Wagner, who always required hefty resources.

James occasionally stayed with our family when he came to Canberra. He often opened up after dinner and a nice bottle of wine and spoke about his life. He was frank, forthright and comfortable with himself; quite content with who he was, regardless, for example, of how he fitted into the received conventional categories of relationships and sexuality. My children remember him as a sophisticated, good-humoured man who drifted into their lives for brief stays. That usually meant noisy sessions in the music room when Wagner or Rossini roared from the Wharfedale speakers between patches on animated discussion.

In early January this year (2021), with James in finer fettle than I heard him for several weeks, feisty, even, I confessed that I still had not solved the reason (perhaps reasons) for my unhappiness with Wagner’s Parsifal. It might be significant that we didn’t break into a familiar tune from that opera as we might have done had we been discussing Mozart, Rossini or Verdi. So even if I solve the riddle of my own discontent, which pivots, I think, on the idea of Wagner’s ‘wonderful moments and terrible half-hours’, James will not be there to help with that resolution. Vale James.