Covid Island Discs

Day 348: Real Men, Joe Jackson

This song is long overdue for Covid Island Discs. A song which is particularly relevant if you grew up in a place like Sydney in the 1970s. Certainly, in those days, the definition of what was acceptable, in terms of being an Australian male, was extremely narrow. Fascinatingly, the strong homophobia that was present in Australia in the 1970s resulted in a very strong gay movement in the latter decades I guess as the pendulum swung back the other way trying to find its equilibrium. The lines I particularly like from this song are:

Man makes a gun, man goes to war
Man can kill and man can drink
And man can take a whore
Kill all the blacks, kill all the reds
And if there’s war between the sexes
Then there’ll be no people left

Sounds about right to me! Sadly the audio quality on this video is a little poor.