After spending Christmas Day with friends, family, and fiends in McClellanville, West Ashley, James Island, and Mt. Pleasant, I settled into the home studio for a session with a stack of old CDs this evening. I popped in Aussie band Hoodoo Gurus’ 1983 album Stoneage Romeos (the newly-released “deluxe edition”) and came upon my new favorite “Christmas song” in the middle of side two — “Tojo.”
Listening to the second verse of the Sidney-based band’s track, I realized it tied into Christmas indirectly by way of a failed WWII mission in which Japanese General and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo planned to drop a bomb on the Australia city of Darwin. The next verse deals with a cyclone named Tracy, which caused heavy damage in Darwin on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 1974 (“That year, Santa never came,” sings frontman Dave Faulkner.)
The clip for the song is available here on YouTube — a great music video from the golden age of music videos when budgets were low and bandmates usually played and mimed to the songs on an odd stage in front of a few cameras.
Stoneage Romeos also features the college radio/early MTV era “hit” “I Want You Back” and garage-rock name-drop-o-rama rave-up “(Let’s All) Turn On.” Dig it.
Here’s a bit of “Tojo” — cheers!
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