Mark Seymour has lived quite a life in music – starting with his family singing group as a child – and he is still at it at age 70. The performer, songwriter and co-founder of seminal Australian band Hunters & Collectors has had a long and winding career arc, from angry rock ‘n’ roller to acoustic solo artist.
Along the way, he has penned many hits still popular today, including Throw Your Arms Around Me, When the River Runs Dry, True Tears of Joy and Holy Grail, which became an unlikely sporting anthem sung in arenas around the country.
Seymour joined the Good Weekend Talks podcast to reminisce about his life in music but also his new project, which reflects on 40 years of music since the release of the album Human Frailty with a concert showcasing both his Hunters & Collectors hits and solo projects, backed by an orchestra.
In this edited version of the conversation, he talks to The Age special correspondent Stephen Brook about disappointing his parents, why he keeps performing and whether he is still in touch with his old bandmates.
There’s no way that teenage me back in the ’80s, watching Countdown would ever have conceived that come 2026, I’d be interviewing Mark Seymour. What keeps propelling you forward? I really like writing songs. I haven’t lost the fascination with that process of song construction. That’s what keeps me interested. I discovered music through singing before anything else had happened when I was very little. But once I cottoned on to the idea of writing songs, it’s one of those strange, dark arts that just never seems to go away. It’s a constant mystery as to how you end up arriving at a point where something really works well.
Thinking about songs and thinking about the next song – is that all day, every day? I’m never far from it, you know.
Throw Your Arms Around Me – you released it in 1984 to no chart action. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that it really took off. What was going on there? How do you know that? Not many people know that. The original recording was ’84. You can’t find it. There was this recording done in a warehouse in Hardware Lane. The brief was to try and do a commercial recording. And someone in the group came up with the idea that if we make it really raw, then we’ll get away with writing something really commercial, which was my department, because I came up with a ballad. I can’t find it, I don’t know where it is. It reemerged two years later on an album that became quite famous.
I don’t think I’d be able to handle the disappointment of being a songwriter and writing this masterpiece, as we think of it now, for it to bomb on arrival. Oh, there’s been a lot of disappointments. (Laughs) The whole question of commerciality is such a very strange beast because when you listen to what one generation hears as sonically acceptable, compared with the next generation, there’s no fluency to any of it. Songs become hits for all sorts of strange reasons. If a song doesn’t really get traction on radio it is mildly disappointing, because I’m ambitious. But the songs that I’ve written that have actually translated really well commercially are the ones I least expected.
You’ve got a new project that’s coming to Melbourne in November. Hunters & Collectors was characterised by many as a pub rock band. So for you to be fronting an orchestra sounds like a new musical dimension. Hunters & Collectors was on another planet. It was really, really loud and robust and just big. Symphony, when you’re amongst it, is incredibly moving.
You are living in the shadow of a legacy created by you back in the 1980s and ’90s, with this incredible run of hits and standards and anthems. Is that daunting? There’s a very strong love of Hunters & Collectors in a certain cohort. When I went solo, it was a lesson I had to learn that a lot of people didn’t accept me doing that. People just didn’t turn up. I remember early on, my manager Michael would book me alone into leagues clubs in South Brisbane, and you’d walk into a space on your own with a guitar, and emblazoned on the banner outside is “Mark Seymour ex-Hunters and Collectors solo acoustic”. And the room would be packed. Then people gradually realised it’s got the name on the banner, but it’s not Hunters & Collectors. Then they just stopped turning up, and I was playing to like 50 to 60 people. And that went on for a long time.
Was that galling for you? I struggled, really struggled. My ego was really ... (Laughs). But I was a grown man. I had children, I had to work.
My friend Anna is 24 years old and on her daily walk, she listens to Hunters & Collectors. I find that sort of amazing and wonderful in a way that you’re still finding a youthful audience after all these years. Again, getting back to the mystery of songwriting. Holy Grail was a really difficult birth. The thing about Hunters & Collectors, too, I used to refer to as threading the needle to get a song away with those guys. There was always this feeling that if we get this right, it’s going to be incredible. But how do you do that? There’s so much psychology in that band. It was a big band, big sounds. I was so accustomed to abandoning ideas quickly. But Holy Grail was just weird. The band recorded it really quickly and the band actually hadn’t physically played it together.
I did read somewhere that Holy Grail, and I’m quoting, “is undoubtedly the only Australian sporting event anthem conceived as its lyricist laboured through a Jeanette Winterson novel”. I’m in the middle of this recording program session with the band, and there’s so much angst and anxiety and stress and disputation about where the record was going and the style of the record. And, you know, you could just feel it, and it was like, “Oh, this is going so badly.” And it wasn’t in the end. The record was really successful. But there was so much angst.
The band process sounds quite angsty at times. Looking back on that now, are you still maintaining relations or has everyone gone their separate ways? We’re OK. I think there’s an image bands have of brotherly ... or … just that you create this bond and you share it with an audience. And people think that that’s a beautiful thing and they love it. And it’ll last forever. I mean it’s also a professional organisation. I still communicate with the guys, but we’re not …
Have you got a WhatsApp group? I believe there is one. I’m not in it (Laughs).
Oh, because? I communicate with them. I was talking to a couple of them this morning, actually, in the dog park, on the phone.
Holy Grail is a sporting anthem performed at numerous events. And that’s why I embrace it, because when you just sing it on acoustic guitar, that’s an interesting song. But at the time, people were pulling their hair out. That’s the thing about songs … What’s that famous line of Dylan’s?
This is not an episode of Hard Quiz, Mark. (Laughs) I’ll tell you anyway, a song should be able to walk around. It should have legs and walk around on its own. The idea that the song just has its own capacity, you know, you can play it anywhere, [and] it’ll work. I think that’s what that song’s got.
Born in 1956, in Benalla, regional Victoria, when did the music bug bite for you growing up? Singing was early on at home in front of Mum and Dad and their relatives. I think I knew I was good at it.
The Seymour Family Singers. Was that a real thing? It sounds very von Trapp. Yeah. It was. My mother was very much into that concept. She might have been inspired by Julie Andrews, but I was in love with Julie Andrews – I was seven or something. We performed in country talent quests. It was very, very straight. But it was good, though. The harmonies were on. Country Victoria 1964. I remember the Beaufort talent quest. We came second and we got pipped at the post by a local girl who sang the Dolly Parton song, Jolene.
Your brother went on to great success with Crowded House. What was that like? Nick and I started getting really interested in going out and seeing bands in pubs in Melbourne around 1978. I don’t know why that happened, really, because our family was quite conservative. My father really didn’t like it. We were very Catholic. I wanted my father to like what I did, but I knew he wouldn’t.
How long did that disapproval last? Years and years and years. I had very little to do with my parents on a personal level in my early career. I basically kept away from them because I knew I would end up confronting them. So there were lines we just didn’t cross. They let us go, but they didn’t really support it. And then I discovered my mother had kept a scrapbook. I was very emotional about it. I think Nick did better in that area. Apart from commercial success, Crowded House are incredible, he was the sweet little boy who played the baby Jesus in the Christmas school pageants. Everyone loved Nick. Especially Mum. She just thought Nick was adorable.
Whereas your persona was this angry, muscly, shouty, aggro guy. I think I was angry, I didn’t realise I was. Years later, I’ve been told I was. You are about to tell me.