DANCING WITH THE VAMPIRES

The promo clip for Dancing With the Vampires from the album "Harlequin Nights"

[dannipuckeridge]

Richard Clapton has written a lot of great music he’s one of my fav singers but this song is amazing love it

[dannipuckeridge]

Richard Clapton has written a lot of great music he’s one of my fav singers this song tho is amazing love it

[kym-bid-bidstrup]

It's all personal taste - obviously - but to me Richard is, and always was, Australia's greatest ever singer-songwriter. Such melodic and lyrical clarity. Next to him, there's daylight. Then maybe Don Walker and Mark Gillespie. Then....

[tommygunn]

My fave aussie artist...
🕶

[charlieleonardo]

It's got kind of a Stones feel and sound to it! Good solid track!

[MiriamVSTVRey]

awesome music and musician graet singer make more music and shering .

[greghughson]

This song has 'hit' written all over it.
It also expresses a truth we all face in reflection or should I say repentance? It can only go up from that point. Richard Clapton has caught that moment intertwined in a clever hook.
Brilliant Meaningful Stuff !!

[tmnl]

The staff of most stations in Australia need to get give this song the airplay it deserves. It's by far the best song released by any Australian artist in the last five years.

[lukashynes]

Fantastic song Richard.... awesome stuff.

[MathsPD]

Damn. I'm a lapsed and recovering Richard Clapton fan. Recently discovered Prussion Blue and other classics I thrashed 40 years ago. Listening to Harlequin Nights for the first time. Wow, this is as good as his best and as good as anything Australia has produced in the last decade. Why wasn't this a massive hit? Damn he still has it. Well done RC

[RikLagarto]

Just catching up on what I've missed over the last few years Clapton-wise..and WOW! Looks like I've got two albums of goodness to catch up with!

[ParadiseDream]

Wow. Great. Great. Great. Kind regards from Berlin. :-)

[tmnl]

Eddie Murphy used to hate it when Tom Petty included him in the words to the song "Jammin Me" and took it personally and never forgave him - "Take back Vanessa Redgrave, Take back Joe Piscopo, Take back Eddie Murphy, Give 'em all some place to go". I'm wondering if Charlie Sheen likes or hates this song? I'm looking to find the lyrics to "Dancing With The Vampires" and I can't find them on Richard's website. This song was on the "Harlequin Night's" album and was released in 2021. I guess Richard has them somewhere. I will have to ask him to send me them sometime.

[tmnl]

I imagine by now Danny Spencer's light blue strat must have hardly no paint left on it. The last time I saw him playing it years ago most of the paint on the back had worn off. Your timber & rainbow 🌈 telecaster has got lots of play on it.

[MagicThys]

Hello and goodbye, tiger
By Larry Schwartz
September 22, 2012 — 3.00am
Harlequin Nights
Richard Clapton
(Independent/MGM)
★★★★
ONE of Australia's foremost songwriters, Richard Clapton seems to take pride in rebelling against what he calls ''the oligarchy of the pop music culture''. The singer says that from the beginning he was out of place in a conformist industry, more in sync with ''this really wonderful subculture'' that included Spectrum, the Dingoes, Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil.
''I was viewed as an enfant terrible because of my complete refusal to be any kind of pop star and especially a celebrity, '' he says.
Four decades after his debut album, Prussian Blue, Clapton says he is still ''kicking against the pricks. But I don't care, '' he says. ''Because they are pricks, I'll keep kicking them.''
The promotional blurb for the new album, Harlequin Nights, notes he has ''never had the pleasure of passing through life in a luxurious rock-star bubble''. Instead, he ''battled everything from bad managers and capricious record companies to drugs, debts, taxes, personal tragedy and a thousand room-service dinners''.
The album was written and recorded while his marriage was breaking down. ''I think divorce is one of the most destructive forces in modern society, '' he says.
Clapton says he wrote the songs on Harlequin Nights to lift himself ''out of the doldrums. There is a Joni Mitchell quote where she said, 'Analyst? I don't need an analyst, I'm a songwriter.' I love that because it is very true, '' he says.
He is buoyed to discover audiences at venues and events including this year's Byron Bay Bluesfest respond as favourably to new songs as they do to early hits, including Girls on the Avenue, Capricorn Dancer and Goodbye Tiger. ''My live career is escalating to a point where it's becoming a bit of a tax problem at times, '' he says.
He name-checks Charlie Sheen in the first single, Dancing with the Vampires. The song came unexpectedly when guitarist Danny Spencer, who has co-written some of the songs, and drummer Mick Skelton started jamming as the band settled down to celebrate with beer and whisky after recording what they thought would be the album's final track, Run Like a River. ''It was the very day that Charlie Sheen was having that rant on the international media. So he was easy pickings.''
Clapton has been working on a memoir and says he has written 100, 000 words. ''There is a little bit of fear and loathing there from a couple of quarters and that sort of dampened my spirits a little, '' he says of concerns he might reveal too much about the excesses of the time. Some contemporaries are in denial about drug use, he says. ''I know how you all lived in those days, '' he says. ''You can't fool me.''
He has described himself as ''the bum of the family'', the black sheep who set out to become a rock star rather than study medicine as his father, a surgeon of Chinese heritage, had hoped.
''We never did reconcile this thing, '' he told me in an interview in the late 1990s.
I find 2012 a lot more scary than, say, 1977.
Clapton was two years old when his parents divorced and he was raised by his mother, who committed suicide when he was 10. ''The early years of my mother are a bit of a blur, '' he told Peter Thompson on ABC TV's Talking Heads in 2008. ''Her life became a roller-coaster, and I was on the ride with her.''
He says his music was influenced by Vietnam War draft resisters he met in Berlin during six years he spent in Europe before returning to Australia with the songs for Goodbye Tiger.
Clapton has described Harlequin Nights as ''a bookend'' to the 1977 record. ''Here, 35 years later, [I'm] still talking to my generation, '' he says. On the first track, Sunny Side Up, he sings of a time ''when the world was safe/ we were happy and free and we knew our place''. ''Frankly, I find 2012 a lot more scary than, say, 1977, '' he says.
In particular, Clapton is concerned about the prospects for his identical twin 22-year-old daughters. On the bright side, daughter Saskia shares his passion for blues artists such as Etta James, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy and Howlin' Wolf and, he says proudly, ''is so disdainful of her fellow students who are into Lady Gaga''.
''I just find the whole Kim Kardashian and X Factor culture bizarre, '' he says. ''I don't understand it. Neither do my daughters. That's what I am hoping to achieve from Harlequin Nights. I'm just trying in some small way to [bring] some energy back into humanity.''