Herring Island
(W.Harrington/C.Harrington)
Wes and Horse Harrington aren’t your run of the mill brother acts going round – and they’ve been going round for a while. Founding members of both The Large Number 12s and The Clip Clop Club, in certain circles they’re revered while in other circles they are unknown. They are an anomaly.
They don’t look like anyone else and they don’t sound like anyone else, harmonising as only brothers can. Think of Don and Phil Everly, Ray and Dave Davies, the Brothers Gibb, but with sound all their own.
Their songs are earworms that creep into your
head and you try to work out what Beatles, Stones, Kinks song it is, until it dawns that’s it’s a Horse and Wes original.
Horse and Wes write very good songs.
One day someone somewhere is going to discover those songs in a Nick Drake, Bill Fay, Rodriguez sort of way
and they’ll make a movie. Picture this – from the back blocks of Bendigo, where their father was one of 18 kids, the brutality of learning their chops in country dance halls, to Horse creeping out of his bedroom
window, hitching to Melbourne to catch a gig – and whatever else he could catch and sneaking home to bed before sunrise. To arriving in Melbourne without a clue and always being in the right place at the wrong time and the wrong place at the right time, and never giving up.
A story of how they never lost their country ways or
work ethic or their underlying rock-solid brotherly bond. And all the while writing and singing ageless, glorious pop songs. A movie with a killer soundtrack. It writes itself.
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