Can You Tell What it is Yet?: The Autobiography of Rolf Harris

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He could sing as well as paint, sometimes at the same time. Harris’s successful way with a sentimental ballad was crowned in 1969 with his mawkish single Two Little Boys, which remained at the top of the hit parade for several weeks. In what now seems an inconceivable coup, Harris routed stars of the stature of Elvis Presley, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, and kept Kenny Rogers’s song Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town from the No 1 position. Also a talented artist he incorporated all this into an interesting prime time Television variety show that featured local and international performers. Moreover, in 1985 he had fronted a video for the NSPCC – Kids Can Say No! – the first of its kind in Britain, aimed at young children and designed to prevent child sex abuse. With a running time of 20 minutes, it showed Harris talking to a small group of seven- and eight-year-olds about “yes feelings” and “no feelings” as well as outlining several uncomfortable situations involving adults that can confront the unwary child.

Can You Tell What It Is Yet?: The Autobiography of Rolf

After his early successes as a children’s performer, Harris achieved much wider fame on television in the late 1960s with The Rolf Harris Show on Saturday nights, a prime-time fixture from 1967 until 1971. As well as songs, guest artistes and a specially created glamorous dance team called the Young Generation, Harris would introduce his weekly pièce de résistance, a gigantic painting in household emulsion to illustrate one of his novelty songs. By then Harris’s television popularity in Britain was on the wane. Moving into radio in 1980 with Rolf’s Walkabout on Radio 2, he travelled across Britain, visiting obscure village halls and organising sing-songs. Again it was Harris’s enthusiasm that made the show successful. He was at ease asking old ladies their age, complimenting them on their youthful looks and then leading groups of pensioners in Do Ye Ken John Peel? The first of these, Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport (Harris’s own adaptation of a Broadway show song from 1954), shot into the charts in 1960. Another success, Sun Arise, reached No 3 in 1962, and in 1965 he scored another unlikely hit with a comedy song about a three-legged man, Jake the Peg. In 1991 Harris diversified again into commercials – not advertising paint (as he had earlier) but extolling the delights of a chocolate bar while sitting in the pouch of a giant puppet kangaroo playing an aboriginal musical instrument.Rolf Harris, who has died aged 93, entertained children and family audiences alike for more than half a century with harmless, if occasionally ludicrous, homespun television appearances; but to general astonishment – not least, it seemed, his own – he was convicted in 2014 on a dozen charges of child sexual abuse. In his seventies, Harris continued to paint, his work being exhibited at the National Gallery in 2002, and in 2005 producing an 80th birthday portrait of the Queen to popular and critical acclaim. People buy him because of his celebrity and there will be a decline in interest given people buy for who is." In 1970 Harris appeared in court on behalf of the manufacturers of the Stylophone. The Inland Revenue had brought a case against Dubreq Studios, claiming that because it was not a keyboard instrument, the Stylophone was liable to taxation.

Rolf Harris - Can You Tell What It Is Yet?: lyrics and songs Rolf Harris - Can You Tell What It Is Yet?: lyrics and songs

One apologist customer wrote: “He may be disgraced now but he was an icon of that certain era of my life. It was a measure of Harris’s perennial appeal that in 1971 it was possible to watch two consecutive hours of him performing on two different television channels. On the day the Falklands were invaded in April 1982, the islands’ radio station followed a patriotic blast of Land of Hope and Glory with three hours of Harris’s greatest hits. But another raged at Harris, blasting: “Nonce. Can't listen to Tie Me Kangaroo Down in the same way ever again.”Australian entertainer and artist who became a star in both his native country and the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s. The Channel 4 show, called Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, was panned by the Telegraph for being “moronic” and “pathetic”. It was meant to provoke debate on the separate-art-from-artist question but merely ended up trivialising Naziism and suggesting that despicable crimes are relative.

ROLF HARRIS songs and albums | full Official Chart history ROLF HARRIS songs and albums | full Official Chart history

Ahead of his time for showing appreciation for the indigenous people of Australia and proudly blending their musical concepts to a wider audience to enjoy. But this all stood completely at odds with Harris’s public persona as a virtuoso on the wobble board, piano accordion, Stylophone and didgeridoo, and an artist of considerable talent who in the 1950s had twice exhibited at the Royal Academy. For all this slightly surreal array of accomplishments, Harris had remained grounded, unspoilt by fame and distinctly unglamorous. As the BBC’s light entertainment supremo of the time, Bill Cotton, noted, Harris might have achieved stardom the hard way, but had never lost his Australian earthiness. But in March 2013 he was arrested by detectives investigating historical allegations of child sexual abuse as part of Operation Yewtree. After a seven-week trial at Southwark Crown Court he was jailed for five years and nine months. Seven further charges were brought in 2017, but he was cleared of three. Some identified in Harris a preoccupation with the corruption of childhood, an insidious process that he believed stemmed from the American invention of the “teenager” after the Second World War. “Teenage rebellion was imported from America,” he told an interviewer in 1996. By the 1960s Harris had established himself as one of the popular entertainers of the day. When he arrived in Vancouver in 1966 for a Canadian tour he was greeted on the quayside by a 200-strong Girl Guide choir singing Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport and was feted as the city’s top nightclub entertainer. By 1968 he had also become the favourite performer in Idi Amin’s Uganda.Four others were heard at a retrial, after which he was formally acquitted. Meanwhile, one of his earlier convictions was quashed by the Court of Appeal. He was released from prison in May 2017. Rolf Harris was born on March 30 1930 in Perth, Australia, the son of a frustrated artist who worked at a power station, and spent his early life in what he described as “practising to be a beatnik”.