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Who put the roo in the stew?Roo was written and recorded by the Webb Brothers. It grew out of what became known in Australia as the beef substitution scandal. In 1981, Australian beef exporters were accused of sending kangaroo meat to the USA in place of real beef. It became a huge scandal at a time when Ronald Reagan was US President. Marius Webb tells the story. At the time there was a beef scandal. It was really big news in Australia and very embarrassing for the Americans as you can imagine. We were sending over what wasn’t the real beef as we know it, it was roo beef. So it was at the RSL club in Gympie if I remember rightly, we got discussing this and I said “I think I might be able to put down some lyrics for a song about this.” And so it was the following morning I got up and milked the cow and went back over and sat down and got at it and I went through until around about 2 o’clock the following morning. I just about had it, I might have changed just a few lyrics from the original. Then we decided to go and launch it in the studio in Brisbane, Sunshine Studio in Brisbane. It took off. We did have quite a lot of faith in it. We knew it had to be fast and the recording companies knew that … as it turned out it soared. Matter of fact it was the quickest, it was the top song at 4BH I think. It came into the top 30 at number 7 and they said they had never had any song before to come in at that spot and eventually it did get to the top (Marius Webb).
The song had the title of The Colonel put the lickin’ in the chicken who put the roo in the stew? and from idea to release, it took little more than a week to get into the hands of DJs and then to the record buying public. According to John Mackenzie, a DJ at 4GY in Gympie at the time, it was such a successful hit song that suddenly the Webb Brothers went from earning about $300 a night to $3000 a night and they were pretty well booked out for 6 months within weeks. John became manager of the Webb Brothers and they went on the road after the mustering was done of course, mustering always took precedence. The song’s success reflected the intensity of the public interest and political debate about the scandal, and by the time the debate died down, so had the sales of Roo. It fell just about as quickly as it rose. Within that fortnight or three weeks, a lot of the heat had gone off the fact that we were sending the kangaroo beef over there. So that’s the story and it sold a lot of records in that time. As a matter of fact they had 3 recording companies pressing it at the one time and they couldn’t keep up with the demand. Did we ever find out how many it sold? I don’t know. In fact its still selling a few but it was in the vicinity of around about 120 000 I think (Marius Webb).
In a relatively short time span, Roo became the biggest selling country music single in Australia for 1981, a fact that qualified the Webb Brothers for another Golden Guitar Award to be presented in Tamworth in January 1982. Submitted by Geoff Walden |