When Daryl Braithwaite entered the studio to record his second solo album, Edge, the bright lights and pop fame of his ’70s band Sherbet were a distant memory. By the mid-’80s, the singer-songwriter had signed up to receive unemployment benefits, through which he was sent to carry out labouring work on the outskirts of Melbourne. “It was digging roads and putting in footpaths and stuff like that,” he tells Apple Music. “I remember people looking at me, going, ‘What are you doing here? I remember you in Sherbet.’ Working out there really gave me the incentive to go, ‘I don’t want to do this. I think I can still do singing.’” Edge was Braithwaite’s attempt to rekindle his music career, as reflected in the record’s title. “For me, it conjured being on the edge of either going into the abyss or rising up above and maintaining. So, it was like, if it’s going to work, I’m going to be all right, but if it doesn’t, I’ll just drop down.” Having spent a year gathering songs from writers such as Ian Thomas (“All I Do”, “As the Days Go By”) and Jef Scott (“Sugar Train”), as well as penning future hits such as “One Summer”, Braithwaite secured a record deal with CBS and hired Simon Hussey (Australian Crawl) to produce the album. Influenced by artists such as Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel (witness the cover of “I Don’t Remember”), his goal was clear. “The main thing was we weren’t going to make it like a Sherbet album with heaps of harmonies,” says the singer. “We were trying to make it noticeably different.” As hoped, the record returned Braithwaite to the top of the Australian charts in 1988, his distinctive vocals soaring atop a collection of melodic guitar-pop, while also veering into more left-of-centre territory on the Todd Rundgren cover, “Pretending to Care”. Here, Braithwaite looks back at some of the key moments on Edge, the album that revitalised his career. “As the Days Go By” “This one came to me on a cassette from Ian Thomas, the Canadian writer. There were two songs on it—one was ‘All I Do’, and one was ‘As the Days Go By’. I played ‘All I Do’ and thought, ‘How good does that sound?’ And then I got to ‘As the Days Go By’ and thought, ‘That’s it! I’ve got two songs already!’ If ‘As the Days Go By’ hadn’t worked, I may not have got a chance with a second single. Things would have been different.” “All I Do” “It’s a love song—that thing of finding someone. Simon and I were very careful lyrically. We didn’t want to get too mushy, and ‘All I Do’ was very close to that. But we liked the feel of it. I guess there’s a little nod to U2 at the start. I always hear that now and go, ‘Oh, is that U2? Oh no, it’s ‘All I Do’!” “Let Me Be” “David Reyne was in a band [Cats Under Pressure], and I remember hearing their version of this. And I thought, ‘We’ve got to do a version.’ To this day, I think their version is better than ours. I think ours is good, and live it works really well. Except sometimes I’ve had people say, ‘It’s so boring!’ It’s hard to answer that really! I guess I’m old enough to turn around and go, ‘OK, yeah, you can have your point.’” “Sugar Train” “Jef Scott, who was in the recording band, wrote it about going up north to Queensland and seeing these sugar cane trains. I think he was touring up there with James Reyne. We ended up making the film clip in Byron Bay and used my son, who was only about five or six years old, in the video. That was nice to have him involved.” “I Don’t Remember” “We all loved Peter Gabriel lyrically, but more so musically. In those early days, we always used to do ‘Solsbury Hill’, but ‘I Don’t Remember’ was the one that snuck in the door.” “One Summer” “I got the idea from an English TV series called One Summer, about two boys, and one of them died. The other idea came from my friend who I’d grown up with—I wrote ‘One Summer’ in the pub where he and his parents lived in South Yarra, Melbourne. And so, the storyline was about him and also about the two boys in One Summer.” “It’s All in the Music” “Garth [Porter, co-writer and former Sherbet bandmate] was sympathetic to me coming back as a solo entity. And he had quite a few songs that I liked. It’s saying the obvious—if you’ve got music, you’ll be happy.” “Pretending to Care” “I just loved it because it was, in some ways, bitter and twisted. And I thought, it’s so harsh. I did get to meet Todd Rundgren, and I told him I did a version, and he looked at me and went, ‘My God, what a choice!’ It’s a bit morose in a way. It’s not a happy song at all.”