Читать книгу Every Day of My Life - Beeb Birtles - Страница 12

Two

ADELAIDE,

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

While still in Holland, Dad had learnt to speak a few words of English, which got him by. My mother, sister and I were thrown in the deep end when it came to learning the new language. We had to start from scratch, as did just about every family that emigrated from Europe to Australia, except for the English of course.

At the Adelaide train station we were met by a man in a Holden utility, who drove us up into the Adelaide Hills to a small country town called Woodside. This was to be our temporary accommodation, a kind of holding camp for migrants until space became available in one of a handful of migrant hostels spread around Adelaide.

As you do when you’re young, I made friends with some other kids and we started exploring the area. It was spring and walking along the hot, rugged outback roads we quickly learned about magpies. They swooped and pecked the top of our heads as a warning to stay away from their nests.

Living at Woodside was communal. Laundries and toilet blocks were shared between families but they were separate from the long blocks of huts where we lived. When the women did laundry at night you could hear their screams because the possums got inside the roof and ran rampant over the rafters or on top of the corrugated iron rooftop and stared at the women with their intense beady eyes.

My father didn’t waste any time finding work. Mr Smits, another Dutchman, hired him as a carpenter. We were invited to dinner at their place once. They were a religious family and gave thanks before eating their meals. I became friends with one of their sons, John, who was around my age. They also had an older son named Tony, who later became a minister in Adelaide.

John taught me to collect empty soft drink bottles because you got five pence when you took them back to the deli. We kept collecting them until we saved enough money to buy a couple of very cool plastic water pistols. We had been eyeing them in the window of the local chemist in the Smits’ neighbourhood.

Building houses in Australia was something totally new to my father. He had to learn new ways of construction but because he was such a skilled carpenter, he got the hang of it very quickly.

During the first few years in Adelaide, my mother suffered greatly from home sickness. She made a couple of trips back to Holland to visit her family whereas my dad showed no interest in going back; he lived for his work.

FINSBURY MIGRANT HOSTEL

Our stay at Woodside was brief, a couple of weeks at most, before space became available at the Finsbury Migrant Hostel on Grand Junction Road, not far from Port Adelaide. All the migrant hostels in Adelaide were built like army Nissen huts, made out of curved corrugated iron with each side almost touching the ground. There were blocks and blocks of them, all numbered. They didn’t have air conditioning, so they became unbearably hot in summer.

At night, families ate in shifts in the community cafeteria. During the week you could place orders for lunch to take to work or school. Your surname was written at the top of a brown paper bag and the meal usually consisted of some kind of sandwich, a piece of fruit, a piece of cake and a drink.

The Europeans complained bitterly about the bland Australian food compared to what they were used to from their countries. Most families couldn’t wait to move out of these hostels. The laundries and bathroom facilities were communal and lacked proper hand-washing facilities. There was never any soap around when you needed it.

For the remaining couple of months of the 1959 school year I was enrolled at Pennington Primary School and walked there from the hostel. Being a new kid and not able to speak the language, other kids goaded me into going up to the teachers and saying swear words. I didn’t have a clue what I was saying of course. As you can imagine, they were not the kind of words kids my age should be saying and I got into trouble.

Kids can be so cruel at times! But, you know, it didn’t faze us not being able to communicate, we just joined in with the kids who spoke English fluently and before too long we were mimicking and forming the words they were speaking. After a while, we could put a whole sentence together and eventually join in complete conversations. Within a year of living in Adelaide I was speaking English fairly well.

At Pennington Primary I got my first taste of cricket and football. I loved playing sports and joined as many different teams as I could. On the weekends I went to the pictures, either with friends from school or the hostel. Sometimes we walked all the way to Port Adelaide and hung out on the jetty. I joined in and did the normal kid thing for a ten-year-old, until one day I got sick.

Because there was never any soap at the hostel, I neglected washing my hands after going to the toilet. I contracted an infectious liver disease called yellow fever and was immediately admitted to Northfield Infectious Diseases Hospital.

Back in those days, if you had an infectious disease they isolated you. Your family couldn’t even visit until you were well again. My mother was worried sick because I was still so young and couldn’t speak English and now I was being taken away from the family for at least three weeks. However, it didn’t freak me out, I just took it in my stride. I was confined to bed and wasn’t allowed to get up, not even to go to the toilet.

The funniest thing about my time in hospital was when the nurses tried to explain about having to urinate into a stainless steel flask. I didn’t have a clue what they were trying to tell me. One night, I woke to the sound of trickling water. I sat up to see where it was coming from and, in the dark, I could barely make out the person in the bed next to me, sitting up and using the shiny weird-shaped stainless steel flask. Immediately it dawned on me. So that’s what they’ve been trying to tell me! It was a major breakthrough.

My mother must have put her foot down and told my dad we wouldn’t be staying at the hostel once I was released from hospital. Dad applied for a bank loan and put a deposit on a block of land in the undeveloped suburb of Netley.

43 HARVEY AVENUE, NETLEY

Caravan and shed

Netley is about halfway between the city of Adelaide and West Beach. Harvey Avenue runs between Marion Road and the edge of the Adelaide Airport. The land in that area belonged to a man named Collett.

When I was discharged from hospital, my parents took me to see the block of land. I saw nothing but sand. Recalling my wonderful summers at the beach in Holland, I took off my shoes and started running wildly across the ‘sand’. Ouch, big mistake! No one had told us that South Australia had these thorns called three-corner jacks and I had about a dozen of them stuck to my feet.

Life lesson number one — don’t assume that sand is the same everywhere in the world!

Behind our block of land stood a house owned by Jean and Dick Collett. Dick, Jean and their children, Merryl and Richard, were our nearest neighbours. Merryl had a horse, and a portion of their land was leased to Russell Thomas, who operated a riding school. The Collett family were instrumental in helping us get our start in Adelaide. They were extremely kind. Jean invited my mother on trips to the Barossa Valley with her friends and she would invite Mum over for afternoon tea.

My parents were the first people to buy a block of land in the area. Dad bought a small corrugated iron garden shed that he erected and this served as my parents’ bedroom, our dining area, and washing and laundry area. A deep, double concrete laundry trough was where my mother did our washing and washed the dishes after meals.

We had no running water or electricity. Our fresh water came from Dick and Jean’s house. Just about every day we filled a couple of buckets of fresh water and carried them back to the shed.

My parents rented a caravan, which became the bedroom Elly and I shared. That’s how we lived for a year until my parents had saved enough money to start building our house.

My father negotiated with a builder: Dad would do all of the woodwork and the builder would take care of the rest. It was very exciting seeing our house being built from the ground up. Every day when Elly and I came home from school, either something was still in progress or something had been completed. When the foundation was set, we walked across the top of it with my parents pointing out where the various rooms were going to be.

The first night we slept there was on Christmas Eve 1960. There was no carpet, just bare floors but we didn’t care. It was the best Christmas present ever to be living in a real house again.

At night, we always ate together as a family. When Mum was close to serving dinner, Elly and I were ordered to turn off the television and take our place at the table. We had family conversations around the dinner table and Elly and I took turns with helping do the dishes after dinner. Mum always washed while we dried. Sometimes Mum sang popular songs of the day and I would add a harmony part. The first time I ever sang harmonies was with my mother, standing at the kitchen sink.

Elly and I earned ten shillings pocket money a week that we could either spend or save in our school bank accounts on Wednesdays. To earn this, we had to make the beds, do the breakfast dishes and sweep the kitchen floor before heading out the door for school. We alternated these duties every day of the week as my parents left the house before us to go to work.

NETLEY PRIMARY SCHOOL

Elly and I started school at the newly built Netley Primary School in February 1960. I was held back a year because of the language barrier and my lack of knowledge of Australian subjects. In Holland, I had been taught European and world geography but I knew nothing about Australia, aside from the fact that Dutch explorers discovered it.

I was in grade five and Mrs Brown was my teacher. I will never forget Mrs Brown as long as I live because one day she called me up to her desk and took a twelve-inch ruler to the back of my lower leg, smacking me until my leg was red raw. I was flabbergasted and didn’t have a clue as to what I had done wrong. She pointed out that I had misspelled ‘Sydney’, using an ‘i’ instead of a ‘y’. Mrs Brown must have had a lot on her plate because her son, Kelvin, a student in our class, was the most unruly of all the kids. She smacked him more than anyone else! Looking back, I’m convinced that the Sydney incident made me determined to become a really good English student. Ever since, I have been a stickler for spelling and grammar.

I made many friends at Netley and got involved in playing all kinds of sports. I took up baseball and cricket. I hung out with friends like Bruce and Kelvin Minerds, who were Australians, and Ilgvar Daga, a Latvian immigrant. Ilgvar loved basketball and sometimes I accompanied him to games.

My memories of the three years I spent at Netley Primary are sketchy at best. By the end of my first year I could speak English fluently. Elly and I spoke Dutch at home, and outside the home we spoke English. To this day I can still carry on a conversation in Dutch. I was young enough, however, that I completely lost my Dutch accent.

I completed grades five, six and seven with flying colours. Even though I was held back to start with, I had an advantage with a couple of subjects like mathematics and geography. I was taught these in earlier grades in Holland and that came in very useful by the time I entered grades six and seven.

Girls flirted with boys and led them around like sheep. Blair was a really good-looking girl but she lost interest very quickly and went from one boy to the next. It was all so innocent back then: getting friends to pass notes to girls you liked. Giggling girls flirting with boys behind the shelter sheds, and boys following girls home to see where they lived.

I liked a pretty girl called Linda, who was so sweet and innocent in primary school. A few years later, she became a rocker and a biker chick, complete with black eyeliner, mascara and black leather clothes. She grew up way quicker than I did! I was innocent and naïve to the extent that I didn’t experience sex for the first time until I was twenty and living in Melbourne.

Another girl I really liked was Wendy Newman, who had a brother, Robert. I was friends with him and I used to go over to their house after school. Wendy and I loosely became boyfriend and girlfriend and I made the mistake of bringing her home to meet my mother.

Life lesson number two — don’t bring someone from the opposite sex home to meet your mother, no matter what age you are!

The minute Wendy was out the door, my mother picked her to pieces, pointing out she had a crooked nose and was poorly dressed.

I learned that lesson very quickly. I think I brought maybe two other girls home after that. It didn’t matter who the girl was, my mother was always extremely critical. No one was ever good enough for me, or for Elly, for that matter.

If my mother only knew that what she was doing at the time was pushing me away from home. After the incident with Wendy I decided that everything I did would take place outside of our family home. Don’t get me wrong, when it came to Elly and me, my mother was very loving and generous. I’ve lost count of the times that we went to the pictures together. We would catch the bus to the city and walk to The Majestic Theatre in King William Street. We saw every Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin comedy and every Elvis Presley movie together. When the new technology of curved Panavision movie screens was introduced in Adelaide we went to see South Pacific. I loved doing that with Mum. While Mum did lots of things with me, Dad never did. I’ve heard other baby boomers say the same thing about their parents, that they weren’t involved in their lives and not very demonstrative with their emotions.

I hugged my father one time and told him that I loved him and I felt him straighten up like a piece of wood. I could tell it made him feel very uncomfortable, so I never did it again. Maybe because his own father had never shown him any love he didn’t know how to handle it. He hardly ever talked to me about his childhood.

My mother was more demonstrative with her love. She would run her fingers through my hair and talk to me about what was going on in my life. After all, I was her firstborn and we had that mother-and-son bond, but that was only when I was young.

The last time my mother came to visit my wife Donna and me in Nashville she showed us some photos of my dad. They were from shortly before he died. She admitted that my father’s only downfall was that he never did anything with me when I was growing up.

Dad died on May 4, 2000 from Alzheimer’s disease. I chose not to go back to Australia to see him because I didn’t want to remember him that way. At that time, Donna and I and our two daughters had been living in the US for ten years and I hadn’t been back to Australia during that time. It greatly disappointed my mother and sister that I didn’t fly back for his funeral. For some reason I had developed an attitude about Dad never doing anything with me and it made me angry. I thought: Why should I fly back for his funeral when he never did anything with me? Now that I’m older I understand that my parents were a product of their generation. Even though Dad may not have remembered who I was, I should have flown back not only for his sake, but mine as well. I now know from having attended my mother’s funeral that it brings closure.

Along with the British music invasion came the fashions of the day. The Beatles had long hair and wore Cuban-heeled boots. We all wanted to look and dress like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. I wasn’t allowed to grow my hair long or own a pair of Beatle boots. And I was especially not allowed to wear skintight jeans!

I defied my parents about this. Sitting in my bedroom, with the door closed, I spent hours hand-stitching the legs of my jeans tight. When they were done I could barely pull them over my ankles. I mean, they were skintight!

I also saved my money and bought my own pair of Beatle boots that I kept at my friend’s place.

Richard Trout and his sister, Charmaine, lived on the corner of Harvey Avenue and Beare Avenue. Whenever I went out, I swung by their house and swapped my shoes for my Beatle boots. I grew my hair as long as I could get away with at the front but the back remained short. It was my feeble attempt at looking cool. It was a ridiculous look when I see old photos of myself now!

Most of my friends were mods, not rockers, and we used to go to a shop in Rundle Street called Scott’s Menswear, where we could get tartan pants and bright-coloured silk shirts made – it was the happening look at the time. Scott’s was downstairs from a long narrow snack bar called J. Sigalas & Co., where we used to buy pop dogs. The owner took long bread rolls and slid them onto metal rods that heated the inside of the bread. When he removed the warm bread roll, he’d squirt tomato sauce or mustard into the bottom of the roll, followed by the hot dog. Those pop dogs were outrageously delicious!

My old friend and fellow music lover, Valda Rubio (née Valtenbergs), remembers this:

The cultural phenomenon of the mods (and later the sharpies) came straight out of the UK. Every weekend scores of young men would assemble outside The Scene in Pirie Street, until a suitably attired mod damsel would choose one, on the basis of his haircut, cravat and scooter (the Vespa was far more superior to the Lambretta), then to be whisked off to adventures unknown.

At the end of the night the summary of events could include driving twenty-abreast on Anzac Highway and gate-crashing parties. It was seen as an honour if a scooter gang discovered your 21st and demolished the food and drink. I was over the moon when they turned up at my party and parked their scooters all over my parents’ lawn in middle-class Beaumont.

For my fifteenth birthday, my parents bought me a Maton Alver acoustic guitar that was right-handed. It was cherry red, the kind that had F holes in it. Being left-handed I immediately turned the guitar over and tried to play it upside down. It was hopeless trying to form chords with my left hand so I flipped the strings over and tried to form chords with my right hand. That still didn’t work because the bridge was set at a slight angle to compensate for the thickness of each string. No matter how I tried I couldn’t get the guitar in tune so I gave up.

My parents’ friends Ary and Jan van Tielen had also chosen to live in Adelaide. However, Ary had returned to Holland after two years, which was the minimum period immigrants were required to live in their country of choice. Jan stayed for five years before moving to California in June 1964.

Because of the difference in voltage between Australia and the US, electrical appliances had to be left behind. When Jan left he sold his combination radio and record player to my parents who bought it for my sixteenth birthday in 1964. The bonus was that I also inherited Jan’s small record collection. I didn’t care that it was second-hand, I was thrilled to have my own record player and my ears became glued to the radio. This was by far the best birthday present my parents had ever given me!

Jan left behind 45s as well as long-playing records. A couple of albums I inherited were Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets and One Dozen Berrys by Chuck Berry. I also had an extended long play album by a singer called Dick Haymes, who was popular in the ’40s and ’50s in the US.

Some of the singles were ‘Shop Around’, with ‘Who’s Lovin’ You’ on the B-side, by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, ‘Mule Skinner Blues’ by Rusty Draper, and ‘Do Not Forsake Me: (The Ballad of High Noon)’ by Frankie Laine. I had a Teresa Brewer single, the name of which escapes me now, plus quite a few other records by popular artists of the day. The Kriesler record player awakened my passion for music.

I was already interested in the hit parade of the day. The most popular radio station in Adelaide was 5DN and every week in The News they printed the 5DN Big Sixty, the top sixty records of the week. This was before the term Top Forty was coined.

Printed in a little separate section underneath the chart they listed the five predictions of songs waiting to get in as the older songs slipped out. Every week I cut the charts out and kept them on a clipboard. And every week I would accurately predict which songs dropped out and which ones made it into the charts.

Once the British invasion was under way I bought the English music magazine Fab. Each issue was jammed with great photos of the latest English rock bands. Bands whose records we heard on the radio. My bedroom walls were covered with photos of them, from the floor to the ceiling.

We watched national television shows like Rock Around The Clock and Bandstand, which featured all the current pop stars and bands. The Easybeats were the most popular Australian band. They were made up of Dutch, English and Scottish migrants. I bought their very first album.

I could name dozens of artists who appeared on television around that time. The Bee Gees were regulars on Bandstand as were the duo of Olivia Newton-John and Pat Carroll. Little Pattie and The Delltones were also regular guests. Then there were The Atlantics with their instrumental surf music, and Rob E.G. playing his Hawaiian steel guitar.

Rob would later form Sparmac, the label that recorded that first incredible Daddy Cool album, Daddy Who? Daddy Cool! He also produced Rick Springfield’s first solo single, ‘Speak To The Sky’, and ‘Feelings’, the first single for Darryl Cotton and me when we were in a duo known as Frieze. But all that was a long way ahead of me — in Adelaide in the mid ’60s, I had just started becoming a huge music fan, I was obsessed.

PLYMPTON HIGH SCHOOL

All through Primary School I was known by my given name of Gerard but, as I entered into Plympton High School in 1963, that was about to change.

The Dick Tracy Show was a popular cartoon series on television during those days. Some of the characters had names like Mumbles, Pruneface, Flattop, Itchy, Joe Jitsu and B.B. Eyes. I have no explanation for why but my school friends – it may have been Bruce Minerds, he was always the class comedian – started calling me B.B. Eyes and that’s how my nickname started. The name stuck and was soon shortened to B.B. and for the rest of my high school years that’s what I was called.

In my first year at Plympton High I met Peter Grigorenko who turned me onto new music. I distinctly remember him playing me Van Morrison’s second solo album, which was jazz-influenced, and Bob Dylan’s very first album. Out of my group of school friends Peter was ahead of his time when it came to music.

In my second year at high school I became very good friends with John D’Arcy. John’s family came from Manchester and they lived at Glenelg Migrant Hostel. John was a huge fan of The Hollies, a vocal harmony group from his hometown. The Hollies were also becoming extremely popular in England following the success of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Their first chart single was a cover of the Coasters’ 1961 single ‘(Ain’t That) Just Like Me’ from their début album Stay With The Hollies.

John and I were also fans of the English group The Zombies, who had a gigantic hit with ‘She’s Not There’. I can’t tell you how many shillings I spent selecting that song in jukeboxes all over Adelaide. It was so electrifying to hear the intro.

After dinner, I rode my bike to either Tony de Vries’ house or John’s place, where we learned some of the popular songs of the day. John played guitar and was great at working out the chords and then teaching us our respective harmonies.

Tony was another friend from Plympton High whose family had migrated from Holland. I went to his house every chance I got because he had a really good-looking sister. She was typically Dutch-looking with beautiful fair skin, a round open face and white blonde hair.

Alas, Tony didn’t last long with us. I don’t know if it was because he didn’t have the same passion for music or the fact that John’s family moved from the Glenelg Migrant Hostel to Christies Beach.

Gordon Rawson, another good friend from high school, sent me this memory:

John D’Arcy introduced us to the Liverpool sound and guitars. We all went to the Sheff’s College of Music and paid for ten music lessons. It was in Glenelg. I used to ride my bike after school, with a guitar that I bought for five guineas in a cardboard box under my arm.

Beeb, John and Tony de Vries started learning a few songs together and then invited me to join the group. The first song I remember doing with the guys was ‘Under The Boardwalk’ by The Drifters. It was also my first attempt at singing background vocals. Not long after that, Tony decided he wasn’t interested anymore and the three of us continued on.

I remember playing The Shadows’ ‘Apache’ in front of Beeb’s mum and her friends in their kitchen at Harvey Avenue. We were rewarded with Dutch salted licorice and pancakes.

English migrants gravitated towards living in one of two outer areas in Adelaide. One was the Salisbury and Elizabeth area and the other was Christies Beach. When John’s family moved to Christies Beach around Christmas of 1964 it became my hangout on weekends.

I completed only three years of high school. As I was getting older and the teachers were getting younger it became hard for them to maintain control in the classroom. Some classes were complete chaos with kids mucking around all the time. That made it impossible to pay attention to what was being taught. Consequently, my grades started to suffer and I lost interest in subjects like Chemistry and Physics. They bored me to tears. French and Mathematics were my strongest subjects.

I completed third year of high school but failed the final examinations. I had the choice of repeating that year or going out into the workforce. The thought of having to repeat without my friends didn’t enthral me, so I dropped out of school. A choice I have regretted ever since!

I guess I must have been about sixteen when I started going out at night on the weekends. I still didn’t drive so I either walked everywhere or caught the bus. I heard about a dance called Sixth Avenue that was held in a hall on Marion Road towards South Road. Gordon Rawson and I walked there a couple of times. I can’t remember whether we had to pay to get in but it was a dance that was chaperoned by adults. A small sound system amplified records that were played from a record player set up in one corner.

At Sixth Avenue most of the kids just came to dance and pash on with each other during the slow songs when they dimmed the lights. They had some kind of mirror ball set up that rotated coloured lights around the hall during these slow numbers. Working up the courage to ask a girl to dance was always a pretty uncomfortable thing for me to do. I was very shy but eventually I did ask a girl to dance during one of the slow songs. As we were dancing I could feel that she was wearing a corset made of very stiff material. It was a total turn off and, to top it off, all she wanted to do was pash on for the duration of the song. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there!

My friend Barry Smith (lead singer of The Town Criers) knew Darryl Cotton at Marion High School, where they were both on the cricket team – Barry was captain. He also remembers this:

There were two dances and the one I played at was in Fifth Avenue. It was called The Pad. My first band, The Acorns, played there a few times. I don’t recall going to Sixth Avenue but I do remember the venue and it would have been a bigger dance than The Pad. It was just a coincidence that the two dances were only a street away from each other.

I think the first time I met Beeb was when he and his dad came around to my folks’ place in Glandore and he bought my Hofner Beatle bass that I played. Beeb took the scratch plate off and played it upside down with the control knobs at the top. It was the first of its type in Adelaide.

When I first saw it in the window of Allans Music it was like the Holy Grail. I had to have it and I stood guard over it for several Saturday mornings trying to hide it so no one else would buy it. I finally snared it on hire purchase. It was like my first girlfriend, car and cigarette all wrapped up in one.

Sixth Avenue didn’t last long for me and I moved on to clubs in the city. One of the first clubs I went to on a regular basis was Beat Basement at the top end of Rundle Street. Man, did I see some great bands performing there. Bands like Hard Time Killing Floor, The Others, Blues, Rags and Hollers, Dust and Ashes, The Bentbeaks, and The Mustangs, who would soon become The Masters Apprentices. Harmonicas were very in at the time and many bands had lead singers who played them. I went to The Cellar in Twin Street a couple of times but the scene there was more folk music and jazz. I was more into pop and rock and roll music.

One of the biggest thrills was when I bought tickets to see The Rolling Stones. Bev Harrell, The Newbeats and Roy Orbison were the opening acts. Seeing the Stones in action gave me chills up my spine and made me want that kind of life.

Some of the best bands in Australia came out of Adelaide. The melting pot of Australian, English and European kids produced fantastic groups. At that time The Twilights were by far the best band in Adelaide. They were the resident band at The Oxford Club in King William Street.

Darryl Cotton and I went to see them there one Sunday night when The Bentbeaks supported them. The club was jammed shoulder to shoulder with pop music fans. No other band in Australia could duplicate the popular songs of the day like The Twilights could. Between the six guys in the band they had such a cool image and a fantastic sound. Glenn Shorrock was one of the two lead singers and Darryl and I loved his voice.

There was a group of us who hung out at Big Daddy’s in the city. Jim Popoff was the man who ran the club. I’m pretty sure this is where I met Skinny (Barry Smith’s cousin whose real name is Lynette) and Dianne and Pam. Big Daddy’s is where we saw Five Sided Circle, The Y?4, The James Taylor Move and visiting Melbourne bands like The Loved Ones.

In those days, alcohol wasn’t served in clubs and we knew no different. When the clubs closed we usually ended up going to someone’s place and having a few drinks there. Skinny’s parents were very relaxed about kids coming over late at night and drinking and having fun at their house.

Valda Rubio remembers this about living in Adelaide during those days:

I was fortunate enough to be born in Adelaide. I am of that opinion more now than when I was growing up there. Melbourne was where it was all happening but Adelaide is where much of it began. For some reason, whether it was the huge influx of British immigrants or just some collective unconscious, Adelaide was the breeding ground for progressive ideas and excellent bands.

The Scene, Scots Church, The Cellar, Big Daddy’s, Opus, Twenty Plus Club, The Oxford Club, Beat Basement, Snoopy’s Hollow and my favourite, Sergeant Peppers, were just some of the popular venues in which local and interstate acts played. Many musicians got their start in Adelaide before moving interstate or overseas.

All I thought about was which band, which venue and what to wear. I remember even going to Big Daddy’s during my lunch hour to get in a quick dance, only to find myself explaining to a slightly bemused supervisor, how I had managed to sprain my ankle during my lunch break.

Those years were some of the most exciting times in my life. We all made so many friends at these clubs and dances, some of them would follow us to Melbourne when our bands moved there to try to make it in the big smoke. Some of us are still friends after all these years, and when we get together we reminisce about those great old days in Adelaide.