Читать книгу Daddy Who? - Craig Horne - Страница 8

The year 1964 was pivotal for Melbourne and the rest of the country. The whole of Australia seemed to be ruled by conservatives. In Victoria it was Premier Henry Bolte and his sidekick, Deputy Arthur Rylah. Together they banned books, demolished Melbourne’s inner city, hung Ronald Ryan, and built the State Electricity Commission and the Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria. Nationally, Prime Minister Robert Menzies and his loyal Country Party deputy Black Jack McEwan opened the immigrant flood gates to anyone from Britain and—oh alright yes, yes, if you must—Europe, erected towering tariff barriers, established the manufacturing industry, sent troops to Vietnam, reintroduced national service for twenty-year-old young men and refused to ratify the International Labour Organisations convention on equal pay for women.

In 1964 a stampede of writers and artists, such Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, Clive James, Barry Humphries, George Johnson, Charmian Clift, Sydney Nolan and Albert Tucker had fled the grinding, self-congratulatory anti-intellectualism of the greatest country on Earth and relocated to foreign shores—actually it was Britain mainly, much to the old darts’ dismay, all those crass colonials throwing up in Earls Court. Britain did, however, eagerly receive her former colony’s booming wheat and wool exports; at least until she joined the European Market, after which she then gave our farmers the elbow.

At the time, Australia’s popular music scene was divided largely between Melbourne and Sydney. Both capitals were dominated by singers covering mostly British and American artists. Johnny O’Keefe, Judy Stone, Slim Dusty, Col Joye, The Delltones, Little Pattie all came out of Sydney. Melbourne boasted Johnny Chester, Merv Benton, Frankie Davidson, as well as bands like The Thunderbirds, The Phantoms, The Red Onions Jazz Band and The Seekers. Sydney hosted the puerile pop television show Bandstand, while Melbourne screened the Go Show, and Stan Rofe pumped out the hits from Britain and the US on radio 3KZ. Wilson remembered Stan’s show well, ‘If a song made US Cashbox 100 Stan would somehow get the record—I think it was flown to him via his airline pilot contacts—and play the song on his show. I heard Dee Dee Sharp, Dee Dee Ford, James Brown and The Beatles’ song “Please Please Me” first on Stan’s show.’

Then in the winter of 1964, Melbourne specifically, and Australia in general, was about to be hit by a rock and roll tsunami that would change everything.

When the Beatles flew in to play Festival Hall in Melbourne on 14 June 1964 the city was ready for change. The first of the Baby Boomer generation were coming of age and flexing their economic muscle. Young people born after 1945 were asserting themselves in fashion, music and the broader cultural landscape. The mere presence of the four Liverpool moptops opened the generational floodgates and all that was old and stale was swept away. So what did the deluge look like?

Twenty thousand screaming fans greeted the band at the airport and many thousands more lined the streets as the Beatles made their way to the Southern Cross in the city, only to be greeted by 20,000 more fans packed into Exhibition Street. Melbourne had never seen anything like it. Private school girls climbed the outside of the hotel trying to get into the band’s rooms, people filled the hotel foyer and Beatle parties raged at the Southern Cross until four in the morning. The older generation was shocked at such behaviour. Tony Charlton, a doyen of television commentators at the time, asserted that any mother with a child screaming outside The Beatles’ Southern Cross Hotel should be ashamed. As one commentator said ‘It seemed that, almost overnight, everybody over the age of twenty suddenly feared for the moral integrity of this nation.’

The three Beatles concerts were nothing short of hysterical, characterised by fainting and screaming teenagers. It was barely possible to hear the music over the crescendo of crowd noise. Suddenly pop music had taken on more significance than just simply being an entertainment; it had transitioned to be an expression of rebellion. Pop music, at least for the foreseeable future, signified the idea of autonomy; it was the vehicle for the celebration of youth and a means for young people to forge their independence. The Beatles had opened teenage ears to the new direction music was taking and we obsessively scanned our radio dials to hear the new sounds. Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and later Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks, The Who and Cream all demonstrated the disruptive power of rock music and further eroded the long held values and institutions so prized by our parents.

When The Beatles finally departed our shores at the end of June they had not only exploded a cultural H-bomb throughout the country, they had also inspired a generation of performers such as Normie Rowe, Johnny Young, Bobbie Bright and Laurie Allen, Ray Brown, John Farnham, Russell Morris, The Master Apprentices, The Twilights, Billy Thorpe, Wendy Saddington to follow their lead.

And so 1964 was the year that young people in Australia got their hands on the cultural levers. Their youthful attitudes to fashion and language, life choices around sex and drugs and rock and roll outraged and alienated everyone over the age of thirty. This was also the year that four teenagers from Melbourne’s suburbs—comrades Wilson, Hannaford, Young and Duncan—took up arms and joined the revolution.

Wilson would never have imagined how much his life was about to change as he entered the church hall on Marriage Road, Brighton one faithful Saturday night in 1964. He was there to play harmonica in his mate Keith Glass’s band The Rising Sons. ‘I think I played on “King Bee” and a couple of other songs from The Stones’ first album,’ explained Wilson. But it was the support band playing wild surf music that peaked his interest. The band featured a couple of guitar players, the first was Rick Dalton—who went on to join Running Jumping Standing Still—and the other was a short twelve-year-old dumpy kid with big glasses that played like a demon. The kid’s name was Ross Hannaford, and the band was The Fauves.

Most young men (and it was mostly young men) in the early to mid-1960s joined bands to get pissed and pickup girls. The music was often a secondary consideration, a means to an end—and that end was a good time. But for Wilson playing music was a far more serious matter. He had, from the very start of his career, what his long-term friend David Pepperell described as a ‘career attitude’ to music. ‘Ross stood out because he was so serious about his craft, he was always trying to learn, to create and improve. He saw music as a viable career, a vehicle to not only practice his art, but also earn a living.’ Some would argue that the tension between the need to earn a good living by playing in a popular band and the need to be defined as a creative, viable artist would characterise Wilson’s musical journey over the next fifty years.

Born in Armadale in Melbourne’s inner-east in 1947, Wilson’s parents were middle class and musical. ‘My dad, Ron, was an accountant with the public service but his passion was jazz’, Wilson explained. ‘He was trumpet player with a huge trumpet collection and a massive jazz record library I could access. He never played in a band but would often sit in the car with a muted trumpet and play lines from jazz records.’ It was a hobby that no doubt soothed the demons he had gathered fighting the Japanese in the Borneo jungles during World War II. It was Wilson’s mother, Innes, however who initially led Wilson down a musical path. ‘Mum was a trained musician, she learnt violin and played the piano and she had a great ear for music.’ Her own musical aspirations had been sidelined by the war and her need to look after her returned husband and two small children.

The view from on top of 1950s Melbourne was of the vision splendid: detached bungalows stuffed with televisions and fridges sprouted like mushrooms and suburbs sprawled over farmland and bulldozed bush, as new factories—filled with migrants—belched smoke and money into the booming economy. But the fifties, for all of its economic growth and prosperity, was not a great time for women, particularly women with artistic interests outside of the home. With two small boys at her heels and a husband locked in the car with his muted trumpet, Innes could only sate her musical appetite by singing in choirs.

‘After a while she insisted my elder brother Bruce and I also sing with her at the Holy Trinity Choir in Hampton’ recalled Wilson. They rehearsed every Thursday night and performed twice on Sundays.

I didn’t know it then but it was great training, I learnt to sing a harmony line and I also came to understand the association with music and money. Sections of the choir, mainly the boy sopranos, were often hired to sing at weddings and special events and we got paid, like a dollar or ten shillings as it was.

It was only natural that Wilson was drawn to music. He listened to his father’s jazz records on his parents Stromberg Carlson radiogram and at night indulged in the secret pleasures of the Top 40 hits burbling through his transistor radio. At first it was all Patty Page and Perry Como, but then young Wilson discovered R&B and rock and roll. He loved Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and The Diamonds and wanted to hear more. And so, saving all of his choir money, Wilson became a record collector, like his dad. ‘My dad worked in town so I would give him my choir cash and ask him to buy me records … two of the first singles I bought were “Little Darlin’” by The Diamonds and Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day”,’ he recalled. And of course Daddy Cool ended up playing both songs live. ‘The next record was “Don’t You Just Know It” by Heuy “Piano” Smith, backed by “High Blood Pressure” … so like, wow pretty cool!’

Life for young Wilson revolved around school, Thursday night rehearsal, the odd Saturday wedding gig and singing in the choir on Sunday. But it was the guilty pleasure that poured out of the three-inch speaker of his transistor radio tucked under his pillow that really excited him. ‘Hi-di-ho-di’ he heard Stan Rofe announce on Melbourne’s 3KZ, and far off Sydney stations pumped out R&B hits that were fresh, original and dynamic. Wilson had indeed entered a ‘cool world’.

But then early in 1958 life got really interesting for the ten-year-old when lightning struck in Dudley Street West Melbourne.

My dad took me and some friends to Festival Hall to see a wild rock and roll show promoted by Lee Gordon. On the bill were Buddy Holly and The Crickets, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny O’Keefe. Paul Anka, who didn’t impress me much but was there as well. It was out of control, JOK was rolling about on stage in an attempt to blow the overseas acts away. He had the Delltones singing harmony and his backing band—the DJ’s wailed away, I loved their big baritone sax sound. Jerry Lee was wild … tossing his hair back and pounding out ‘Great Balls of Fire’. I can’t remember what Buddy did but he was great.

Then things got really crazy at the house of stoush.

All these rockers and bodgies and widgies started jumping and jiving around and I thought my dad would be shocked at what was happening both on stage and in the crowd. Maybe he’d make us leave—but when I looked at his face, it wore a great big smile and I knew that it was okay … that gig changed my life.

For Wilson, the concert was the rock and roll equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount and he was now a fully ordained disciple. A couple of years later he went to Festival Hall again and saw Crash Craddock and the doo-wop band The Diamonds, as well as Santo & Johnny who played their instrumental hit ‘Sleep Walk’. Again, the earth moved. Gradually a plan was crystallising in Wilson’s adolescent mind, ‘I didn’t have any great ambitions, I just thought that maybe, just maybe, I could leap around on stage and sing just like JOK and Jerry Lee.’

But then Buddy Holly went down in a plane, Jerry Lee married his thirteen-year-old cousin and disappeared, and Elvis enlisted in the army. The rebel yell of rock music had become a polite enquiry from the likes of Pat Boone, Connie Francis and Frankie Avalon, hardly the soundtrack to inspire a teenage revolution. The void was filled with folk music and traditional jazz. Radio started playing The Weavers, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez records, and dances all over Melbourne staged jazz nights with bands like The Red Onions Jazz Band, featuring a couple of members who were fellow students from Wilson’s school, Haileybury College. ‘So it was like, wow you can play and do stuff around town, so they were my first role models’ he remembers.

As a teenager the first regular things I went to weren’t rock and roll shows they were jazz dances. I used to follow the Red Onions to places like the Onion Patch at the Oakleigh RSL (which became The Caravan Club many years later) the Beaumaris Community Centre (all from Melbourne’s south-east). Often after the dance had finished we’d hitch hike into town to Frank Traynor’s Folk and Jazz Club in Exhibition Street in the city and eat toasted raisin bread, drink coffee and check out the groovy bearded folkies types singin’ songs about farmers in Victoria or something … oh and check out their gorgeous girlfriends.

Then Wilson discovered the ‘crowbar blues’. There were a few things on TV that really got Wilson’s attention, like The Robert Herridge Theatre, which was a thirty-minute music anthology series made for CBS, aired between 1959 and 1960. Each show dealt with a particular aspect of jazz and had titles like ‘The Sound of Miles Davis’ and ‘The Modern Jazz Quartet and the Art of Jazz’.

One day Robert Herridge announced that a very famous blues man was to appear on the show: Lightnin’ Hopkins. Well he started playing and holy shit … I was transfixed … what was that? How does he play like that? So I asked my mother what was he doing and she said he was playing twelve bar blues. But I heard it as ‘crowbar blues’, which kind of made more sense to me, like he was playing a crowbar and singing like a pile driver. So I went to school and started telling my friends that ‘there was this great music called Crowbar Blues’ and ‘you really should check it out’ … Then a show on ABC TV hit the airwaves called, Five O’Clock Club, it was a kind of kids pop show from the BBC and had Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated as the resident band with Cyril Davies on harp! Some kids show! It often featured the American blues guys who happened to be touring Europe at the time: Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters … so I began to put things together.

Wilson started researching the origins of this new esoteric music in stores around town, especially at Frank Traynor’s Folk and Jazz Club.

The gigs were staged in a room at street level, but up the stairs there was a record store run by Tony Standish on Fridays and Saturdays. It was there I found John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf. Howlin’ Wolf man, when he sang, ‘I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)’ I thought holy shit, like he was from Mars, it was so bizarre I loved it. Then because of the jazz thing there was an Australian label called Swaggie that put out great jazz stuff, like every Louis Armstrong track from 1929 to 1940 on seven inch thirty three and a third EPs. It was on that label that I discovered ‘Sleepy John Estes’.

It was the summer of 1963–64 and Wilson was fully immersed in trawling around the jazz and folk haunts of Melbourne listening to people like Martyn Wyndham-Read, Brian Mooney and Danny Spooner, as well as Smacka Fitzgibbon, Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers, Brian Brown and Judith Durham. He was also buying records and listening to as much blues as he could get on the radio. But then disaster struck. He was hitching down to Torquay, just south of Geelong on Victoria’s Surf Coast and had got as far as the Flinders Street Extension Melbourne. The car stopped at the Mission for Seamen and as he got out of the passenger seat he was cleaned up by a passing car. He suffered, amongst other injuries, a badly broken leg. Summer was suddenly over for young Wilson.

I ended up in hospital in traction for six weeks! I was so bored I had nothing to do but listen to the radio. But it was while I was lying in hospital that I was attracted to the harp, I heard it played by John Lennon on The Beatles’ ‘Love Love Me Do’ and ‘I Should Have Known Better’ not to mention all that Stones stuff. While I was in hospital I saw their picture in a Sunday paper under the headline ‘The Stone Age’. Wow, I thought all that stuff was pretty cool … When I finally got out of hospital I was in plaster and immobile so I asked Dad that rather than buy me records with my pocket money how about he buy me a harmonica. So he bought me a Hohner Echo Super Vamper, I think it was in C. and so throughout that lost summer I learnt to play harp by copying stuff I heard.

Wilson’s harp progressed quickly, ‘I copied harp lines from records, I played a lot of chords rather than lines, most harp players try to sound like Little Walter or something which is impossible, so I stuck to playing chords.’ He kept buying records like EMI Stateside Authentic R&B. It was from that record he learnt to play songs like ‘King Bee’ and heard the influential harp player Lazy Lester.

In a very short time his leg healed to the point where he could get out of his plaster and start playing music with other people, like with the band of his neighbour and friend Keith Glass, The Rising Sons. Whenever the Rising Sons played local gigs, Wilson would come along to accompany with his harp. It was at one of those shows that he met the then twelve-year-old Ross Hannaford

Like Wilson, Hanna was prodigiously talented. From an early age he showed dual abilities as a musician and as an artist. Sometimes these two creative outlets would form a tension in his life that he found difficult to resolve.

Hanna was born in December 1950 in Newcastle New South Wales, but grew up in Bentleigh East and Moorabbin in Melbourne’s south-east. He went to Cheltenham Primary then on to Brighton High School, largely because it had strong drama and art programs, then Mentone Grammar followed by art courses at Prahran Tech and RMIT. He often said that he ultimately wanted to be a painter not ‘a guitar player man, but I pestered my parents for a guitar at eight or something, I took lessons but then it got to theory, music was a sideline back then; I always wanted to paint.’ But his guitar teacher recognised that even as an eight-year-old he was showing real talent by working out the songs of Elvis, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson and Hank Marvin. ‘I used to play banjo in a kid jazz band and fooled around with a little Canora acoustic that was fitted with a pickup shoved in the sound hole and played through a shitty little amp, it did the job.’

A few years later a short, rotund twelve-year-old Hanna teamed up with his guitar playing mate Rick Dalton and formed the instrumental band The Fauves. The band had taken their name from a loose group of early twentieth century modern artists that included Matisse, André Derain, Jean Puy and Georges Braque. Art critic Louis Vauxcelles disparaged the movement and the painters as fauves, or wild beasts. It seemed a rather precocious name for a bunch of Melbourne school kids playing Ventures and Shadows covers, but Fauves they were. Hanna explains, ‘I didn’t even own an amp, man. I plugged my guitar into an old television set and my mum had to drive me to gigs and hang around until we finished cause I was so young.’ After a while all the surf music The Fauves were playing was getting kind of naff. The Stones and Beatles had hit and everyone was either listening to or playing the blues and The Fauves wanted to go down that path as well. But they lacked a crucial ingredient: a singer and front man. Enter Ross Wilson.

The Rising Sons with Wilson played support to The Fauves that Saturday night in Brighton. Wilson saw the two guitarists from The Fauves checking him out from the side of the stage. At the end of the night it was Rick Dalton who approached Wilson and asked if he sang as well as played the harp. ‘They were primarily an instrumental band but were interested in playing more R&B material and they needed a singer,’ explained Wilson.

I’d been singing in local choirs for years and I had developed a good ear, so yeah sure I could sing. Rick invited me to a rehearsal at Hannaford’s place the next Saturday, ‘Sure why not?’ But when I got there, there was already this other singer wailing away, so why did they need me? But eventually I sang a couple of numbers and I was in and the other singer was out. My first lesson in the harsh realities of show-biz.

The band couldn’t have made a better choice; Wilson at sixteen years of age was an extremely musically literate young man, with a deep knowledge of jazz and the origins of the blues. ‘I joined the band and coincidently almost overnight, the jazz dance thing died, basically because the Beatles had hit and changed everything. So all of a sudden venues started to think well … maybe this R&B thing might fly.’

The first gig The Fauves landed with Wilson as singer/harp player was at the Downbeat Club which was an old jazz gig above Clements Music in Russell Street in Melbourne’s CBD. Mostly only friends and family came to see the band but no matter, they were launched on the R&B high seas. The Downbeat Club shows were augmented by a few local church dances and lots of rehearsals. Then fate intervened. ‘One day we saw an advertisement in the paper, R&B bands wanted, no experience necessary … well that was us … we played R&B and we had absolutely no experience!’ The advertisement was placed by a couple of likely lads interested in managing R&B bands, Ian Oshlack and his sidekick Peter. ‘We applied for the job’, Wilson remembered, ‘and we were in.’

They started booking us for gigs but they didn’t like our name, so we needed another … Ian suggested the Pink Thinks. They said they’d dress us all in pink shirts and play up the whole pink thing. We said, yeah sure whatever. But we got a Christmas gig at a local hall supporting Olivia Newton-John and the poster read Olivia Newton-John and the Pink Finks, which we thought sounded much better so we kept that name.

The band’s sound kept evolving towards tougher R&B and blues; The Rolling Stones, Yardbirds and Pretty Things were a big influence. Jenny Brown, in her blog Flaming Hoop, quotes Wilson describing the catalyst for this direction: ‘We got into early John Lee Hooker. We went wow—he could just make stuff up. So that’s what we did too.’ Brown commented the two boys were made for each other. ‘Yeah we could bounce off each other. We felt we knew what the other one was going to do next. We could naturally go to harmonies without even thinking about it.’ It was now time for the Pink Finks to pay their dues; they needed to start playing live regularly.

Ian ran a dance down in Rosebud for the summer holidays so we were booked to play over the summer of 1964–65 with The Rising Sons and that was our first real gig. It was called Bluebeat Club and we played that dance virtually every night of the week, alongside bands like The Flies and The Spinning Wheels. Teenagers paid their two shillings and off we’d go. It was wild, we shared a shitty little fibro house, well you can guess the rest, it was our first time living away from home so it was great fun and we learnt how to play.

It was during this time that Wilson became aware of soul music.

At the fun fair was a trampoline and between gigs we’d hangout there. The guy running the whole thing played these great records like Otis Redding, Booker T and the M.G’S, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett. I asked the guy what this stuff was and he said soul! I’ve always asked the right questions, it’s been a great way to learn. So once we got back to Melbourne I headed straight to Batman’s and the Coles 200 Store to look for this new music. I found it on Atlantic London out through Festival. I think I first heard BB King and ‘Rock Me Baby’ which was out on Astor, I bought it for two and six.

The band was getting noticed. They were gigging around coastal haunts as well as a host of suburban dances and their sound was hardening, less Stones and more Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. It was time to take it to another level, which meant going into the studio. In May of 1965 the five schoolboys got one hundred pounds together and walked into Crest records in Mont Albert. They wanted to record a song they heard The Rising Sons perform live. They had never heard the original.

We recorded Richard Berry’s ‘Louie Louie’ at Crest, a local studio in Waverly Road. It had two mics set up in this huge room and we recorded the song in two takes, no overdubs. I didn’t really know all the lyrics so I ad-libbed on the spot. We only had limited time so we then quickly cut ‘Got Love If You Want It’ as the B side. We put it out on our own label, Mojo. My brother designed the label and the five hundred copies we pressed were distributed by Crest. Incredibly, even though it was pretty rough and raw, it had wildness about it—maybe that’s why it became a minor hit in Melbourne, making number sixteen on the local 3DB charts! What a blast!

A lot of credit for the record’s success rests with the legendary Stan Rofe, who was the first to play it on the radio and resulted in the demand for the band’s services exponentially increasing, which in turn led to a change in the band’s management arrangements.

Brian de Courcy was a prominent dance promoter around town who also managed performers like Merv Benton as well as other W&G artists. He hired the Pink Finks to play a number of his ‘spectaculars’ around town and it seemed only natural that he would get the boys a contract with W&G. A few months later Ian Oshlack gave way to de Courcy as the bands manager and as a result they ‘started playing more prestigious venues, places like Mentone Mod.’ It was there they played on the same bill as The Strangers, Merv Benton, Les Stackpool and Laurie Arthur. Wilson remembered that the first time he saw Joe Camilleri was with his band The King Bees at Mentone Mod.

Meantime, in 1965 The Pink Finks got signed to the ‘In’ label distributed through W&G—The Loved Ones were also on their register, as was Johnny Chester’s backing band The Chessmen, and Somebody’s Image. The band recorded their second single, the Joe South song ‘Untie Me’, originally recorded by The Tams, backed by ‘Nowhere to Run’. Unfortunately for the band the single didn’t enjoy the success of ‘Louie Louie’, so they went back into the studio and recorded Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Backdoor Man’—an interesting choice for a seventeen-year-old lead singer from Hampton—and backed it with ‘Something Else’. ‘Backdoor Man’ does highlight the great harp playing of Wilson and the emerging guitar talent of Hanna.

The Finks went on to record Johnny Chester’s ‘You’re Good For Me’ and the plaintive ‘Comin’ Home Baby’ for the W+G with both songs produced by Chester, unfortunately the record didn’t bother the charts. The band had previously recorded a variation of the blues standard ‘It Hurts Me Too’ as ‘It Hurts Me So’ and the raucous Muddy Waters song ‘I’ll Put A Tiger In Your Tank’. In a portent for things to come, The Pink Finks were not allowed to perform the Muddy Waters song on the Dick Williams’s ABC television show Hit Parade because of the suggestive lyrics. So the band shelved, leaving the field open for Brisbane band The Purple Hearts to record the Muddy Water’s classic and release it.

With the Finks’ recording career going nowhere it was time for some important decisions to be made. It was the end of 1965 and Wilson was done with school, year 12 was out of the way as it was for most members of the band. Drummer Richard Franklin quit the band to concentrate on his film course at university. It was quite a good career move for Richard—he became a successful film director both in Australia and overseas. His credits include The True Story of Eskimo Nell, Fantasm, Road Games and Patrick. He then moved to America and directed Psycho II, Cloak and Dagger, Link and FX2. Guitarist David Cameron, who had replaced Rick Dalton, decided to go to NIDA to pursue an acting career and subsequently landed roles in the ABC’s Bellbird before moving on to a host of mini-series and feature film appearances including Against the Wind and Dawn. Dalton went on to play with Running Jumping Standing Still, while bass player Geoff Ratz also left the band. The exception was Hanna who was still only fourteen, meaning leaving school for him wasn’t an option. So the two Rosses were left to contemplate their future and come up with a plan. In Wilson’s case this took on some urgency, ‘I’d been lying around home thinking about what to do next. You know I got up late, watched the mid-day movie, that kinda thing, it was summer holidays after all.’ But Wilson’s mum soon got sick of that. ‘She said that school was over so it was time to get a job.’ Wilson subsequently got off the couch and into an entrance exam for the Commonwealth Public Service; he passed and joined the Department of Supply. ‘It was great, I had a phone and desk, you could smoke inside and after hours I could write song lyrics.’

An extremely important event in the life of young Wilson occurred at the Department of Supply in 1966 when he met the seventeen-year-old Patricia Mary Higgins.

‘I’d been working briefly at the department after finishing school when I formally met Ross,’ Pat remembered.

I’d already seen him play harp at the Chicago Blues Club in North Melbourne. I’m not sure whom it was with, possibly with Keith Glass or maybe Chris Stockley or Mick Hamilton. I remember thinking that he played harmonica like a black man. I subsequently saw him play at Opus with The Pink Finks.

Pat, as she is universally known, was born in Yarraville and educated at St Augustine’s College and was destined to become not only Wilson’s future wife and the mother of their son Daniel, but also a singer, journalist and a pop star in her own right. Pat wrote for Go-Set under the pseudonym ‘Mummy Cool’, sang with the Melbourne art band Rock Granite & the Profiles, and recorded the infectious Wilson-written ‘Bop Girl’ which became a nation Number 2 hit and one of the highest selling singles of 1983. The song’s film clip, which was directed by Gillian Armstrong, was also notable as the screen debut for a fifteen-year-old Nicole Kidman. ‘After seeing him play a few times around town and bumping into him at work, we just started going out together.’

With his love life sorted and a steady income coming in, Wilson could now turn his attention to finding a vehicle for his emerging song-writing talents.

‘After everyone left the band Hannaford and I decided that we wanted to keep playing, so over the next eighteen months or so we tried out a lot of new players, drummers, we had some bad drummers and a few bass players and Mike Edwards on sax and flute.’ But then Mike Rudd, who would later front the progressive outfit Spectrum, became available. ‘He had just come over from New Zealand and had been playing rhythm guitar in a band called The Chants; they broke up so we got him in on the bass and soon after Peter Curtin joined us on drums.’

This new band became The Party Machine. ‘There was a lot of talk in the media around that time about the Labor Party and the party machine men that ran it, so I just bolted on the word party. I thought “Party Machine” sounded pretty cool.’

David Pepperell said he saw The Party Machine around this time and was knocked out by the band. ‘Musically they were really progressive compared to everything else happening in Melbourne at the time—and the material, both Wilson’s songs and his interesting arrangements of covers were extraordinary!’

Pat also saw The Party Machine play quite a bit and confirmed David’s assessment, ‘They lifted the lid off every time they took the stage, they were playing material that was really unique, they were so different from everyone else at the time.’

John Higgins, Pat’s brother and the band’s sometimes roadie, noticed that Party Machine always had a strong sense of purpose. ‘They were original and exciting,’ he said. ‘Hannaford and Mike Rudd were outstanding musicians and Wilson was of course a great singer and harp player … [his] other strength was in performance, from the beginning he was a great entertainer on stage.’

Pepperell agrees, describing Wilson as ‘A pocket dynamo, crackling with ideas and brightness, he related extraordinarily well to his audience … he stood out. It was clear even then that he had what it took for stardom.’

Wilson’s undoubted onstage charisma was in stark contrast to his more introverted offstage presence. Like many highly creative people he was an extrovert on the stage, and more introspective in private. Higgins observed that Wilson was always very quiet:

I remember one time my mother said ‘oh Ross you don’t say much do you’ and he said ‘I really only talk when I’ve got something to say’. Well he always had something to say onstage, I really believe that in those days Ross could only really express himself in front of an audience, some may interpret this duality as arrogance, but I think he was simply a quiet, shy guy away from the spotlight.

There’s no doubt that The Party Machine were an innovative band. Wilson explained their philosophy: ‘There were a lot of Melbourne bands emulating English acts like The Beatles and Rolling Stones. Some of them like The Twilights and Masters Apprentices were writing their own songs, but The Party Machine weren’t afraid to go out on a limb by trying out weird stuff that wasn’t exactly commercial.’ Wilson recalls,

One of the first songs I wrote was based on a Lazy Lester song ‘I’m a Lover Not a Fighter’, only I called the song rather precociously ‘I’m the World’s Greatest Lover’. Others turned into something else—like ‘Please Please America’ off the second Daddy Cool album was originally part of something I wrote with Hanna called ‘The Camel Suite’. Don’t ask me why, but it was about camels and camel farms. When we rewrote it, it went from being, ‘We all live on a camel farm, we just sold out of the apple farm,’ or something stupid like that, to having lyrics people could understand.

But it was another clutch of songs that Wilson wrote that got him and The Party Machine into a lot of trouble, songs that nonetheless seemed to fit the zeitgeist of the time.