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2 A Funny Buzz

THE EARLY TO MID SIXTIES

‘Why don’t you teach her “Botany Bay”?’ said Ruth, sticking her head round the door.

‘I don’t know it.’

‘You’ve been culturally imperialised.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I bet I have more fun than you do.’

– Helen Garner, ‘Other People’s Children’ (1980)¹

To those who were born in the middle decades of the 20th century and immersed in Western culture and pop music, the coming of British groups such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles seem to have made 1960 and 1965 as distinct from one another as desert and jungle. Just as the early to mid 1970s are often characterised as a period in which bored teenagers sat around waiting for punk to ‘break’, the early 1960s are generally seen – even by people who lived through those years – as a time of musical and even social stasis. This is a subjective view; it holds sway because history is written by the winners – rock and rollers, in this case, rather than those who followed other types of music. Certainly, Western popular music of the early 60s owes much more to a white European tradition than to an African-American one, and it therefore often sounds far more pallid, low-key, pedestrian and ‘sing-song’ to 21st-century ears than the music that came after mid-decade. Advances in recording and reproduction served to sharpen this distinction. Ultimately, we can only hear the past strained through the sieve of the present, and the thin gruel which results in this case is not always easy to stomach. Most of us – as well as those who did the choosing for our canon – are coming from a very different aesthetic position. The first hundred pages of Bob Stanley’s excellent overview of British pop, Yeah Yeah Yeah, demonstrate this many times over.

Rock and roll – whenever it began and whatever it ultimately is – had briefly come to the fore in the mid 1950s, of course, but at that time it seemed to most listeners merely an extremist novelty. Along with its milder associate, pop music, it had jostled with folk, jazz and other forms as one of a number of appropriate teen enthusiasms. The early rock and roll musicians did not spring fully formed into this performance mode: they had started out as jazz or country players, working in what we would now understand as a swing style. American-British record producer Joe Boyd, discussing the London scene of the early 60s, observes:

Some jazz clubs had already started programming folk singers and comedians while others would soon be taken over by rock entrepreneurs. Jazz had comfortably coexisted with R&B and rock ’n’ roll, but the Birth of Rock elbowed it out of the way.²

If this was true in the UK and in Boyd’s other hangouts, such as New York, it was not necessarily so in Australian cities, where jazz and folk were a conjoined force, often ‘against’ rock and roll, although rock and roll in the early 60s did not seem a terribly potent force. The big names of 50s rock – Col Joye, Johnny O’Keefe, Dig Richards, and others who made their names early – had by now become established entertainers, compelled by professional requirements to broaden their palette and demonstrate they were more than just rockers. Just as, twenty years later, many young or otherwise unknown musicians saw punk as a way to break into the music industry, ‘rock and roll’ in the mid 1950s was – accidentally or deliberately – a starting point for men and women who quickly became entertainers in a variety of styles. A post-rocker might sing ballads on television variety shows, or take on older standards so as to appeal to a broader demographic. The many covers of show tunes released in the early 60s – Billy Thorpe’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ and Normie Rowe’s ‘Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)’, for example – might be seen as attempts to appeal across markets.

Christopher Koch’s 1985 novel The Doubleman (a story Koch himself describes as a ‘fairy tale’) presents a sensitive portrait of post-war Australia’s cultural touchstones (in this case, Hobart in the 50s and Sydney in the 60s). Koch worked for the ABC, the national broadcaster, in the 60s and presents a credible account of the way entertainers – and through them specific cultures – might gain a hold on the population. The book’s narrator, Richard Miller, tells a story about a folk-rock group called Thomas and the Rhymers, who take Australia by storm with a unique and complex sound that acknowledges both traditional balladry and psychedelia. This last element does not sound particularly plausible, but everything surrounding it does, particularly the importance of media (notably television) and the transition the band undergoes from playing crowd-pleasing country and western in regional towns to performing in the elitist folk clubs of the gentrifying inner city.

Prominent modernist architect Robin Boyd coined the term ‘Austerica’ to describe what he saw as Americanised modern Australia; he was talking about streetscapes and buildings – design styles rather than cultural ones, either popular or high – but the concept can readily be extended, and many critics believe that Austerica also reigned in the cultural sphere in the mid 20th century. Lawrence Zion has claimed that Australians of the late 1950s did not understand the ‘cultural origins of rock ’n’ roll’.³ By this he appears to mean that Australia, lacking a visible, oppressed non-European population at this time and with much of its population still in many ways embracing the repulsive concept of ‘white Australia’, was unable to comprehend rock and roll as the product of the losing end of a social/ethnic imbalance. Yet he also suggests that ‘most rock ’n’ roll performers [appropriated] “America” as the source of their style . . . distilled through records, radio, magazines [and] Hollywood films,’ and through visiting American performers.

For all his strengths as a cultural commentator, Zion is entirely wrong even to imply that there was one ‘Australia’ in the late 50s, let alone that it was some kind of Austerica. Nigel Buesst’s glorious 1963 short film, Fun Radio, is a red-blooded critique of the kind of Americanisation that Zion claims to detect – and its very existence demonstrates that Austerica was hardly an all-pervasive phenomenon. The Australian-raised Buesst, a creative and often whimsical left-of-centre filmmaker, supported himself as a photographer and a stringer for television news for most of this decade. When he came back to Australia in the early 60s from Britain (where he had worked on Ealing comedies), he was horrified by what he saw as a new and (at least in comparison with Britain) crass commercialism. Fun Radio is his filmic response, a highly structured and often very funny composite of news images from his own camera, set to the hysterical banter of commercial radio DJ Don Lunn. Lunn himself appears (apparently unwittingly) in the film, as do the accoutrements of contemporary teen life in all their hollow horror, including beach and surf culture and an absurd competition in which young women are compelled to trot alongside a Volkswagen being driven slowly around Melbourne’s Albert Park Lake – when the car’s tank runs dry, one of the contestants wins it. There are also scenes of American pop stars, such as the Beach Boys and Roy Orbison, landing at Melbourne’s Essendon Airport and clips of international touring artists in concert, wittily juxtaposed with boxing footage. All of this set to a soundtrack of forcedly jolly and ‘modern’ surf music.

As this chapter will show, the reality of Australia in the early 60s is very different from any fantasy of a hyper-Americanised ‘Austerica’. The documentary evidence points instead to the dominance of a particular strain of Australian pop star. Young Australians certainly worshipped some American idols – such as Johnny Ray, whom Johnny O’Keefe had impersonated professionally before working under his own name – and there were also very popular British stars, like Cliff Richard. Numerous movements and trends existed in youth culture at the time, however, both within and outside the various cultural styles that we have come to understand as ‘rock and roll’. Whether Australians saw these movements – and the Australian celebrities who promoted them and worked within them – as uniquely local, or as part of the local branch of a wider scene, depended on the individual and his or her world view, as we will see.

YOUNG MODERN: ONE CITY’S POP CULTURE IN THE EARLY SIXTIES

Looking in detail at the scene in one city can deepen our understanding of all of them: in his study ‘Rock ’n’ Roll, Youth Culture and Law ’n’ Order’, Raymond Evans claims that a focus on one city’s youth culture in the 50s enables a ‘closer-grained regional analysis’ which captures ‘additional texture, detail and nuance’ that a wider perspective might miss.⁴ I will take a similarly closer-grained approach here, using the Adelaide magazine Young Modern to assess the way popular music was represented to teenagers in Australia in the early 60s.

Young Modern in 1965, with a young Twilights on the cover

During this period, Australian cities were more likely to celebrate their own performers than would be the case later in the decade. State capitals had their own television and radio stations, which promoted local and international (rather than national and international) entertainers. Adelaide briefly even had its own pirate radio station;⁵ it was operated by John Woodruff, who would later become an important figure in music management, beginning with Adelaide group the Angels. Similarly, there were local specialist magazines. Fondly remembered by those who grew up in Adelaide in the 60s (John Dowler named his late-70s proto-new-wave group after it, though silverchair probably didn’t name their 2007 album after it), Young Modern lasted for four years. It had a number of owners, though some measure of control was usually exercised by one Ron Tremain, who claimed in 1964 (by which time he was its managing editor, at the age of 23) to have come to the magazine after working on the Adelaide News, followed by Stock and Station Journal, a position playing piano with a group called the Del-Aires, and management of a club called the Princeton ‘running casual dances for young people’. Tremain eventually became the magazine’s proprietor.⁶

Whether because it was desperate to increase sales, or just because it had the freedom to do so, Young Modern experimented with different styles and ideas, showcasing youth culture in numerous forms. It even delved into politics, an area few of its readers may have felt directly connected to, given that the voting age at this time was still 21. Nevertheless, the youthful and cultured future Premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan, was featured in the magazine, writing about the questionable fairness of long-established patrician Premier Thomas Playford’s ability to retain power in the state through the support of independents.⁷ Perhaps this was, for some Young Modern readers, a significant contribution to their rising political consciousness.

JAZZ, FOLK AND POP AROUND AUSTRALIA

Those Young Modern readers who did see political change in the air may have thrilled to the words of local folk singer Paul Brand, who told the magazine:

Life should be regarded as a comprehension of all the body can see and do. In suburbia, however, it seems man is content with married life, a family, and a home. They are in a rut – a great unthinking rut.’⁸

Brand was a popular proposition in Adelaide in 1962. He released an LP, Feeling Folk Blues, and like many of his folk cohort he also sang trad jazz with a local band, Dick Frankel’s Jazz Disciples.⁹ His ‘only future plans’ in 1962 were ‘to learn all I can about jazz in any way possible, and to convey these feelings back to people.’¹⁰ When he played his own version of folk music, at the ‘beaty’¹¹ Catacombs Coffee Lounge in the tiny inner-eastern suburb of Hackney, for instance,

There was virtually no sound from the audience – no conversation, no shuffling of feet, just an occasional clinking of a coffee cup. Occasionally the door leading from the street opened, and more people entered, quietly finding themselves a seat at the crowded tables. When he had finished, the applause was quite outstanding – exuberant and sustained.^12s

Brand’s back and forth between jazz and folk might seem unusual today, but this pairing was a major drawcard for young Australians in the early 60s. The Brisbane Folk Centre at the Geographical Society Hall, with its ‘twelve largish tables’ and ‘dim lighting (candles)’, featured numerous acts playing a range of music from traditional songs to classical guitar; attendees also played chess or dominos or sang along with the performers.¹³ Evening events – such as singer Paul Marks’s shows with the Melbourne New Orleans Jazz Band – might involve a solo singer performing folk and blues songs to their own guitar accompaniment, and then a second set with the jazz band behind them. Marks, who worked as a hospital theatre orderly, a labourer and a postman, had begun Paul Marks’s Blues Band in 1956, and recorded for the Swaggie label in 1958.¹⁴

As we will see, certain pop or rock groups, like the Seekers and the Loved Ones, would evolve from the Melbourne branch of this scene. One of the more unlikely success stories was that of Sydneysider Gary Shearston, who went from the protest folk scene of the 60s – and a commercial TV show – to a top ten hit in Britain in 1975 with a version of Cole Porter’s ‘I Get a Kick out of You’.¹⁵ Back in Adelaide at the dawn of the 60s, however, Paul Brand saw no value in striving for crossover between folk, pop and rock and roll; indeed, he was withering about what he (or perhaps Young Modern) called ‘r and r’, telling the magazine, ‘I fail to see how the average-minded person can absorb all this r and r, much less even try to appreciate it.’¹⁶ A similar attitude is expressed from a different angle by Christopher Koch’s fictional Brian Brady: ‘I just want to dig those old bush songs up and sing them, and travel the country. Pop music’s nothing but concocted crap’.¹⁷ The real folk singer Martyn Wyndham-Reade had a similar attitude, sympathising with people he was sure were ‘sick and tired of being belted over the head with rock and roll and the other garbage they hear.’¹⁸

The contrast between jazz ‘beatniks’ and rock was plain to most, and jazz was seen as a more cultured pursuit, as one writer to TV Week, signing themselves ‘Intellectual’, suggested:

You should go to a rock ’n’ roll dance and see some of the rough types that get there. Then you should go to a beatnik gathering. They are peaceful and intellectual. Perhaps their fashions are different, but weren’t rock ’n’ roll fashions also different when they were first introduced?¹⁹

The Red Onions, from Melbourne, are a perfect example of a trad jazz band with youth appeal, a sense of humour, and an approach that would later seem to fit perfectly with mid-60s rock; indeed, a breakaway section of the group would go on to form the Loved Ones. The Red Onions’ star was Englishman Gerry Humphrys (also spelt Humphreys and Humphries), who was profiled thus in Young Modern:

Clarinet . . . 22 years . . . shaved off his beard to a wigmaker, received 7/6, then bought a Modigliani postcard print, copied it, and sold it as an original for 15 gns, for which he promptly purchased a clarinet for 2/6 and an old pair of wellington boots. Likes . . . old faces and opportunity shops.²⁰

Some of the content of this profile may be true, as indeed may be the assertion that tuba player Kim Lynch ‘was left an estate which included a tuba captured from the Comanches during the Battle of Agincourt.’²¹

“And I’ll bet they waste all their time painting pictures and writing poetry.”

Nigel Buesst’s film Gerry Humphrys – The Loved One, completed in 2000, included interviews with Humphrys (who by this time had returned to his native England, where his Australian fame meant nothing and where he opted not to use his musical talents) and with those who had witnessed his achievements. Buesst comments that Humphrys ‘entered our world, blew up a storm and seemingly disappeared.’²² Humphrys said he had relocated to Australia in his late teens because:

I wasn’t getting on very well with my stepfather . . . My father was killed during the war, there was a certain amount of friction [at home] at the time . . . We used to receive regular food parcels after the war . . . Billie Bluegum was my favourite teddy bear . . . I was always in touch with Australia, very fond of it. April 1 1957, I left for Australia.²³

Humphrys’ circle included Gordon Dobie, who remembered Humphrys as owning nothing but ‘the clothes he stood up in and his clarinet,’²⁴ and Adrian Rawlins, who reminisced about spending time with Humphrys in 1959 when ‘he’d only fairly recently arrived in Melbourne . . . Gerry seemed to me a typical kind of jazzo.’²⁵ Another informant on the Buesst film about Humphrys, Sue Ford, recalled a café called Reata which, true to the stereotype of this era, featured ‘glittering sort of candles in Chianti bottles’, where she listened to Humphrys’ ‘wonderful improvisations’ on clarinet.²⁶ Ross Hannaford, who would be an even bigger pop star than Humphrys within a decade as the guitarist in Daddy Cool, was ‘in love with the Red Onions’ and was lucky enough to find himself a day job assembling planet lamps with Humphrys (‘a very funny man’) and other band members.²⁷ The Red Onions Jazz Band played southern suburban Melbourne middle-class haunts such as Ormond RSL and Beaumaris Yacht Club (Humphrys was known to sleep on the beach at Beaumaris).²⁸ Humphrys was the band’s raconteur,²⁹ and while the group was promoted as New Orleans jazz, it also had a darker, Celtic or medieval tinge.³⁰ An unidentified interviewee in Buesst’s documentary tells us:

There was a distinctive Melbourne bohemian push . . . they were true bohemians, they were folk singers, they were artists and musicians . . . there was a gallery in East St Kilda that had a party every week at midnight.

Koch’s fictionalised assessment of the folk scene is typified by ‘the Loft’, whose atmosphere combines a nascent form of patriotism and identification with the working classes’ lot – presumably the province of a young middle-class clientele –with a faked nostalgia for the 19th century:

Three storeys above the Darling Harbour docks, it really had been a grain loft, years ago. Gordon Cartwright, the middle-aged ex-carnival man who ran it, had leased the top floor of one of the old brick warehouses here to cash in on the folk phenomenon . . . A heavily symbolic sack of wheat hung near the stage. Nearby, in the western wall, a door opened onto space. Its old loading platform and beam-and-tackle were still suspended three floors above the lane, and an appropriate nineteenth century portscape glimmered out there, like Doré’s London: the lamps and stone mushrooms of the Pyrmont Bridge; the lights of wharves and ships.’³¹

Posters of famous folk artists like the Seekers are to be found here (though their inclusion in this pen-picture may have been to assure any sceptical readers that Thomas and the Rhymers were not based on the Seekers). Koch’s slightly acid outlook, and the enlistment of a former carny as the person profiting financially from the scenario, might seem more typical of the rock world, but there was surely crossover between the impresarios of the two scenes.

As indicated earlier, jazz clubs intersected with the folk scene in Adelaide. Young Modern reported that ‘Jazzwise, some eminent authorities say that in a few months Adelaide will be the centre of modern gear in Australia.’ These clubs included La Cantina (which by the 1980s had become a rock venue called Lark and Tina’s), Black Orchid (‘definitely for people who wear big pearl cufflinks’, according to Young Modern), the Cellar, the aforementioned Catacombs (‘where the music was folksy sort of stuff but good’), Las Vegas, and The Tavern.³² It is often suggested that the appearance in Australia of non-English speaking migrants, especially those from Italy, revolutionised coffee consumption in the nation, inducting many Australians into the world of the espresso machine and, of course, coffee snobbery. A consumer culture naturally evolved around a mood-enhancing drug such as caffeine, and the coffee club needed a music to go with it. Both jazz and folk extended into this realm, but also into regular suburban dances, generally referred to by the name of the church or civic hall which hosted them. In Melbourne, Keith Barber from Glenroy had played in a jazz band called the Soul Agents; they changed into a bluesy rock group, the Wild Cherries, playing in a coffee lounge in the inner Melbourne suburb of South Yarra ‘which had survived on jazz but was rapidly changed in 1963 into one of the country’s first discotheques, the Fat Black Pussy Cat.’³³

There were other Australian jazz musicians soon to convert to rock and pop who had already gone overseas. The most notable – though an anomaly – is Christopher ‘Daevid’ Allen, who as a child had been a radio actor on 3DB. In his late teens he attended Melbourne’s National Art Gallery School, while at the same time studying electric guitar (‘mainly chords’)³⁴ with the jazz player, composer, and writer of television and commercial music, Bruce Clarke (Clarke also worked in television set design, and later taught both the Birthday Party’s Mick Harvey and I’m Talking/Essendon Airport’s Robert Goodge). At the age of 22 Allen moved to London, where his career as a musical performer began in earnest.³⁵ He additionally became, in writer Ian Peel’s words, ‘a prolific tape-loop composer.’³⁶ Allen met Robert Wyatt and also Kevin Ayers, who convinced Allen he should abandon jazz for rock music by playing him records by the Yardbirds. Allen later told Richie Unterberger he was ‘really grateful’ to Ayers:

Because what he brought to me was the possibility to go out of rather a strict music and poetry that I was practicing, and show me a way that I could actually get involved in the rock scene, without really particularly changing what I was doing. And he encouraged me to do that. He was the prime mover in getting me to do that, I think. It was he and I that started Soft Machine.³⁷

Allen’s tenure in the band he and Ayers began with Wyatt was short, because he was banned from re-entering Britain from France by UK immigration authorities in 1967 – ‘ostensibly because I am by birth Australian’ (not usually a barrier at that time) ‘but actually because I was playing in a psychedelic band promoting hallucinogens. Stopped at Dover with the band, singled out and sent back to Paris with only my guitar.’³⁸ Not only did this halt Allen’s involvement in Soft Machine (his work with this brilliant band is captured on an often-reissued album of demos recorded by Giorgio Gomelsky, though Allen’s own song from the sessions, ‘Fred the Fish’, has disappeared), it also prevented him from fulfilling plans he had made with Paul McCartney to collaborate on tape loops.³⁹ He went on to lead numerous incarnations of his band Gong, and did not return to Australia until 1981. (As an aside, Soft Machine had several unusual Australian connections, the most interesting of which after Allen was the exceptional, enigmatic and unavoidably ‘centre stage’ drummer Phil Howard. Howard’s Australian origins were known to all around him, yet he seems to have made little impact in Australia itself before his British work. He replaced Wyatt in 1971 and played on half of Soft Machine’s fifth album before being fired. He has since disappeared.)

The correct mode of dress in Australia’s jazz and folk worlds was generally considered to involve a duffle coat; in Melbourne this might be accompanied by some item of red clothing – socks, for instance. The duffle coat in particular, however, seemed to become a symbol simply of slightly – one might say safely – transgressive youth. Take this complaining letter, for instance, published in Young Modern in June 1963:

DEAR EDITOR:

Last week at St. Clair dance, I saw a youth dressed in suit, collar and duffle coat try to enter. He was told to remove his coat, yet he was a regular, not a foreigner. To top this, two girls entered the dance wearing black stockings. Is St. Clair getting soft on girls and hard on boys?

DUFFLE COAT’S BROTHER, Adelaide.⁴⁰

‘Melbourne is most fortunate in having a number of excellent folk-singers within its city walls,’ mused Young Modern in April 1963; having just extended its distribution into the eastern states, the magazine was probably eager to emphasise its newly widened focus:⁴¹

These include Glen Thomasetti, Martyn Wyndham-Reade, Brian Mooney, Trevor Lucas, David Lumsden and Peter Laycock . . . These singers are to be heard on records, at concerts, and in particular in coffee lounges . . . For the coffee lounge is the stronghold of the Melbourne folk singer.⁴²

Thomasetti, a contributor to Australian Tradition, the Melbourne folk magazine co-edited by Wendy Lowenstein, subsequently took a different course: she became a brilliant novelist. Lowenstein herself became a historian (she is also the mother of film director Richard Lowenstein). The evocatively named Wyndham-Reade has already been mentioned; Lucas relocated to London in the mid 60s, where he became a member of Fairport Convention and the husband of Sandy Denny (a relationship her producer Joe Boyd has described as damaging to her work).⁴³ Lucas would produce the very FM-radio friendly (but highly political) bands Goanna and Redgum in the 80s. In 1970, Lucas told Go-Set:

I used to sing with a traditional jazz band in Melbourne. I was very young. I started playing guitar when I was 13 or 14. Then I got into folk music, playing and singing. I made a folk LP back in Australia . . . Australia is a very stimulating place to work in because of the middle-class oppression. It helps people to be a little more creative, it makes them fight that much harder, like in Ireland. You don’t get this so much in London.’⁴⁴

In a 1962 issue of the small magazine Jazz Notes, it was proclaimed that ‘Melbourne, whether you like it or not, IS the jazz centre of Australia and has been for the past 17 years or so’ (that is, since the end of the Second World War), though this statement was made in the context of the Australian Jazz Convention being held in Adelaide.⁴⁵ The greatest commercial success of the folk and jazz scenes in Melbourne – or anywhere else – at this time was not particularly class-conscious or even broadly challenging, however. Judith Cock,⁴⁶ a secretary at the Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, began singing in public, covering Bessie Smith songs with the University Jazz Band.⁴⁷ She’d been playing piano and dabbling in trad jazz since the early 60s.⁴⁸ Understandably, but to her regret, she changed her surname to Durham when she began making public performances. Three decades later she recalled her jazz days as a bit of a romp:

Jazz was so incredibly popular, there was a real cult movement in those days. Town halls were literally packed to the rafters every weekend with teenagers. It was crude entertainment in a way, but it had a real character of its own. It had its own fashion – corduroys, sloppy joes and desert boots. You’d knit yourself a jumper, using very big needles and a special stitch to end up with a fisherman’s rib. [You wore] very tight corduroys . . . as tight as you could stand, with the big jumper over them. Then you’d top it all off with a duffle coat!

The jazz shows were very uplifting and we’d stomp and cake-walk all over the joint. When they were over, everybody went off to a coffee lounge. You maybe had a beatnik boyfriend, and went off for coffee and a toasted cheese sandwich after the dance. It was the in thing to do.⁴⁹

The Seekers formed in 1962. Keith Potger and Athol Guy had both been in rock and roll bands in the late 1950s – the Trinamics and the Ramblers, respectively. When these broke up, the two of them, along with Ken Ray and Bruce Woodley, started a doo-wop group called the Escorts,⁵⁰ which evolved into the folk group the Seekers. The initial line-up fractured when Ray left the group to get married;⁵¹ unknowingly, Durham was debuting for the Seekers as Ray’s replacement when she performed at the Treble Clef.⁵² According to the account she gave official biographer Graham Simpson, she was asked to join the group in a very vague manner, so that her full membership was henceforth assumed by everyone but her. She continued to sing jazz as a solo artist after she had joined the band which would make her internationally famous, including a massively successful rendition of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ at Melbourne’s Myer Music Bowl.⁵³

In 1963 the Seekers (including Durham) signed to the W&G label, a recording concern operated by two families, the Whites and the Gillespies, with the redoubtable Ron Tudor as its A&R man and publicity director. Tudor, as it happened, offered to release a 7″ EP of Durham as a solo artist.⁵⁴ Durham, meanwhile, assumed that Seekers’ records would be credited to ‘Judith Durham and the Seekers’, but the paternalistic and single-minded Athol Guy opposed this⁵⁵ (his paternalism and single-mindedness would be useful to him later in the decade, when he became a conservative politician). Durham correctly saw the Seekers as daggy and herself ‘as very hip and a bit off-beat’ in a way that ‘didn’t fit with the image.’⁵⁶ The group recorded Introducing the Seekers for W&G, but were only mildly successful in Australia; it took a trip to the UK and a series of happy accidents to make them million-selling stars. Foremost among these accidents was their encounter with Dion O’Brien, better known as Tom Springfield of highly successful group the Springfields. O’Brien’s sister and bandmate, Dusty Springfield, claimed that the Springfields broke up when they saw ‘what was coming’⁵⁷ – that is, the Beatles. She was probably wrong about their own unsustainability in the mid 60s, though: the Seekers, for whom Tom Springfield then wrote a series of exceptional hit songs, were strong challengers to the Beatles, and Springfield herself as a solo artist was a marvel.

Young Modern uncovered more folk stars who would go on to great pop things; in early 1962, the magazine spotlighted a young family man from Para Hills,⁵⁸ in the city’s north-east, who by the end of the decade would be one of the country’s best-known pop producers:

One of the finest jazz voices in South Australia may be heard every Saturday night at the Boomerang Club coming from the vocal cords of Pat Aulton.

The visitors’ first impression of Pat is that he is a wild “rocker”, but give him his guitar, put him in a coffee lounge, and the true artist in him comes out.⁵⁹

Late the same year, Aulton won the Young Modern Songwriting Competition with song called ‘Our Love of Long Ago’. The magazine had a relationship with the local television program Woodies Teentime, and Aulton appeared on the show to receive his award.⁶⁰

YOUNG ELIZABETHANS

In the mid 1950s South Australia had been the site of a bold new experiment by the Playford government. The ‘new town’ of Elizabeth, constructed in a rural area north of Adelaide, was intended primarily as a domicile for immigrants from northern Europe who worked in manufacturing. Elizabeth is where later commercial pop/rock stars like Jimmy Barnes, his brother John Swan, Bernard ‘Doc’ Neeson, Doug Ashdown, Glenn Shorrock (who later reported that ‘the first electric guitar I ever saw was Doug Ashdown’s’),⁶¹ and other fine musicians such as Martin Armiger and Pip Proud were to begin the long process of honing their skills for the wider world.

Barnes became one of Australia’s best-loved singers as a member of Cold Chisel and later as a solo artist; John Swan (“Swanee”) had a successful solo career in the 80s; Neeson would be the singer in the Angels; Ashdown became a well-respected folk musician and singer-songwriter; Shorrock was first a teen idol as a member of the Twilights in the late 60s, and then in the 70s the voice of the international million-selling Little River Band; Armiger was a member of the Sports and later a writer, producer, and co-ordinator of soundtracks, while Proud was an innovator who enjoyed (or didn’t) a brief period of prominence in the late 60s and a revived career in the early 21st century. In short, this new town was a hotbed of talent and ambition.

Elizabeth had its own major venue, the Octagon, where in the late 60s the teenaged Barnes and Swan could thrill to such groups as the Masters Apprentices.⁶² Between Elizabeth and Adelaide proper lies Salisbury, and here the youth of the two cities could mix. Dances held there – sometimes under the name of the Matelot Club – attracted up to 700 people.⁶³ The young Doc Neeson booked shows there.⁶⁴ The readers of Young Modern first encountered Glenn Shorrock as part of Salisbury Youth Centre’s attraction the Twilights, who at this early stage were represented rather confusingly as a sub-set of another band, the Vectormen, because the three singers of the original Twilights performed in tandem with other groups. Shorrock had heard Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ while he was living in the Elder Park Hostel, and was a bodgie ‘from then on.’⁶⁵

It seems, from this angle, that Elizabeth and Salisbury were much more rock-oriented than Adelaide itself. In October 1962, an enthused reader yelled from Young Modern’s letters page:

Not many teenagers in Adelaide have heard of the dance at the Salisbury District Youth Centre. This is a well patronised dance, with attendance of over 500 . . . The resident band is the Vectormen who have a tremendous sound . . . They are from Elizabeth and have played at many local dances. Kevin Steele and Don Parsons are the two male vocalists and are backed [sic] by three terrific boys, the TWILIGHTS, Mike, Glen [sic] and Paddy, who have appeared on Seventeeners.⁶⁶

The Twilights went on to become one of the biggest Australian groups of the sixties, and recorded one of the decade’s best albums, Once Upon a Twilight. But Adelaide’s dance scene had many other stars too. Barry McAskill was the leader of Levi Smith’s Clefs (he was also, notably, arrested for leading a conga line from the Whiskey disco along Sydney’s William Street, causing a three-hour traffic jam).⁶⁷ He had ‘sung his way to the top’ in Adelaide in 1963; as well as being the ‘compere-vocalist’ of the TV show Teensville, he performed with his own group on Wednesday nights at the “Drifter’s Casual Club.”⁶⁸ Doug Ashdown, like many of his colleagues, was born in the UK. On arriving in Adelaide, he formed the Sapphires; he returned to the UK in the early 60s and joined a band called Rommel and the Desert Rats, then went back to Adelaide to play alongside Bobby Bright in the Beaumen (or Bowmen) until, at the end of 1964, he remade himself as a solo folk artist. ‘I was sort of the underground in Adelaide’, he claimed ten years later, writing songs about ‘heavy things like why is there air?’⁶⁹ The second half of the 60s would see him record and release excellent albums on a regular basis.

APRIL IN ADELAIDE, PATTI IN MAROUBRA

Adelaide, however vibrant, was a small city, and Ron Tremain was adamant that Young Modern, which at this time was still completely focused on Adelaide, was by and for its audience:

We couldn’t run a teenage magazine and keep the kids out, and, of course, we didn’t want to. They got in our chairs, tables, tea trays and hair, and we never knew whether it’d be some interstate name or Fred Nerk from Snake Gully who’d be sidling round the end of the counter.⁷⁰

So it was perhaps not surprising that in 1962, when a young girl from the Adelaide suburb of Tranmere – April Potts, soon to be known as April Byron – gave Johnny O’Keefe a song she had written, this in itself would be newsworthy to Young Modern. That she was then involved in some uproar within its pages is also unsurprising. Potts had shown O’Keefe the song, ‘He’s My Michael’, assuming he would somehow help her to record and release it. Instead, he ‘gave’ it to his protégé Laurel Lea, much to Potts’s displeasure. As Young Modern told its readers, ‘she was most adamant . . . “NOBODY BUT ME RECORDS MY SONG!”’⁷¹

It is difficult in hindsight to establish whether this was a beat-up; soon enough, ‘April Byron’ signed a contract with O’Keefe, and Sydney singer Kevin Todd recorded her song after it received ‘top treatment by one of Sydney’s leading arrangers’ and ‘the backing of one of the best bands.’⁷² Two years later she was being described as ‘Girl of the Moment’ in ‘Victoria and Melbourne’ when ‘Heart’ was released on the Leedon label;⁷³ her ‘Make the World Go Away’ was a minor hit the same year, and she later received some songs from the Bee Gees for a single. But despite her talent and charisma, she did not have a genuine hit record.

For Australia as a whole, the girl of the moment was Little Pattie, née Patricia Amphlett, from the southeastern suburbs of Sydney (Eastlakes, where the local beach is Maroubra). She was her school’s star pupil and aspired to a career as a neurosurgeon – something her parents were willing to support her in and which was clearly not beyond her – but was sidetracked by singing at a young age. She was not some kind of Gidget figure: she was originally nicknamed ‘Little Pattie’ by schoolfriends because she had two taller friends with the same name.⁷⁴ Winning a talent contest (‘because nobody else entered’, she said later⁷⁵) launched Amphlett on a pop career and she scored early with her exceptional ‘He’s My Blonde-Headed, Stompie Wompie, Real Gone Surfer Boy’, backed with ‘Stompin’ at Maroubra’. The record reached no. 2 late in 1963, and Amphlett was thrown into a pop tempest which took the unglamorous form of endless touring, often by train, with her manager Philip Jacobsen and his brother, Col Joye. It must have required enormous stamina to cope with being an intelligent teenager and yet routinely treated as ‘a bit of fairy floss.’⁷⁶ She has since claimed that one of the few times she was taken seriously was the night she spent with the Beatles in Sydney, celebrating Paul McCartney’s 22nd birthday at their hotel.⁷⁷ By the mid 60s she was doing panto – The Ugly Duckling, with Johnny O’Keefe⁷⁸ – but her career had not devolved into fluffy irrelevance. She also found herself literally on the front line, when she and Col Joye performed in Vietnam for Australian troops and were unwilling witnesses to the battle of Long Tan. This was not what politicised her, though; it was more the casual way in which she had been treated by the industry as a young girl in show business. She later lent her name and talents to left-wing causes and has become prominent in arts and entertainment union organisation.

OLD WAVE

Another surf music success story was the Atlantics, named not after the ocean (which doesn’t touch Australian shores) but after a briefly popular brand of fuel. The group members met on a bus travelling between a Sydney beach and their home suburb of Randwick in Sydney in the summer of 1960-61.⁷⁹ Their biggest and best-remembered hit was 1963’s ‘Bombora’, written by guitarist Jim Skiathitis and drummer Peter Hood before surf music had become big but released to capitalise on the craze. ‘Bombora’ sold half a million copies in twelve countries.⁸⁰ Sven Libaek, later known as a composer of remarkable film and television soundtracks, was an A&R man for CBS at the time and the group’s producer. Instrumental rock/pop in the surf music and/or ‘Shadows’ style enjoyed broad but brief popularity, but the Atlantics would move away from their instrumental base to back the established singer Johnny Rebb. They would never recapture their early success, though Peter Hood’s song ‘Come On’, released by the Atlantics in 1967, is an acknowledged classic. Guitarist/keyboard player Theo (Thaao) Penglis, guitarist and collector (perhaps metaphorically) of empty whiskey bottles⁸¹ would go from surf music to Hollywood success; he played Andre DiMera in the American television soap Days of Our Lives from 1981.

Instrumental groups everywhere could see the writing on the wall. The Mustangs, a popular Adelaide dance band, advertised for a singer in late 1965: ‘They had to catch up or fade away’,⁸² writes Jim Keays; he saw the group as ‘virtually from the old wave.’⁸³ Keays, who had arrived in Adelaide’s comfortable eastern suburbs from Scotland with his adoptive parents at the age of five,⁸⁴ joined the Mustangs and helped transform them into a different group, the Masters Apprentices. Whether he had a vision of what they would become is uncertain; what he was armed with was the memory of a genuine vision – an apparition – from his early adolescence, which had told him unequivocally that he would go on to lead the biggest band in Australia.⁸⁵

ROCK AND ROLL’S SENSIBLE PROFESSIONALS: THE JACOBSENS

Colin and Kevin Jacobsen, the sons of cabinet makers in a family of five, jumped on rock and roll at the appropriate time and, while it might have seemed in the early 60s that they offered a less interesting shadow version of the extravagant and rambling exploits of Johnny O’Keefe (of whom more later), they were without doubt the greater success story in the long term.

Both Jacobsens played in the jazz group the KJ Quintet in the late 1950s (Kevin on piano, Colin on guitar and vocals), then discovered that rock and roll was simply ‘country music with a backbeat’. Interviewed for the television show Talking Heads in 2006, Joye declared ‘I was in the right place at the right time.’⁸⁶

My brother started a band and they played for the local football club, weddings, and things like that. Then I came to sit in with them, and sing songs and play guitar. So Kevin Jacobsen became – he was KJ, so it was the KJ Quintet. But we had to get out of the name of KJ Quintet when we were booked to do a big show, because that sort of didn’t work. And we had to get a good name because all the names were Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, roll-off-the-tongue names. And Colin Jacobsen didn’t roll off the tongue. So we had a meeting with a clairvoyant lady and she came up with the name of Col Joye and the Joy Boys. We got into show business, I suppose, inadvertently in a way, because we were playing dances and weddings and cabarets and things like that. And one day Brian Henderson had Bandstand running, and he said, ‘I’ve been getting letters in about Col Joye and the Joy Boys, but I don’t know how to find them, but they tell me they’re pretty good.’ So from that we played other shows, and we were asked to record for Festival Records, and then we had a number one record.⁸⁷

Joye makes it sound easier than it probably was: the group had gone through a number of incarnations and unsuccessful records before ‘Bye Bye Baby’ made the top five in both Sydney and Melbourne midway through 1959. Joye would go on to become known as a gentle, reasonable, pleasant star – in sharp contrast to Johnny O’Keefe, with whom he would have considerable conflict.

In terms of drama, O’Keefe’s story is more compelling – he certainly hurt more people, including himself. But Joye and the Jacobsen management/recording/touring empire were a consistent presence on the Australian scene for decades.

ROCK AND ROLL’S IGNORANT, ARROGANT PIGS

An argument could be made that the most significant difference between folk, jazz, and rock and roll stars was the way they conducted themselves. Rock stars – with the possible exception of Johnny O’Keefe, who had to have a finger in every possible pie – had not yet begun to project themselves in an intellectual, social-commentary framework. Rockers like Dig Richards, who would not shine as a creative performer until the 70s and his Harlequin album, seemed to be cartoon characters, more Flintstonian than anything else. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if I have the evil eye on me,’ Richards joked to TV Week in 1961. Not only was his career at a standstill – echoes therein of Peter Sellers’s comedy record ‘I’m So Ashamed’ – but he was forever having car accidents (he was ‘branded “the worst teenage driver in show business”’) and made news for trivial clumsiness, such as when he hit his head in a swimming pool.⁸⁸ The early rock and roll singing stars, young and reckless, often played up to the goofy light the press shone on them.

Whatever the fascinations of his particular story, his (questionable) status as an innovator, and the undoubted talents of his backing musicians, Johnny O’Keefe’s real talent lay in self-promotion. This is a rare and important knack, but it does not necessarily make one’s recorded music legacy pleasant listening. The mid-80s telemovie Shout! The Story of Johnny O’Keefe presents the whole O’Keefe story in telling ways: O’Keefe, as played by Terry Serio, is bratty, cocksure, and always doing first in Australia what others had done a few years previously in the rest of the world. Curiously, in casting Serio as O’Keefe the show’s producers chose someone who was better looking and a much better singer than the man he was portraying, presumably on the grounds that, thirty years on, Australians expected more from their stars than the original could muster.

O’Keefe appears to have long held an urge to take centre stage; he appeared as an actor in amateur theatre in the early 1950s (a production of Death of a Salesman in 1952, for instance),⁸⁹ and he would later be a driving force behind a branch of the community group the Younger Set’s drama activities on behalf of the Spastic Centre.⁹⁰ He became associated with the controversial American promoter Lee Gordon, undermining Gordon’s assumption that only American acts would attract Australian crowds: O’Keefe went on to tour Australia with Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran in 1957; with Buddy Holly and the Crickets in 1958;⁹¹ and with Chuck Berry and Bobby Darin in 1959.⁹² In 1958, he facilitated the creation of the song ‘The Wild One’, arguably his longest lasting legacy (though he is also remembered for his boisterous version of ‘Shout’ as well as other hits). His contribution to ‘The Wild One’, on which he is credited as a co-writer, was the absurd, sexual line ‘Shake it till the meat comes off the bone’. Sydney DJ Tony Withers was also credited as a co-writer – purely as an incentive for him to play ‘The Wild One’ on his program on 2SM – which he naturally did.⁹³ Long after O’Keefe’s death, Iggy Pop would cover the song, having heard Albert Lee’s 1982 version while on David Bowie’s yacht, on a tape compiled by the painter George Underwood. The song was known in the USA as ‘Real Wild Child’; Lee’s version added, in brackets, ‘Wild One’. Pop would re-record it with the Melbourne group Jet in 2008 to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, and praised it for what he saw as its immutable value – its ‘tiny idea’ and ‘simple premise.’⁹⁴

O’Keefe worked with musicians of a high standard, but his records are generally dull. He knew his abilities lay elsewhere. In the early 60s, as he moved towards a damaging series of nervous breakdowns and prescription drug dependency, O’Keefe travelled throughout the United States to further his career while simultaneously making a statement about Australian talent and ability. ‘Anyone can see that Johnny O’Keefe is the king of Australian rock ’n’ roll,’ a TV Week reader calling him or herself ‘OK O’Keefe’ wrote in 1960. ‘He has more personality and is a better singer than pudgy-faced [New Zealander Johnny] Devlin will ever be.’⁹⁵ His ostentatious tastes were also a thrill for many: ‘Johnny doesn’t look sloppy like most rock ’n’ roll artists, either,’ cooed two of his biggest Adelaide fans, teenagers Kaye Stewart and Joan Kennett in Young Modern:

‘With that cute hairdo and sophisticated suits, he looks really SOPHISTICATED and SMOOTH.

‘Mmmm . . . did you know he bought a pair of 8-carat gold shoes worth £50?

‘Ohhhh . . . GORGEOUS!’⁹⁶

Part of his decadence, however, might also have been that he was rumoured to be ‘a pig socially,’ as a 1962 Young Modern piece put it.⁹⁷ Popular rock and roll singer Betty McQuade also called him an ‘ignorant, arrogant pig’.⁹⁸ His first wife, who suffered appallingly at his hands, described him as ‘horribly untidy,’ – probably one of the lesser of his unpleasant characteristics that she experienced.⁹⁹

Combining delusion with berserk optimism, O’Keefe constantly advertised his far-reaching plans; to a degree, rock and roll seemed as much his franchise as his career. He manufactured his own publicity.¹⁰⁰ When it was reported that he was Australia’s highest-paid entertainer, his answer: ‘Those reports are way out, man’, may have been a denial – or else a clever use of beat-speak.¹⁰¹ He planned an alcohol-free restaurant for teenagers in ‘down town’ Sydney.¹⁰² He put some old green gloves from the ABC prop room on John Hurley for Six O’Clock Rock, thus creating Jade Hurley.¹⁰³ The same show gave Noelene Batley to Australia: her song ‘Barefoot Boy’ was a hit.¹⁰⁴ Batley had won a talent quest at Ling Nam’s Chinese Restaurant in Sydney¹⁰⁵ and – according to one of its organisers, Festival A&R man Ken Taylor – was ‘a most docile and co-operative young artist, and one of the loveliest human beings that this industry has ever produced.’¹⁰⁶ She would go on to work in cabaret in Japan and the US.

Six O’Clock Rock began in 1959, and had a jazz element;¹⁰⁷ each instalment began with the Paddington Town Hall clock striking six,¹⁰⁸ and ended with O’Keefe and his manager Peter Page vomiting (off camera) from nerves and relief.¹⁰⁹ In Koch’s The Doubleman, for which the author no doubt drew on his experiences working at ABC, a show called Eight O’Clock Rock is the locus of a decadent, sexually exploitative and simmeringly gay party scene; O’Keefe’s environment was possibly less sophisticated and camp, but probably just as venal.¹¹⁰ ‘Before it erupted on our screens,’ remembers one viewer, the writer Denise Young, ‘parents and kids watched more or less the same movies and listened to more or less the same songs.’ The emergence of ‘the first oppositional show’, Six O’Clock Rock, saw the creation of a public rebel: ‘Johnny O’Keefe yawped our barbaric yawp.’¹¹¹

O’Keefe wanted to translate his yawp into American¹¹² by recrafting Six O’Clock Rock as ‘a big budget international show’ and pitching it to television stations in the US; TV Week reported O’Keefe saying ‘he has made negotiations with “certain people.”’¹¹³ He certainly thought big: ‘Biographies of O’Keefe and about 100,000 wallet-sized give-away photographs’ were, it was said, ‘distributed among America’s 4,000 radio stations’ during his promotional blitz there in early 1960. O’Keefe was promoted as ‘Boomerang Boy’,¹¹⁴ having obtained rudimentary skills in boomerang throwing from residents of the urban Aboriginal settlement of La Perouse, in Sydney’s south.¹¹⁵ He appeared on the TV show American Bandstand¹¹⁶ and also ‘sent 200 three-minute colour film clips to theatres and TV stations’; gave ‘boomerangs to every U.S. radio station’; and hired ‘rock and roll pioneer, Bill Haley, as his manager’. It was announced that ‘as a gimmick – he plans to stand on the ledge of the 80th floor of the Empire State Building and threaten to jump off, unless every New York disc jockey plays his records.’¹¹⁷ One sarcastic TV Week reader suggested that someone give him a push – to help him find ‘the only smash hit he will ever make.’¹¹⁸ Yet the last of these soundbite-style claims actually suggested a desperate and perhaps ailing man. In April 1960 he was reported to be suffering from nervous tension.¹¹⁹ There are conflicting reports of how many copies his American single “She’s My Baby,” on Liberty, sold: a few hundred, two thousand,¹²⁰ or a hundred thousand.¹²¹ He later claimed to have sold many records in New Orleans by pretending to be black¹²² (that is, he limited publication of his photograph in the media, thus keeping his whiteness a secret), and that the reason he was dumped by Liberty was because he’d been fraternising with black musicians¹²³ in that city. It is clear that the truth of these assertions is entirely secondary to the value they had in promoting Johnny O’Keefe.

A car accident outside the NSW town of Kempsey in June 1960 led to operations (reputedly, twenty-seven) to restore his face,¹²⁴ which he nevertheless stated was not important in a career sense.¹²⁵ Guitarist Johnny Greenan, and his wife Jan, were also injured in the accident; O’Keefe’s defence counsel tried to imply that Johnny Greenan had been driving O’Keefe’s Plymouth Belvedere. O’Keefe made his facial operations a feature of Six O’Clock Rock, inviting viewers to observe his changing visage over the months. His next album was called I’m Still Alive, and its cover showed the wreck O’Keefe and the Greenans had emerged from.

Later, pursuing his dreams of fame in Britain, O’Keefe found himself in a mental institution in Tooting Bec, having overdosed on his numerous prescription drugs (and others); on regaining consciousness O’Keefe, virtually a walking cliché by this time, told doctors he was Christ.¹²⁶ Returning to Sydney, he heard Martians’ voices in his head.¹²⁷ In 1961 he moved to commercial television with The Johnny O’Keefe Show;¹²⁸ a title that was later changed to Sing, Sing, Sing to downplay its identification with a figurehead who was often too unwell to compere. His frequent replacement – who had once told O’Keefe to ‘stick his show in his fucking arse’ when faced with a demand that he have his hair cut for television¹²⁹ – was the young Billy Thorpe, who would go on to much greater things.¹³⁰ By 1964 O’Keefe was described as ‘aggressive and abusive’ as a result of nervous breakdowns, drugs and possibly his car accident.¹³¹ He was given shock treatment,¹³² which exacerbated his paranoia and delusions. He nevertheless maintained his career for more than another decade, often as a nostalgia act. In 1977 he unveiled a commemorative grotto to Elvis Presley in Melbourne General Cemetery; by the following year, O’Keefe too was dead.

TEENAGE, MY FOOT! POP ON TV

O’Keefe was many things in one package, and a particularly prominent part of his identity for Australians was his role as a TV host. His overreaching self-promotion should not obscure the fact that, even by the standards of the time, his televisual style was very rough. This may have been why the teenagers thought he was, if not one of them, at least genuine and honest; in Australian society there can be two sides to being ‘a pig socially’. A letter writer to TV Week in March 1960, spoke damningly of Melbourne’s ‘so-called teenage shows’:

Teenage, my foot! They are all (‘Cool Cats’, ‘Teenage Hour’ and the revolting ‘HI Fi Club’) arranged, designed and compered by adults, who have barely an idea of what teenagers want in rock ’n’ roll. We, the teenagers, don’t want sponsors, commercials, prizes, competitions, clubs, elaborate sets and the stiff, unnatural little dolls trying to jive in shiny suits, well-oiled hair and ballerina dresses. We don’t want formality. We want these shows to slam on the entertainment, and slam it on good. But all we ever see is the occasional carefully rehearsed item inserted among a lot of trivial drivel. Sydney has the right idea in ‘Six O’Clock Rock’. You could not call it uncouth or unsuitable, it is good, clean fun for all kids, and it wastes no time with unnecessary talking. Melbourne tries to make up for its lack of talent with the sugary artificial jazz which is so unbearable. To think that the ‘Hi Fi Club’ is being transmitted all over Australia makes me shudder.¹³³

Hi-Fi Club was compered by Bert Newton, a DJ who was already well on his way to becoming one of Australia’s most beloved television personalities.¹³⁴ The show purported to offer ‘Modern music designed for moderns’. Col Joye and the Joye Boys were regular guests,¹³⁵ though Joye was generally critical of television as a medium; he told TV Week in 1960 that it did not give ‘local artists a “fair go”’. The magazine continued:

Col, who earns as much as the Prime Minister, Mr. Menzies, said television was his worst form of income . . . ‘I regard it only as a means of entertaining crippled children and other unfortunate people who normally are not able to see me perform.’¹³⁶

Joye later recalled:

There was no rehearsals, you just went on and sung your things. But in those days, we did things that no television station in the world would have attempted. We did outdoor shows and our equipment was pretty bad, pretty basic – even our recording equipment. But we got by.¹³⁷

Other shows abounded; the Australian incarnation of American Bandstand began as Accent on Youth and was then called TV Disk Jockey before becoming Bandstand in 1958.¹³⁸ The Allen Brothers – Peter Allen and Chris Bell, who were neither brothers nor truly surnamed Allen – were regulars on the show between 1960 and 1963¹³⁹ and – in a bizarre story often marveled at even today – went on to be managed by Judy Garland after they appeared in cabarets in Tokyo.¹⁴⁰ Bandstand, helmed by the straightlaced but apparently fun-loving Brian Henderson, who soon found his niche in a much longer career as a newsreader, seems to have been cosy and lacking in surprise.

Though its title seems strange from a post-1977 perspective, the November 1965 TV show The New Wave on Stage perfectly encapsulates the way popular rock music was performed and presented at this time. Presented at the Capitol Theatre in Perth, the show begins with Max Merritt and the Meteors, introduced as a New Zealand group, performing a jovial, jaunty ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’. The constant presence of a particular whistling noise in the audience response suggests that the enthusiastic crowd response heard on the soundtrack is actually a tape loop. Merritt’s Meteors also provide backing for the next song, Lynne Randell’s ‘It’s Alright’, which is almost impressive in its lyrical banality and repetitiveness; Randell performs careful, stilted dance moves, but the song is rousing. Jade Hurley’s ‘How I Lied’ is an impressively dramatic pop tune; Hurley collapses at his piano while introducing another song – the victim, we are told, of an old knee injury. Stepping in, Max Merritt and the Meteors present an invigorated ‘Hold On’. Ray Brown and the Whispers, a Leedon signing from Sydney and a successful chart act in 1965, then perform ‘Gloria’ and three more of their hits from that year, all covers. Brown, like Randell, periodically waves to certain audience members; by this portion of the show the audience, having been provided with streamers and large balloons, are rambunctious. While it might be safe to assume that the show was sanitised and streamlined for the sake of a televisual hour, it nevertheless demonstrates the raw abilities and focused showmanship of Australian pop/rock musicians in the mid 60s.

INDIGENOUS VS. LOCAL

The rise of Aboriginal singer Jimmy Little as a country and western balladeer in the early 60s is one of those exceptions that proves a rule. There were few Aboriginals in the mainstream media then – as now – and with all due respect to Little and his considerable abilities, it could certainly be argued that he served white Australian prejudice as, through no fault of his own, he became the one well-known Aboriginal pop singer. His popularity allowed the majority of Australians to rest assured that they were not as racist as was sometimes declared. This, of course, was hardly Little’s problem, much less his doing. His biggest hit was ‘Royal Telephone’, a glib country and western ballad which would be remembered by no-one if Little had not sung it. His rise to fame came at the same time the Bulletin, Australia’s pre-eminent weekly journal, controversially dropped its banner slogan ‘Australia for the White Man’ (although it is worth noting that its use of this phrase was historically more complicated – tangled up with the issue of exploitation of imported non-white labour – than it seems at first glance).

Jimmy Little saw himself as a peacemaking example:

I had a freedom that excluded me from being prejudiced against. Because I was non-threatening. I was an ally of everybody. Wanting to be an interpreter, a communicator and a person who can explain situations. I didn’t want to jeopardise that by saying, I belong to this [ethnic and/or political] group.

I felt that if they can break the egg that I’m in then they can destroy me if they like, you know. What I was doing, I was promoting Aboriginal Australia. Promoting to the hilt.¹⁴¹

He praised his fellow Australian performers – the vast majority of whom were non-indigenous – as versatile and necessarily able: ‘Countries like the USA have such a wide circuit that many entertainers can use the same routine for years and build up a big reputation for themselves,’ he reasoned. ‘In Australia entertainers have to vary their method of presentation, their songs and even their dress regularly. This means that artists out here are more original in their routines.’¹⁴²

Australian consumers occasionally agreed with this broad assessment. Less than a year before Little’s claim, three Australian singles had taken up the top three positions in Melbourne’s top forty: Col Joye’s “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”, Lonnie Lee’s “I Found a New Love” and O’Keefe’s “Come On and Take My Hand.”¹⁴³ While student journalists complained that record sales might only reflect sales of 400 copies in key ‘record bars’ (so that ‘shop girls and office tea boys . . . are determining what the rest of the population is hearing all day’),¹⁴⁴ it does indicate a certain grass-roots interest in, and support for, local artists.

Australia was to America as New Zealand was to Australia: when rocker Max Merritt relocated to Sydney in November 1963¹⁴⁵ – one stage in a journey that would eventually take him on to London in the 70s and later, to the USA – he felt like a ‘veteran of music and show business. I had been doing it about two years when I got to Sydney.’ Yet Australia made him feel like ‘a grain of salt in the bottom of a bucket. It seemed so huge after living in Christchurch and Auckland.’¹⁴⁶

Australia itself was gradually becoming more accessible and networked. In 1964, groovy Oz magazine entrepreneurs and enfants terribles Richard Neville and Martin Sharp were generating publicity and flying around the country visiting universities to raise money towards court costs resulting from an obscenity prosecution (discussed further in chapter 4).¹⁴⁷ At the same time, novel ways were being found to cross great distances economically: a 22-year-old javelin thrower named Reg Spiers illicitly flew from London to Perth in a C.O.D. crate marked ‘synthetic polymer emulsion’, then hitched home to Adelaide.¹⁴⁸

References to the USA – and comparisons between the talent and ability of Australian and American performers – were evidently a constant. In a nation supposedly dominated by the cultural cringe, the public pronouncements were very often on Australia’s side, even if it only took the form of Mouseketeer Cheryl Holdridge’s reputed declaration in 1960 that she was ‘in love with’ local pop singer Lucky Starr.¹⁴⁹ The American success of Melbournite Diana Trask was a matter of fascination for the celebrity magazines. Trask, who was reported glibly opining that ‘all young Australian artists should go to America if they want to get on’,¹⁵⁰ was represented by TV Week as living out a kind of tawdry show-business life in which she was ‘constantly surrounded by the wealthiest stage-door Johnnies in America’, playing places like Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe,¹⁵¹ and starring on TV shows like Sing Along with Mitch. TV Week’s breathless accounts made even the ‘minor virus’ Trask caught during a ‘Mexican engagement’ seem glamorous.¹⁵²

It is important to note, however, that the Australian acts mentioned above saw America largely in terms of their own ambition – as a place where they could show a wider audience what they could do. TV Week mused in 1961 that the USA was the Australian artist’s ‘land of failure,’¹⁵³ stage-door Johnnies or no. However, the cultural cringe rhetoric that is supposed to have been so ubiquitous at this time is far less evident when Australians were talking about Britain or the US than might have been assumed. If Australian audiences were in thrall to international artists, they were – and are – just as likely to turn against them, or at the very least consider them ripe for parody.

Rolf Harris and Frank Ifield were both enormously successful in Britain (and Canada) by the early 60s. Harris had no particular performance background in Perth, where he had been born and raised; he had relocated to Britain in the early 1950s to pursue an art career and became an entertainer, recording a series of comedy pop hits produced by George Martin. His musical successes were executed in tandem with a growing reputation as a popular children’s television performer.

Ifield had three million-selling hits around the world in the early 60s. The son of an inventor, he grew up in the New South Wales town of Dural, where he subsequently claimed that he discovered yodelling to the family cow (Betsy) resulted in a higher milk yield.¹⁵⁴ He would later credit the country and western music he heard on Sydney radio, along with the discovery of his own singing voice as a companion on his three-mile walk to school, as his most critical musical impetus. His first concert performance was at the Dural Memorial Hall. Like Harris, however, he had ambitions to become a visual artist; musical entertaining seemed to simply carry him along in its wake. His singing career, which had already been fostered by radio, really took off in 1956 when television was introduced to Australia at the time of the Melbourne Olympics. Ifield was soon a star on a program called Campfire Favourites. The sleevenotes to his early 60s Greatest Hits proclaim that it was ‘the challenge of tackling and conquering a new audience which drove him to leave Australia, where as a top-line entertainer his future was secure.’¹⁵⁵ Decamping for Britain in late 1959, he released his iconic and best-remembered single, the breezy ‘I Remember You’ (top ten in America, Britain and elsewhere) followed by ‘Lovesick Blues’ and ‘The Wayward Wind’. Unlike Harris, Ifield rarely made much of his Australianness, beyond the rather unusual insinuation that yodelling was an appropriately rural activity, such as might be practiced by a young man from the rugged outback (although it isn’t). Rubbish like ‘She Taught Me How to Yodel’ attempted to capitalise on this fiction; his speedy, syncopated reading of the early-20th-century ‘unofficial national anthem’ of Australia, ‘Waltzing Matilda’, was a stab at another aspect of his legend. His own songwriting – for instance, his single ‘I Listen to My Heart’ – was of the same standard as the songs procured for him.

1964 saw many Australians fall in line with the rest of the world’s adulation of the Beatles. Jan Smith’s novel An Ornament of Grace, published in 1966 but written two years earlier, is a stunningly cruel novel about a populist journalist in Sydney. Here she describes an unnamed group who are plainly the Beatles on what would prove to be their only collective visit to Australia. She depicts ‘a bright, hot room with flushed faces and wet feet, trying to think of something no one else will ask and knowing it’s impossible.’¹⁵⁶:

“Don’t tell me they wrote that song themselves?”

“Did you see what they did at the airport?”

“Ask them about the film and how much money they’re getting.”

Everybody will, if someone else doesn’t get in first. At least the television people have gone, so we’re spared one misery, listening to those cute bastard-American idiots in their cute suits asking about their sex lives and making ten minutes stretch into twenty . . . Already it’s started, the big fish like Heath and Sarah zooming in with how much money are you making and what do you think of Australia? Tell us we’re as loud and noisy and appreciative as people anywhere else, or better. There’s nothing worse than being different.¹⁵⁷

Smith’s cynical assessment of the Beatles and Australia was not unusual at the time. Oz reported that the Beatles’ Sydney shows were underattended, and in the initial burst of their fame the group were regarded by many in Australia (as elsewhere) as manufactured and/or exploitative commercial rubbish. Col Joye said of the group many years later that ‘I didn’t like them much ‘cause they cut the legs from underneath me, and O’Keefe as well,’¹⁵⁸ though – as previously stated – Joye has nevertheless enjoyed an impressive fifty-year career.

The Beatles’ 1964 tour of Australia, while inspirational for many, drew scorn from young and old fogeys alike (above: Oz 9, May 1964; below: Nation, May 14, 1964).

Although the impact of the Beatles in Australia would turn out to be considerable, it is simplistic to suggest that they pressed a ‘reset’ button for Australian pop and rock music. The country already had many stars, and more were emerging.

BILLY THORPE SCREWS HIS HEAD OFF

Billy Thorpe was virtually born into show business, and he would make much of his early 60s experiences. Thorpe grew up in Brisbane – he had first appeared on children’s TV in that city in 1957, when he was 11 years old.¹⁵⁹ He had been friends there with two Barrys: Gibb and Lyde (the latter later became known as guitar player and producer Lobby Loyde).¹⁶⁰ Thorpe sometimes performed under the name Little Rock Allen¹⁶¹ and had worked with his idols¹⁶² O’Keefe and Joye as part of a show known as the Rockin’ Roll Train, travelling to and playing regional areas on a train.¹⁶³

Thorpe moved to Sydney to further his career. In the first of two sensationalist memoirs he wrote in the 1990s, he reminisces:

With all the amazing surf beaches in and around Sydney, surf music and dances, known as ‘stomps’, were huge. Surf clubs all over Australia, and particularly those around Sydney, were havens for live music and bands. Some of the local surf groups, such as Roland Storm and the Statesmen, had big local followings on this circuit.¹⁶⁴

Roland Storm and the Statesmen featured Billy Green, who will be a name to contend with throughout the next fifteen years of this narrative; he is discussed further at the end of this chapter. Another impressive local group was Ray Brown and the Whispers, a Sydney group who released five successful singles and no less than three albums in 1965.

In the early 70s, talking with Lee Dillow from Daily Planet, Thorpe was effusive about the early 60s:

I was really digging Surf City, consequently I was there quite a bit. One night a band came in. They were playing there, it was Vince Melouney, John Watson, Col Baigent and another couple of guys . . . The Aztecs.

The Aztecs had started out as an instrumental group called the Vibratones; they had a recording agreement with a label known as Linda Lee (there was clearly something about this kind of alliterative name in the early 60s: Lonnie Lee and Laurel Lea were stars during this period, and it might even have had an impact on Barry Lyde’s decision to become Lobby Loyde). The Aztecs’ manager John Harrigan operated Surf City and another venues such as Stomp City and the Beach House. Writing in 1996 of his first – unrehearsed – show with the Aztecs backing him, Thorpe described it as a synergistic success that marked a new chapter in the development of rock: ‘the unstoppable rolling excitement of something new.’¹⁶⁵ Thorpe told Dillow:

They didn’t have a singer at that stage so Harrigan informed them that if we could get together he could probably record us . . . We put down a thing called ‘Blue Day’. It was shithouse, but it got to about No. 10 in Sydney. A funny buzz.¹⁶⁶

Second guitarist Tony Barber had joined the new group around the same time as Thorpe, and had written ‘Blue Day’; by 1996 Thorpe had revised his opinion of the song to ‘a great first record’.¹⁶⁷ Through its relationship with the distributor/label Festival, the new group including Thorpe was able to record at the larger company’s studio.¹⁶⁸

Later, while Harrigan was on an overseas trip, his mother signed the group to Alberts. Though this publishing house-cum-production company was later to prove very important to Australian music, Alberts were not yet a label in their own right and – not to put too fine a point on it – the Aztecs were no Missing Links (though they did have much greater commercial success). Thorpe continues the story: since ‘Blue Day’ had been a ‘moderate success’,

we recorded again. This time it was “Poison Ivy”. I don’t know to this day what happened. One week we were virtually unknown – the next week we were being chased down the street . . . I was only 16, you dig, and there I was, meeting all these incredible people, travelling around the country. Staying in the best hotels, drinking booze, screwing my head off.¹⁶⁹

Barber was a creditable songwriter, but Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs’ biggest early hits were pedestrian covers, the unsurprising ‘Poison Ivy’, ‘Mashed Potato’ and, most dismally from an artistic perspective, the string-laden horror that was their ‘Over the Rainbow’. ‘Sick and Tired’, however, is a good demonstration of the group’s dynamism. Though they were based in Sydney, they were also exceptionally popular in both Melbourne and Perth.¹⁷⁰ The group released its first album on Parlophone in 1965; it did not contain any originals.¹⁷¹ There were strains, as Thorpe told Dillow: ‘At the time we were all young kids. There was so much stress and we were so important in the business. So many offers being made to us individually – I guess that’s what happened.’¹⁷²

Tony Barber was the first to quit the Aztecs because, he told Dean Mittelhauser twenty years later, ‘It got tedious . . . We met people that we’d never meet again, and had to be on our best behaviour . . . ALWAYS! Nicely dressed because in those days all the bands were smartly dressed.’¹⁷³ Barber’s subsequent solo career was patchy, but nevertheless artistically greater than Thorpe’s in the same period. Thorpe, who died in 2007, is held in high regard in the early 21st century because of his work in the late 60s and early 70s, when he reinvented himself for the alternative festival circuit; in his earlier days he was little more than an eager performer and, not unrelatedly, a sexual colossus, if his memoirs are to be believed.

Other stars comparable to Thorpe began to emerge. Normie Rowe was a trainee telephone technician who sang on the Melbourne dance circuit, usually with the band the Thunderbirds. 3KZ DJ Stan Rofe encouraged him to go professional.

He said, “Do you have any aspirations of being a singer?” And I didn’t know what an aspiration was. He explained it to me, invited me off to some of the bigger dances in Melbourne. I met some of my idols. And then I started working in these places, and it gave me the background. From the dances, people saw me and invited me to appear on shows like The Go Show and Teen Scene.174

Rowe’s early hits, like Thorpe’s, were often notionally updated versions of old chestnuts such as ‘Que Sera Sera’ or ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ – great records, but hardly creative milestones. Rowe’s career, like Col Joye’s, would become that of a performer in a light entertainment/cabaret style; Rowe’s was arguably ruined by his own Vietnam experience – mirroring Elvis Presley, he was required to be a member of the armed forces. As will be seen in later chapters, Johnny Young would have a major impact, as the writer of what was far and away Rowe’s best song, ‘Hello’ (not a huge hit, for the usual inexplicable reasons), and of a truly masterful song about Rowe – ‘Smiley’, sung by Ronnie Burns. Rowe would also give the world, via his transformed backing band the Playboys, one of the great and (relatively) unsung experimental pop groups of the late 60s, Procession.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS

Much is made of the British or other overseas origins of Australian pop stars of the 1960s, particularly in non-Australian accounts. This connection between migrant status and success as an entertainer is easily explained by reviewing the biographies of popular performers from all over the world: the ability and willingness to entertain is a valuable skill for any child whose family is new in a neighbourhood, and particularly for those who regularly move around. Families whose parents are in the military, or the public service, and so on have a high proportion of children with the skill to entertain. The mobility of the Gibb family is almost certainly the formative element of the Bee Gees’ success, for instance. The country of birth of an Australian pop star is no indication of anything; the fact that they were migrants at a young age was in many cases the impetus that drove them to be entertainers.

Consider, for instance, a major talent like Wilhelmus Arnoldus Maria Francis Groenewegen. Though fondly remembered in some quarters, he left Australia for the USA in the mid 1970s – and left rock for jazz soon afterwards. As a result, his contribution to Australian pop music has been marginalised in the collective memory. He had moved from the Netherlands to the regional NSW town of Orange in the late 1950s with his three brothers, three sisters and widowed mother, and picked up a guitar at the age of 14. Through his job as a chemist’s delivery boy, he was able to buy an acoustic Nightingale Jackaroo from a pawn shop; ‘it had a stencil of a Jackaroo,’ he recalls, ‘with a hat with corks – he was sitting against a tree with a billy boiling.’ Soon, Groenewegen was playing top-forty songs by ear.

After the family moved to Sydney’s north shore, Groenewegen began to play Friday night dances in the suburb of Brookvale with Bix Bryant and the Raiders. The group was evidently a hoot; he recalls a prank they played, pretending the house they lived in was haunted, that was written up in the Sunday papers and made them famous to the extent that tourists would pass by to stare at it.

Groenewegen’s bands morphed from Roland Storm and the Statesmen, mentioned above as playing at Surf City, to the Epics and the Questions; he saw Doug Parkinson play at a talent quest and ‘blow everybody’s mind’. The creative relationship between Groenewegen – who would soon go by the name Billy Green, for commercial reasons – and the powerful singer Parkinson will be outlined in chapter 4.

Joe Camilleri’s early musical experiments are similarly interesting, both because Camilleri would later become a major star in Australia with Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons and subsequently the Black Sorrows, but also because his experiences, like Groenewegen’s, show that rock and pop music was a good way for a recent immigrant to become socially accepted. Camilleri was born in Malta in 1948; his family came to Australia when he was two.¹⁷⁵ His early life in music reads like a script for a poignant film:

Rock & roll singing was always what I wanted to do, even when I was very young. Our family didn’t have a gramophone but this lady down the road did, and we’d go down to her place and listen to the rock & roll records and then get out on the median strip . . . and sing to the cars.¹⁷⁶

Camilleri started playing music in 1964:

I bought a bass guitar from Suttons, a white Fender bass. I was working at Australian Motor Industries, getting parts for cars, and I started to take lessons in bass guitar. You always start with your friends. I was going out with fellow countrymen – all Maltese – and a guy had bought a beautiful set of drums, all sparkly, red and white, and I got the white bass. It was all colour and movement. So we just tried to play – all very unusual stuff, very weird.

The band was called the Drollies: ‘Remember how we used to have little troll dolls on our pencils and they used to dangle off the F.J.s? They were the days, squire, I tell you.’¹⁷⁷

We finally got seven songs together . . . we were the worst band in the world for all time . . . We were on first, supporting the Wild Colonials, Normie Rowe, Spinning Wheels, Lyn Randell, Bobby and Laurie and the Rondells and a band called the King Bees which I finally joined . . . It really would have been great if it had been 1971 or 1972. I reckon we sounded like Captain Beefheart doing Little Richard songs, which is fantastic. I had a tambourine. I had all the movements . . . We got things made, we all had blue suits with purple lining, it was just ridiculous – all for this one job. The band broke up after the job because we were so awful.¹⁷⁸

Before and after Beatlemania, there were hundreds of groups around the country like the Drollies. Some were closer to getting a bite of the cherry than others, and the process of success and failure owed far more to chance than it did to ability, of course: John Finlay, manager of Channel Nine’s talent booking subsidiary Southern Talent Services, told Young Modern seven big names to watch out for in 1964. These included Johnny Ioannou, a Greek singer ‘not long in this country’; Tina Lawton, a folk singer; Toni Hendry and Janice Kaye; the Folk Three; and the Del Rios.¹⁷⁹ None of these acts made any great impact; neither did the Four Tones, whose ‘Tennessee Stomp’ was issued on Young Modern’s own record label. This was similar in concept to the label started by Everybody’s magazine in Sydney, though it predated it; the YM label was only distributed in Adelaide.¹⁸⁰

FRESH, ORIGINAL, DYNAMIC AND DEFUNCT

In 1964 Young Modern was trumpeting itself as ‘a fresh, original and dynamic magazine for youth – the teens AND twenties – who are the spearhead of our nation.’¹⁸¹ It announced its transition from fortnightly to weekly production in what appears to have been its final issue, in mid 1965.¹⁸² With hindsight, this was clearly the passing of a great institution. Had it survived a little longer it surely would have provided a valuable ongoing account of the rise of the many talented Adelaide and other Australian musicians of the late 60s. Along with the increasingly exciting local scene, Beatlemania – which Young Modern was belatedly beginning to notice –would probably have sustained it for years; the magazine’s publisher Ron Tremain was instrumental in bringing the Beatles to Adelaide. Adelaideans had been lucky in the early 60s, whether they realised it or not (some, like John Dowler, obviously did); they’d had their own magazine, which spoke directly to them on a number of important issues.

It may seem a banal generalisation, but it is no less true for that: the 1960s were a time of enormous change for pop music and youth culture. Any objective observer at the time, lacking our hindsight, would surely have been convinced that rock and roll – that primitive, slightly silly and slapdash form – was a fad that would pass, albeit too slowly, and the serious and deep popular music of the 60s would be based in folk and jazz. There might even be some who still feel this was the case.

The evidence assembled in this chapter shows that, even at this early stage in modern rock/pop music, Australian artists were not passive recipients of international sounds, and did not necessarily merely fabricate local versions of the work of artists from the northern hemisphere (that is, from Britain or North America). The ‘indigenous’ (Anglo working-class) element in folk music, the experimental aspects of jazz, the locally relevant aspect of surf music – these and other strains of popular music were all at work on local pop and rock and roll. Few Australians would have demanded only to hear local artists play local music, but equally few Australians would have denied the ability of Australian artists to entertain their own people. By various means, new bands and artists would come forth in the second half of the sixties to express youth and social issues, either directly and overtly, or simply in radical sounds and styles. As the Seekers, Frank Ifield and Rolf Harris had already done, some of them would go on to make a mark on the wider world; others would make their biggest mark in Australia itself.

From The Legend: The Illustrated Story of the Bee Gees, written by David English and illustrated by Alex Brychta, ©1979 The Legend Company.