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4 We Weren’t Exactly Keeping a Low Profile

THE MISSING LINKS

The Missing Links were an anomaly for their time: they were a band – two bands, actually – that functioned as an umbrella for a range of outstanding, fiery, reckless free spirits who rapidly, yet apparently artlessly, bashed out a very fine recorded legacy. They were not typical of their day, but they were exactly the kind of band that had to exist at a time when Australians were grappling with that question of what the strengths of Australian music could be.

The idea of ‘Missing Links’ was a knowing nod to the popular perception of long-haired youth and primitive behaviour, something anyone could get. There was also a particularly Australian aspect to the name, if one wanted to make a crass analogy with Aboriginal people who were so often criticised as being primitive throwbacks and a quickly perishing connection to the past – though the Missing Links themselves did not make this comparison and, in fairness to them, were obviously claiming to be the links in question. Strangely though, the art department at Phonogram, for whom the Links made their one and only album, saw a historical Australian connection: the LP cover depicted the group shackled to an enormous ball and chain. a reference to convictism. Their final, posthumous EP kept an aspect of this metaphor going; its title was Unchained.

The Missing Links concept – essentially, loud and frantic R&B – was so strong that it survived a complete line-up change (all the more unusual because there was no strong manager figure in their orbit, eager to rationalize such changes for the purpose of retaining a commercially vibrant brand). A Sydney group, the Missing Links were important in the early to mid 1960s music scene for their vibrancy and their extreme outlook.

R&B was becoming a passion for a minority of young men around Australia; they included Keith Glass, Ross Wilson, Gulliver Smith and Kerryn Tolhurst in Melbourne, and Matt Taylor and Lobby Loyde in Brisbane, all of whom would be notable in the scene for decades. Most of these devotees began as enthusiastic magpies, and Peter Anson was no different. Anson’s father had introduced him to jazz, and he’d been listening to it from an early age: ’I collected books about it, and records. All those books mentioned the origins of jazz in early black music.’¹ More extraordinarily. in a time of institutionalized racism, he was a beneficiary of the US government’s generosity in spreading the blues message:

There was a record shop in Sydney called Edels. They had Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee, Lightnin’ Hopkins. Then I found out, through a bass player I knew, about Alan Lomax’s blues recordings put out by the Library of Congress. We didn’t know where we’d find these records and he said, ‘Why don’t we try the American embassy?’ Off we went. And they said, ‘Oh, we’ve got all these recordings – you can take ’em home and have a listen.’

This was only part of the Missing Links’ inspiration, though. Anson claims to have been more directly motivated by Ray Hoff, a Sydney musician who, with his group the Off Beats, was a regular live favourite in the early sixties. Hoff later relocated to Perth, where most of his recording was done and where he was a strong favourite of another 60s icon, Johnny Young. Perth had a blues scene that filled some with awe; it offered, as one commentator put it, ‘escape from the convention-ridden and practical-minded world of today . . . a dark, eerie sort of a world.² For Anson, Hoff was ‘the Sinatra of the blues in this country, and I could get to see him regularly; he was one of the guys I used to talk to.’

I don’t know where he got his stuff, but he knew all about the blues – and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, too. He used to do a solo gig with just an electric guitar at a folk club in Kings Cross. He was featured there, and live he meant more to me than those early Stones things.

Still, Anson’s wish to avoid a day job was probably the strongest motivating force in the creation of the group in early 1964. His brother, Cliff, was working as a roadie for Billy Thorpe:

He said, ‘These guys are making a bit of dough – why don’t you get a band together, play some tunes, get something going, I can get you some work.’

So I put an ad in the Herald for musicians, and various people turned up. Then, through contacts my brother had, we got auditioned around the place . . . I gave up my job as a public-service clerk. It was 1970 the next time I had a day job.

Coincidentally, many of the Missing Links came from northern New South Wales, specifically the Port Macquarie area. Guitarist (and later well-known Sydney recording engineer) Dave Boyne was one of them, Ronnie Peel was another. Peel had learnt piano from an ‘old time piano teacher who’d been a bit of a gay girl in her time and knew all about boogie’.³ One day, Peel saw a new kind of ‘big long guitar’ on TV and ‘it fucking freaked me right out’; he discovered it was a bass. Acquiring one, he played it in a group called the Mystics which, like Port Macquarie itself, featured a few future Missing Links. They played surf music at what were known as Sound Lounges – discotheques with live bands, often operated by Ivan Dayman – some in Sydney suburbs like Dee Why and Parramatta. Peel met a young man with ‘the longest hair I’d ever seen in my life’: this was Anson. Another core early member was singer Bob Brady, from all reports a perspicacious character. After initially considering the name Fang, the new group became the Missing Links.

Anson remembers the group taking off quickly, though he is equivocal about their level of success. ‘There was a bit of screaming from the audience – it was part of the thing to scream, wasn’t it? They’d just scream for the sake of it. Sometimes you couldn’t hear yourself too well.’ As Mike Rudd explains more fully in the next chapter, Anson says this meant less than it might seem because of the minimal power of rock equipment at the time: ‘The biggest amplifier was about 30 watts!’

The Missing Links were then living in the middle ring suburb of Top Ryde, sharing a flat with two brothers whose parents were their landlords. This was an advantage, because the group’s ‘wild’ appearance might have counted against them when it came to mundanities like finding a place to live. Anson says the flat had another advantage: it was ‘in the middle of a shopping centre. At night, you could make all the noise you wanted.’

The group had a lot of work. ‘My dad knew the entertainment director for Miller’s Pubs, so we got work on that circuit,’ says Anson. They were also associated with John Harrigan’s agency (see chapter 2) and played at his venues. They had some high profile engagements, such as playing at a benefit for Oz magazine in November 1964; its editors were being prosecuted for a satirical cartoon by Martin Sharp about a yob’s night out. An engagement that fell through perhaps brought them more kudos than it would if it had gone ahead: the promoter of the Rolling Stones’ 1964 tour, Harry M. Miller, threw them off the bill of the Sydney show, reputedly because they looked too scruffy. This would be enough in itself to earn them a badge of honour, but the legend has further developed that the Missing Links were dropped because they presented too much competition to the Stones in terms of their wild and rugged sound: they blew the Stones off the stage.

I didn’t make a brilliant living, but I certainly managed to pay my rent. If you look at the top ten and top forty of that time, there was a lot of Australian stuff on the charts. A hell of a lot more than there is now. And we got plenty of gigs – just local dances, sound lounges, but they were all paid . . . We didn’t end up playing much blues, though we always featured a couple of Leadbelly songs in the stage repertoire. We always did ‘Midnight Special.’

Suzie Wong’s was a Sydney club that served as the hub of the blues-rock scene in the mid 60s. Anson remembers it as a great place:

Once we started working there, we were meeting other musicians – there was music seven nights a week. It was a meeting place for people who’d go hang out there in the daytime. And we’d be working there at night. It was a trad-jazz place originally, and then slowly it changed over. It had a fabulous atmosphere. It was underground, downstairs, in an arcade. You went down and there was a bar, and a dance floor; it probably held a hundred people.

The guy that owned Suzie Wong’s, Jim Harris, was Greek. I think they had a Chinese cook – but he only cooked spaghetti!

The Missing Links recorded one single for Alberts (via the Harrigan connection). ‘I don’t think we were trying to do anything much,’ says Anson of the recording session for the single.

Alberts was trying to start up a stable of recording people. They signed us and when the time came to record they suggested we do some originals. So we sat down and wrote those songs. Not because we wanted to write songs . . . but we had a recording contract and we were expected to do it! I didn’t have much vision at that stage.

It was the only record the first Missing Links made, a tuneful Anson composition called ‘We 2 Should Live.’ It was released in early 1965 on Parlophone, which had a special relationship with Alberts’ music publishing company; the two companies were a couple of months away from hitting gold with the Easybeats. In the Missing Links, however, Alberts were confronted with a group who, whatever they did have, certainly had no sense of a collective direction. Anson, sick of being forced to play Beatles covers (presumably by svengalis like Harrigan), had ideas for a new group; he eased himself out of the Missing Links soon after the release of ‘We 2 Should Live’. He was soon a core member of Jeff St John and the Id, having ‘met the guys who ended up being the Id hanging out’ at Suzie Wong’s during the day. ‘I’d left the Links and was hanging around the scene. I met these guys who said “Yeah, we want to form a blues band.”’

Andy Anderson remembers Anson as ‘a purist, an original – I liked him a lot. Pete Anson loved R&B, jazz, blues . . .’ Anderson was known in his Missing Link days as Andy James (the name change came about, he says, because he ran away from home in New Zealand in 1965 at the age of 16, and didn’t want his parents to find him); he came to the Missing Links via an ad in the paper placed by guitarist John Jones.

Anderson joined the Missing Links in mid 1965. By this stage it was not so much a group in flux, more a name looking for some people to embody it. The one connection between the later Links and the earlier one was Jones, who replaced Anson shortly before the end of the original band’s life. Anderson had filled in once for original drummer Danny Cox, and believes that ‘they were on the verge of breaking up when I first saw them – I helped to patch things as a drummer, but then they broke completely. I remember backing Bob Brady [in a solo performance]; he kicked someone in the head at Bankstown, which caused a huge ruckus. I thought we’d never get out of there alive. He was a hard boy. Very hard boy.’

Once the new Links were under way, the original group made themselves scarce, says Anderson. Over a few months in mid 1965 the entire line-up was replaced.

Doug Ford was born in Casino, NSW (not far from Port Macquarie) and came to Sydney to attend the Radio and Television School, where he was hassled and eventually dismissed from his apprenticeship because of his long hair. John Jones approached him and ‘said they were reforming the Missing Links.’⁴ (In 1970, Ford claimed to have spent six months of 1965 at the Conservatorium of Music where he was ‘taught basic jazz’ in 1965 before he joined the Missing Links.)⁵ Ford recalls that the Links would go to extremes in their stage act, with outfits made from chaff bags dyed pink or red, with holes cut out for their arms and heads, hessian trousers and cowboy boots: ‘Nobody else was doing anything like that’.

The Missing Links have a 13-month recording history: from March 1965 to April 1966. One single by the original line-up; four singles, a covers EP and an album by the second version. In mid 1965, the Links were signed to Philips, whose staff were clearly open to unusual sounds: it would soon be Pip Proud’s label too. Anderson remembers visiting their offices:

I remember going in there one day after I’d had my first taste of grass . . . I squatted down – there was nowhere to sit, with albums on all the chairs in this guy’s office – so he sat at his desk and I squatted down on the rug. The next minute he was saying, ‘Are you all right?’ I was still in the squat position, but I’d fallen onto my back and I was staring up at him. People were looking into the office and he was looking down and going, ‘Are you all right?’ That might be the reason we only did one album for them!

What is actually surprising – and possibly further evidence of Philips’s adventurousness during this brief period – is that the Missing Links got to make an album at all. This was a period in which many groups were denied the opportunity to produce an album until they had chalked up a number of chart successes with singles. Even a major live drawcard with chart successes, like Doug Parkinson In Focus, was not given this opportunity – and it was clear that group, unlike the Missing Links, had a large repertoire, thanks to their peerless songwriter/guitarist Billy Green. Add to this unusual situation the fact that various members of the Missing Links believe that Philips manufactured only small quantities (hundreds of copies) of the group’s releases, and it seems likely that Philips either did not know what it was doing, or was doing something other than trying to make a hit group out of the Missing Links.

The Missing Links is an uneven album, with crazy covers ranging from Dylan (“On the Road Again”) to Chris Montez, off-the-cuff originals and a couple of R&B standards – and a backwards-played “Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut” for good measure, alongside an orthodox forwards version. Anderson sees the backwards song – which was released, improbably, over two sides of a single – as an attempt to recreate the improvisational insanity and unearthly quality of the Links live: “We heard the tape playing backwards as it rewound, and I said ‘That’s our sound, man, that’s what we sound like live! Release that!’ They said ‘You’ve got to be kidding’ and I said ‘That’s what people like!’ When we’d end up smashing instruments, all that shit.” Of the rest of the album, Anderson says:

It was just microphones hanging from the roof of the studio. The fastest, loudest noise to get to the mike won. I think we sounded a hell of a lot better live, a lot gruntier and more menacing. Sometimes that sound comes through, but it was pretty primitive recording. Pretty basic.

But we didn’t know we were doing an album! I know I wrote ‘Wild About You’ and ‘Speak No Evil’ at the time. ‘Driving Me Insane’, I always loved that song. When Hutch [drummer Baden Hutchens] brought it in he was like, ‘You sing it!’ and I was, ‘No, you sing it, man!’ And when you listen to his drumming . . . that was our sound. A lot happened on that track that was just like we were. Yeah, I loved that.

‘Some Kind of Fun’ is more or less done the way Chris Montez did it, just a bit rougher. It was just a matter of, ‘Oh, let’s put that down’ – I don’t even know if we thought we’d recorded it, because it didn’t take long to put something down. All of a sudden it was ‘That’s enough, we’ve got enough for an album.’

Anderson understandably sees this as a pity because, as he remembers it, the band had more potential than could be translated to record:

There was something happening musically in that band that was . . . you’d get carried away. We used to break things up and stuff, but it was contained within the music, it wasn’t a matter of [we’re] gonna run out and hurt someone . . .

But it might have seemed quite scary. Like when you’re riding a motorbike, it’s not scary to you, but when you ride past someone really fast they go . . . ‘Shit!’ If you look across at someone else doing a hundred miles an hour, when you’re going the same speed, it doesn’t matter – you’re on the same wavelength. You can reach over and touch the other person.

I didn’t smoke a lot or drink a lot onstage in those days, it was definitely the music . . . Oh, there were pills, the methedrine gets you going . . . but I just loved the music, and being free of those limits like ‘twelve bars and then back to the chorus,’ you know. I loved it, there was a real freedom going on.

The Missing Links split for the last time in late 1966, because, Maggie Makeig claimed in Everybody’s, their ‘producers and managers all want to make them sound like Normie Rowe’.⁶ This seems unlikely, if only because it would have been impossible. Realising as so many did at this time that Sydney was not the place to do the things they were doing, Ford and Anderson relocated to Melbourne to start a band that was initially known as the New Missing Links and then the Running Jumping Standing Still.

The Missing Links’ legend was revived early – appropriately, though, for a group that seemed bigger than the sum of its parts, this was not because of the activities of its former members. Ross Wilson, who had never made any bones about his garage-rock roots, was involved in the Missing Link record label with Keith Glass and David Pepperell in the mid 70s: the name was a direct reference to the group. Wilson also masterminded the soundtrack to Oz, Chris Löfvén’s ‘rock and roll road movie’, and arranged for the singer-turned-actor Graham Matters – he’d been a member of the Adderley Smith Blues Band in Melbourne – to sing the Missing Links’ ‘You’re Driving Me Insane’ for it. Meanwhile, unbeknown to almost anyone, Brisbane’s Saints had been playing ‘Wild About You’ in their live set since 1974.

Individual Missing Links benefited little from this (particularly as a dogsbody at EMI listed the songwriting credit for the Saints’ record version of ‘Wild About You’ on their first album as ‘Unknown’). Former Links went on to seemingly mundane and ‘straight’ day jobs – aside from Anderson, who has become a well-known television actor, and Doug Ford, who joined the Masters Apprentices and, with Jim Keays, wrote some of their biggest hits.

It is distinctly possible that the Missing Links remain so highly regarded and beloved largely because they were able to record an album and they took to the task of making it with devil-may-care gusto. Certainly, their outsider status was a major part of what Anderson and Ford thought they were about, as Anderson recalls:

‘Long haired poofters’ is what you’d get called . . . ‘animals.’ There was the sharpies, and in Melbourne there was the mods and whatever, surfers and mods and everyone hated bloody longhairs. It was pretty dangerous.

It was fine during the day, walking round the city. Doug and I used to taunt people. One day we went to a department store and I pretended to be blind . . . He led me round and I’d pretend to speak this stupid language and he’d pretend to be translating for me. We had a lot of games. We weren’t exactly keeping a low profile.

As much as the band may have been an anomaly, the Missing Links’ legacy has been pervasive over the intervening fifty years. As we shall see, many later groups similarly refused to keep a low profile – with often spectacular results.