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5 The Snap and Crackle of Pop

THE MID TO LATE SIXTIES

‘There’s a new age dawning this year, he told me. ‘An old cycle’s ending and a new one begins, in 1966. Did you know that, Dick? The earth-forces will come into their own, and people will be liberated.’

– C. J. Koch, The Doubleman¹

The story of the counterculture that developed in the western world in the late 60s is, like that of any mythological era, riddled with half-truths crossed with untruths. As we shall see, the notion often expressed at this time that all was now opportunity and possibility – from the breaking down of rigid, millennia-old institutions to the radical act of releasing a single that was more than three minutes long – amounted in fact to one step forward, three steps in another direction entirely.

Visceral and showy, it is easy to imagine the period as boldly painted in illusory deep patterns of ultra-sensation. ‘Somehow with the optimism of the sixties,’ the film director Peter Weir claimed two decades later, ‘there was a feeling that everything was going to work out, that you didn’t need to plan.’² Of course, this is only a very small segment of the cultural mix, inseparable from the rest. Pip Proud claimed that the best way to typify the late 60s in Sydney was as a time when special inspectors had the power to measure women’s bathing costumes at Sydney beaches – which is to say that it was a time of prudery thrown into stronger contrast by a small number of ‘liberated’ minds. Certainly the Australian government remained conservative throughout this period, during which three Prime Ministers – Menzies, Holt and the slightly more interesting Gorton – presided over a persistently strong ‘lucky country’ economy.

Similarly, even though the counterculture was sold by means of rhetoric that invoked anti-commercial, even anti-capitalist values, a general cynicism prevailed in many quarters as to whether particularly ‘out there’ artists were genuine and their work valid, or if consumers were not so much going on a trip as being taken for a ride. This scepticism extended even into the alternative scene(s). Essentially, there were very few people throughout the world, including Australia, who didn’t think that the action – where the beautiful people were making free decisions based purely on their own enlightenment – was happening somewhere else. Barry Miles, a self-proclaimed insider in the London ‘underground’, has discussed the way his small, select gang felt that the Move, a group from Birmingham, had demonstrated hypocrisy by suddenly experiencing an ‘overnight conversion to hippiedom’ when they released ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’ in early 1967. ‘The point,’ says Miles, ‘is that psychedelic music grew from an environment, a very specific London one . . .’³

In fact there are quite a few ‘points’, and the most pertinent one is that while many, indeed most, kowtowed to London as the centre of the counterculture universe during this time, there is no reason to assume that London’s psychedelic explosion was any more exciting than anyone else’s. Miles is presumably speaking only from his own experience at what seemed like the pumping heart of a movement. For that matter, when Proud ventured to London at the very end of that decade he found that his few Sydney friends who’d made good didn’t want to know him, and the scene, in general terms, was dismal. In any case it is quite possible that the interpretations of that cultural style that were created in other places were more impressive than the original – whatever that original actually was. Russell Morris’s ‘The Real Thing’ may be ‘a dog of a song’ without ‘much there melody-wise and lyric-wise’, as Dave Mason of the Reels once put it.⁴ But as a studio experiment allowed to run riot in the form of a 7” single, it was a stunning leap in a new direction, and its similarly chart-topping follow-up, ‘Part Three: Into Paper Walls)’, went twice as far again.

Many others talk of this period as one in which technology (especially those mundane matters of amplification and multi-track recording) could never match their own vision or ambition; at the same time, tape recording was becoming more convenient and compact: a ‘new boom in electronics’ was announced in 1967, as the cassette tape was readied for launch.⁵ Similar advances at both the home and public music production level were made rapidly in the later 60s and into the 70s.

Very few people of any stripe trust art, or their responses to it, and art – pop music included – often goes out of its way to be untrustworthy. Towards the end of Patrick White’s 1970 novel The Vivisector, a life of the fictional modern artist Hurtle Duffield, White gives over more than five pages to snatches of dialogue from the vain, trivial, pretentious and foolish glitterati of Sydney responding (or not) to a retrospective of the artist’s work. The themes of the babble include whether or not Duffield sells largely to Americans, how rich he must be, and how little the attendees actually understand the work in question. It’s an extended riff on the same type of hollow chatter Jan Smith relates from the Beatles press conference (see chapter 2). White, as one of Australia’s most celebrated and yet most misunderstood writers, is in part bemoaning his own fate (he even includes a dig at himself⁶), but he is also reflecting on the fate of creators in the marketplace, as indeed his character’s life itself is an extended reflection on the 20th century in Australian art. The point White makes, writing as he is on the cusp of what would turn out to be non-indigenous Australia’s greatest leap to date in terms of artistic flowering, is that art and commerce are inseparable, that commerce’s blunt, mulish desire leads art wherever it wants it to go. Even in the case of Duffield – who comes (through adoption) from a wealthy background but whose interest in money goes no further than its power to free him to paint pictures when he pleases – materialism, the dictates of fashion, and the petty lives of the miserable rich women he courts are bound up with his life as an artist.

In 1970 Marty Rhone – a Dutch-Indonesian Australian with handsome, apparently Asian features and a string of very fine, but for the most part commercially unsuccessful singles behind him – released a self-penned parody song, ‘So You Want To Be a Pop Singer’. In it, he mimicked and satirised three vocalists who are rarely, for all their good qualities, spoken of in the same sentence: Russell Morris, Bob Dylan and Johnny Farnham. Rhone’s record focused particularly on the ‘manager’ operating the star (Ian Meldrum, Morris’s manager and Farnham’s manager Daryl Sambell were both referred to by their nicknames, ‘Molly’ and ‘Sadie’). Rhone was holding the pushy hand of the industry up for examination, and while he delivered the song with a smile on his face, its humour bordered on viciousness.

Rhone was vicious because the pop scene was tough, particularly for Australian artists. Only a small percentage of consumers would have failed to make a distinction between locally made and international records and acts. Increasingly, fans of Australian musical stars came to see international acceptance as, if not the raison d’etre of local performers, then certainly something worth grabbing at any opportunity. Record companies were, of course, complicit in this. Australia could be a proving ground for numerous artists, just as the Bee Gees or the Easybeats had honed their skills there. By the 1980s, groups like INXS were readily peddling the nonsense that their hardiness as a band was forged in the fabled ‘beer barns’ of the Australian suburbs. Yet it was also true that any Australian group which had experienced success in its homeland potentially offered the best of both worlds to a British or American record company – it was both new (at least to audiences outside Australia) and polished. Thus Bee Gees’ 1st, or Procession’s remarkably assured, crafted, and tasteful second take at a debut LP; or the Masters Apprentices’ third album, Choice Cuts, their first release in Britain after numerous Australian hits. The La De Das, the Twilights, Johnny Young, the Easybeats, Olivia Newton-John, MPD Ltd and many others were able to reinvent themselves in the northern hemisphere. But while Australian impresario Robert Stigwood’s willingness to take on an Australian group called the Bee Gees made it possible for them to land on their feet overseas, most Australian acts suffered as a result of the insularity and provincial nature of the ‘scenes’ they were trying to break into. This may well have been a result of outright prejudice in some cases, but more often – as we shall see – the networks that mattered simply weren’t available to new arrivals.

The internationalists nevertheless made inroads – although this in no way diminishes the worth and importance of those who stayed behind, many of whom were making even better records than their peers who’d been drafted to the UK by dint of having achieved everything they were supposed to achieve in Australia. The Australian-in-Europe professionals were often producing bland work in order to compete in the mainstream, whereas their former colleagues were relegated to the margins, where the greatest art is usually found. By definition, those at the margins usually don’t have the wherewithal to leave a very visible legacy; as a result, the official histories are riddled with gaps. Thus, for example, we have the account offered in the 90s by British rock journalist Martin Huxley, who dismisses Australian music of the 60s apparently because of its lack of international commercial success:

Such Melbourne-based acts as the Loved Ones, the Groop, Ronnie Burns, Normie Rowe and Bobby and Laurie, along with Adelaide transplants the Masters Apprentices and the Twilights (not to mention Bon’s old Perth pal Johnny Young) would never really figure out how to process their influences into anything authentic or personal and would never really produce music of sufficient merit to cause any sleepless nights for their overseas contemporaries.⁷

Huxley is attempting here to create a context for AC/DC, the subject of his biography, and (as non-Australian writers of books about Nick Cave have also discovered) it is easy to talk up your subject by deriding their contemporaries or context on the basis of their supposed obscurity. It’s even easier when you have evidently done no research. Huxley’s central premise, that groups like the Loved Ones or the Twilights were in the business of ‘process[ing] influences’, along with his assumption that the only success is commercial success, is ludicrous and beneath contempt. Try to imagine Pete Townshend in 1967 feeling nervous upon discovering that the Loved Ones, based in Melbourne, are a truly superb rock band.

When it comes to processing ‘influences’, journalist/social commentator Craig McGregor offers a more accurate picture of young Australians in the mid 60s:

The process of borrowing from overseas can be quite random. Duffle coats, winkle-picker shoes, drain-pipes, Beatle hairstyles and black stockings betray the English influence; whitewall tyres, Bermuda shorts, swept-back motorcycle handlebars, surf shirts and sneakers betray the American. But often there is an astute selectivity at work. Young Australians seem to have rejected the sentimentality of many US films and TV shows, but have accepted the American talent for self-criticism; it seems to fit in well with the sardonic tradition of local humour.⁸

OUTSIDERS AND INSIDERS

At least since the 1960s, New Zealanders have seen Australia as the next step up the ladder; a few have made the next step, beyond their greater neighbour (greater, at least, in size) and into the wider world’s consciousness. Max Merritt, for instance, was a figure to reckon with in Australia in the 70s, and his various incarnations of Max Merritt and the Meteors were famously inspirational to Australians who saw them play live.

This section introduces two important individuals who travelled from New Zealand to Australia in the mid 60s with their respective bands. Mike Rudd and Brian Peacock would both go on to play important roles as songwriters – and in other areas of the music industry – in Australia. Their stories are of great interest in themselves within the context of Australian music, and each of them, in a different way, also provides an invaluable take on the Australian scene from 1966 onwards. One significant difference between them concerns their outlook and approach: Peacock, who played in and wrote for the Librettos, Normie Rowe’s Playboys, and Procession, saw his time in Sydney, and later Melbourne, as an interlude; he was always en route to London. Rudd, who was a member of the Party Machine, then formed Spectrum and was simultaneously in Ross Wilson’s Sons of the Vegetal Mother, had rather different ambitions, and fitted into the Melbourne scene very early in his career. One important element in both men’s stories is Melbourne-born Ross Wilson, another remarkable and multi-faceted figure who will also appear at many points throughout this story.

Like so many of the strands in this history, beginnings, ends and definitive intersections can be hard to pinpoint. A motley assortment of private schoolboys in Melbourne’s bayside suburbs of Brighton and Beaumaris coalesced in the mid 60s into groups such as the Fauves, including Ross Hannaford; the Rising Sons, with Keith Glass; and the Pink Finks, with Ross Wilson.

Hannaford recalled in 1971 that the Fauves “only knew two numbers”:

We thought it would be funny to start a rock band and we played at this church dance and Ross Wilson sat in with this other band that played there. The guys used to live in the same street where we practiced. It was Keith Glass’s band. We’ve known Keith a long time. Ross started with them and played a bit of harp . . .⁹

Keith Glass – yet another figure who will play important roles in this story – went on to be guitarist and songwriter in the great Melbourne pop groups 18th Century Quartet (which also featured Hans Poulsen as singer-songwriter) and Cam-Pact; in the mid 70s, together with Wilson, he would also start (and go on to run with his wife Helena) the Missing Link label (the record shop with the same name was a continuation of Archie and Jugheads, which Glass opened with David Pepperell early in that decade).

In 1972, the fortunes of relative newcomer TV broadcaster the 0-10 network would be saved by the scandalous soap opera Number 96; alongside topless women and storylines involving drug use and adultery, the show famously introduced sympathetic gay characters – reputedly for the first time in mainstream television anywhere. Homosexuality was, nonetheless, illegal throughout Australia until the individual states and territories began a piecemeal process of decriminalization starting in 1973. It was therefore a brave, if not foolhardy, move for the Melbourne group Cam-Pact – who identified, in the main, as heterosexual – to flirt with a homosexual ‘image’ several years earlier. It came in the form of, firstly, their name (they were originally the Camp Act), and secondly a mouth-to-mouth kiss between bassist Mark Barnes and guitarist Chris Stockley in the film clip for their first single, ‘Something Easy’ (1967). Such ‘shock tactics’ paved the way for other groups – the Zoot, for instance – to make an impression with similar attention-grabbing ideas. Cam-Pact themselves were impressive and unusual; they were predominantly a soul group, but they also delved into psychedelic pop.

By the time Mike Rudd’s group Chants R&B arrived in Melbourne from Christchurch towards the end of 1966, individuals like Wilson, Hannaford and Glass had graduated from school dances and very local venues like the Beaumaris Community Centre’s venue, Stonehenge, to become players on the Melbourne scene. Hannaford had joined Wilson in the Pink Finks, and in early 1967 they formed a new band together, Party Machine. Rudd heard Party Machine playing, ‘maybe it was at Tenth Avenue and I thought, “this actually sounds like a really good band, I really love what they’re doing” . . . I just stored that away, and then I heard they were looking for a bass player, and auditioned.’ The group were unusual for the time, not necessarily because they played their own material for the most part, but because they played Ross Wilson’s material, which was provocative and didactic, and also on occasion personal. Wilson’s songs were as unique to his experience and worldview as, for instance, those of Ray Davies. Rudd, who at this stage did not write songs himself, remembers the group was ‘successful to a degree’:

In the early stages we were doing fifty-fifty covers and Ross’s material, and it expanded from there. I think I had something to do with the discussions in the van on the interminable drives from Sydney, saying, ‘Look, we may as well just go for broke and hope to impress industry people – i.e. musicians – with what we’re doing’, because I felt quite strongly that what Ross was writing and what we were playing was so different. And when I look back on it now, it still is. Everyone else was going in one particular direction, a very UK-oriented thing, and Ross was in a different area, probably more towards the States. But it was very different for here. If you listen to it now it’s cute, you’d almost call it psychedelic bubblegum.

Robert Wolfgramm, a schoolboy in the late 60s, and raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, experienced a debauched (in comparison to his usual existence) weekend to which the Party Machine contributed when he attended a show at Piccadilly’s, a club based at Ringwood in Melbourne’s outer east:

First on stage was the Party Machine featuring Ross Hannaford, Ross Wilson and Mike Rudd, followed by the highlight for the outer urban ‘heavy’, ‘progressive’ set, Lobby Loyde’s Wild Cherries. What with mostly mod girls and sharpie boys, 20-minute jams, and throwing-up, I knew this was ‘happening’. I might have been the only brave hippie there, but this really was ‘the scene’. And I was in it. Of course, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and once the stories of my ‘wild’ weekend in Ringwood reached back to the power centre of the Academy, that was the end of weekends away. I’d been let off the leash to be ‘a witness’ in the big smoke, but had been trashed by it. As it turned out, I didn’t need another Piccadilly’s experience; one was sufficient to cast my reputation among my peers as a hippie-druggie. On the sniff of a vomitus handkerchief, I became famous.¹⁰

Another incident in the Party Machine’s life – as described by Hannaford in 1971 – shows the kind of aggression a band might encounter when trying to confront and provoke an audience, rather than merely pander to them. This remains, of course, a working hazard in entertainment:

A fight we had when we played in this nasty place . . . this joint, like Tenth Avenue. There were sharpies and all these nasty little girls. They kept putting shit on Mike, saying he was dirty; it was stupid, because he’s a clean guy. Also my amp, which I used to put on a chair, the whole thing fell over while I was playing and everyone laughed. This made me angry, like I didn’t show it, but it was pent up anger. The tune we saved for last, had a long randy solo in it and they were pissing around and rolling on the floor and all that. I was facing my amp and playing guitar, and sort of walking backwards, with my back to the audience, known [sic] there was a mike standing behind me, but making it look accidental-like, when I was walking backward I knocked the mike stand into the audience. You might think that’s an aggressive thing to do, but they were nasty people. There was just a little stage and I was standing on the floor. I was really angry and I was bumping people accidentally. I knew they would get in the way. So they bashed me back and at one stage they had me on the ground and were kicking me and stuff. I got up and swung my guitar around. We finished and although I’d started all the trouble they didn’t pick on me when we were taking out the gear, they bashed up Mike and Russell. Mike got a really big black eye out of it. Nasty. Yes, that is a highlight I suppose.¹¹

The Party Machine leant towards a multimedia approach. ‘The days of four musicians walking on stage and merely playing are fast disappearing,’ Go-Set lectured its readers in early 1968. ‘The emphasis now is on the visual side with the sound playing a supporting, and complementing role.’¹² Pip Proud’s withering assessment of 1960s prudery is confirmed by the response to the Party Machine’s most notorious act, the publication of their ‘songbook’, which included two sets of lyrics, ‘I Don’t Think All Your Kids Should Be Virgins’ and ‘Don’t It Make You Sick’ (‘First I got an axe and I split her in two . . .’). The typeset, photocopied ‘books’ were seized by the Vice Squad and the band was attacked in the tabloid press. ‘It sounds so incredibly quaint nowadays’, says Rudd.

The Party Machine broke up in April 1969. David Elfick wrote in Go-Set that Ross Wilson was moving to Britain to join the well-known Melbourne group Procession:

This shock decision came just as the group are receiving the recognition they deserve. Last year their songbook caused a sensation but after that died down, their popularity waned . . . Lead guitarist Ross Hannaford has decided to return to art school. The two remaining members of the group, Mike Rudd, bass guitarist, and Peter Curtin, drummer, will keep together and form another group. They will be joined by David Skewes (ex Mantra) who will be on a Hammond organ . . .¹³

This last assemblage was to be the beginning of Spectrum, who will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 8.

Procession, the band Wilson left the Party Machine and Melbourne to join, has a long and involved history that begins with Brian Peacock, guitarist and singer in New Zealand’s biggest mid-60s group, the Librettos, flying into Sydney. It is best told in his words:

I have a vivid impression of arriving in Sydney at night time and seeing the city from the air, which was mind-boggling. We spent the next year, at least, living in abject poverty in Sydney, keeping up the image in New Zealand. Trying to live this double life of successful pop stars when in reality we were doing second jobs like car washing and so on in Kings Cross. We basically became a backing band, guns for hire in the Sydney leagues clubs. I remember working with Lucky Starr, who was hot on the heels of his ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ hit.

We were pretty amazed about the industry built up around the leagues clubs of NSW and Queensland. We were in Sydney, so we could earn really good money in the leagues clubs, but we were also playing the rock venues of the time, from Surf City at Kings Cross down to tiny little bars like Suzie Wong’s, which a lot of the pop groups of the time were working. The money was really poor, the conditions were really poor. But we loved it, money was really just a means to an end in those days, and the Australian industry was pretty grass roots, there was no infrastructure for popular music at that time.

The Librettos were lucky enough to get into some of the Normie Rowe tours, and they went on forever, they’d be three or four months long, typically, he’d do one-nighters in every town throughout the outback. Apart from the major cities, you’d do the Dubbos, Waggas, it was a never-ending slog from one end of the country to the other. We thrived on it. We thought it was great. We were like the opening act on a bill of twenty artists – it seemed like twenty – the Sunshine Review, all the artists that worked on the same label Normie was released through.

Normie Rowe was the biggest star of his kind in Australia in the mid 1960s. He had been discovered by Ivan Dayman; Dayman introduced him to one-time Young Modern songwriting competition winner Pat Aulton, who would become his producer.¹⁴ Handsome, with a fine voice and a jovial approach, many of Rowe’s song choices at this time – like those of so many of his peers – now seem stodgy and unimaginative. He certainly got the breaks, even starring in a film made in New Zealand called Don’t Let it Get to You.15 One early band who backed Rowe was the King Bees, which also featured Joe Camilleri.¹⁶ Rowe soon created his own permanent outfit, the Playboys.

Dayman managed both Rowe and Marcie Jones, a singer who featured heavily on Dayman’s Go!! Show and played at many of his suburban dances. Rowe and Jones became romantically involved, and Dayman dealt with the situation by booking them tours on opposite sides of the country.¹⁷ Later, when Rowe was in the UK, Dayman persuaded his manager there, David Joseph, to withhold Jones’s letters to Rowe, so as to damage their relationship.¹⁸

Peacock continues:

Ivan Dayman was the promoter. He was based in Brisbane but Sunshine was a Festival Records imprint so it was all run out of Sydney. Pat Aulton was the main producer. It was like a mini-Motown set-up, we were like the house band for a lot of recordings.

Pat Aulton liked us as musicians, and started using us doing backing tracks for some of the artists on Sunshine. There was Peter Doyle, Marcie Jones, there was a whole lot . . . Mike Furber, though he had a band called the Bowery Boys. I can’t remember which ones we played on and which ones we toured with. We used to back some of those artists live on Ivan Dayman’s shows. I think the link with Sunshine came out of us working for Ivan at his clubs. He had what were called sound lounges all around the country.

They were known as sound lounges, which I think probably originally started with recorded music [being] played in them, but increasingly they had live acts as he built up his roster of artists, and we were probably one of the main ones, because we would go anywhere and do anything in our eagerness to work. Ivan used to take full advantage of it! But we were willing participants.

It was really very ad hoc. For instance, he had a venue up in Brisbane called Cloudlands Ballroom, which was this beautiful old ballroom up on top of a hill, legendary. It actually had some accommodation in the basement below it, and we used to live there when we were up in Brisbane. We played these big shows in the ballroom, and then we’d go down to our little dive of an apartment down below! That used to be our base in Queensland, and Ivan would wander in some day and say ‘I want you to do Toowoomba, then Sydney, then Melbourne’, he’d give us some folded bills, and he’d say – he had this saying we always used to send up – ‘Take the Valiant, father’. He had this old station wagon; we used to throw all our equipment in the back of it, three amps and a drumkit, and we’d fit in the back of a Valiant station wagon and drive from Brisbane to Melbourne in one hit, without thinking anything of it. We’d do a week in Melbourne at one of his venues, then up to Sydney to one of his clubs there and you’d play there the whole week. You’d do these really long sets, starting about eight or nine till three in the morning. So it was a great experience for a bunch of young kids.

We had a radio hit here in Australia – that song ‘Rescue Me’ by Fontella Bass, which we’d been playing for years in New Zealand. During that era the nightclub scene in Sydney was really big, the real true traditional Vegas-style nightclubs, and I remember getting somehow into Chequers free to see Shirley Bassey. This was the mid 60s, and this was the kind of manager we had . . . old-school show business, someone like Shirley Bassey was seen as the epitome of show business. Those things were still an influence on us even though we were taking a completely different path musically. It was still that mixture of putting on a show, a consciousness of that. Then we graduated up the ladder in the Sunshine thing, we became more important, and we got onto the big Normie Rowe tours. That was luxury for us, we were touring in a proper coach, the artists were in a coach, staying in motels, instead of scrabbling round in people’s apartments and on couches.

The Librettos occasionally achieved broad exposure, for example when they supported the Seekers’ second major Australian tour in 1966.¹⁹ This may have been where Peacock first made the connections that would result in his becoming road manager and occasional songwriter for the New Seekers in the early 70s. In the mid 60s, however, the Librettos’ lifestyle was still hand-to-mouth.

We’d go back every six months or so to do a tour of New Zealand to restock the coffers. We were living a pretty tough life at the time, eating bread and jam, all sharing one flat in Kings Cross. It was around the time of Max Merritt and the Meteors, and Dinah Lee was doing pretty well around here, and the Invaders – they were the New Zealand acts who were over here trying to break into the Australian scene. So that led on to the Normie Rowe tours, then eventually Normie’s management being taken over by David Joseph, who was a television producer from Melbourne. We were asked to join Normie’s backing group, myself and another guy from the Librettos. By that stage the Librettos got pretty close to the end of their path, a couple of the members had left and we’d replaced them, then we went from being a quartet to being a trio. So the two of us who were original members of the Librettos got asked to join Normie’s band, and that meant our chance to get to England so we decided to do it.

David Joseph had lined up a record deal for Normie with Polydor in the UK so we thought it was well worth while taking up the offer. But it was a couple of the members of Normie’s old Playboys and us, it was never really a great matching up because we were worlds apart . . . we had no ties really to Australia, whereas they wanted to get back to their girlfriends, back to Melbourne.

It was a very interesting time to be in London, we got to see some great artists because of the link with Polydor. Polydor UK distributed the Stax-Volt label amongst others, and we were doing a lot of demos and rehearsal work in the Polydor studios right in the middle of London and as a result of that when the Stax-Volt tour came through the UK, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, Booker T and the MGs, all those artists, they kicked off the tour with a week’s rehearsals at the Polydor studios in London, So I got to sit in on the rehearsals with those guys for a week. Experiences you’d never dream of – Booker T and the MGs, just incredible! Polydor also had the Who, so I used to bump into Keith Moon all the time going up in the lift, I remember standing side-stage at the Hammersmith Odeon . . . the artists we saw in those years!

Joseph’s schemes for Normie Rowe’s international success fell in a heap when Rowe was called up for national service in September 1967; the tide of public opinion had not yet turned regarding the Vietnam war, as it soon would, and the decision was made that Rowe should serve. Glenn A. Baker postulates that this was a government public relations exercise, and the fact that Rowe was singled out was a secret even to the pop star himself.²⁰ Rowe’s best singles came late in his pop career, with Peacock’s irresistible ‘Penelope’ (1968) and Johnny Young’s remarkable ‘Hello’ (1970). Ronnie Burns’s 1970 hit ‘Smiley’ (‘Off to the Asian war . . . ’), writing of which was credited to Johnny Young (though Ian Meldrum claims that both he and John Farrar were involved in the song’s creation),²¹ was a mournful paean to Rowe. Burns had, presumably, changed his attitude to Rowe by the time he sang ‘Smiley’; in early 1968 he had been quoted musing cruelly about his rival: ‘Normie Rowe the singer is . . . a manufactured product of excessive promotion, it works but it doesn’t last.’²²

In Rowe’s absence, Joseph and Peacock decided to remake the Playboys (who now had two British members, Trevor Griffin and Mick Rogers) as a new band. Local content regulations, and the launch of a new television channel by air travel magnate Reg Ansett, meant an opportunity for a Saturday morning pop show on which the group – now renamed Procession – could perform regularly. This entailed returning to Australia (Melbourne, this time, where Peacock soon got married and started a family) and a chance to relaunch for the international market:

David, being the smart guy that he was, had come up with this idea of what he was going to do after the Normie Rowe thing had fallen through, which was to go back to what he knew – TV production – and he’d come up with this concept which he couldn’t see missing, in that the Australian channels needed it more than anything else. And that was a 4-hour Saturday morning music show which cost bugger all to produce . . .

It was really shoestring – he had a little office in Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, in the building where [artist] Charles Blackman’s studio was, up towards the corner of Grey Street. We were in Armstrong’s most of the week doing the backing tracks for the artists and they would record them and then mime to them . . . that gave us enormous freedom in the recording studio to do our own stuff. We used to knock off all the Channel Ten stuff as quick as we could and then we’d use the nights and early mornings to work on our own stuff. Channel Ten were paying for all the studio time, or David’s production company, I can’t remember which.

Joseph had arranged for a Brisbane pop singer he’d seen supporting Rowe to host the show: the singer was Ross D. Wyllie (it rhymed with ‘smiley’) and the show Uptight; a title which no-one involved seemed to realise was somewhat angsty for a programme of unrehearsed, knockabout pop miming and chat. Wylie was paid a pittance ($60 a week, he later recalled), but his pop career subsequently flourished, as will be seen later in this chapter. He also made an album, Uptight Party Time, credited to Ross D. Wyllie and the Uptight Party Team via ‘four separate recording sessions and countless cans of Fosters.’ A medley of 31 songs (from ‘Satisfaction’ to ‘Flowers in the Rain’ to ‘You Are My Sunshine’), the LP was ‘A Procession Production’ and demonstrated yet again the versatility of Peacock’s group. David Joseph ‘basically saw the two things’ – band and TV show – ‘working hand in hand’, Peacock says:

He knew we wanted to get back to England as soon as we could, and was encouraging us to get as much writing and demoing done as we could. Which is what we did. We put together a whole lot of demos, and then he flew off to the US and the UK and put together a record deal with Philips in England and Mercury in the US. Those labels were allied — all owned by Philips . . . Our sole intent was to get back overseas.

The readers of Go-Set were worried about an air of ‘hype’ surrounding Procession. Canberran Paul Culnane – later a music historian of some note and co-founder of the exceptional Milesago website – wrote a barbed letter to the magazine in 1968 about Ian Meldrum’s overly rapturous review of the group:

Dear Go-Set.

I was appalled at the giving away of ‘instant fame’ to the Procession. Granted I haven’t heard ‘Anthem’, nor experienced what is hailed as ‘sensational’ by Go-Set writers; but aren’t Procession getting the easy way out, when we, the actual people who make groups what they are, haven’t seen or heard them yet?

Surely it is up to us to like who we like or don’t like without it being pumped into our brains by know-alls like Mr. Meldrum, who is so sure of himself he can pass a judgement without us even having heard of the Procession.²³

Meldrum’s response was that ‘A certain Canberra-ite should get his facts right and get with it by joining the Procession’.²⁴

Procession’s debut album was Procession Live at Sebastian’s, recorded on 3 April, 1968 – probably before the Uptight record, which was issued the same year. It was ‘the first stereophonic ‘LIVE’ performance album ever produced in Australia’, proclaimed Anthony Knight’s sleevenotes. The album, says Peacock, ‘was to show that we were a good live band, because we knew from our time over there that you had to be able to cut it live, not just be a studio band.’

The idea of making a live album first was part of that plan to get the record deal that we wanted. And to his credit, David pulled it off. We had one of the first major advance record deals signed for an artist that had never left the country . . . And that enabled us to go, when we did go to England, we rented this grand house in Chester Square which is just behind Buckingham Palace in Chelsea. The house was owned by the British Ambassador to Brazil, Lord Russell, and it was very grand – which I think was partly to meet David’s requirements. We all moved in — David and his wife and child, and then the band members. It was a four- or five-storey London townhouse. Grand. The full bit, with the servants’ quarters in the basement. So the multi-thousand dollar advance that we got went a long way towards paying for that lifestyle for the first six months or a year.

The group had signed to Mercury, for whom they recorded their self-titled debut studio album; in the US, the album was released on Mercury subsidiary Smash, home to Jerry Lee Lewis, It was produced by Mike Hugg, the drummer from Manfred Mann. Peacock remembers:

We always thought we were one step away from making it. You always have that hope. And we were doing things, to the best of our knowledge, in the way that we needed to do them. But it just shows that it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on something, if it’s not in the groove . . . I don’t think we ever really made the right record. I don’t blame anyone for it not working. It can be a very random thing.

In some ways it was frustrating . . . I think part of the problem was that we really allowed ourselves to be moved away from our original intentions, in the effort to get commercial success. In Australia we’d been really pretty progressive. We set the agenda creatively. Then we went to the UK and we fell into being pushed around a lot more by the record company and the requisites of the commercial pop world. So I think we lost a bit of direction.

Peacock and Ross Wilson had no doubt crossed paths before (Rudd remembers the Party Machine appearing on Uptight in pyjamas, though this presumably was not the reason the group were temporarily banned from the show). Wilson was, in any case, a well-known figure in Melbourne and Peacock decided he might be Procession’s future.

David eventually gave up and brought his family back to Australia. We then went back to our gigging, just being a real rock group in the back of a transit van up and down the M1 and playing wherever we could get a gig. That’s when we started reigniting the passion that we’d had before. That led to re-looking at the realities of what the group was. I knew about Ross Wilson’s Party Machine, and I was really keen on bringing Ross over to join the band.

I rang him up and told him what we were doing and asked him if he was interested in joining us. I don’t think it was too much of a surprise that he leapt at the chance and came over. I think he was feeling, at the time, that he was banging his head against a brick wall, and the idea of getting away and going to London for a while appealed to him.

Wilson’s decision meant the end of the Party Machine, says Rudd: ‘Automatically. And I don’t think we were that injured – we may have had our noses out of joint for a week but we could see it was an opportunity for Ross and then I saw it perhaps as a possible stage of evolution for myself.’ Peacock picks up the story:

Ross came over and got married. I’d found this fantastic old country mansion at Reigate, outside London, in Surrey. So when he came over I’d already moved the band into this country estate. That was quite fun in itself. It was a beautiful house, really impeccably furnished with a Steinway grand piano in the drawing room and antique furniture throughout. We had to maintain the pretence that it was a couple – myself and my wife and kids – living there. When in fact we had about ten people living there – band members, roadies, girlfriends. Whenever the agent and the owner used to come around to inspect it, we had to bundle everyone into the transit van and pop down to the local pub while my wife and I went through the charade of showing them through the house.

This house featured in Australian director Philippe Mora’s first feature film, Trouble in Molopolis, which starred Richard Neville, Germaine Greer and Martin Sharp. Peacock felt himself a part of the Australasian expat scene, and he was where the action was – London:

During that era we were playing clubs in London which were really upmarket discos. Places like Revolution Club. Just on weeknights, it wouldn’t start until two in the morning, and you’d play a couple of one-hour sets. The A list of London pop society on any given night would be out in those clubs. You’d have McCartney and Lennon and Eric Clapton and people like that turning up to your gigs. Not because we were there, we happened to be playing there, but these were the kind of people who were walking around in the clubs at two or three in the morning. It was a whole other world.

We were basically working to get another record deal. The Philips deal had come to an end. We were out of contract and looking to start over. But the problem was that there was Ross and I and the other half of the band – as it turned out later, it wasn’t obvious at the time – was a bit begrudging of the fact that this guy had been parachuted in from Australia and made the lead singer, when we had Mick Rogers, who was a great singer. I had been doing all the lead vocals before that . . . We had a regular weekly spot at the Marquee, which was pretty big-time in those days –we had a Tuesday night residency there with Yes. So we were doing pretty well live, we were certainly no slouches, but it never really gelled properly. It was like a strange mishmash of Ross’s songs with the much more pop approach that I had to writing.

But I remember some of his songs that we used to do were more [like] Party Machine and Sons of the Vegetal Mother, like ‘Papa’s in the Vice Squad’ and ‘Make Your Stash’.

This last song would later feature on albums by both Spectrum and Daddy Cool.

That tells you were they were coming from. It was a pretty heavily drug-related culture at the time. Acid was prevalent in London. I think the last thing we did together as a band before Ross came back – and this is the desperation state we’d reached – we did this boat trip from Southampton to New York and back on this little Italian steamer, ferrying American students back from their European vacations and then bringing another load over. It was a pretty interesting trip. But when we got to New York Ross and I were — it really illustrated the split in our band — Ross and I went off to Greenwich Village and looked up all the landmarks that we wanted to see and that’s when we discovered macrobiotics . . . when we got back our wives were all astounded when we announced we were only going to be eating brown rice from now on. And we proceeded to do that. But that then led to Sons of the Vegetal Mother and where all that came from.

Not only did Wilson have his macrobiotic philosophy when he returned to Australia, he also had a wife – Pat, who had gone with him to Britain – and a song, ‘Eagle Rock’, which had come to him in a dream and will be associated with him for ever after. Ross (and Pat) Wilson’s next phase is discussed in chapter 9.

CLEVES

Another important trans-Tasman story, this one involving the then-unusual scenario of a woman playing a role as an instrumentalist within a group, was that of the Cleves, who had begun in New Zealand as the Clevedonaires. Unlike Rudd’s or Peacock’s groups, the Cleves did not make a significant impact on the charts, or even sustain a high media profile, but they were present at a number of significant moments in the history of the period, particularly in the presentation of rock/pop music in other media. Gaye Harmon, who played in the band with two of her brothers, recalls that the group decided to relocate to Sydney after they had been swept up in media interest in New Zealand regarding a tour to Vietnam for the purpose of entertaining troops there – a tour they pulled out of when they discovered they’d only been given one-way tickets.

We must have got the travel bug, so with Vietnam a non-starter we settled for going to Australia instead . . . Work had been arranged for us at Cooma in the Snowy Mountains. The day we arrived, we had to play a four-hour set until midnight, then we were told to pack up all our gear and set it up in a nightclub down the road, where we were expected to play until 3 a.m. This was to be a nightly arrangement. Naturally, we weren’t too thrilled about it, so we got in touch with our New Zealand agent, Benny Levin, and he got us out of the deal and found alternate work for us as resident band at the Hume Hotel in Yagoona. So we moved to Sydney.

The Hume is now sheltered accommodation, I believe, but it was a great venue in those days. We loved it there. We played to packed houses, fronting under our new, shortened name ‘the Cleves’ and also backing guest stars like Eden Kane and Dinah Lee. Dinah Lee enjoyed working with us and introduced us to a friend of hers, Bobbie, who was PA to the head of the Cordon Bleu agency, Harry Widmer. It was a great piece of luck, as Harry became our agent and then the work just kept coming.

Harmon recalls that Widmer was key to the group providing music for the soundtrack to Peter Weir’s short film Michael, part of Three to Go, a trilogy exploring individual (fictional) young people’s stories. The songs they wrote for the film were released as an EP, Music from Michael; they also recorded a scintillating self-titled album that ran between prog and pop. The Cleves were versatile in the extreme: in the early 70s, they recorded a single ‘Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie – Na, Na, Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye’ with Donnie Sutherland, the ex-jockey who had become a DJ and Go-Set writer; they also recorded jingles and other sessions. Their story in the 70s will be resumed later in this narrative.

THE TELEVISION’S HUNGRY

In subsequent chapters, the power and value of the mid-70s television show Countdown will be discussed, as will the strange misconception in many music and popular culture histories that Countdown was the first ‘real’ Australian rock program, arriving in what had been a music-television desert. Putting aside the fact that music television is, in most of its incarnations, barely something to celebrate, it should be pointed out – if this chapter hasn’t already provided enough evidence – that pop and rock music was very much a part of Australian television by the late 60s. It seems to have been almost de rigueur to give a star his or her own TV show, in fact. Ronnie Burns’s hit with ‘Smiley’ coincided with the announcement of his clip and mime show Now Sound.²⁵ Earlier in the decade, in April 1966, Laurie Allen and Bobby Bright – as Bobby and Laurie – had a number one hit with ‘Hitchhiker’. The pair were then given their own show, It’s a Gas, which first aired in July 1966.²⁶ The program – its name was later changed to the more compelling Dig We Must27 – featured comedy as well as music.

Another beneficiary of television’s embrace of pop was Billy Thorpe, who was briefly discussed in chapter 2 and will feature heavily in chapter 9. In 1965 he had split the original Aztecs and put together a new line-up:

Firstly I got Johnny Dick and Teddy Toi from [Max Merritt and] the Meteors . . . They were pissed off with the lack of recognition they were getting, I guess, so they decided to join me. Also a band from Western Australia called Ray Hoff and the Offbeats were playing in Sydney at the time. So I got the two guitar players from there. Firstly Mike Downs and then Col Risby.²⁸

Thorpe’s live television show, It’s All Happening, was from all reports a vibrant and sensational program featuring not only local acts like the Easybeats but also international visitors such as Neil Sedaka. A few years later, Thorpe griped to Planet’s Lee Dillow that the show’s demise was caused by network politics:

BT: Political scenes by Channel 7 down here which I’d dig you to print.

LD: How do you mean political?

BT: Well they had a teen show of their own in mind with Ian Turpie and all those cats. So if Sydney wouldn’t take that, they wouldn’t take ours. So that was that. An incredible disillusionment for us. Our ratings were so good.²⁹

The show in question was presumably The Go!! Show, which was hosted first by Ian Turpie and then by Johnny Young. The following year, Thorpe acted as fill-in host for The Go!! Show while Young was overseas, and told his audience he was going to drop acid on air. The Minister for Health – via talkback host Mike Walsh – informed Thorpe that he would go to jail if he did. The threat no doubt ruffled feathers and delighted viewers, but it appears Thorpe did not go ahead with it.³⁰

THE WAY THEY PLAYED

In 1966 journalist Maggie Makeig travelled to Hobart with the ambition of finding out how the teenagers of that city were catered for musically. She visited Beachcomber, ‘a big teenage dance centre in Hobart’ – and saw the bands the Falcons, the Silhouettes, the Avantis: ‘Some were good, some were rank amateurs’. She also listed other bands, such as Chaos + Co (‘a basically English group’), the Kravats, the Trolls, the Bitter Lemons, and the Beat Preachers. There were two music shows on local TV, Saturday Stomp and Saturday Party.³¹

Perth-born songwriter Brian Cadd had recently left Hobart – where he was playing in the Planets – for Melbourne, where Ian Meldrum persuaded him it would be a good idea to change his name to Brian Caine (this didn’t last).³² Later in the decade the Van Diemen label issued records by a number of Tasmanian artists, including Clockwork Oringe³³ and Sweaty Betty.³⁴

Each Australian city had its particular scene and style, as well (of course) as its rip-offs and frauds. In 1970, the poet Andrew Jach published a piece in the small press magazine Holocaust called ‘Brisbane your balls have burnt off’. In it he replicates the visceral and to his mind hollow world of Brisbane nightlife, where one might find:

some vain semblance of enjoyment from the

vast array of In places, such as the red orb

the reD ORB

the rED ORB

the RED ORB

thE RED ORB

tHE reD ORB

THE RED ORB

and also

the municipal library

OPEN MONDAY TO FRIDAY TILL TEN

can be obtained³⁵

Jim Keays writes convincingly about the late-60s live music circuit in his memoir His Master’s Voice, describing Brisbane as ‘run by [a] cartel’,³⁶ Ivan Dayman operating a bus with the Sunshine logo on its side, in which he would ‘ferry artists up and down the vast Queensland coast.’³⁷ Brisbane was also oppressive, in Lobby Loyde’s memory: ‘You used to get raided for having long hair, playing loud music, walking sideways and looking bad on a Sunday afternoon.’³⁸ Brisbane had its own TV pop show, Countdown; in October 1967, Dayman’s Sunshine label issued a various artists album called T.V.’s “Countdown”, which preceded Uptight Party Time by a year. The Countdown album featured tracks from future Uptight compère Ross D. Wyllie.³⁹

Any touring band would have to play Sydney, but groups from outside were often ambivalent, even apprehensive, of the venues it offered. ‘Sydney was different,’ according to Keays, who was from Adelaide but lived in Melbourne, the heart of music in Australia at this time: ‘The criminal element ran the strip clubs, the nightclubs and most other venues.’⁴⁰ Go-Set’s publisher Philip Frazer saw Sydney as ‘old school’: ‘In Sydney the venues tended to be controlled by old time entrepreneurs and record companies.’⁴¹

Twice in two years, Sydney’s august Bulletin went out to local clubs to try and whip itself into a state of shock at the goings-on of contemporary youth. In 1968 it exposed the main hives:

In Sydney, at lunch-time, the Op Pop, a cavernous blue-black cellar in Castlereagh Street, with mirrors, harsh bands, and teenagers in what appear to be cast-offs lurking in every corner, is packed solid, and on Saturday nights 600 or more will be found slumped on the steps or milling round the dance floor. North Sydney’s sober purlieus have been enlivened of late by Here, a brash discotheque that is open until well past midnight; the Manly Pacific Hotel is crammed on Saturdays for the Questions, and the P.A. Club at Prince Alfred Hospital jumps to the Castaways group; along the North Shore a string of wine bars and discotheques rivals the more urban attractions of the Hawaiian Eye, the Whisky a Go Go, the Vibes, and Beethoven’s. None of these places can match the Melbourne discotheques, headed by Sebastian’s and Bertie’s, which have superb bands and facilities and feature the liveliest singers in the country.⁴²

In 1970, the Bulletin returned to the Whisky a Go Go, which it declared to be Sydney’s most successful disco, ‘a fitting place for the rhythmic pulsations to be shared in the no-touch, do-your-own-thing that has become the disco job pattern.’ Jonathan’s, an old cinema on Broadway (a road south of the city centre which turns into George Street, central Sydney’s main thoroughfare) with silver walls, ‘plush lounges, shaped Perspex lighting and a sound system of infinite complexity.’ Its ‘ten-man resident group, the Complex, threw away its Sergio Mendes bag and delved deep into the eclectic cornucopia of the “new” rock. The ties and jackets rule was relaxed.’ Other discos, at this time, were Stagecoach, Caesar’s Palace (which Keays describes as ‘a seedy late-night dive in the heart of downtown Sydney.’⁴³ It was the venue where Chain recorded their debut album, Chain Live⁴⁴), and Caesar’s In Place.⁴⁵ The Masters Apprentices were also welcomed at Ward Austin’s Jungle ‘and countless suburban dances from Hunters Hill to St Ives and Clovelly.’⁴⁶

For Keays, Melbourne similarly presented ‘an endless procession of suburban dances. These were held in Mechanic’s Institute Halls, Masonic Halls, Scout halls, town halls – in fact any hall that would allow rock ’n’ roll music.’⁴⁷ Halls would take on temporary names as venues: Broadmeadows Town Hall was the ‘Palace’⁴⁸ and later the White Elephant and (as mentioned earlier) Beaumaris Civic Centre was ‘Stonehenge’. Keays later adds Lion’s Clubs to the list of potential venues.⁴⁹ The large number of venues around the city and its hinterland meant there was plenty of work for bands; however, it also meant that bands had to travel widely – and fast – between shows:

We would do three gigs a night most Fridays and Saturdays no matter what state we were in – stoned or Queensland . . . It was a mad dash to make them all. Each dance featured three bands and there was no margin for error.⁵⁰

Mike Rudd, who saw enough of this life in his own professional career in the Party Machine and others, can also stand back and critique the practice:

When I first went as Joe Public to Sebastian’s and saw the Loved Ones, I was just knocked out. I thought they were the best thing I’d ever seen. But they’d do the same thing – they’d do half an hour at Sebastian’s, and then off they went, and they’d do maybe two or three spots a night. And that actually killed that band. They cite that as the reason, because they had half an hour’s worth of material, that’s all they did.

The groups’ equipment was, by necessity, relatively portable, according to Rudd:

They’d be using their own equipment, but it’d be tiny. It’d be very similar to what bands are doing today, mostly, which is carrying a little portable amp. The PAs were even portable, but the PAs would be there because they’d be act one or two or three on the night, and they wouldn’t mic anything up. Those were the days! . . . I actually enjoyed those days. Soundwise it was at a reasonable level, you couldn’t get above a hundred watts anywhere, doing anything, so audiences and musicians weren’t being deafened as a matter of course.

Well the Thumpin’ Tum was a tiny place, Sebastian’s was tiny, the Catcher was reasonably large and they probably had a slightly bigger PA than most places, but the technology just wasn’t there, you didn’t have three-way or four-way PAs, it was just column speakers – that was it, that was as dangerous as it got.

THE LOVED ONES AND ‘THE LOVED ONE’

The late 1960s – hippiedom, psychedelia and associated elements – remain iconic and fascinating to many members of the generation which experienced them firsthand and many who have come to them since then. The era has, not surprisingly, been the focus of numerous books and films, both fiction and factual. Iain McIntyre’s Tomorrow Is Today is a particularly valuable and in-depth overview of Australian pop in its wider social context between 1966 and 1970, and is strongly recommended for anyone with a particular interest in that scene. This chapter strives to avoid replicating material from that book, but it is so good that some duplications cannot be avoided. McIntyre’s praise for the Loved Ones – shared by Mike Rudd, whose late-70s band, Instant Replay, did a version of the Loved Ones’ ‘Everlovin’ Man’⁵¹ – as an undeniably original and irresistible Australian group of the 60s – is one of these.

The Red Onions Jazz Band was briefly discussed in chapter 2 as an example, perhaps, of a jazz collective that walked and talked like a pop group, with its Dadaist humour and unique personality. In October 1965, with their second album, Wild Red Onions, still unreleased, three members of the group – Gerry Humphrys, Kim Lynch, and the orchestrator of the coup, relative newcomer Ian Clyne⁵² – went into the studio with former Wild Cherries guitarist Rob Lovett for what was ostensibly another Red Onions recording session.⁵³ To the surprise of their label, W&G, they emerged as the Loved Ones, with a new sound and a new song – ‘The Loved One’. ‘I suddenly found that to me, quite realistically, my roots were in blues,’ Humphrys told Nigel Buesst, ‘so I rapidly learnt to play the harmonica . . . it was R’n’B with baroque classical influences I find it very hard to put a tag on.’⁵⁴ ‘The Loved One’, patched together in the studio and a perfect example of seemingly artless high complexity in music, was perfect. Humphrys included handclaps in the verse because he felt that without them ‘people are going to get lost’.⁵⁵

The unusual and non-intuitive nature of the Loved Ones’ material is best demonstrated by Humphrys’ obvious inability to mime to it during the group’s many television appearances: he anticipates exultations that aren’t there and consistently mouths the wrong words.⁵⁶ Yet it’s clear that Humphrys was the heart and soul of the group, which peaked quickly and died within two years, the victim of its own inexperience and overwork. Clyne had been sacked early in the piece, for being too organised and ambitious, while W&G’s unwillingness to invest in the band, along with the various demands of fame and fortune, proved to be a drag on the group’s creativity, to name but three bummers. In Nigel Buesst’s 2000 film about Humphrys, Lynch complains of having ‘no time to refresh or write new material, half-hour spots . . . the band was stagnating, frankly.’⁵⁷

Many a time with the Loved Ones, the original inspiration just sounded so much better. That’s why, in the end, we used to compose in the studio. That’s the way I find I can work, personally, Of course it’s a bit of a bind for the musos, because they like to be a little more secure.⁵⁸

‘The Loved Ones was basically a revivalist group’, Humphrys told Daily Planet in 1971. At one stage we had three records in the top ten. Once we had become successful, we were obliged to play only our records. It was all too commercial, and I got out. It took me two years to recover from that incredible scene.⁵⁹

The Loved Ones split in October 1967, though they reformed briefly in early 1968 for a 3XY ‘pop happening’ where, it was reported, they wore ‘clothes designed by up and coming gear designer Helen Hooper’ and attended ‘a select orgy in her honour.’⁶⁰

Writer Barry Dickins met Humphrys in 1969, by which time he was working as a set designer for TV’s Channel 7. He remembered him as ‘a man who made me laugh as soon as I looked at him . . . a Cockney bloke with enormous black eyes and remarkable long black hair and dimples. Gerry Humphreys [sic] and I started working immediately, making a papier maché walnut some 70 feet in length. It was wanted urgently for the Channel Seven Ballet. The stroppy, overweight girls had to emerge from this prop for a scene in The Nutcracker Suite.’ Dickins says Humphries had a cooker and a bar fridge inside the walnut and invited women into it for sexual activities.⁶¹ This was only part of Humphrys’ hijinks:

One sunny June day outside the loading bay, Gerry found an old had-it wooden recorder that some musician had turfed in the drain. He patiently repaired it with wire and sticky tape and played jazz on it. Immediately. ‘Far out, man!’ he said to me, and to my surprise he disrobed and got on the top of the rubbish cart and we wheeled him nude into the workshop.⁶²

This story is both wonderful and somehow terrible, because it seems to mark the way in which Humphrys was exchanging his creative role for that of a mere showman. As we will see in chapter 8, he remained a figure in early 70s Melbourne before returning to Britain, more or less permanently, in 1977.

TWO POP EXPOSÉS

There were pop shows, and there were also shows about pop on television. At least two one-off productions from the mid to late 60s enlighten us about this phenomenon in great detail, and set the agenda for this chapter with their rapid montages of exotic cynicism and flamboyant glibness. One is the 1967 television pilot Approximately Panther, directed by Tony L. Lamb. It provides a perfect picture of mid-60s Australia and where it positioned itself as part of the world, and more particularly a portrait of Melbourne, ‘the Mecca of Australian music’ at this time according to Jim Keays.⁶³ Approximately Panther was founded on the vibe generated by the Melbourne-based music magazine Go-Set, though it pushed a little further than the ‘teens and twenties paper’ (of which more later). The program begins with an over-the-top montage of soldiers, people farewelling an ocean liner, a headline trumpeting ‘girl in space’; it then switches to footage of young people, Gerry Humphrys, the Rolling Stones, the edifice of Melbourne’s major railway station in Flinders Street, a violin on a chair, a guitar in a tree, an old car, a new car, a ticking clock, people in a club, and a pinball machine. The show’s host is typing at a table in a small room with books in the background. ‘I’m Douglas Panther,’ he announces, ‘Go-Set’s drunken reporter.’

The show juggles the probably impossible task of delivering an exposé of 1960s youth while at the same time catering to the same youth. Lamb also flags various marketing possibilities for an Approximately Panther TV series, as Panther asks about the spending power of an eighteen-year-old and explores possibilities of cars, fashion and guitars. One of the strangest elements of the film is the inclusion of the Beatles’ clip for ‘Penny Lane’ with occasional and seemingly random bursts of teenage screaming on the soundtrack – another example of Australian ambivalence towards international pop success.

We see Normie Rowe going to London, and the girls who saw him off at Essendon Airport; Panther tells the viewer that Melbourne has become Australia’s ‘teen mecca’, an excuse to segue into the Loved Ones’ ‘Everlovin’ Man’ being played by a 3AK DJ hamming it up in the studio and a montage of DJ faces with a monkey’s face thrown in. Panther is next seen atop a rubbish tip writing his genius work on a portable typewriter. The Loved Ones’ filmclip for ‘The Loved One’ follows, blended into footage of a DJ playing it on the radio and Gerry Humphrys’ excruciatingly poor miming covered up slightly by tree foliage in front of his face. We’re then given a brief tour of Melbourne ‘discotheques’ (pronounced ‘discotheek’ on the soundtrack), including the Garrison and the Thumpin’ Tum. The group Running Jumping Standing Still (with Andy Anderson, once of the Missing Links) is seen, while an unidentified person claims mysteriously on the soundtrack that ‘you can pick up girls, there’s always girls there . . . there are even some of them that are licensed.’ The film ends with footage of people at a party in a Victorian-era house drinking from the bottle and dancing to a stop-start pop song. Tellingly, if you want to see all this frenzied decadence as some kind of furious romp raging against the Vietnam war and the last flickering moments of innocent delight, a candle is burning down.

The Snap and Crackle of Pop was an exposé in Sydney TV station ATN-7’s documentary series Seven Days. Broadcast in June 1968, it’s an hour-long report that reveals the kinds of resistance pop musicians faced in the 60s. Seven Days attacks on a number of fronts, shocked at Lobby Loyde’s Wild Cherries and their preference for improvisation, shocked at Max Merritt and the Meteors’ hair, shocked at how easy it is to film a woman’s sequined underpants when she is dancing and your camera is on the floor. It’s the usual mixture of prurience, squeamishness and jealousy. That said, it provides a multi-faceted overview of the pop scene at that moment in time, from the far-out to the very staid, and to that extent it seems truthful.

A narrative thread that runs throughout the program is the story of a group, the Climax 5, who are temporarily under the wing of Pat Aulton, now transformed from the folk songwriter of early-60s Adelaide into a producer of quick and snappy 45s for Festival. Aulton is himself reasonably dismissive, if not of the Climax 5 themselves, at least of the pop process and his own ‘ears’ when it comes to picking a hit. The progress of the song is followed from two of the group’s members – Nick and Mick – playing it to both Aulton and Jack Arthur at Leeds Music. ‘We use a group sound for the teenyboppers . . . it’s not raucous and noisy, it’s just a happy little song,’ says Aulton.

The Climax 5’s record ‘is one of the 200-odd records released in Australia last month’, our host, writer-director Lance Peters, tells us as he stands, looking slightly appalled, in Edels record shop. The Climax Five are just another of those pop groups with ‘kidney- or heart- or pelvis-shaped guitars . . . occasionally one of the members is a girl . . . she’s the one with the short hair.’ The groups are dressed by ‘that well-known tailor, St Vincent de Paul’ (a second-hand shop) and the music is ‘made up of 90 percent exploitation and 10 percent hallucination.’ The groups, Peters persists, are ‘motivated by such components as sexual frustration, parental neglect, war, despair and occasionally even talent.’

‘Individualism is out, collectivism is in’, according to Peters, and we see some brief footage of the appropriately named group Unknown Blues. The process, we are told, is to ‘buy a guitar, learn a few chords, write a few songs, and then try them out on a music publisher.’ In this scene, like many in the film, the camera performs a loving close-up on every participant’s cigarette.

Flash to the Executives, at this stage a highly successful club group, and more loving camera work on their cigarettes. One year previously, we are told, an industrial designer named Harry Widmer made a bet he could promote a new group (an ‘unknown industrial product’, The Bulletin suggested),⁶⁴ and the fresh-faced youngsters we see before us are currently enjoying the outcome of this boast. ‘Every group that’s got a top record, we copy it,’ claims one band member. The Executives’ philosophy seems to be: ‘Doing so much material, you must eventually end up with material that’s your own’. The group toured the US in 1968.⁶⁵ Ten years later former Executive Ray Burton would confess that he didn’t really like the rest of the band ‘as people’. But, he noted, ‘it was a ticket to America, after all.’⁶⁶ The song ‘My Aim Is to Please You’ is the Executives’ greatest pop moment; much later, a version of the group would contribute the lively theme song to the soap opera The Young Doctors. Burton’s songwriting work is discussed in chapter 8.

The Snap and Crackle of Pop shows us the Executives playing at Cronulla Surf Club in Sydney’s south, a venue run by their manager. A teenage dance, we are informed, brings them $150 a night; a one-night club date nets $200 and a school function $80. So the group make between $80 and $1800 a week, split – after deducting costs – between performers, manager and road manager. ‘It’s no bonanza’, we are told, ‘and popularity is a fickle mistress.’

The film offers a midway proposition between the Climax 5 and the ultra-commercial Executives in the form of Doug Parkinson and the Questions, whose loud amps – ‘almost to distortion level’ – are clearly an issue for Peters. ‘You’ve got to have volume and punch and drive and a feel,’ comments Parkinson, ‘and transmit it to the audience.’ Another member of the Questions – who were, at this time, on the very brink of changing the name of their group to Doug Parkinson In Focus, following a court case over their name – suggests that ‘at the rate we’re going, about 90 percent of the pop musicians today are going to be deaf in five years, either from the band they’re playing in or the in-between discotheque music’. There were, plainly, new issues in the style and power of pop music.

Parkinson and the Questions had previously existed separately from one another. Parkinson’s first group had been Strings and Things, who rose to prominence in 1964 at the Narrabeen Antler, on Sydney’s northern beaches. He then went on to the A Sound, a high school band featuring the siblings Helen and Syd Barnes on bass and guitar; this group recorded a single for Festival in 1966.⁶⁷ Parkinson was a cadet reporter with the Daily Telegraph at the time. Meanwhile the Questions, who included Duncan Maguire and Billy Green, were playing at the Caropus Room at another northern Sydney suburb, Manly; they had recorded an instrumental album with the imaginative title What Is a Question.

The national ‘Battle of the Sounds’ competition, run by the chocolate manufacturer Hoadley’s from 1966 to 1972, was hotly contested; Parkinson’s group tried three times to win what Planet’s Lee Dillow called ‘Hoadley’s Battle of the Rip-offs’. Parkinson recalled: ‘Winning on our third attempt [in 1969] was unbelievable. I honestly feel that when the Groop won [in 1967] we were robbed. I know we had no presentation but F . . . ! Surely it’s music.’ Parkinson and In Focus, wearing ‘stunning black and red uniforms’, eventually won in competition with the Valentines, Aesop’s Fables (from Sydney), the Brisbane Avengers, and Chain.⁶⁸ As well as scoring a national hit with a raucous version of the Beatles’ recent album track ‘Dear Prudence’, they received a ‘very exciting film festival award for our Coke commercial.’⁶⁹ A greatly superior record to ‘Dear Prudence’ was its follow-up, the Billy Green original composition ‘Without You’. In 1971, Parkinson reflected bitterly on the dictates of the market: ‘We now observe the graph as it descends. We put “Hair” on the flip side and it was about here that the crack started to widen. We were bowing to pressure, trying to be popular at the expense of our music.’⁷⁰

The group produced a number of remarkable, edgy and creative singles, mostly written by Green. The band’s line-up was, unfortunately, erratic. Green, who had threatened to leave the band during its Questions period to become a producer,⁷¹ and who later did leave to form another, short-lived group called Rush, says now:

In Focus really split up because of Duncan’s inability ‘to put up with Johnny Dick’s sense of groove’. That was it really. Those two were always fighting. I was the glue, the PR person to put them back together again, magically. Sometimes, backstage, Duncan would be making Johnny Dick feel like a heel, right before going on stage. I would jump in there and do a quick repair job so we could do a good show.

Duncan could be a bastard sometimes . . . hard to believe. Eventually, and inevitably, Johnny quit! He couldn’t stand it anymore. That’s when Doug and Johnny split to England . . .

The story of the band they formed with Vince Melouney, Fanny Adams, is told in chapter 8.

The Snap and Crackle of Pop also covers Melbourne group the Wild Cherries, and its report on this outfit opens a new can of worms: the issue of improvisation and its impact on a professional performance. The Wild Cherries – seen here in their second incarnation featuring Lobby Loyde, who had recently defected from Brisbane-Melbourne group the Purple Hearts – claim in the show that they improvise a lot and play more for themselves than the audience. Author and journalist Craig McGregor, who appears in the film in a boxing ring with, amongst others, Sven Libaek and DJ Bob Rogers, claims to have heard the Wild Cherries many times and opines that ‘they’re a very good pop group indeed,’ adding that – contrary to what many viewers may have believed – ‘you can improvise on an electric guitar just as a jazz musician can improvise on the sax.’

Purple Hearts, ca. 1965

Loyde had first played onstage at the age 17 at Cloudland. As he told Iain McIntyre, his first band was the Devil’s Disciples in 1963 in his native town of Brisbane. As mentioned, his friends and competitors in local talent shows back then were the Bee Gees (‘Gibby and the two little dribblers’)⁷² and Billy Thorpe. Late in life, Loyde remembered Brisbane – particularly its Blues Club – as being as progressive as Melbourne in the early to mid 60s, possibly more so. His Purple Hearts bandmate Mick Hadley remembers ‘one venue, the Primitif’, but also enough shows in halls and ad hoc spaces to make it ‘pretty vibrant, really.’⁷³

The Purple Hearts were a nationwide sensation; Everybody’s appears to have considered them bad boys, running a photograph of them captioned: ‘Normally they are not to be found on demolished building sites, but we took them to one anyway, because we felt the bricks and steel and mortar suited their uncompromising attitude to blues, and their clunky gear.’⁷⁴

Loyde claims in The Snap and Crackle that the Wild Cherries’ set is ‘almost totally’ improvised, because the alternative is ‘boring, bores the people, bores us.’ He went on to show his ongoing interest, which he would continue to display in different ways through the 1980s and his SCAM management organization, in the contrasts between art and profit:

If you’re going to play the same old stale thing the same way every night you get pretty sick of it, especially when you’re lazy like us and you don’t learn that many new songs . . . Even the most successful pop groups, that claim they make a fortune, don’t. There’s no money in this country. If you got a number one record you’d be lucky to get $600 out of it, even if you sold 50,000 copies.

From the boxing ring, Libaek commends Max Merritt and the Meteors, in part for their jazz inflections: band members Stewie Speer and Bob Birtles (not to be confused with Beeb Birtles, who hit it big in the 70s with the Little River Band) both have a jazz background. The Snap and Crackle take on Merritt and the Meteors is that they’re the ‘oldest pop group in Sydney,’ with an average age of 33; Speer was forty at the time.⁷⁵ It is unclear when this interview snippet was filmed but it seems likely to have been before a major car accident near Bunyip, east of Melbourne, in June 1967, during which Merritt lost an eye, Speer suffered damage to his hands and had his legs crushed (Merritt joked: ‘Stewie had what they called scrambled legs’), and Birtles acquired a permanent limp. Only bassist Yuk Harrison was relatively unscathed.⁷⁶ The group continued valiantly, and were even given the prize, in 1969, of a four-part ABC-TV concert series, just before they relocated to Britain, identified by Merritt as ‘an easy place to lose bread’.⁷⁷

The program goes on to state that ‘the pop world today is a mini-matriarchal society’ – by dint of the young girls who, as consumers, ostensibly control it. When it comes to girl singers – Lynne Randell and Cheryl Gray (later known as Samantha Sang) are held up as examples) – we are told that they are ‘small, cute and plain’.

The Snap and Crackle then profiles Johnny Farnham, shown being interviewed on the new northern NSW television station ECN8 while out touring with the still ubiquitous Col Joye. Farnham speaks in quotable quotes that acknowledge both the extremely surreal lot of the pop star and his gratitude at being so loved:

Last night we played Tamworth and I got the sleeve of my shirt ripped out . . . the fans made me and I love every one of them . . . I haven’t been mobbed very often – I’ve been in the business just since the record’s come out – but I, confidentially, love it . . . I was a plumber for two years before I was a singer – even now I don’t have the nerve to go up to a girl and ask her to dance with me.

We see Farnham and a scratch band rollicking through ‘the record’ in question, ‘Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)’ which, of all the records and songs dismissed as wanting in this book, is probably the worst: it is shallow, smarmy and snide, a sub-George Formby music hall dud without even a redeeming double entendre. A novelty song poking fun at a woman who works in a dreary and unpleasant job, it rather undermines the ‘matriarchal society’ tag, though in his live rendition Farnham does at least veer away from the record to declare ‘I love you though you’ll always be a cleaning lady’(!).

Farnham has been smoking since he was five;⁷⁸ he migrated to Australia with his family at the age of ten. He was at school when he joined the Mavericks, and a plumber’s apprentice when his second band, Strings Unlimited, began playing.⁷⁹ A show of theirs in country Victoria got them attention from accountant-turned-manager Daryl Sambell, while an EP they recorded got them noticed by an advertising executive hoping to find a distinctive voice for a television advertisement for Trans-Australian Airlines. In both cases, the attention was really directed at Farnham, who went solo in 1967 and released ‘Sadie’ towards the end of that year. The current affairs program 4 Corners devoted a programme to showing – much like The Snap and Crackle’s coverage of the Climax 5 – ‘how a record company promotes an unknown.’⁸⁰ This, along with manufactured outrage from DJ Stan Rofe, who insisted he hated the single,⁸¹ helped ‘Sadie’ become the biggest selling Australian record of 1968.

Daryl Sambell, who would also manage the Masters Apprentices and others, is described by Jim Keays as ‘overtly gay . . . he flitted around like Nureyev and was quintessentially high camp.’⁸² Sambell has also been described as ‘Rasputin’⁸³, while inside the industry (and, as mentioned, in Marty Rhone’s ‘So You Want To Be a Pop Singer’) Sambell was known as ‘Sadie’. Farnham was chosen to sing ‘Sadie’, and the use of the tag to refer to Sambell was surely as a result of the song being a hit, but Sambell was reputed to personally launder Farnham’s clothes.⁸⁴ Keays claims that his fellow Masters Apprentice Glenn Wheatley’s fictionalised memoir, Who the Hell is Judy in Sydney, would never ‘pass the lawsuit test . . . The Daryl Sambell-Johnny Farnham stories alone would have tipped the bucket, and half the industry would have come down like a ton of bricks.’⁸⁵ The fact that Wheatley went on to manage Farnham from the late 70s onwards, and is credited with reinventing his career, only adds intrigue to this statement.

After ‘Sadie’, Farnham had a string of hits including the absurd ‘Jamie’, written by Hans Poulsen; a version of ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’, the possibly humorously titled ‘Looking through a Tear’ and the marvellous Vanda and Young composition ‘Things to Do’. Peter Dawkins, who will feature in future chapters, produced JP Farnham Sings in July 1975, the singer’s last album for five years⁸⁶ and the final element in the first stage of his career, during which he was overworked and the strategy behind his management seemed primarily one of exploitation.

Wherever there’s a pop group, Lance Peters informs us in The Snap and Crackle of Pop, there’s a manager. Harry Widmer, Carol West (Lynne Randell’s manager), and Peter Conyngham (‘who’s almost as young as all the groups he manages’) are all mentioned. Conyngham is seen on screen railing against unethical practices in the industry; similarly, West critiques ‘little agents starting up that don’t even have a hundred dollars to back themselves.’

A record which retails for a dollar, we are told, will earn the artist four or five cents; top-forty lists are compiled by phoning record stores, but they are not done very comprehensively. Pop, it would seem, ‘floats on a sea of promotions’. A group of DJs from Sydney’s 2UW, including Ward Austin and Baby John Burgess, are shown discussing – and dismissing – numerous records. ‘Climax 5,’ exclaims one contemptuously. ‘What a name to have!’ Another ponders:

Why do they release these records with this simple little backing . . . and then say, ‘Oh you don’t play Australian records’ – You can’t play this in competition with what the Town Criers come up with in Melbourne, which is a good production sound [because] they’ve spent money on it.

The Climax 5 are given the thumbs down, though those present claim – perhaps for the benefit of the television cameras – to be interested in seeing whether the kids ‘vote’ for it. It is fairly safe to assume they did not.

PRINT MEDIA REPORTING, AND CREATING, THE COUNTERCULTURE

Despite, or perhaps because of, Australia’s remote and unexciting image, the You Beaut land is compulsively tuned in to the rest of the world, thirstily absorbing the pop products of its culture and society.—Richard Neville, Playpower (1970)⁸⁷

Richard Neville (‘an acid munching, jumped up ex-public schoolboy’,⁸⁸ according to a joking character assassination in The Living Daylights, the Australian counterculture newspaper edited by his former colleague on Oz, Richard Walsh, in 1973-4) was being disingenuous here – or, more accurately, unusually modest – when he typified Australians as merely ‘thirstily absorbing . . . pop products’. He was one of the many Australians who had also been busily producing such products, in the form of the original Sydney incarnation of Oz magazine and more particularly its London-based successor, and through his part in its media fallout. Writing his examination/exhortation of the alternative society, Playpower (‘a quasi revolutionary document for the contentment of crème caramel–slurping rich kid armchair revolutionaries’)⁸⁹ in his London domicile, he was pitching his plea for clemency to the Western world, which was yet to sit in judgment (via its representatives drawn from propertied Britons over forty) on London Oz for its ‘Schoolkids’ issue.⁹⁰

Neville had left Walsh to continue publishing the satirical Oz in Sydney, and relocated to London:

The genesis of London Oz was due more to the enthusiasm of a Fleet Street newspaper than the determination of its founder. Shortly after arriving in the UK from Australia I was interviewed by the Evening Standard. The idea of launching a London OZ, at that time barely a passing fancy, somehow ended up a headline: ‘Rebel Aussie whizz-kid to publish here.’ Telephones began buzzing with eager contributors, printers extended lunch invitations . . . and what was once merely my exhibitionistic impulse to impress a friendly gossip columnist soon gathered its own momentum and hit the streets a few months later with a resounding thud.⁹¹

Australia had a whirlwind revolutionary 60s like other western nations, in some ways more so, and in the mid 60s individual Australians abroad contributed to – in some cases, led – contemporary debates in the countries where they were living. Readers of the thoughtful Sydney journal Nation, for instance, were informed that Germaine Greer was ‘the biggest figure on the London Other-Culture scene’ alongside Mary Quant and Mick Jagger.⁹² Neville’s involvement in the international ‘scene’ also justifiably lent him the status of a counterculture hero. The charge that he was a pornographer (because of ‘Schoolkids’ Oz) or someone merely along for the ride – he certainly entertained the latter possibility – was bolstered by an Australian critic in London who saw Neville as a ‘half-phoney . . . playing to the gallery, cashing in on other people’s genuine craziness’.⁹³ It might be contended that Australians could only be this innovative when they left Australia; Lillian Roxon, the Everybodys journalist who redefined music criticism in New York in the early 70s, is another example. There may be some truth to all this, but in any case it would not detract from the status of these individuals as role models for younger Australians.

In Australia itself, the standard pop press was not big on surprises. The early 60s had Young Modern, a concerted attempt by ‘straight’ publishing to make something of interest to the still rather ill-formed teenage audience. Philip Frazer’s Go-Set, which began publishing in 1966, was every bit as cynical in its motivation, but arguably more adventurous and even countercultural.

In 1965 Frazer had edited Melbourne’s Monash University’s student paper, Lot’s Wife, with Tony Schauble. ‘We’d changed it into quite a good political, liberal conscience paper,’ he told Planet’s Lee Dillow in 1972, ‘as opposed to the lairy style that had been uni papers up until then.’⁹⁴ Frazer and Schauble then started thinking about other publications they might produce:

We had a whole series of ideas that we’d thought up purely as a diversion. One of them was a teenage paper. Normie Rowe was happening at the time. This seemed to be the ultimate – a pop paper for the manipulated teenage populat[ion]. We thought up the whole format in a morning, including the name – which was the corniest name we could think of – that being what the whole game was about. That afternoon we went to 3UZ with our idea. It was incredible. The reaction was fantastic . . . It was just a whole trip that took off without anyone having any motivation at all.⁹⁵

Go-Set began in February 1966 in Melbourne, and brought the writing of Lily Brett, Douglas L. Panther, David Elfick, Wendy Saddington, Greg Quill, amongst others, to prominence (the last two listed were also well-known musicians). It is described by historian Seamus O’Hanlon as a ‘manifestation of a very vibrant youth culture in Melbourne in the 1960s’ and, indeed, as confirming Melbourne as the ‘centre of the pop scene’ from the mid 60s.⁹⁶ By the end of its first year, there were three versions of Go-Set, aimed at pop fans and advertisers in Victoria-Tasmania, NSW-Queensland, and Western and South Australia.⁹⁷ The paper’s form and style was exactly what its audience required, and its most unusual aspect, from an early 21st century viewpoint, is that it aimed to cater for both teenagers and readers in their 20s – demographics that many would see as quite different (though teenagers have never objected to reading something for an older age group, of course). The magazine offered up photographs of, and gossip and interviews with, stars of the moment and would-be stars, record reviews, advice and fashion tips. Advertising was largely but not exclusively for music-related items – records, instruments, live shows and the like. Early in its existence the magazine had a cross-promotional, mutually beneficial relationship with television’s similarly titled Go!! Show.

Keays says the Masters Apprentices read the magazine ‘avidly in Adelaide’; he describes it as ‘a crazy, unorganized mess, but it worked.’⁹⁸ Later, the publishers were to launch a subsidiary, more pop-oriented version called Gas and a more adult, political publication, Revolution.⁹⁹ Go-Set continued on into the 70s with, it claimed, a circulation of 57,000 per week.¹⁰⁰ Its format had implications for the way the Australian music press would operate for at least two decades after its demise in 1974. Juke, which was initially edited by former Go-Set chart compiler (and critic, writer and ultimately editor) Ed Nimmervoll, was arguably a direct successor to Go-Set, particularly in its post-Nimmervoll era, when it became a much more uncritical reporter on the music industry, unlike the relatively partisan and left-field Rock Australia Magazine (better known as RAM). Ian Meldrum – who will be discussed further anon – joined the staff of Go-Set early in its existence; his original job was to clean the house the magazine was run from.¹⁰¹ He was soon writing for them, with a story about Ronnie Burns meeting the (flamboyant and gay) thespian Frank Thring.¹⁰² It is possibly true that Meldrum was the magazine’s greatest gift to Australian music – and like the magazine itself, it was a gift with both positive and negative implications.

MOLLY

Ian Meldrum was born in the regional Victorian town of Orbost, near the holiday beach settlement Lakes Entrance, in 1946.¹⁰³ He has always been relatively secretive about his background, and it is plain that he did not fit in. He learnt piano from an early age, then did musical comedy at school; he liked ‘classical music and musical comedy and all of that’ and experienced pop music through the Tarax jukeboxes in Kyabram, a town north of Melbourne¹⁰⁴ – ‘I liked it, but it didn’t move me.’¹⁰⁵ He relocated to Melbourne for his final years of schooling, attending the prestigious Wesley College. In 1962, while studying law at the University of Melbourne, he was billeted with some aunts in St Kilda. In a strange and audacious move, he asked their neighbours across the road – the Burns family, whose son Ronnie was a singer – if he could live with them instead.¹⁰⁶ What was even more extraordinary was that Meldrum did go on to live with the Burnses – for almost a decade.¹⁰⁷

Another turning point for Meldrum was hearing the Beatles on a transistor radio ‘in the sand dunes’ at yet another regional Victorian pleasure spot, Point Leo.¹⁰⁸ And in a happy accident for his future career, he once tripped over singer Lynne Randell on the beach ‘and we became great friends.’¹⁰⁹

A friend from school, Max Ross, had gone on to be a member of the Groop, a hit band which began as the Wesley Trio and which, Meldrum later recalled, ‘was the first band I could get into because it was Australian music.’ It was late 1965.

I knew some people in the industry like Stan Rofe and Ken Sparkes . . . I said I’d try to get their record “Ol’ Hound Dog” on air. I never looked at it then as even publicity, because I was being the regular band moll.’¹¹⁰

The ‘moll’ tag, which Meldrum happily applied to himself with all its sexually subservient connotations,¹¹¹ possibly led to Rofe’s dismissive nickname for him: ‘Molly’. Within six months – in tandem with his Go-Set activities – Meldrum was not only a reporter on the TV show Kommotion, he was also miming international hits for the show (a briefly popular practice until it was banned by Actors Equity in 1967).

Go-Set, August 30, 1969.

Meldrum’s involvement in Russell Morris’s career included his first acknowledged production job, ‘The Real Thing’. The song was supposedly written by Johnny Young for Ronnie Burns. The story goes that when Meldrum heard the demo tape as he was passing by Young’s dressing room at Uptight, he cajoled a copy from Young and insisted to EMI that the song be given to Morris, whom he was now managing. On the recording, the song, which is in three distinct parts, was played by the Groop; Meldrum impulsively urged them to play for twice as long as was originally intended, speeding up as they went. He then added an overkill of sound effects and overdubs – everything including the kitchen sink and a Hitler speech and a nuclear explosion – as well as Groop member Brian Cadd reading the ‘conditions of sale’ wording from the back of a tape box:

‘I said, “Just read part of that.” So where you hear the talking it is in fact Brian reading and then he and I going into hysterical laughter.’¹¹²

Howard Gable, who had recently come to Melbourne from New Zealand as resident A&R/producer for EMI (he had produced ‘Sadie’), saw no commercial potential in the recording, and initially refused to release it, at which Meldrum ‘really kicked up a stink . . .’¹¹³ The battle to see the record become Morris’s solo debut, and to have it available nationwide, was possibly as arduous as the recording process itself, if not more so. But by April 1969, Go-Set was reporting that ‘The Real Thing’ was ‘a real hit’: ‘Record bars are finding it hard to keep the record in stock. In Sydney you can’t buy a copy of “The Real Thing” anywhere.’¹¹⁴

Achieving a number one single allowed Meldrum, Morris and Young to have a free hand in creating its follow-up, which was a Morris and Young collaboration in the way that ‘A Day in the Life’ was a Lennon-McCartney song – it was two separate tunes jammed together. Former Missing Link Doug Ford played on ‘Part Three Into Paper Walls’ as well as its flipside, ‘The Girl That I Love’.¹¹⁵ The A side – which is seven minutes long, forty seconds longer than its predecessor – starts up where ‘The Real Thing’ ends (and then ends with the beginning of ‘The Real Thing’!); it’s as if the team were making a concept album in instalments. Meldrum was, incidentally, never paid for his production work, as this would have been seen as a conflict of interest.¹¹⁶ Twenty-five years later, he remarked with his usual candor and garbled syntax, ‘I’d be the last person to hire myself to do a record production.’¹¹⁷ His meticulous muddle-headedness – ‘he only ever understood passion’, according to engineer Ern Rose¹¹⁸ – might have been the reason that Brian Cadd, when he was ‘going through a period of slight disenchantment’ with his friend, recorded a song about Meldrum called ‘Handyman.’¹¹⁹

WINGS OF AN EAGLE

Meldrum’s ascent as a record producer is one way to look at the success of ‘The Real Thing’; another is through the career of the 19-year-old whose name was on the single’s label, Russell Morris. In early 1968, Meldrum had written in Go-Set that ‘the biggest threat to Ronnie is the golden wonder boy, Johnny Farnham, who with his first record “Sadie” has reached the coveted No. 1 position in most states.’¹²⁰ Ronnie Burns’s biggest hit, ‘Smiley’, was still ahead of him, but as we have already seen his status as ‘golden wonder boy’ would be usurped not only by Farnham but by Russell Morris – and as a result of Meldrum’s own efforts.

Russell Morris may have seemed like the flipside (substantial, ‘with-it’, sensitive) to the jovial showman Johnny Farnham in 1968, but he was still in many ways the same kind of product. Indeed, ‘The Real Thing’ was just as much a novelty record as ‘Sadie’, though its bombast and good-natured pretentiousness certainly made it more listenable. And Morris felt obliged to defend Farnham in the early 70s: ‘He really likes what he’s doing . . . he must be to keep going. That’s what he is, it’s what he wants to do.’¹²¹

Russell Morris had left his group, Somebody’s Image, with whom he had achieved minor chart success, in 1967. ‘Everyone wanted to be in a band,’ he later recalled, ‘some of the bands were just hopeless.’¹²² Thirteen years after leaving Somebody’s Image he told Toby Creswell:

We were up in Sydney after we’d had two hit singles, and we were living on bananas and yoghurt with five dollars each in our pockets, and sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house in Stanmore. My manager, who also managed Ronnie Burns, was in town at the time and I came in to see him at the Sheraton to get some more money. We were desperate and here he was staying in a real hotel . . . I thought, ‘Fuck this, I gave up a diploma in accounting to be in a rock & roll band and these are the guys with all the money’ . . . I decided to leave the band and go solo.¹²³

As related, Meldrum took up the cudgels on Morris’s behalf, acting as his manager and the producer of his first two solo singles (they parted ways just before Morris travelled to the UK). The acknowledged top-flight songwriters at the time, Johnny Young and Hans Poulsen, both submitted songs. Along with ‘The Real Thing’ and ‘Part Three Into Paper Walls’, there was Poulsen’s ‘The Girl That I Love’, a sparkling ballad. As mentioned above, ‘Part Three’ also incorporated a song by Morris himself, and his subsequent hits – such as ‘Wings of an Eagle’, about a dying Aboriginal man¹²⁴ – were self-penned. Morris was a key participant, often outshining more established acts, in Operation Starlift – a package tour that included the Masters Apprentices, Zoot, Ronnie Burns, the Valentines, the Kinetics and Farnham, as well as local artists in each state.¹²⁵

By 1971 Morris was recreating himself as a sensitive artist (he wrote some remarkable hits at this time) – the opposite of Farnham, who played with scratch bands and toured constantly: ‘I won’t work without a good band to work with me,’ Morris said. ‘I refuse to work in hotels, which my manager can’t understand, ’cause that’s where the bread is . . . I want people to listen to what I’m doing, plus, of course, I’m still trying to overcome my pop star image.’¹²⁶ Possibly the best of his singles was the relatively bombastic ‘Mr. America’, an exploration of his possible future as an international star.

Morris was sensitive about his public image. ‘I can walk down the street,’ he told Lee Dillow in 1971, ‘and some thirteen-year-old chick will say: “Oh, look. There’s Russell Morris. Isn’t he a prick. What a shit.”¹²⁷ ‘At that time,’ he later told Creswell, ‘Thorpie was king and I was a big poofta.’¹²⁸ He took up karate for self-defence, because ‘guys seem to take exception to me’ and it cleared his head: ‘I’ve written some of my best songs while I was training’.¹²⁹ He spent five years in the US, beginning in 1973. While Morris’s songwriting and much of his output was original and sophisticated (his late-70s/early-80s career as part of Russell Morris and the Rubes a little less so), he did not manage to reinvent himself as a megastar the way John Farnham did in the 80s. He did, however, enjoy one of the biggest selling albums of his career – Sharkmouth – in 2013.

SONGWRITERS WITH A GOLDEN TOUCH

In the mid to late 60s it became possible – and credible – to be both a songwriter and a performer, and some young men from diverse backgrounds achieved this distinction and record-selling status. Hans Poulsen – born Bruce Gordon Poulsen, in 1945 in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Chelsea – started a group in 1965 that he called the 18th Century Quartet and recorded ‘The World Goes On.’¹³⁰ Rock promoter Ian Oshlack tried to turn the band into a supergroup with a revised line-up including Keith Glass: ‘They describe their sound as baroque beat.’¹³¹ Glass later described the group as like ‘an electrical Seekers. We were a pretty innovative band.’¹³² Poulsen, who claimed he lived ‘on my own or with gentle chicks that looked after me.’¹³³ wrote hits for New Zealand groups Larry’s Rebels and the Fourmyula (‘Lady Scorpio’ was co-written with Bruce Woodley, who considered Poulsen ‘a quirky little character’);¹³⁴ for Zoot (‘Monty and Me’, also written with Woodley); and for Russell Morris (‘It’s Only a Matter of Time’ and ‘You on my Mind’). His 1970 solo hit ‘Boom Sha La La Lo’ was another Woodley co-write; the two – along with Billy Green – also put together a soundtrack for a surfing film, Getting Back to Nothing. Like Poulsen’s two solo albums (Natural High and Lost and Found, Coming Home the Wrong Way Round), these were released on Fable. Considered by some to have been the standout performer at the 1970 Ourimbah festival,¹³⁵ Poulsen left Australia in 1972 for pastures new and wrote songs for the New Seekers, who became something of a repository for Australasian expat songwriters. Along with Captain Matchbox, Poulsen is a star of the pivotal party scene in Tim Burstall’s rousing 1971 film Stork. In the mid 80s, eight of his songs appeared in Dave Clarke’s Time the Musical and on the soundtrack album sung by Stevie Wonder, Cliff Richard and Dionne Warwick.¹³⁶ Poulsen’s star diminished in the 80s, and his whimsy increasingly fell on deaf ears (for instance, the publicity surrounding his cassette-only album Sacred Games which proclaimed that its title track was written ‘after contact with the dolphin Holy Fin.’¹³⁷)

Johnny Young was well-known as a pop performer, first in Perth and then nationwide, before he took on the additional role of hit songwriter. Born John de Jong in Rotterdam, he was part of the Dutch diaspora to Australia in the late 1940s, where his family settled in Kalamunda, an outer suburb of Perth. (Young came to Australia much earlier – and at a younger age, it should be noted, than other well-known Dutch-born Australian musicians like Billy Green or Harry Vanda.) By the age of twenty, he was working as a DJ, as a television compere (for Club 17), and releasing singles. His first hit, the following year, was ‘Step Back’, released on the Clarion label. It was donated to him by the Easybeats, who he met when they were passing through Perth. Angus Young (no relation, obviously) has suggested that in the early 60s Bon Scott played drums in a band backing Young, which is possible but unsubstantiated.¹³⁸ Moving to the eastern states, Johnny Young hosted the pop show Too Much, then took over The Go!! Show from Turpie. In early 1968, Young told Go-Set that his success was due to ‘lucky circumstances’:

‘I was not talented’, he said, ‘just fortunate.’

‘Johnny O’Keefe was the genius who helped me originally,’ he said. ‘Most people think I’m big-headed.’¹³⁹

It’s not clear what role O’Keefe played in Young’s success, but it is clear that Young was both astute and very conscious of his place in the industry – he added as much as he could to his armoury of abilities throughout the 60s, just as O’Keefe had (and more). In the space of a few years he went from performer to TV compere to songwriter, journalist, DJ and producer. Perhaps to counter the impression that their writers and the musicians they wrote about constituted a mutually backscratching elite, in the late 60s/early 70s Go-Set flirted with hostility between its columnists. Ian Meldrum and Young were both contributors to the magazine when Meldrum wrote:

Who can forget the times when Johnny Young played King pop star? The innocent, wide-eyed little boy who projected his adolescent body on stage, hand over mouth, completely overcome by the occasion, and awkwardly hand clapping through every number, and at the same time the obnoxious little terror off stage who ruthlessly trod on people to fulfil his ambitions.¹⁴⁰

One can only speculate on what Meldrum meant by this; other sources suggest that Young was particularly well-liked in the music industry, either because of or despite his good-natured blandness. It was apparently an act of generosity – he paid for Barry Gibb to fly from Queensland to Sydney for a television appearance, when Gibb had been facing a gruelling drive – that cemented the friendship between the two men. The Bee Gees and/or Gibb were to write a number of songs with Young in mind. During Young’s time in London Barry Gibb gave him some lessons in songwriting, at which point Young seemingly effortlessly added this string to his bow. Returning to Australia in early 1968 ‘in a state of exhaustion after six months’ intensive work’ in Europe, Young claimed expansively that he was making $2,000 dollars a week; that ‘When people say that Johnny Young was a flop as a pop singer in England, I readily agree with them’; and, most importantly, that he was about to release an album of his own songs, Surprises.¹⁴¹

Young’s pop singing success diminished at the same time his writing successes began. His biggest hit was undoubtedly ‘The Real Thing’ for Russell Morris, as discussed above. His ‘I Thank You’, written for the Aboriginal boxer-turned-singer Lionel Rose, is little more than a ditty, though it did reputedly sell 50,000 copies and led to ‘thousands of teenagers screaming their groovy heads off for their latest idol, Lionel.’¹⁴² The Lionel Rose phenomenon deserves wider study as an extraordinary outpouring of affection for an indigenous Australian shortly after a referendum in which Australians voted overwhelmingly to allow the Commonwealth to legislate for all indigenous people: an act which is often seen as an invitation to Aboriginal people to become part of mainstream Australia.

The best Johnny Young composition is a tie between ‘Smiley’, sung by Ronnie Burns and a number one hit in 1970, and ‘The Star’, recorded by Ross D. Wyllie, which had enjoyed chart success a year earlier. Like ‘The Real Thing’, these songs were sugar-coated subversion, though the first may have been accidentally so; Young and others have given varying explanations of the connection between the song ‘The Real Thing’ and the ‘It’s the real thing’ slogan used to promote Coca-Cola in the same year (1969). It has been posited that Young heard the phrase in London and decided to satirise it, and through it capitalism and advertising. Another version has it that the song was offered to Coca Cola as a jingle, that the song was rejected but the phrase taken on by the company worldwide.¹⁴³ In the 1970 film The Naked Bunyip, an exploration of sexuality in Australia, Morris (a symbol in the film for all teen idols) is seen singing ‘The Real Thing’ in front of a large Coca-Cola banner. Perhaps Young’s parody was co-opted by the company, but in the final analysis it seems most likely that ‘the real thing’ as a phrase was merely a manifestation of the late-60s zeitgeist, just as Morris’s band had called themselves Somebody’s Image. The globally famous New Seekers song – ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’, from 1971 – began life as a Coke commercial, incidentally.

‘Smiley’, a song about Normie Rowe, was curious for a number of reasons, not least that Colin Peterson – the drummer in the Bee Gees during their early UK years – had played a character called ‘Smiley’ in a film of the same name in the late 1950s. Young also wrote a brilliant song, ‘Hello’, for Rowe to sing – this and Brian Peacock’s ‘Penelope’ were Rowe’s two best tracks of the period, ‘The Star’ was a hit for Wyllie, who had formerly been a member of Brisbane group the Kodiaks¹⁴⁴ but, as mentioned earlier, was best known as the host of Uptight. The song was a reflection on the loneliness of the popular performer. Even at a time when the Australian pop press was impressed by almost anything, it was not particularly besotted with Wyllie. Meldrum – admittedly the Australian journalist who was keenest to whip up controversy – wrote in Go-Set that Wyllie ‘walks with a limp, has had numerous flop records, is certainly no Davy Jones.’¹⁴⁵ Wyllie’s limp was the result of childhood polio; his doctor had recommended music tuition as therapy.¹⁴⁶ Meldrum continues:

He readily admits that he hasn’t the voice of Tom Jones nor the sex appeal of Elvis Presley, but Ross D. Wyllie should be more than happy with the talent he has.’¹⁴⁷

Presumably he was. ‘The Star’ was also a top-forty hit in Britain for Herman’s Hermits in late 1969; the group first heard it while touring Australia in the middle of that year.¹⁴⁸

Young had teamed up with Kevin Lewis, formerly of Festival Records, to take over David Joseph’s television shows (the Happening series) and produce a new one, Young Talent Time. That his subversiveness had been a mere blip is shown by a ‘Lewis-Young production’ LP released under Young’s name and entitled A Young Man and his Music; here Young presents insipid readings of songs he had written for others that seem to suggest an artist who does not even realise, much less take pleasure in, the quality of his own work (astutely, he did not attempt to sanitise ‘The Real Thing’). Young Talent Time, a show which would bring performers such as Jamie Redfern, Debbie Byrne, Dannii Minogue and Tina Arena to the world, was often grotesque high kitsch. Young chose to avoid any reference to his songwriting past, and indeed since the earliest period of Young Talent Time has been happy to use as his signature tune his 1967 ballad version of the Beatles’ ‘All My Loving’.

POP AND BUBBLE . . .

Bubblegum, as a form, has been derided widely since its creation. Indeed, the backlash against bubblegum began almost as soon as the term was coined, and came in tandem with resistance to what was seen as its campy and crassly commercial qualities; some listeners undoubtedly felt that bubblegum was overly calculated, almost scientifically catchy. Yet in many instances this scornful dismissal of bubblegum was unfair, especially when contrasted with the ways in which other extremely simple, repetitive and instant forms of popular music, such as heavy rock, have been lionised.

Zoot began in Adelaide in the early 1960s, and were originally named Down the Line, after a Hollies song. One mainstay of the group was Beeb Birtles, born Gerard Birtlekamp, whose family arrived from Holland in 1958, when he was 10.

Like many scenes of the time, the Adelaide live music industry seems to have been run rather like a sport. The ‘opposition’ band to Down the Line was the Mermen, featuring singer Darryl Cotton and guitarist Rick Brewer. Cotton switched sides, or was otherwise transferred to Zoot, in early 1965, and Brewer moved over soon after.¹⁴⁹ Their name change to ‘something short and punchy’ was a gift from budding entrepreneur Doc Neeson,¹⁵⁰ who would become lead singer of the Angels in the 70s. Paddy McCartney, one of the two singers in the Twilights, alerted EMI to Zoot’s potential, and the group travelled to Melbourne in mid 1968 to be immersed in a marketing plan that would prove to be a short-term success but also bring about their undoing. Birtles later recalled:

There was a guy in Melbourne who was a manager, called Wayne De Gruchy. Wayne came over to see the group and saw a lot of potential in us becoming a very popular young band in Australia. And when they brought us over to Melbourne, he and another guy that owned the Bertie’s disco in Melbourne decided that they needed a gimmick of some sort, to really get the band going. And the image that was decided on was: ‘Think pink, think Zoot’! It was this outrageous thing where the band dressed up in all-pink clothes, which of course . . . all the young girls loved us in these ridiculous outfits and all their boyfriends hated our guts, y’know? And that’s really how the whole thing came about . . . I always felt very very uncomfortable dressing that way, ’cos it wasn’t me. But, at the same time . . .¹⁵¹

Later that year, Zoot appeared at the Melbourne Velodrome alongside the Twilights, the Masters Apprentices, Johnny Young, the Iguana and the Wild Cherries. The event was broadcast on television and radio; this may have been a factor in their success. Within six months, Zoot had switched managers – to Daryl Sambell – and released ‘Monty and Me’, a song written by Hans Poulsen and Bruce Woodley and produced by Ian Meldrum, to considerable success. Signing with Sambell was a strange move for a group who would soon become so sensitive about their perceived sexuality; Cotton told the student press in early 1969 that ‘there are a helluva lot of camps in the business. These blokes can break you if you don’t sleep with them. They could stop any group in Australia.’¹⁵² Zoot were immersed in a Think Pink ad campaign: invitations to its launch took the shape of a big pink heart, the group wore pink suits, and Rick Brewer played a pink drum kit.¹⁵³ Jim Keays claimed two decades later that his group, the Masters Apprentices, had decided at the time that ‘we wouldn’t have what we considered a pansy sort of look, like the Zoot in their pink outfits and stuff.’¹⁵⁴ In fact, Keays bought his sexually ambiguous clothing in women’s clothing stores, despite his professed anti-‘pansy’ stance.

Having arrived in a flash, Zoot seemed quickly on the wane, perhaps because of the gimmickry associated with their popularity. The always loud-mouthed and judgmental Stan Rofe commented:

I don’t disadmire the Zoot, nor do I have any personal grudge agin’ them. As predicted by all in the industry, they were the big bubblegum group of 1969 and even their staunchest fans won’t deny on the eve of another year the Zoot’s star is fading.¹⁵⁵

The group received a new lease on life when they attracted a hot new talent to their ranks in Rick Springfield, a Sydney guitarist/songwriter who had toured Vietnam with Mike Brady’s MPD Ltd and, under the name of Wickedy Wak, released a single written by Johnny Young and produced by Meldrum, the rousing ‘Billie’s Bikey Boys’. Springfield attempted to extract Zoot from pink stigma by means of riff-rock, beginning with a single, ‘Mr. Songwriter’/’Flying’, the latter having all the elements that characterised the classic sound of his international hit career in the 80s. Zoot’s next single, ‘Hey Pinky’, was accompanied by a ritual burning of their pink clothes on the show Happening ’70; the visceral effect of which was presumably somewhat muted by the fact that it took place on black-and-white television. ‘We keep telling people our musical style has changed,’ whined an unidentified Zoot member to Go-Set’s Jean Gollan, adding that ‘more people are listening to us and agreeing. They’re realizing that we’re not quite the pink poofters that they thought.’¹⁵⁶

Springfield was the first Zoot member to maintain a strong songwriting presence, and the group’s sound shifted radically. He also initiated the band’s cover of the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’,¹⁵⁷ which sounded more like Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’. This was the sum total of its genius, unfortunately; it is almost a novelty record, and whatever novelty it had was somewhat undermined by the fact that Doug Parkinson In Focus had done something very similar, though slightly better, the previous year. It is a shame, considering the high quality of the other material released by Zoot at this time – for instance, the epic ‘Turn Your Head’, or the show-business psychodrama of ‘The Freak’ – that, like Parkinson’s band, they are generally remembered not for their excellent original material but for a tossed-off and ineffectual Beatles cover.

Zoot split in mid 1971. Springfield went on to become a star in the US, as an actor and performer; Rick Brewer was to see major chart success again in the Ferrets; while Birtles and Cotton remained together as a duo under the name Frieze, discussed below.

Zoot’s career ran parallel to – and, in some respects, in competition with – that of Perth’s Valentines; indeed, the Valentines’ break up (on 1 Aug 1970)¹⁵⁸ occurred shortly after they were embroiled in a brief public argument with Zoot (and the Masters Apprentices) about which of the bands was the first to wear a specially designed band uniform.

The Valentines brought joint vocalists Bon Scott and Vince Lovegrove to Australia’s attention. The group had come together in 1966 as a merger of Perth’s two top acts, the Spektors and the Winztons (Scott was from the former, Lovegrove the latter). Scott would go on to sing in Fraternity and AC/DC; Lovegrove would become known as a manager, promoter and journalist. Other members would have extensive careers in a number of top groups, drummer Doug Lavery for instance, would become a member of Axiom.

Whatever qualities the Valentines may have possessed, like Zoot before Springfield (or, for that matter, the Masters Apprentices between Mick Bower and Doug Ford, as we shall see below), the group lacked a songwriter. Although rhythm guitarist Ted Ward provided some strong material, the fact that three of the Valentines’ seven singles came via the Easybeats is testament to this deficiency. They also lacked focus, as they were well aware. Scott admitted late in the group’s career: ‘We can do anything from heavy rock to bubblegum, but there’s nothing that could be called distinctively the Valentines. But when we find our bag, baby, we’ll be sticking to it!’¹⁵⁹

Like Johnny Young, they became Clarion recording artists; their most interesting single was a cover of the Soft Machine’s brilliant ‘Love Makes Sweet Music’; like the original, it was not a hit. (There is no evidence that Soft Machine founder Daevid Allen’s Australian origins played any part in the decision to cover this song.) In late 1967 the Valentines moved to Melbourne, which they made their base for the next three years. They also switched labels, from Clarion to Philips, at the instigation of Ron Tudor, formerly of W&G and soon to launch his own Fable label. Their 1969 single ‘My Old Man’s a Groovy Old Man’ – a genuine bubblegum record, though nowhere near Vanda and Young’s best work – was a top-forty hit. In March of that year members of the group were prosecuted for marijuana possession, an event which Go-Set claimed ‘shook the pop world’, but far from adversely affecting their status, this seemed to have boosted it: ‘They even gained in popularity.’ The Valentines subsequently came out in favour of pot legalisation. Go-Set asked: ‘Was this when they first realised that they could be honest with their fans?’¹⁶⁰

Late in the Valentines’ career, their music was reported to be ‘getting heavier (and better) all the time – now with their own arrangements of Jeff Beck and Chicago’s plus their own compositions.’¹⁶¹ Their last single, ‘Juliette’, was probably their best, but they split four months after its release.

Other practitioners of bubblegum in Australia found it expedient to move into fresh fields. Sydney group Flying Circus had two hits written by the American song writing duo, Buzz Cason and Mac Gayden: ‘Hayride’ and ‘La La’. They toured with the Valentines (and Johnny Farnham and Mike Furber), whom they considered ‘gas guys’, saying: ‘They really turned us on to the simple things in life, picnics on the roadside and such. We really dig that group.’ Flying Circus’s live set included some country rock songs,¹⁶² and this was to become their stock in trade. In the early 70s they relocated to Canada, where they achieved no little success in a larger market.

MASTER KEAYS

In chapter 2 we briefly encountered the Mustangs as they ambivalently accepted a vocalist in the form of Jim Keays. The group had auditioned Keays in late 1965 at their rehearsal space in an old stables;¹⁶³ Keays had just given up on learning the bass; his tutor had been the Twilights’ John Bywaters.¹⁶⁴ The augmented line-up became the Masters Apprentices. ‘The Masters and the Easybeats,’ David Day and Tim Parker write in their 1987 history of Adelaide rock and pop, ‘were probably the two major bands to actually start what has now become known as the Australian sound’, adding rather needlessly that ‘the Masters were really a band that created their own sound . . . It was an Australian sound.’¹⁶⁵

The new group covered Adelaide in advertising stickers¹⁶⁶ and had a residency in a café over a fish and chip shop in Glenelg. They then found a venue that was arguably more appropriate: the Beat Basement, a club with a ‘rounded ceiling, so it was much like a tunnel.’¹⁶⁷ Other bands playing there – according to Keays – included a slew of intriguingly named outfits such as the Others, Blues Rags ’N’ Hollers, Dust and Ashes, Y?4, 5 Sided Circle, and the Syssys.¹⁶⁸ The next major venue for the Masters was the Octagon in Elizabeth, where they became the ‘biggest drawcard.’¹⁶⁹ They would then move on to regional tours in South Australia, including the industrial town of Whyalla and the ‘Cornwall of the south’, the Yorke Peninsula.¹⁷⁰

In 1966 the Masters’ Mick Bower and Rick Morrison made up a song in the studio, possibly at the suggestion of engineer/producer Max Pepper. They called it ‘Undecided’, and it brought together all the tricks they’d learned as an R&B pop band. Pepper, an Adelaide personality, was remembered decades later for having sold posters of James Dean’s mangled car at rock and roll parties¹⁷¹ and for his Gamba studio, which included a Moog synthesiser and became a ‘centre for experimentation’¹⁷² at night. Pepper achieved the echo effect on Keays’s vocal from what he called the ‘government garage across the road’ from his studio;¹⁷³ the crickets that can be heard on the song were, however, unintentional. In a story that seems quite common amongst groups at this time (the same thing supposedly happened to Zoot), however extraordinary it may seem, the band were unaware that ‘Undecided’ had been released until they heard it on the radio.

The Masters moved to Melbourne, living at first in an unromantic caravan park in Sunshine.¹⁷⁴ ‘When we went to Melbourne eventually,’ Keays recalled in Parker and Day’s book, ‘we were branded a new wave sort of band because of our looks.’¹⁷⁵ Their record label, Astor, sent them to Armstrong’s in Albert Park Road to record:¹⁷⁶ amongst his other achievements, house engineer Roger Savage had recorded the Rolling Stones’ debut single ‘Come On’. Here, he was set to work as engineer on Bower’s turgid ‘Living in a Child’s Dream’,¹⁷⁷ though Ian Meldrum may have been the actual producer on the song.¹⁷⁸ For a brief period in the mid 1960s Bower was turning out the most powerful and pointed R&B pop singles in Australia, if not the world: ‘Wars or Hands of Time’, the B side to ‘Undecided’, was an early anti-Vietnam pop song that packed a considerable punch, and ‘Buried and Dead’, the Masters Apprentices’ second single, was a vibrant gem. It is a shame that the juvenile psychedelia of ‘Living in a Child’s Dream’ was Bower’s last major hit: the mounting pressure of the group’s increasing celebrity became too much for him. He suffered a nervous breakdown¹⁷⁹ and was compelled to leave the band, who were now in need of a songwriter. Another great writer, the iridescent Brian Cadd – a rival to Poulsen and Young, who is discussed further in chapter 8 – gave the group a song called ‘Silver People’ which they turned into one of their best tracks, the compulsive ‘Elevator Driver’.¹⁸⁰

Like the Missing Links before them, the Masters Apprentices had two very different line-ups. Two years into their ascendancy, the entire band aside from Keays had been replaced for various reasons (health, competence, a wish to stay in Adelaide rather than relocate to Melbourne). ‘Essentially, the Masters were two entities,’ Keays writes in his autobiography; the first version ‘ceased to exist at about New Year’s Eve 1967.’¹⁸¹ The difference between the Masters Apprentices and the Missing Links, of course, is that the Masters had one constant in Keays (with the exception of the band’s final, short-lived incarnation in Britain).

The early 1968 line-up of the Masters featured Doug Ford, formerly of the Missing Links and Running Jumping Standing Still, Colin Burgess, later AC/DC’s first drummer, and guitarist Peter Tilbrook. True to the spirit of 1968, the band wore ‘clothes which Jim designs and we all wear,’ huffed Burgess, ‘except for Peter [Tilbrook], who’s commercial and buys off the rack.’¹⁸² Keays had hoped to get Beeb Birtles into the group as bassist; instead, a chance airplane seat assignment found him talking with Daryl Sambell, who suggested Glenn Wheatley,¹⁸³ then playing in the Brisbane group Bay City Union.

In late 1969 the group recorded ‘Turn up Your Radio’: ‘It screams and tears thru your trannie,’ yelled the ever-modern Meldrum from the pages of Go-Set, ‘like a JUMBO JET taking off from KENNEDY airport.’¹⁸⁴ Having exhausted all avenues (and themselves) in becoming the biggest group in Australia in the late 60s, the Masters Apprentices journeyed to the UK in May 1970;¹⁸⁵ Glenn Wheatley and Marcie Jones, who was working there with her group the Cookies, pretended to be married in order to rent a house in London.¹⁸⁶ The group would later record at Abbey Road; at least one of their last singles, ‘Because I Love You’, was a very good song.¹⁸⁷ Keays claims that the Bronze label, home of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (featuring Mick Rogers, previously of Procession) and Uriah Heep, wanted to sign them – but that EMI wouldn’t let them out of their contract.¹⁸⁸ Their Masters Apprentices’ legacy and Keays’s subsequent activities will be discussed in later chapters.

SUPERDROOP’S SUPERGROUPS

Jim Keays recalls that in the mid 1960s he and other Masters would go and see the Twilights at Adelaide’s Oxford Club: ‘They were fantastic’, he says, while adding: ‘We didn’t want to be like them.’¹⁸⁹ Indeed, the Masters’ story was that of a group always chasing a decent songwriter and songs; the Twilights were immensely versatile and scintillating and also had at least one brilliant songwriter in Terry Britten. Like many of the abovementioned groups, however, most of their best-known hits are covers; Britten’s contributions are the exceptions.

The Twilights depicted as puppets of their manager, Garry Spry

The Twilights (who were discussed briefly in chapter 2 in their earliest, vocal-only incarnation) moved to Melbourne in 1965 after recording their first single, ‘I’ll Be Where You Are’, at Vi-Sound Studios on Hindley St. They had a hit, ‘If She Finds Out’, the following year and won Hoadley’s National Battle of the Sounds in 1966. In order for them to take part, one of their vocalists (McCartney) had to exit the band temporarily, because the competition required a five-piece group; the prize was a trip to the UK, and the other band members worked their passage on the liner that took them to Britain so as to raise the money for his fare. Terry Britten’s ‘9.50’ was recorded at Abbey Road in early 1967. Drummer Laurie Pryor contributed a song called ‘Young Girl’, and the group also played a Hollies cover, ‘What’s Wrong with the Way I Live’. Whereas Jim Keays’s memory of Abbey Road is glimpsing John Lennon playing piano through a studio door, Glenn Shorrock had the distinction of standing next to Paul McCartney at a urinal.

The Twilights were an unusual bag. Shorrock, for all his vocalising and other musical skills, seemed happiest when dressed up as ‘Superdroop’, a fat superhero character the group introduced into their live performances towards the end of their career as they tried to spark up their act; Superdroop is also featured in the video they made to promote their single ‘Cathy Come Home’. Twenty years later – after his dream run with Little River Band – Shorrock returned to this kind of cabaret when he concocted Two for the Show for the Sydney nightclub Kinselas, where he performed impressions of Joe Cocker, Easybeats, the Bee Gees, Billy Thorpe, Ross Wilson and Johnny O’Keefe.¹⁹⁰

The Twilights’ first, self-titled album had been almost entirely covers; ‘Needle in a Haystack’ had been a particularly big hit for them. Their second (and final) album, Once Upon a Twilight, is probably one of the best psychedelic pop records of the 1960s, replete with an unlistenable comedy number (‘The Cocky Song’) and Britten gems such as ‘Mr. Nice’, ‘Blue Roundabout’, ‘Take Action’ and ‘Paternosta Row’.

Cliff Richard covered a song from the LP, Britten’s ‘Mr Nice’ (Britten would go on to spend much of the 70s as Richard’s guitarist/songwriter); at approximately the same time, Britten released a solo single, ‘2000 Weeks’, named for Tim Burstall’s film and written on commission from Columbia Pictures.¹⁹¹ Once Upon a Twilight had the same name as a TV pilot made in 1967 that starred the group (as themselves), comedian Mary Hardy and Ronnie Burns (indeed, the show is an origins story for Burns, in which the hick mummy’s boy from Gumnut Gully, ‘Alphonse,’ becomes a pop star). Shorrock’s new year’s resolution for 1968 was ‘for the TV show to be a success, and for the group to make it in America.’¹⁹² They went to the UK instead and, facing the possibility of success – a Top of the Pops appearance and pirate radio exposure – they bailed. In his memoir, From This Side of Things, the Groop’s Brian Cadd muses on the fate his band and Shorrock’s both suffered there:

The Twilights and the Groop were typical of so many of the acts that went to London and failed. We experienced enough once we got there to realise that no-one from Australia at that point really understood how it all worked. The Groop had taken a manager over who was spectacularly out of his league in an industry that was huge and powerful and that swallowed up acts like ours, virtually on sight.¹⁹³

Reputedly the Twilights could earn a thousand dollars for a half-hour appearance in Australia; in many of their performances they chose to recreate a famous album of the time – such as Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – on stage, though little evidence remains of the effectiveness of these imitations. They announced their breakup in 1969, giving the highly unlikely explanation that Pryor had ‘told the other members of the six-member group he wanted to concentrate on jazz’ (it’s possible that he wanted to, but he didn’t). They played their farewell performance at the Sydney Trocadero at the beginning of February that year.¹⁹⁴

Shorrock almost immediately went into management, taking on one of two bands known at the time as the Avengers – the one from Brisbane, rather than the one from New Zealand.¹⁹⁵ The Brisbane Avengers were set to record two Terry Britten compositions for their single; Shorrock later claimed, wistfully, that the group was ‘like a “little Twilights” to me.’¹⁹⁶ Ian Meldrum ‘hurriedly made my exit’ from an interview with them, ‘because strains of the N. Z. Avengers’ current single wafted through the air’ from a nearby radio. The battle of the Avengers was clearly going to be fierce, although the Brisbane group seemed good-natured about the situation: ‘They also said that if their current name doesn’t work out and the NZ Avengers take the glory they will seriously consider joining up with the Valentines to make an 11-piece group . . . the VALENVENGERS.’¹⁹⁷

Shorrock’s retirement from performance was extremely temporary. Ian Meldrum had a knack for being on the spot when major splits were announced; he appears to have been the first journalist to be told the Beatles were breaking up, though it didn’t really register with him until he read the transcript of his interview in Go-Set. He was in the studio with the Groop (their ‘Woman You’re Breaking Me’, an early Brian Cadd songwriting venture, was a huge hit in 1967, kept out of the top spot only by Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ and the Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’),¹⁹⁸ when he was told by Ronnie Charles that the band were ‘splitting up for all time and that Brian and Donnie were forming a new group.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous’, I said.

‘It’s true,’ said Ronnie.

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

‘Well I haven’t had much time to think about it,’ said Ron, ‘considering I only found out about it an hour ago.’¹⁹⁹

Meldrum goes on to say that he has heard from the manager of Melbourne band the Iguana that Shorrock has quit as manager of the Brisbane Avengers, and from Vince Lovegrove that Doug Lavery is leaving the Valentines ‘to join a supergroup.’ Allegations then flew thick and fast – that Don Mudie and Brian Cadd had facilitated the breakup of the Groop to form Axiom, drawing members from the Valentines and Cam-Pact, and ‘immediately hailed as a supergroup’. The shake-up that led to the creation of Axiom was so intense that Go-Set created a table for its readers showing what the ramifications would be.²⁰⁰

For his part, Doug Lavery claimed he hadn’t enjoyed being in the Valentines because he didn’t like the music. Cam-Pact’s Chris Stockley stated that ‘Keith Glass and I had already decided to leave the Cam-Pact long before I heard from Brian. We were on the verge of forming a new group with Paddy from the Twilights – we still needed an organist. But that fell through when Keith went to Sydney to do Hair.’

Cadd announced that the scene needed ‘more groups working together, supergroups . . . intergroup performances’ and in one rumination he virtually wrote the Fable label/Bootleg family band manifesto:

There should be pop festivals. One thing I’ve noticed – there’s very little pop world social life. In Sydney they try, at places like Caesar’s and the Here, but all you end up [with] is a conglomeration of new groups . . . There’s so much unexploited talent around. Australia is probably the most talented country in the world . . . The best thing that would help Australia would be radio stations playing 90 percent Australian records, regardless of their quality . . . It’d be bad at first, but the standard would have to improve.²⁰¹

Axiom retreated to the northern Victorian town of Nathalia, where Don Mudie’s family lived, and rehearsed in the local football club’s changing rooms for two weeks.²⁰² They were initially uncertain whether to record or not, because they didn’t want to be tied into a contract that would spoil their international chances. If they were able to get a one-record deal, they were looking to record two songs. One of these would be a signature hit – Cadd’s lilting, hippie-ish ‘A Little Ray of Sunshine’.²⁰³

Shorrock’s departure from the Avengers’ management seemed a fait accompli; he had almost joined the group Ram Jam, ‘but they weren’t after the international acclaim and prestige so I decided against it’. Axiom’s attraction was ‘the fact that they wanted to go to England as much as I did.’

Plus, of course, the fact that they’re all known in their own right. I wouldn’t have been prepared to go through all that getting known again. I mean why should I? – I’ve been through enough of it.²⁰⁴

In hindsight it seems amusing that Go-Set felt the 26-year-old Shorrock was too old for the ‘limelight’.²⁰⁵

If Axiom’s Australian contemporaries Mississippi had an American name, Axiom had a contentiously ‘American’ song as their debut single: ‘Arkansas Grass’, a veiled critique of the Vietnam War in the guise of an American Civil War story. Its follow-up, the top-five hit ‘A Little Ray of Sunshine’, remains an Australian classic, and its quality was apparent even in 1970, when Jean Gollan wrote in Go-Set that ‘If ever a single seemed aimed at number one, this is it.’²⁰⁶ Ed Nimmervoll concurred, lauding Shorrock’s rendition of ‘a plaintive, caressing lyric to just bass and a growing string arrangement which builds into a full, thumping climax, only to grow soft again. Everything is just SO right.’²⁰⁷ Shorrock brought an element of comedic performance to Axiom’s live shows, just as he had done for the Twilights, and the band claimed ‘the progressive groups criticize them for the comedy aspect of their stage act’, which a Go-Set reporter described as ‘nearly always hilariously funny.’²⁰⁸ Shorrock was still playing Superdroop onstage (in fact, he won a talent contest during Axiom’s sea voyage to Britain).²⁰⁹

With his time as hit writer for the Groop under his belt, Cadd in particular was a name to be reckoned with at this time, and big things were expected of Axiom. Go-Set reported that ‘Axiom intend to play the whole English scene very cool – they regard it as the first step in their real ambition, which is to get to America with some sort of name behind them, and perhaps a couple of English records.’²¹⁰ Their album Fools Gold was accompanied by a 20-minute colour film ‘made for the overseas market’.²¹¹

There were two warning signs, though neither seemed terribly ominous at the time. One was the lone dissenting voice of critic Ed Nimmervoll, who wrote that ‘Axiom lack just one thing – a something which is pure, unmistakable Axiom.’²¹² The other was the insistence by Sitmar, the shipping line which took them to Britain, that they strike a nautical pose on the cover of their album: for Cadd the cover ‘remains one of the truly great mockeries of a rock band.’²¹³ The group lasted long enough to return to Australia once, but their second trip to London saw them break up almost immediately, in March 1971.²¹⁴

Axiom’s story was that of the Twilights and the Groop all over again. Cadd returned to Australia and produced a vast and impressive body of work in the early to mid 70s, including advertisements, hit singles, television themes and film soundtracks: he was immortalized in 1974 after writing the theme song to the film Alvin Purple – but also by being discussed in the film itself, which was at the time the most commercially successful Australian movie ever released.²¹⁵

Shorrock remained in Britain after Axiom’s demise and joined a British-Belgian orchestral jazz-rock outfit called Esperanto, which released three albums; this band recorded at least one Shorrock song (‘Statue of Liberty’) which would also be released by the Little River Band, and reputedly also performed (but did not release) Shorrock songs that are now seen as LRB standards, including ‘Help Is on Its Way’ and ‘Emma’. He also released solo singles, including the strangely meta ‘Let’s Get the Band Together’.

Shorrock’s star would not shine in the USA the way he hoped until an unusual combination of celebrity musicians came together in Little River Band in the early 70s; this process is described in chapter 8. In the meantime, future bandmate Beeb Birtles was suffering the indignity of being sponsored by the Frieze clothing company. After the breakup of Zoot, Birtles and Darryl Cotton formed a duo that was forced to take the name Frieze, and the company – perhaps unable to get over the Think Pink days – insisted they adopt silly, clothing-related names, though of course only Birtles needed to do so. ‘Darryl Cotton was okay, he was Cotton, right?’ Birtles told Parker and Day in 1987. ‘But they wanted to call me something like Terry Lene. and I was supposed to have a brother called Crepe Lene . . . ’²¹⁶ The duo played shows in department stores to a pre-recorded backing track; they had a genuinely grotesque song, ‘Why Do Little Kids Have To Die’. Not long after their album was issued, credited to both ‘Frieze’ and ‘Birtles and Cotton’, Birtles joined up with Mississippi, whose members included Graeham Goble. LRB was slowly being assembled.

SWINGING IN THE BREEZE

In 1968 Doug Ashdown made a superb album, Source, which included a composition called ‘Something Strange’, which he explained was ‘written with me singing into a tape recorder. I don’t know what the words meant . . . It’s all quite ridiculous.’²¹⁷ After recording three albums on his own, Ashdown formed a songwriting and production relationship with Jimmy Stewart; their first album working together, The Age of Mouse, was a double. It was also released in the USA (as a single disc), where it sold ‘a few thousand copies.’ The two went to New York in 1972 and hated it; they were advised to go to Nashville. Ashdown assumed the southern city would feature ‘everyone sitting on porches with corn-cob pipes and guitars – wholesome beautiful country and nice houses’, but it turned out to be ‘full of insurance companies and printers [and] office buildings’.²¹⁸ Within a year, Ashdown had written a country hit single.

After he and Stewart returned to Australia in 1974, Ashdown had this message for his musical compatriots:

Every single person who makes a record in this country . . . must be made to realise that our market isn’t Australia, it’s the entire English-speaking world.²¹⁹

It is clear from memoirs, memories and recordings that the Australian pop scene was diverse and vibrant in the late 1960s – most particularly, though not by any means exclusively, in Melbourne. When the Seekers completed their successful Australian tour, which included playing to 200,000 people at Melbourne’s Myer Music Bowl in March 1967 (a controversially brief twenty-minute set!)²²⁰ many might well have taken the group’s international success as a sign of the future for Australian music. Indeed, as we will see, when the Seekers split in 1968 some of that band’s members used their international contacts to introduce other Australasians to the world market, and the Bee Gees did the same: Maurice Gibb not only introduced Tin Tin (Steve Groves and Steve Kipner) to the British charts, but also maintained contact and offered opportunities to such Australian stars as Ronnie Burns. Go-Set broke the news in a way that highlights the occasional ambivalence in Australia to the possibility of losing favourite musicians to the wider world:

‘What?’ I hear the anguished cry of many Burns fans – ‘Our all-Australian Ronnie can’t do it to us, even if it does mean an L.P. with Maurice Gibb!’ But you can relax – Ronnie is only going to be away for four weeks – 2½ weeks in England to make the L.P., three days in Germany to promote his single, and a week in the states.²²¹

The album was to be made up of Maurice Gibb and Johnny Young compositions, but was later called off because of ‘costing difficulties’.²²² However, when Barry Gibb subsequently lined up more sessions Burns cancelled because he wanted to promote ‘Smiley’. ‘This could be my first chance at an Australian gold record,’ Burns reasoned, ‘and I value that more than rushing into English recording.’²²³

There are so many examples of Australians relocating to Britain for long or short periods during this period that the music press seemingly had to redefine ‘success’ constantly so as to make each new departure notable. The Seekers had set the bar very high, so that even though their major success was as a pop group, it became necessary to categorise them as something else, in order that each new pop hopeful could be ‘Australia’s first’ pop or rock artist to make waves internationally.

The rising star of Olivia Newton-John is an example. Newton-John, the daughter of a noted Melbourne academic, was a Go!! Show regular in the mid 60s. By the end of that decade, she was chosen to join Don Kirshner’s post-Monkees group Toomorrow (not to be confused with the British pop group with the more conventional spelling), who starred in a film of the same name.²²⁴ ‘Two good years out of my life wasted’, she was later to tell TV Week,²²⁵ but soon afterwards she had her first big hit with ‘If Not for You’. Like that of the Bee Gees, Newton-John’s Australian career is the familiar story of an artist gaining all the professional experience necessary to launch herself fully formed, yet ‘new’, on the international market.

The mid-60s Newton-John was a bubbly innocent whose career arc was the one aspired to by so many teenage girl TV stars; the rich irony being that in Newton-John’s case, ambition was the only thing she lacked. Indeed, that lack was a considered policy: ‘I wasn’t at all ambitious,’ she told Debbie Kruger in 1994, adding that ‘it’ (success) ‘just kept happening to me,’ but also pointing out that in Australia in the 1960s an ambitious woman was seen as ‘grasping’ and, presumably, self-promoting to an amoral degree.

Newton-John won a contest on Johnny O’Keefe’s show Sing Sing Sing in 1964; the prize, as was common, was a trip to England. Like Little Pattie a few years previously, Newton-John’s education was lost to music and television. The people of Melbourne chipped in to the debate between Newton-John and her mother, who won: she ‘kind of dragged me . . . She said I needed to broaden my horizons.’ By the end of 1965, the two were living in Perrins Court, two blocks from the Hampstead tube station, with Newton-John plotting for many months to return to Australia and rejoin her boyfriend, Go!! Show host Ian Turpie. At a certain point – unlike her singing partner Pat Carroll, who had a genuine desire for success but was unable to extend her visa – Newton-John’s career took on a life of its own. Her first major hit – a cover of a song she disliked, Bob Dylan’s ‘If Not for You’ (previously covered by George Harrison), set her on a country-rock course in the early 70s, and she gained a public profile which soared to megastar status later in the decade.

The La De Das also enjoyed an international profile for a brief period. The group had been formed by Kevin Borich and Phil Key in New Zealand in 1965; they initially recorded ‘in a guy called Eldridge Stebbing’s garage’²²⁶ (Stebbing would later become a legendary Auckland producer). They moved to Australia in 1967, and first played at radio DJ Ward Austin’s Jungle discotheque, then supported the Easybeats for their final shows (according to Phil Key, ‘Kevin did a whole set with his fly down. The girls yelled at him and we tried to do our thing and no one knew who the hell we were.’)²²⁷ The La De Das achieved some notoriety by taking on a concept album project: a song cycle based on Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, narrated by poet, scenester, and self-styled friend to the Stones and Dylan (and in the real world, associate of the Red Onions and Loved Ones) Adrian Rawlins. Though pretentious, this album is musically marvelous; nevertheless, the group disowned it almost immediately. Phil Key berated his group’s commitment to the record by admitting, ‘We weren’t here to promote it . . . but we wanted to go to England, and we had some money and we didn’t care.’²²⁸ The La De Das toured France; in one more story of almosts to throw on the rock history pile, they reputedly failed to attend an audition with Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant because their truck broke down.²²⁹ They also ‘almost’ had a hit with the Beatles’ song ‘Come Together’, which they had recorded on the understanding that the Beatles would not release theirs in the near future – then they did.²³⁰ The group entered a period of disarray, but reconvened in Australia in the early 70s and recorded some excellent material; their Rock and Roll Sandwich, produced by Rod Coe (of whom more later) is fast, loud and fun.

HEADING FOR THE SEVENTIES

Joe Camilleri, whom we have already encountered as a member of the short-lived Drollies, was one of thousands of young Melbournians hopping between bands, developing his musical versatility and style, throughout the 60s. At the time, he says, ‘I was living in North Altona and I wanted to live in St Kilda’²³¹ – in other words, he was a suburban boy who longed for bohemia. In 1986, Camilleri gave an extensive overview of his early career to Wendy Milsom and Helen Thomas:

I was fortunate that the band called the King Bees were desperate for a singer. They came from the other side. I came from Altona and I was a bit of a wild dog in those days. They were all Melbourne Grammar boys [and] Glen Waverley High kids. They taught me a lot, I couldn’t speak English before I met them. They were doing a job in Footscray. I auditioned for them and we went through about forty songs . . . They used to back Normie Rowe . . . So I would do Normie Rowe songs, and ‘I Belong With You’ and all the Easybeats songs.

We were really young. We were fifteen or sixteen years old and we were supporting the Easybeats, and we were playing at the Catcher when it used to go until 6 a.m. We would get something like $32 for the night and we would be there from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. We had to play between all the main groups. It was pretty outrageous stuff . . . Ross Wilson’s band the Pink Finks, Little Gulliver.²³²

If the King Bees had a job in Warrnambool: ‘we would put everything in the Dodge; the PA, the amps, ourselves, guitars . . . It was just a sedan. Dave Flett was a genius, he could make it fit. His motto is: if it doesn’t fit, cut it in half. We would have a little spot for Peter Starkie in the back seat, because he was the skinniest’.²³³

Flett, Starkie and Camilleri all went on to have varying degrees of success in Melbourne music in the 70s – Camilleri would become the most famous of the three; by the end of the decade he would lead one of the country’s most prominent live bands, who were also a pop chart act.

The spirit of the late sixties as the times crept slowly into the early 70s is probably best exemplified by Wendy Saddington. Like so many of the great Australian musicians (especially female musicians) of this time, Saddington was under-recorded, and while she had her fervent fans – not least Renée Geyer – she remained a minority taste when she could quite appropriately have been a superstar. John Topper, an informant on the early 70s who will feature heavily in chapter 8, remembers seeing Saddington around his local area (the government housing estate of West Heidelberg) before she became famous. Saddington left school at fifteen. ‘I’ve had about 25 jobs since I left school, they were all bomb-outs,’ she moaned in 1968. ‘The only thing I can do besides sing is type and that doesn’t really grab me.’²³⁴ She was ‘discovered’ in 1966 at a coffee shop in Carlton called the Love In.

This guy from a group called the Revolution got in contact with me and before long I was singing with them at a few gigs. Then I became involved with the James Taylor Move, who I put up with for four months. We just didn’t suit each other, I mean to say – they wanted to wear their creepy thin suits when I wanted to sing. I guess you could put it down to a mild clash of personality.

She went on to perform with the long-lasting, much beloved Chain (as well as giving them a new name to replace Beat ’n’ Tracks²³⁵), though she later dismissed this experience by saying: ‘You can take so much of working your guts out five lousy nights a week for some pathetic amount of money which when split five ways becomes even worse.’²³⁶

Saddington was an unusual type; her attitude was forthright and her preference – to sing live and to perform covers of songs she loved (‘Nobody Knows You (When You’re Down and Out)’, as done by Jimmy Cox, Bessie Smith, Odetta, Otis Redding, etc.); Robert Parker’s ‘Barefootin’ ’; the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’; Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’; and Nina Simone’s ‘Backlash Blues’), rather than concentrating on original composition and a stream of records – was considered commercial suicide. ‘Some admire me, some think I’m the opposite – rubbish’, she told a GTK reporter in 1970. ‘Melbourne’s slowing down,’ she told Go-Set, ‘because the discos are unlicensed and the kids are too young.’²³⁷ She would shortly begin work as a Go-Set journalist, noted most particularly for her work as an advice columnist. The punchline of this 1969 interview resonates with her spirit, a kind of down-at-heel larrikinism that serves as both an epitaph and a provocative poke in the eye to the whole of the 1960s, not just young female singers:

Before you go Wendy, any words of wisdom to aspiring young female singers? ‘Yeah, give it up ’cos you’re no good.’²³⁸

Perhaps some did, and of course many young performers of both sexes gave up, or were given up on, many of them justifiably. Yet the 1970s would in fact see a flowering of Australian popular music, and a whole new outpouring of something which, while it might have seemed at times dangerously close to patriotism, could more correctly be characterised as the unlocking of creativity and activity in live and recorded music, in songwriting, in broadcasting and in political awareness.