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6 Falling off the Edge of the World

THE EASYBEATS

‘Easyfever was a disease. Everybody in the pop scene contracted it as the sound of our greatest ever group swept the country in 1966.

The Easys were churning out number one hits faster than any other artist could even make records. Every Easybeats performance was the scene for riots on a scale unknown before on the Australian pop scene.’

– David Elfick, 1969¹

Like the Gibb brothers, the members of the Easybeats were migrants, though not all of them were from England: they were variously of Scottish, Dutch and English origin. Nevertheless, the Easybeats were unquestionably an Australian band. Unlike the Bee Gees, they had their greatest success in Australia and have continued to identify as Australian – although not without caveats, as a recent comment from Harry Vanda indicates:

We always wanted to relate to Australia; we called ourselves an Australian band, although there were no Australians in it to speak of. But yeah, we felt Australian by that time already. Maybe because of the acceptance we’d had here, all the help, all the people on our side. To us this was an absolutely wonderful country. The alternative to pumping petrol in Glasgow or The Hague. So we were Australians and we remained Australians ever since.²

Not unnaturally, a large number of Australians continue to regard the group with great affection; ‘Friday on My Mind’, their biggest hit internationally and a number one in Australia over the summer of 1966-7, is often cited as the best of all Australian pop records. It is certainly close to perfect within its genre, but it is far from unique in the group’s remarkable and brilliant catalogue.

The Easybeats came together in 1964 at Villawood Migrant Hostel in Sydney’s south-western suburbs. One of the band’s songwriting masterminds, guitarist George Young, has said the various members were living ‘in or around’ the hostel at the time.³ Not only were they a mix of European ethnicities; they also varied in age, from late teens to mid-twenties. Drummer Gordon ‘Snowy’ Fleet had been a member of Liverpool band the Nomads (not, as frequently stated, the Mojos); he was 24 (an advanced age, to some) and married with a child. He named his new band the Easybeats after another he had previously played in, and was also its first manager.⁴ Bass player Harry Vanda – he’d shortened his name to four easy syllables from the difficult six of Hendrickus Vandenberg – was 18, and had been in Australia a year;⁵ in the Netherlands he’d had a band called the Starfighters. Guitarist Dingeman Vandersluys (rendered in some quarters as van der Sluijs), who took the stage name Dick Diamonde, was also Dutch by birth, and married. Teenage vocalist ‘Little’ Stevie Wright had ‘come through the ranks of local clubs, dances and talent shows’⁶ and was known to many as Chris Langdon when Vanda and Diamonde first met him. He had played in a band called the Outlaws (or was playing in this band when the rest of the Easybeats met him – accounts differ), followed by another called Chris Langdon and the Langdells, which some sources suggest briefly included Vanda and Diamonde. The three of them heard about ‘this shit-hot little bloody guitarist,’⁷ the Scottish-born George Young. Wright reverted to his real name for the new group after edging out a competitor, John Bell, who was deemed ‘a bit shy’ for the projected image (Bell went on to perform with the Throb).⁸ Never ones to waste names, the new group initially called themselves the Starfighters.⁹

‘George could busk his way through a bit of piano, guitar’, his younger brother Angus has recalled, adding that all his brothers ‘were players, which is strange, I suppose, because my mother and father never played.’¹⁰ The oldest of the Young brothers, Alex, was a working musician who’d stayed in Britain when the family emigrated and settled in the Sydney suburb of Burwood; his two younger brothers, Malcolm and the aforementioned Angus would also become highly successful and distinctive guitarists. Like the Bee Gees, the oldest sibling in the family was a sister; Margaret Young had an R&B record collection that included Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino. These classics are often credited with influencing all the boys, though – like the Gibbs’ sister, Lesley – Margaret was not a performer.

Vanda says that as a displaced person, he – along with the rest of his family – had ‘a bit of an “us and them” mentality.

I think a lot of the way we expressed ourselves – talking, looking, the attitude – would also have been very much a part of the music. But maybe not from an intellectual point of view, just from an attitude point of view.’¹¹

In his early days in the group, it is often suggested, Vanda’s limited English kept him in the background – or, rather, meant he expressed himself primarily via his music and goofy facial expressions. Yet Young’s thick Scottish accent was a similar hindrance, and their common eagerness to experiment with sound might well have come from a desire to express their individuality without inviting ridicule by actually saying – or singing – anything.

The new group arrived in a hurry. A casual Dutch-related connection – a bouncer they met on the street – led to a late-night residency at a notorious establishment in Sydney’s Kings Cross called Beatle Village. A more lucrative deal lured them from there to the Bowl then on to John Harrigan’s venues Surf City and the Beach Hut. Through their manager, real-estate agent Mike Vaughan (‘probably one of THE great characters ever’, according to Lillian Roxon),¹² the group met the 26-year-old Ted Albert, who became their producer and publisher. Ultimately the Alberts’ and Youngs’ family businesses would collaborate on one of the great showbiz success stories of the late 20th century. Alberts was a long-established and highly successful family music publishing business, and in the early 60s had forged a relationship with EMI to release various ‘Albert Productions’ on the Parlophone label; it would set up its own label in the early 70s. Alberts’ biggest commercial successes during its Parlophone days were the Easybeats and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, though from an artistic perspective the success of early Missing Links and Throb singles should not be discounted.

Ted Albert usually recorded his bands at pop radio station 2UW’s Radio Theatre in George Street, Sydney and it was here he took his new signings to record the reputed 45 songs in their repertoire, most of which were original Wright/Young or, less frequently, Wright/Vanda/Young compositions. George Young later recalled that Albert ‘was so scared that he would miss a possible hit that he took us into the studio and had us put down every song we had, finished or not. Most of it was dreadful, although the first single came from those sessions.’¹³

Other recollections by Young contradict this in detail but not in spirit. Their debut, ‘For My Woman’, was certainly dynamic; the second, ‘She’s So Fine’, was a number one hit around Australia in mid 1965 – a considerable feat for a group which had barely toured and did not have the advantage of network television exposure. Vaughan martyred himself for the cause, selling his Jaguar to buy a station wagon so the Easybeats could go on tour. They did so on wages so low that they were living, the possibly apocryphal story goes, on soup made from potato peelings. Certainly, semi-starvation appears to have been the reason Wright collapsed on The Go!! Show and was hospitalised. However weakened they may have been, however, the Easybeats were young men with a guppy spark: their self-defence-motivated fight with a group of labourers in Windsor Hotel is said to have made them a favourite with Melbourne DJs. ‘Easyfever’ meant 300 fans invaded the Youngs’ family home when their address was published in a magazine; it meant a Brisbane Festival Hall show was cut short by police after 17 minutes because of the mass hysteria that broke out. A Bulletin columnist was witness to the phenomenon, describing Easyfever as though it were some kind of cult or mass-hypnosis exercise. Girls would frantically attack security guards or beat themselves up in their anguish; some ‘tugged at their own hair or just sat there with three or four fingers in their mouths . . .’¹⁴ Of course, it wasn’t really a 60s phenomenon – it was a mass-media phenomenon. Similar episodes of mass hysteria half a century earlier focused on movie stars. But it was unusual for an Australian group to attract such a response.

‘Wedding Ring’ is a beautiful document of early-60s male and female roles: all Wright wants is ‘love’; all his woman ‘wants wants wants is a wedding ring’ (the group tried to keep it a secret that three of them were married, but Wright, who wrote and sang these words, was a bachelor). It was a top-ten hit nationally, as was ‘Sad and Lonely and Blue’. In his fine history of the Vanda and Young relationship, John Tait relates a perfect example of crude humour in the kind of audience participation that would reach its apex with the ‘no way, get fucked, fuck off’ response chanted at the Angels in the 1970s: the audience’s response to the ‘call’ of the Easybeats’ ‘Come and See Her’ was ‘gonorrhea, gonorrhea.’¹⁵ Their audiences were not immune to genuine emotional manipulation, though; ‘In My Book’ was written as a tearjerker, and in performance Wright would surreptitiously poke his fingers in his eyes to produce real tears.¹⁶ After ‘Women (Make You Feel Alright)’, which Young has said was ‘knocked out . . . in about ten minutes’,¹⁷ reached number one – ‘we still don’t like it much’, Wright said at the time¹⁸ – the group started to get used to being at the top of the Australian charts. The next step, as their fans well understood, would have to be the world:

Dear Go-Set

I am a regular “Go-Set” reader and a fan too . . . but I am upset about a comment on the Easybeats by Stan Rofe. He said the Easybeats will have to brush up a little on their act if they hope to do well in America. I think they are by far Australia’s No. 1 group, and will soon be the world’s. I think their act is great and Little Stevie is fantastic the way he goes on, but George is my favourite. It is just unfortunate that Little Stevie’s pants split . . .

Good luck, Easybeats, for when you go overseas . . . I’m sure you have plenty of fans who wish you the same!’

Dissatisfied Easybeat Fan Forever, Northcote.¹⁹

According to Vanda, the group feared they would reach a point where audiences might respond with ‘“Oh shit, not them again!” So we felt [we should] leave on a high note and let’s see if we can duplicate the whole experience over there.’²⁰ ‘Over there’ was to be Britain; they recorded ‘Sorry’, another extraordinary, classic single, to keep Australia satisfied while they were gone and set 14 July, 1966 as the date on which they would leave Australia. In the first week of July, the newlywed Vanda’s young wife, Pam, committed suicide – apparently out of anguish at the prospect of being left behind in Australia. He became a widower with a five-month-old son, Johan.

The Easybeats did not change their plans; Vanda’s parents stepped in to take care of their infant grandson. Vanda has always sought to downplay the importance of this event in the Easybeats story – a tragedy that surely damaged all the lives it touched. He told Debbie Kruger in 2005 that ‘it was a private thing,’ adding that if it had come out in any of his songs, it was only ‘from sheer carelessness.’ It was not his desire to ‘bore the world shitless with my pain.’²¹ That may be so, but Vanda, who remarried, has written countless songs about desertion and loneliness in the last forty years.

Easyfever riots continued when the group touched down in Perth en route to the UK; screaming fans prevented their aeroplane from taking off again by surrounding it on the tarmac. The group’s Australian earnings meant they were no longer starving by this stage (‘we took a lot of money’, Vanda said in 1969)²² but naturally on arriving in London they were keen to make further progress. It didn’t help that, as Wright later recalled, the band were treated by the British ‘with the contempt they usually reserve for those from a European country.’²³ Ted Albert, who had produced their records to date, came to London, where they recorded ‘Baby I’m A Comin’,’ a funny, catchy, bizarre tearaway of a song.²⁴ Their British label United Artists had no faith in its hit potential, and instead put Chicagoan Shel Talmy – who’d already worked wonders on the Who and the Kinks – in charge. The first session with Talmy produced four tracks which formed the core of the US album Good Friday: ‘Remember Sam’, ‘Made My Bed, Gonna Lie in It’, ‘Pretty Girl’ and the first notable song written by Vanda and Young without Wright, ‘Friday on My Mind’. The two had been inspired to write the song after seeing a short film about French vocal group the Swingle Singers, who specialized in largely a capella vocalized versions of famous classical pieces such as Bach’s “Air on the G String”²⁵ The only evident similarity between the Swingle Singers’ sound and ‘Friday on My Mind’ is the frantic, staccato, wordless backing vocals in the song’s chorus which – like a lot of the best ideas – started out seeming hilarious, then became a key feature of something new and marvellous. Young has described ‘Friday on My Mind’ as ‘real working class rock ’n’ roll’, adding: ‘Being Hostel boys, that’s what you dream about, Friday.’ As he goes on to explain, the record was not an instant hit in Britain:

It was practically a repetition of the same situation with our first record in Australia. Not many people were interested – not because we were an Australian band or anything, it’s just that they weren’t into the record.

But then the pirate radio stations got a hold of it. Caroline, London, even Luxembourg, all these stations had Australian disc jockeys, and all the guys would slip in the record even though it wasn’t programmed. It was due to these guys that the record broke. . . . we were very pleased. It was one in the eye to everyone who thought we wouldn’t make it.²⁶

As mentioned, in Australia ‘Friday on My Mind’ is generally regarded as a classic – if not the classic – Australian pop song. It is not particularly local in theme – except that it’s putatively anti-authoritarian (Stevie tells us that though he’s working for ‘the rich man’, he’ll ‘change that scene one day’, though there’s no more to the manifesto than that, and Simon Reynolds points out that a song like the Specials’ ‘Friday Night, Saturday Morning’ from 1981 makes it seem somewhat hollow in comparison),²⁷ and it’s anti-work, too. In November 1966, while the equally magnificent, rapid-fire ‘Sorry’ was at the top of the Australian charts, ‘Friday on My Mind’ was released and became an enormous hit, reaching #1 by the end of the year. Many saw it as consummate British beat pop: sharp, powerful, provocative. The Easybeats, for a moment, had the world at their feet.

The next single, ‘Who’ll Be the One’, was every bit as melodic and inventive as ‘Friday’, but without the power-pop attack; it was not a success. Young described it later as ‘rubbish, crap’.²⁸ A group as marvelous as the Easybeats could, however, have clawed their way back from this: it was the industry – and, according to Young, ‘the dope thing’²⁹ – that was the real problem. Yet while drugs may have been a factor, Vaughan was perhaps the real stumbling block; he had entangled the group in a number of unwieldy contracts, and then absented himself. In 1976, George Young recalled the Easybeats’ situation in the late 60s:

[We’d] start recording for one company and halfway through we’d find that the money had run out so we’d stop, start all over again two or three months later with another company and then the same thing would happen, it got so confusing.

But we kept on writing. So we had a regular thing going where we would go down to the Central Sound Studios in Denmark Street, London, every week to demo the latest tunes we had written. We got to the stage where we could get down a pretty complete demo in about an hour, with overdubs, effects and everything else.³⁰

Australia still offered uncomplicated love. On 13 May, 1967 the Easybeats returned, the glow of ‘Friday’ all about them, for a tour, supported by the Twilights, Ronnie Burns and Larry’s Rebels; conquering heroes, the group received a civic reception at Sydney Town Hall. A Bulletin correspondent found Stevie ‘drinking beer out of a can and wearing a saffron-colored shirt with white sleeves’ and noted, in the non sequitur style of the times, ‘The same color is worn by novice Buddhist monks and it is also painted on the tails of airliners to warn away other airliners.’³¹ Wright related the ubiquitous groupie tales: of a girl who delivered herself to the band at Lennons Hotel in Brisbane in a parcel, the Perth girls who crawled through their hotel fanlight.³² The reporter went to the show and saw what excited girls, though s/he remained personally unmoved:

The greatest excitement came during the playing of ‘Friday on My Mind’. Little Stevie was enormously impressive. Not only did he sing, he shook, he vibrated, he shuddered and with his hands and fingers extended he made high-speed quivering movement, like someone suffering from electric shock or on the farthest extremity of delirium tremens.³³

The only major line-up change in the band’s history occurred on this tour when, suffering from fractured and strained family relationships, Snowy Fleet left the group. He became a successful builder in Perth, not touching a drumkit again until the Easybeats’ brief 1986 reunion; in the 21st century he ran Fleet Studios in the Perth suburb of Jandakot. Back in Britain, the band began recording a new album, to be titled Good Times, with producer Glyn Johns and makeshift drummer Freddy Smith. UK record company support fell through, however, and the Good Times album was not released; five of its tracks surfaced in 1977 on the Easybeats compilation, The Shame Just Drained, and its title was recycled for a definitive quarter-century Alberts compilation in 1988. The Purple Hearts’ drummer Tony Cahill – who had previously played with Screamin’ Lord Sutch in London and would later be the bassist in Python Lee Jackson – became a permanent replacement for Fleet and the first Australian-born Easybeat. The group’s epic next single, ‘Heaven and Hell’, was recorded and released soon afterwards. Young recalls:

We, as a band, weren’t worldly-wise like other bands around us . . . We were still kids and there was nobody, no producer, no record company people, looking over our shoulder and pointing us the right way. We were more or less left to blow with the wind, with no conception of the business, marketing or musical policy, we were just writing music for music’s sake – not a bad thing, I suppose.

At that time we were very anti-nonoriginal, so to speak. The ultimate as far as we were concerned was to be totally original and get hits. Original in the sense of finding new drumbeats, new guitar styles, new melodies, new chord changes, that sort of thing.³⁴

‘Heaven and Hell’ was original, and also vibrant and ambitious; it had a good chance of being a hit around the Western world except for a very clearly articulated line about ‘discovering someone else in your bed’ which led to it being banned by some radio stations; European radio didn’t touch it either. Young has since said that the failure of ‘Heaven and Hell’ was disillusioning for him and Vanda, who were now in the most experimental phase of their time in the Easybeats, though they would write more ‘three-minute operas’, notably ‘Falling off the Edge of the World’ and the inferior ‘The Music Goes Round My Head’ (which Young has described, for no obvious reason, as being in a ska/bluebeat style).³⁵ The brilliant ‘Come In, You’ll Get Pneumonia’ was the latter’s B side, with orchestral contributions courtesy of the Bee Gees’ arranger Bill Shepherd and backing vocals from Olivia Newton-John and Pat Carroll, but it would have been another masterful Easys moment even without the all-star cast; it accomplished the improbable feat of being a funky weepy.

There is a story that Paul McCartney heard one of these late-period Easybeats singles on his car radio and was so besotted that he pulled over and called the BBC to find out who was singing it – and to ask the station to play it again. Some (including Young) say this was their later single ‘Good Times.’³⁶ Even this kind of support, however, wasn’t enough.

Young has said the duo’s response to their failure to chart was ‘bugger it, let’s turn out any old muck to get a hit!’³⁷ Vanda concurs that ‘we came up with tunes like “Hello How Are You” and real maudlin shit, because we were trying to get on the radio.’³⁸ ‘Hello How Are You’ simply shows that the Easybeats’ ‘maudlin shit’ is anyone else’s magnificent, lush pop. It was mildly successful, making the top twenty in Britain (and 23 in Australia). Vanda, incidentally, puts one of the team’s greatest songs – the complex, funny and brilliant ballad ‘Falling in Love Again’ – in the same ‘cornball’ bag, and calls it ‘our BBC period’³⁹; it was later recorded by Ted Mulry with lashings of what sounded like sitar, but was probably Billy Green’s treated guitar, for a top-three hit in 1971.

By 1969, Vanda and Young – at this point jointly the Brian Wilson of the group – were holed up in a flat in Moscow Road that had previously been a jingle studio for pirate radio. They were concentrating on making demos, often for other artists, with a view to restoring the group’s fortunes. Somehow – it now seems bizarre that such a thing could happen – the last proper Easybeats album, Friends, was made up almost completely of Vanda and Young demos, sung mainly by Young, with the addition of two group tracks, ‘St Louis’ and the regrettably titled ‘Rock and Roll Boogie’. Composer credits on almost all tracks are given to one ‘Russell’, though whether this is record company error or a ploy devised by Vanda and Young to negotiate their way through the complications of being exclusively signed to more than one label is difficult to judge.⁴⁰ In his comprehensive 1977 interview with Glenn A. Baker, Young described this record succinctly as ‘a fuckup that came from changing labels . . . Harry and I played the drums and just about everything else.’⁴¹

‘St Louis’ offers an early example of Vanda and Young’s tendency to reference American place names in their songs, though as Vanda conceded to Debbie Krueger: ‘I wouldn’t know what bloody St Louis was like; I’ve never been there.’⁴² Another peculiar habit of theirs is to begin songs with the information that the singer/narrator is walking down the street. ‘Walking in the Rain’, famously covered by Grace Jones, is perhaps the best of these, though ‘Yesterday’s Hero’ offers strong competition. It had to be a strategy, and it certainly served them well in the following decades.

The group was petering out, and there are many suggestions that Stevie Wright’s heroin use, which was to dog him throughout the 70s and 80s and make him an embarrassment to his former bandmates and many in the industry, had begun (Tony Cahill was already hooked). They returned to Australia in October 1969 to make some money, recording an Easybeats Special for Channel 7 and performing 35 live shows. Vanda announced his engagement to Melbournite Robyn Thomas. The support act for the group’s shows was the Valentines, for whom Vanda and Young had written some songs. It seems clear in hindsight that, although there was no official announcement, this was the end. ‘Eventually we’ll come home,’ Vanda told the press, suggesting that he and Young would be working behind the scenes with a range of artists.⁴³

Tait puts forward the tantalizing notion of a plan to relaunch the Easybeats in London in the early 70s involving Harry Vanda, George Young and his brother Alex, plus drummer Eddie Sparrow, who worked extensively with former Soft Machine guitarist Kevin Ayers.⁴⁴

Python Lee Jackson, with Tony Cahill, would have a freak international hit in 1972 with ‘In a Broken Dream’, largely because they’d happened to employ Rod Stewart, at the time a relatively unknown session singer, when they recorded it in 1970. Dick Diamonde did nothing musically significant after the Easybeats. Wright, described by Vanda in 1969 as a ‘novelist, an actor, and “an all-round show-biz person,” took on menial jobs, joined the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, consolidated his aforementioned heroin habit, and began working on a solo album. But as he told Ed Nimmervoll in 1975, it ‘just wasn’t coming together’ – he’d never written music before and hadn’t written lyrics for years – and so he ‘went to the boys and they saw the basis of something good in what I’d done.’ Essentially, ‘the boys’ (Vanda and Young, of course) took over the project; they ‘played practically everything on the album between the two of them’, as well as writing almost all the songs.⁴⁵ The resulting Hard Road (1974) – and its 1975 successor, Black Eyed Bruiser – followed a similar formula; they are ersatz Easybeats albums, indicators of where the group might have gone had they stayed together. They also form the best ‘missing link’ argument for the theory that AC/DC was essentially a continuation of the Easybeats.

It was reported in 1974 that the multiple contracts in which Mike Vaughan had entangled the band made it impossible for Wright to do what he wanted him to do (with Vanda and Young’s approval), which was to form his own new Easybeats, aided by agent Michael Chugg⁴⁶: the name was effectively ‘unusable’.⁴⁷ Wright’s early solo forays were highly successful, but his addiction would soon ruin his chance of becoming the vocalist with Mott the Hoople⁴⁸ – and, most likely, with AC/DC. Certainly, Bon Scott came across like a parallel-universe Stevie, as well he might have done, given the predilection his Valentines had for Vanda/Young compositions.

The Vanda and Young continuing partnership is covered in further detail in chapter 7. Like the Easybeats, it appears to have gone into abeyance without any fanfare; a 2006 John Paul Young album, In Too Deep, features a picture of chief composer/producer Harry Vanda at the controls with a very empty seat beside him. When ‘Friday on My Mind’ was voted “Best Australian Song” by the Australian Performing Rights Association in 2001, it was Harry Vanda who served as spokesman for the duo (and the band), as George Young was living in apparent seclusion in Portugal, Stevie Wright made no sense, and the others were now absent from the industry. But the Easybeats’ legacy was already assured, without the need for any industry kowtowing; in fact, Alberts themselves had begun the process of enshrining the Easybeats’ legacy with the release of a 1977 compilation with the aforementioned ridiculous title The Shame Just Drained: it only scratched the surface of the previously unreleased material. A 2-LP career retrospective, Absolute Anthology, emerged the following year. Repackaging has long been Alberts policy: the teen-oriented various artists compilation Rocka was soon joined by ‘collector’-oriented releases such as Alberts Archives, featuring obscure Vanda/Young productions and early 60s tracks from Billy Thorpe, the Throb and, of course, the Easybeats.

For better or worse (probably worse, given the awfulness of the record), INXS and Jimmy Barnes gave the canonization of Vanda and Young perhaps its biggest boost when they covered ‘Good Times’, the Easybeats’ worst single, in 1987. The Barnes/INXS version appeared on the soundtrack of Joel Schumacher’s film The Lost Boys and thereby became a top-fifty hit in the US.⁴⁹ Barnes, in particular, slaughtered the song (though at least he didn’t replicate guest backing vocalist Steve Marriott’s pig squeals on the original). But whatever its artistic value (essentially none), the record showed that when Australia’s most successful pop/rock artists of the late 80s wanted to represent the best of Australian commercial rock music, they turned to the Easybeats. There was something in their work for everyone, and almost all of it was magnificent.