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8 It’s a Flash!

THE EARLY TO MID SEVENTIES

Australian rock is probably the most advanced in the music world because this country has never known success, that perverter of truth and destroyer of progress. By the very virtue of its separateness and isolation Australian rock has weaved itself into its own thing; it has a distinction, an original and exciting dimension so totally its own. Even our pop-hype groups are so much better than many so-called ‘International-Heavy-Super-Hype’ bands, our pop-hypes have to achieve on stage the same sounds English and American bands achieve in a million dollar studio. Put them in good studios with open-minded technicians and you get LPs like ‘the Masters” English LP, a very good LP for a band that musically is still learning what it’s about. Put the Aztecs, Chain, Spectrum etc. into the same studios and watch out ears.’¹

Lobby Loyde was expressing a minority view when he trumpeted these forthright, insider opinions on the state of Australian music in 1971 in the high-quality weekly Melbourne music paper Daily Planet. He appears to have forgotten about his childhood rivals the Bee Gees, along with other Australians who’d had major success in the 1960s (though these omissions can perhaps be explained by his definition of ‘rock’).

Within the next few years Australian groups and artists such as AC/DC, Rick Springfield, Olivia Newton-John and Little River Band would experience major international success. None of them was obviously Australian in sound or style, but all emerged quite organically from within the Australian pop/rock industry, even if only the first was likely to have met with Loyde’s approval – appropriately so, since AC/DC owed a significant debt to his own work.

Loyde was already a well-known player when he wrote these words. He had gravitated from Brisbane to Melbourne in the late 60s, had joined and then left the Aztecs, and was currently playing with a final, ad hoc line-up of the Wild Cherries, who had an extraordinary single on the Havoc label, ‘I’m the Sea (Stop Killing Me)’, the B side of which also bore the title ‘Daily Planet’. Loyde would shortly move on to form the Coloured Balls, a group that grew out of his solo experiments. In this 1971 diatribe he went on to declare ‘war on Schmaltz’ on behalf of ‘Australian rock players’:

We think Australian audiences deserve the music we can hear in our heads; not the sell out crap that recording company producers hear in their cash register un-heads.’²

Like a number of his contemporaries, including Billy Thorpe, Loyde’s condemnation of the mainstream music industry derived from bitter experience. His rejection of the economics of the business was fashionably simplistic, but it stands to reason that Australian record companies would ignore Australian acts as long as they could profit by concentrating primarily on promoting their parent companies’ British and American artists, whose recording costs they didn’t have to pay and who they only had to deal with in person on the rare occasion those artists came to Australia on tour.

The early 70s would see the overturning of this cosy arrangement, as the national culture quickly, if unevenly, came into bloom. The development of a consciously Australian popular music was a key element in this broader flowering. The next two chapters – one an overview of the period, the other focusing specifically on Daddy Cool and Skyhooks – explore its different aspects.

NEW SOCIETY

The decade of the 70s is typified for many Australians by the gospel-pop song ‘It’s Time’, which was the campaign theme of the victorious Labor Party in the watershed election of August 1972. The song’s vocalist was Alison McCallum, who in the late 60s had been a member of Dr Kandy’s Third Eye (along with Gulliver Smith). McCallum had recently made the national top ten with Vanda and Young’s song ‘Superman’; given her participation in ‘It’s Time,’ listeners might well have felt invited to compare Labor’s visionary leader Gough Whitlam with that same superhero.

There was nervous anticipation, both optimistic and pessimistic, about the new society that would take shape after the expected Labor victory; the question of the future appearance and feel of the new Australian culture was foremost for Australians. Australians (particularly but not solely young Australians) seem to have known that something was about to happen as soon as the 1970s rolled around. The nation had been prosperous for so long that almost no one under 35 had any memory of what it was like to be anything other than securely employed; this was largely true even among people who considered themselves working class and/or downtrodden. Consequently, society’s elders – whose fears and conservative habits (or in some cases radical left-wing politics) had been shaped by the Depression and the Second World War – seemed alien to them.

Its relative prosperity notwithstanding, Australia was plainly a morally and spiritually frazzled nation ready for some kind of cultural revolution. Billy McMahon, the new Liberal Prime Minister who had come to power via a backroom coup in 1971, was neither liked nor trusted even by those in his own party and government, and his promotion was clearly a mistake.³ (Time would show that his greatest legacy, aside from making Whitlam’s victory easier, was the fathering of the Hollywood actor Julian.)

It seemed highly unlikely that the electorate – even if most of it had happily tolerated two decades of oppressively staid federal government under the patrician Menzies, the stilted Holt, and the cocky and genially gnarled Gorton – would elect McMahon: a Labor government in 1972 was closer to certain than it had been for decades, and had indeed almost happened in 1969. The youth vote – there were adults with no memory of a government other than the Liberal/Country Party conservative coalition – was one important sector of the population agitating for change; Gough Whitlam had also courted other elements of the community, such as postwar migrants and residents of the underresourced outer suburbs of the major cities. What’s more, the Liberals’ entanglement of Australia in the Vietnam war had become widely unpopular, perhaps because, as journalist and activist Pete Steedman has put it, ‘mummy middle class’ had begun to see ‘sonny middle class coming back in a fucking bag’⁴; Australian women, led by Jean McLean, organised the Save Our Sons Movement. The rise of this organisation made it plain that protest against government policy was not merely the province of overstimulated, rebellious-for-the-sake-of-it young people; there were also others who (albeit more cautiously) rejected not only the war but the ‘straight’ yet hypocritical society from which it had sprung. While protest against the Vietnam war, rapacious urban development, and racism was no longer only the province of youth, however, rock and pop music was still primarily for the under-25s who had grown up with it.

The early 70s saw an upsurge in political activism which embraced the Aboriginal Land Rights movement⁵ and other protests by and on behalf of Aboriginal people in Australia, including the Aboriginal embassy that was erected three times outside Parliament House in Canberra, and pulled down by the authorities twice.⁶ The Aboriginal Black Panther movement shone briefly, with leading activist Denis Walker thrilling and frightening the Anglo-Australian media with statements such as: ‘It would give me a lot of pride to walk down the street carrying a gun to make sure no pig could touch me.’⁷ Walker’s Anglo-Australian girlfriend, Lindy Morrison, was a social worker in Brisbane, although she would soon abandon that profession for the theatre and later for music – all of these pursuits were appropriate within the world of protest and activism. In the country that had been in the forefront of enfranchising women 80 years earlier but then became mired in adherence to textbook gender roles, women’s liberation marches were now frequent and effective. Merely the activism inherent in leading a radical lifestyle was liberating for many women and men. Most prominent – probably because they were the most inclusive – were the seminal Vietnam moratoriums of 1970 and 1971,⁸ mass demonstrations that are still regarded as a crucial element in the development of not only a radical Australia but also a motivated middle Australia. Ian Turner wrote of the first moratorium in Melbourne in May 1970:

There had been nothing like it in Melbourne since V-E day; a concourse of people so vast that the city centre was wholly occupied. The traffic stopped, the shops closed; for a whole afternoon the city returned to one of its traditional functions – a place where pedestrians could define their own needs and purposes . . . The people of my generation made at most one in ten of those who filled the streets. The ninety per cent were young. For the first time even children had taken to the streets of their own volitions . . . telling the oldies that the world would soon be theirs . . . This was the counter-culture on the march . . .⁹

In Sydney, Greg Quill reported, ‘A very human anger hurled itself down wintry city blocks and stamped into cold pavements.’¹⁰

For once, the vast majority of Australia’s pop stars let it down; none of these potential role models seemed to think change would come about through protest, though Wendy Saddington assured Go-Set readers that ‘the Vietnam War stinks’. Ronnie Burns – still in the public’s mind the star who sang the first anti-Vietnam pop song, ‘Smiley’ – said he’d be marching in the moratorium parade ‘because I believe the war’s wrong’ but said he felt it would only be a gesture. Mike Rudd, always cynical, didn’t think the Moratorium ‘will really succeed’.¹¹ Jeremy Noone of Company Caine coined the term ‘plastic wombats’ to refer to his country’s soldiers in Vietnam (the Australian cousins of the ‘Yankee paper tigers’).¹² The Arts Vietnam festival staged in Sydney in October 1968 had been by all reports a major success in raising consciousness about the war; Pip Proud and Nutwood Rug Band were there, but it is plain that many were sceptical about young people’s involvement in these causes.

Tim Burstall’s wonderful comedy Stork shows the confusion these ideas often generated. Eleven minutes into the film, a montage of protest posters introduces a scene in which Bruce Spence, in the title role, disrupts a Monash University lecture. The showy music that plays over these posters seems to suggest a cavalcade of craziness, or perhaps a collection of consumable, but ephemeral, protest ‘products’: it’s yet another example of the non sequitur approach to the representation of political activism in the early 70s. In early 1972, Anarchist draft resister Michael Matteson came out of hiding to appear on the cutting-edge current affairs show This Day Tonight, with every expectation of being arrested afterwards. Instead, he escaped through a small window at the back of the ABC’s Sydney studios.¹³ The police ended up looking stupid and TDT looked refreshingly countercultural; the real radicals looked brave and principled (as indeed they were); and activism was seen to be effective, whatever Ronnie Burns might believe.

There were numerous other changes in the air. In his book on glam rock, Barney Hoskyns quotes Esquire journalist Tom Hedley to the effect that the early 70s were ‘the homosexual time . . . The faggots were our [i.e., Americans’] new niggers.’¹⁴ ‘Homosexuality was chic,’ Hedley says, and in Australia too, gay liberation was a hot topic. In one sense, of course, this was old news in Australian pop – Keith Glass’s soul-pop group Cam-Pact’s flirtation with a homosexual ‘style’ had already challenged convention in the late 1960s. Jim Keays writes that in the late 60s Daryl Sambell ‘quite frequently’ booked the Masters Apprentices into ‘camp dances . . . in out-of-the-way venues that only those in the know could find’.¹⁵ There was clearly a whole vocabulary of camp behaviour in the music hall styles of are-they-or-aren’t-they-gay celebrities of Australian television such as Graeme Kennedy, Stuart Wagstaff, Frank Thring,¹⁶ Ian Meldrum, and a host of lesser lights. At the same time, everyday life featured often horrific violence against gay men, which in many ways can be interpreted as sanctioned by the wider society. Unsurprisingly for the times, there were also macho groups like the Zoot (discussed in chapter 5 in their late 60s context), who saw the writing on the wall for their former non-threatening bubblegum image and were quick to deny any ‘pink poofter’¹⁷ tag. There is also, of course, Johnny Farnham’s infamous line (no doubt a reaction to rumours about his close relationship with his manager): ‘If poofters come near me, I’ll kill ’em’.¹⁸ A Gay Lib demonstration against the ABC’s decision – apparently at the last minute – not to screen a report on homosexuality¹⁹ appears to have been an important spark for the gay rights rallies which took place in mid 1972. In July of that year, the organisation C.A.M.P. proclaimed a ‘Sexual Liberation Week’.²⁰

Few would disagree that Melbourne remained the centre of Australia’s music scene in the early 70s, as it had been in the late 60s. When the decade began, clubs like Sebastian’s and Bertie’s (both brainchildren of Michael Browning, soon to be manager of AC/DC), and the Thumpin’ Tum, all located in the central business district, reigned supreme. Weekend dances in the middle-to-outer suburbs – such as the Q Club in Kew, Pepper’s in Box Hill, the White Elephant at Broadmeadows, and the Purple Spirit in Sunshine – would host name bands like the La De Das, the Aztecs, and Chain. Establishments like the T. F. Much Ballroom (in Fitzroy, walking distance from the city centre, and the natural place for Peter Weir to document Australia’s emerging pop/rock acts) and Toorak’s Regent Theatre augmented the scene by featuring markets and art as well as innovative new bands.

Melbourne was famously the most staid and wowserish of the nation’s state capitals, but it nevertheless (or perhaps for that very reason) had a thriving art-rock underbelly. It had the nation’s premier ‘import’ record shop, Archie and Jugheads; located ‘in a tiny lane off Collins Street’ and owned and operated by Keith Glass and David Pepperell, the shop offered British and American releases for sale before the Australian branches of the major record labels had issued them locally.²¹ That Melbourne boasted the country’s best newspaper (The Age), and that after 1971 the state of Victoria had an unusually liberal Liberal government under the benign and democratic Rupert Hamer, did not hurt matters.

In January 1970 the Age tossed out some apparently zany predictions about the decade ahead. Many of them proved to be correct. It suggested the Labor party would win the next federal election, in 1972, and serve two terms – which it did, even if its second term was cruelly curtailed by political conspiracy at the highest levels. The paper also suggested ‘TV, movies, pop music, color, art and good design’ would free young people’s minds from an ‘obsession with the printed word’, and:

Young people . . . will be bored and dissatisfied . . . Young fashions – as usual – will outrage the oldies. The more sartorially adventurous young men will probably be wearing codpieces, while bared breasts and scantily-girt buttocks will be de rigueur for the trendier (skinnier?) young women.²²

Out-of-town weekend rock festivals were providing places for young people to congregate, and even if they didn’t actively conspire against the mainstream, but rather maintained a sullen lack of interest in it, such gatherings made them realize just how many they were in number.

PILGRIMAGES FOR POP

As will be seen, where people experienced their rock and pop would become very important. Festival events were quickly embraced by Australians – already well acquainted with various versions of an outdoor lifestyle. Tully and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs starred at the ‘Pilgrimage for Pop’ festival at Ourimbah. Here, in February 1970, a natural amphitheatre near Gosford in NSW²³ saw ‘8,000 people who like pop and individuality’ congregating in a ‘green valley’. The event had been organized by the Nutwood Rug Band, a group of US draft dodgers from California. Plainly, there was great apprehension amongst law enforcers about the event, but as Go-Set reported: ‘The local police gazed at the thousands of colorful “pilgrims” and got used to the idea that long hair, beards, beads and no-bras don’t spell trouble.’²⁴ Age journalist Robert Drewe – later to become a very good novelist – noted ‘short back-and-sides young constables’ looking ‘frankly envious as young semi-naked couples emerged from the shady Ourimbah Creek.’²⁵ Wendy Saddington, who wrote regularly for Go-Set in the early 70s, presented a report on Ourimbah that presented it as a genuine communal experience:

Ourimbah was simply a flash, a quick look at how life should be and a brilliant weekend proving that one can be so much happier without the ridiculous restrictions and conventions which society insists upon. A place, a time where policemen could be people and people could be humans, not just indoctrinated representatives of ammunition or targets.²⁶

The Fairlight Festival near Mittagong the following year was a disaster due to weather and organizational problems;²⁷ Myponga, with a smaller group of attendees (estimated at 5,500), was not a success either: heavy rain and icy winds no doubt made the experience unpleasant even before the Draft Resisters’ Union tried to break down the fence, distributed pamphlets condemning the festival as a money-making concern, and at one point marched onto the stage chanting ‘out, pigs’ and ‘free concert’.²⁸ Another ‘pop concert’, sponsored by the T. F. (the ‘T. F.’ did indeed stand for ‘Too Fucking’) Much Ballroom and planned for the outer Melbourne township of Launching Place, was washed out and a compensatory event was staged five weeks later at Burnley Oval in inner Melbourne, where the musical exponents joined forces with the long-running Ashton’s Circus.²⁹ Anticipation of Launching Place inspired two marvelous songs recorded at the sessions for (and added to the reissue of) Spectrum’s first album, Spectrum Part One, though Mike Rudd’s bleak description of ‘children making love to children’ hardly evoked feelings of bliss. The organisers of the Lothlorien festival arranged not only for the presence of the Nutwood Rug Band, but also displayed an Australian flag appropriated from atop the Sydney GPO; ‘Friends’, the Planet’s correspondent announced, ‘the Commonwealth patches its flags.’³⁰

It is distinctly possible that even for those who did not attend these regional festivals – some of which were day trips from major cities, others camping forays only available to dropouts (or the wealthy or frugal or otherwise ‘free’) – the image of rock ’n’ roll in the countryside, rather than in small clubs or halls in cities and towns, was part of a nascent environmentalist ethos, as exemplified by poet Charles Buckmaster, writing in 1970:

There is no retreat – you thrust your obscenities beneath my feet and tell me that I soil your earth!

I scrape at the bitumen of your carnal streets – the soil in which no thing could grow for a thousand years. So much destruction!³¹

Midway between the rock festival experience and countercultural lifestyle celebration was the Aquarius Festival, which the Australian Union of Students had organised every two years since 1967. The 1971 iteration of this arts and music festival, held in Canberra, was in retrospect deemed to have been ‘a good example of bourgeois culture at its worst’, so it was decided to move the 1973 event away from ‘the university scene’ to a location in northern NSW. The small town of Nimbin was chosen by co-directors ‘Kaptain Kulture and Superfest’ (Johnny Allen and Graeme Dunston of the NUAUS),³² who ruminated: ‘The big if is whether the locals would take kindly to an inundation of heads.’³³ Many of them didn’t, but within a relatively short time the ‘heads’ became the locals – Nimbin was soon known in Australia as the epitome of an ‘alternative lifestyle’ town, though today it is perceived as a bastion of elderly hippies and hard drugs. Another festival in northern NSW, the Tamworth Country Music Festival – now a national institution – began as a low-key and very traditional affair, also in 1973.³⁴

For most Australians old enough to remember the early 70s, the most important rock festivals were the four Sunburys, staged by Odessa Promotions, which was headed by promoter John Fowler. The first was in January 1972; all took place in a ‘natural amphitheatre’ by a stream just outside Melbourne. Not only were many of the performances legendary (particularly those by Chain, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, and the Coloured Balls), there were also – importantly – films and records made of at least some of the Sunbury shows, which greatly increased their impact. At Sunbury ’73, Paul Hogan – ‘everybody’s favourite clown’ for his TV work and witty cigarette ads – entertained the crowd.

Skyhooks, in only their first year of existence, and with original singer Steve Hill, were notoriously a major event at Sunbury ’74. They were booed off stage; Hill quit after seeing film of himself from the day. The group would triumph with new singer Graeme ‘Shirley’ Strachan at next year’s Sunbury. Sunbury ’74 also saw ‘one of England’s up-and-coming name groups, Queen,³⁵ perform twice and get pilloried by the crowd despite – or because of? – Michael Chugg’s appearance beforehand to ‘bawl everybody out before they started, with an order for indulgence or good manners or shut up or piss off’.³⁶ Queen vowed never to return to Australia (though their moral rectitude didn’t prevent them playing Sun City under apartheid, and evidently what they meant was that they would not come back to Australia until the nation embraced them commercially.) The four Sunburys were not all momentous debuts and presentations of ‘the ripe raspberry’ to British pretenders; Australian Rolling Stone blithely reported (with its usual mix of poor writing and obliquity) of 1974’s event that ‘someone drowned on the last day, and there were a couple of casualties’;³⁷ while Sunbury ’75 has been described as a ‘shit fight in the mud’.³⁸

Deep Purple were the only band who played Sunbury ’75 and got paid, apparently because they were the only band paid up front. When the show was less lucrative than expected (torrential rain meant that less than half the expected number turned up), there was no money left to pay anyone else; of the Australians, only Jim Keays – who’d done a deal with Colonial Jeans to present his Boy from the Stars – made money at the time. When Deep Purple returned to Australia later that year, the musicians union brokered a levy on their fee to provide recompense to the other bands. Nevertheless, the unfairness of the original situation understandably raised the ire of many participants – Billy Thorpe suggested it was the reason he left Australia for America.³⁹

Unsurprisingly, drugs were a major feature of these events. Two youths were charged with selling LSD at Sunbury ’73⁴⁰ and gaoled for three months. Another attendee was remanded for riotous assembly and hindering and assaulting police.⁴¹ Drugs, of whatever stamp, were of course an ongoing issue. Johnny Young philosophised that ‘If marijuana were legalized, nobody would be interested in smoking it . . . It is like underground music – as soon as it becomes a commercial success, underground freaks lose interest in it.’⁴² At the same time, self-proclaimed ‘prude’ and ‘teetotaller’⁴³ Moss Cass – the Labor MP for Maribyrnong and just under two years away from becoming Minister for the Environment and Conservation in the Federal Labor government – was promoting the legalization of marijuana and claiming that nicotine and alcohol users were hypocrites for resisting such a move.⁴⁴

The T. F. Much’s successor, the Much More Ballroom, had been closed in 1972 ‘because of a complaint that marijuana was smoked there’ (presumably, on more than one occasion) and Wendy Arnott in the Age opined that ‘without it, the picture of places to go and enjoy rock in pleasant conditions is quite desolate.’⁴⁵

By mid 1974 the dichotomy between festivals and smaller venues had become a major issue: the former, it was argued, offered mellow, introspective music for the intellect, in contrast with the harsh, loud, dance music for the feet provided in the latter. Having only just established rock music as an art form, of sorts, some observers were out to pillory “pub rock” and its main promoter, booker Bill Joseph. In The Rock Scene 1974, a documentary begun by Bert Deling and Gary Martyn but seemingly never finished, Captain Matchbox’s Mic Conway suggests that Joseph’s bands are ‘practically all heavy rock bands . . . the music itself is innately aggressive which I’m not saying is a bad thing’ unless ‘it’s the only thing that is happening . . .’⁴⁶ Few groups straddled the two scenes, though one worthy of further investigation is the pointedly camp Cranberry Junglepuss’s Fourteenth Tree Group, a band which used its exceptional two-drum-kit line-up to resounding effect live in both intimate and festival settings. The group’s one album, Jumbo’s Tea Party, attests to a rowdy combination of funk, grooves and general hedonism.⁴⁷

As we will see, pub rock – a form no-one thought of as anything but throwaway in its early days, when larger, outer-suburban pubs were experimenting with ways to bring in clientele – would come to be a genre all its own. Usually thunderous music with chanted vocals and catchy choruses, it was instantly appealing, anti-intellectual, also often good-humoured. Its musical originals may have come from garage rock and R&B; its roots might also be in the foot-stomping boogie of Billy Thorpe or Lobby Loyde’s Coloured Balls. In its initial phase it meant bands like Buster Brown, a group described by its vocalist, Gary ‘Angry’ Anderson, as ‘a real tiger on the end of a rope.’⁴⁸ From 1973 to 1975 he trumpeted that band as a voice of the downtrodden working class; he would then transfer that rather ill-defined but apparently heartfelt spirit to Rose Tattoo. In The Rock Scene 1974, former T. F. Much proprietor John Pinder criticises the nascent pub scene, talking of ‘giant drinking farms where people can only come in their Holden Monaros to listen to that very aggro, negative sort of music which is popularised by that environment;’ what Pinder wanted to see, on the other hand was a ‘discotheque-y kind of venue’ that could operate as a workshop. Underlying this was apparently a desire to see greater experimentation and less professionalism: Pinder felt that mistakes were important: ‘There’s nowhere for people to be bad anymore.’⁴⁹

Drugs and religion seemed to mix in strange ways – although both promoted a higher consciousness, after all. Megan Sue Hicks visited Australia from the US in 1970, and made her own impact, albeit small. She was twenty years old:

I came to Australia in 1970, when my father’s company transferred him to Sydney. He worked in the oil industry, and the South Pacific was booming at the time. I had a one-year work visa . . . In some respects Sydney was so sophisticated and so cosmopolitan. In other respects, in terms of the music business, it seemed like everyone was trying to invent it and no one knew what the thing would look like when it was done. There was a lot of squabbling, and jockeying for position and posing, and it seemed like kids trying to find a grown up way to behave, and when you think of it most of us were kids – I didn’t know anyone over 30.

Through my mother’s involvement in one of the churches in Sydney, I met Clelia Adams . . .⁵⁰ She was the office manager for the Sydney bureau of Go-Set . . . She was hanging round with a bunch of Christadelphians at that time, a strange little sect. One of the guys at Go-Set was a Cristadelphian, I think he was trying to date Clelia, or convert her – if he couldn’t do one, he’d do the other. My mother was very religious, she’d dragged me along I think it was the Methodist mission. They had youth groups and services but it was pretty much a snore.

Hicks was soon working as a ‘gofer’ at Go-Set’s Sydney office. Her Christian beliefs would have stood her in good stead at this period. Agitation for change – in a different direction – was coming in the form of the so-called Jesus Rock fad of the early 70s. The most infamous local product of this phenomenon was Sister Janet Mead’s 1974 hit recording of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’; Mead was a teacher (at Adelaide’s St. Aloysius College) who had been invited to record Donovan’s ‘Brother Sun, Sister Moon’ at Festival Records in Sydney with producer Martin Erdman; for the B side, she bashed out a version of the Lord’s Prayer with music arranged by Arnold Strals. ‘I simply sang a prayer I use daily to a new tempo,’ she explained.⁵¹ The song was a worldwide hit; it is rumoured to be the first Australian recording (as opposed to a recording made outside Australia by an Australian artist) to sell a million copies in the USA.

Less well-known today, although it was a phenomenon at its inception, is Rock Mass for Love, which began in Perth in 1970 under the sponsorship of the Very Rev. John Hazlewood. Claiming that ‘people had been alienated from Christ too long by narrow expressions of itchy-bitchy love,’ Hazlewood arranged for music written by 25-year-old Bruce Devenish to be performed by Perth’s top group, Bakery.⁵² They recorded a live album at a mass at St George’s Cathedral in Perth on 21 March 1971 that almost made the national top twenty.⁵³ Bakery would go on to record one of the great progressive rock albums of the era, Momento, a 1972 recording which, sadly, has been largely forgotten. A film, Alpha and Omega, was made of the ‘Rock Mass’.⁵⁴

Soon afterwards, impresario Harry M. Miller was conducting auditions for the Australian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar in the basement of Melbourne’s Metro Theatre.⁵⁵ Many who were chosen would soon be big names, notably Jon English (as Judas), John Paul Young (as Annas) and Marcia Hines (an American who had come to Australia to appear in the stage production of Hair and replaced Michelle Fawdon as Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar a year into the show’s run).⁵⁶ Hines later became a well-loved pop star in Australia, with numerous hit singles between 1975 and 1981. English, who had been a member of Sydney band Sebastian Hardie, went on to be a television actor as well as scoring a run of hit singles.⁵⁷ Less distinguished was the career of Trevor White, who went from playing Jesus to releasing possibly the best dance-pop single of the 70s, ‘All You Want to Do Is Dance’ (1977), to . . . very little else.

Planet’s Sydney correspondent was blown away by the spectacle of Jesus Christ Superstar:

Visually the set is too much, too much altogether. The object which dominates is a 15-foot duodecahedron (I didn’t know either . . . anyway it’s a 12-sided figure). The top half lifts off . . . the five sides open like petals and there is a centre plate which acts as a lift and sinks down to become a trapdoor . . . and it rotates, the whole damn thing rotates . . . The duodecahedron reminded me of a cross between a lunar module, a water lily and a venus fly trap. The set is a massive distraction. It appears to be audience-orientated instead of concept-orientated.’⁵⁸

Miller, whose career as a manager, publicist and entrepreneur has made him infamous in Australia for decades, began promoting international touring acts in 1961 with the Kingston Trio. He’d brought Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical to Australia in 1969.⁵⁹ His success as a promoter in the early 70s notwithstanding, he was happy to describe Australian society at this time as a sandwich with a ‘strange soggy filling . . . an awful spaghetti in the middle.’

What’s happening now is that the person I call the man in the street, who does a damn hard day’s work, is reacting against the spaghetti filling because he’s becoming more informed . . . On the other side of the sandwich, are the true leaders.’⁶⁰

Hair is often lauded as an icebreaker, perhaps even a groundbreaker, in Australia for the nudity and hippie politics it brought to the stage, but also for the stars it created. Many loved it; some were less than impressed; one of the unimpressed, Adrian ‘Avatar’ Linden, decided to create a rock musical of his own, Grass, for which Sven Libaek wrote the music. The show was about a girl, Janet Ant, who is prosecuted for smoking marijuana, and the mock-trial created by her friends.⁶¹

In a time of upheaval and dissent, confusers abounded. The so-called ‘Wonderful Wizard of Aussie’, Ian Channell, inaugurated ALF – the Australian Liberation Front for Action, Love and Freedom, and, in the early 70s, became ‘official resident merlin of the University of New South Wales.’⁶² Channell attacked student activists and suggested their issues were ‘poisonous bullshit’.⁶³ He later saw the attractions of a wider realm and moved to New Zealand to become wizard of an entire dominion.

AIR PLAY

The 1970 ‘Radio Ban’ proved to be a watershed in the history of Australian popular music. The vagaries of the music industry and the corresponding unpredictability of chart success make it hard to state anything with certainty, but the ban might well have killed off some careers prematurely (or justifiably) and boosted a number of others. Examples of pop stars whose careers might have been very different without the ban include late 60s performers such as Johnny Young, Issi Dy, Ronnie Burns and Ross D. Wyllie; those who benefited included the group later known as Mississippi but at the time called Allison Gros, as well as other Fable label artists. Paul Conn, in his 2000 Weeks, sees a direct relation between the radio ban and a ‘stimulus given to non-commercial music’.⁶⁴ Certainly by the time the dispute ended in October, with the radio stations retaining their right to play music without paying record companies for the privilege, a reset button had been pushed on the music scene.

Since the mid 50s, record companies had agreed to accept as ‘payment’ for allowing their recordings to be played on the radio a mandatory (short) period per day during which their new releases would be played – something that amounted to free advertising for all the major labels.⁶⁵ But these internationally owned labels, along with Rupert Murdoch’s label Festival, had grown dissatisfied with the arrangement, arguing that they were essentially providing free content to radio stations. Through their organization, the Australian Performing Rights Association, they attempted to negotiate a new deal with the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters, pushing for financial compensation based on airplay. The radio stations rejected this on the grounds that they were providing promotion, thus spurring sales; the Bulletin described the dispute as a question of ‘just who is doing whom a service.’⁶⁶

Negotiations broke down in late May 1970,⁶⁷, and the big labels imposed a six-month freeze on the supply of new records to radio; the broadcasters in return imposed a ban on playing new releases by those labels, as well as excluding them from the regional top-forty charts which they compiled. Consequently, many records released at this time did not get airplay – others, such as Spectrum’s 1971 hit ‘I’ll Be Gone’, were held back until the dispute was resolved. With his usual poor spelling Stan Rofe announced:

The ban effects new records by Russell Morris, Doug Parkinson, Ross D. Wyllie, Normie Rowe, Jeff St John, Ronnie Charles, Issi Dy and the Sect.

‘I’ve waited months to put this one out,’ rued Issi Dy of his new single, ‘now it’ll probably die, without airplay.’⁶⁸ (It did, whatever the reason.) Russell Morris, who already had two chart-toppers under his belt, was conciliatory: ‘The only good thing that may come out of it is the new labels which will spring up (such as the Fable label), which won’t be involved in the dispute. Artists who normally wouldn’t be given a chance by the larger companies could get on this way, and the scene will gain some new acts.’⁶⁹

The Fable label – under the aegis of Ron Tudor, formerly of W&G – certainly benefited from the radio ban, most specifically through their middle-of-the-road singer Liv Maessen, who made number one in mid-May with a version of Mary Hopkin’s ‘Knock, Knock Who’s There’ (the original, like many UK hits of that period, had fallen victim to the ban), and the Mixtures, who covered Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summertime’ and hit number one in August. Within a year the Mixtures would have a number two single in Britain with their own, very similar ‘The Pushbike Song’.⁷⁰ The band’s Mick Flynn would be back in Australia a few years later touring as half of Pussyfoot, with a revoltingly coy number one single entitled ‘The Way That You Do It’.⁷¹ An ad for Fable in Go-Set featured not only Maessen but also folksinger John Williamson’s ‘Old Man Emu’ (top ten in July); the Strangers and their new single ‘Melanie Makes Me Smile’ (number 14 the same month); and Hans Poulsen’s ‘Boom-Sha-La-La-Lo’ (top ten in May).⁷²

Tudor let Fable bask in the glory, flying his artists to the Kings Cross Hotel to present them to the Sydney public, where one reporter marveled at Poulsen’s ‘white pyjama suit and love beads’.⁷³ Poulsen’s cachet at this time can be deduced from his appearance in Stork, where he performs in the extended party scene, backed by Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. Carrl and Janie Myriad (née Conway, sister to Captain Matchbox’s Conway brothers), who played mandocello and ‘dolcema’⁷⁴ respectively, were described by a journalist as ‘a tall blond boy looking like Louis Hayward as Captain Blood [and] a girl with long dark hair and a face that would not have been out of place in a Renaissance painting.’ They advocated a form of music they called ‘ragtime progressive bluegrass’, releasing ‘Last Saturday (We Fell in Love)’ on the label – it did not chart.⁷⁵ However, they appear to have been an exception to Fable’s run of diverse hits at that time.

This brief period of great success allowed Fable to make investments in a number of other acts including Allison Gros, who had a number one hit in mid 1971 under the name Drummond with a cover of the Rays’ 1957 hit (written by Frank Slay and Bob Crewe), ‘Daddy Cool’. Ron Tudor is interviewed in The Rock Scene 1974, and pinpoints as the major drawback to operating in the Australian record industry the difficulty of reaching critical mass:

We’ve had a few handicaps – one of them being . . . the size of our domestic market, which is the one we have to live and survive in, and we have to gear our productions to survive in our market of 13 million people . . . we can’t run to making the kind of productions that’ll make a big impression overseas.

Tudor professed himself mildly heartened, however, by the links his label had made internationally:

A few years ago I would have been appalled at spending more than $4,000 on producing an album. Recently we spent $15,000 dollars on the new Brian Cadd album that’s coming out . . . We’ve placed Cadd’s album overseas, so we get advance moneys . . .

As well as pursuing an international solo career (largely American-based, through Chelsea Records),⁷⁶ Cadd managed a Fable subsidiary label, Bootleg,⁷⁷ and the Bootleg Family Band – originally formed with Cadd at the helm to back the label’s various artists – had their own top-ten hit in early 1973, a cover of Loggins and Messina’s ‘Your Mama Don’t Dance’. Bootleg also released Mississippi’s hit records and a commercially successful LP by Kerrie Biddell in 1973, and generated sufficient revenue, it would seem, for Cadd to convincingly sue the label for $10,000 in royalties in the mid 70s.⁷⁸

Fable’s achievements provided encouragement for other ‘minor’ or independent labels that soon followed, including Havoc, which showcased the production talents of Aztecs drummer Gil Mathews. The most prominent and longest lasting of these new ‘minors’ was Mushroom, established by Michael Gudinski with Ray Evans in 1973; some journalists claim that Mushroom ‘blurred the lines between independents and majors,’⁷⁹ though this is probably most true for those who would like to see those lines blurred, or who never really understood the distinction between major and independent in the first place. Certainly Mushroom had a distribution relationship with a ‘major’ record company (Festival) from the outset, which disqualifies it as a truly independent label (‘Without the backing of an established label like Festival there would have been no Mushroom Records’, Stuart Coupe writes in his biography of Gudinski).⁸⁰

MAGIC MUSHROOM