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ОглавлениеThis book is an attempt to make sense of events, people, places and recordings that emerged under the banner of Australian popular music between 1960 and 1985. The time frame is somewhat arbitrary; it is the product of conceiving a fifty-year history (from 1960 to 2010), only to realise that fifty years was too much to take on if I was to do the material justice, and consequently splitting the period in half (the second half of what is now a two-volume survey can be expected sometime in the third decade of this century). Like any history should, it tries to challenge assumptions – in this case, assumptions about the culture, the times and the outcomes of Australian pop – and re-evaluate its subject.
One thing I did not want to do is write a book that strings together all the previously published anecdotes about pop musicians to create a smug, comfortable bedtime story for baby boomers. I also hoped to avoid writing one of those point-and-laugh books about historical ‘fashion crimes’, which try to calm fears about change and experiment by poking fun at the past and people who can’t answer back (because even if they’re still alive and interested, they’re not that person anymore). Both these approaches are no more than lazy historical window-shopping; they don’t ask any difficult questions about the politics, places of consumption and production, interactions and conversations, power structures or beliefs within pop music.
The process of writing this book was, as a result, complicated and arduous, though often rewarding and enjoyable. It is founded on documentary evidence, drawn primarily from the Australian music press, augmented by published and unpublished memoirs, films and television programs, and of course actual records (that is, 7- and 12-inch vinyl, or CD re-releases). These are combined with interviews and a small amount of internet research. Sources are supplied in the endnotes for every statement made in the book, aside from interviews which I conducted myself; the reader can assume that if no source is given for a quote, it is one I obtained from my informants. I appreciate that there is an inherent weakness in using the music press so extensively: on a number of occasions, while seeking clarification on a particular statement from decades ago, I was told by a musician that they were actually teasing, joking with, or lying to the journalist in question. Even when that’s not happening overtly, the music press is notoriously full of boasts and promotional puff. Yet I contend – particularly as I am one of those people who has trouble recalling what he did last week and twenty years ago – that when writing history there is a potentially greater weakness in depending too heavily on people’s memories of past events. I have also been told often enough by many of my informants that their memories are obscured by whatever drugs and alcohol they were using at the time; this confirms for me that my approach is probably the best one.
This book is enormous – not an assertion of its excellence, incidentally, just a statement of fact. It could have been twice as big. It is structured in chapters of vastly different sizes, the larger of which are subdivided into smaller sections. The shorter chapters concentrate on particular artists, with the aim of presenting a number of historical ‘slices’ in the form of a case study. The ‘cases’ are all valid and important artists, but they are not necessarily the most valid and important; indeed, that’s a judgment I don’t want to have to try to make.
I have tried to be user-friendly and provide some kind of overarching framework to help my reader stay focused, but at the same time both you, my reader, and I have to remember that to ‘focus’ the story necessitates being restrictive, and perhaps even deceptive. It is easier to regard history as a story of leaders and followers, or people magically drawn by irresistible, pervasive ideas (in the case of a history of music from the early 60s to the mid 80s, ‘the Beatles’, ‘the Stones’, ‘psychedelia’, ‘counterculture’, ‘the new wave’). Unfortunately for history books, though fortunately for real life, this is simply not how the world works. The history of any cultural phenomenon is of people jostling – for supremacy, or just a livelihood, or a number of different things at once – and these people’s paths cross or they don’t, and they become successful in the eyes of others, or they don’t, and they produce great work or terrible work or, in the case of most people, work that lies somewhere in between.
I should say, too, that I am of the belief, though it is entirely unprovable, that talent does not carve its own path: if the Easybeats hadn’t met a Dutch doorman at a Sydney club in the early 60s, they may not have become Australia’s biggest pop group of the mid 60s (or they may have, by some other means, but the point is merely that they may not have; the genius of George Young and Harry Vanda was not a irresistible force that would inevitably discover gold). In one sense this attitude masks a degree of card-shuffling; I would, however, trot out the old adage that describes success as ‘one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration’ – and add that luck has to be considered a huge part of the whole shebang as well. In short, there is no inevitability to any of these stories. Ian Meldrum probably was wrong to overspend his production budget on ‘The Real Thing’, and because it went on to become a hit, and an iconic song, does not vindicate that decision; it’s merely harder to come by stories of people who overspent Meldrum-style and produced a megaflop, because no-one wants to remember that, or they fudge the issue, or apply creative accounting, or it just doesn’t mean as much because it happened to nobodies – but it certainly happens. On a related point, the Models’ single ‘On’ is, I am certain to the point of declaring it an indisputable fact, at least a thousand times better by almost any standard than their later release ‘Out of Mind, Out of Sight’, and the reality that the first was not a hit, while the second was, proves nothing about either record’s intrinsic value, though it does perhaps prove something about marketing and how the record-buying public feels about aspiring pop bands wielding chain saws in their videos. All art relates to commerce on some level; pop music seems to have done so more than most art forms, though this might just be a perception. Writing commercial pop music requires great talent, but the greatest pop groups in the world – the Reels, for instance – were often barely able to eke out a living. Only the most ardent free-market advocate would suggest that the craft of pop music is entirely about creating music that is more popular than any other music, and even popularity is hard to gauge exactly: Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’ was not a hit at the time of its release, but twenty-five years later it was the most popular karaoke song in Australia.
Some may feel I pay insufficient attention to questions of culture, gender, and race in this book; others may feel I pay too much attention to these issues simply by mentioning them in this sentence. I grew up in the 1970s as part of quite possibly the first generation of non-indigenous Australians to be relieved of the idea that Australian culture was inherently inferior and that any pursuit of culture per se was to be found in other, older countries. Which is not to say we were unaware of this idea, and indeed in many ways it still persists. But we did not suffer under the weight of it in the way our predecessors might have. What is more, my childhood encompassed the years when Australia embraced multiculturalism. I was born as the country approached a milestone – twenty years of immigration from continental Europe – and was shifting toward an ostensibly merit-based (rather than racially oriented) immigration policy. Australian multiculturalism is a Canadian concept taken to its logical extreme; one outcome is that over a third of Australians today have a parent or a grandparent who was born outside the country. An equally important aspect of ethnic difference – policy towards and treatment of Australian Aboriginal people – also began to be addressed, haltingly, awkwardly – and often badly, as it still is at time of writing. I mention all these issues here in order to explain some of the opinions expressed in this book and some of the decisions I made in prioritising certain elements, people and artefacts over others. Briefly, my attitude is that I know there was a ‘cultural cringe’; I know there was (and is) racism in Australia; I know women were (and are still) oppressed. I don’t shy away from these things in this history; I want you, as a reader, to take them as a given. What I don’t want to do is to return continually to these essential, central elements of Australian society during the period I am analysing as to an unscratchable itch. They are undeniable truths. Anyone who dismisses my attitude as ‘politically correct’ is, I contend, an anti-historical crank who won’t get much out of this book (or, for that matter, life): such people should write their own books to read. Having said all that, I am troubled by the lack of marginalised voices in this volume: my explanation for this is simply that many of the people who might have been discussed under this rubric were uncontactable or unwilling to talk. I feel particularly the lack of a large number of female performers who are difficult to write about in the context of a work like this because, in the main, they were vocal interpreters of others’ music: pretty mastheads fronting a showband. Print media advertising from the early 60s shows a huge parade of such young women, whose careers were almost certainly brief and exploitative. I don’t wish to diminish performers such as these; I do pay closer attention to some (for instance, Adelaide’s April Byron, who was a songwriter as well) but I feel that ultimately the focus has to be on musicians who either write their own music or who strongly and decisively reinterpret others’ work in a challenging way. Given the horrifically sexist, indeed in many ways misogynist, times, this was exceptionally more difficult for women to achieve than it was for men. Women, or rather girls, were assigned the role of appropriate consumers of popular music, particularly ‘pop’ music. Fortunately for everyone (except talented female musicians of the 60s and 70s, many of whom can and do feel cheated), the idea that a successful songwriter and/or instrumentalist might be female is almost – almost – unremarkable in popular music today.
At the same time, I feel no need to justify the high concentration of New Zealanders present in this history; all I can really say is, firstly, that my New Zealand-born informants (I use two, in particular, when discussing the 60s and early 70s: Brian Peacock and Mike Rudd) have a good perspective on the Australia they encountered, and secondly, that there’s an argument to be made that New Zealand punches above its weight as a creative society, in pop music and other areas. To leave out that delightful nation close to Australia’s east would, in any case, both pander to nationalism and skew the work to the point of inaccuracy. I have not, it should be noted, tried to tell New Zealand’s own pop music story (which John Dix relates in his remarkable Stranded in Paradise).
Incidentally, in mentioning my awareness of various prejudices in Australia’s past and present, I do not mean to suggest that I am some kind of cross between Buddha and a blank slate: I can’t not be affected by my own experiences. All any of us can do is recognise our possible biases. Many may feel there is a distinct Melbournist tinge to this work: certainly, I have lived in Melbourne for three-quarters of my life, including the years I was working on this book. However, all evidence suggests that Melbourne was the centre of Australian music in the 60s and through to the early 80s; while there’s no particular reason why this was the case, once it became so, the culture naturally expanded on itself. To investigate the smaller capitals and other regions in detail would have been fascinating. But concentrating too much on peripheral places, which took from the wider world but did not have input back, would be detrimental to the overall narrative.
I have tried to avoid some of the usual pitfalls of music history and criticism (including, I hope, irritating and clichéd expression). I consider many music writers have shown a lazy dependence on the idea of ‘influence’, and this harks back to my earlier gripe about the notion of a ‘second-rate’ Australia of the past in which people are beholden to ideas delivered by boat from London. The notion of ‘influence’ strikes me as nothing more than a convenient way of pigeonholing people, and one which hides more important truths. Billy Green, guitarist/songwriter in the group Doug Parkinson and the Questions (later retitled Doug Parkinson In Focus) between 1966 and 1970, may well have devoured every Beatles album when it came out; he would have been a little marginalised if he hadn’t. But if he did, I don’t see this as any justification for talking about the Beatles’ influence on Billy Green, because to do so obscures the reality that a number of factors were at work here: Billy Green was surely at least as influenced by the group’s record company saying ‘Be at the recording studio on Friday to record a hit single’; by the opportunity to write for Doug Parkinson’s extraordinary voice, much more powerful and versatile than any of the Beatles’; by his own experimentation with new instruments and non-Anglo-American music; by the desire to create new music in a pop context; by competition with other groups; by the spirit of the times; by a desire to continue to work in the music industry; and so on. That this group’s best-known hit was a cover of ‘Dear Prudence’ neither negates nor proves this assertion, incidentally. Billy Green’s best songs for In Focus, such as ‘Without You’, are unique.
It also perturbs me that so many writers seem to use the term ‘influenced by’ as a polite way of saying ‘copied’, or implying some similar value judgement about the capacity of artists for original thought. Going beyond this, it needs to be said that even when groups or artists do copy the style and sound of more famous artists, there are numerous reasons why they might do so, including for instance a commercial imperative, or an artisanal impulse, or the wish to pay homage or contribute to the general musical culture in a style people will easily recognise. ‘Influence’ covers and hides anything; if the 70s Tasmanian group Beathoven mimicked the sound of the early Beatles, were they ‘influenced’ by the Beatles or were they influenced by the idea of taking a recognisable retro sound, selling records, and launching careers by it? Daddy Cool may have been ‘influenced’ by 1950s doo-wop in a manner of speaking, but the impetus for the group was surely the idea of playing doo-wop in a ‘head’ music environment. The idea of ‘influence’ hangs out with all of these possibilities, and explains absolutely nothing. It is worth noting, too, that artists – particularly when they are looking back over decades – are often extremely keen to describe their work in terms of influences, possibly in part as a convenient shorthand but also possibly because artists are typically the worst judges of their own work and often think of it largely in terms of what they and others were (or could have been) listening to at the time. Many also hope to simply diminish their earlier work as juvenilia.
I have also tried to move away from the illustration mode usually adopted in pop-culture histories. The internet will soon enter its third decade of mass popularity; almost any depiction of a given artist, as well as their music, can now be summoned up in an instant, and I imagine most of my readers have access to this delightful mess. What then would be the point of reproducing conventional photographs of the people cited in the text? Whatever promo picture I might choose to illustrate what Australian Crawl looked like, you can not only find that image online, you can also view a dozen or more other photos, along with many videos and much more besides, that will collectively give you a greater understanding of the group’s line-ups and styles. Instead, I have drawn on images that are still largely hidden from the web, which I hope provide something of the flavour of the times rather than merely highlighting some celebrities. There is a far more extensive world of knowledge, opinions and images out there now to follow up, should you be so inspired, and I hope you are.
Finally, a word about errors. It might appal anyone who hasn’t written a book to find a historian conceding error in a work before it is even published. When you’re making assertions twenty to a page, and throwing in the odd bad-tempered criticism or high five, some things are bound to get out of whack. Sometimes – perhaps without realising it – a writer sacrifices a narrow, strict truth in pursuit of a broader one. I have tried not to do this, but I also try to write concisely and appropriately – and entertainingly, too, if I can. The documents I’ve used sometimes conflict with one another, and people’s memories sometimes conflict with the documents, so in some cases I’ve had to make a captain’s pick. If I have put two and something that looked like two together and come up not with four, but with 4.1 or 7, I hope the reader can forgive me and the libelled keep their lawsuits to a minimum.
Music, like any art, provokes strong responses, of course, and there are times when I am no doubt unreasonably harsh, or unreasonably glowing, in my assessment of some work or another. Readers should take my meanderings in the spirit they are intended; I welcome correspondence on any subject. My ultimate aspiration is that this work inspires others to tease out more of this history, in new ways and revelatory interpretations.
David Nichols
Melbourne, 2015
