This book is dedicated to my parents, Jane Miller and Graham Nichols, and to the memory of Katherine Spielmann
© 2016 David Nichols
Foreword © 2016 Dave Graney
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Verse Chorus Press
PO Box 14806, Portland OR 97293
Cover art © Ben Montero
Book design and layout by Steve Connell/Transgraphic Services
The author and the publishers wish to thank all those who supplied illustrative material and gave permission to reproduce copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders, and the publishers welcome communication from any copyright owners from whom permission was inadvertently not obtained. In such cases, we will be pleased to obtain appropriate permission and provide suitable acknowledgment in future editions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nichols, David, 1965-
Title: Dig: Australian rock and pop music, 1960-85 / David Nichols.
Description: Portland, OR: Verse Chorus Press, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015034550 | ISBN 9781891241611 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Popular music--Australia--1961-1970--History and criticism. | Popular music--Australia--1971-1980--History and criticism. | Popular music--Australia--1981-1990--History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML3504.N53 2016 | DDC 781.640994/09046--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034550
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Contents
Foreword by Dave Graney
INTRODUCTION – Ascension
1 Wild Beat Overture
2 A Funny Buzz – THE EARLY TO MID SIXTIES
3 I Feel as Good As If I Were Dead – THE BEE GEES
4 We Weren’t Exactly Keeping a Low Profile – THE MISSING LINKS
5 The Snap and Crackle of Pop – THE MID TO LATE SIXTIES
6 Falling off the Edge of the World – THE EASYBEATS
7 Knights in Yellow Armour – PIP PROUD
8 It’s a Flash! – THE EARLY TO MID SEVENTIES
9 Million Dollar Riff – DADDY COOL / SKYHOOKS
10 We Aren’t Here to Confuse People – AC/DC
11 Bending Corners – THE MID TO LATE SEVENTIES
12 Five Years of Fancy Cars – DRAGON
13 Happy/Sad Is a Really Fantastic Emotion – THE REELS
14 We Were 60 Years Old When We Were 19 – THE TRIFFIDS
15 There’s Absolutely No Art in the Moodists – THE MOODISTS
16 The Modern Song – THE EARLY TO MID EIGHTIES
AFTERWORD – What’s It Like Out There?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
I first met David Nichols when he was a teen music fan in early 80s Melbourne. He was too young to get into the pubs my band the Moodists were mostly playing in but had started a fanzine and wrote about music and drew cartoons for it. If truth be told, having a teenage fanzine writer and illustrator on your case is a pretty cool situation to be in. He made us authentic, in a way.
In the intervening years he has continued to write about and engage with popular and unpopular music as a community radio broadcaster, an artist manager (very briefly) and as a musician himself. His writing was published in actual pop monthlies like Smash Hits and successful lifestyle advertising cultural wraparounds such as Rolling Stone Australia. He has experienced the limitations and constraints of the scene on the island and has continued to chase down rumours and will-o’-the-wisp reputations that occasionally spawn mad fevers in the compound and he’s brought a lot of them down to earth and into play here.
As he says in the introduction, it’s a large book and it obeys no logic other than what chance and the weather have given him to use, just this one time he has everything and everyone in his sights. He has given himself the power and conceit to set a grid and tempo to a larger story than anybody has attempted before. He also became an actual historian along the way too. A made guy.
This book has been years – decades – in the making. Stories you had to really get a feel for, otherwise they’d just come out all wrong. Just pale shadows of American or British stories. Mad characters like Johnny O’Keefe getting right up in your face and bellowing out of tune about how great they were. Just listen to the digital files now and it sounds all blustering and off-key, but if a writer could take you somewhere close to the race-track and you could smell the fumes on the audience’s breath too . . .
So many details that jump out at you in each chapter. Young British emigrés traveling on the same ships to Australia in the late 50s who emerge a decade later as flaming pop stars from different cities, still looking back at the world they’d been dragged away from. The Bee Gees in the dusty cowtown that was early 60s Brisbane and their precocious child talent contest rivals, Billy Thorpe and Lobby Loyde.
There’s also the endlessly repeated struggles for authenticity as “real” music is posited against “pop pap”. People fight that battle in the late 50s and the early 60s. Trad jazzers and folkies versus rock ’n’roll barbarians. People making their own instruments and clothes. Art vs. money. The technology dragging the floor out from under the players feet – constantly. The wider world flooding in and washing through the whole picture. The regional variations, the radio pumping out sounds as soon as the vinyl was baked in the pressing plants. Then TV opening up the pipelines as well. People mad for new shit! Then the New Zealanders coming in with their weird vowels – their poise and their brains and their drugs!
This text is dense and full of mad detail. David Nichols is deeply and widely interested in the characters and the choices they make or have to make in the scenes here. He’s got empathy and his own prejudices balancing all the while too. He admits at the start – it’s a Melbourne-centric story in many ways, but why not? If that’s the spot you were watching, reading and listening from for the most part?
I had a friend who was from the UK alternative 80s music world and he’d ended up happily in Melbourne and working in the scene in a music distribution admin type gig. He was a real music fan though. He continued