In 1963 the Seekers (including Durham) signed to the W&G label, a recording concern operated by two families, the Whites and the Gillespies, with the redoubtable Ron Tudor as its A&R man and publicity director. Tudor, as it happened, offered to release a 7″ EP of Durham as a solo artist.54 Durham, meanwhile, assumed that Seekers’ records would be credited to ‘Judith Durham and the Seekers’, but the paternalistic and single-minded Athol Guy opposed this55 (his paternalism and single-mindedness would be useful to him later in the decade, when he became a conservative politician). Durham correctly saw the Seekers as daggy and herself ‘as very hip and a bit off-beat’ in a way that ‘didn’t fit with the image.’56 The group recorded Introducing the Seekers for W&G, but were only mildly successful in Australia; it took a trip to the UK and a series of happy accidents to make them million-selling stars. Foremost among these accidents was their encounter with Dion O’Brien, better known as Tom Springfield of highly successful group the Springfields. O’Brien’s sister and bandmate, Dusty Springfield, claimed that the Springfields broke up when they saw ‘what was coming’57 – that is, the Beatles. She was probably wrong about their own unsustainability in the mid 60s, though: the Seekers, for whom Tom Springfield then wrote a series of exceptional hit songs, were strong challengers to the Beatles, and Springfield herself as a solo artist was a marvel.
Young Modern uncovered more folk stars who would go on to great pop things; in early 1962, the magazine spotlighted a young family man from Para Hills,58 in the city’s north-east, who by the end of the decade would be one of the country’s best-known pop producers:
One of the finest jazz voices in South Australia may be heard every Saturday night at the Boomerang Club coming from the vocal cords of Pat Aulton.
The visitors’ first impression of Pat is that he is a wild “rocker”, but give him his guitar, put him in a coffee lounge, and the true artist in him comes out.59
Late the same year, Aulton won the Young Modern Songwriting Competition with song called ‘Our Love of Long Ago’. The magazine had a relationship with the local television program Woodies Teentime, and Aulton appeared on the show to receive his award.60
YOUNG ELIZABETHANS
In the mid 1950s South Australia had been the site of a bold new experiment by the Playford government. The ‘new town’ of Elizabeth, constructed in a rural area north of Adelaide, was intended primarily as a domicile for immigrants from northern Europe who worked in manufacturing. Elizabeth is where later commercial pop/rock stars like Jimmy Barnes, his brother John Swan, Bernard ‘Doc’ Neeson, Doug Ashdown, Glenn Shorrock (who later reported that ‘the first electric guitar I ever saw was Doug Ashdown’s’),61 and other fine musicians such as Martin Armiger and Pip Proud were to begin the long process of honing their skills for the wider world.
Barnes became one of Australia’s best-loved singers as a member of Cold Chisel and later as a solo artist; John Swan (“Swanee”) had a successful solo career in the 80s; Neeson would be the singer in the Angels; Ashdown became a well-respected folk musician and singer-songwriter; Shorrock was first a teen idol as a member of the Twilights in the late 60s, and then in the 70s the voice of the international million-selling Little River Band; Armiger was a member of the Sports and later a writer, producer, and co-ordinator of soundtracks, while Proud was an innovator who enjoyed (or didn’t) a brief period of prominence in the late 60s and a revived career in the early 21st century. In short, this new town was a hotbed of talent and ambition.
Elizabeth had its own major venue, the Octagon, where in the late 60s the teenaged Barnes and Swan could thrill to such groups as the Masters Apprentices.62 Between Elizabeth and Adelaide proper lies Salisbury, and here the youth of the two cities could mix. Dances held there – sometimes under the name of the Matelot Club – attracted up to 700 people.63 The young Doc Neeson booked shows there.64 The readers of Young Modern first encountered Glenn Shorrock as part of Salisbury Youth Centre’s attraction the Twilights, who at this early stage were represented rather confusingly as a sub-set of another band, the Vectormen, because the three singers of the original Twilights performed in tandem with other groups. Shorrock had heard Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ while he was living in the Elder Park Hostel, and was a bodgie ‘from then on.’65
It seems, from this angle, that Elizabeth and Salisbury were much more rock-oriented than Adelaide itself. In October 1962, an enthused reader yelled from Young Modern’s letters page:
Not many teenagers in Adelaide have heard of the dance at the Salisbury District Youth Centre. This is a well patronised dance, with attendance of over 500 . . . The resident band is the Vectormen who have a tremendous sound . . . They are from Elizabeth and have played at many local dances. Kevin Steele and Don Parsons are the two male vocalists and are backed [sic] by three terrific boys, the TWILIGHTS, Mike, Glen [sic] and Paddy, who have appeared on Seventeeners.66
The Twilights went on to become one of the biggest Australian groups of the sixties, and recorded one of the decade’s best albums, Once Upon a Twilight. But Adelaide’s dance scene had many other stars too. Barry McAskill was the leader of Levi Smith’s Clefs (he was also, notably, arrested for leading a conga line from the Whiskey disco along Sydney’s William Street, causing a three-hour traffic jam).67 He had ‘sung his way to the top’ in Adelaide in 1963; as well as being the ‘compere-vocalist’ of the TV show Teensville, he performed with his own group on Wednesday nights at the “Drifter’s Casual Club.”68 Doug Ashdown, like many of his colleagues, was born in the UK. On arriving in Adelaide, he formed the Sapphires; he returned to the UK in the early 60s and joined a band called Rommel and the Desert Rats, then went back to Adelaide to play alongside Bobby Bright in the Beaumen (or Bowmen) until, at the end of 1964, he remade himself as a solo folk artist. ‘I was sort of the underground in Adelaide’, he claimed ten years later, writing songs about ‘heavy things like why is there air?’69 The second half of the 60s would see him record and release excellent albums on a regular basis.
APRIL IN ADELAIDE, PATTI IN MAROUBRA
Adelaide, however vibrant, was a small city, and Ron Tremain was adamant that Young Modern, which at this time was still completely focused on Adelaide, was by and for its audience:
We couldn’t run a teenage magazine and keep the kids out, and, of course, we didn’t want to. They got in our chairs, tables, tea trays and hair, and we never knew whether it’d be some interstate name or Fred Nerk from Snake Gully who’d be sidling round the end of the counter.70
So it was perhaps not surprising that in 1962, when a young girl from the Adelaide suburb of Tranmere – April Potts, soon to be known as April Byron – gave Johnny O’Keefe a song she had written, this in itself would be newsworthy to Young Modern. That she was then involved in some uproar within its pages is also unsurprising. Potts had shown O’Keefe the song, ‘He’s My Michael’, assuming he would somehow help her to record and release it. Instead, he ‘gave’ it to his protégé Laurel Lea, much to Potts’s displeasure. As Young Modern told its readers, ‘she was most adamant . . . “NOBODY BUT ME RECORDS MY SONG!”’71
It is difficult in hindsight to establish whether this was a beat-up; soon enough, ‘April Byron’ signed a contract with O’Keefe, and Sydney singer Kevin Todd recorded her song after it received ‘top treatment by one of Sydney’s leading