TEENAGE, MY FOOT! POP ON TV
O’Keefe was many things in one package, and a particularly prominent part of his identity for Australians was his role as a TV host. His overreaching self-promotion should not obscure the fact that, even by the standards of the time, his televisual style was very rough. This may have been why the teenagers thought he was, if not one of them, at least genuine and honest; in Australian society there can be two sides to being ‘a pig socially’. A letter writer to TV Week in March 1960, spoke damningly of Melbourne’s ‘so-called teenage shows’:
Teenage, my foot! They are all (‘Cool Cats’, ‘Teenage Hour’ and the revolting ‘HI Fi Club’) arranged, designed and compered by adults, who have barely an idea of what teenagers want in rock ’n’ roll. We, the teenagers, don’t want sponsors, commercials, prizes, competitions, clubs, elaborate sets and the stiff, unnatural little dolls trying to jive in shiny suits, well-oiled hair and ballerina dresses. We don’t want formality. We want these shows to slam on the entertainment, and slam it on good. But all we ever see is the occasional carefully rehearsed item inserted among a lot of trivial drivel. Sydney has the right idea in ‘Six O’Clock Rock’. You could not call it uncouth or unsuitable, it is good, clean fun for all kids, and it wastes no time with unnecessary talking. Melbourne tries to make up for its lack of talent with the sugary artificial jazz which is so unbearable. To think that the ‘Hi Fi Club’ is being transmitted all over Australia makes me shudder.133
Hi-Fi Club was compered by Bert Newton, a DJ who was already well on his way to becoming one of Australia’s most beloved television personalities.134 The show purported to offer ‘Modern music designed for moderns’. Col Joye and the Joye Boys were regular guests,135 though Joye was generally critical of television as a medium; he told TV Week in 1960 that it did not give ‘local artists a “fair go”’. The magazine continued:
Col, who earns as much as the Prime Minister, Mr. Menzies, said television was his worst form of income . . . ‘I regard it only as a means of entertaining crippled children and other unfortunate people who normally are not able to see me perform.’136
Joye later recalled:
There was no rehearsals, you just went on and sung your things. But in those days, we did things that no television station in the world would have attempted. We did outdoor shows and our equipment was pretty bad, pretty basic – even our recording equipment. But we got by.137
Other shows abounded; the Australian incarnation of American Bandstand began as Accent on Youth and was then called TV Disk Jockey before becoming Bandstand in 1958.138 The Allen Brothers – Peter Allen and Chris Bell, who were neither brothers nor truly surnamed Allen – were regulars on the show between 1960 and 1963139 and – in a bizarre story often marveled at even today – went on to be managed by Judy Garland after they appeared in cabarets in Tokyo.140 Bandstand, helmed by the straightlaced but apparently fun-loving Brian Henderson, who soon found his niche in a much longer career as a newsreader, seems to have been cosy and lacking in surprise.
Though its title seems strange from a post-1977 perspective, the November 1965 TV show The New Wave on Stage perfectly encapsulates the way popular rock music was performed and presented at this time. Presented at the Capitol Theatre in Perth, the show begins with Max Merritt and the Meteors, introduced as a New Zealand group, performing a jovial, jaunty ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’. The constant presence of a particular whistling noise in the audience response suggests that the enthusiastic crowd response heard on the soundtrack is actually a tape loop. Merritt’s Meteors also provide backing for the next song, Lynne Randell’s ‘It’s Alright’, which is almost impressive in its lyrical banality and repetitiveness; Randell performs careful, stilted dance moves, but the song is rousing. Jade Hurley’s ‘How I Lied’ is an impressively dramatic pop tune; Hurley collapses at his piano while introducing another song – the victim, we are told, of an old knee injury. Stepping in, Max Merritt and the Meteors present an invigorated ‘Hold On’. Ray Brown and the Whispers, a Leedon signing from Sydney and a successful chart act in 1965, then perform ‘Gloria’ and three more of their hits from that year, all covers. Brown, like Randell, periodically waves to certain audience members; by this portion of the show the audience, having been provided with streamers and large balloons, are rambunctious. While it might be safe to assume that the show was sanitised and streamlined for the sake of a televisual hour, it nevertheless demonstrates the raw abilities and focused showmanship of Australian pop/rock musicians in the mid 60s.
INDIGENOUS VS. LOCAL
The rise of Aboriginal singer Jimmy Little as a country and western balladeer in the early 60s is one of those exceptions that proves a rule. There were few Aboriginals in the mainstream media then – as now – and with all due respect to Little and his considerable abilities, it could certainly be argued that he served white Australian prejudice as, through no fault of his own, he became the one well-known Aboriginal pop singer. His popularity allowed the majority of Australians to rest assured that they were not as racist as was sometimes declared. This, of course, was hardly Little’s problem, much less his doing. His biggest hit was ‘Royal Telephone’, a glib country and western ballad which would be remembered by no-one if Little had not sung it. His rise to fame came at the same time the Bulletin, Australia’s pre-eminent weekly journal, controversially dropped its banner slogan ‘Australia for the White Man’ (although it is worth noting that its use of this phrase was historically more complicated – tangled up with the issue of exploitation of imported non-white labour – than it seems at first glance).
Jimmy Little saw himself as a peacemaking example:
I had a freedom that excluded me from being prejudiced against. Because I was non-threatening. I was an ally of everybody. Wanting to be an interpreter, a communicator and a person who can explain situations. I didn’t want to jeopardise that by saying, I belong to this [ethnic and/or political] group.
I felt that if they can break the egg that I’m in then they can destroy me if they like, you know. What I was doing, I was promoting Aboriginal Australia. Promoting to the hilt.141
He praised his fellow Australian performers – the vast majority of whom were non-indigenous – as versatile and necessarily able: ‘Countries like the USA have such a wide circuit that many entertainers can use the same routine for years and build up a big reputation for themselves,’ he reasoned. ‘In Australia entertainers have to vary their method of presentation, their songs and even their dress regularly. This means that artists out here are more original in their routines.’142
Australian consumers occasionally agreed with this broad assessment. Less than a year before Little’s claim, three Australian singles had taken up the top three positions in Melbourne’s top forty: Col Joye’s “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”, Lonnie Lee’s “I Found a New Love” and O’Keefe’s “Come On and Take My Hand.”143 While student journalists complained that record sales might only reflect sales of 400 copies in key ‘record bars’ (so that ‘shop girls and office tea boys . . . are determining what the rest of the population is hearing all day’),144 it does indicate a certain grass-roots interest in, and support for, local artists.
Australia was to America as New Zealand was to Australia: when rocker Max Merritt relocated to Sydney in November 1963145 – one stage in a journey that would eventually take him on to London in the 70s and later, to the USA – he felt like a ‘veteran of music and show business. I had been doing it about two years when I got to Sydney.’ Yet Australia made him feel like ‘a grain of salt in the bottom of a bucket. It seemed so huge after living in Christchurch and Auckland.’146
Australia itself