References to the USA – and comparisons between the talent and ability of Australian and American performers – were evidently a constant. In a nation supposedly dominated by the cultural cringe, the public pronouncements were very often on Australia’s side, even if it only took the form of Mouseketeer Cheryl Holdridge’s reputed declaration in 1960 that she was ‘in love with’ local pop singer Lucky Starr.149 The American success of Melbournite Diana Trask was a matter of fascination for the celebrity magazines. Trask, who was reported glibly opining that ‘all young Australian artists should go to America if they want to get on’,150 was represented by TV Week as living out a kind of tawdry show-business life in which she was ‘constantly surrounded by the wealthiest stage-door Johnnies in America’, playing places like Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe,151 and starring on TV shows like Sing Along with Mitch. TV Week’s breathless accounts made even the ‘minor virus’ Trask caught during a ‘Mexican engagement’ seem glamorous.152
It is important to note, however, that the Australian acts mentioned above saw America largely in terms of their own ambition – as a place where they could show a wider audience what they could do. TV Week mused in 1961 that the USA was the Australian artist’s ‘land of failure,’153 stage-door Johnnies or no. However, the cultural cringe rhetoric that is supposed to have been so ubiquitous at this time is far less evident when Australians were talking about Britain or the US than might have been assumed. If Australian audiences were in thrall to international artists, they were – and are – just as likely to turn against them, or at the very least consider them ripe for parody.
Rolf Harris and Frank Ifield were both enormously successful in Britain (and Canada) by the early 60s. Harris had no particular performance background in Perth, where he had been born and raised; he had relocated to Britain in the early 1950s to pursue an art career and became an entertainer, recording a series of comedy pop hits produced by George Martin. His musical successes were executed in tandem with a growing reputation as a popular children’s television performer.
Ifield had three million-selling hits around the world in the early 60s. The son of an inventor, he grew up in the New South Wales town of Dural, where he subsequently claimed that he discovered yodelling to the family cow (Betsy) resulted in a higher milk yield.154 He would later credit the country and western music he heard on Sydney radio, along with the discovery of his own singing voice as a companion on his three-mile walk to school, as his most critical musical impetus. His first concert performance was at the Dural Memorial Hall. Like Harris, however, he had ambitions to become a visual artist; musical entertaining seemed to simply carry him along in its wake. His singing career, which had already been fostered by radio, really took off in 1956 when television was introduced to Australia at the time of the Melbourne Olympics. Ifield was soon a star on a program called Campfire Favourites. The sleevenotes to his early 60s Greatest Hits proclaim that it was ‘the challenge of tackling and conquering a new audience which drove him to leave Australia, where as a top-line entertainer his future was secure.’155 Decamping for Britain in late 1959, he released his iconic and best-remembered single, the breezy ‘I Remember You’ (top ten in America, Britain and elsewhere) followed by ‘Lovesick Blues’ and ‘The Wayward Wind’. Unlike Harris, Ifield rarely made much of his Australianness, beyond the rather unusual insinuation that yodelling was an appropriately rural activity, such as might be practiced by a young man from the rugged outback (although it isn’t). Rubbish like ‘She Taught Me How to Yodel’ attempted to capitalise on this fiction; his speedy, syncopated reading of the early-20th-century ‘unofficial national anthem’ of Australia, ‘Waltzing Matilda’, was a stab at another aspect of his legend. His own songwriting – for instance, his single ‘I Listen to My Heart’ – was of the same standard as the songs procured for him.
1964 saw many Australians fall in line with the rest of the world’s adulation of the Beatles. Jan Smith’s novel An Ornament of Grace, published in 1966 but written two years earlier, is a stunningly cruel novel about a populist journalist in Sydney. Here she describes an unnamed group who are plainly the Beatles on what would prove to be their only collective visit to Australia. She depicts ‘a bright, hot room with flushed faces and wet feet, trying to think of something no one else will ask and knowing it’s impossible.’156:
“Don’t tell me they wrote that song themselves?”
“Did you see what they did at the airport?”
“Ask them about the film and how much money they’re getting.”
Everybody will, if someone else doesn’t get in first. At least the television people have gone, so we’re spared one misery, listening to those cute bastard-American idiots in their cute suits asking about their sex lives and making ten minutes stretch into twenty . . . Already it’s started, the big fish like Heath and Sarah zooming in with how much money are you making and what do you think of Australia? Tell us we’re as loud and noisy and appreciative as people anywhere else, or better. There’s nothing worse than being different.157
Smith’s cynical assessment of the Beatles and Australia was not unusual at the time. Oz reported that the Beatles’ Sydney shows were underattended, and in the initial burst of their fame the group were regarded by many in Australia (as elsewhere) as manufactured and/or exploitative commercial rubbish. Col Joye said of the group many years later that ‘I didn’t like them much ‘cause they cut the legs from underneath me, and O’Keefe as well,’158 though – as previously stated – Joye has nevertheless enjoyed an impressive fifty-year career.
The Beatles’ 1964 tour of Australia, while inspirational for many, drew scorn from young and old fogeys alike (above: Oz 9, May 1964; below: Nation, May 14, 1964).
Although the impact of the Beatles in Australia would turn out to be considerable, it is simplistic to suggest that they pressed a ‘reset’ button for Australian pop and rock music. The country already had many stars, and more were emerging.
BILLY THORPE SCREWS HIS HEAD OFF
Billy Thorpe was virtually born into show business, and he would make much of his early 60s experiences. Thorpe grew up in Brisbane – he had first appeared on children’s TV in that city in 1957, when he was 11 years old.159 He had been friends there with two Barrys: Gibb and Lyde (the latter later became known as guitar player and producer Lobby Loyde).160 Thorpe sometimes performed under the name Little Rock Allen161 and had worked with his idols162 O’Keefe and Joye as part of a show known as the Rockin’ Roll Train, travelling to and playing regional areas on a train.163
Thorpe moved to Sydney to further his career. In the first of two sensationalist memoirs he wrote in the 1990s, he reminisces:
With all the amazing surf beaches in and around Sydney, surf music and dances, known as ‘stomps’, were huge. Surf clubs all over Australia, and particularly those around Sydney, were havens for live music and bands. Some of the local surf groups, such as Roland Storm and the Statesmen, had big local followings on this circuit.164
Roland Storm and the Statesmen featured Billy Green, who will be a name to contend with throughout the next fifteen years of this narrative; he is discussed further at the end of this chapter. Another impressive local group was Ray Brown and the Whispers, a Sydney group who released five successful singles and no less than three albums in 1965.
In the early 70s, talking with Lee Dillow from