This was only part of the Missing Links’ inspiration, though. Anson claims to have been more directly motivated by Ray Hoff, a Sydney musician who, with his group the Off Beats, was a regular live favourite in the early sixties. Hoff later relocated to Perth, where most of his recording was done and where he was a strong favourite of another 60s icon, Johnny Young. Perth had a blues scene that filled some with awe; it offered, as one commentator put it, ‘escape from the convention-ridden and practical-minded world of today . . . a dark, eerie sort of a world.2 For Anson, Hoff was ‘the Sinatra of the blues in this country, and I could get to see him regularly; he was one of the guys I used to talk to.’
I don’t know where he got his stuff, but he knew all about the blues – and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, too. He used to do a solo gig with just an electric guitar at a folk club in Kings Cross. He was featured there, and live he meant more to me than those early Stones things.
Still, Anson’s wish to avoid a day job was probably the strongest motivating force in the creation of the group in early 1964. His brother, Cliff, was working as a roadie for Billy Thorpe:
He said, ‘These guys are making a bit of dough – why don’t you get a band together, play some tunes, get something going, I can get you some work.’
So I put an ad in the Herald for musicians, and various people turned up. Then, through contacts my brother had, we got auditioned around the place . . . I gave up my job as a public-service clerk. It was 1970 the next time I had a day job.
Coincidentally, many of the Missing Links came from northern New South Wales, specifically the Port Macquarie area. Guitarist (and later well-known Sydney recording engineer) Dave Boyne was one of them, Ronnie Peel was another. Peel had learnt piano from an ‘old time piano teacher who’d been a bit of a gay girl in her time and knew all about boogie’.3 One day, Peel saw a new kind of ‘big long guitar’ on TV and ‘it fucking freaked me right out’; he discovered it was a bass. Acquiring one, he played it in a group called the Mystics which, like Port Macquarie itself, featured a few future Missing Links. They played surf music at what were known as Sound Lounges – discotheques with live bands, often operated by Ivan Dayman – some in Sydney suburbs like Dee Why and Parramatta. Peel met a young man with ‘the longest hair I’d ever seen in my life’: this was Anson. Another core early member was singer Bob Brady, from all reports a perspicacious character. After initially considering the name Fang, the new group became the Missing Links.
Anson remembers the group taking off quickly, though he is equivocal about their level of success. ‘There was a bit of screaming from the audience – it was part of the thing to scream, wasn’t it? They’d just scream for the sake of it. Sometimes you couldn’t hear yourself too well.’ As Mike Rudd explains more fully in the next chapter, Anson says this meant less than it might seem because of the minimal power of rock equipment at the time: ‘The biggest amplifier was about 30 watts!’
The Missing Links were then living in the middle ring suburb of Top Ryde, sharing a flat with two brothers whose parents were their landlords. This was an advantage, because the group’s ‘wild’ appearance might have counted against them when it came to mundanities like finding a place to live. Anson says the flat had another advantage: it was ‘in the middle of a shopping centre. At night, you could make all the noise you wanted.’
The group had a lot of work. ‘My dad knew the entertainment director for Miller’s Pubs, so we got work on that circuit,’ says Anson. They were also associated with John Harrigan’s agency (see chapter 2) and played at his venues. They had some high profile engagements, such as playing at a benefit for Oz magazine in November 1964; its editors were being prosecuted for a satirical cartoon by Martin Sharp about a yob’s night out. An engagement that fell through perhaps brought them more kudos than it would if it had gone ahead: the promoter of the Rolling Stones’ 1964 tour, Harry M. Miller, threw them off the bill of the Sydney show, reputedly because they looked too scruffy. This would be enough in itself to earn them a badge of honour, but the legend has further developed that the Missing Links were dropped because they presented too much competition to the Stones in terms of their wild and rugged sound: they blew the Stones off the stage.
I didn’t make a brilliant living, but I certainly managed to pay my rent. If you look at the top ten and top forty of that time, there was a lot of Australian stuff on the charts. A hell of a lot more than there is now. And we got plenty of gigs – just local dances, sound lounges, but they were all paid . . . We didn’t end up playing much blues, though we always featured a couple of Leadbelly songs in the stage repertoire. We always did ‘Midnight Special.’
Suzie Wong’s was a Sydney club that served as the hub of the blues-rock scene in the mid 60s. Anson remembers it as a great place:
Once we started working there, we were meeting other musicians – there was music seven nights a week. It was a meeting place for people who’d go hang out there in the daytime. And we’d be working there at night. It was a trad-jazz place originally, and then slowly it changed over. It had a fabulous atmosphere. It was underground, downstairs, in an arcade. You went down and there was a bar, and a dance floor; it probably held a hundred people.
The guy that owned Suzie Wong’s, Jim Harris, was Greek. I think they had a Chinese cook – but he only cooked spaghetti!
The Missing Links recorded one single for Alberts (via the Harrigan connection). ‘I don’t think we were trying to do anything much,’ says Anson of the recording session for the single.
Alberts was trying to start up a stable of recording people. They signed us and when the time came to record they suggested we do some originals. So we sat down and wrote those songs. Not because we wanted to write songs . . . but we had a recording contract and we were expected to do it! I didn’t have much vision at that stage.
It was the only record the first Missing Links made, a tuneful Anson composition called ‘We 2 Should Live.’ It was released in early 1965 on Parlophone, which had a special relationship with Alberts’ music publishing company; the two companies were a couple of months away from hitting gold with the Easybeats. In the Missing Links, however, Alberts were confronted with a group who, whatever they did have, certainly had no sense of a collective direction. Anson, sick of being forced to play Beatles covers (presumably by svengalis like Harrigan), had ideas for a new group; he eased himself out of the Missing Links soon after the release of ‘We 2 Should Live’. He was soon a core member of Jeff St John and the Id, having ‘met the guys who ended up being the Id hanging out’ at Suzie Wong’s during the day. ‘I’d left the Links and was hanging around the scene. I met these guys who said “Yeah, we want to form a blues band.”’
Andy Anderson remembers Anson as ‘a purist, an original – I liked him a lot. Pete Anson loved R&B, jazz, blues . . .’ Anderson was known in his Missing Link days as Andy James (the name change came about, he says, because he ran away from home in New Zealand in 1965 at the age of 16, and didn’t want his parents to find him); he came to the Missing Links via an ad in the paper placed by guitarist John Jones.
Anderson joined the Missing Links in mid 1965. By this stage it was not so much a group in flux, more a name looking for some people to embody it. The one connection between the later Links and the earlier one was Jones, who replaced Anson shortly before the end of the original band’s life. Anderson had filled in once for original drummer Danny Cox, and believes that ‘they were on the verge of breaking up when I first saw them – I helped to patch things as a drummer, but then they broke completely. I remember backing Bob Brady [in a solo performance]; he kicked someone in the head at Bankstown, which caused a huge ruckus. I thought we’d never get out of there alive.