Another incident in the Party Machine’s life – as described by Hannaford in 1971 – shows the kind of aggression a band might encounter when trying to confront and provoke an audience, rather than merely pander to them. This remains, of course, a working hazard in entertainment:
A fight we had when we played in this nasty place . . . this joint, like Tenth Avenue. There were sharpies and all these nasty little girls. They kept putting shit on Mike, saying he was dirty; it was stupid, because he’s a clean guy. Also my amp, which I used to put on a chair, the whole thing fell over while I was playing and everyone laughed. This made me angry, like I didn’t show it, but it was pent up anger. The tune we saved for last, had a long randy solo in it and they were pissing around and rolling on the floor and all that. I was facing my amp and playing guitar, and sort of walking backwards, with my back to the audience, known [sic] there was a mike standing behind me, but making it look accidental-like, when I was walking backward I knocked the mike stand into the audience. You might think that’s an aggressive thing to do, but they were nasty people. There was just a little stage and I was standing on the floor. I was really angry and I was bumping people accidentally. I knew they would get in the way. So they bashed me back and at one stage they had me on the ground and were kicking me and stuff. I got up and swung my guitar around. We finished and although I’d started all the trouble they didn’t pick on me when we were taking out the gear, they bashed up Mike and Russell. Mike got a really big black eye out of it. Nasty. Yes, that is a highlight I suppose.11
The Party Machine leant towards a multimedia approach. ‘The days of four musicians walking on stage and merely playing are fast disappearing,’ Go-Set lectured its readers in early 1968. ‘The emphasis now is on the visual side with the sound playing a supporting, and complementing role.’12 Pip Proud’s withering assessment of 1960s prudery is confirmed by the response to the Party Machine’s most notorious act, the publication of their ‘songbook’, which included two sets of lyrics, ‘I Don’t Think All Your Kids Should Be Virgins’ and ‘Don’t It Make You Sick’ (‘First I got an axe and I split her in two . . .’). The typeset, photocopied ‘books’ were seized by the Vice Squad and the band was attacked in the tabloid press. ‘It sounds so incredibly quaint nowadays’, says Rudd.
The Party Machine broke up in April 1969. David Elfick wrote in Go-Set that Ross Wilson was moving to Britain to join the well-known Melbourne group Procession:
This shock decision came just as the group are receiving the recognition they deserve. Last year their songbook caused a sensation but after that died down, their popularity waned . . . Lead guitarist Ross Hannaford has decided to return to art school. The two remaining members of the group, Mike Rudd, bass guitarist, and Peter Curtin, drummer, will keep together and form another group. They will be joined by David Skewes (ex Mantra) who will be on a Hammond organ . . .13
This last assemblage was to be the beginning of Spectrum, who will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 8.
Procession, the band Wilson left the Party Machine and Melbourne to join, has a long and involved history that begins with Brian Peacock, guitarist and singer in New Zealand’s biggest mid-60s group, the Librettos, flying into Sydney. It is best told in his words:
I have a vivid impression of arriving in Sydney at night time and seeing the city from the air, which was mind-boggling. We spent the next year, at least, living in abject poverty in Sydney, keeping up the image in New Zealand. Trying to live this double life of successful pop stars when in reality we were doing second jobs like car washing and so on in Kings Cross. We basically became a backing band, guns for hire in the Sydney leagues clubs. I remember working with Lucky Starr, who was hot on the heels of his ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ hit.
We were pretty amazed about the industry built up around the leagues clubs of NSW and Queensland. We were in Sydney, so we could earn really good money in the leagues clubs, but we were also playing the rock venues of the time, from Surf City at Kings Cross down to tiny little bars like Suzie Wong’s, which a lot of the pop groups of the time were working. The money was really poor, the conditions were really poor. But we loved it, money was really just a means to an end in those days, and the Australian industry was pretty grass roots, there was no infrastructure for popular music at that time.
The Librettos were lucky enough to get into some of the Normie Rowe tours, and they went on forever, they’d be three or four months long, typically, he’d do one-nighters in every town throughout the outback. Apart from the major cities, you’d do the Dubbos, Waggas, it was a never-ending slog from one end of the country to the other. We thrived on it. We thought it was great. We were like the opening act on a bill of twenty artists – it seemed like twenty – the Sunshine Review, all the artists that worked on the same label Normie was released through.
Normie Rowe was the biggest star of his kind in Australia in the mid 1960s. He had been discovered by Ivan Dayman; Dayman introduced him to one-time Young Modern songwriting competition winner Pat Aulton, who would become his producer.14 Handsome, with a fine voice and a jovial approach, many of Rowe’s song choices at this time – like those of so many of his peers – now seem stodgy and unimaginative. He certainly got the breaks, even starring in a film made in New Zealand called Don’t Let it Get to You.15 One early band who backed Rowe was the King Bees, which also featured Joe Camilleri.16 Rowe soon created his own permanent outfit, the Playboys.
Dayman managed both Rowe and Marcie Jones, a singer who featured heavily on Dayman’s Go!! Show and played at many of his suburban dances. Rowe and Jones became romantically involved, and Dayman dealt with the situation by booking them tours on opposite sides of the country.17 Later, when Rowe was in the UK, Dayman persuaded his manager there, David Joseph, to withhold Jones’s letters to Rowe, so as to damage their relationship.18
Peacock continues:
Ivan Dayman was the promoter. He was based in Brisbane but Sunshine was a Festival Records imprint so it was all run out of Sydney. Pat Aulton was the main producer. It was like a mini-Motown set-up, we were like the house band for a lot of recordings.
Pat Aulton liked us as musicians, and started using us doing backing tracks for some of the artists on Sunshine. There was Peter Doyle, Marcie Jones, there was a whole lot . . . Mike Furber, though he had a band called the Bowery Boys. I can’t remember which ones we played on and which ones we toured with. We used to back some of those artists live on Ivan Dayman’s shows. I think the link with Sunshine came out of us working for Ivan at his clubs. He had what were called sound lounges all around the country.
They were known as sound lounges, which I think probably originally started with recorded music [being] played in them, but increasingly they had live acts as he built up his roster of artists, and we were probably one of the main ones, because we would go anywhere and do anything in our eagerness to work. Ivan used to take full advantage of it! But we were willing participants.
It was really very ad hoc. For instance, he had a venue up in Brisbane called Cloudlands Ballroom, which was this beautiful old ballroom up on top of a hill, legendary. It actually had some accommodation in the basement below it, and we used to live there when we were up in Brisbane. We played these big shows in the ballroom, and then we’d go down to our little dive of an apartment down below! That used to be our base in Queensland, and Ivan would wander in some day and say ‘I want you to do Toowoomba, then Sydney, then Melbourne’, he’d give us some folded bills, and he’d say –