We had a radio hit here in Australia – that song ‘Rescue Me’ by Fontella Bass, which we’d been playing for years in New Zealand. During that era the nightclub scene in Sydney was really big, the real true traditional Vegas-style nightclubs, and I remember getting somehow into Chequers free to see Shirley Bassey. This was the mid 60s, and this was the kind of manager we had . . . old-school show business, someone like Shirley Bassey was seen as the epitome of show business. Those things were still an influence on us even though we were taking a completely different path musically. It was still that mixture of putting on a show, a consciousness of that. Then we graduated up the ladder in the Sunshine thing, we became more important, and we got onto the big Normie Rowe tours. That was luxury for us, we were touring in a proper coach, the artists were in a coach, staying in motels, instead of scrabbling round in people’s apartments and on couches.
The Librettos occasionally achieved broad exposure, for example when they supported the Seekers’ second major Australian tour in 1966.19 This may have been where Peacock first made the connections that would result in his becoming road manager and occasional songwriter for the New Seekers in the early 70s. In the mid 60s, however, the Librettos’ lifestyle was still hand-to-mouth.
We’d go back every six months or so to do a tour of New Zealand to restock the coffers. We were living a pretty tough life at the time, eating bread and jam, all sharing one flat in Kings Cross. It was around the time of Max Merritt and the Meteors, and Dinah Lee was doing pretty well around here, and the Invaders – they were the New Zealand acts who were over here trying to break into the Australian scene. So that led on to the Normie Rowe tours, then eventually Normie’s management being taken over by David Joseph, who was a television producer from Melbourne. We were asked to join Normie’s backing group, myself and another guy from the Librettos. By that stage the Librettos got pretty close to the end of their path, a couple of the members had left and we’d replaced them, then we went from being a quartet to being a trio. So the two of us who were original members of the Librettos got asked to join Normie’s band, and that meant our chance to get to England so we decided to do it.
David Joseph had lined up a record deal for Normie with Polydor in the UK so we thought it was well worth while taking up the offer. But it was a couple of the members of Normie’s old Playboys and us, it was never really a great matching up because we were worlds apart . . . we had no ties really to Australia, whereas they wanted to get back to their girlfriends, back to Melbourne.
It was a very interesting time to be in London, we got to see some great artists because of the link with Polydor. Polydor UK distributed the Stax-Volt label amongst others, and we were doing a lot of demos and rehearsal work in the Polydor studios right in the middle of London and as a result of that when the Stax-Volt tour came through the UK, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, Booker T and the MGs, all those artists, they kicked off the tour with a week’s rehearsals at the Polydor studios in London, So I got to sit in on the rehearsals with those guys for a week. Experiences you’d never dream of – Booker T and the MGs, just incredible! Polydor also had the Who, so I used to bump into Keith Moon all the time going up in the lift, I remember standing side-stage at the Hammersmith Odeon . . . the artists we saw in those years!
Joseph’s schemes for Normie Rowe’s international success fell in a heap when Rowe was called up for national service in September 1967; the tide of public opinion had not yet turned regarding the Vietnam war, as it soon would, and the decision was made that Rowe should serve. Glenn A. Baker postulates that this was a government public relations exercise, and the fact that Rowe was singled out was a secret even to the pop star himself.20 Rowe’s best singles came late in his pop career, with Peacock’s irresistible ‘Penelope’ (1968) and Johnny Young’s remarkable ‘Hello’ (1970). Ronnie Burns’s 1970 hit ‘Smiley’ (‘Off to the Asian war . . . ’), writing of which was credited to Johnny Young (though Ian Meldrum claims that both he and John Farrar were involved in the song’s creation),21 was a mournful paean to Rowe. Burns had, presumably, changed his attitude to Rowe by the time he sang ‘Smiley’; in early 1968 he had been quoted musing cruelly about his rival: ‘Normie Rowe the singer is . . . a manufactured product of excessive promotion, it works but it doesn’t last.’22
In Rowe’s absence, Joseph and Peacock decided to remake the Playboys (who now had two British members, Trevor Griffin and Mick Rogers) as a new band. Local content regulations, and the launch of a new television channel by air travel magnate Reg Ansett, meant an opportunity for a Saturday morning pop show on which the group – now renamed Procession – could perform regularly. This entailed returning to Australia (Melbourne, this time, where Peacock soon got married and started a family) and a chance to relaunch for the international market:
David, being the smart guy that he was, had come up with this idea of what he was going to do after the Normie Rowe thing had fallen through, which was to go back to what he knew – TV production – and he’d come up with this concept which he couldn’t see missing, in that the Australian channels needed it more than anything else. And that was a 4-hour Saturday morning music show which cost bugger all to produce . . .
It was really shoestring – he had a little office in Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, in the building where [artist] Charles Blackman’s studio was, up towards the corner of Grey Street. We were in Armstrong’s most of the week doing the backing tracks for the artists and they would record them and then mime to them . . . that gave us enormous freedom in the recording studio to do our own stuff. We used to knock off all the Channel Ten stuff as quick as we could and then we’d use the nights and early mornings to work on our own stuff. Channel Ten were paying for all the studio time, or David’s production company, I can’t remember which.
Joseph had arranged for a Brisbane pop singer he’d seen supporting Rowe to host the show: the singer was Ross D. Wyllie (it rhymed with ‘smiley’) and the show Uptight; a title which no-one involved seemed to realise was somewhat angsty for a programme of unrehearsed, knockabout pop miming and chat. Wylie was paid a pittance ($60 a week, he later recalled), but his pop career subsequently flourished, as will be seen later in this chapter. He also made an album, Uptight Party Time, credited to Ross D. Wyllie and the Uptight Party Team via ‘four separate recording sessions and countless cans of Fosters.’ A medley of 31 songs (from ‘Satisfaction’ to ‘Flowers in the Rain’ to ‘You Are My Sunshine’), the LP was ‘A Procession Production’ and demonstrated yet again the versatility of Peacock’s group. David Joseph ‘basically saw the two things’ – band and TV show – ‘working hand in hand’, Peacock says:
He knew we wanted to get back to England as soon as we could, and was encouraging us to get as much writing and demoing done as we could. Which is what we did. We put together a whole lot of demos, and then he flew off to the US and the UK and put together a record deal with Philips in England and Mercury in the US. Those labels were allied — all owned by Philips . . . Our sole intent was to get back overseas.
The readers of Go-Set were worried about an air of ‘hype’ surrounding Procession. Canberran Paul Culnane – later a music historian of some note and co-founder of the exceptional Milesago website – wrote a barbed letter to the magazine in 1968 about Ian Meldrum’s overly rapturous review of the group:
Dear Go-Set.
I was appalled at the giving away of ‘instant fame’ to the Procession. Granted I haven’t heard ‘Anthem’, nor experienced what is hailed as ‘sensational’ by Go-Set writers; but aren’t Procession getting the easy way out, when we, the actual people who make groups