Meldrum’s response was that ‘A certain Canberra-ite should get his facts right and get with it by joining the Procession’.24
Procession’s debut album was Procession Live at Sebastian’s, recorded on 3 April, 1968 – probably before the Uptight record, which was issued the same year. It was ‘the first stereophonic ‘LIVE’ performance album ever produced in Australia’, proclaimed Anthony Knight’s sleevenotes. The album, says Peacock, ‘was to show that we were a good live band, because we knew from our time over there that you had to be able to cut it live, not just be a studio band.’
The idea of making a live album first was part of that plan to get the record deal that we wanted. And to his credit, David pulled it off. We had one of the first major advance record deals signed for an artist that had never left the country . . . And that enabled us to go, when we did go to England, we rented this grand house in Chester Square which is just behind Buckingham Palace in Chelsea. The house was owned by the British Ambassador to Brazil, Lord Russell, and it was very grand – which I think was partly to meet David’s requirements. We all moved in — David and his wife and child, and then the band members. It was a four- or five-storey London townhouse. Grand. The full bit, with the servants’ quarters in the basement. So the multi-thousand dollar advance that we got went a long way towards paying for that lifestyle for the first six months or a year.
The group had signed to Mercury, for whom they recorded their self-titled debut studio album; in the US, the album was released on Mercury subsidiary Smash, home to Jerry Lee Lewis, It was produced by Mike Hugg, the drummer from Manfred Mann. Peacock remembers:
We always thought we were one step away from making it. You always have that hope. And we were doing things, to the best of our knowledge, in the way that we needed to do them. But it just shows that it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on something, if it’s not in the groove . . . I don’t think we ever really made the right record. I don’t blame anyone for it not working. It can be a very random thing.
In some ways it was frustrating . . . I think part of the problem was that we really allowed ourselves to be moved away from our original intentions, in the effort to get commercial success. In Australia we’d been really pretty progressive. We set the agenda creatively. Then we went to the UK and we fell into being pushed around a lot more by the record company and the requisites of the commercial pop world. So I think we lost a bit of direction.
Peacock and Ross Wilson had no doubt crossed paths before (Rudd remembers the Party Machine appearing on Uptight in pyjamas, though this presumably was not the reason the group were temporarily banned from the show). Wilson was, in any case, a well-known figure in Melbourne and Peacock decided he might be Procession’s future.
David eventually gave up and brought his family back to Australia. We then went back to our gigging, just being a real rock group in the back of a transit van up and down the M1 and playing wherever we could get a gig. That’s when we started reigniting the passion that we’d had before. That led to re-looking at the realities of what the group was. I knew about Ross Wilson’s Party Machine, and I was really keen on bringing Ross over to join the band.
I rang him up and told him what we were doing and asked him if he was interested in joining us. I don’t think it was too much of a surprise that he leapt at the chance and came over. I think he was feeling, at the time, that he was banging his head against a brick wall, and the idea of getting away and going to London for a while appealed to him.
Wilson’s decision meant the end of the Party Machine, says Rudd: ‘Automatically. And I don’t think we were that injured – we may have had our noses out of joint for a week but we could see it was an opportunity for Ross and then I saw it perhaps as a possible stage of evolution for myself.’ Peacock picks up the story:
Ross came over and got married. I’d found this fantastic old country mansion at Reigate, outside London, in Surrey. So when he came over I’d already moved the band into this country estate. That was quite fun in itself. It was a beautiful house, really impeccably furnished with a Steinway grand piano in the drawing room and antique furniture throughout. We had to maintain the pretence that it was a couple – myself and my wife and kids – living there. When in fact we had about ten people living there – band members, roadies, girlfriends. Whenever the agent and the owner used to come around to inspect it, we had to bundle everyone into the transit van and pop down to the local pub while my wife and I went through the charade of showing them through the house.
This house featured in Australian director Philippe Mora’s first feature film, Trouble in Molopolis, which starred Richard Neville, Germaine Greer and Martin Sharp. Peacock felt himself a part of the Australasian expat scene, and he was where the action was – London:
During that era we were playing clubs in London which were really upmarket discos. Places like Revolution Club. Just on weeknights, it wouldn’t start until two in the morning, and you’d play a couple of one-hour sets. The A list of London pop society on any given night would be out in those clubs. You’d have McCartney and Lennon and Eric Clapton and people like that turning up to your gigs. Not because we were there, we happened to be playing there, but these were the kind of people who were walking around in the clubs at two or three in the morning. It was a whole other world.
We were basically working to get another record deal. The Philips deal had come to an end. We were out of contract and looking to start over. But the problem was that there was Ross and I and the other half of the band – as it turned out later, it wasn’t obvious at the time – was a bit begrudging of the fact that this guy had been parachuted in from Australia and made the lead singer, when we had Mick Rogers, who was a great singer. I had been doing all the lead vocals before that . . . We had a regular weekly spot at the Marquee, which was pretty big-time in those days –we had a Tuesday night residency there with Yes. So we were doing pretty well live, we were certainly no slouches, but it never really gelled properly. It was like a strange mishmash of Ross’s songs with the much more pop approach that I had to writing.
But I remember some of his songs that we used to do were more [like] Party Machine and Sons of the Vegetal Mother, like ‘Papa’s in the Vice Squad’ and ‘Make Your Stash’.
This last song would later feature on albums by both Spectrum and Daddy Cool.
That tells you were they were coming from. It was a pretty heavily drug-related culture at the time. Acid was prevalent in London. I think the last thing we did together as a band before Ross came back – and this is the desperation state we’d reached – we did this boat trip from Southampton to New York and back on this little Italian steamer, ferrying American students back from their European vacations and then bringing another load over. It was a pretty interesting trip. But when we got to New York Ross and I were — it really illustrated the split in our band — Ross and I went off to Greenwich Village and looked up all the landmarks that we wanted to see and that’s when we discovered macrobiotics . . . when we got back our wives were all astounded when we announced we were only going to be eating brown rice from now on. And we proceeded to do that. But that then led to Sons of the Vegetal Mother and where all that came from.
Not only did Wilson have his macrobiotic philosophy when he returned to Australia, he also had a wife – Pat, who had gone with him to Britain – and a song, ‘Eagle Rock’, which had come to him in a dream and will be associated with him for ever after. Ross (and Pat) Wilson’s next phase is discussed in chapter 9.
CLEVES
Another important trans-Tasman story, this one involving the then-unusual scenario of a woman playing a role as an instrumentalist within a group, was that of the Cleves, who had begun in New Zealand as the Clevedonaires. Unlike Rudd’s or Peacock’s groups, the Cleves did not make a significant impact on the charts, or even sustain a high media profile, but they were present at a number of significant moments in the history of the period, particularly in the presentation