We must have got the travel bug, so with Vietnam a non-starter we settled for going to Australia instead . . . Work had been arranged for us at Cooma in the Snowy Mountains. The day we arrived, we had to play a four-hour set until midnight, then we were told to pack up all our gear and set it up in a nightclub down the road, where we were expected to play until 3 a.m. This was to be a nightly arrangement. Naturally, we weren’t too thrilled about it, so we got in touch with our New Zealand agent, Benny Levin, and he got us out of the deal and found alternate work for us as resident band at the Hume Hotel in Yagoona. So we moved to Sydney.
The Hume is now sheltered accommodation, I believe, but it was a great venue in those days. We loved it there. We played to packed houses, fronting under our new, shortened name ‘the Cleves’ and also backing guest stars like Eden Kane and Dinah Lee. Dinah Lee enjoyed working with us and introduced us to a friend of hers, Bobbie, who was PA to the head of the Cordon Bleu agency, Harry Widmer. It was a great piece of luck, as Harry became our agent and then the work just kept coming.
Harmon recalls that Widmer was key to the group providing music for the soundtrack to Peter Weir’s short film Michael, part of Three to Go, a trilogy exploring individual (fictional) young people’s stories. The songs they wrote for the film were released as an EP, Music from Michael; they also recorded a scintillating self-titled album that ran between prog and pop. The Cleves were versatile in the extreme: in the early 70s, they recorded a single ‘Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie – Na, Na, Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye’ with Donnie Sutherland, the ex-jockey who had become a DJ and Go-Set writer; they also recorded jingles and other sessions. Their story in the 70s will be resumed later in this narrative.
THE TELEVISION’S HUNGRY
In subsequent chapters, the power and value of the mid-70s television show Countdown will be discussed, as will the strange misconception in many music and popular culture histories that Countdown was the first ‘real’ Australian rock program, arriving in what had been a music-television desert. Putting aside the fact that music television is, in most of its incarnations, barely something to celebrate, it should be pointed out – if this chapter hasn’t already provided enough evidence – that pop and rock music was very much a part of Australian television by the late 60s. It seems to have been almost de rigueur to give a star his or her own TV show, in fact. Ronnie Burns’s hit with ‘Smiley’ coincided with the announcement of his clip and mime show Now Sound.25 Earlier in the decade, in April 1966, Laurie Allen and Bobby Bright – as Bobby and Laurie – had a number one hit with ‘Hitchhiker’. The pair were then given their own show, It’s a Gas, which first aired in July 1966.26 The program – its name was later changed to the more compelling Dig We Must27 – featured comedy as well as music.
Another beneficiary of television’s embrace of pop was Billy Thorpe, who was briefly discussed in chapter 2 and will feature heavily in chapter 9. In 1965 he had split the original Aztecs and put together a new line-up:
Firstly I got Johnny Dick and Teddy Toi from [Max Merritt and] the Meteors . . . They were pissed off with the lack of recognition they were getting, I guess, so they decided to join me. Also a band from Western Australia called Ray Hoff and the Offbeats were playing in Sydney at the time. So I got the two guitar players from there. Firstly Mike Downs and then Col Risby.28
Thorpe’s live television show, It’s All Happening, was from all reports a vibrant and sensational program featuring not only local acts like the Easybeats but also international visitors such as Neil Sedaka. A few years later, Thorpe griped to Planet’s Lee Dillow that the show’s demise was caused by network politics:
BT: Political scenes by Channel 7 down here which I’d dig you to print.
LD: How do you mean political?
BT: Well they had a teen show of their own in mind with Ian Turpie and all those cats. So if Sydney wouldn’t take that, they wouldn’t take ours. So that was that. An incredible disillusionment for us. Our ratings were so good.29
The show in question was presumably The Go!! Show, which was hosted first by Ian Turpie and then by Johnny Young. The following year, Thorpe acted as fill-in host for The Go!! Show while Young was overseas, and told his audience he was going to drop acid on air. The Minister for Health – via talkback host Mike Walsh – informed Thorpe that he would go to jail if he did. The threat no doubt ruffled feathers and delighted viewers, but it appears Thorpe did not go ahead with it.30
THE WAY THEY PLAYED
In 1966 journalist Maggie Makeig travelled to Hobart with the ambition of finding out how the teenagers of that city were catered for musically. She visited Beachcomber, ‘a big teenage dance centre in Hobart’ – and saw the bands the Falcons, the Silhouettes, the Avantis: ‘Some were good, some were rank amateurs’. She also listed other bands, such as Chaos + Co (‘a basically English group’), the Kravats, the Trolls, the Bitter Lemons, and the Beat Preachers. There were two music shows on local TV, Saturday Stomp and Saturday Party.31
Perth-born songwriter Brian Cadd had recently left Hobart – where he was playing in the Planets – for Melbourne, where Ian Meldrum persuaded him it would be a good idea to change his name to Brian Caine (this didn’t last).32 Later in the decade the Van Diemen label issued records by a number of Tasmanian artists, including Clockwork Oringe33 and Sweaty Betty.34
Each Australian city had its particular scene and style, as well (of course) as its rip-offs and frauds. In 1970, the poet Andrew Jach published a piece in the small press magazine Holocaust called ‘Brisbane your balls have burnt off’. In it he replicates the visceral and to his mind hollow world of Brisbane nightlife, where one might find:
some vain semblance of enjoyment from the
vast array of In places, such as the red orb
the reD ORB
the rED ORB
the RED ORB
thE RED ORB
tHE reD ORB
THE RED ORB
and also
the municipal library
OPEN MONDAY TO FRIDAY TILL TEN
can be obtained35
Jim Keays writes convincingly about the late-60s live music circuit in his memoir His Master’s Voice, describing Brisbane as ‘run by [a] cartel’,36 Ivan Dayman operating a bus with the Sunshine logo on its side, in which he would ‘ferry artists up and down the vast Queensland coast.’37 Brisbane was also oppressive, in Lobby Loyde’s memory: ‘You used to get raided for having long hair, playing loud music, walking sideways and looking bad on a Sunday afternoon.’38 Brisbane had its own TV pop show, Countdown; in October 1967, Dayman’s Sunshine label issued a various artists album called T.V.’s “Countdown”, which preceded Uptight Party Time by a year. The Countdown album featured tracks from future Uptight compère Ross D. Wyllie.39
Any touring band would have to play Sydney, but groups from outside were often ambivalent, even apprehensive, of the venues it offered. ‘Sydney was different,’ according to Keays, who was from Adelaide but lived in Melbourne, the heart of music in Australia at this time: ‘The criminal element ran the strip clubs, the nightclubs and most other venues.’40 Go-Set’s publisher Philip Frazer saw Sydney as ‘old school’: ‘In Sydney the venues tended to be controlled by old time entrepreneurs and record companies.’41
Twice in two years, Sydney’s august Bulletin went out to local clubs to try and whip itself into a state of shock at the goings-on of contemporary youth. In 1968 it exposed the main hives: