Russell Morris had left his group, Somebody’s Image, with whom he had achieved minor chart success, in 1967. ‘Everyone wanted to be in a band,’ he later recalled, ‘some of the bands were just hopeless.’122 Thirteen years after leaving Somebody’s Image he told Toby Creswell:
We were up in Sydney after we’d had two hit singles, and we were living on bananas and yoghurt with five dollars each in our pockets, and sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house in Stanmore. My manager, who also managed Ronnie Burns, was in town at the time and I came in to see him at the Sheraton to get some more money. We were desperate and here he was staying in a real hotel . . . I thought, ‘Fuck this, I gave up a diploma in accounting to be in a rock & roll band and these are the guys with all the money’ . . . I decided to leave the band and go solo.123
As related, Meldrum took up the cudgels on Morris’s behalf, acting as his manager and the producer of his first two solo singles (they parted ways just before Morris travelled to the UK). The acknowledged top-flight songwriters at the time, Johnny Young and Hans Poulsen, both submitted songs. Along with ‘The Real Thing’ and ‘Part Three Into Paper Walls’, there was Poulsen’s ‘The Girl That I Love’, a sparkling ballad. As mentioned above, ‘Part Three’ also incorporated a song by Morris himself, and his subsequent hits – such as ‘Wings of an Eagle’, about a dying Aboriginal man124 – were self-penned. Morris was a key participant, often outshining more established acts, in Operation Starlift – a package tour that included the Masters Apprentices, Zoot, Ronnie Burns, the Valentines, the Kinetics and Farnham, as well as local artists in each state.125
By 1971 Morris was recreating himself as a sensitive artist (he wrote some remarkable hits at this time) – the opposite of Farnham, who played with scratch bands and toured constantly: ‘I won’t work without a good band to work with me,’ Morris said. ‘I refuse to work in hotels, which my manager can’t understand, ’cause that’s where the bread is . . . I want people to listen to what I’m doing, plus, of course, I’m still trying to overcome my pop star image.’126 Possibly the best of his singles was the relatively bombastic ‘Mr. America’, an exploration of his possible future as an international star.
Morris was sensitive about his public image. ‘I can walk down the street,’ he told Lee Dillow in 1971, ‘and some thirteen-year-old chick will say: “Oh, look. There’s Russell Morris. Isn’t he a prick. What a shit.”127 ‘At that time,’ he later told Creswell, ‘Thorpie was king and I was a big poofta.’128 He took up karate for self-defence, because ‘guys seem to take exception to me’ and it cleared his head: ‘I’ve written some of my best songs while I was training’.129 He spent five years in the US, beginning in 1973. While Morris’s songwriting and much of his output was original and sophisticated (his late-70s/early-80s career as part of Russell Morris and the Rubes a little less so), he did not manage to reinvent himself as a megastar the way John Farnham did in the 80s. He did, however, enjoy one of the biggest selling albums of his career – Sharkmouth – in 2013.
SONGWRITERS WITH A GOLDEN TOUCH
In the mid to late 60s it became possible – and credible – to be both a songwriter and a performer, and some young men from diverse backgrounds achieved this distinction and record-selling status. Hans Poulsen – born Bruce Gordon Poulsen, in 1945 in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Chelsea – started a group in 1965 that he called the 18th Century Quartet and recorded ‘The World Goes On.’130 Rock promoter Ian Oshlack tried to turn the band into a supergroup with a revised line-up including Keith Glass: ‘They describe their sound as baroque beat.’131 Glass later described the group as like ‘an electrical Seekers. We were a pretty innovative band.’132 Poulsen, who claimed he lived ‘on my own or with gentle chicks that looked after me.’133 wrote hits for New Zealand groups Larry’s Rebels and the Fourmyula (‘Lady Scorpio’ was co-written with Bruce Woodley, who considered Poulsen ‘a quirky little character’);134 for Zoot (‘Monty and Me’, also written with Woodley); and for Russell Morris (‘It’s Only a Matter of Time’ and ‘You on my Mind’). His 1970 solo hit ‘Boom Sha La La Lo’ was another Woodley co-write; the two – along with Billy Green – also put together a soundtrack for a surfing film, Getting Back to Nothing. Like Poulsen’s two solo albums (Natural High and Lost and Found, Coming Home the Wrong Way Round), these were released on Fable. Considered by some to have been the standout performer at the 1970 Ourimbah festival,135 Poulsen left Australia in 1972 for pastures new and wrote songs for the New Seekers, who became something of a repository for Australasian expat songwriters. Along with Captain Matchbox, Poulsen is a star of the pivotal party scene in Tim Burstall’s rousing 1971 film Stork. In the mid 80s, eight of his songs appeared in Dave Clarke’s Time the Musical and on the soundtrack album sung by Stevie Wonder, Cliff Richard and Dionne Warwick.136 Poulsen’s star diminished in the 80s, and his whimsy increasingly fell on deaf ears (for instance, the publicity surrounding his cassette-only album Sacred Games which proclaimed that its title track was written ‘after contact with the dolphin Holy Fin.’137)
Johnny Young was well-known as a pop performer, first in Perth and then nationwide, before he took on the additional role of hit songwriter. Born John de Jong in Rotterdam, he was part of the Dutch diaspora to Australia in the late 1940s, where his family settled in Kalamunda, an outer suburb of Perth. (Young came to Australia much earlier – and at a younger age, it should be noted, than other well-known Dutch-born Australian musicians like Billy Green or Harry Vanda.) By the age of twenty, he was working as a DJ, as a television compere (for Club 17), and releasing singles. His first hit, the following year, was ‘Step Back’, released on the Clarion label. It was donated to him by the Easybeats, who he met when they were passing through Perth. Angus Young (no relation, obviously) has suggested that in the early 60s Bon Scott played drums in a band backing Young, which is possible but unsubstantiated.138 Moving to the eastern states, Johnny Young hosted the pop show Too Much, then took over The Go!! Show from Turpie. In early 1968, Young told Go-Set that his success was due to ‘lucky circumstances’:
‘I was not talented’, he said, ‘just fortunate.’
‘Johnny O’Keefe was the genius who helped me originally,’ he said. ‘Most people think I’m big-headed.’139
It’s not clear what role O’Keefe played in Young’s success, but it is clear that Young was both astute and very conscious of his place in the industry – he added as much as he could to his armoury of abilities throughout the 60s, just as O’Keefe had (and more). In the space of a few years he went from performer to TV compere to songwriter, journalist, DJ and producer. Perhaps to counter the impression that their writers and the musicians they wrote about constituted a mutually backscratching elite, in the late 60s/early 70s Go-Set flirted with hostility between its columnists. Ian Meldrum and Young were both contributors to the magazine when Meldrum wrote:
Who can forget the times when Johnny Young played King pop star? The innocent, wide-eyed little boy who projected his adolescent body on stage, hand over mouth, completely overcome by the occasion, and awkwardly hand clapping through every number, and at the same time the obnoxious little terror off stage who ruthlessly trod on people to fulfil his ambitions.140
One can only speculate on what Meldrum meant by this; other sources suggest that Young was particularly well-liked in the music industry, either because of or despite his good-natured blandness. It was apparently an act of generosity – he paid for Barry Gibb to fly from Queensland to Sydney for a television appearance, when Gibb had been facing a gruelling drive – that cemented the friendship between the two men. The Bee Gees and/or Gibb were to write a number of songs with Young in mind. During Young’s time in London Barry Gibb gave him some lessons in songwriting, at which point Young seemingly effortlessly added this string to his bow. Returning to Australia in early 1968 ‘in a state of exhaustion after six months’ intensive work’ in Europe, Young claimed expansively that he was making $2,000