If the King Bees had a job in Warrnambool: ‘we would put everything in the Dodge; the PA, the amps, ourselves, guitars . . . It was just a sedan. Dave Flett was a genius, he could make it fit. His motto is: if it doesn’t fit, cut it in half. We would have a little spot for Peter Starkie in the back seat, because he was the skinniest’.233
Flett, Starkie and Camilleri all went on to have varying degrees of success in Melbourne music in the 70s – Camilleri would become the most famous of the three; by the end of the decade he would lead one of the country’s most prominent live bands, who were also a pop chart act.
The spirit of the late sixties as the times crept slowly into the early 70s is probably best exemplified by Wendy Saddington. Like so many of the great Australian musicians (especially female musicians) of this time, Saddington was under-recorded, and while she had her fervent fans – not least Renée Geyer – she remained a minority taste when she could quite appropriately have been a superstar. John Topper, an informant on the early 70s who will feature heavily in chapter 8, remembers seeing Saddington around his local area (the government housing estate of West Heidelberg) before she became famous. Saddington left school at fifteen. ‘I’ve had about 25 jobs since I left school, they were all bomb-outs,’ she moaned in 1968. ‘The only thing I can do besides sing is type and that doesn’t really grab me.’234 She was ‘discovered’ in 1966 at a coffee shop in Carlton called the Love In.
This guy from a group called the Revolution got in contact with me and before long I was singing with them at a few gigs. Then I became involved with the James Taylor Move, who I put up with for four months. We just didn’t suit each other, I mean to say – they wanted to wear their creepy thin suits when I wanted to sing. I guess you could put it down to a mild clash of personality.
She went on to perform with the long-lasting, much beloved Chain (as well as giving them a new name to replace Beat ’n’ Tracks235), though she later dismissed this experience by saying: ‘You can take so much of working your guts out five lousy nights a week for some pathetic amount of money which when split five ways becomes even worse.’236
Saddington was an unusual type; her attitude was forthright and her preference – to sing live and to perform covers of songs she loved (‘Nobody Knows You (When You’re Down and Out)’, as done by Jimmy Cox, Bessie Smith, Odetta, Otis Redding, etc.); Robert Parker’s ‘Barefootin’ ’; the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’; Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’; and Nina Simone’s ‘Backlash Blues’), rather than concentrating on original composition and a stream of records – was considered commercial suicide. ‘Some admire me, some think I’m the opposite – rubbish’, she told a GTK reporter in 1970. ‘Melbourne’s slowing down,’ she told Go-Set, ‘because the discos are unlicensed and the kids are too young.’237 She would shortly begin work as a Go-Set journalist, noted most particularly for her work as an advice columnist. The punchline of this 1969 interview resonates with her spirit, a kind of down-at-heel larrikinism that serves as both an epitaph and a provocative poke in the eye to the whole of the 1960s, not just young female singers:
Before you go Wendy, any words of wisdom to aspiring young female singers? ‘Yeah, give it up ’cos you’re no good.’238
Perhaps some did, and of course many young performers of both sexes gave up, or were given up on, many of them justifiably. Yet the 1970s would in fact see a flowering of Australian popular music, and a whole new outpouring of something which, while it might have seemed at times dangerously close to patriotism, could more correctly be characterised as the unlocking of creativity and activity in live and recorded music, in songwriting, in broadcasting and in political awareness.
6 Falling off the Edge of the World
‘Easyfever was a disease. Everybody in the pop scene contracted it as the sound of our greatest ever group swept the country in 1966.
The Easys were churning out number one hits faster than any other artist could even make records. Every Easybeats performance was the scene for riots on a scale unknown before on the Australian pop scene.’
– David Elfick, 19691
Like the Gibb brothers, the members of the Easybeats were migrants, though not all of them were from England: they were variously of Scottish, Dutch and English origin. Nevertheless, the Easybeats were unquestionably an Australian band. Unlike the Bee Gees, they had their greatest success in Australia and have continued to identify as Australian – although not without caveats, as a recent comment from Harry Vanda indicates:
We always wanted to relate to Australia; we called ourselves an Australian band, although there were no Australians in it to speak of. But yeah, we felt Australian by that time already. Maybe because of the acceptance we’d had here, all the help, all the people on our side. To us this was an absolutely wonderful country. The alternative to pumping petrol in Glasgow or The Hague. So we were Australians and we remained Australians ever since.2
Not unnaturally, a large number of Australians continue to regard the group with great affection; ‘Friday on My Mind’, their biggest hit internationally and a number one in Australia over the summer of 1966-7, is often cited as the best of all Australian pop records. It is certainly close to perfect within its genre, but it is far from unique in the group’s remarkable and brilliant catalogue.
The Easybeats came together in 1964 at Villawood Migrant Hostel in Sydney’s south-western suburbs. One of the band’s songwriting masterminds, guitarist George Young, has said the various members were living ‘in or around’ the hostel at the time.3 Not only were they a mix of European ethnicities; they also varied in age, from late teens to mid-twenties. Drummer Gordon ‘Snowy’ Fleet had been a member of Liverpool band the Nomads (not, as frequently stated, the Mojos); he was 24 (an advanced age, to some) and married with a child. He named his new band the Easybeats after another he had previously played in, and was also its first manager.4 Bass player Harry Vanda – he’d shortened his name to four easy syllables from the difficult six of Hendrickus Vandenberg – was 18, and had been in Australia a year;5 in the Netherlands he’d had a band called the Starfighters. Guitarist Dingeman Vandersluys (rendered in some quarters as van der Sluijs), who took the stage name Dick Diamonde, was also Dutch by birth, and married. Teenage vocalist ‘Little’ Stevie Wright had ‘come through the ranks of local clubs, dances and talent shows’6 and was known to many as Chris Langdon when Vanda and Diamonde first met him. He had played in a band called the Outlaws (or was playing in this band when the rest of the Easybeats met him – accounts differ), followed by another called Chris Langdon and the Langdells, which some sources suggest briefly included Vanda and Diamonde. The three of them heard about ‘this shit-hot little bloody guitarist,’7 the Scottish-born George Young. Wright reverted to his real name for the new group after edging out a competitor, John Bell, who was deemed ‘a bit shy’ for the projected image (Bell went on to perform with the Throb).8 Never ones to waste names, the new group initially called themselves the Starfighters.9
‘George could busk his way through a bit of piano, guitar’, his younger brother Angus has recalled, adding that all his brothers ‘were players, which is strange, I suppose, because my mother and father never played.’10 The oldest of the Young brothers, Alex, was a working musician who’d stayed in