Vanda says that as a displaced person, he – along with the rest of his family – had ‘a bit of an “us and them” mentality.
I think a lot of the way we expressed ourselves – talking, looking, the attitude – would also have been very much a part of the music. But maybe not from an intellectual point of view, just from an attitude point of view.’11
In his early days in the group, it is often suggested, Vanda’s limited English kept him in the background – or, rather, meant he expressed himself primarily via his music and goofy facial expressions. Yet Young’s thick Scottish accent was a similar hindrance, and their common eagerness to experiment with sound might well have come from a desire to express their individuality without inviting ridicule by actually saying – or singing – anything.
The new group arrived in a hurry. A casual Dutch-related connection – a bouncer they met on the street – led to a late-night residency at a notorious establishment in Sydney’s Kings Cross called Beatle Village. A more lucrative deal lured them from there to the Bowl then on to John Harrigan’s venues Surf City and the Beach Hut. Through their manager, real-estate agent Mike Vaughan (‘probably one of THE great characters ever’, according to Lillian Roxon),12 the group met the 26-year-old Ted Albert, who became their producer and publisher. Ultimately the Alberts’ and Youngs’ family businesses would collaborate on one of the great showbiz success stories of the late 20th century. Alberts was a long-established and highly successful family music publishing business, and in the early 60s had forged a relationship with EMI to release various ‘Albert Productions’ on the Parlophone label; it would set up its own label in the early 70s. Alberts’ biggest commercial successes during its Parlophone days were the Easybeats and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, though from an artistic perspective the success of early Missing Links and Throb singles should not be discounted.
Ted Albert usually recorded his bands at pop radio station 2UW’s Radio Theatre in George Street, Sydney and it was here he took his new signings to record the reputed 45 songs in their repertoire, most of which were original Wright/Young or, less frequently, Wright/Vanda/Young compositions. George Young later recalled that Albert ‘was so scared that he would miss a possible hit that he took us into the studio and had us put down every song we had, finished or not. Most of it was dreadful, although the first single came from those sessions.’13
Other recollections by Young contradict this in detail but not in spirit. Their debut, ‘For My Woman’, was certainly dynamic; the second, ‘She’s So Fine’, was a number one hit around Australia in mid 1965 – a considerable feat for a group which had barely toured and did not have the advantage of network television exposure. Vaughan martyred himself for the cause, selling his Jaguar to buy a station wagon so the Easybeats could go on tour. They did so on wages so low that they were living, the possibly apocryphal story goes, on soup made from potato peelings. Certainly, semi-starvation appears to have been the reason Wright collapsed on The Go!! Show and was hospitalised. However weakened they may have been, however, the Easybeats were young men with a guppy spark: their self-defence-motivated fight with a group of labourers in Windsor Hotel is said to have made them a favourite with Melbourne DJs. ‘Easyfever’ meant 300 fans invaded the Youngs’ family home when their address was published in a magazine; it meant a Brisbane Festival Hall show was cut short by police after 17 minutes because of the mass hysteria that broke out. A Bulletin columnist was witness to the phenomenon, describing Easyfever as though it were some kind of cult or mass-hypnosis exercise. Girls would frantically attack security guards or beat themselves up in their anguish; some ‘tugged at their own hair or just sat there with three or four fingers in their mouths . . .’14 Of course, it wasn’t really a 60s phenomenon – it was a mass-media phenomenon. Similar episodes of mass hysteria half a century earlier focused on movie stars. But it was unusual for an Australian group to attract such a response.
‘Wedding Ring’ is a beautiful document of early-60s male and female roles: all Wright wants is ‘love’; all his woman ‘wants wants wants is a wedding ring’ (the group tried to keep it a secret that three of them were married, but Wright, who wrote and sang these words, was a bachelor). It was a top-ten hit nationally, as was ‘Sad and Lonely and Blue’. In his fine history of the Vanda and Young relationship, John Tait relates a perfect example of crude humour in the kind of audience participation that would reach its apex with the ‘no way, get fucked, fuck off’ response chanted at the Angels in the 1970s: the audience’s response to the ‘call’ of the Easybeats’ ‘Come and See Her’ was ‘gonorrhea, gonorrhea.’15 Their audiences were not immune to genuine emotional manipulation, though; ‘In My Book’ was written as a tearjerker, and in performance Wright would surreptitiously poke his fingers in his eyes to produce real tears.16 After ‘Women (Make You Feel Alright)’, which Young has said was ‘knocked out . . . in about ten minutes’,17 reached number one – ‘we still don’t like it much’, Wright said at the time18 – the group started to get used to being at the top of the Australian charts. The next step, as their fans well understood, would have to be the world:
Dear Go-Set
I am a regular “Go-Set” reader and a fan too . . . but I am upset about a comment on the Easybeats by Stan Rofe. He said the Easybeats will have to brush up a little on their act if they hope to do well in America. I think they are by far Australia’s No. 1 group, and will soon be the world’s. I think their act is great and Little Stevie is fantastic the way he goes on, but George is my favourite. It is just unfortunate that Little Stevie’s pants split . . .
Good luck, Easybeats, for when you go overseas . . . I’m sure you have plenty of fans who wish you the same!’
Dissatisfied Easybeat Fan Forever, Northcote.19
According to Vanda, the group feared they would reach a point where audiences might respond with ‘“Oh shit, not them again!” So we felt [we should] leave on a high note and let’s see if we can duplicate the whole experience over there.’20 ‘Over there’ was to be Britain; they recorded ‘Sorry’, another extraordinary, classic single, to keep Australia satisfied while they were gone and set 14 July, 1966 as the date on which they would leave Australia. In the first week of July, the newlywed Vanda’s young wife, Pam, committed suicide – apparently out of anguish at the prospect of being left behind in Australia. He became a widower with a five-month-old son, Johan.
The Easybeats did not change their plans; Vanda’s parents stepped in to take care of their infant grandson. Vanda has always sought to downplay the importance of this event in the Easybeats story – a tragedy that surely damaged all the lives it touched. He told Debbie Kruger in 2005 that ‘it was a private thing,’ adding that if it had come out in any of his songs, it was only ‘from sheer carelessness.’ It was not his desire to ‘bore the world shitless with my pain.’21 That may be so, but Vanda, who remarried, has written countless songs about desertion and loneliness in the last forty years.
Easyfever riots continued when the group touched down in Perth en route to the UK; screaming fans prevented their aeroplane from taking off again by surrounding it on the tarmac. The group’s Australian earnings meant they were no longer starving by this stage (‘we took a lot of money’, Vanda said in 1969)22 but naturally on arriving in London they were keen to make further progress. It didn’t help that, as Wright later recalled, the band were treated by the British ‘with the contempt they usually reserve for those from a European country.’23 Ted Albert, who had produced their records to date, came to London, where they recorded ‘Baby I’m A Comin’,’ a funny, catchy, bizarre tearaway of a song.24 Their British label United Artists had no faith in its hit potential, and instead put Chicagoan Shel Talmy – who’d already worked wonders on the Who and the Kinks – in