It was practically a repetition of the same situation with our first record in Australia. Not many people were interested – not because we were an Australian band or anything, it’s just that they weren’t into the record.
But then the pirate radio stations got a hold of it. Caroline, London, even Luxembourg, all these stations had Australian disc jockeys, and all the guys would slip in the record even though it wasn’t programmed. It was due to these guys that the record broke. . . . we were very pleased. It was one in the eye to everyone who thought we wouldn’t make it.26
As mentioned, in Australia ‘Friday on My Mind’ is generally regarded as a classic – if not the classic – Australian pop song. It is not particularly local in theme – except that it’s putatively anti-authoritarian (Stevie tells us that though he’s working for ‘the rich man’, he’ll ‘change that scene one day’, though there’s no more to the manifesto than that, and Simon Reynolds points out that a song like the Specials’ ‘Friday Night, Saturday Morning’ from 1981 makes it seem somewhat hollow in comparison),27 and it’s anti-work, too. In November 1966, while the equally magnificent, rapid-fire ‘Sorry’ was at the top of the Australian charts, ‘Friday on My Mind’ was released and became an enormous hit, reaching #1 by the end of the year. Many saw it as consummate British beat pop: sharp, powerful, provocative. The Easybeats, for a moment, had the world at their feet.
The next single, ‘Who’ll Be the One’, was every bit as melodic and inventive as ‘Friday’, but without the power-pop attack; it was not a success. Young described it later as ‘rubbish, crap’.28 A group as marvelous as the Easybeats could, however, have clawed their way back from this: it was the industry – and, according to Young, ‘the dope thing’29 – that was the real problem. Yet while drugs may have been a factor, Vaughan was perhaps the real stumbling block; he had entangled the group in a number of unwieldy contracts, and then absented himself. In 1976, George Young recalled the Easybeats’ situation in the late 60s:
[We’d] start recording for one company and halfway through we’d find that the money had run out so we’d stop, start all over again two or three months later with another company and then the same thing would happen, it got so confusing.
But we kept on writing. So we had a regular thing going where we would go down to the Central Sound Studios in Denmark Street, London, every week to demo the latest tunes we had written. We got to the stage where we could get down a pretty complete demo in about an hour, with overdubs, effects and everything else.30
Australia still offered uncomplicated love. On 13 May, 1967 the Easybeats returned, the glow of ‘Friday’ all about them, for a tour, supported by the Twilights, Ronnie Burns and Larry’s Rebels; conquering heroes, the group received a civic reception at Sydney Town Hall. A Bulletin correspondent found Stevie ‘drinking beer out of a can and wearing a saffron-colored shirt with white sleeves’ and noted, in the non sequitur style of the times, ‘The same color is worn by novice Buddhist monks and it is also painted on the tails of airliners to warn away other airliners.’31 Wright related the ubiquitous groupie tales: of a girl who delivered herself to the band at Lennons Hotel in Brisbane in a parcel, the Perth girls who crawled through their hotel fanlight.32 The reporter went to the show and saw what excited girls, though s/he remained personally unmoved:
The greatest excitement came during the playing of ‘Friday on My Mind’. Little Stevie was enormously impressive. Not only did he sing, he shook, he vibrated, he shuddered and with his hands and fingers extended he made high-speed quivering movement, like someone suffering from electric shock or on the farthest extremity of delirium tremens.33
The only major line-up change in the band’s history occurred on this tour when, suffering from fractured and strained family relationships, Snowy Fleet left the group. He became a successful builder in Perth, not touching a drumkit again until the Easybeats’ brief 1986 reunion; in the 21st century he ran Fleet Studios in the Perth suburb of Jandakot. Back in Britain, the band began recording a new album, to be titled Good Times, with producer Glyn Johns and makeshift drummer Freddy Smith. UK record company support fell through, however, and the Good Times album was not released; five of its tracks surfaced in 1977 on the Easybeats compilation, The Shame Just Drained, and its title was recycled for a definitive quarter-century Alberts compilation in 1988. The Purple Hearts’ drummer Tony Cahill – who had previously played with Screamin’ Lord Sutch in London and would later be the bassist in Python Lee Jackson – became a permanent replacement for Fleet and the first Australian-born Easybeat. The group’s epic next single, ‘Heaven and Hell’, was recorded and released soon afterwards. Young recalls:
We, as a band, weren’t worldly-wise like other bands around us . . . We were still kids and there was nobody, no producer, no record company people, looking over our shoulder and pointing us the right way. We were more or less left to blow with the wind, with no conception of the business, marketing or musical policy, we were just writing music for music’s sake – not a bad thing, I suppose.
At that time we were very anti-nonoriginal, so to speak. The ultimate as far as we were concerned was to be totally original and get hits. Original in the sense of finding new drumbeats, new guitar styles, new melodies, new chord changes, that sort of thing.34
‘Heaven and Hell’ was original, and also vibrant and ambitious; it had a good chance of being a hit around the Western world except for a very clearly articulated line about ‘discovering someone else in your bed’ which led to it being banned by some radio stations; European radio didn’t touch it either. Young has since said that the failure of ‘Heaven and Hell’ was disillusioning for him and Vanda, who were now in the most experimental phase of their time in the Easybeats, though they would write more ‘three-minute operas’, notably ‘Falling off the Edge of the World’ and the inferior ‘The Music Goes Round My Head’ (which Young has described, for no obvious reason, as being in a ska/bluebeat style).35 The brilliant ‘Come In, You’ll Get Pneumonia’ was the latter’s B side, with orchestral contributions courtesy of the Bee Gees’ arranger Bill Shepherd and backing vocals from Olivia Newton-John and Pat Carroll, but it would have been another masterful Easys moment even without the all-star cast; it accomplished the improbable feat of being a funky weepy.
There is a story that Paul McCartney heard one of these late-period Easybeats singles on his car radio and was so besotted that he pulled over and called the BBC to find out who was singing it – and to ask the station to play it again. Some (including Young) say this was their later single ‘Good Times.’36 Even this kind of support, however, wasn’t enough.
Young has said the duo’s response to their failure to chart was ‘bugger it, let’s turn out any old muck to get a hit!’37 Vanda concurs that ‘we came up with tunes like “Hello How Are You” and real maudlin shit, because we were trying to get on the radio.’38 ‘Hello How Are You’ simply shows that the Easybeats’ ‘maudlin shit’ is anyone else’s magnificent, lush pop. It was mildly successful, making the top twenty in Britain (and 23 in Australia). Vanda, incidentally, puts one of the team’s greatest songs – the complex, funny and brilliant ballad ‘Falling in Love Again’ – in the same ‘cornball’ bag, and calls it ‘our BBC period’39;