As indicated earlier, jazz clubs intersected with the folk scene in Adelaide. Young Modern reported that ‘Jazzwise, some eminent authorities say that in a few months Adelaide will be the centre of modern gear in Australia.’ These clubs included La Cantina (which by the 1980s had become a rock venue called Lark and Tina’s), Black Orchid (‘definitely for people who wear big pearl cufflinks’, according to Young Modern), the Cellar, the aforementioned Catacombs (‘where the music was folksy sort of stuff but good’), Las Vegas, and The Tavern.32 It is often suggested that the appearance in Australia of non-English speaking migrants, especially those from Italy, revolutionised coffee consumption in the nation, inducting many Australians into the world of the espresso machine and, of course, coffee snobbery. A consumer culture naturally evolved around a mood-enhancing drug such as caffeine, and the coffee club needed a music to go with it. Both jazz and folk extended into this realm, but also into regular suburban dances, generally referred to by the name of the church or civic hall which hosted them. In Melbourne, Keith Barber from Glenroy had played in a jazz band called the Soul Agents; they changed into a bluesy rock group, the Wild Cherries, playing in a coffee lounge in the inner Melbourne suburb of South Yarra ‘which had survived on jazz but was rapidly changed in 1963 into one of the country’s first discotheques, the Fat Black Pussy Cat.’33
There were other Australian jazz musicians soon to convert to rock and pop who had already gone overseas. The most notable – though an anomaly – is Christopher ‘Daevid’ Allen, who as a child had been a radio actor on 3DB. In his late teens he attended Melbourne’s National Art Gallery School, while at the same time studying electric guitar (‘mainly chords’)34 with the jazz player, composer, and writer of television and commercial music, Bruce Clarke (Clarke also worked in television set design, and later taught both the Birthday Party’s Mick Harvey and I’m Talking/Essendon Airport’s Robert Goodge). At the age of 22 Allen moved to London, where his career as a musical performer began in earnest.35 He additionally became, in writer Ian Peel’s words, ‘a prolific tape-loop composer.’36 Allen met Robert Wyatt and also Kevin Ayers, who convinced Allen he should abandon jazz for rock music by playing him records by the Yardbirds. Allen later told Richie Unterberger he was ‘really grateful’ to Ayers:
Because what he brought to me was the possibility to go out of rather a strict music and poetry that I was practicing, and show me a way that I could actually get involved in the rock scene, without really particularly changing what I was doing. And he encouraged me to do that. He was the prime mover in getting me to do that, I think. It was he and I that started Soft Machine.37
Allen’s tenure in the band he and Ayers began with Wyatt was short, because he was banned from re-entering Britain from France by UK immigration authorities in 1967 – ‘ostensibly because I am by birth Australian’ (not usually a barrier at that time) ‘but actually because I was playing in a psychedelic band promoting hallucinogens. Stopped at Dover with the band, singled out and sent back to Paris with only my guitar.’38 Not only did this halt Allen’s involvement in Soft Machine (his work with this brilliant band is captured on an often-reissued album of demos recorded by Giorgio Gomelsky, though Allen’s own song from the sessions, ‘Fred the Fish’, has disappeared), it also prevented him from fulfilling plans he had made with Paul McCartney to collaborate on tape loops.39 He went on to lead numerous incarnations of his band Gong, and did not return to Australia until 1981. (As an aside, Soft Machine had several unusual Australian connections, the most interesting of which after Allen was the exceptional, enigmatic and unavoidably ‘centre stage’ drummer Phil Howard. Howard’s Australian origins were known to all around him, yet he seems to have made little impact in Australia itself before his British work. He replaced Wyatt in 1971 and played on half of Soft Machine’s fifth album before being fired. He has since disappeared.)
The correct mode of dress in Australia’s jazz and folk worlds was generally considered to involve a duffle coat; in Melbourne this might be accompanied by some item of red clothing – socks, for instance. The duffle coat in particular, however, seemed to become a symbol simply of slightly – one might say safely – transgressive youth. Take this complaining letter, for instance, published in Young Modern in June 1963:
DEAR EDITOR:
Last week at St. Clair dance, I saw a youth dressed in suit, collar and duffle coat try to enter. He was told to remove his coat, yet he was a regular, not a foreigner. To top this, two girls entered the dance wearing black stockings. Is St. Clair getting soft on girls and hard on boys?
DUFFLE COAT’S BROTHER, Adelaide.40
‘Melbourne is most fortunate in having a number of excellent folk-singers within its city walls,’ mused Young Modern in April 1963; having just extended its distribution into the eastern states, the magazine was probably eager to emphasise its newly widened focus:41
These include Glen Thomasetti, Martyn Wyndham-Reade, Brian Mooney, Trevor Lucas, David Lumsden and Peter Laycock . . . These singers are to be heard on records, at concerts, and in particular in coffee lounges . . . For the coffee lounge is the stronghold of the Melbourne folk singer.42
Thomasetti, a contributor to Australian Tradition, the Melbourne folk magazine co-edited by Wendy Lowenstein, subsequently took a different course: she became a brilliant novelist. Lowenstein herself became a historian (she is also the mother of film director Richard Lowenstein). The evocatively named Wyndham-Reade has already been mentioned; Lucas relocated to London in the mid 60s, where he became a member of Fairport Convention and the husband of Sandy Denny (a relationship her producer Joe Boyd has described as damaging to her work).43 Lucas would produce the very FM-radio friendly (but highly political) bands Goanna and Redgum in the 80s. In 1970, Lucas told Go-Set:
I used to sing with a traditional jazz band in Melbourne. I was very young. I started playing guitar when I was 13 or 14. Then I got into folk music, playing and singing. I made a folk LP back in Australia . . . Australia is a very stimulating place to work in because of the middle-class oppression. It helps people to be a little more creative, it makes them fight that much harder, like in Ireland. You don’t get this so much in London.’44
In a 1962 issue of the small magazine Jazz Notes, it was proclaimed that ‘Melbourne, whether you like it or not, IS the jazz centre of Australia and has been for the past 17 years or so’ (that is, since the end of the Second World War), though this statement was made in the context of the Australian Jazz Convention being held in Adelaide.45 The greatest commercial success of the folk and jazz scenes in Melbourne – or anywhere else – at this time was not particularly class-conscious or even broadly challenging, however. Judith Cock,46 a secretary at the Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, began singing in public, covering Bessie Smith songs with the University Jazz Band.47 She’d been playing piano and dabbling in trad jazz since the early 60s.48 Understandably, but to her regret, she changed her surname to Durham when she began making public performances. Three decades later she recalled her jazz days as a bit of a romp:
Jazz was so incredibly popular, there was a real cult movement in those days. Town halls were literally packed to the rafters every weekend with teenagers. It was crude entertainment in a way, but it had a real character of its own. It had its own fashion – corduroys, sloppy joes and desert boots. You’d knit yourself a jumper, using very big needles and a special stitch to end up with a fisherman’s rib. [You wore] very tight corduroys . . . as tight as you could stand, with the big jumper over them. Then you’d top it all off with a duffle coat!
The jazz shows were very uplifting and we’d stomp and cake-walk all over the joint. When they were over, everybody went off to a coffee lounge. You maybe had a beatnik boyfriend, and went off for coffee and a toasted cheese sandwich after the dance. It was the in thing to do.49
The Seekers formed in 1962. Keith Potger and Athol Guy had both been in rock and roll