Daddy Who?. Craig Horne

phone and desk, you could smoke inside and after hours I could write song lyrics.’

      An extremely important event in the life of young Wilson occurred at the Department of Supply in 1966 when he met the seventeen-year-old Patricia Mary Higgins.

      ‘I’d been working briefly at the department after finishing school when I formally met Ross,’ Pat remembered.

      I’d already seen him play harp at the Chicago Blues Club in North Melbourne. I’m not sure whom it was with, possibly with Keith Glass or maybe Chris Stockley or Mick Hamilton. I remember thinking that he played harmonica like a black man. I subsequently saw him play at Opus with The Pink Finks.

      Pat, as she is universally known, was born in Yarraville and educated at St Augustine’s College and was destined to become not only Wilson’s future wife and the mother of their son Daniel, but also a singer, journalist and a pop star in her own right. Pat wrote for Go-Set under the pseudonym ‘Mummy Cool’, sang with the Melbourne art band Rock Granite & the Profiles, and recorded the infectious Wilson-written ‘Bop Girl’ which became a nation Number 2 hit and one of the highest selling singles of 1983. The song’s film clip, which was directed by Gillian Armstrong, was also notable as the screen debut for a fifteen-year-old Nicole Kidman. ‘After seeing him play a few times around town and bumping into him at work, we just started going out together.’

      With his love life sorted and a steady income coming in, Wilson could now turn his attention to finding a vehicle for his emerging song-writing talents.

      ‘After everyone left the band Hannaford and I decided that we wanted to keep playing, so over the next eighteen months or so we tried out a lot of new players, drummers, we had some bad drummers and a few bass players and Mike Edwards on sax and flute.’ But then Mike Rudd, who would later front the progressive outfit Spectrum, became available. ‘He had just come over from New Zealand and had been playing rhythm guitar in a band called The Chants; they broke up so we got him in on the bass and soon after Peter Curtin joined us on drums.’

      This new band became The Party Machine. ‘There was a lot of talk in the media around that time about the Labor Party and the party machine men that ran it, so I just bolted on the word party. I thought “Party Machine” sounded pretty cool.’

      David Pepperell said he saw The Party Machine around this time and was knocked out by the band. ‘Musically they were really progressive compared to everything else happening in Melbourne at the time—and the material, both Wilson’s songs and his interesting arrangements of covers were extraordinary!’

      Pat also saw The Party Machine play quite a bit and confirmed David’s assessment, ‘They lifted the lid off every time they took the stage, they were playing material that was really unique, they were so different from everyone else at the time.’

      John Higgins, Pat’s brother and the band’s sometimes roadie, noticed that Party Machine always had a strong sense of purpose. ‘They were original and exciting,’ he said. ‘Hannaford and Mike Rudd were outstanding musicians and Wilson was of course a great singer and harp player … [his] other strength was in performance, from the beginning he was a great entertainer on stage.’

      Pepperell agrees, describing Wilson as ‘A pocket dynamo, crackling with ideas and brightness, he related extraordinarily well to his audience … he stood out. It was clear even then that he had what it took for stardom.’

      Wilson’s undoubted onstage charisma was in stark contrast to his more introverted offstage presence. Like many highly creative people he was an extrovert on the stage, and more introspective in private. Higgins observed that Wilson was always very quiet:

      I remember one time my mother said ‘oh Ross you don’t say much do you’ and he said ‘I really only talk when I’ve got something to say’. Well he always had something to say onstage, I really believe that in those days Ross could only really express himself in front of an audience, some may interpret this duality as arrogance, but I think he was simply a quiet, shy guy away from the spotlight.

      There’s no doubt that The Party Machine were an innovative band. Wilson explained their philosophy: ‘There were a lot of Melbourne bands emulating English acts like The Beatles and Rolling Stones. Some of them like The Twilights and Masters Apprentices were writing their own songs, but The Party Machine weren’t afraid to go out on a limb by trying out weird stuff that wasn’t exactly commercial.’ Wilson recalls,

      One of the first songs I wrote was based on a Lazy Lester song ‘I’m a Lover Not a Fighter’, only I called the song rather precociously ‘I’m the World’s Greatest Lover’. Others turned into something else—like ‘Please Please America’ off the second Daddy Cool album was originally part of something I wrote with Hanna called ‘The Camel Suite’. Don’t ask me why, but it was about camels and camel farms. When we rewrote it, it went from being, ‘We all live on a camel farm, we just sold out of the apple farm,’ or something stupid like that, to having lyrics people could understand.

      But it was another clutch of songs that Wilson wrote that got him and The Party Machine into a lot of trouble, songs that nonetheless seemed to fit the zeitgeist of the time.