You can place the guy in that tradition of musos from the fifties who looked to prolong their careers by becoming an all-round entertainer and venturing away from the wilder world of rock into the mainstream, which was, pretty much, the reason why I've ended up seeing him with Little River Band at least three or four times.
Where others would be inclined to stick to the metropolitan centres playing large venues Little River Band were an act that went out and worked the back blocks, to the extent that I saw them, as mentioned above, in Home Hill.
Musically, of course, LRB weren't exactly Hughesy's preferred option, but they were consistently good enough to be worth shelling out the readies to see. You were assured of a good show, a tight band, brilliant sound and note-perfect renditions of whatever they included in the set list.
And the last time I saw them there was the added attraction of special guest Warren Zevon, who delivered a mid-set blast of quite brilliant proportions.
Well, he would, wouldn't he? He had LRB as his backing band, and they were, as I recall, pretty much note perfect on his material. You could do a lot worse.
Finally, and this is where the Purple Hearts and Wild Cherries elements kick in as well, I was reminded how little recorded evidence exists of some of Australia's best bands.
Take a glance through the discography of any leading Australian band from the sixties and, in most cases you'll be lucky to find more than a handful of singles and one (well, maybe two) album.
Part of that was down to the lack of recording facilities across the country, and, in any case there weren't a whole lot of bands writing their own material so that what was recorded tended to be covers of tracks from overseas acts.
The Twilights were more prolific than most, but still only managed two albums and a total of fifteen singles.
The Purple Hearts and Wild Cherries disks, on the other hand, contain everything either band recorded (at least as far as released recordings go) and needed to be padded out to full CD length by adding live recordings of the Cherries and Hearts offshoot the (Lobby Loyde-less) Coloured Balls.