At the end of 1967 a family holiday took us to Brisbane, and for some reason (I don’t recall exactly why) I ended up going to the 4BC Christmas Spectacular at Festival Hall, featuring The Twilights, The Cherokees, and Ronnie Burns. The opening act was a band from Bowen who called themselves The Soul Survivors, who I recall as being quite impressive from my vantage point at the back of the hall.
The highlight was The Twilights, an Adelaide band who’d won the previous year’s Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds, which gave them a trip to England and recording sessions at Abbey Road. Glenn Shorrock went on to the Little River Band, and guitarist/songwriter Terry Britten, who went on to write, among other hits, What’s Love Got To Do With It? for Tina Turner.
Like the Soul Survivors, The Twilights were surprisingly good. Given reports that they’d worked out the whole of Sgt Peppers and were capable of playing it from start to finish before the album was released that should have come as no surprise, but back in those pre-Internet days such reports didn’t always register.
Apart from the disappearance of second singer Paddy McCartney, who re-emerged in a gorilla suit and proceeded to remove the remaining members of the band one by one I don’t recall much else. It was a standard pop package, and I’d only gone because it was something to do on a Saturday night in Brisbane.
Back in Townsville, of course, I probably wouldn’t have gone if something like that line-up breezed through town.
While my mates and I didn’t have the same purist intensity that prompted The Wild Cherries to drop Crossroads from their set list because Cream’s cover of that track made it commercial we still tended to look down our noses when it came to people who were topping the charts without the patina of musical integrity.
I don’t recall why my mate Bob and I were at Townsville Airport late at night after Russell Morris, riding high on the charts with The Real Thing, played Townsville (needless to say we hadn’t gone) but I recall the Oh, yeah, so what? that followed sighting Mr Morris standing waiting for a flight.