A couple of coincidences had me pondering the Australian music scene from the sixties and seventies as I set off around the regular morning circuit one Wednesday morning in May 2010.
Reflection: A few thoughts on Australian music from the sixties
Glenn Shorrock turned up on Peter Thompson's Talking Heads on Monday evening, which took me back to The Twilights and Little River Band. Hardly Hughesy's cup of tea you might have thought, but if it wasn't for LRB I wouldn't have had the chance to catch Warren Zevon live in, of all places, Home Hill.
Working through the CD shelves for the Bento database on Tuesday afternoon I'd run across the Purple Hearts/ Coloured Balls Benzedrine Beat, and the search for a track listing on the net (after all it's much easier to cut and paste rather than type in the often lengthy details) took me to the Half A Cow website, where a subsequent look around revealed the existence of a Wild Cherries album, which was duly purchased and downloaded for later listening.
Those things certainly take you back.
While Hughesy, throughout the period involved, was a distant observer rather than an active participant in the southern music scene and I'm working on impressions rather than experienced actuality, I'd read extensively (including the weekly Go Set from late '66 until some time before its demise in 1974, and the book shelves include, among other titles, Iain McIntyre's Tomorrow Is Today: Australia in the psychedelic era, 1966-1970, so I suspect I'm not as badly informed as I might have been.
For a start it was obvious that while there was a distinct scene in each of the state capitals and some of the major regional centres, anyone who wanted to hit the big time needed to be in Sydney or, more particularly in Melbourne.
Indeed, on reflection, there's a pretty sound case for installing Melbourne as the hub of the Australian music scene, and a fair chunk of the morning walk was devoted to considerations of why this should be so.There are a couple of obvious factors behind that impression, and they're pretty difficult to counter if you're inclined to elevate Sydney into the prime position.
For a start, given the fact that it was published in Melbourne, it'd hardly be surprising if Go Set's coverage tended to be Melbourne-centric, although there was significant coverage of the Sydney scene and, to a lesser extent, what was happening in Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.
For some reason Tasmania seemed to be a pop music free zone apart from vaguely-remembered coverage of a Loved Ones tour that reached the wilds of Devonport and Launceston. Some things, like the story that someone stole Gerry Humphries' harmonica, just stick in your mind.
But in any case it was hard to escape the conclusion that Melbourne was where it was at (baby). If you were looking for a Sydney-centric world view there was the semi-glossy magazine Everybody's, which featured significant music content but wasn't strictly devoted to covering the pop scene.
A second factor in the case for Melbourne is the city's dominance of the pop music TV scene. While Sydney produced some significant music TV, Brian Henderson's Bandstand didn't exactly set the universe on fire and Donny Sutherland's Sounds (or whatever it was called) paled into insignificance beside the Melbourne-based Countdown.
And before Countdown there were various two-, three- and maybe even four-hour Saturday morning music shows with names like Kommotion! that featured live bands as well as whatever other musical content they could dig up to fill in the lengthy time slot.
Hughesy, due to the programming policies of Townsville's sole commercial TV station, never actually got to see those Saturday morning shows, but you could see what was coming up or what had just been) in the pages of Go Set.
And while there were Sydney-based record labels (Albert Productions being the prime example) one definitely gets the impression that Melbourne was dominant on the label front as well.
While we're looking at the differences between Sydney and Melbourne scenes (and we're talking a fair bit of guesswork here) there was another factor that came into play as well.
While both cities enjoyed bayside or beachside locations the presence of Sydney Harbour, a large body of water with few crossing points probably made the development of a city-wide scene difficult. Sure, there were probably quite vibrant little scenes in places like Bondi, Manly, Paddington, and, particularly Kings Cross but I suspect that the first two weren't all that easy to get to unless you lived in the vicinity.
In Melbourne, on the other hand, it was relatively easy to travel from one side of suburbia to the other. Stephen Cummings in his Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy, writes of roaming Melbourne from one side to the other when I was twelve, checking out groups I read about in the teen music rag Go-Set (p. 4) and recalls that every church, community hall and police boys' club from Rosebud to Altona had some kind of beat group playing (p. 5).
Now, the same thing may well have been true in Sydney, but I suspect people were disinclined to travel too far away from their home turf or the inner city public transport hub.
The ease of getting around Melbourne more than likely contributed to the musical scene as well. A series of reminiscences in Rhythms magazine by ex-Campact man Keith Glass talked about playing sets in two or three (maybe even four) suburban dances on a single night, something I suspect would have been a little more difficult in the Harbour City.
But Sydney and Melbourne was where you needed to be if you were going to hit the big time, and the big questions for up and coming acts were (a) how to get there and (b) how to find enough work to earn a living when you did.
On the second count, the number of suburban dances in Melbourne probably helped, and it's interesting to note the number of ex-Adelaide acts that shot to prominence after relocating to Melbourne, with Shorrock's Twilights and the Masters Apprentices being two prime examples.
Shorrock's appearance on Talking Heads, however, reminded me of one of the key answers to question (a) above, which was the seemingly ridiculous concept of a national talent quest sponsored by a chocolate bar.
That might be ridiculous in today's terms, but there was quite definitely a substantial benefit to taking out the national title in Hoadley's (makers of the Violet Crumble Bar) National Battle of the Sounds.
With a series of regional Battles that led up to State and National Finals there was the possibility that up and coming acts from just about anywhere could hit the big time. Very few acts from Outer Woop Woop went close, of course, but it was a handy means of getting exposure beyond your back yard and for the national winner there was a trip to London and a recording session at Abbey Road.
The reality of taking out that title wasn't quite as glamorous as it may seem on the surface. The Twilights and the Masters Apprentices were two winners who found it almost impossible to get gigs in Britain (hardly surprising - it would've been tough enough if you were British) and wouldn't have enjoyed the stint as the ocean liner house band that paid the cost of the trip to Blighty.
Three other things came out of the Shorrock interview, or, if not directly from the interview, from my reflections thereon.
First, I was reminded how many prominent Australian performers were migrants. Shorrock, like many of his peers, was born in England and arrived in Adelaide aged ten, as was the Easybeats' Stevie Wright, who was nine when he landed in Sydney. Jim Keays (Masters Apprentices) and Jimmy Barnes were both Scots, as was AC/DC's Bon Scott, and the list goes on...
Second, as Shorrock talked about his ability to mimic other artists I was reminded that, having obtained a pre-release copy of Sergeant Pepper, by the time the album appeared in Australian stores The Twilights were playing the whole thing from go to woah in their live show.
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.