Concerts Over The (Townsville) Years
It’s probably cheating to start Hughesy’s concert reminiscences with a show I didn’t attend. but since I heard the show in question live as it happened I reckon counting The Beatles’ show from Brisbane’s Festival Hall at the end of June 1964 is fair enough since it raises a couple of interesting issues.
From time to time over the next couple of years packages of assorted Australian acts passed through Townsville and were more or less completely ignored by Hughesy and his peers at Pimlico High School.
You knew they were in town, of course. If you hadn’t noticed the advertising in the paper or heard about the show over the radio you picked up the vibe of screaming teenage hysteria that went around the school grounds at lunchtime.
Rumours that Normie Rowe or whoever was the current flavour of the month had been sighted driving past the school were greeted with more or less total disdain, largely, I think with the benefit of hindsight, due to the belief that concerts were an excuse for teenage girls to turn on the screams and waterworks in hysteria to the max mode.
Given the fact that the show was broadcast, it’s interesting that nobody seems to have gone to the trouble of recording it. Surely, even back in the days of reel to reel recorders, there was somebody who thought of making the effort.
Or maybe someone did, but the reels ended up on a tip somewhere.
Since there’s no sign of a recording, it’s hardly surprising there isn’t a set-list anywhere in sight on the usual locations. It was probably more or less the same as what was played in Melbourne, namely:
I Saw Her Standing There
You Can't Do That
All My Loving
She Loves You
Till There Was You
Roll Over Beethoven
Can't Buy Me Love
This Boy
Twist And Shout
So, while I’d heard snatches of music amid the screams there was nothing that prompted me to want to catch shows that made their way to Townsville over the next few years.
Looking back, there’s at least one show I would have loved to have seen. Brisbane’s Purple Hearts had joined The Easybeats on a marathon North Queensland tour in 1965 and would certainly have played Townsville. Later reports suggested I’d missed something special, but there you go...
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.
Back in Townsville after that Festival Hall show it was very much a case of nothing much on the concert scene.
After I’d finished Year Twelve in 1968 a year at University, while it wasn’t exactly an academic success, was followed by two years at Teachers’ College and the live music scene centred around the odd University Cabaret and Friday nights at The Scene.
I suspect that every city in the western world boasted a venue called The Scene.
The other venue that packed them in on Saturday nights was the old Sadler’s Sound Lounge, universally known as The Scrounge where live music wasn’t on the agenda but large numbers of females were.
Somewhere along the way, the old proprietors of The Scrounge were bought out by a local businessman and the venue was reincarnated as the Inside Out, a pretty standard disco/rock club with the formerly Cairns-based Barabbas and a blues band called Gutbucket, who were about fifty-fifty Army conscripts from down south and local long-hairs.
For most of us Barabbas was pretty much where it was at, a four-piece (power trio plus vocalist) who drew their repertoire from the heavier end of the musical spectrum and featured a bloody good guitarist by the name of Rick Montgomery (or Montgomerie?)
We’d seen Barabbas a couple of times before they made the big relocation and I had a nodding acquaintance with Rick & Co by the time they made the move, which meant that in the small hours of an Easter Saturday morning I found myself on stage jamming on the blues kazoo...
After my father was transferred to Brisbane I ended up spending the last bit of 1970 and all of 1971 in a University residential college, and an effective income of minus-six cents a fortnight meant that there wasn’t a great deal of spare cash to pay for live music.
As a result I was spending most Saturday nights at Underworld (for more details, see The Underworld Years) though I somehow managed to see Johnny O’Keefe and the four-piece Masters Apprentices at the Inside Out.
O’Keefe, by that stage, was well and truly past his heyday, but still put on a good show although the drugs, alcohol and numerous breakdowns had obviously taken their toll.
The Masters Apprentices were in their heavy incarnation and rocked fairly hard, though I wasn’t overly impressed. To this day it’s a case of give me Undecided, Buried And Dead and Wars Or Hands Of Time over their later stuff.
A fortnightly twelve dollar cheque from Brisbane was needed to keep me in coffee, toothpaste and reading material with some left over for the odd extravagance, and each set of holidays found me heading south on the student vacation special, the cheapest available rail transport.
The discovery that one of those vacation periods coincided with a concert by Tully meant I needed a ticket. I managed to inveigle one out of the parental coffers, though the sight of my Mum lining up to buy same must have been a little surreal.
Tully was one of the numerous bands that had spun off from Barrie McAskill’s Levi Smith Clefs and had been the house band for the Sydney production of Hair before a more subterranean existence, becoming more or less the Australian equivalent of Pink Floyd when it came to Underground Cult status.
The show at the Schonell Theatre came with the obligatory light show by Ellis D. Fogg and while it might have been more enjoyable with a little herbal enhancement I may well have been the only member of the audience who hadn’t indulged beforehand.
At least that was the way it felt as Michael Carlos’ keyboards flooded the theatre and someone (the bass player?) intoned something about riding along on my bicycle under the sea.
By the end of 1971 I’d managed to sneak through Teachers’ College (to this day I’m not sure quite how, but I did) and along the way I’d managed to pass a couple of University subjects which meant that I probably got off on the wrong foot when I arrived at Heatley Primary announcing that I needed the paperwork to upgrade from two-year to three-year trained status. How was I to know that the principal, after at least nine years of part time and external study had finally finished his degree?
As far as music was concerned I spent most of 1972 filling in gaps in the album collection, and catching live music at the Inside Out, but there was one strange highlight. For some reason the Australian Union of Students had sponsored an Australian tour by American protest singer Phil Ochs, and the tour included a gig on the lawns outside the Refectory at James Cook, which drew a substantial crowd, though I suspect most of those present had no idea who Phil Ochs actually was.
The memories of the night are, unsurprisingly, somewhat dim, but I remember being struck by the clarity of Ochs’ voice - you can hear what I meant on Phil Ochs In Concert - and the quality of the writing. I was expecting something along the lines of a lesser Dylan, yet here was this guy with a great voice and songs that had character rather than protest-by-numbers clichés.
The issues with the boss meant that the end of 1972 saw me transferred to Palm Island, which wasn’t going to help much when it came to concerts, though one of the sets of school holidays happened to coincide with a Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee concert at Brisbane City Hall.
Back on the mainland in 1974 to finish off my degree I managed to add a few names to the seen in concert listing, which might, at a glance, seem like a fairly eclectic selection but was influenced by the vagaries of who was actually passing through Townsville rather than personal taste.
There was a concert in the University Refectory featuring Margaret Roadknight, Graham Lowndes and the pre-Newcastle Song Bob Hudson. While Roadknight and Lowndes were the main attraction with pretty amazing voices to me the highlight of the night was Hudson, who opened with Loudon Wainwright’s little trilogy that culminates with Suicide Song.
And having wangled an invitation to the post-concert party in Hermit Park I had the opportunity to express that opinion to the artist concerned.
Daddy Cool may have been well and truly past their heyday when they played the old Wintergarden Theatre later in 1974 but still delivered a great show which included a lengthy take on Duke Of Earl along with the predictable DC Classics like Eagle Rock, Teenage Blues, Come Back Again and Hi Honey Ho. Great fun.
And along the way I found myself at the Townsville Sports Reserve on separate occasions for shows by Buck Owens & His Buckaroos and, believe it or not, Aussie teeny-bop sensations Sherbet. Owens was pretty good, and gave me the opportunity to catch up with a number of Palm Island acquaintances, but Sherbet were, despite any reservations I might have had, pretty amazing.
Attendance at that show largely came about through the influence of my ex-flatmate Mr Dave, who’d pointed out that for all their teeny-screamy bopper appeal they actually delivered a pretty classy line in quality pop music. To the sceptical reader I’ll see your Howzat? and raise you You’ve Got The Gun or Summer Love.
In any case the experience was good enough to have us turning out for all subsequent Sherbet shows in the area.
Mr Dave was also largely responsible for persuading me to head off to see the Little River Band, who I’ve seen in concert four times. While they’re not my cup of musical tea they’ve invariably delivered a quality show on stage - good enough to have Hughesy actively campaigning to get friends and acquaintances off to see them in Home Hill in the early nineties, though the presence of special guest Warren Zevon on the bill had more than a little to do with the matter.
The later Sherbet shows were at the old Regent Theatre in Hermit Park, where I also saw the La De Das in their Kevin Borich boogie band incarnation, much to the bemusement of some of my Year Seven students in 1975.
Early 1976 saw me turning out to catch the criss-cross polyrhythms that explode with happiness purveyed by the London-based African musos from Osibisa. We’d started with a Chinese dinner, queued in the wet season rain at the Murray Basketball stadium and then enjoyed a pretty magical show but some of the glow evaporated when the boss called me into the office the following day to inform me that he was taking me off the nice Year Five class I’d spent three days with and I was going to be filling in for various other staff members who were heading off on lengthy in-service activities.
For some reason the refrains of Woyaya (We are going/Heaven knows where we re going/ We know we will) seemed appropriate.
When it comes to incongruous double bills they don’t come much stranger than a show at the Showgrounds with Chuck Berry supported by the Army Band from Lavarack Barracks.
Berry’s performance, backed by the Adelaide outfit that later morphed into The Angels, was more or less as expected, though my clearest recollection of the evening involved Mr Berry’s limousine being caught in the crush of departing concert goers. The Chuckster seemed less that impressed as assorted indigenous members of the audience pounded on the car roof with cries of See you later, countryman.
The preferred venue for concertes was, however, the Sound Shell in South Townsville’s Dean Park where I caught Little River Band, The Angels, Cold Chisel, Redgum, The Sports, Split Enz and Jo Jo Zep & The Falcons.
Little River Band, as previously noted, could be relied on to deliver a quality show, but The Sports/Split Enz double bill wasn’t as good as it could have been. While The Sports are one of my all-time favourite Australian bands, it was one of those take it in turn to headline affairs, and a high-quality set from Split Enz culminating in a mass sung-along I Got You was followed by a disappointing set from Steve Cummings and company, who at that stage included Red Symonds (as I recall from certain on-stage banter).
Redgum put on a pretty good show as well, while The Angels and Cold Chisel provided a contrast in approaches in another double bill. I preferred the rough-hewn approach of Cold Chisel to the highly-staged performance Doc Neeson put on fronting The Angels, but when it came to spontaneity there was nothing quite like Jo Jo Zep.
Actually, that weekend in Townsville shortly after the release of Screaming Targets almost matches the Little Feat encounter at the Byron Bay Bluesfest twenty-something years later as the most surreal experience of Hughesy’s concert-going years.
Things started off more or less as soon as school got out on the Friday afternoon, when it was a case of heading straight to Wavelength Records, where I knew there was the opportunity to get my copy of Screaming Targets autographed.
I arrived on the scene to find Joe Camilleri and Wilbur Wilde ensconced in the middle of the Townsville Permanent Arcade, and with the signature obtained I hung around waiting to rendezvous with the missus after she finished work.
I’d been known to spend lengthy periods of time (and considerable amounts of money) at Wavelength, so that wasn’t exactly anything new, though I didn’t make a habit of spending Friday afternoons there. Given the likelihood of a reasonable soundtrack, interesting conversation and a range of passing acquaintances it wasn’t a bad place to spend an hour or two, but on this occasion there was the chance to watch the sales pitch of a great Australian rocker.
Given a leggy bikini-clad blonde who was impervious to that sales pitch, however, Joe turned to those present (myself, Gary and Randy from the shop and whoever else happened to be on site) and inquired what he needed to do to sell another copy.
You could, I suggested, grovel...
And grovel he did. Unfortunately it didn’t work.
After five we headed home, showered, put on the concert-going gear and headed out to eat before parking the car close to the Dean Park Sound Shell and finding a suitable vantage point in the grassy amphitheatre.
There were a couple of preliminaries, including Townsville’s one and only punk band, and when The Falcons hit the stage a fairly straightforward run through Route 66 didn’t suggest anything much beyond workmanlike R&B.
It was at that point, however, that Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons encountered standard Townsville Sound Shell practice, which involved remaining seated until the encore. The stage wasn’t the highest one you’ve ever seen, and once people in front of the stage stood, everybody else was more or less obliged to do the same if they wanted to see.
As the band locked into the riff from The Honeydripper (at least that’s what I seem to recall being treated to for the next ten minutes or so) Joe started working the audience to get the crowd on their feet and into dancing mode, and once that had been accomplished, the gear lever was shifted to Overdrive and we were off for a good hour and a fair bit more of surging reggae-inflected R&B with a mid-set pause for breath in the form of The Cthulu in all its moody sax-driven magnificence.
It was the sort of show that made me think that I’d just seen the perfect opening act for someone like The Rolling Stones, since they’d force the stars to really work to avoid the ignominy of being blown off the stage by the support act.
Once the show was over we would, under normal circumstances, have been inclined to head for homer, but the rumour mill suggested that there was a strong possibility Joe and company might be interested in jamming at a cabaret being held at the University Refectory, so that was where we were headed.
Once we’d made our way into the venue, the first face I spotted was a colleague from the next school across, who’d also made his way out from the Sound Shell.
What did you reckon? asked Brett.
Bloody close to rock’n’roll heaven, I responded.
Why don’t you tell Joe that? Brett suggested, nodding towards the bar where a certain Mr Camilleri was opening negotiations involving a Victoria Bitter.
I’ll pay for that, I interjected, waving a bank note towards the bar attendant. Least I could do. Great show, Joe.
Joe may or may not have recognized me as the you could grovel dude from Wavelength seven or eight hours earlier, but looked at me with a bewildered expression and the sort of gesture that goes with extreme puzzlement.
The bastards wouldn’t dance, he remarked.
They usually don’t, I pointed out. Not till the encore. Mate, you did really well.. (Or words to that effect). Whatever the wording it was enough to start a conversation that continued shout for shout for a couple of hours as Wilbur Wilde attempted to out-cool someone I ended up teaching with in Bowen a couple of years later about ten metres away.
It must have been around two when Joe looked at me and remarked that with a voice like that I could possibly do well in a doo wop band.
You mean, I suggested, something like “Book Of Love” by The Monotones? Well I wonder wonder who de doo doo who....
The Joe jamming rumour may have failed to get off the ground, but the partial rendition of Book Of Love that followed, fuelled by many beers, may not have reached any great heights musically, but remains something that I’ll carry to my grave.
Given the lateness of the hour we weren’t up at sparrow fart on Saturday morning, but a return to Wavelength revealed that the second part of yesterday’s rumour was going to happen. I’d been informed that The Falcons would, more than likely, be playing The Dalrymple on Saturday night.
The uncertainty depended on various factors connected to the Friday night show (basically, if the gig at The Dalrymple was advertised too early, Friday night’s attendance might be down) but since it was on, we were going.
The stage in a beer barn was more or less home territory for Joe and company, and there was a dance floor right in front of the stage, so there were no repeats of certain issues from Friday night, and while the Saturday night set wasn’t quite as earth-shattering as the previous night’s, two nights of prime rock were a truly memorable experience.
Up tempo R&B also featured on my last night as a resident of Townsville. The removalists had carted off my goods and chattels and I was left with a bare bones residence when I headed off to catch Dr Feelgood. While it was a long time after their mid-seventies heyday and Wilko Johnson was long gone, a night of Lee Brilleaux-fronted full-ahead raunch was a good way to conclude that particular slice of my life.
Looking back over a bit more than a quarter of a century after about the same length of time I’m surprised how many acts I managed to catch, given the relative dearth of tours to that neck of the woods.
There were several more that I could have caught along the way. Paul Kelly at the Sugar Shaker and The Sunnyboys at the Seaview are two that spring to mind on the pubs and clubs scene, and I guess I really should have gone out of my way to see Leo Kottke, but there you go....
