music snobs that he had surrounded himself with. If the prog scene was a section of a Royal Botanic Gardens, he especially loved what would be known in lay terms as The Stinking Penis Plant Of That Peculiar World. Yes, King Crimson. We were talking upon matters musical one day and the theme was the relative merits of various books on the subject. By this time, the mid 90s, the field was growing by the day and you would have been right to wonder if the story was in danger of being told one too many times. It was getting to be all hearsay and rote tale telling. My friend James opined that for a music book to be considered good – in his not so humble opinion – the writer had to champion at least ONE act in it that just defied all known streams of thought as to what was considered to be good taste. The story or argument had to be built around one massive, gushing column of totally strange material. Some hopelessly untrendy, unknown, forgotten, degraded, weak and basically unstable piece of stuff. Past its use-by date. Uncultured, unpasteurized, unmediated junk. If that presence was held to be there, in the mind of the writer – and he used that presence to illuminate the dense jungle surrounds he was guiding us through – well it was an argument that was at the least worth giving an audient posture toward.
In this book, David Nichols has summoned many emanations of such a presence for us to give our attention to. A great piece of work in itself.
Thank you comrade. From a player. Someone had to wrestle this shit down. It will be a great challenge for someone in the future to pick up the trail for Volume Two.
Dave Graney,
Melbourne 2015
This book is an attempt to make sense of events, people, places and recordings that emerged under the banner of Australian popular music between 1960 and 1985. The time frame is somewhat arbitrary; it is the product of conceiving a fifty-year history (from 1960 to 2010), only to realise that fifty years was too much to take on if I was to do the material justice, and consequently splitting the period in half (the second half of what is now a two-volume survey can be expected sometime in the third decade of this century). Like any history should, it tries to challenge assumptions – in this case, assumptions about the culture, the times and the outcomes of Australian pop – and re-evaluate its subject.
One thing I did not want to do is write a book that strings together all the previously published anecdotes about pop musicians to create a smug, comfortable bedtime story for baby boomers. I also hoped to avoid writing one of those point-and-laugh books about historical ‘fashion crimes’, which try to calm fears about change and experiment by poking fun at the past and people who can’t answer back (because even if they’re still alive and interested, they’re not that person anymore). Both these approaches are no more than lazy historical window-shopping; they don’t ask any difficult questions about the politics, places of consumption and production, interactions and conversations, power structures or beliefs within pop music.
The process of writing this book was, as a result, complicated and arduous, though often rewarding and enjoyable. It is founded on documentary evidence, drawn primarily from the Australian music press, augmented by published and unpublished memoirs, films and television programs, and of course actual records (that is, 7- and 12-inch vinyl, or CD re-releases). These are combined with interviews and a small amount of internet research. Sources are supplied in the endnotes for every statement made in the book, aside from interviews which I conducted myself; the reader can assume that if no source is given for a quote, it is one I obtained from my informants. I appreciate that there is an inherent weakness in using the music press so extensively: on a number of occasions, while seeking clarification on a particular statement from decades ago, I was told by a musician that they were actually teasing, joking with, or lying to the journalist in question. Even when that’s not happening overtly, the music press is notoriously full of boasts and promotional puff. Yet I contend – particularly as I am one of those people who has trouble recalling what he did last week and twenty years ago – that when writing history there is a potentially greater weakness in depending too heavily on people’s memories of past events. I have also been told often enough by many of my informants that their memories are obscured by whatever drugs and alcohol they were using at the time; this confirms for me that my approach is probably the best one.
This book is enormous – not an assertion of its excellence, incidentally, just a statement of fact. It could have been twice as big. It is structured in chapters of vastly different sizes, the larger of which are subdivided into smaller sections. The shorter chapters concentrate on particular artists, with the aim of presenting a number of historical ‘slices’ in the form of a case study. The ‘cases’ are all valid and important artists, but they are not necessarily the most valid and important; indeed, that’s a judgment I don’t want to have to try to make.
I have tried to be user-friendly and provide some kind of overarching framework to help my reader stay focused, but at the same time both you, my reader, and I have to remember that to ‘focus’ the story necessitates being restrictive, and perhaps even deceptive. It is easier to regard history as a story of leaders and followers, or people magically drawn by irresistible, pervasive ideas (in the case of a history of music from the early 60s to the mid 80s, ‘the Beatles’, ‘the Stones’, ‘psychedelia’, ‘counterculture’, ‘the new wave’). Unfortunately for history books, though fortunately for real life, this is simply not how the world works. The history of any cultural phenomenon is of people jostling – for supremacy, or just a livelihood, or a number of different things at once – and these people’s paths cross or they don’t, and they become successful in the eyes of others, or they don’t, and they produce great work or terrible work or, in the case of most people, work that lies somewhere in between.
I should say, too, that I am of the belief, though it is entirely unprovable, that talent does not carve its own path: if the Easybeats hadn’t met a Dutch doorman at a Sydney club in the early 60s, they may not have become Australia’s biggest pop group of the mid 60s (or they may have, by some other means, but the point is merely that they may not have; the genius of George Young and Harry Vanda was not a irresistible force that would inevitably discover gold). In one sense this attitude masks a degree of card-shuffling; I would, however, trot out the old adage that describes success as ‘one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration’ – and add that luck has to be considered a huge part of the whole shebang as well. In short, there is no inevitability to any of these stories. Ian Meldrum probably was wrong to overspend his production budget on ‘The Real Thing’, and because it went on to become a hit, and an iconic song, does not vindicate that decision; it’s merely harder to come by stories of people who overspent Meldrum-style and produced a megaflop, because no-one wants to remember that, or they fudge the issue, or apply creative accounting, or it just doesn’t mean as much because it happened to nobodies – but it certainly happens. On a related point, the Models’ single ‘On’ is, I am certain to the point of declaring it an indisputable fact, at least a thousand times better by almost any standard than their later release ‘Out of Mind, Out of Sight’, and the reality that the first was not a hit, while the second was, proves nothing about either record’s intrinsic value, though it does perhaps prove something about marketing and how the record-buying public feels about aspiring pop bands wielding chain saws in their videos. All art relates to commerce on some level; pop music seems to have done so more than most art forms, though this might just be a perception. Writing commercial pop music requires great talent, but the greatest pop groups in the world – the Reels, for instance – were often barely able to eke out a living. Only the most ardent free-market advocate would suggest that the craft of pop music is entirely about creating music that is more popular than any other music, and even popularity is hard to gauge exactly: Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’ was not a hit at the time of its release, but twenty-five years later it was the most popular karaoke song in Australia.
Some may feel I pay insufficient attention to questions of culture, gender, and race in this book; others may feel I pay too much attention to these issues simply by