even better records than their peers who’d been drafted to the UK by dint of having achieved everything they were supposed to achieve in Australia. The Australian-in-Europe professionals were often producing bland work in order to compete in the mainstream, whereas their former colleagues were relegated to the margins, where the greatest art is usually found. By definition, those at the margins usually don’t have the wherewithal to leave a very visible legacy; as a result, the official histories are riddled with gaps. Thus, for example, we have the account offered in the 90s by British rock journalist Martin Huxley, who dismisses Australian music of the 60s apparently because of its lack of international commercial success:
Such Melbourne-based acts as the Loved Ones, the Groop, Ronnie Burns, Normie Rowe and Bobby and Laurie, along with Adelaide transplants the Masters Apprentices and the Twilights (not to mention Bon’s old Perth pal Johnny Young) would never really figure out how to process their influences into anything authentic or personal and would never really produce music of sufficient merit to cause any sleepless nights for their overseas contemporaries.7
Huxley is attempting here to create a context for AC/DC, the subject of his biography, and (as non-Australian writers of books about Nick Cave have also discovered) it is easy to talk up your subject by deriding their contemporaries or context on the basis of their supposed obscurity. It’s even easier when you have evidently done no research. Huxley’s central premise, that groups like the Loved Ones or the Twilights were in the business of ‘process[ing] influences’, along with his assumption that the only success is commercial success, is ludicrous and beneath contempt. Try to imagine Pete Townshend in 1967 feeling nervous upon discovering that the Loved Ones, based in Melbourne, are a truly superb rock band.
When it comes to processing ‘influences’, journalist/social commentator Craig McGregor offers a more accurate picture of young Australians in the mid 60s:
The process of borrowing from overseas can be quite random. Duffle coats, winkle-picker shoes, drain-pipes, Beatle hairstyles and black stockings betray the English influence; whitewall tyres, Bermuda shorts, swept-back motorcycle handlebars, surf shirts and sneakers betray the American. But often there is an astute selectivity at work. Young Australians seem to have rejected the sentimentality of many US films and TV shows, but have accepted the American talent for self-criticism; it seems to fit in well with the sardonic tradition of local humour.8
OUTSIDERS AND INSIDERS
At least since the 1960s, New Zealanders have seen Australia as the next step up the ladder; a few have made the next step, beyond their greater neighbour (greater, at least, in size) and into the wider world’s consciousness. Max Merritt, for instance, was a figure to reckon with in Australia in the 70s, and his various incarnations of Max Merritt and the Meteors were famously inspirational to Australians who saw them play live.
This section introduces two important individuals who travelled from New Zealand to Australia in the mid 60s with their respective bands. Mike Rudd and Brian Peacock would both go on to play important roles as songwriters – and in other areas of the music industry – in Australia. Their stories are of great interest in themselves within the context of Australian music, and each of them, in a different way, also provides an invaluable take on the Australian scene from 1966 onwards. One significant difference between them concerns their outlook and approach: Peacock, who played in and wrote for the Librettos, Normie Rowe’s Playboys, and Procession, saw his time in Sydney, and later Melbourne, as an interlude; he was always en route to London. Rudd, who was a member of the Party Machine, then formed Spectrum and was simultaneously in Ross Wilson’s Sons of the Vegetal Mother, had rather different ambitions, and fitted into the Melbourne scene very early in his career. One important element in both men’s stories is Melbourne-born Ross Wilson, another remarkable and multi-faceted figure who will also appear at many points throughout this story.
Like so many of the strands in this history, beginnings, ends and definitive intersections can be hard to pinpoint. A motley assortment of private schoolboys in Melbourne’s bayside suburbs of Brighton and Beaumaris coalesced in the mid 60s into groups such as the Fauves, including Ross Hannaford; the Rising Sons, with Keith Glass; and the Pink Finks, with Ross Wilson.
Hannaford recalled in 1971 that the Fauves “only knew two numbers”:
We thought it would be funny to start a rock band and we played at this church dance and Ross Wilson sat in with this other band that played there. The guys used to live in the same street where we practiced. It was Keith Glass’s band. We’ve known Keith a long time. Ross started with them and played a bit of harp . . .9
Keith Glass – yet another figure who will play important roles in this story – went on to be guitarist and songwriter in the great Melbourne pop groups 18th Century Quartet (which also featured Hans Poulsen as singer-songwriter) and Cam-Pact; in the mid 70s, together with Wilson, he would also start (and go on to run with his wife Helena) the Missing Link label (the record shop with the same name was a continuation of Archie and Jugheads, which Glass opened with David Pepperell early in that decade).
In 1972, the fortunes of relative newcomer TV broadcaster the 0-10 network would be saved by the scandalous soap opera Number 96; alongside topless women and storylines involving drug use and adultery, the show famously introduced sympathetic gay characters – reputedly for the first time in mainstream television anywhere. Homosexuality was, nonetheless, illegal throughout Australia until the individual states and territories began a piecemeal process of decriminalization starting in 1973. It was therefore a brave, if not foolhardy, move for the Melbourne group Cam-Pact – who identified, in the main, as heterosexual – to flirt with a homosexual ‘image’ several years earlier. It came in the form of, firstly, their name (they were originally the Camp Act), and secondly a mouth-to-mouth kiss between bassist Mark Barnes and guitarist Chris Stockley in the film clip for their first single, ‘Something Easy’ (1967). Such ‘shock tactics’ paved the way for other groups – the Zoot, for instance – to make an impression with similar attention-grabbing ideas. Cam-Pact themselves were impressive and unusual; they were predominantly a soul group, but they also delved into psychedelic pop.
By the time Mike Rudd’s group Chants R&B arrived in Melbourne from Christchurch towards the end of 1966, individuals like Wilson, Hannaford and Glass had graduated from school dances and very local venues like the Beaumaris Community Centre’s venue, Stonehenge, to become players on the Melbourne scene. Hannaford had joined Wilson in the Pink Finks, and in early 1967 they formed a new band together, Party Machine. Rudd heard Party Machine playing, ‘maybe it was at Tenth Avenue and I thought, “this actually sounds like a really good band, I really love what they’re doing” . . . I just stored that away, and then I heard they were looking for a bass player, and auditioned.’ The group were unusual for the time, not necessarily because they played their own material for the most part, but because they played Ross Wilson’s material, which was provocative and didactic, and also on occasion personal. Wilson’s songs were as unique to his experience and worldview as, for instance, those of Ray Davies. Rudd, who at this stage did not write songs himself, remembers the group was ‘successful to a degree’:
In the early stages we were doing fifty-fifty covers and Ross’s material, and it expanded from there. I think I had something to do with the discussions in the van on the interminable drives from Sydney, saying, ‘Look, we may as well just go for broke and hope to impress industry people – i.e. musicians – with what we’re doing’, because I felt quite strongly that what Ross was writing and what we were playing was so different. And when I look back on it now, it still is. Everyone else was going in one particular direction, a very UK-oriented thing, and Ross was in a different area, probably more towards the States. But it was very different for here. If you listen to it now it’s cute, you’d almost call it psychedelic bubblegum.
Robert Wolfgramm, a schoolboy in the late 60s, and raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, experienced a debauched (in comparison to his usual existence) weekend to which the Party Machine contributed when he attended a show at Piccadilly’s, a club based at Ringwood in Melbourne’s outer east:
First