had previously existed separately from one another. Parkinson’s first group had been Strings and Things, who rose to prominence in 1964 at the Narrabeen Antler, on Sydney’s northern beaches. He then went on to the A Sound, a high school band featuring the siblings Helen and Syd Barnes on bass and guitar; this group recorded a single for Festival in 1966.67 Parkinson was a cadet reporter with the Daily Telegraph at the time. Meanwhile the Questions, who included Duncan Maguire and Billy Green, were playing at the Caropus Room at another northern Sydney suburb, Manly; they had recorded an instrumental album with the imaginative title What Is a Question.
The national ‘Battle of the Sounds’ competition, run by the chocolate manufacturer Hoadley’s from 1966 to 1972, was hotly contested; Parkinson’s group tried three times to win what Planet’s Lee Dillow called ‘Hoadley’s Battle of the Rip-offs’. Parkinson recalled: ‘Winning on our third attempt [in 1969] was unbelievable. I honestly feel that when the Groop won [in 1967] we were robbed. I know we had no presentation but F . . . ! Surely it’s music.’ Parkinson and In Focus, wearing ‘stunning black and red uniforms’, eventually won in competition with the Valentines, Aesop’s Fables (from Sydney), the Brisbane Avengers, and Chain.68 As well as scoring a national hit with a raucous version of the Beatles’ recent album track ‘Dear Prudence’, they received a ‘very exciting film festival award for our Coke commercial.’69 A greatly superior record to ‘Dear Prudence’ was its follow-up, the Billy Green original composition ‘Without You’. In 1971, Parkinson reflected bitterly on the dictates of the market: ‘We now observe the graph as it descends. We put “Hair” on the flip side and it was about here that the crack started to widen. We were bowing to pressure, trying to be popular at the expense of our music.’70
The group produced a number of remarkable, edgy and creative singles, mostly written by Green. The band’s line-up was, unfortunately, erratic. Green, who had threatened to leave the band during its Questions period to become a producer,71 and who later did leave to form another, short-lived group called Rush, says now:
In Focus really split up because of Duncan’s inability ‘to put up with Johnny Dick’s sense of groove’. That was it really. Those two were always fighting. I was the glue, the PR person to put them back together again, magically. Sometimes, backstage, Duncan would be making Johnny Dick feel like a heel, right before going on stage. I would jump in there and do a quick repair job so we could do a good show.
Duncan could be a bastard sometimes . . . hard to believe. Eventually, and inevitably, Johnny quit! He couldn’t stand it anymore. That’s when Doug and Johnny split to England . . .
The story of the band they formed with Vince Melouney, Fanny Adams, is told in chapter 8.
The Snap and Crackle of Pop also covers Melbourne group the Wild Cherries, and its report on this outfit opens a new can of worms: the issue of improvisation and its impact on a professional performance. The Wild Cherries – seen here in their second incarnation featuring Lobby Loyde, who had recently defected from Brisbane-Melbourne group the Purple Hearts – claim in the show that they improvise a lot and play more for themselves than the audience. Author and journalist Craig McGregor, who appears in the film in a boxing ring with, amongst others, Sven Libaek and DJ Bob Rogers, claims to have heard the Wild Cherries many times and opines that ‘they’re a very good pop group indeed,’ adding that – contrary to what many viewers may have believed – ‘you can improvise on an electric guitar just as a jazz musician can improvise on the sax.’
Purple Hearts, ca. 1965
Loyde had first played onstage at the age 17 at Cloudland. As he told Iain McIntyre, his first band was the Devil’s Disciples in 1963 in his native town of Brisbane. As mentioned, his friends and competitors in local talent shows back then were the Bee Gees (‘Gibby and the two little dribblers’)72 and Billy Thorpe. Late in life, Loyde remembered Brisbane – particularly its Blues Club – as being as progressive as Melbourne in the early to mid 60s, possibly more so. His Purple Hearts bandmate Mick Hadley remembers ‘one venue, the Primitif’, but also enough shows in halls and ad hoc spaces to make it ‘pretty vibrant, really.’73
The Purple Hearts were a nationwide sensation; Everybody’s appears to have considered them bad boys, running a photograph of them captioned: ‘Normally they are not to be found on demolished building sites, but we took them to one anyway, because we felt the bricks and steel and mortar suited their uncompromising attitude to blues, and their clunky gear.’74
Loyde claims in The Snap and Crackle that the Wild Cherries’ set is ‘almost totally’ improvised, because the alternative is ‘boring, bores the people, bores us.’ He went on to show his ongoing interest, which he would continue to display in different ways through the 1980s and his SCAM management organization, in the contrasts between art and profit:
If you’re going to play the same old stale thing the same way every night you get pretty sick of it, especially when you’re lazy like us and you don’t learn that many new songs . . . Even the most successful pop groups, that claim they make a fortune, don’t. There’s no money in this country. If you got a number one record you’d be lucky to get $600 out of it, even if you sold 50,000 copies.
From the boxing ring, Libaek commends Max Merritt and the Meteors, in part for their jazz inflections: band members Stewie Speer and Bob Birtles (not to be confused with Beeb Birtles, who hit it big in the 70s with the Little River Band) both have a jazz background. The Snap and Crackle take on Merritt and the Meteors is that they’re the ‘oldest pop group in Sydney,’ with an average age of 33; Speer was forty at the time.75 It is unclear when this interview snippet was filmed but it seems likely to have been before a major car accident near Bunyip, east of Melbourne, in June 1967, during which Merritt lost an eye, Speer suffered damage to his hands and had his legs crushed (Merritt joked: ‘Stewie had what they called scrambled legs’), and Birtles acquired a permanent limp. Only bassist Yuk Harrison was relatively unscathed.76 The group continued valiantly, and were even given the prize, in 1969, of a four-part ABC-TV concert series, just before they relocated to Britain, identified by Merritt as ‘an easy place to lose bread’.77
The program goes on to state that ‘the pop world today is a mini-matriarchal society’ – by dint of the young girls who, as consumers, ostensibly control it. When it comes to girl singers – Lynne Randell and Cheryl Gray (later known as Samantha Sang) are held up as examples) – we are told that they are ‘small, cute and plain’.
The Snap and Crackle then profiles Johnny Farnham, shown being interviewed on the new northern NSW television station ECN8 while out touring with the still ubiquitous Col Joye. Farnham speaks in quotable quotes that acknowledge both the extremely surreal lot of the pop star and his gratitude at being so loved:
Last night we played Tamworth and I got the sleeve of my shirt ripped out . . . the fans made me and I love every one of them . . . I haven’t been mobbed very often – I’ve been in the business just since the record’s come out – but I, confidentially, love it . . . I was a plumber for two years before I was a singer – even now I don’t have the nerve to go up to a girl and ask her to dance with me.
We see Farnham and a scratch band rollicking through ‘the record’ in question, ‘Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)’ which, of all the records and songs dismissed as wanting in this book, is probably the worst: it is shallow, smarmy and snide, a sub-George Formby music hall dud without even a redeeming double entendre. A novelty song poking fun at a woman who works in a dreary and unpleasant job, it rather undermines the ‘matriarchal society’ tag, though in his live rendition Farnham does at least veer away from the record to declare ‘I love you though you’ll always be a cleaning lady’(!).
Farnham has been smoking since he was five;78 he migrated to Australia with his family at the age of ten. He was at school