Sambell, while an EP they recorded got them noticed by an advertising executive hoping to find a distinctive voice for a television advertisement for Trans-Australian Airlines. In both cases, the attention was really directed at Farnham, who went solo in 1967 and released ‘Sadie’ towards the end of that year. The current affairs program 4 Corners devoted a programme to showing – much like The Snap and Crackle’s coverage of the Climax 5 – ‘how a record company promotes an unknown.’80 This, along with manufactured outrage from DJ Stan Rofe, who insisted he hated the single,81 helped ‘Sadie’ become the biggest selling Australian record of 1968.
Daryl Sambell, who would also manage the Masters Apprentices and others, is described by Jim Keays as ‘overtly gay . . . he flitted around like Nureyev and was quintessentially high camp.’82 Sambell has also been described as ‘Rasputin’83, while inside the industry (and, as mentioned, in Marty Rhone’s ‘So You Want To Be a Pop Singer’) Sambell was known as ‘Sadie’. Farnham was chosen to sing ‘Sadie’, and the use of the tag to refer to Sambell was surely as a result of the song being a hit, but Sambell was reputed to personally launder Farnham’s clothes.84 Keays claims that his fellow Masters Apprentice Glenn Wheatley’s fictionalised memoir, Who the Hell is Judy in Sydney, would never ‘pass the lawsuit test . . . The Daryl Sambell-Johnny Farnham stories alone would have tipped the bucket, and half the industry would have come down like a ton of bricks.’85 The fact that Wheatley went on to manage Farnham from the late 70s onwards, and is credited with reinventing his career, only adds intrigue to this statement.
After ‘Sadie’, Farnham had a string of hits including the absurd ‘Jamie’, written by Hans Poulsen; a version of ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’, the possibly humorously titled ‘Looking through a Tear’ and the marvellous Vanda and Young composition ‘Things to Do’. Peter Dawkins, who will feature in future chapters, produced JP Farnham Sings in July 1975, the singer’s last album for five years86 and the final element in the first stage of his career, during which he was overworked and the strategy behind his management seemed primarily one of exploitation.
Wherever there’s a pop group, Lance Peters informs us in The Snap and Crackle of Pop, there’s a manager. Harry Widmer, Carol West (Lynne Randell’s manager), and Peter Conyngham (‘who’s almost as young as all the groups he manages’) are all mentioned. Conyngham is seen on screen railing against unethical practices in the industry; similarly, West critiques ‘little agents starting up that don’t even have a hundred dollars to back themselves.’
A record which retails for a dollar, we are told, will earn the artist four or five cents; top-forty lists are compiled by phoning record stores, but they are not done very comprehensively. Pop, it would seem, ‘floats on a sea of promotions’. A group of DJs from Sydney’s 2UW, including Ward Austin and Baby John Burgess, are shown discussing – and dismissing – numerous records. ‘Climax 5,’ exclaims one contemptuously. ‘What a name to have!’ Another ponders:
Why do they release these records with this simple little backing . . . and then say, ‘Oh you don’t play Australian records’ – You can’t play this in competition with what the Town Criers come up with in Melbourne, which is a good production sound [because] they’ve spent money on it.
The Climax 5 are given the thumbs down, though those present claim – perhaps for the benefit of the television cameras – to be interested in seeing whether the kids ‘vote’ for it. It is fairly safe to assume they did not.
PRINT MEDIA REPORTING, AND CREATING, THE COUNTERCULTURE
Despite, or perhaps because of, Australia’s remote and unexciting image, the You Beaut land is compulsively tuned in to the rest of the world, thirstily absorbing the pop products of its culture and society.—Richard Neville, Playpower (1970)87
Richard Neville (‘an acid munching, jumped up ex-public schoolboy’,88 according to a joking character assassination in The Living Daylights, the Australian counterculture newspaper edited by his former colleague on Oz, Richard Walsh, in 1973-4) was being disingenuous here – or, more accurately, unusually modest – when he typified Australians as merely ‘thirstily absorbing . . . pop products’. He was one of the many Australians who had also been busily producing such products, in the form of the original Sydney incarnation of Oz magazine and more particularly its London-based successor, and through his part in its media fallout. Writing his examination/exhortation of the alternative society, Playpower (‘a quasi revolutionary document for the contentment of crème caramel–slurping rich kid armchair revolutionaries’)89 in his London domicile, he was pitching his plea for clemency to the Western world, which was yet to sit in judgment (via its representatives drawn from propertied Britons over forty) on London Oz for its ‘Schoolkids’ issue.90
Neville had left Walsh to continue publishing the satirical Oz in Sydney, and relocated to London:
The genesis of London Oz was due more to the enthusiasm of a Fleet Street newspaper than the determination of its founder. Shortly after arriving in the UK from Australia I was interviewed by the Evening Standard. The idea of launching a London OZ, at that time barely a passing fancy, somehow ended up a headline: ‘Rebel Aussie whizz-kid to publish here.’ Telephones began buzzing with eager contributors, printers extended lunch invitations . . . and what was once merely my exhibitionistic impulse to impress a friendly gossip columnist soon gathered its own momentum and hit the streets a few months later with a resounding thud.91
Australia had a whirlwind revolutionary 60s like other western nations, in some ways more so, and in the mid 60s individual Australians abroad contributed to – in some cases, led – contemporary debates in the countries where they were living. Readers of the thoughtful Sydney journal Nation, for instance, were informed that Germaine Greer was ‘the biggest figure on the London Other-Culture scene’ alongside Mary Quant and Mick Jagger.92 Neville’s involvement in the international ‘scene’ also justifiably lent him the status of a counterculture hero. The charge that he was a pornographer (because of ‘Schoolkids’ Oz) or someone merely along for the ride – he certainly entertained the latter possibility – was bolstered by an Australian critic in London who saw Neville as a ‘half-phoney . . . playing to the gallery, cashing in on other people’s genuine craziness’.93 It might be contended that Australians could only be this innovative when they left Australia; Lillian Roxon, the Everybodys journalist who redefined music criticism in New York in the early 70s, is another example. There may be some truth to all this, but in any case it would not detract from the status of these individuals as role models for younger Australians.
In Australia itself, the standard pop press was not big on surprises. The early 60s had Young Modern, a concerted attempt by ‘straight’ publishing to make something of interest to the still rather ill-formed teenage audience. Philip Frazer’s Go-Set, which began publishing in 1966, was every bit as cynical in its motivation, but arguably more adventurous and even countercultural.
In 1965 Frazer had edited Melbourne’s Monash University’s student paper, Lot’s Wife, with Tony Schauble. ‘We’d changed it into quite a good political, liberal conscience paper,’ he told Planet’s Lee Dillow in 1972, ‘as opposed to the lairy style that had been uni papers up until then.’94 Frazer and Schauble then started thinking about other publications they might produce:
We had a whole series of ideas that we’d thought up purely as a diversion. One of them was a teenage paper. Normie Rowe was happening at the time. This seemed to be the ultimate – a pop paper for the manipulated teenage populat[ion]. We thought up the whole format in a morning, including the name – which was the corniest name we could think of – that being what the whole game was about. That afternoon we went to 3UZ with our idea. It was incredible. The reaction was fantastic . . . It was just a whole trip that took off without anyone having any motivation at all.95
Go-Set began in February 1966 in Melbourne, and brought the writing of Lily Brett, Douglas