For a brief period in the mid 1960s Bower was turning out the most powerful and pointed R&B pop singles in Australia, if not the world: ‘Wars or Hands of Time’, the B side to ‘Undecided’, was an early anti-Vietnam pop song that packed a considerable punch, and ‘Buried and Dead’, the Masters Apprentices’ second single, was a vibrant gem. It is a shame that the juvenile psychedelia of ‘Living in a Child’s Dream’ was Bower’s last major hit: the mounting pressure of the group’s increasing celebrity became too much for him. He suffered a nervous breakdown179 and was compelled to leave the band, who were now in need of a songwriter. Another great writer, the iridescent Brian Cadd – a rival to Poulsen and Young, who is discussed further in chapter 8 – gave the group a song called ‘Silver People’ which they turned into one of their best tracks, the compulsive ‘Elevator Driver’.180
Like the Missing Links before them, the Masters Apprentices had two very different line-ups. Two years into their ascendancy, the entire band aside from Keays had been replaced for various reasons (health, competence, a wish to stay in Adelaide rather than relocate to Melbourne). ‘Essentially, the Masters were two entities,’ Keays writes in his autobiography; the first version ‘ceased to exist at about New Year’s Eve 1967.’181 The difference between the Masters Apprentices and the Missing Links, of course, is that the Masters had one constant in Keays (with the exception of the band’s final, short-lived incarnation in Britain).
The early 1968 line-up of the Masters featured Doug Ford, formerly of the Missing Links and Running Jumping Standing Still, Colin Burgess, later AC/DC’s first drummer, and guitarist Peter Tilbrook. True to the spirit of 1968, the band wore ‘clothes which Jim designs and we all wear,’ huffed Burgess, ‘except for Peter [Tilbrook], who’s commercial and buys off the rack.’182 Keays had hoped to get Beeb Birtles into the group as bassist; instead, a chance airplane seat assignment found him talking with Daryl Sambell, who suggested Glenn Wheatley,183 then playing in the Brisbane group Bay City Union.
In late 1969 the group recorded ‘Turn up Your Radio’: ‘It screams and tears thru your trannie,’ yelled the ever-modern Meldrum from the pages of Go-Set, ‘like a JUMBO JET taking off from KENNEDY airport.’184 Having exhausted all avenues (and themselves) in becoming the biggest group in Australia in the late 60s, the Masters Apprentices journeyed to the UK in May 1970;185 Glenn Wheatley and Marcie Jones, who was working there with her group the Cookies, pretended to be married in order to rent a house in London.186 The group would later record at Abbey Road; at least one of their last singles, ‘Because I Love You’, was a very good song.187 Keays claims that the Bronze label, home of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (featuring Mick Rogers, previously of Procession) and Uriah Heep, wanted to sign them – but that EMI wouldn’t let them out of their contract.188 Their Masters Apprentices’ legacy and Keays’s subsequent activities will be discussed in later chapters.
SUPERDROOP’S SUPERGROUPS
Jim Keays recalls that in the mid 1960s he and other Masters would go and see the Twilights at Adelaide’s Oxford Club: ‘They were fantastic’, he says, while adding: ‘We didn’t want to be like them.’189 Indeed, the Masters’ story was that of a group always chasing a decent songwriter and songs; the Twilights were immensely versatile and scintillating and also had at least one brilliant songwriter in Terry Britten. Like many of the abovementioned groups, however, most of their best-known hits are covers; Britten’s contributions are the exceptions.
The Twilights depicted as puppets of their manager, Garry Spry
The Twilights (who were discussed briefly in chapter 2 in their earliest, vocal-only incarnation) moved to Melbourne in 1965 after recording their first single, ‘I’ll Be Where You Are’, at Vi-Sound Studios on Hindley St. They had a hit, ‘If She Finds Out’, the following year and won Hoadley’s National Battle of the Sounds in 1966. In order for them to take part, one of their vocalists (McCartney) had to exit the band temporarily, because the competition required a five-piece group; the prize was a trip to the UK, and the other band members worked their passage on the liner that took them to Britain so as to raise the money for his fare. Terry Britten’s ‘9.50’ was recorded at Abbey Road in early 1967. Drummer Laurie Pryor contributed a song called ‘Young Girl’, and the group also played a Hollies cover, ‘What’s Wrong with the Way I Live’. Whereas Jim Keays’s memory of Abbey Road is glimpsing John Lennon playing piano through a studio door, Glenn Shorrock had the distinction of standing next to Paul McCartney at a urinal.
The Twilights were an unusual bag. Shorrock, for all his vocalising and other musical skills, seemed happiest when dressed up as ‘Superdroop’, a fat superhero character the group introduced into their live performances towards the end of their career as they tried to spark up their act; Superdroop is also featured in the video they made to promote their single ‘Cathy Come Home’. Twenty years later – after his dream run with Little River Band – Shorrock returned to this kind of cabaret when he concocted Two for the Show for the Sydney nightclub Kinselas, where he performed impressions of Joe Cocker, Easybeats, the Bee Gees, Billy Thorpe, Ross Wilson and Johnny O’Keefe.190
The Twilights’ first, self-titled album had been almost entirely covers; ‘Needle in a Haystack’ had been a particularly big hit for them. Their second (and final) album, Once Upon a Twilight, is probably one of the best psychedelic pop records of the 1960s, replete with an unlistenable comedy number (‘The Cocky Song’) and Britten gems such as ‘Mr. Nice’, ‘Blue Roundabout’, ‘Take Action’ and ‘Paternosta Row’.
Cliff Richard covered a song from the LP, Britten’s ‘Mr Nice’ (Britten would go on to spend much of the 70s as Richard’s guitarist/songwriter); at approximately the same time, Britten released a solo single, ‘2000 Weeks’, named for Tim Burstall’s film and written on commission from Columbia Pictures.191 Once Upon a Twilight had the same name as a TV pilot made in 1967 that starred the group (as themselves), comedian Mary Hardy and Ronnie Burns (indeed, the show is an origins story for Burns, in which the hick mummy’s boy from Gumnut Gully, ‘Alphonse,’ becomes a pop star). Shorrock’s new year’s resolution for 1968 was ‘for the TV show to be a success, and for the group to make it in America.’192 They went to the UK instead and, facing the possibility of success – a Top of the Pops appearance and pirate radio exposure – they bailed. In his memoir, From This Side of Things, the Groop’s Brian Cadd muses on the fate his band and Shorrock’s both suffered there:
The Twilights and the Groop were typical of so many of the acts that went to London and failed. We experienced enough once we got there to realise that no-one from Australia at that point really understood how it all worked. The Groop had taken a manager over who was spectacularly out of his league in an industry that was huge and powerful and that swallowed up acts like ours, virtually on sight.193
Reputedly the Twilights could earn a thousand dollars for a half-hour appearance in Australia; in many of their performances they chose to recreate a famous album of the time – such as Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – on stage, though little evidence remains of the effectiveness of these imitations. They announced their breakup in 1969, giving the highly unlikely explanation that Pryor had ‘told the other members of the six-member group he wanted to concentrate on jazz’ (it’s possible that he wanted to, but he didn’t). They played their farewell performance at the Sydney Trocadero at the beginning of February that year.194
Shorrock almost immediately went into management, taking on one of two bands known at the time as the Avengers – the one from Brisbane, rather than the one from New Zealand.195 The Brisbane Avengers were set to record two Terry Britten compositions for their single; Shorrock later claimed, wistfully, that the group was ‘like a “little Twilights” to me.’196 Ian Meldrum ‘hurriedly made my exit’ from