1968 Doug Ashdown made a superb album, Source, which included a composition called ‘Something Strange’, which he explained was ‘written with me singing into a tape recorder. I don’t know what the words meant . . . It’s all quite ridiculous.’217 After recording three albums on his own, Ashdown formed a songwriting and production relationship with Jimmy Stewart; their first album working together, The Age of Mouse, was a double. It was also released in the USA (as a single disc), where it sold ‘a few thousand copies.’ The two went to New York in 1972 and hated it; they were advised to go to Nashville. Ashdown assumed the southern city would feature ‘everyone sitting on porches with corn-cob pipes and guitars – wholesome beautiful country and nice houses’, but it turned out to be ‘full of insurance companies and printers [and] office buildings’.218 Within a year, Ashdown had written a country hit single.
After he and Stewart returned to Australia in 1974, Ashdown had this message for his musical compatriots:
Every single person who makes a record in this country . . . must be made to realise that our market isn’t Australia, it’s the entire English-speaking world.219
It is clear from memoirs, memories and recordings that the Australian pop scene was diverse and vibrant in the late 1960s – most particularly, though not by any means exclusively, in Melbourne. When the Seekers completed their successful Australian tour, which included playing to 200,000 people at Melbourne’s Myer Music Bowl in March 1967 (a controversially brief twenty-minute set!)220 many might well have taken the group’s international success as a sign of the future for Australian music. Indeed, as we will see, when the Seekers split in 1968 some of that band’s members used their international contacts to introduce other Australasians to the world market, and the Bee Gees did the same: Maurice Gibb not only introduced Tin Tin (Steve Groves and Steve Kipner) to the British charts, but also maintained contact and offered opportunities to such Australian stars as Ronnie Burns. Go-Set broke the news in a way that highlights the occasional ambivalence in Australia to the possibility of losing favourite musicians to the wider world:
‘What?’ I hear the anguished cry of many Burns fans – ‘Our all-Australian Ronnie can’t do it to us, even if it does mean an L.P. with Maurice Gibb!’ But you can relax – Ronnie is only going to be away for four weeks – 2½ weeks in England to make the L.P., three days in Germany to promote his single, and a week in the states.221
The album was to be made up of Maurice Gibb and Johnny Young compositions, but was later called off because of ‘costing difficulties’.222 However, when Barry Gibb subsequently lined up more sessions Burns cancelled because he wanted to promote ‘Smiley’. ‘This could be my first chance at an Australian gold record,’ Burns reasoned, ‘and I value that more than rushing into English recording.’223
There are so many examples of Australians relocating to Britain for long or short periods during this period that the music press seemingly had to redefine ‘success’ constantly so as to make each new departure notable. The Seekers had set the bar very high, so that even though their major success was as a pop group, it became necessary to categorise them as something else, in order that each new pop hopeful could be ‘Australia’s first’ pop or rock artist to make waves internationally.
The rising star of Olivia Newton-John is an example. Newton-John, the daughter of a noted Melbourne academic, was a Go!! Show regular in the mid 60s. By the end of that decade, she was chosen to join Don Kirshner’s post-Monkees group Toomorrow (not to be confused with the British pop group with the more conventional spelling), who starred in a film of the same name.224 ‘Two good years out of my life wasted’, she was later to tell TV Week,225 but soon afterwards she had her first big hit with ‘If Not for You’. Like that of the Bee Gees, Newton-John’s Australian career is the familiar story of an artist gaining all the professional experience necessary to launch herself fully formed, yet ‘new’, on the international market.
The mid-60s Newton-John was a bubbly innocent whose career arc was the one aspired to by so many teenage girl TV stars; the rich irony being that in Newton-John’s case, ambition was the only thing she lacked. Indeed, that lack was a considered policy: ‘I wasn’t at all ambitious,’ she told Debbie Kruger in 1994, adding that ‘it’ (success) ‘just kept happening to me,’ but also pointing out that in Australia in the 1960s an ambitious woman was seen as ‘grasping’ and, presumably, self-promoting to an amoral degree.
Newton-John won a contest on Johnny O’Keefe’s show Sing Sing Sing in 1964; the prize, as was common, was a trip to England. Like Little Pattie a few years previously, Newton-John’s education was lost to music and television. The people of Melbourne chipped in to the debate between Newton-John and her mother, who won: she ‘kind of dragged me . . . She said I needed to broaden my horizons.’ By the end of 1965, the two were living in Perrins Court, two blocks from the Hampstead tube station, with Newton-John plotting for many months to return to Australia and rejoin her boyfriend, Go!! Show host Ian Turpie. At a certain point – unlike her singing partner Pat Carroll, who had a genuine desire for success but was unable to extend her visa – Newton-John’s career took on a life of its own. Her first major hit – a cover of a song she disliked, Bob Dylan’s ‘If Not for You’ (previously covered by George Harrison), set her on a country-rock course in the early 70s, and she gained a public profile which soared to megastar status later in the decade.
The La De Das also enjoyed an international profile for a brief period. The group had been formed by Kevin Borich and Phil Key in New Zealand in 1965; they initially recorded ‘in a guy called Eldridge Stebbing’s garage’226 (Stebbing would later become a legendary Auckland producer). They moved to Australia in 1967, and first played at radio DJ Ward Austin’s Jungle discotheque, then supported the Easybeats for their final shows (according to Phil Key, ‘Kevin did a whole set with his fly down. The girls yelled at him and we tried to do our thing and no one knew who the hell we were.’)227 The La De Das achieved some notoriety by taking on a concept album project: a song cycle based on Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, narrated by poet, scenester, and self-styled friend to the Stones and Dylan (and in the real world, associate of the Red Onions and Loved Ones) Adrian Rawlins. Though pretentious, this album is musically marvelous; nevertheless, the group disowned it almost immediately. Phil Key berated his group’s commitment to the record by admitting, ‘We weren’t here to promote it . . . but we wanted to go to England, and we had some money and we didn’t care.’228 The La De Das toured France; in one more story of almosts to throw on the rock history pile, they reputedly failed to attend an audition with Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant because their truck broke down.229 They also ‘almost’ had a hit with the Beatles’ song ‘Come Together’, which they had recorded on the understanding that the Beatles would not release theirs in the near future – then they did.230 The group entered a period of disarray, but reconvened in Australia in the early 70s and recorded some excellent material; their Rock and Roll Sandwich, produced by Rod Coe (of whom more later) is fast, loud and fun.
HEADING FOR THE SEVENTIES
Joe Camilleri, whom we have already encountered as a member of the short-lived Drollies, was one of thousands of young Melbournians hopping between bands, developing his musical versatility and style, throughout the 60s. At the time, he says, ‘I was living in North Altona and I wanted to live in St Kilda’231 – in other words, he was a suburban boy who longed for bohemia. In 1986, Camilleri gave an extensive overview of his early career to Wendy Milsom and Helen Thomas:
I was fortunate that the band called the King Bees were desperate for a singer. They came from the other side. I came from Altona and I was a bit of a wild dog in those days. They were all Melbourne Grammar boys [and] Glen Waverley High kids. They taught me a lot, I couldn’t speak English before I met them. They were doing a job in Footscray. I auditioned for them and we went through about forty songs . . . They used to back Normie Rowe . . . So I would do Normie Rowe songs, and ‘I Belong With You’ and all the Easybeats songs.
We