1969, Vanda and Young – at this point jointly the Brian Wilson of the group – were holed up in a flat in Moscow Road that had previously been a jingle studio for pirate radio. They were concentrating on making demos, often for other artists, with a view to restoring the group’s fortunes. Somehow – it now seems bizarre that such a thing could happen – the last proper Easybeats album, Friends, was made up almost completely of Vanda and Young demos, sung mainly by Young, with the addition of two group tracks, ‘St Louis’ and the regrettably titled ‘Rock and Roll Boogie’. Composer credits on almost all tracks are given to one ‘Russell’, though whether this is record company error or a ploy devised by Vanda and Young to negotiate their way through the complications of being exclusively signed to more than one label is difficult to judge.40 In his comprehensive 1977 interview with Glenn A. Baker, Young described this record succinctly as ‘a fuckup that came from changing labels . . . Harry and I played the drums and just about everything else.’41
‘St Louis’ offers an early example of Vanda and Young’s tendency to reference American place names in their songs, though as Vanda conceded to Debbie Krueger: ‘I wouldn’t know what bloody St Louis was like; I’ve never been there.’42 Another peculiar habit of theirs is to begin songs with the information that the singer/narrator is walking down the street. ‘Walking in the Rain’, famously covered by Grace Jones, is perhaps the best of these, though ‘Yesterday’s Hero’ offers strong competition. It had to be a strategy, and it certainly served them well in the following decades.
The group was petering out, and there are many suggestions that Stevie Wright’s heroin use, which was to dog him throughout the 70s and 80s and make him an embarrassment to his former bandmates and many in the industry, had begun (Tony Cahill was already hooked). They returned to Australia in October 1969 to make some money, recording an Easybeats Special for Channel 7 and performing 35 live shows. Vanda announced his engagement to Melbournite Robyn Thomas. The support act for the group’s shows was the Valentines, for whom Vanda and Young had written some songs. It seems clear in hindsight that, although there was no official announcement, this was the end. ‘Eventually we’ll come home,’ Vanda told the press, suggesting that he and Young would be working behind the scenes with a range of artists.43
Tait puts forward the tantalizing notion of a plan to relaunch the Easybeats in London in the early 70s involving Harry Vanda, George Young and his brother Alex, plus drummer Eddie Sparrow, who worked extensively with former Soft Machine guitarist Kevin Ayers.44
Python Lee Jackson, with Tony Cahill, would have a freak international hit in 1972 with ‘In a Broken Dream’, largely because they’d happened to employ Rod Stewart, at the time a relatively unknown session singer, when they recorded it in 1970. Dick Diamonde did nothing musically significant after the Easybeats. Wright, described by Vanda in 1969 as a ‘novelist, an actor, and “an all-round show-biz person,” took on menial jobs, joined the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, consolidated his aforementioned heroin habit, and began working on a solo album. But as he told Ed Nimmervoll in 1975, it ‘just wasn’t coming together’ – he’d never written music before and hadn’t written lyrics for years – and so he ‘went to the boys and they saw the basis of something good in what I’d done.’ Essentially, ‘the boys’ (Vanda and Young, of course) took over the project; they ‘played practically everything on the album between the two of them’, as well as writing almost all the songs.45 The resulting Hard Road (1974) – and its 1975 successor, Black Eyed Bruiser – followed a similar formula; they are ersatz Easybeats albums, indicators of where the group might have gone had they stayed together. They also form the best ‘missing link’ argument for the theory that AC/DC was essentially a continuation of the Easybeats.
It was reported in 1974 that the multiple contracts in which Mike Vaughan had entangled the band made it impossible for Wright to do what he wanted him to do (with Vanda and Young’s approval), which was to form his own new Easybeats, aided by agent Michael Chugg46: the name was effectively ‘unusable’.47 Wright’s early solo forays were highly successful, but his addiction would soon ruin his chance of becoming the vocalist with Mott the Hoople48 – and, most likely, with AC/DC. Certainly, Bon Scott came across like a parallel-universe Stevie, as well he might have done, given the predilection his Valentines had for Vanda/Young compositions.
The Vanda and Young continuing partnership is covered in further detail in chapter 7. Like the Easybeats, it appears to have gone into abeyance without any fanfare; a 2006 John Paul Young album, In Too Deep, features a picture of chief composer/producer Harry Vanda at the controls with a very empty seat beside him. When ‘Friday on My Mind’ was voted “Best Australian Song” by the Australian Performing Rights Association in 2001, it was Harry Vanda who served as spokesman for the duo (and the band), as George Young was living in apparent seclusion in Portugal, Stevie Wright made no sense, and the others were now absent from the industry. But the Easybeats’ legacy was already assured, without the need for any industry kowtowing; in fact, Alberts themselves had begun the process of enshrining the Easybeats’ legacy with the release of a 1977 compilation with the aforementioned ridiculous title The Shame Just Drained: it only scratched the surface of the previously unreleased material. A 2-LP career retrospective, Absolute Anthology, emerged the following year. Repackaging has long been Alberts policy: the teen-oriented various artists compilation Rocka was soon joined by ‘collector’-oriented releases such as Alberts Archives, featuring obscure Vanda/Young productions and early 60s tracks from Billy Thorpe, the Throb and, of course, the Easybeats.
For better or worse (probably worse, given the awfulness of the record), INXS and Jimmy Barnes gave the canonization of Vanda and Young perhaps its biggest boost when they covered ‘Good Times’, the Easybeats’ worst single, in 1987. The Barnes/INXS version appeared on the soundtrack of Joel Schumacher’s film The Lost Boys and thereby became a top-fifty hit in the US.49 Barnes, in particular, slaughtered the song (though at least he didn’t replicate guest backing vocalist Steve Marriott’s pig squeals on the original). But whatever its artistic value (essentially none), the record showed that when Australia’s most successful pop/rock artists of the late 80s wanted to represent the best of Australian commercial rock music, they turned to the Easybeats. There was something in their work for everyone, and almost all of it was magnificent.
my music has brought young people to tears, to exclaims of ‘genius’, yet, still, there are these incredible people who think im a child. Gosh, i was screwed up too, i used to cry at night, but i got out of it, i created my self out of the mess my parents manufactured, but it seems theres not many like me. isnt there anyone who values truth before pleasure? i have no resentment, only a rather compassionate repulsion, and hence, a lonliness.1
– Pip Proud, circa 1967
In 2006 Lobby Loyde described Australian music of the 1960s and 70s as ‘bloody sissy pop. The worst elements of pop.’2 This view, coloured by insider experience, has its merits. Sissy pop – a valid form in itself, with Johnny Young’s song ‘The Girl That I Love’ perhaps a prime and marvelous example of it – certainly thrived in this place and time (the alert reader may also have noticed that Adelaide even had a group in the mid 60s called the Syssys). But it is also undeniably true that some of the best pop music ever made came about in this era. If Pip Proud was pop (folk pop?), then he proves it.
While much of the flowery and celebratory puff which seems unavoidable in writing about the 60s should be viewed with some scepticism, the short public career of Pip Proud between 1967 and 1969 demonstrates, at the very least, that major record companies of the period were happy, even eager, to release experimental and entirely original Australian-made music, however