Dig. David Nichols S.

marveled at Poulsen’s ‘white pyjama suit and love beads’.⁷³ Poulsen’s cachet at this time can be deduced from his appearance in Stork, where he performs in the extended party scene, backed by Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. Carrl and Janie Myriad (née Conway, sister to Captain Matchbox’s Conway brothers), who played mandocello and ‘dolcema’⁷⁴ respectively, were described by a journalist as ‘a tall blond boy looking like Louis Hayward as Captain Blood [and] a girl with long dark hair and a face that would not have been out of place in a Renaissance painting.’ They advocated a form of music they called ‘ragtime progressive bluegrass’, releasing ‘Last Saturday (We Fell in Love)’ on the label – it did not chart.⁷⁵ However, they appear to have been an exception to Fable’s run of diverse hits at that time.

      This brief period of great success allowed Fable to make investments in a number of other acts including Allison Gros, who had a number one hit in mid 1971 under the name Drummond with a cover of the Rays’ 1957 hit (written by Frank Slay and Bob Crewe), ‘Daddy Cool’. Ron Tudor is interviewed in The Rock Scene 1974, and pinpoints as the major drawback to operating in the Australian record industry the difficulty of reaching critical mass:

      We’ve had a few handicaps – one of them being . . . the size of our domestic market, which is the one we have to live and survive in, and we have to gear our productions to survive in our market of 13 million people . . . we can’t run to making the kind of productions that’ll make a big impression overseas.

      Tudor professed himself mildly heartened, however, by the links his label had made internationally:

      A few years ago I would have been appalled at spending more than $4,000 on producing an album. Recently we spent $15,000 dollars on the new Brian Cadd album that’s coming out . . . We’ve placed Cadd’s album overseas, so we get advance moneys . . .

      As well as pursuing an international solo career (largely American-based, through Chelsea Records),⁷⁶ Cadd managed a Fable subsidiary label, Bootleg,⁷⁷ and the Bootleg Family Band – originally formed with Cadd at the helm to back the label’s various artists – had their own top-ten hit in early 1973, a cover of Loggins and Messina’s ‘Your Mama Don’t Dance’. Bootleg also released Mississippi’s hit records and a commercially successful LP by Kerrie Biddell in 1973, and generated sufficient revenue, it would seem, for Cadd to convincingly sue the label for $10,000 in royalties in the mid 70s.⁷⁸

      Fable’s achievements provided encouragement for other ‘minor’ or independent labels that soon followed, including Havoc, which showcased the production talents of Aztecs drummer Gil Mathews. The most prominent and longest lasting of these new ‘minors’ was Mushroom, established by Michael Gudinski with Ray Evans in 1973; some journalists claim that Mushroom ‘blurred the lines between independents and majors,’⁷⁹ though this is probably most true for those who would like to see those lines blurred, or who never really understood the distinction between major and independent in the first place. Certainly Mushroom had a distribution relationship with a ‘major’ record company (Festival) from the outset, which disqualifies it as a truly independent label (‘Without the backing of an established label like Festival there would have been no Mushroom Records’, Stuart Coupe writes in his biography of Gudinski).⁸⁰

      MAGIC MUSHROOM