H T R A E N O E TIM J a s o n Wa lk e r
Jason Walker is a New Zealand-born, Sydney-based writer and musician. He has written about music, and a variety of other topics, for magazines such as Penthouse, Rolling Stone, Music Australia Guide, Time Out Sydney and many others since he began his professional writing career in 1984. Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth is his second music biography. His first, Gram Parsons: God’s Own Singer, was published in 2002. Jason is also a musician and songwriter, and recently released his third album, Ceiling Sun Letters, on the Laughing Outlaw label.
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Ja son Walker
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly. Extracts from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1996. Extracts from Most People I Know by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1998.
First published in 2009 Copyright © Jason Walker 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 1 74175 823 8 Text design by Phil Campbell Index by Puddingburn Publishing Services Set in 10.25/16.5 pt Utopia by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgements Author’s note Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Epilogue Discography Sources Bibliography Index
1946–62 1963–65 1965–66 1967–69 1970–71 1972–75 1976–82 1983–87 1988–94 1995–99 2000–05 2006–07
vii xi 1 Little Rock Allen, the opening act ‘Hey, Bill—do you remember Surf City?’ Searching for that Aztec vibration Thorpe’s wild years Aztec is an energy Sunbury says, Suck more piss! American Aztec Beyond Eden’s Gate Billy joins the Zoo Australia, a slight return 21st Century Man The bitter taste of Tangier
5 39 73 93 115 135 173 219 231 247 263 279 297 305 307 315 317
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Acknowledgements
I must first of all offer my deepest gratitude to my agent, Jane Burridge, who initially planted the idea of a Billy Thorpe biography in my head as we discussed Thorpie just days after his passing. I appreciate your strength, resolve, good humour, and faith in my work. My thanks go to Irene Sullivan at the Canberra office of the National Archives of Australia who assisted me, particularly with copies of records of the Thorpe family’s arrival in Australia. Thanks are due to Jane Palfreyman at Allen & Unwin, who offered absolute encouragement, great food and wine, and for keeping a close and optimistic eye on what was at times a trying project. Special thanks indeed to the book’s editor Clara Finlay, and copy editor Alex Nahlous, who made the manuscript hit those sweet, high notes in the bits where I left it slurred and out of tune.
Acknowledgements vii
Thanks to Clinton and Debbie Walker for their hospitality and encouragement, as well as hilarious reminiscences of seeing and hearing Thorpie. Thank you to Paul McIntyre, without whom I wouldn’t be where I am today. Many thanks to curator of Australian history and society Peter Cox, and reference librarian Philippa Rossiter and the staff at the Powerhouse Museum, who gave me access to popular culture periodicals from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a killer selection of Australian music reference books, during the early days of my research. Thank you to the Aztecs—Vince Melouney, Tony Barber, Warren Morgan and Paul Wheeler—for their recollections. Thanks also to Michael Browning and his sister Coral Browning. To Ed Nimmervoll, for the benefit of his direct personal experience with Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs during his tenure at Go-Set during the 1960s and 1970s. To former Aztec drummer Gil Matthews for his interest, help and frank storytelling during the research for this book. Thanks also to Sammy Gaha, who provided both great hospitality and a memorable interview at his home. Thanks are due to another of Billy’s dearest and oldest friends, Sir Wayne Martin, who contributed photographs and other memorabilia in addition to several lengthy interviews. Thanks to Noel Mengel at Brisbane’s Courier-Mail for allowing me to use his own interview material with Billy, gathered over many years. Thanks also to the Courier-Mail’s Matt Condon for his assistance. Also thanks to Meredith Connor at the same
viii Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
newspaper for her memories of seeing Thorpie at the first Sunbury. Robb Richards, who played in Brisbane’s legendary rock’n’roll band the Planets, also provided much fascinating background material and insights into Billy’s early days as a performer. Thank you. Many thanks to my old flatmate Shane Johns, whose personal library and music collection were helpful and inspirational. I owe you more than a debt of gratitude. I’d like to thank Eliza Metcalfe for allowing me to set up my Melbourne office in her front room during August/September of 2008. Your kindness and generosity will not be forgotten. Thanks are also due to Jackie Marshall and Miha Vanic. Much of the first draft of this book was finished in the latter’s home in Ljubljana, Slovenia. My gratitude to both of you. Many thanks to my dear friends Brian Crouch, Corrina Steel, Dave McCormack, Craig Gilliver, Samantha Douglass, Leah Greenfield, Eleanor Laud, Jenny Queen, Michael Taylor, Michael Carpenter and Stuart Coupe. Thanks and much love to my family.
A cknowledgements ix
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Author’s note
Even though William Richard Thorpe has long been considered rock royalty in his adopted home country of Australia, his passing brought to light passionate recollections from men and women— many now grandparents—who had stood before Thorpie in past years at the Australian rock’n’roll altars of renown. From TC’s Sound Lounge and Birdland in Brisbane, Surf City, Hawaiian Eye, Chequers and the Whisky A Go Go in Sydney’s Kings Cross, and fanning out across regional towns big and small, in the dust of Sunbury, Myponga and Ourimbah, the mud at Wallacia, Narooma, Bluesfest—anywhere fans of loud Australian rock music gathered, there would be Thorpie in the midst of them. Thorpie didn’t only perform. During his almost fifty years in show business, he broke new ground, engineered major changes to the way Australian venues and promoters did business, demanded and received at one point the highest fees ever earned by an Australian artist. It’s fair to say that Oz Rock would be a far
A uthor’s note xi
different beast today had the pocket rocket from Moorooka never been unleashed upon us. He was the first in a series of national iconic pop stars that came in the wake of the manic Johnny O’Keefe, but predating the likes of Normie Rowe, Ronnie Burns and a host of others, and sculpting a new raw, soul and R&B-influenced sound before anyone had ever heard of the Beatles in Australia. Indeed, it was ‘that Thorpie fellow’ who kept the Beatles off the number one spot during the first flush of their Australian stardom, with a cover of ‘Poison Ivy’. Even though his Australian career waned after he left the country to attempt a break into the unforgiving US music market, it was always a welcoming audience that cheered him on every time he returned home. For a time, new music fans equated his name with a forgotten era of craven blues rock, a misunderstood and uniquely Australian take on hard rock that fell from fashion as bands like Sherbet, Australian Crawl, Little River Band and Skyhooks took live shows out of the ‘suck more piss’ ethos and into more rarefied places, where irony and sarcasm entertained audiences more than a balls-out riff or a thundering head beat. It’s time for Billy Thorpe’s sometimes mercurial career to be given a thorough appraisal, because above all things, he was truly Australian. He was a battler, a doer, a self-promoter, and a voice that was often imitated and was never diminished by abuse. Billy Thorpe was no saint, but he wasn’t interested in being liked. He just wanted to be adored. Jason Walker Darlinghurst, Sydney, 2009
xii Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Prologue
In the beginning, they called him Little Rock Allen, Australia’s Youngest Rock’n’Roll Vocalist and His Electric Guitar. It is a Saturday night in 1958 at the old Cloudland Ballroom, a stirring and strange venue, its soaring silver-blue arch out of place over Brisbane’s Bowen Hills. No less out of place is young Billy Thorpe. A year into his performing career, the eleven-year-old lad is nervous, his hair slicked into a casual pompadour, his face scrubbed to pinch-able perfection and a too-big Gretsch Country Gentleman (sold to him by country star Reg Lindsay) slung around his shoulders. The place is crammed with Saturday night punters, young couples, sharpies, bookies out on the tonk, bored waitresses, musicians drinking for free and undercover cops scouting for underage drinkers. A talent scout from Sydney is reputed to be in the crowd somewhere, a backstage face contributes to the
Prologue 1
conversation. ‘Someone’s gonna be famous here I reckon,’ says the piano tuner, cleaning his nails with a pocketknife. A singer closes the door of the ladies’ room and gargles red wine and honey to prepare her throat. The nerves of all but the most experienced performers gathered in the dressing-rooms are jangling. The talent booker comes in to post the running sheet on the wall, next to a reminder to performers that anyone who smokes, chews gum or swears onstage will not be invited back. Who’s on the bill tonight? A boogie-woogie pianist, two teenage yodellers, a contortionist, a man who can swallow talcum powder then regurgitate it still dry, an Aboriginal whip cracker/country singer, and a knife thrower. The main attraction though is Little Rock Allen. The boy’s short career is already full of highlights—the classic chance discovery by a talent scout named Gwen Iliffe who gave him the Little Rock name, two supportive parents, and a crisp, booming voice that you’d file under ‘hillbilly’—and he’s now a star on the Brisbane television show Teen Beat. Young he may be, but this is not his first show. His nerves are those of the experienced showbiz kid. His is the sweat of the prepared rocker, confident but not overly so. His voice and hands steadied to lash out into a number by Eddie Cochran or Hank Williams. He is already a contracted performer, appearing at Birdland in the heart of Brisbane with the Planets, the city’s premier rock’n’roll band. He also has a regular evening spot at La Boheme restaurant. His fellow artists recognise his legitimacy as a rocker, the way in which he can compress his voice, add a little vibrato
2 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
here and there, not to mention his manic, slashing guitar style. Although he has the confidence of a performer ten years his senior, Billy Thorpe still has a long road ahead of him. Nevertheless, the stage is where he belongs, now and for the foreseeable future. Behind him, he feels the presence of Mrs Mary Saint Ledger, his accompanist for the twenty-minute set. ‘We’re on, William,’ she says, squeezing his shoulder, a familiar smile in her voice. The stage curtain rattles apart quickly, and Little Rock plugs the guitar into his tiny Coronet amplifier. It crackles and whines as he jiggles the jack. Signal. Electricity. Wood, steel, wire and two young hands. His little knee twists into a wiggle and he counts along with Mrs Saint Ledger who’s now seated at the battered upright piano behind him. A photographer from the Courier-Mail darts quickly onto the stage before Billy can step up to the ribbon microphone. ‘Smile, Mister Little Rock,’ says the cameraman with a blinding flash. Little Rock makes a D chord and turns the high beams of his charm on, a smile as wide and sunny as Beaudesert Road in high summer. The piano begins to pound out the rolling bass line to Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire’, and Little Rock flies into the hurricane stomp of the song. The crowd howls as one, an enthralled, electric applause. They see his desire, his ambition to transcend the boundaries of his age, and in that moment, as the child becomes an entertainer, there comes a noise like a high wind. They are whistling at him, each one shouting encouragement, men and women alike. Billy accepts it as his due, his tribute from the adults that surround
Prologue 3
him. Already, they seem to forget that he is a child; afterwards some of them will even attempt to buy him a drink. It is the women that Billy hopes to please the most. They are most important to him: his mother, Mary Saint Ledger, the young brunette at the table down front with the spray of lavender in her bosom. He plays his hardest and best for them all. As Mary vamps those last four chords on the piano, the crowd seems to explode into the air like a flock of birds rising at a gunshot. They’ve never seen anything like this boy before. The evening is crowned a success, though Little Rock has to be driven home before midnight, to talk excitedly with his parents, to relay the triumphs and ecstatic moments. Then he eventually goes to bed, where he will lie awake for some time, his body and mind wired into a high gear. Before he can sleep, he must relive those moments that transported him, the exciting flashpoint where his voice, his guitar and his whole being became one vibration of pure blues static. The cornerstone is set, the plumbline hangs true and there will be a thousand more shows, he thinks to himself. Many even better than this one, to many thousands more people. He knows what he is destined for, and for now, knowing is enough. He can sleep.
4 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Chapter 1
1946–62 Little Rock Allen, the opening act
Whatever else people say about Billy Thorpe, his timing would always be perfect. From the first moment he drew breath, his presence, or his ‘life force’ as one friend described it, was always ‘larger than life itself’, and the stories that are often told about his voracious lust for life, his sense of humour and his ego make perfect sense when you consider that it was his very arrival that brought his parents such profound joy. Billy Thorpe was the quintessential ‘baby boomer’, a child of the first optimistic flush that followed the end of the Second World War. In that period of pure exhilaration at the end to such a terrible conflict—the horrors of which still had yet to be fully disclosed— men and women celebrated the return of peace in time-honoured fashions. Master Thorpe’s parents were not young when he was conceived. William Henry Thorpe and his wife, Mabel, lived on
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 5
an unprepossessing suburban street in a small semi at 29 Windsor Avenue, Flixton, just ten kilometres from the centre of Manchester in England’s ‘grim’ north. Grim it was, early in the peace. The city was still a bomb site, littered with craters the size of football fields which were brimming with rainwater, brick rubble and dead cats. The city’s enormous cotton mills, soap factories, tanning plants and other major industries were still reeling from the heavy damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe. Equally unrelenting had been the steady attrition of the city’s young male workforce, most of whom had been pressed into active duty all over the world; those who had survived theatres of conflict in Europe, Africa, southeast Asia, the Pacific and the vast oceans between were slowly being demobilised and returned home. William Thorpe senior had not seen active duty. Born in 1904, a decade before the outset of the Great War, Bill was already in his mid-thirties when Germany invaded Poland. Though a certain gung-ho nationalist fervour might not have allowed it in an era when service to King and country were paramount desires, Bill was already, in the parlance of the time, getting on in years. By all accounts kind, gentle and generous, Bill loved a good singalong and could be heard tinkling the ivories both at his local pub and at home. He was an ardent lover of all kinds of music—comedy, light opera, vaudeville tunes and popular music—as was Mabel. The pair were first introduced to each other at a local dance in Manchester in 1930 by mutual friends. Mabel, a keen dancer, had been attracted to the diminutive, lively Bill, whose banter and gentility she found engaging. There is very little information about Bill’s work history, though his occupation as listed on various
6 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
forms and several censuses includes ‘lorry driver’, ‘general hand’ and ‘labourer (soap works)’, the latter being the job that appears on his only child’s birth certificate. Although by today’s standards he was not old, at that time men who were above the age for military service were put to work in mostly menial jobs that didn’t pay very well. Mabel worked during the war years too, in a variety of jobs. Women were encouraged to work, and many of them gained well-paying jobs in armament factories and other essential war work schemes. Full-time work was not scarce, and the booming defence industry created a generation of empowered women who stood at lathes and foundries alongside male colleagues and received equal pay. While Mabel and Bill had a good life, they had never come close to having a child. It was not so uncommon to be childless in those middle decades of the twentieth century as the uncertainty of war naturally caused a change of priorities for many couples; considering that in 1945 Mabel was already in her early forties, her sudden pregnancy in June of that year came as no small shock. For the now expectant parents—who had no doubt long since resigned themselves to a childless future—it was thrilling beyond measure to be in the family way. On the afternoon of 29 March 1946, William Richard Thorpe was born at St Mary’s Hospital in Flixton, streets away from his first childhood home. Billy’s was a relatively trouble-free arrival, surprising for all considering that children born to mothers over forty in those years tended not to be carried to term. To the end of their lives, Bill and Mabel knew that their strawberry-blond lad was a blessing in every way. Bill junior was christened for his
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 7
father and grandfather respectively and was almost immediately called ‘Billy’ by his parents and relatives. By the time the inquisitive and mischievous Billy was three or four, Bill and Mabel were considering the next stage of their lives. Mabel had become a stay-at-home mum and Bill was considering semi-retirement. In the years up to 1950, England was slow to rebuild, with rationing of food, clothing and petrol still in force, and the effects of the heavy wartime bombing of Manchester still obvious. After all, most of the city’s industrial estates, nearby suburbs, refineries and city buildings had been reduced to rubble, and the city had burned for weeks on end in the wake of the most sustained Luftwaffe bombings in late 1940. Hundreds of Mancunian civilians died, largely because Manchester’s industrial infra structure made it a prime target. Much has been written about the terrible London Blitz, but Manchester too had literally been razed to the ground. Jobs were being lost at an exceptional rate and many people, Bill included, had to scrounge for work in order to get by. Before long, Manchester lost its appeal for the Thorpes. The complete reconstruction of the city was still over a decade in the future, and since Bill had family there, the trio packed up their belongings and shifted on to Blackpool. Little Billy was about to turn four. As an only child, Billy developed mentally rather quickly, and his school reports would later hint at a mind that was nearly impossible to keep in check. He may have even been somewhat ‘hyperactive’, though no such designation existed at the time except in medical textbooks. The family always preferred to call him
8 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
‘energetic’ or ‘mischievous’, and his father delighted in the way young Billy would sit on his knee and carefully pick out a simple countermelody while Bill played the piano in the front room. Music was an integral part of Thorpe family life. It permeated everything they did, whether it was Billy’s dad sitting down at the piano early in the evening or on Saturdays with friends and family around, his mum singing around the house as she cleaned and cooked, or the warm summer afternoons when Billy played by himself in the backyard with the radiogram blaring loudly on the doorstep. For many, the postwar years represented a renaissance of music, as jazz, folk, country (or hillbilly) and swing music developed at a phenomenal rate. Increased trade between the United States and the United Kingdom and an end to shellac rationing (the primary ingredient in the production of the most popular sound format of the day, the 78 rpm record) meant a minor revolution for family homes starved of mechanically reproduced music since 1940, most having had to rely on sheet music of popular tunes or listen to whatever emerged from the wireless. While the likes of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, growing up only three hundred kilometres away in Dartford, experienced revelations around the cowboy songs of Gene Autry (who had as early as the 1920s recorded excellent blues cuts), Tom Mix and Tex Ritter, the seminal musical moment of Billy Thorpe’s early childhood came at age four and, revealingly, was not some folk, blues or hillbilly cut. Rather, it was the voice of suave French singer Maurice Chevalier coming through the speaker of that wireless radiogram in Blackpool, in the long dry summer of 1950. The song in question was a syrupy accordion and strings confection
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 9
called ‘Sous les Ponts du Paris’ (‘Under the Bridges of Paris’). It must have been an eye-opener for young master Thorpe—he wrote nearly fifty-five years later that as a result of that one song, he ‘couldn’t get enough of music. Any music.’ Billy started primary school in 1951, and for a child so used to getting his own way from doting parents, the strictures of state schooling were unexpectedly harsh. In contrast to his parents’ calm acceptance and the warmth of the family home with its piano and wireless, he had to immerse himself in the discipline of hard work, slightly sour warm milk every morning, a school uniform and, worst of all, other children. Billy was an outgoing, friendly child, but his diminutive stature (inherited from his tiny, dynamic parents) made him the target of bullies almost immediately. His formative schooling in Britain would, among other things, instil in him a lifelong hatred of bullies, infantile behaviour, those who sought to elevate themselves above others, and scrapping. Billy never went looking for trouble, a trait that persisted right through his life, although he was well remembered for the sharp edge of his tongue. His sassyness was loved by Mum and Dad but not so well appreciated at school, where children from much tougher areas of Blackpool thought him soft. Billy had a mouth on him, there were no two ways about it. Rather than let his mouth get him into deeper water, though, he preferred to make jokes: making bullies laugh meant a reprieve from beatings or having your rough woollen school shorts pulled to your ankles. It meant respect and being left alone to get on with the day to day of education.
10 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
It wasn’t all some state-school nightmare, however. Billy did well in some classes, particularly English, music and art, and was drawn to creative pursuits. These came easily to him and he found them all rewarding, even though he would be in his forties before he would take up writing. Music more than anything was his love, his passion and his escape from the mundane. One thing that postwar children like Billy had in common was a desire to escape from their present existence to some other world promised by music. As the first generation in some time to be so completely drawn to popular culture, these children understood the power of music and cinema. The two were often interlinked: the Saturday afternoon serials that seven-year-old Billy devoured at the Tivoli cinema in Blackpool often featured cowboy songs like ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds’ or ‘Singing the Blues’, and the same serials would also feature variations on ‘country and western’ or ‘hillbilly’ music, including the Western Swing of Spade Cooley, yodellers and balladeers. In those days, the music itself was as varied, different and beautiful as the regional areas that produced it: country music, bluegrass and folk music from the Appalachian mountains, blues from the Mississippi, jazz and blues from Kansas and Chicago, folk ballads from Oklahoma, Cajun music and boogie from Louisiana, Texas blues and Western Swing, Californian country and jazz, and Tin Pan Alley popular song and bebop from New York City. Billy found all such music completely irresistible. By age seven, his requests for an acoustic guitar were heard regularly. ✿
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 11
In 1954 the Thorpes, like hundreds of thousands of other British citizens, were considering applying for the Australian government’s assisted passage scheme, which was designed to shore up Australia’s population with English-speaking migrants. Nearly a decade after the end of the Second World War, the Australian government needed the input of migrant workers to bolster the strength of a workforce depleted by the devastating years of war. Aimed at ablebodied men and women, whether single or married with young families, the move to attract new migrant families was supported by a marketing campaign ahead of its time—coloured brochures showing white sandy beaches and suntanned Australians, and promotional newsreels extolling the possibility of a better life in a faraway country. While migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds lined up for a chance simply to enter Australia, whites from Great Britain and other posts of the Commonwealth were not only encouraged to move to Australia, they were offered money and incentives to do so, creating the phenomenon of the ‘ten-pound Pom’. The offer of assistance in relocating must have been as persuasive to Bill and Mabel as it was to tens of thousands of other English folk who happily left their war-ravaged homeland behind to travel to the other side of the world. For a fee of ten pounds (about half of Bill’s monthly earnings), he filled out the application forms from Australia House in London and, in just under a month, the family had been approved for ‘assisted passage’. They underwent the usual medical examinations for pleurisy, tuberculosis, polio and other infectious diseases and were passed fit and healthy, just days after Billy turned nine.
12 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
On 29 March 1955, Billy received his ninth birthday present— the long-desired acoustic guitar. Billy’s obsession with music had already created a niche for him at school, where he would spend hours in the music room picking out melodies on the piano and the school’s few battered guitars. He had of course been pestering his mum and dad for just such a present. He usually got what he asked for—one of the joys of being an only child—and this time he had sold his father on the idea by suggesting that he would be able to earn money with it, rather than constantly asking for pocket money. He rewarded his parents’ faith by applying himself to the instrument with great dedication. Though his hands were still tiny, he forced them into the first position chords, pressing hard to make the chords ring true from the inexpensive guitar’s tough action. With his persistence came encouragement from his dad, who showed him how to tune the guitar to the piano in the front room. It wasn’t long before Billy was perched on the edge of a chair by the family record player, trying to figure out the chords to his favourite country and western songs. He mastered several, and his parents were quite taken aback at how rapidly his voice and guitar playing began to mesh. In early June 1955 the Thorpe family sailed from the Tilbury docks, forty-two kilometres south of London, on board the RMS Strathaird, bound for Gibraltar, and then on to Naples, Italy. Young Billy stayed close to his mum and dad for the first two days of the trip, but the lure of playing with the gangs of children roaming the ship was too much, and soon he was racing around the decks with new friends while Bill and Mabel relaxed in the wood-panelled
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 13
tourist class lounge with their fellow migrants. They speculated about what they’d find in Australia; many of them had relatives who had gone to Australia already and were aware that while their destination was exotic, the initial accommodation would be less than salubrious. There was talk of Nissen huts in the hot, dusty outer suburbs of Sydney, snakes and spiders, and coarse Australians who spoke with a most unflattering accent. The first leg of the trip through the Mediterranean Sea was much rougher than many of the passengers would have expected. By the time the boat reached Port Said at the mouth of the Suez Canal in the early morning and joined the large queue of boats, the sixteen-hour journey through the deserts of Egypt would seem beautifully surreal by comparison. The waters were calmer and the desert air heralded the long warm days and nights of cruising ahead, as the Strathaird navigated the 163-kilometre canal and sailed out into the Gulf of Suez and on to Aden, then to Bombay (now Mumbai) and Colombo in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). As the ship crossed the equator, the Strathaird’s crew observed the usual mildly humiliating naval ritual of Neptune’s visit, beginning with the ship’s purser or captain coming aboard dressed as King Neptune and overseeing proceedings where young men were made to wade through rotting garbage, were pelted with eggs and then smeared with melted ice cream, before being thrown into the ship’s pool. After Colombo, the next stop would be Fremantle, Western Australia, then Melbourne. On the morning of 25 August 1955, the Thorpes disembarked from their long ocean voyage at Port Melbourne dock, and after their passports and documentation had
14 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
been checked by immigration, the family boarded a bus headed for the Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel. It was here that the Thorpes discovered that a Melbourne winter wasn’t far removed from the northern hemisphere’s in temperature, although it could be quite agreeable during a winter’s day if the sun held. Melbourne held a great deal of familiarity for English migrants, as its architecture displayed a loyalty to England, the people spoke a reassuringly mangled version of the Queen’s English, and between its trams, church spires and trees, it seemed like a mutation of Home. Homesickness, naturally, reigned. Among the migrants, English and European alike, there was an inherent regret at having to leave behind all that was familiar—even if it had been pockmarked with bullet holes or damaged by sustained bombings. But for Bill Thorpe, Australia would be his second home in his middle age; neither he nor Mabel felt particular sorrow at having to leave their home country, apart from missing the few family members left behind. The first order of business was finding Billy a new school and before long he was settled into St Kilda Park Primary, just off St Kilda Road, where the tough children of St Kilda’s abattoir workers, dockers and union men made it hard going at first. St Kilda was a steadfastly working-class area; since Billy hailed from the hardbitten north of England, he should not have been too fazed by it. But he was a small boy for his age, and the combination of his accent and his size meant that he was once again routinely bullied. Not even his natural talent for defusing trouble could keep him from being knocked around. The children would say to him, ‘Get
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 15
that bloody plum out of your mouth, ya poof!’ and threaten to beat him up, sometimes even following through. Finding suitable work in Melbourne proved harder than anticipated for Bill senior. He rattled around between menial jobs, working for a variety of employers. He briefly drove a lorry and worked as a builder’s labourer. He generally found the casual dismissiveness of some Australians quite offputting. They seemed not so different to northerners back home with their tough, no-nonsense speech, their rough compassion and their extra ordinary ability to drink gallons of beer every afternoon before the somewhat unusual 6 pm closing time. Bill knew that if he couldn’t secure employment within two years, the family would have to return to England. It quickly became clear that Melbourne was not to be the final stop for the Thorpes. Though it was interesting enough as a place to live, Bill and Mabel had their hearts set on somewhere different—more tropical and laid-back, a place for a peaceful semi-retirement. As they spoke to their Australian acquaintances, they realised that they wanted to live somewhere like Brisbane. Bill didn’t like the idea of living in Sydney so much, and Brisbane’s location and lifestyle was much more appealing. He spoke to the immigration department, who advised him of the opportunities available to English migrants there, and hinted that he might be able to run a small grocery store or mixed business, as banks were lending money to those starting small businesses. Decision made, Bill senior asked for relocation to Queensland and purchased a small grocery store in Moorooka, Brisbane. In November 1955, the Thorpes boarded a train at Flinders Street Station bound for Queensland.
16 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Compared to the soot-speckled brick terrace homes of Manchester, with row upon row of bomb pits, skeletal buildings and the destroyed infrastructure of that city’s industry, the drowsy, low-slung outer suburbs of Brisbane in 1955 seemed so contented that they almost appeared to sleep all day in the humid air. Having disembarked from the long hot two-day train journey, the Thorpes’ first port of call was Yungaba, the immigration depot at Kangaroo Point on the Brisbane River. Inside the converted Italianate man sion, built some sixty years previously with sugar cane money, Billy came to know a little about his home city: it was slow, and the heat was oppressive. His parents wilted in the humidity. Still, it wasn’t too long before the family was installed in the threebedroom home behind the storefront on Fegen Drive, Moorooka, near Beaudesert Road, with a tram stop across the street and Billy’s new primary school just a few minutes up the Magic Mile. Life must have seemed idyllic. During the Second World War, Brisbane had become a garrison town for US defence personnel, and its population of 334,000 grew suddenly by about seventy-five thousand American men and some women. It had been rewired then for the entertainment necessary to keep the minds of soldiers occupied when they were not fighting the Japanese just a few hundred kilometres away. All of this recent history must have seemed new and remarkable to the Thorpes; by great contrast, Manchester had pursed its lips during the war and since American soldiers didn’t bring their shore-leave frivolities as far north as Lancashire, the Thorpes would have found Brisbane very open to fun, music and certain subtropical mischief.
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 17
In the Thorpes’ first year in Brisbane, they heard the tectonic movements of popular culture—Elvis Presley on the radio had the kids excited, and the movie Blackboard Jungle had young people dancing in the aisles at the city’s Regent Street Theatre. The police had already organised a ‘bodgie squad’ to root out evildoers. They waited outside the cinemas and patrolled the city’s alleys looking to capture this elusive sub-species before they could subvert the morality of the Brisbane suburbs. The bodgies (the name derives from the Australian slang term for something which is ‘bogus’ or ‘dodgy’, hence ‘bodgie’) were young people who imitated American dress, hair, and music tastes and, above all, their interest in the opposite sex. The Brisbane newspapers led the call for a crackdown on the immoral behaviour of the young, who had suddenly found a way to express themselves in a manner the British-influenced establishment found distasteful. One column in the Sunday Mail fatuously calling itself the ‘Modern Youth Panel’ noted that ‘it is blatant, if not immodest, to walk down Queen Street [Brisbane’s main street] hand in hand in daylight’. Clearly, a substantial knee jerk was about to locate itself perilously close to teenage groins already straining at the thought of freedom. In 1956, Brisbane’s city fathers discovered that teenagers were not about to let the ‘squares’ push them around so easily. Sydney rocker Johnny O’Keefe was already famous in Australia as ‘the Wild One’ and had begun his ascent to stardom with his unrestrained take on rock’n’roll, but the city council refused to allow one of his shows at the Brisbane City Hall to be billed as ‘rock’ music. Instead, it was promoted as a ‘jazz’ gig and O’Keefe
18 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
was, rather humorously in retrospect, described as ‘a Gentleman of Jazz’. It fooled no one, and the show was far from sedate. In November of that year a showcase of Australian rock’n’roll groups took place at Brisbane Stadium, which was attended by young people wearing the cuffed (or ‘pegged’) pants and immaculate ducktail haircuts that tended to identify one as a ‘bodgie’. It appeared to the local constabulary that, fired up by the libidinous intent of the music, these young folks simply itched to dance and make trouble. Several of the three thousand otherwise well-behaved teenagers were intent on confronting the police with their dancing, and in the subsequent rush, lights were knocked down, someone started a fire, and electrical cables were shorted out; even though eight people were arrested, no one stopped dancing. The next day’s newspapers fanned the public outrage, and radio 4BH even suggested that this ‘devil’s music’ should be banned, which sparked letters of protest from kids who simply wanted to dance. Fearing the loss of their young audience, 4BH management instead started a rock’n’roll show and found the increase in audience share more suited to their tastes. Now at least part of the adult establishment acknowledged that these ‘teenagers’ in fact had a great deal of pull, as both a consumer force and a political one. Indeed, Brisbane was nothing if not a modern city on the front foot economically. The recently opened British Motor Corporation plant in Eagle Farm offered jobs and security to its workforce, and the city’s workers spent their weekends gambling, drinking, dancing and fighting, just as their fellow Aussies did in every city and town across the country. The fact that many of
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 19
these workers were under the age of twenty and spending their money around town made them a valuable commodity. Businesses came to know and value these teenagers and their money, and rock’n’roll began to lose its scuffed reputation. The Thorpes’ shop at number 10 Fegen Drive was perched near the corner of a small block of homes between Beaudesert Road and Blomfield Drive, about a minute’s walk from what was then the last stop on the tramline that ran to and from the city. Billy was installed at Moorooka State School, but just as at St Kilda Park Primary, the bullying continued mercilessly. Although at various times it was said that bullies made his life ‘a living hell’, Billy’s initial shyness gave way to a more outgoing, even flamboyant style. He apparently claimed on more than one occasion that he had come from America and was even heard to adopt a suitable accent to press the point home. In time, possibly born from the desire not to stand out too much or attract the wrong kind of attention, Billy’s accent—the ‘American’ and the English—faded, and he soon sounded as ocker as the best of them. He never lost his desire for attention though; he performed in school plays, sang at school concerts and was constantly getting into trouble with teachers. While he saw school as merely an impediment, his academic performance was not terrible, and his progress was seen as average. Socially, he was more popular among the girls than the boys, which seems to have set the course for the rest of his life. He could misbehave convincingly but was at the same time polite in class, though often outspoken and sometimes disruptive.
20 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Outside of school, he was obsessed with music and movies, and spent most of his spare time playing the guitar and practising his yodelling style. He was a big fan of country music, which had overtaken pop music as his first love, although he still rated the music of Jerry Lee Lewis, the star—along with fellow rockabilly reprobate Elvis Presley—of Sam Phillips’s Memphis-based Sun Records. In the storage room at the back of his parents’ shop, he would sit down with his little record player, practise his songs and neglect his homework. When it was too warm inside, he would sit on the steps behind the shop among the packing cases and keep strumming. Billy was in many ways the typical only child of older parents—he had their endless approval and unconditional love and no other siblings for them to be concerned with—so he was living in a place of contentment at home. Billy had only himself for company, and he enjoyed the time he spent inside his own head and the endless hours of guitar playing. Even though he was still at primary school, Billy was already developing his career as an entertainer. He had plans for the future and in 1957 those plans began to eventuate. His first show may have been at the Catholic church hall in Salisbury, singing ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, or it might have been the same song but at the Railway Hotel in Woolloongabba. Either way, the boy was a star on the rise. No one was less surprised about this fact than Billy and his doting parents. Nineteen fifty-seven was also the year that television began to boom around Australia. It had officially started broadcasting in 1956 but the adaptation of technology moved much more slowly
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 21
then, and it took nearly two years for television to arrive in Brisbane. But when it finally arrived, talent and interesting stories were needed to take it to the next level. In early 1957, Gwen Iliffe was skirting around the Thorpes’ Fegen Drive home, trying to see if anyone was out back. Gwen and her husband Jim were in the process of putting together a television variety show, The Channel Niners, for the latest television station to come to Brisbane. Gwen wasn’t a booking agent but she was scouting for talent and unlike some places, talent didn’t just fall off the trees in Queensland. You had to know where to look. That day, she was looking for a piano teacher and musician named Mary Saint Ledger. The only address she had for Mary was Fegen Drive, Moorooka, and she went to the local shop and post office to see if anyone knew where she lived. She stopped for a moment to collect her thoughts when, from the back of number 10, she heard a child’s voice quite unlike anything she’d heard before. Following the sound she found a young boy, perched on an old Coca-Cola crate by the back steps, pounding away on his plywood guitar and emitting yodels so impressive that she immediately asked to speak with his parents. As it turned out, Mary Saint Ledger lived just around the corner, and when the two were introduced, Billy discovered that she was as good a pianist as his hero Jerry Lee Lewis: ‘She could have gone toe to toe with him,’ he later said admiringly in his biography. As Gwen was to discover that very day, although he was only eleven years old, Billy was ready for stardom. He was unstoppable in his pursuit of his goals and possessed all the instincts of a confident teenager at least six years older. There was no power
22 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
which could keep him in school except the cold hard fact that the state required him to attend three more torturous years of enforced schooling. With that ahead of him, Billy would briefly consider his homework before picking up his guitar and imitating Slim Whitman. What he wanted more than anything was to sing. And with the help of Gwen, her husband Jim and Mary Saint Ledger, that’s exactly what Billy did. Mary offered to back him up when he played his shows, and the pair went to work on a set that traversed popular songs, country, hillbilly, rockabilly and rock’n’roll. Mary was keen to tutor Billy on the piano but found his hands were too small. In any case, he was content to play the guitar. Billy began playing live shows with Mary, working under the nom de plume Little Rock Allen. This rather unusual stage name had been Mary’s idea, agreed to by Gwen and Jim, who wanted the boy to gain whatever professional experience he could. The name gave the boy credibility as it implied that his stature was unrelated to his age or talent; he could have been anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five for all anyone in the audience knew. But there was another reason for the insinuation of Billy’s ‘maturity’. In the 1950s, the authorities were zealous about protecting the rights of children who worked in entertainment to prevent them from being exploited by unscrupulous booking agents, promoters and parents. Government agents had been known to turn up to gigs at licensed venues where underage performers worked and would literally remove them from the stage. Billy’s teacher at Moorooka during 1958 was Garth Knudsen, then fresh from teachers training college. He recalled: ‘[Billy] was
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 23
a delightful student and a so-so cricketer with a wonderful personality, a trait that has stood him in good stead during his life and his career.’ Knudsen stayed in touch with Billy when he moved on to high school, and remembered giving the boy some career advice: ‘. . . when he told me he was leaving Salisbury State High School to embark on a musical career, I very wisely told him he would get nowhere without an education.’ As Brisbane’s skyline grew year on year, the appeal of the city and Fortitude Valley beckoned Billy away from Moorooka, where many streets had yet to be tar sealed and the dust flew in summer to fill your mouth and nose. The city’s newly opened Festival Hall, though quite an ugly building, became universally loved for the musical and cultural experiences that took place there. Already rebellious, cultured and adventurous, Billy traversed Brunswick Street, hopping trams to find the 45s he loved in the city’s few record stores. In 1960, Billy had left behind intermediate school and moved on to Salisbury State High School. Now that he’d entered the last years of schooling, the completion of which he considered a necessary evil, he still burned with the desire for recognition and adoration. His schoolmates remembered him as a perpetual clown in the classroom. He loved the attention, and would do almost anything to court it; as always, his ‘fan base’ was mostly female. His teachers were not so impressed by his antics. The high school principal, Mr Mackie, had been very outspoken on his feelings about ‘bodgie’ behaviour, haircuts and music. He had already banned any students with ‘unsuitable hair’ from attending school functions, including dances. ‘The dances are school dances, not
24 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
open to the public, and we reserve the right not to admit anyone we don’t want. There are certain types of haircut we don’t want at the school and therefore we don’t want them at the dances,’ he told the students. Not surprisingly, Mr Mackie took an almost instant dislike to Billy and warned him that his lifestyle would lead him straight to Boggo Road Gaol. Despite attracting the attention of the school’s formidable headmaster, Billy was a popular and outgoing student. In 1960, he performed in the school’s adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance. He could appreciate the melodic complexities of Gilbert and Sullivan’s mannered nineteenth-century world. He didn’t particularly care for the music but it gave him the opportunity to sing from his heart, to show the expression and power of his young voice. Billy at thirteen was not like the other children at his school. He cultivated the impression for others that he always had somewhere better to be, and he couldn’t be bothered with their childish activities. This was a boy whose favourite record was Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and the B-side, which he loved almost as much, ‘Lovin’ Up a Storm’. He grew his reddish-blond hair unconventionally long by the standards of the day, and people can still recollect him standing out as he climbed aboard the bus or tram from Moorooka to the city, self-consciously resplendent in a suit and boots. As any fool knows, you can’t choose your time on earth or foresee how you might live those moments. Some of us are blessed with both the ability to pick the moment that defines us and the preternatural gumption to simply run with it. William Richard Thorpe had no special gift of foresight; he was simply a ball of
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 25
fire who accelerated his career development from an age when most people are still kicking a football around with no idea of what may occur, let alone the possibility of predestination. Of course, it helped that Billy Thorpe had landed in Australia at just the right time, with an admirable punctuality, a toothy smile and a toehold in light entertainment. He was always right on time. Right on time to feel the first rays of his early stardom. Some said Billy was spoiled by his parents, but even with the selfawareness, brashness and the solitary nature that goes with being an only child, Billy heard everything in musical terms and saw life with a visionary’s clear sight. He was too wired, too wound up to wait until he was the right age. The star inside him could not be denied and his outrageous need to express himself was greater than the confines of his small, chubby body. For a kid who was often bullied, he showed no outward signs of psychological scarring. Lobby Loyde, who attended the same high school as Billy under the name of John Baslington Lyde, recalled years later that he and Billy were both bullied in the Queensland state school system, though he admitted that it was much worse for the smaller Billy, who was a full year younger than Loyde. It may have been tough at times, but Billy was so pragmatic in his pursuit of his goals that he never let the bullying destroy him. If anything, it stimulated in him the desire to believe in the possibilities of an unknown future, to be stronger, even more optimistic and to rise above the petty pecking order. It also helped that he had support from the two people who loved him and never judged his behaviour. Billy explained how the dynamic worked between him and his parents, as they allowed
26 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
him to pursue his interests without censure. ‘My parents did a wonderful job of raising me, mainly because they let me be. I was very, very lucky and my parents saw the direction I wanted to go in. They allowed me to play music, so I was out playing gigs unchaperoned when I was ten and eleven with guys in their midtwenties and thirties. They were the antithesis of showbiz parents in as much as they stayed out of the way, but when I needed moral and financial support, I got it. I don’t think I would have ever gotten into show business without their support.’ Mum and Dad’s support was instrumental here, but it also helped that there was a country music TV show that ran every day called Ranch Party. ‘It was this show that we got in Australia when television first started,’ Billy remembered. ‘They were re-runs of shows shot in the US in the late fifties and featured Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley—all these people—and Joe Maphis was the guitar player. I was influenced by Memphis hillbilly and rock’n’roll, living in a country twelve thousand miles away. Those were my early roots.’ ✿ The way some people like to tell it, Brisbane as it was in the 1950s remained unchanged throughout the 1960s and clung on into the mid-seventies. It was mostly thanks to one Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the Queensland state premier who made the ‘Sunshine State’ his kingdom, the boys in blue his private army and the bemused residents his ‘people’. Bjelke-Petersen was actually of Danish extraction and was born in New Zealand but had emigrated to
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 27
Australia as a boy. He owned a peanut farm in Kingaroy and kept his personal interests at a premium while in power. Brisbanites were unafraid to be themselves during those repressive years, even if it meant they just had to be prepared to find a heavyset copper standing on their head if they attempted to push the limits. Since that was the modus operandi of rock music itself—to subvert the status quo and have a really good time doing it—people were prepared for the repercussions. Robb Richards, who played drums for the Planets during their six-year career as the pre-eminent rock band in Brisbane, remembers: ‘Brisbane at the time was unbelievable. Joh was premier and boy, anything the kids wanted they had to really fight for it. There were marches in the streets! The cops, I mean, they were just bad boys. You had to watch yourself. In the newspapers, columnists called us “sons of the devil” for playing rock music. It was that movie . . . what was it? Blackboard Jungle. That had ’em dancing on the seats and in the aisles at the Regent Street Theatre, if you can imagine that.’ The redemptive, soul-uplifting power of music had cut through in Pig City. ‘Rock’n’roll was an us-and-them mentality, and the acts developed in Brisbane because of this even greater need for expression in a place like that,’ Billy said to Brisbane music journalist Noel Mengel in 2006. ‘It was only in the sixties that the extroverted kind of look became more accepted. In the fifties, a bodgie looked like a bodgie, mate. There were spivved-up Holdens with foxtails on the aerials, the T-shirts with fag packets tucked up under the sleeve, and the cars cruised Queen Street at night as the coppers looked on. It was like the film American Graffiti. This was Brisbane Graffiti.’
28 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Perhaps not surprisingly, it was an American who brought this rock’n’roll music closer than ever to Australian kids—Lee Gordon, an outgoing and perceptive Yank from Detroit, Michigan, who had come to Australia as a merchandiser for Royal Art Furnishing. Emboldened by the crazed reception for pre-rock star Frank Sinatra after he had barnstormed through shows in Sydney and Melbourne, Gordon then introduced the ‘Nabob of Sob’ Johnnie Ray and storytelling singer Frankie Laine to audiences, just as rock music had begun to exert its massive cultural pull in America. Through his US connections, Gordon heard of another young singer named Elvis who filled musty auditoriums, dusty county fairgrounds and sagging canvas marquees across the southern United States, leaving young women damp everywhere he went. Such was the pulling power of this new music they called ‘hillbilly pop’ or, in the more covert Negro slang, ‘rock’n’roll’, that when Gordon brought Bill Haley & His Comets to Sydney, no less than ten thousand screaming kids and a vaguely concerned constabulary showed up at Mascot to welcome the pudgy, good-natured former country and western star who was already in his thirties. Haley was shocked at his reception and even more so when Gordon begged him to stay another week and play more shows to meet the outrageous demand, offering Haley US$100,000 into the bargain, an astronomical sum even by today’s standards. The Musicians Union, which had a stronghold even in the dour union-hating territories belonging to Bjelke-Petersen, insisted that as a condition of their working visa touring artists from overseas needed to employ Australian union musicians either as backing or as support acts, a condition that still exists today. Lee
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Gordon’s patronage of the Brisbane-based Planets ensured that they became the go-to guys for rock, jump, rhythm and blues and, in fact, any musical style. In 1959 Gordon offered them the opportunity of being the support act for teen sensation Fabian and following this, they either backed or supported (or both) international artists like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as Aussie sensations Col Joye and Johnny O’Keefe. Billy was right there, standing at the side of the stage breathing in the sweat, tears, exhalations and exertions as his musical heroes worked the stage. It was all pure energy, like sunlight streaming through a crack in the curtains. ‘Through that regular association with the Planets,’ wrote Billy in 2006, ‘I got to be around, stand in the wings and listen, watch rehearsals, be in the dressing-rooms and occasionally play on the same stages with many of the world’s rock’n’roll giants.’ Birdland, the club that the Planets oversaw, was a local phenomenon, the clubhouse of choice for teens wishing to ‘rock’. The Planets had spent several weekends renovating the club, a ballroom on the second floor of an Art Deco building on Adelaide Street near King George Square. The building was notorious during the Second World War as the Cocoanut Grove, a club set up by the US army to entertain American servicemen, though it had more recently been home to a legal firm and the huge sprung dance floor was covered with partitions. The band and their friends tore out the wooden partitioning and purchased industrial quantities of cheap paint (a pound per twenty-litre tin) without knowing the colour. It turned out to be a memorably vile pink. By the time the floors had been sanded, the toilets fixed up and two
30 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
bars set up to sell soft drinks, Birdland (named not for the New York jazz club but rather as a play on the name of the popular ballroom Cloudland, and as a signifier that it was somewhere you could go to meet a ‘bird’) was a going concern, and the candy floss interior design seemed not to matter so much when the kids were stomping away on the dance floor. The balcony had to be closed to dancers after the opening night when it partially collapsed. It was an institution for young Billy, a school where he could invest his desire to learn and his intelligence in the direction of his career. ‘It’s where I learned most of what I know about showmanship and music. And a good deal about life.’ In that enormous space Billy worked on his act, learned some more guitar licks and got his stage presence happening. He played cricket on the dance floor with the Planets after gigs until five or six in the morning. Perhaps like the big brothers he never had, the Planets kindly introduced the boy to rock, blues, R&B, babes and beer. At Birdland, Billy claimed to have drunk his very first beer sitting on the trolley that regularly rumbled up the lift shaft that climbed the common wall between the club and the Globe Hotel right next door. It was also the location of another pivotal moment in Billy’s life: the band dressing-room on the third floor was where he lost his virginity at age twelve to a girl nearly twice his age. As well as his work with the Planets, Billy scoured the newspapers for opportunities. He looked for talent quests and school shows he could participate in; he even applied for and got a restaurant gig at La Boheme in the city. He had a simple desire to perform under any circumstance, even if it meant tailoring his material to suit a different type of audience. For the La Boheme
1946–62: Lit tle Rock Allen, the opening act 31
gig, he learned songs like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, which would later become one of his most requested and was associated with him as much as any other hit he would record. His love for schmaltzy pop tunes was legendary and caused consternation among his friends, but Billy was never ashamed of it. He thought the old songs, lavished with strings, were lovely to sing and play. It was also good training for his voice, which could—as style and taste demanded—wrap itself smoothly around an elongated vowel or be truncated into a dying scream in the manner of Little Richard. As far as Billy could later recall, the chance to actually record a single eluded him. There were no recording studios anywhere in Brisbane—you had to travel to Sydney, to the near mythical Festival Recording Studio at Pyrmont. The opportunity arose several times to record a song live onto tape at radio station 4BC, where Geoff Atkinson, a Thorpie booster and fan, was a popular DJ. The Planets’ weekly appearances on the Channel Nine show Teen Beat involved miming rather than playing live, in order to counter the usual problems that emerged with live broadcast television and outdated sound technology. The Planets would consult with the network and the radio stations to find out which songs were performing well in charts and playlists, select a few songs, write up basic charts and record a version of each song at the 4BC studio, which they would then mime to ‘live’ on the television show. On Wednesday nights, Billy would sometimes go and record with the band. Sadly, none of this material has survived. When Alan Bond bought Channel Nine in the 1980s, all such archival material at all branches of the network was destroyed, literally thrown into huge skips and used as landfill. The Teen Beat
32 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
shows were the only such recordings from this early and important period of Billy’s career development, and those radio station tapes were probably erased as well, since purchasing new reels of magnetic tape was very expensive. As Billy’s desire for fame and fortune accelerated, there was no doubt in the minds of the Planets that he could make it, and he remained grateful for this faith for the rest of his life. ‘For the respect and friendship those guys showed me at such a young age I owe the Planets a debt of gratitude I can never repay. I was never treated like the kid. Without realising it they mentored and coached me into being a performer and what I learned being around, listening and playing with them and the artists they worked with has stayed with me all my life.’ In their typically supportive way, Bill and Mabel remained devoted to their only son, and when Billy was fifteen, they allowed him to travel to Sydney with the Planets’ pianist Steve Neil. After the twenty-hour drive to the Big Smoke, Billy discovered Kings Cross for the first time and was immediately hooked. He and Neil roamed around, checking the place out. Since it was a Mecca for musicians, Billy wanted to be part of it, and immediately. While he was in Sydney during that week-long visit, Neil told him about the auditions Channel Nine in Sydney was holding, looking for artists and performers of all kinds. Billy rocked up with his guitar and pulled out his best songs. He must have impressed them, because the following day he received an offer to appear on The Jimmy Hannan Show, an incredibly popular television show screened live around the country every week.
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Returning to Brisbane after his pivotal first Sydney visit, Billy did something he’d not tried before: he began working as part of a duo. He teamed up with another young local singer, Peter James, at a Birdland gig where the pair pulled out an unrehearsed version of the Isley Brothers’ ‘Shout’; the duo worked well together. One-time Sydney boy Peter James was then the Brisbane identity most hotly tipped for national success. He was a little older than Billy and appeared on local television shows. John Blanchfield, who these days manages Billy’s old rival Normie Rowe, was in the early 1960s a Brisbane performer with a devout following of his own, and he describes how the two were seen at the time: ‘Billy was the biggest around town, no doubt about it. But everyone considered [him] to be a bit of a flash in the pan, and their money was on Peter James.’ For about five months, they performed around Brisbane and were beginning to attract a lot of attention, even in Sydney where word of their act had started getting around. In March 1962, the duo format was building momentum; Billy turned sixteen and made good his escape from high school. The time was right to try their luck in Sydney: he and Peter farewelled Brisbane with a packed house show at TC’s Sound Lounge in the city, a performance which had many people again swearing that it would be Peter James who would become famous. Blanchfield describes the experience: ‘I was there at their farewell Brisbane show . . . and they were doing Everly Brothers, Isley Brothers—great duo and duet songs—and I loved them, thought they were amazing. But I have to honestly say I thought that Peter James was the bigger star.’
34 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
On his second visit to Sydney, Billy was ecstatic; at last, he was in a perfect position to realise his ambitions. He and Peter went to live in Maroubra with Peter’s parents, who were just as supportive of their son as the Thorpes, and who were prepared to put their money behind the pair. Peter and Billy shopped their act to numerous bookers, agents, managers and scouts, and soon there was plenty of interest in them. To increase their chances of making more money, they also positioned themselves as solo artists. They attracted as much attention separately as they did together; the gigs rolled in, and soon the pair appeared on The Jimmy Hannan Show together, then again separately a few weeks later. For Billy, the Kings Cross Theatre, now called Surf City, was a continual beacon. They had the biggest, youngest crowds, the most enthusiastic dancing and if you went off there, you could start big and get bigger. Prior to its Surf City incarnation, the Kings Cross Theatre had been a popular movie house as well as a showcase for legitimate theatre. In the 1930s, the likes of Noel Coward, Vivien Leigh and Peter Finch had sweated at its footlights. The legendary Pete Seeger had played there in the 1940s, when he was already notorious at home in the US as a communist sympathiser. The family behind Surf City was the Harrigans, in particular Eileen—known to all and sundry as Ma—and her son John, the venue’s manager. The music they featured was ‘surf’ music (hence the name ‘Surf City’): not just the clangy, heavy reverb of surf instrumentals but surfie Stomp songs sung by, among others, fourteen-year-old Patricia Amphlett. Every Sunday, John Harrigan hosted auditions to find singers to take the Stomp and similar
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sounds to the Harrigan family’s recently opened Surf City in Auckland. The audition proved successful for Billy and Peter, but the reward was surprisingly bitter: only one of them could go to New Zealand as the Harrigans couldn’t afford to send both. As Billy put it, ‘Here’s where fate either deals you a hand or doesn’t. Peter and I flipped a coin and I won. Well, it seemed like I’d won at the time.’ Flying into New Zealand was another first for Billy. He wore himself ragged, working two one-hour shows five nights a week, singing, and educating New Zealand kids in the ways of the Stomp. But there was clearly a limit to how much stomping Kiwi teens needed. Within a fortnight, Surf City in Auckland rolled over dead, flat busted, which left Billy in a tight spot—stranded in another country with no money, nowhere to stay and no return ticket. It was this sequence of events that led to Billy’s hilarious hamburger-eating contest at the White Lady Pie Cart in Shortland Street off Queen Street, Auckland’s main drag. Billy had been bet a substantial sum of money that he couldn’t polish off a dozen hamburgers with the lot. Sadly for the bettor, he didn’t realise that Billy had a murderous appetite and self-described ‘hollow legs’. On a last-ditch double-or-nothing bet with the bloke who had made the wager in the first place, Billy won the contest. This win meant he was able to return to Sydney with some money in his pocket—and some great stories to tell. But when he arrived at Peter James’s parents’ home to pick up some possessions, he discovered that Peter had gone underground, depressed at having missed out on what he thought was to be his chance at stardom, and his mother had some fairly strong words for Billy, whom she
36 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
accused of ruining her son’s chance at a music career. Billy never took such things to heart, though he was a bit surprised; Peter’s parents had known that it was a simple case of heads or tails that had taken Billy on his New Zealand adventures, nothing more. Peter James, Auckland and Brisbane were in his past now. Beyond his youthful imaginings of a musical career, there was a new world taking shape. His new life was only just beginning, and he was about to meet a new group of people, including his first real band. Behind the boyish good looks was that voice and the killer instinct, the desire to grab an audience by the scruff of the neck, to make them love him. Even his first name ceased to define him. Everyone called him ‘Thorpie’ now.
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Chapter 2
1963–65 ‘Hey, Bill—do you remember Surf City?’
There was never a time in the twentieth century when the Cross wasn’t the centre of all the dirty work going on in Sydney. For decades before the day Thorpie piled out of Central Railway and got the tram to the Cross, it had been the score, the push, and the razor lifting the epidermis and letting the claret out. It was bent and curly, late starting and open early. You lived there because you wanted to be in the middle of all that thrilling humanity, having a perve, having a ‘lair’, a punch-up with mugs and a good knees-up. For those who got on the tram and returned home to beachside working-class suburbs like Coogee, Maroubra or Bondi, the Cross was its own reward. There was no reason to live there but it was fun to visit, to dabble in it. If you were there, perhaps you remember your ideal weekend, drinking yourself insensible at the Kings Cross Hotel, perving at the girls at the Pink Pussycat then crawling home to the suburbs, picking the teeth out of your bottom lip on your way to work on Monday morning.
1963–65: ‘Hey, Bill—do you remember Surf Cit y?’ 39
For Sydney, Kings Cross was no sideshow—it was the circus itself. It was the main event in the round, like Beale Street in Memphis, or Soho in London: the asylum where the inmates calmly went about their business while from the periphery thousands of suburban yobs came to gawk at the bohemians, the elderly poofs, the poets, the working girls, the trannies and freaks, all the while behaving so madly themselves that it beggared belief. Everyone wanted a piece of that action, to be in on the carousel. The Cross was more than just a lair-up and ten times greater than the sum of chat-up lines—it was what passed for depravity in the opinions of those who had never thought of living there, and it became merely a dip into someone else’s hard-earned freedom. To try to imagine how the Cross teemed even on a weekday lunchtime, the interested can dip into the classic Australian film They’re a Weird Mob, by legendary British director Michael Powell. More than any other cultural touchstone of that period, the film— based on the book of the same name by Nino Culotta (aka Sydney writer John O’Grady)—offers a lingering look at how Kings Cross, the city and Circular Quay were in those heady days when Billy Thorpe reigned. To seventeen-year-old Thorpie, that stretch of road from Oxford Street across Burton, Liverpool and William streets, past Victoria Street and Bayswater Road, and winding on down by El Alamein Fountain, was a single rhinestone of reflected light and life stitched onto an otherwise dead continent. It represented the apex of his aspirations—it was what everyone who didn’t live there called ‘the big smoke’, and inside its city limits he could take his
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shot at the brass ring. The neon-lit curlicues of Kings Cross drew him close. ✿ On the corner of William Street and Darlinghurst Road in June 1963, there were two main attractions to catch your eye. One was a café known as the Hasty Tasty, where the straights stared in at you as they passed on into the wonderland of Kings Cross that lay beyond. Perhaps they lingered a moment or nipped inside and paid their two bob for a mixed grill. The other was a Kings Cross institution, where mad men gathered every hour on the hour for the girly show: the Pink Pussycat. Two legendary Sydney identities, ‘Last Card’ Louie Benedeto and Sir Wayne Martin, ran the Pussycat, which in 1963 (having been rebuilt once after a firebombing, just prior to several further successful arson attacks on the location) stood in pretty much the exact spot as the CocaCola sign does now. The Cross was a wake-up call for Billy. If his excitement about coming back to live in Sydney after his abortive trip to New Zealand had been any weaker, it might have given him pause for thought. But self-doubt didn’t come easily—it was more a matter of collecting his bearings. Of course, even at seventeen Billy was financially better off than most blokes his age. With the ability to support himself and the drive to succeed, booking in at the Canberra Oriental Hotel at 223 Victoria Street was a good move. With his innate confidence, Billy felt right at home there. As he wrote in Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll, the Cross was ‘music,
1963–65: ‘Hey, Bill—do you remember Surf Cit y?’ 41
musicians, poets, painters, dips’ joints, brothels, hookers, pimps, hoons, charity molls, spruikers, toffs, chats, mooks, lairs, mugs, phizgigs, drag queens, straights, shines, bent cops, street gangs, armed robbers, killers, tea-leaves, neon, glitz, Surf City, the Chevron Hotel, the Rex, the Mansions, the Hampton Court, the Mayfair, the Pink Pussycat, the Paradise, Angelo’s Spaghetti Bar, the Kellett Club, Les Girls, Italian, Hungarian, Thai and Indian food, and the best bloody schnitzels on the planet. God, I loved it.’ One of Billy’s first acquaintances up the Cross was ‘Little’ Sammy Gaha, whom drummer and author Leon Isackson called ‘one of the all-round crazy people of the day’. Gaha’s older brother Tony played drums in a Latin American band that performed around the Cross during the early sixties. Gaha was a Coogee boy who, like Billy, had been performing professionally since before he entered puberty. Aged fourteen, he would front up to Sammy Lee’s nightclub and ask the infamous Mr Sammy if he could get up with the band and sing. It didn’t take long before Gaha was doing his own thing, singing professionally and working the audience like an old hand. Gaha’s stories are legendary and hilarious, so it’s little wonder that he and Billy Thorpe were destined to hit it off. ‘I had met Lenny Bruce in 1962 when he came to Australia, and I hung out with him. He had this thing where he would dress up like a priest and go to strip clubs. I was doing pretty much the same thing the night I first met Bill,’ says Gaha. The rapport between the two was immediate, and Gaha wasted no time in introducing Billy to Sir Wayne Martin. When Billy first walked through the door of the Pink Pussycat, he was—first of all—underage, but Sir Wayne and
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Sammy Gaha both enjoyed the company of women above all else in life, and they liked to encourage the presence of individuals who would raise the tenor of the establishment. Plus, if they went out anywhere, groups of girls would flock to Billy’s side and Sir Wayne and Gaha would reap the benefits of the association. It wasn’t just Billy they adopted for such purposes; Sir Wayne recalls that people like Tab Hunter, Ernest Borgnine, Sammy Davis Jr and many other celebs were unwittingly put to work. Since the advent of surf music—both the instrumental hits of bands like the Atlantics and the Tornadoes and the songs of Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys—Surf City, the venue which Thorpie could see from his bedroom window, had become home to one of the most popular teen dances of the day. It was a place where bands were actually paid to perform, and their regular talent quests were uncovering new acts on a weekly basis. The problem for singers like Billy Thorpe (who had already auditioned at Surf City with Peter James) in the lean years between rock’s first flush in 1956 and the British Invasion in 1963 was that vocalists had for a short time been out of fashion. Instrumental groups like the Shadows (the UK band led by Hank Marvin who backed Cliff Richard on his early hits) and the Tornadoes, Dick Dale, Link Wray and a host of others took rock into a harder-edged direction. Worse still, other styles proliferated, such as folk, bluegrass and country music; because of his early love for country music and folk, however, it was hardly anathema to Billy. After all, he had been discovered while trying to work out the chords to a Hank Williams tune, and his early repertoire was littered with Elvis, Hank and Jerry Lee Lewis.
1963–65: ‘Hey, Bill—do you remember Surf Cit y?’ 43
Billy was always meeting musicians around the Cross. It was an occupational hazard: everyone with a dream of making it in showbiz hung around looking for opportunities. It was not necessarily the place you went to make it as a rock’n’roller; there were better places for that, mostly the talent quests at the Police Boys clubs, or the rowdy pubs that lined the Princes Highway from the south end of King Street, Newtown, all the way to Sylvania where rockers like Johnny Devlin pounded it out regularly. All over the city, young men gathered in garages, scout halls and school music rooms with a common goal: to play the dance venues and get the kids stomping. It was an expensive hobby. Electric guitars and amplifiers were incrementally more expensive than they are today, and musicians faced a good deal of antipathy. It took harassed parents who were willing to sign on for the hire purchase of a decent guitar, which was more likely to be a Maton or a Hofner rather than the infinitely more desirable red Fender Stratocaster with a white pick guard and maple neck like the one Hank Marvin played. The musicians who would fulfil the bargain were at that moment making waves on the other side of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In the first instance, it was North Shore sensation Vince Melouney, a handsome young guitarist and the driving force behind a new Sydney band called the Aztecs. Even while still at Normanhurst Boys High School in 1960, Vince had a following who would crowd around the school’s music room at lunchtime to hear him play. After he left high school and got a good day job working for the gas company in North Sydney, he led a Shadows-style instrumental group called the Vibratones. The
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group built a devoted fan base and rehearsed twice a week at the scout hall in Asquith, where the local kids hung around outside listening to them play. Their fans were rewarded with a single of instrumentals, ‘Expressway’/‘Man of Mystery’, which was released in early 1963. The band comprised Melouney, guitarist Val Jones, bassist John Watson and drummer Colin Baigent. Eventually, through a series of gigs and some interest from Surf City’s management, the band started to enjoy some minor success. After all, instrumental groups were the fashion, and Melouney was a fine up-and-coming guitarist. For one reason or another, the Vibratones’ name dragged on the group and someone suggested they call themselves the Aztecs. They then got in a lead singer, Johnny Noble, to propel their set in a slightly different direction. Playing the usual round of school halls, scout dens, restaurants and private parties led to an invitation to play at one of John Harrigan’s Surf City ‘auditions’. Harrigan was fast becoming one of Sydney’s leading promoters and venue managers. The client list would soon include the likes of Max Merritt and the Meteors, the influential Missing Links, Ray Brown and the Whispers, and the Sunsets—a group that would later metamorphose into Tamam Shud. The Harrigans had been involved in Sydney nightlife since the 1920s and John, who had grown up in Shanghai, was friendly with the Wongs who ran Chequers on Goulburn Street in the city. Harrigan immediately liked the Aztecs and recommended them to Kevin Broadhurst, better known around Sydney at the time as Brian Vogue, who ran the Linda Lee label. Vogue had already seen the group in action at a scout hall show in Wahroonga and with
1963–65: ‘Hey, Bill—do you remember Surf Cit y?’ 45
Harrigan showing interest in managing the group, he offered the band a recording deal. The band cut their first instrumental single billed as the Aztecs—the down-tempo sleep-surfing ‘Smoke and Stack’ and its flipside, the more muscular ‘Board Boogie’. Harrigan was by Billy’s description a ‘hustler and swift as a fart, but a believer—in the scene and me’. Bands would audition for Harrigan on a Sunday afternoon by playing an entire set; these auditions were advertised as a dance, and crowds of kids would show up to boogie. The bands didn’t get paid to audition, just the prospect of a booking at Surf City or one of his other clubs, like the Beach House in Elizabeth Street, the Star Club, the Sunset Disco or the Hawaiian Eye. Harrigan asked Melouney if the Aztecs would mind providing some backing for Billy Thorpe’s set and he immediately agreed. Vince took Billy backstage to the band’s dressing-room and introduced him to the group. Harrigan had already had the idea of adding Billy to the Aztecs without otherwise changing the line-up. For his guest slot that Saturday night, Billy suggested that he do ‘Shout’, ‘Jenny Jenny’ and ‘High Heeled Sneakers’. The group took to the stage, uncertain as to whether this Thorpe fellow was just another try-hard pissant, but were immediately taken aback by Billy’s wild onstage presence. He wasn’t physically imposing but his voice was huge—he pulled his jaw back from the microphone to really belt it out. Playing rhythm guitar he led the group through ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and had the tough Surf City crowd eating out of his palm. The audience danced madly through ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ and ‘High School Confidential’ and that was Billy’s first big opportunity in front of a Sydney crowd. It was the break he’d been
46 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
waiting for and he seized it with both hands and shook it hard. After he left the stage, the crowd was still applauding, cheering and whistling for the dynamo they’d just seen. They wanted more, and John and Eileen Harrigan wanted more, so Billy obliged, returning for an encore performance of ‘Shout’ that stretched out to seven or eight minutes as he worked the audience as hard as he was pushing himself. It paid off in spades: young girls invaded the stage, throwing themselves at Billy, who swiftly managed to free himself to vanish back down into the dank dressing-room while the kids went crazy, stamping the dance floor thirty feet above his head. Vince joined him in the dressing-room and excitedly extended the invitation to Billy to join the band as their lead singer. He accepted on the spot. Out onstage, Harrigan took the microphone and shouted, ‘Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, ladies and gentlemen. Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. They’ll be back next Saturday night.’ The net effect of that announcement by Harrigan, coupled with the aftershocks of Billy’s powerful appearance with the band, accelerated the departure of Noble and Valentine Jones soon after, both of whom were unprepared to share the proposed billing, though there were apparently no hard feelings from Noble. At a meeting on the Monday following Billy’s appearance, Harrigan made it clear that he wanted to bill the group as ‘Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs’. Jones protested but Harrigan refused to make concessions. He wanted the Aztecs to play a minimum of five nights a week, starting the following Saturday. He offered them spots at Surf City and the Beach House. He intended to sign them to an exclusive management contract and offered them a
1963–65: ‘Hey, Bill—do you remember Surf Cit y?’ 47
salary of fifty pounds a week starting immediately, with an eventual increase to two hundred pounds a week if they could fill his venues. In return for the outlay he was prepared to make, including musical equipment, a Kombi van to get their gear around in between shows, and stage outfits, he wanted fifty per cent of their earnings upfront until he had recouped his initial investment in full—then he would reduce his cut to thirty-five per cent. The band, all of them relative newcomers to this kind of business, accepted without hesitation. Each of the Aztecs would later come to regret handing over such generous terms, but the only thing that mattered then was that stardom was a distinct possibility. Within a fortnight, the band had quit their respective day jobs; their weekdays were now spent on the stage at Surf City crouched over a portable record player with a pile of the latest 45s from overseas, learning and rehearsing new material. By the end of that two-week period Valentine Jones had quit, preferring the safety of his day job. Billy and Vince could both see the need for two guitarists rather than just leaving the rhythm and lead work to Melouney, with Billy very occasionally shoring up the rhythm guitar parts himself, which restricted his natural showman ship. They began looking for another guitarist; meanwhile, Saturday and Sunday afternoon shows were spent honing new songs and soliciting the audiences’ opinion on the songs that worked and the ones that didn’t. It wasn’t long before they found their new guitarist. Early in 1963, a heartbroken young man named Tony Barber, having parted ways with the love of his life, made the decision to leave his
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hometown of Norwich in Norfolk for Australia. Barber had been in a Shadows-influenced group in England called the Electrons, who had a little bit of form in the UK, having toured with the Searchers, among others. ‘We weren’t much,’ said Barber. ‘Pretty big locally.’ He made the six-week boat journey to Sydney on board the Sitmar cruise liner the T.V. Fairsky, one of the many passenger boats that travelled from Southampton Dock to Perth and Mel bourne and finally to Circular Quay, bringing with them thousands of ‘ten-pound Poms’ like the Thorpes. Anyone with trade experience was most welcome and those under nineteen, like Tony, travelled free. For a young man with dreams of musical stardom, it was quite an experience. On board ship, Tony composed numerous tunes, instrumentals and lyrical songs, including one that would be his first Australian hit, ‘Broken Things’. Once he’d recovered from the journey, Barber took a room at a migrant workers’ hostel out in Riverwood and went straight into a job as a window dresser two days after getting off the boat. At the same time, he continued to write songs and on days off from window dressing looked up the various music publishers around town, wandering in with his guitar to pitch them his songs. Col Joye picked up several of Barber’s songs for the Joy Boys, including the instrumental ‘Sandy the Surfin’ Sandfly’ which appeared on the Joy Boys’ instrumental EP Surf Party. Tony then joined a band called Geoff Doyle and the Resonets, playing lefthanded rhythm guitar. Like the Aztecs and dozens of other groups in Sydney, they were an instrumental surf band, also with a 45 rpm single out on the Linda Lee label, the obscure and rare ‘Broken
1963–65: ‘Hey, Bill—do you remember Surf Cit y?’ 49
Toy’. Several members of the band would later form the seminal wild rock group the Throb. The Resonets likewise went to audition at Surf City. It was at one of their weekly Saturday afternoon matinee shows that Billy spotted Tony Barber sitting on the steps by the stage. Tony had turned up this time to play as a solo artist, without the Resonets. He was happily bashing his way through ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’ in his own style and Billy instantly saw his potential. Tony Barber was—and still is—an exceptionally well-dressed individual, obsessed with quality clothes, and he was appalled at the sight of all these tanned kids milling around at Surf City barefoot and bare-legged. ‘I couldn’t believe it. Young people walking around in Bermuda shorts and around the dances with no socks or shoes on. Yuck. They didn’t even have ties on. That was absolute culture shock for me,’ he says now. Even though Billy was waving a hamburger about and spitting chunks of it as he spoke to Tony, at least he was smartly dressed, wearing a black shirt, black tie and black silk suit tailored by Pineapple Joe, who also made suits for all of Johnny O’Keefe’s band members, in a tiny room above Gowings on George Street. He was also wearing Edward Mellor triple-D point black leather boots with Cuban heels, adding a decent inch and a half to his height. Tony was immediately taken with this brash young man. ‘This guy came up—I’ll never forget it. It was Thorpie, as cocky as he ever was and always is. Even then he had that arrogance. He’s never lost it—it’s just gotten worse. He came over and between slurps and burps at his hamburger said, “You’re a bloody lousy singer—can you play guitar?” I asked how much his band were making and
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they were making five dollars more than the other group—I was very money conscious, you are when you’ve lived in England. So I said, okay, I’ll join.’ Once the new line-up was settled, the Aztecs made further strides ahead. Within three weeks, the band was back in the Linda Lee studio, this time recording original songs by their new guitarist, ‘Blue Day’ and the flipside, ‘You Don’t Love Me’. The B-side was an instrumental of almost no vocal note, except for the bloodchilling scream Thorpie supplied. Given the previous track record of Linda Lee releases and the poor way the singles were distributed, it was interesting to see how well ‘Blue Day’ actually did at the time. With its distinctive and slightly off-key harmonica solo, it showed the influence of the Beatles (who had yet to actually make an impression in the Australian charts), but it was more than that. Though it made no impression on the small circle of popular music critics, the song had a good melody and an interesting arrangement compared to most of what was being commercially released in Australia at the time. The song made it to number 17 on the Sydney charts, which gave the cautious Tony the confidence to quit his day job and commit fully to the Aztecs. The reputation the band was building meant they were pulling huge crowds to Surf City, the Beach House and Hawaiian Eye every night they played. On the nights they didn’t play, Billy was out meeting girls, Tony Barber would be at home reading his comics and Vince Melouney would be keeping to himself. The band weren’t so focused then on financial success; being young men they naturally enjoyed the attention of the girls, the admiration
1963–65: ‘Hey, Bill—do you remember Surf Cit y?’ 51
of the blokes and the respect they got from local nightclub owners. The bouncers of the clubs all knew the boys in the band, and Billy for one never had to reach into his pocket for a thing. The relationships Billy forged in those early days would last for the rest of his life. He knew he could trust Sir Wayne Martin implicitly; after all, Sir Wayne’s motto was, and still is, ‘Leave ’em sweet.’ Whenever Billy wanted to meet a young lady somewhere discreet for a bit of fun, he knew where the spare key was at Sir Wayne’s Woollahra home, and the parties that went on there are still laughed and talked about by those fortunate enough to have been invited. The shenanigans continued on the road as well. As with all the incarnations of the Aztecs, sex was a big part of the attraction of being in such a successful group. The actual playing of songs might occupy two hours of your day, perhaps more if the band was playing matinee shows, which still left a lot of spare time. Whenever the Aztecs toured in regional areas, there were plenty of young girls who wanted to meet the boys and it wasn’t a stretch to invite them into your tiny hotel room for some fun. Sex was always available, with girls regularly running after them. Billy recalled many times when he would be walking down Darlinghurst Road to take his clothes to the laundry, and a gaggle of teenage girls would leap off a passing bus and give chase, or lean out the windows and scream at him. Not all the Aztecs felt comfortable with the wild sex though. Tony Barber, being the impeccable character that he was, preferred to read, or sit with his guitar and write songs.
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For the most part Billy took all the attention in his stride, but such things rapidly lost their novelty value. As the ‘curse’ of fame has proven in many cases, the constant attention wears the famous person down and creates a very real need for privacy, or at least a respectful distance. It wasn’t long before Billy actually showed how cruel he could be; blokes who heckled him at gigs, and screaming girls—in fact anyone whom he felt wasn’t showing him any respect—would cop the sharp end of his tongue. ‘Mate, Billy could tear you to shreds if he felt like it,’ recalls Sammy Gaha. ‘He certainly had a knack for dealing with hecklers. He wouldn’t be mean all the time—sometimes he’d just have a go at them, like, “Fuck off, you wanker.” Other times he’d say some really outrageous thing about them and then just laugh it off.’ With his years of experience in the nightclub industry, Sir Wayne Martin could always spot a blue coming if Billy—or anyone else—was getting hot under the collar. Martin would defuse the situation, move Billy into the company of the girls, and get the offending party out of the venue while offering them a free drink next time they returned. ‘[Billy] was such a sweet bloke, really. I don’t ever recall seeing him really lose his temper with people while I was around. That doesn’t mean he didn’t ever lose it, but whenever I was around, he knew that I liked things to be sweet with everyone, no fights over sheilas or anything like that.’ Sir Wayne and Sammy Gaha would put the word around occasionally that Billy was having a birthday party, or some other celebration, telling girls they knew to bring their girlfriends, all the while stage-whispering at them, ‘and no blokes!’ The roll-up to Sir Wayne’s pad would have staggered Hollywood stars. That
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there might have been something approaching orgies at Sir Wayne’s place wasn’t quite true, but he does admit that there were paintings hanging over a hole in each of the bedroom doors, so that you could slide them across and have a quick perve at what was going on inside. Nothing too kinky, as Sir Wayne might say. A major influence Tony Barber brought with him from England was the Beatles. He’d seen them play several times before leaving the country—‘I came away awestruck,’ he said— and had brought their singles with him on the boat. He told the Aztecs that the Beatles would hit Australia ‘like nothing they’d seen before’. ‘I remember it wasn’t until Tony had joined the group that I ever heard about the Beatles,’ Billy claimed. ‘He’d brought this record out from England called “Please Please Me” and was raving about it. We didn’t want to know about it. It just wasn’t our bag.’ The band’s weekly schedule was punishing, but there was nothing so prosaic as day jobs, wives or mortgages holding them down. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights they played at Surf City, and Saturday nights became their big night at the Beach House. Harrigan had virtually handed the group this venue to use as a kind of clubhouse of their own, to see if they were indeed the drawcard they appeared to be. The band repainted the place themselves and added murals of the Beatles to the foyer and the walls of the club. Harrigan was impressed with the way the group had pulled substantial radio play and sales for their first single as Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, so he called a meeting to sound the band out about doing another single as soon as possible. Tony ventured
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that he had, while on the boat from England, written a ballad called ‘Broken Things’, and now that the band actually had a recording deal and the demand for another single, he suggested it could be the A-side. In March of 1964, Barber had received from his brother Michael a copy of the Rolling Stones EP entitled The Rolling Stones, which contained their version of the Coasters’ ‘Poison Ivy’ (a Leiber/Stoller composition). When Tony played it for the rest of the Aztecs at rehearsal one afternoon, they immediately grabbed onto it and started performing it live. The band pushed for their version of the song to be the A-side, and though Barber felt a little miffed that the group wanted to push his self-penned tune to the B-side, he wouldn’t regret it either. They recorded the two songs in one three-hour afternoon session at EMI’s 301 Studio in Castlereagh Street, Sydney. ‘We used to all take a big role in production of the songs,’ says Vince Melouney. ‘I’m not sure who actually engineered and produced “Poison Ivy” though.’ Within days of its release, ‘Poison Ivy’ went straight to number one all over the country. Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs were propelled out of their parish and into more high-flown company, taking their place alongside the big chart toppers like Digger Revell, Johnny O’Keefe, Frank Ifield and Jimmy Little. Immediately, the band’s stock rose—Billy’s in particular. It seemed not to matter what the band did—even if it was miming along to one of their 45 rpm singles played at 78 rpm onstage at Surf City while the fans fell about in hysterics at the sight of the band lurching and jumping around like mad men. Such practical jokes became a regular part of the Aztecs’ live
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shows and they proved they could get away with anything. At the 2UW theatre, a live show was broadcast every Wednesday at lunchtime; one Wednesday Tony Barber sang his version of the Billy Fury ballad ‘Wondrous Place’, which featured a pause of several beats in the middle. During this particular performance, Tony elongated the pause substantially and Col Baigent snuck up behind him with two cymbals and crashed them together less than an inch behind Tony’s head. Tony’s nerves went to bits and the crowd nearly rioted with the hilarity of it. Tony became helpless with laughter and the show descended into further farce as the band joked about with every song, adding crude lyrics and funny asides. Their first appearance in Disc magazine, which was an insert inside another popular magazine called Everybody’s, came on 8 April 1964, and with cameo pictures of each member, it reported that the band was on the rise. Billy was ecstatic and mailed copies of the magazine to his mum and dad. The two journalists who compiled Disc, Maggie McKeig and Jim Oram, became great fans of the group and by the end of April that year, the band was being prominently featured every week, most notably in the singles charts. By now, the amount of interest in the Aztecs was ringing all the right bells for John and Ma Harrigan. There was big money to be made out of popular music for smart managers who globalised the interest in their artists. Though the Beatles at this stage were still months away from worldwide stardom, Harrigan must have taken some cues from Brian Epstein’s management style. At the end of May, Harrigan headed to the UK to promote the Aztecs.
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Despite the huge amount of success the band was suddenly enjoying, Brian Vogue released the band from their Linda Lee contract. Tony Barber is still speechless about it forty-six years after the fact: ‘He just let us go. We could never work out why, but we ended up signing to Albert’s.’ The Albert deal—which amounted to a twelve-month recording and publishing agreement— was brokered not by John Harrigan but by his mother. ‘She thought she’d done a great thing,’ said Tony, ‘but when he got back, John went berserk. He was smart enough to realise that what Linda Lee had done, he could probably do better.’ The Parlophone/Albert signing was announced on 17 June and it was noted that this essentially made them label mates to the Beatles. Ted Albert was running his family’s business; in the early sixties the Albert brand was the oldest music company in the city, possibly the entire country. ‘Ted Albert was one of, if not the nicest people in Australian music ever,’ says Melouney. ‘An absolute gentleman and lovely to deal with. He really had a lot of faith in the Aztecs.’ Unbeknown to the band, Festival had been negotiating to purchase Linda Lee precisely because the Aztecs were on the label. Once Festival had the rights to the Linda Lee singles—a total of six tracks including the pre-Thorpe Aztecs instrumentals— they reissued it all on one side of an LP, and devoted the other side to singles by the Aztecs’ old lead singer Johnny Noble. Billy was insulted by the idea but it sold well. Another Beatles connection came via English rock’n’roller Tony Sheridan, for whom the band was preparing to back up on a tour of Australia. Sheridan was becoming more famous globally
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because of his association with the Beatles during their residency in Hamburg, Germany, in 1960–61. It was the demand for Tony Sheridan’s Polydor single of ‘My Bonnie’ (in which he was backed by the Beatles, who were billed on the single as the Beat Brothers) that had first sparked Brian Epstein’s interest in managing the group. Subsequently, any interest in Tony Sheridan seemed to revolve around his association with the Beatles rather than his own music, a fact he clearly resented. After all, just two years previously, Sheridan had been the star and the Beatles were going hungry playing in dingy clubs. George Harrison described Sheridan as ‘a bummer’ and said that although they all enjoyed working with him because he was a good singer and guitarist, the association had an ‘up’ and a ‘down’ side. By late June 1964, the Beatles had long since eclipsed Sheridan’s minor fame and they arrived in Australia for the first time, only to find that this ‘Billy Thorpe character’ with his version of ‘Poison Ivy’ had for a time kept ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ off the number one spot in Sydney. The Beatles and Billy now shared a record label as well as chart-topping singles, and the Aztecs attended a reception hosted by Ted Albert and EMI at the Sheraton Hotel in the Cross. Sheridan was indisposed with a 103-degree temperature, so the Aztecs popped into his hotel room to discuss the forthcoming tour shortly before they joined the Beatles a few doors away on the same floor for a cup of tea. The Aztecs weren’t intimidated; Billy quite rightly considered himself a peer of the Beatles, and furthermore he had been playing exactly that kind of music long before anyone in Australia had heard a single note from the UK group.
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Once Sheridan had recovered and the tour had commenced, the Aztecs and support acts Dave Bridge and Digger Revell found Sheridan to be rather hard work. He was by all accounts a mercurial fellow prone to moody silences after a show if the crowd response hadn’t been so good. Before long, Sheridan’s behaviour veered from the bizarre to the outright hostile. This was the Aztecs’ first lengthy tour away from Sydney and they were naturally concerned about how they would be received by audiences in other towns and cities. After a show in Newcastle where the Aztecs had dazzled the crowd, Sheridan came out and completely stole them back. Having proved his ability to capture a large group of people, Sheridan dashed his expensive guitar to the stage floor and disappeared into the wings, cursing loudly. Even with all their japery onstage, the boys couldn’t understand such unprofessional behaviour from someone who had so obviously impressed the audience. Billy spoke to him backstage after Sheridan had cooled off somewhat and he sheepishly explained that the show had not been up to his usual high standards of performance. Billy accepted this explanation, but two nights later, back at Surf City, Sheridan objected to Tony Barber’s guitar playing so Billy offered to step in to appease him. Just a few songs into the set that night, Sheridan made a sarcastic remark about the band, then swung around and spat at Billy, cursing him in front of the Aztecs’ devoted fan base. Immediately the crowd began booing Sheridan and the singer’s act died on the spot. There was a repeat of this performance in Brisbane, again after an incredibly positive crowd reaction to his set. Sheridan banged his head on the low doorway from the
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stage to the dressing-room. For enquiring whether he was okay, Billy was spat at again, and this time Sheridan offered to punch his head in. This kind of carry-on, in addition to his continual criticism of the band members, did not endear him to anyone. Others speculated that Sheridan, who was not an average performer by any stretch, was perhaps intimidated by Thorpie’s showmanship— not to mention the fact that the Aztecs’ single was still much higher in the charts than his own. Billy was offended by Sheridan’s behaviour, which he considered indicative of an ego inversely proportional to his talent, and was later heard to speak dismissively of any artist whose egotism he felt was unjustified. In July 1964, the group toured all over Australia again, this time with the eccentric pop star Screaming Lord Sutch, who arrived in the country without his regular backing group, the Savages. By comparison to their less than pleasant time with Tony Sheridan, the Aztecs took an instant liking to ‘Sutchy’, as they referred to him, and they all agreed that the Screaming Lord Sutch tour was one of the best experiences they could have had after the fiasco with Sheridan. In 1963, Sutch had stood for UK Parliament for the seat of Stratford-upon-Avon, recently vacated by one John Profumo, the Tory war minister who had been forced to resign after misleading Parliament over revelations surrounding his extramarital affair with London woman Christine Keeler. When the press found out about Profumo’s brief affair with Keeler, and her subsequent romance with a Russian naval diplomat, the story became global
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news and damaged the reputation of Harold Macmillan’s ruling Conservative Party. Sutch contested the by-election caused by Profumo’s resignation on the ticket of the National Teenagers Party, to raise awareness of the changing role teenagers were beginning to play in society and to protest the condescending manner in which teenagers were treated by the establishment. It could be argued that Sutch played a very important role in bringing to the attention of political parties the fact that teenagers could, and indeed were about to, have an impact on political decision making. Teenagers were already impacting the way capitalism and democracy worked, simply by bringing their spending power to the attention of corporations and governments who were beginning to see young people as something other than an impediment to public order and morality. The Aztecs found touring with Screaming Lord Sutch a great deal of sometimes unpredictable fun. They would play their own fifteen- or twenty-minute set, and then relax by the side of the stage to watch Sutch—backed by the Dave Bridge Trio—as he cavorted in his underpants. A precursor to Alice Cooper and a contemporary of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, from whom he had borrowed some of his act, Sutch relied heavily on props like the leopard skins he often wore, the skull on a stick he carried around and a coffin perched on the stage. He had the crowds eating from his palm, particularly with his ‘Jack the Ripper’ sketch that had underage girls shrieking in terror across the country. During this part of the set, Sutch appeared to carry a dagger and would impressively ‘murder’ an ‘innocent young girl’ who happened to
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wander onto the stage. Often the ‘girl’ was played by one of the Aztecs, including Billy, but manager John Harrigan got in on the act several times, including the time that Lord Sutch manhandled him onto a table while pretending to disembowel him at the same time. The table collapsed without warning and Harrigan was sent sprawling to the ground. The crowd erupted and Harrigan made a commando roll off stage, laughing hysterically. In the November 1964 issue of Music Maker, Adrian Rawlins wrote of being impressed by ‘the professionalism, the controlled and effective showmanship’ of Billy and the Aztecs. ‘The group’s unity . . . was far superior to many overseas pop groups that one has seen, and the youth and good looks of the boys surely equip them for very big crowd popularity. If only they had a Brian Epstein! But perhaps they don’t need one.’ Sutch, for his own part, was impressed enough with the Aztecs to offer John Harrigan his assistance in securing them appearances in England through the London Kings Agency which represented him at home. Despite the generous offer, the gigs did not eventuate. Harrigan thought it was faintly ludicrous to endanger the boys’ profile in Australia by putting them on a slow boat to England for a long shot at success there, or worse, risking bankruptcy by flying them to the UK at 3500 pounds for five plane tickets. In November, the Aztecs linked up with up-and-coming New Zealand band Ray Columbus and the Invaders for a short tour of Sydney and Melbourne. The Invaders was a tight unit with musical chops that made Tony Barber sit up and take notice. ‘They were so good. They did a lot of Beatles covers and I tell you, talk about
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the Twilights, they made them look sick. They really had that sound down pat.’ Once back in Sydney, Everybody’s continued their patronage of the band with a photo shoot for a specious article about the length of popular music artists’ hair. ‘In our business we have to be noticed,’ Billy said. ‘That’s why we grew our hair long.’ ‘I can’t understand why it makes people so angry,’ Vince Melouney was quoted as saying. ‘We sometimes get abuse that is notable for its lack of originality.’ Such frivolities meant little to the Aztecs. Their new label loved them and devoted a lot of time to developing the band’s career. Albert’s PR man Tony Geary got behind them in a big way and cooked up numerous publicity stunts. One notable example involved one of the band wearing a bear suit from a fancy dress shop and, accompanied by Ma Harrigan dressed up as Davy Crockett, complete with a realistic toy gun, bursting into the offices of radio station 2UW, scaring the receptionist witless. They raced upstairs to the studio where popular DJ Jon Royce was getting ready for his afternoon shift, bundled him into Tony Geary’s MG sports car and drove him around the city to Martin Place, where they caused a public nuisance. An amused policeman had to be talked out of arresting someone, but gamely tried to write them a ticket for overloading a car and carrying a bear in a convertible without permission. Royce luckily thought the whole exercise was hilarious and they let him go, shoving him into a cab blindfolded, with instructions to the cabby to deliver this ‘parcel’ to 2UW. Along the way, Royce removed his blindfold and made it back to the station with five
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minutes to spare before his shift started. He talked of nothing else on the show that day but those loveable larrikin Aztecs, who were strolling around the Cross, still in costume, listening to Royce on a transistor radio. With such small and endearingly innocent pranks the Aztecs built a public profile, emerging from the uncertainties of being a parochial and faddish ‘teenage’ group and developing a major national following. For their first Parlophone single, the group chose ‘Mashed Potato’, a grinning idiot of a song that featured just three words. It became a huge hit in Sydney and the band even developed a dance step for it. Pleasingly for Tony Barber, his tune ‘Dontcha Know’ was recorded as the B-side and ended up becoming a second single that was a hit in Melbourne. Despite the connection with Parlophone, the Beatles’ label in the UK, the Aztecs professed a greater liking for the Searchers and discussed the idea of releasing a cover version of ‘When You Walk in the Room’ as the follow-up to ‘Mashed Potato’. As the commercial cash-in surrounding all things British Beat-related continued, it all added up to more exposure in places they couldn’t have imagined. When they toured Australia and New Zealand with Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, they noted that Kramer was performing ‘When You Walk in the Room’ in his set as well. The Aztecs began rehearsing it on tour at soundcheck time, figuring it was the firm choice for their next single. The Aztecs found New Zealand audiences extremely reserved compared with the noisy welcomes they were used to at home. The New Zealand opening act, the Librettos, did better with the local crowds, while Kramer and the Dakotas were greeted with a similar mania
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to the Beatles, who had stormed through the country only two months before. Upon their return to Sydney, the Aztecs were dismayed to find that Parlophone had rush-released their recording of Chris Kenner’s ‘Sick and Tired’. Even though the band was upset about its release, ‘Sick and Tired’—with its vampy introduction to the three stabbing chords that finish it—was the most obvious step they had yet taken, deliberately or not, in the direction of the Beatles. The Searchers’ version of the same song, which arguably isn’t as good as the Aztecs’, was then released in Australia and became a huge national hit. There was some satisfaction in that the Aztecs’ take on ‘Sick and Tired’ went to number 2 in Sydney, number 7 in Melbourne and number 3 in Adelaide, while the Searchers’ faded back down the charts almost immediately. The band’s popularity grew dramatically after this single; it capitalised on a current pop/rock sound and, coming close on the heels of ‘Poison Ivy’, it boosted their public profile, even as their young audiences adopted the pop culture phenomenon known as ‘Beatlemania’. The Aztecs were subject to the kind of stage invasions, screaming and general hysteria the Beatles experienced everywhere they played—after all, their image was sharp and modish. They were well-rehearsed and individualistically dressed (they had already set aside the identical stage suits in favour of their own look), and their moves were carefully choreographed, swinging the sea-green horns of their distinctive Burns Bison guitars (which Melouney hated) rhythmically while Billy copped some of Billy J. Kramer’s stage moves. They spent countless
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hours perfecting their look and sound, as well as rehearsing every day. The Aztecs would perform several times a day at ‘sound lounges’, of which there were dozens in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. These were unlicensed venues aimed at teenagers and were nothing more than a small stage (if there was one at all), an even smaller vocal PA and a few scattered lounge chairs. They sprang up in the central business districts of major cities, opened at lunchtime for the whole afternoon, and young office workers would come in with their sandwiches and buy a coffee, have a Coke, smoke cigarettes and listen to two or three bands while a jukebox blared between sets. In Sydney, they opened and shut with alarming frequency—venues like The Bowl (owned by the same company that ran the Sunshine record label, home to Tony Worsley and the Blue Jays among others), Havana Village, Teenage Cabaret and the Harrigans’ own Beatle Village on Oxford Street. The Aztecs were now huge in Sydney and could easily pack out a sound lounge by themselves. It was becoming clear to John Harrigan that there was little need for such small shows, and soon they graduated out of the small-time clubs altogether. Billy was continuing to discover that stardom had a price. With it came a certain notoriety; besides the attention from young women, he would cop shit from young blokes on the street and his Bayswater Road flat became a target for fans and eventually burglars, not least because indiscreet journalists practically made his address public knowledge. His home was broken into twice in
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one month, and though the place was ransacked the first time, nothing was taken. The second time, money, suits and shirts were stolen. The Aztecs were offered a slot on Johnny O’Keefe’s Channel Seven television show Sing Sing Sing, which softened the blow of Billy’s burgled flat. ‘He was always a big hero of mine,’ Billy related in Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll. ‘He was my idol, and though I’d met him many times before, the call to do his show was one of the biggest thrills I had at that time. Even though the new music scene was booming, there was still reluctance on the part of some of the old guard to accept or legitimise it. We represented a new youth culture that was a threat to the old regime of which JOK and Col Joye were the undisputed kings. ‘We’d heard that JOK didn’t want any of these young, scruffy, long-haired poofter bands on his show, but even he couldn’t ignore the ratings, and the long-haired poofters were rating big time! Hence the call, and the date was set. We arrived at the Channel Seven studios in Frenchs Forest, where the show went live to air Sunday evenings, and were greeted with much respect by the producer who led us to the guest star dressing-room. He took us out to the studio and the band was formally introduced to JOK. When he saw me, he shook my hand warmly and gave me that squinty-eyed look of his. I guess he could see that look in my eye that said I’m going after your title, pal, and there’s no stopping me. He was extremely friendly and we rehearsed two numbers then went back to relax until our time came to perform. We were sitting around in the dressing-room waiting for the show
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to start when the producer arrived with a note for me from JOK. I thought it was going to be a “break a leg” note—you know, “good luck”.’ Instead, O’Keefe had offered the group the services of his personal on-set barber, because he didn’t want greasy long-haired ‘poofters and louts’ on his show. It was a quintessential rock star move by JOK, who was easily intimidated by other, younger artists. Billy saw red and told O’Keefe to ‘get fucked’ and that he could find another band to replace them for the live telecast. The band was already in their Kombi and pulling out of the parking lot when one of the producers came running out after them to ask them to kindly ignore Mr O’Keefe. O’Keefe pretended nothing had happened, cheerfully introduced the band and was the very soul of politeness in front of the cameras. Still, he refused to speak to the group once the taping was over. Nobody said anything as they packed up their instruments even though Billy swore that as the group left the studio, they could hear him having a meltdown in his dressing-room, kicking the wall and cursing. As 1964 wound down, the band returned to the studio to cut ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. The reasoning behind the choice of this schmaltzy ballad—naturally most often associated with Judy Garland’s rendition in the 1939 MGM musical Wizard of Oz—seems to have escaped everyone. It was a favourite of Billy’s but even so, ‘it caught everyone unawares,’ says Tony Barber. ‘It was such a complete turnaround for us. Did you know that got us into the adult clubs?’ This unusual choice for the Aztecs’ next single brought them a curious acceptance from a different audience than their core
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teenage following, but it also precipitated further ill-feeling in the band. Despite the fact that it was a hit, damage was being done to the cohesion of the group. Tony for one was not pleased with the idea of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. He thought it was all veering a little too close to cabaret showbiz for his liking, a criticism Billy typically laughed off. ‘I chose it as a joke,’ he said. ‘I used to sing it sometimes in Brisbane.’ Little matter that he would still be ripping out twenty-five-minute versions of it nearly forty years later. The Aztecs found themselves playing in high-toned clubs and cabaret nightspots, forced to cut down the rabble-rousing numbers in favour of more sedate songs. Suddenly there were comments among the rest of the group about being nothing more than a cabaret backing act for Billy. It wasn’t the only thing Baigent, Watson, Barber and Melouney were upset about. For some time, there had been dissatisfaction over how John Harrigan handled business for the Aztecs. They felt they weren’t being paid enough and, not unusually for the period, their management contract was onerous if not downright unfair. To add to the tension, their plans to record another single were once again stymied by another act releasing their intended cover as a single first—in this instance, fellow Sydney combo Ray Brown and the Whispers followed their first number one (a creative take on Chubby Checker’s ‘20 Miles’) with ‘Pride’, the very same track the Aztecs had already cut but not released. It may have been a political move by Harrigan to play up the rivalry between the groups he managed, but the Ray Brown version of ‘Pride’ stepped out of the gate and bolted straight to number one.
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It proved to be a critical moment. Tony, who’d been considering doing his own thing for some time, stepped off stage just as ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ went to number one. ‘Harrigan had us convinced that by paying us a consistent week’s wage, we’d make more that way over the years. But we had to pay income tax out of that. After a while, I realised he must have been reaping money in. When I think about it, I realise he must have made a fortune. When we were on tour, he would have all these thousands of photographs printed. We never got a thing from that.’ Barber also had some issues with the star complex Billy was developing. ‘Towards the end, he got more, this is BILLY THORPE and the Aztecs. He wouldn’t lift the gear or anything. It was an, “I don’t play the guitar, I don’t have to” attitude. He’d come in with his mic in his hand while the rest of us would be struggling with this huge equipment.’ It was a shame, but no real surprise that the first Aztecs line-up imploded the way it did. ‘The first year’s fun,’ Tony said. ‘When you’re successful and you get a hit record and you rush out to get the newspapers and you see your name in print. And that brushes off. But you go out and people recognise you and kids scream at you, but then about the third year, the screaming just about drives you up the wall. It sickens you. At the end I couldn’t stand it. It just shook right through. All those girls . . . I just felt they were making fools of themselves. There we were standing up there and these kids were just screaming like a pack of idiots. I know you shouldn’t have this hate against the audience . . . no. It wasn’t hate . . . It was that I felt embarrassed for them.’
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Perhaps unsurprisingly given the haphazard way business was being conducted in the music industry at that time, money was cited as the cause of the discontent in most articles regarding the break-up of the band. When asked about the dissolution of the first Aztecs, Billy said, ‘We sank a lot of money back into what we were doing. But to be truthful we ended up with very little apart from record royalties. It wasn’t until the first group break-up that I realised what we were worth but what we weren’t getting and I think that’s what started the break-up.’ Of course, there had been great tension at work in the band during their two-year career, with egos clashing and fans hiding in their hotel rooms, but money was the trigger that led to the undoing of the Aztecs. Within a week of Tony Barber’s departure, Vince Melouney left, and Col Baigent and John Watson were then allegedly given their marching orders. Barber and Melouney put together a short-lived duo, Vince and Tony Two, but never recorded anything before they split. Tony then went solo with some success, including the Billy Thorpe sound-alike hit ‘Someday’. Melouney persevered with his Vince Melouney Sect for close to a year before he left Australia to join the Bee Gees in England. Billy gave no hint of being upset about the split of the group, at least not publicly. Harrigan bolstered his ego by assuring him that he was still the star and that they would find other musicians. Though it was a traumatic event for the rest of the band, the break-up of the first incarnation of the Aztecs was just a speed bump for Thorpie. The kinetic energy of cross-audience success as a result of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ gave him momentum
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like he’d never known. Further success seemed assured, no matter what pop or rock song he would decide to tackle next. Of course, he was mostly preoccupied with how he would put together the best new band he could possibly assemble.
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Chapter 3
1965–66 Searching for that Aztec vibration
After the quick and acrimonious split of the Aztecs, Billy began sorting out a new band. It couldn’t be just any old combination thrown together to fulfil some live dates—he wanted the best possible players, musos adept with recording duties who could also blaze onstage. They needed to be reliable, tough and smart—for which they would receive a lucrative wage. It wasn’t a hard task to sort out his ideal line-up. In fact, he knew exactly the players he wanted and a good idea of how they would fit together. Harrigan had asserted his ownership of the Aztecs name, and Billy was quietly confident that this new line-up of the band would be vastly superior. It would be a return to the top of the heap, a recovery that would be noticed by all the right people while his young female fans would barely notice the absence of the original band members. It was to be a dashing recovery, and it would come at Ray Hoff’s expense.
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In 1965, Sydney blues singer Ray Hoff was in no uncertain terms the hippest guy to take the bandstand at Kings Cross nightspot Suzie Wong’s. Among aficionados in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, Hoff’s choice of only the best musicians for his band made him an influential, much-admired bandleader. With impeccable taste he chose only the funkiest songs for his band, the Offbeats, to cover. He was a pioneer, having been around the traps since the late 1950s. He was from that generation of rockers that emerged in the wake of Col Joye and JOK; a contemporary of Johnny Devlin, Dig Richards and Lonnie Lee, he outlasted all those blokes. He came up the hard way, honing his act through the Police Boys Club gig in Leichhardt every Wednesday under the tutelage of O’Keefe before he branched out into harder-edged blues stuff, the real deal. Not just twelve-bar crap either, but funky-as-shit sounds like the Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and James Brown. Real down-home stuff. While other artists dithered around in search of a wacky trend, duff dance crazes or a novelty hit, it was Hoff who knew what was ‘happening’ well before anyone else did. Hoff and his band, nominally based in Perth, Western Australia, had been up until recently signed to WA label Clarion, and often played at Suzie Wong’s, the best place to see blues and R&B bands playing not for teenagers but for purists and music fans with enquiring minds. Hoff was a few years older than Thorpie and had just inked a contract with RCA, a very prestigious signing indeed. The band had been sent into the EMI studios at 301 Castlereagh Street to record some material for singles and one of the tunes they’d jammed on was Chuck Berry’s ‘Little Queenie’. Despite the fact that Hoff had no intention of releasing the song
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as a single, RCA’s A&R (Artists and Repertoire) department knew a hit when they heard one, and they went ahead and pressed it up for sale. ‘Little Queenie’ had been out for less than a fortnight and there were encouraging noises at the lower end of the Australian charts, and some movement on the city charts in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. With his manager’s backing, Billy made his move. He approached Mike Downes and Col Risby from the Offbeats, who were very receptive to his overtures. Working with Ray Hoff was all about prestige and money was no object either, but working with someone famous as opposed to someone ‘cool’ was attractive. Even though they both loved working for Hoff, Thorpie had a major profile with no less than three songs in the Top 20 at the time. It can’t have been too difficult a decision to make. Another who would lose out to Billy at this time was Max Merritt, who had been a ‘face’ around Sydney since his arrival from New Zealand in 1964. A Christchurch boy who’d been performing semi-professionally since his teens, Max honed his singing and playing ability in front of discerning audiences of US Air Force servicemen from the US air base near his hometown, and after significant success in New Zealand, brought his heavily soul-influenced band—guitarist Peter Williams, bass player Teddy Toi and drumming sensation Johnny Dick—across the Tasman. Within a year on the Sydney scene, Merritt’s reputation as an artist was bedrock solid and he was playing his passionate hybrid of R&B, soul and rock seven nights a week right around the country. He was also about to release his second album for RCA, Max Merritt’s Meteors.
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The crack rhythm section of Max Merritt’s Meteors were well regarded for their high standards of musicianship. Billy made an offer to Teddy Toi and Johnny Dick, both of whom hesitated for a time, since they felt a certain loyalty to Merritt, who’d looked after them well. Eventually though, like Downes and Risby, they found the offer too good to refuse. While the news of the defections was a surprise to some, the shockwaves soon died down. ‘I learned about the Offbeats breaking up while I was cooking spaghetti bolognaise, waiting for my girlfriend Christine to come home from work,’ says Hoff, who had that very day learned he had the number one song in Sydney with ‘Little Queenie’. ‘It was number one on 2GB’s chart and of course, “Queenie” comes on and all I could think of was, “I’ve got the number one!” Then they play a Thorpie track, and then the DJ says, “That’s Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. He’s got a new band now, so Max Merritt’s lost Johnny Dick and Teddy Toi and Ray Hoff’s lost his two guitar players.” I went wobbly at the knees. So I’ve turned it off. Col was living down on Victoria Street [in Kings Cross], so I’ve called in there and confirmed it with him, had a bit of a whinge and we’re mates again. We don’t hold grudges so that smoothed over alright . . . It put Max on his behind for a while, and myself too—in fact, I went back to Perth for a while.’ For the new-look Aztecs, rehearsals and recording began straightaway, and there were a number of low-key live dates in Melbourne. Almost immediately, opinion was divided over the power of this new five-piece set-up. The playing was killer, just as Billy had anticipated, but there was something missing. The cohesion of Watson and Baigent was gone, and while Toi and Dick
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naturally had chemistry with each other, Risby and Downes didn’t immediately mesh with their new rhythm section. Things picked up in the studio though. Keen to repeat the staggering success of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, Thorpie’s next two singles leaned heavily on the ‘relaxed’ side. A version of Marty Robbins’s 1962 pop hit ‘I Told the Brook’ went to number one in Sydney and its follow-up, the Platters’ ‘Twilight Time’—a song even older than Billy—went in at number 3, proving that even if the choice of songs wasn’t very exciting, Thorpie was happy to record such cabaret material simply to keep the boss happy. Of course, Billy was peeved when Digger Revell released his version of the latter song; though the two records received about the same amount of airplay, Billy’s sold moderately better. The Mk II Aztecs who’d signed on for a little hard rocking had the chance to work out their ya-yas with rockers like ‘Funny Face’ and ‘My Girl Josephine’ as the flipsides, and their live shows veered from slow ballads to blues through to outright stomping rock songs. Winning the gong for ‘Best Teenage Performer’ at the seventh TV Week Logie awards was the first real national recognition of Thorpie’s talents. When the award—which is based on postal voting—was announced live on television on Friday 26 March 1965, Billy was there at the award ceremony at the Palais de Dance in St Kilda, Melbourne, to collect his gold Logie. Despite this proof of his success, Billy could not help but be aware of the line of be-quiffed dandies who were rapidly queuing up to take a shot at his standing as Supreme Teen Idol. One such pretender Billy had been hearing a lot about was Normie Rowe. It had been apparent for quite some time that
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Melbourne-based Normie was shaping up as the first serious threat to Billy’s edgy pop-star appeal. The fact that Rowe had famously been sacked from his job as a PMG technician because his hair was too long must have been a source of both irritation and interest to Billy. By April 1965, Rowe was appearing regularly on Melbourne television and had a recording contract with Sunshine Records. Billy preferred to take the piss out of those whose egos needed some dusting up, and he generally reserved his sharpest barbs for smartarses and hecklers, but even though there were no harsh words between them initially, an almost instant rivalry emerged between the two young stars. Rowe’s first hits, ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ and his radical reworking of the Doris Day hit ‘Que Sera Sera’, were huge in 1965, with some pundits making the claim that the latter had sold one hundred thousand copies (though this was later revised to thirty-five thousand), an unheard-of sales figure for a teen idol. As fortune would have it, the Aztecs struggled to keep pace with the rapid changes in popular music tastes, but Billy was soon further frustrated with the rapid emergence of a number of potential rivals who were offering more original sounds, like Perth boy Johnny Young (who was even then writing his own material, an unusual career move for the time), Ronnie Burns (with whom Billy had gone to primary school back in St Kilda in 1955) who quit beat group the Flies to go solo, Peter Doyle, Tony Worsley, Mike Furber, Jeff St John and the Id, the Loved Ones, the Throb, Marty Rhone, and the Valentines, with Bon Scott and Vince Lovegrove. Nineteen sixty-five was a watershed year for Australian music. Just as in the rest of the world, the heavy influence of the Beatles was showing up in most recorded music made in Sydney and
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Melbourne. Aside from Normie Rowe and the Playboys, whose ‘Shakin’ All Over’ showed a debt to the less polite beat groups like Them (Van Morrison’s band) and the Animals, many of the bands challenging Thorpie’s position were in thrall to the Mersey Sound (which included not only the Beatles but also the Dakotas, Herman’s Hermits and other Liverpool artists), though in some cases the influence of the Rolling Stones and the Searchers was cutting through. On 7 July, the brand-new line-up of the Aztecs made their Sydney debut at the Gala Night of Stars show at Sydney Stadium in Rushcutters Bay, alongside thirty other artists. Things were starting to even out for Billy, or so it appeared. However, before too long, cracks began to appear. Many of the Aztecs’ diehard fans couldn’t quite get to grips with the new line-up of their favourite band. The Aztecs, touring along with fellow Surf City stars Ray Brown and the Whispers, began a twelve-day tour on 11 October that kicked off in Albury and took in a number of regional centres as well as Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane. The two bands were shoring up an enviable live reputation right around the country, one that was set in stone for the Aztecs after a show at Perth’s Capitol Theatre ended in a riot. When the band had flown into Perth, there were an estimated ten thousand kids waiting to greet them. Perth radio station 6PR held a contest to see who could provide the biggest banner with the group’s name; the winner’s was more than fifty feet (fifteen metres) in length. It was Aztecmania at its zenith, at a time when live shows were more about the sheer sexual appeal of the group than the music. ‘When we got to the hotel, there were girls in cupboards, under
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the beds and on the outside fire escapes,’ Billy told Glenn A. Baker in 1995. ‘The first show was just a riot; we were about four bars into the first song and the fire curtain came down because of all the kids running onto the stage. At the second show, they had police dogs in the aisles.’ Police were indeed patrolling the aisles of the theatre with dogs, but this didn’t stop thousands of fans—mostly young girls— from tearing up the joint. The police were attacked, the dogs were kicked, chairs were tipped over and windows smashed. Thorpie was pulled off stage by manic, adoring fans and trampled. His collarbone and three ribs were broken in the stampede. The matinee show on the same day was filmed for the television show National Bandstand, capturing the Aztecs, the Whispers, Max Merritt and Lynne Randell in action. Thoroughly unimpressed by the insane conduct of his fans, and in particular the undignified way in which they’d set about removing items of his clothing while he lay on the floor of the theatre, not to mention injured and sore, Billy was deeply annoyed. Normie Rowe must have understood how Thorpie was feeling. He was experiencing a similar mania at his shows. ‘It got to be a nightmare,’ said Billy. ‘That kind of fame is not fun.’ On 27 October, Billy’s face adorned the cover of Everybody’s and inside, the magazine printed some inane letters from teenage fans to Billy. ‘Darling Billy, my cat had kittens and I named one of them after you. I hope that’s okay.’ ‘Billy, you know the other day when you were walking through Kings Cross and a bunch of girls screamed at you from the bus? That was me and my friends.’
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It must have given him pause for thought. Credibility was something that English bands went after, and the Beatles had it in spades, the Stones had it, the Kinks and others all possessed it, and though Thorpie would never have actively courted a different, more ‘cool’ audience, it would have been an appealing idea. No more screaming girls at the shows. No more broken bones. It was ludicrous behaviour and it puzzled the media who had yet to examine in full the phenomenon of female fandom. In fact, it was years before academics even thought to look at how young women had been empowered for the first time as the locus of the musical experience. The final issue of Everybody’s magazine for 1965 featured Billy, Normie Rowe and Ray Brown on the cover, and also announced the winners of the Pop Star of the Year awards. Billy was voted ‘Best Male Singer’, while the Easybeats took the prize for ‘Most Original Band’ and Normie Rowe and Ray Brown were named ‘Most Successful Chart Riders’. At the dusty end of 1965, which had been a generally successful yet frustrating year for Billy, there was the prospect of a prestigious Christmas/New Year season booking on the Gold Coast. It was good for several reasons—the money would be excellent, the beaches made for great swimming, the Gold Coast girls lived in their cossies and, of course, he was within a two-hour drive of Mum and Dad in Brisbane. An amusing and ultimately unworkable plan, floated by Billy to one incredulous TV Week journalist, had him flying over the beaches in a helicopter delivering his set through a megaphone. However, the shows he and the Aztecs—as well as up-and-comers the Easybeats, and Tony and the Blue Jays—had
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been booked for were not quite what he’d been led to expect. For one thing, the shows were not in the Broadbeach Hotel’s toney ballroom but in a marquee tent set up in the beer garden. There were several tense phone calls to John Harrigan, complaining about working ‘tent shows’. But the huge crowds that gathered for every show, with an average of one hundred and fifty extra people above the tent’s capacity squeezing in at the edges, had Billy quickly changing his tune about the tent. ‘Once I got into it, I liked it,’ Billy said to Scott Derrick, the TV Times correspondent, by phone. ‘The audience here is amazing and the tent atmosphere somehow gave the whole thing a real show business feeling.’ The holiday crowds included folks from Sydney, Newcastle and Melbourne who turned up in their hundreds, eager to see the latest teen sensation from Sydney—all at ten shillings a head. Given his later experiments with exceedingly loud volume, it’s interesting to note that even then—as an article in TV Times dated 12 January 1966 reported—‘the reaction of surrounding motel dwellers was also sensational. They bombarded police and the hotel managers with complaints of the noise. “It can be heard two blocks away,” said one angry non-pop fan.’ The pub, at the insistence of Gold Coast police, didn’t just ask the Aztecs to turn the volume knobs down a few notches. They were forced to literally pull the plug on two of the shows, even though the band, Harrigan and the venue owners had come to an agreement that the band would keep an eye on the sound. In the end, the sound issues were sorted to the satisfaction of sleeping holidaymakers, the venue and the group. Rolls of old carpet were
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draped above the bandstand to absorb some of the sound and the tent was repositioned to send the noise straight out to sea. During the day, the band lay on the beach and even took surfing lessons. Billy was also being dazzled with the promise of a trip to America, including an alleged engagement on the prestigious Ed Sullivan Show in New York. Harrigan was working on these US engagements in the wake of the release on an American label of ‘Twilight Time’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (though contemporary reports which described the singles as ‘US hits’ were stretching the truth somewhat), but was finding it difficult to negotiate a decent deal that wouldn’t end up costing him personally. The airfares alone ran into the thousands, and the appearance fees wouldn’t come near covering the costs; all this made taking the rest of the Aztecs out of the question. The band returned to Sydney to find that they, as well as the Easybeats, had been profiled in, of all places, The Australian Women’s Weekly. Under the banner ‘Who’s Who on the Teen Scene’ was a paragraph on each band, explaining their appeal to Aussie teens. Impressively, it was one of the few magazines to spell each band member’s name correctly. As well as the US rumours, there was talk of a tour of New Zealand and Japan, before some projected engagements in Vietnam to play for Australian troops. TV Times also wondered out loud whether 1966 would be the year that Billy Thorpe became ‘Private W. Thorpe’; at nineteen, he was now eligible to be called up for service in the Vietnam conflict. The same article also noted that if he weren’t called up for military duty, he would be ‘attending singing lessons at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music’.
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There was no way Billy needed singing lessons from anyone. After all, John Harrigan was currently considering offers from the three major commercial networks in Sydney to have Billy host his own music-based show. Harrigan and Billy had worked together in 1965 on just such a proposal for a television variety show that would offer live performances by popular regional and nationally known artists rather than the usual mimed offerings of shows like Kommotion and Dig We Must. As negotiations with Channel Seven stepped up, with a more substantial wage on offer for Billy and the band, it was clear that the show had real drawing power. Billy’s name was in lights in every major city in Australia and he drew screaming crowds of young girls everywhere he turned up to play. In early March, a pilot for the show, titled It’s All Happening, was filmed with director Tony Culliton. The show’s music producer, Franz Conde, brought invaluable experience from his years in English television, which allowed him to adapt live rock music performances in the studio. The pilot featured live performances by Ray Brown and the Whispers, Brian Withers, Laurel Lee, Toni McCann, Merv Benton, Colin Cook and ex-Aztec Tony Barber, and Seven gave the go-ahead for a season’s worth of one-hour shows, all filmed and broadcast live for that Billy Thorpe seat-of-the-pants experience. The Aztec line-up was further augmented with a horn section and some strings, as well as the Happening go-go dancers—indispensable for audience credibility in the mid-sixties. By this time, the line-up of Ted Toi, Mike Downes, Col Risby and drummer Johnny Dick
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was augmented by keyboardist Jimmy Taylor, saxophonist Tony Buchanan and trumpeter Rocky Thomas. Billy had little patience to sit around wondering whether the Seven network would take up the show nationally. The band took off for a lengthy twelve-date tour of rural Victoria and New South Wales, including performances at Nowra, Bega, Queanbeyan, Wagga Wagga and Bendigo among other tidy towns. The band arrived back in Sydney exhausted, having had only one day off, but ready to commence their television careers. Only weeks before the series premiere at 5 pm on Sunday 20 March, Seven in Melbourne refused to air the show there, because they were convinced there should be a separate show to present Melbourne-based talent. This crimped Billy’s plans for the show to further increase his profile in Victoria’s capital city but despite this, it was all happening. As the show rolled on with guests like Max Merritt and the Meteors, MPD Limited and Ja-Ar (a New Zealand singer who would later achieve fame under his real name, John Rowles), the producers managed to lock in several US performers for live appearances, including has-been teen idol Bobby Rydell whose first hit was ‘Kissin’ Time’ in 1959 but whose most recent US single, ‘Diana’, had barely charted a year before he appeared on Billy’s show. Behind the scenes, Harrigan continued to work on the possibility of US dates but a rejection from the Ed Sullivan Show producers more or less scuttled that trip; nothing was mentioned to the media, who were distracted with a press release about a projected Aztecs tour of South Africa at the end of 1966. A South African promoter who had heard the locally released Aztec singles
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on EMI offered a tantalising $25,000 fee for the band to tour the segregated music venues of Sun City if, and only if, the EMI singles translated into South African chart hits. In any event, they didn’t, and the band was happy to be playing several shows a week and backing the solo acts on the TV show on a Sunday afternoon. On Tuesday 29 March, Channel Seven threw a suitable birthday bash for their compere, who turned twenty. By this time, Billy was receiving on average one hundred and fifty letters and cards a day, and for his birthday he received sacks and sacks of mail from adoring fans. On 1 May, Billy hosted Neil Sedaka on the show, and the two immediately hit it off. ‘Oh, yes—I certainly do remember Mister Thorpe,’ Sedaka recalled. ‘I enjoyed appearing on his show immensely. His band really nailed my song and it was refreshing to not have to mime on a television show.’ Also appearing that May was Peter Doyle, a young Jeff St John and the Id, and the Questions. An article by Frank Courtis in TV Times on 1 June noted that there would be link-ups in most capital cities, including Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, making Thorpie a national rather than merely a Sydney identity. ‘I only do three numbers myself each show, so that the audience does not see that much of me,’ Billy said. ‘Requests for tickets to the performances have been fantastic. We’ve set up a PA system in the studio so that it’s just like a concert. It’s terrific for audience participation.’ The energetic dancing and performing made the scaffolding stage set rattle and lurch alarmingly, and on more than one occasion, microphones came unplugged during songs (just as the residents of the Gold Coast might have hoped for when the
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Aztecs savaged their eardrums earlier that year). There were two rehearsals each week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while the dancers rehearsed their parts at least four times a week under the watchful eye of sixteen-year-old choreographer Ross Coleman, who would later go on to work in US films and onstage as a director. Melbourne continued to resist screening the show, even as Go-Set magazine optimistically reported that Melbourne’s Channel Seven had in fact bought the rights but were having difficulty ‘slotting it appropriately’. It was a source of annoyance to every one involved with the show, but Billy’s reputation was growing everywhere else, even in Perth. The first season schedule of thirteen episodes was drawing rapidly to a close and John Harrigan went back to Seven with a contract that would see Thorpie earning around $700 a week, an amount more than ten times the average weekly salary. The network’s executives were happy to reward Billy financially, as the ratings increased steadily week on week. The Aztecs were happy with their lot too, even though their recording career virtually came to a standstill for almost the entire year. In addition to their pay for an hour of screen time and twenty hours of rehearsal a week, they averaged another $300 a week each from the prestigious bookings they were getting at Chequers. The network also entered into negotiations with New Zealand television to screen the show there, trading off the fact that both Toi and drummer Johnny Dick were Kiwis. In this busy year, the one single that Billy and the Aztecs managed to record was released in July, ironically—given their newfound national television stardom—to the poorest showing
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yet for an Aztecs single, number 14 on the Sydney charts. Still, the song, ‘The Word for Today’, remains a fan favourite. While Billy was hosting his own show he was prohibited from making appearances on other programs but this hardly affected his earning capacity. Harrigan had three bookings planned for Billy and the band over two days, Friday 12 and Saturday 13 August. The Friday show was in Hobart, Tasmania, and it very nearly ended in disaster. A huge crowd had gathered at the Hobart City Hall and the band was late. Thanks to their increasingly ridiculous weekly schedule, they’d missed their flight. A plane was chartered as quickly as possible. In Hobart, support acts the Corvettes and the Kravats played to a warm reception while the main attraction were being buffeted around above Bass Strait, but as 10.30 pm approached, the crowd became restive. A limousine raced the Aztecs to the venue from the airport, and they dressed for the gig in the back of the car. Billy chose a white suit, blue shirt, black tie and white leather boots with fourinch Cuban heels. By the time the Aztecs took the stage, after some unnecessary teasing of the crowd by the show’s promoter, there was a certain abandon among revellers. The boys from the local surf club were employed to keep the girls away from the lip of the stage, but about thirty minutes into the Aztecs’ set, a young girl got onto the stage and ran towards Billy. He was turning towards her just as she smashed straight into him, bloodying his nose and knocking him down. She landed awkwardly with her arm on his neck. Both fan and idol had to be carried semiconscious from the stage. Billy’s nose was broken and his throat was badly bruised. Ever the showbiz professional,
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Billy returned to the stage after a few minutes and finished the show despite the pain he was in. Afterwards, he gave an interview to Peter Cashman, a student journalist from secondary school magazine Probe. ‘Fabulous! It was the wildest show we’ve ever done! Even wilder than Perth! At one stage it was close, I thought I was going over the edge.’ Early the following morning, the band flew back to Melbourne for two shows at the fortnightly ‘Mod!’ dances on the same day, one in Mentone and one at Brighton Town Hall, personally earning $500 for each appearance. This sort of earning capacity put Billy ahead of Normie Rowe, who was reputed to earn about $400 a show. The group flew back to Sydney that evening. On the set of It’s All Happening the next afternoon, Billy’s voice was almost completely gone. He presented the show but could not sing, and when John Harrigan demanded he go to hospital, Billy refused. ‘The thought of it upset him too much,’ said Harrigan to a TV Times reporter on 15 August. It must have also bothered Harrigan considerably, because Billy’s initial refusal to seek medi cal help cost him a singing spot on a Coca-Cola commercial and jeopardised a tour of Western Australia. Finally, he consulted specialists at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney who warned him not to sing again until an examination on Friday 26 August. Once it became clear to Thorpie that he could possibly lose the ability to sing for good, he took the medical advice seriously and spent time recuperating, somewhat miserably, at his flat in Double Bay. Once he was in the clear, Billy’s singing was as strong as ever. He had the support of a growing number of fans who continued to write to him, and he was chosen to host the first annual Go-Set
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magazine Pop Poll awards with UK singer Helen Shapiro. The deal of course was that the show would form part of It’s All Happening, proving that Billy was on the crest of a big career wave. However, he was much closer to the breaking of the wave than he, Harrigan or Seven would have liked to admit. A TV Times cover story on 28 September painted a rosy picture, however. True to his reputation for profligate spending, as befits a young man of twenty, Billy had purchased (for cash) a $20,000 Aston Martin—although Billy relates the humorous story of how he haggled with the car dealership, paying 8000 pounds cash in the old denomination before the advent of decimal currency. The article also reported that he was moving into a home unit ‘in the fashionable Sydney suburb of Point Piper. He will have his own beach and a speedboat.’ When it was suggested to Billy in the article that his popularity had waned since he had embraced television, he was quick to deny it. ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘Since we launched It’s All Happening, our fans have increased. The show appeals to a wider age group. Mind you, I probably don’t have as many fans among the very young ones, the thirteen-year-olds for instance. Younger artists like Mike Furber probably appeal to them. The other week, the Aztecs and I received the highest payment ever for a dance spot in Melbourne.’ The article also reported that Billy had been dating Sydneybased model Jackie Holme, a New Zealander. Go-Set had reported this ‘fact’ earlier in the year, though they watered down speculation of Billy’s marriage plans, noting, ‘Billy Thorpe must sure be the most furphy-ridden guy around, there’s this business about his “fiancée”, Sydney model Jackie Holme who is at present in London.
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She’s a beautiful girl and so naturally Billy has taken her out quite a lot, especially lately. But engaged . . . never!’ Of course, the week that the TV Times special came out, Billy was back on Melbourne stages for Friday and Saturday night shows at Teenrage in Broadmeadows. The Melbourne television network had finally conceded to screen It’s All Happening weekly at the same time as it screened in Sydney. To boost his profile further was a retrospective overview of Billy’s career as an Aztec in the Melbourne-based weekly Go-Set, which ran over a six-week period. It was written by Sue Peck under the byline of ‘Pretzel’. Peck would later marry Tony Barber. Despite the success of the Pop Poll, which screened as part of the 2 October edition of the TV show, the news from the network was not good. Advertiser interest was already falling and there were sharp drops in viewing numbers. The release of the single ‘I’ve Been Wrong Before’ was met with little interest from record buyers and, to further cloud the issue, Melbourne’s Channel Seven inexplicably waited nearly three weeks to screen the Pop Poll show; Billy lamented to Harrigan that this was going to have a dire effect on the show. For his part, Harrigan couldn’t understand what the resistance was to Billy in Melbourne, where he was ostensibly very popular on the live scene. In late November, Seven told Harrigan the network intended to can the show and offered a cash payment for breaking the twelvemonth contract with Billy seven months early. Both Harrigan and Billy were deeply disappointed by the decision, which capped the year on an entirely negative note. Perhaps they had been blindsided by television and had ignored the real muscle of Billy’s
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career—as a live performer and recording artist—but after a string of rejections from the US and the non-event that was the mooted South African tour, 1966 had in fact been a bit of a dud year in the wash-up. Despite the huge increase in profile, it had little actual effect on record sales, compounded by the fact that only two singles had been released. Billy—as fleet-footed as ever with the press—issued a statement saying he’d had offers from Nine and Ten on the same day as the Channel Seven axing was announced. While this wasn’t strictly true, it highlighted another problem—the Aztecs were suddenly faced with an unwanted hiatus. Unlike the previous year, there were no prestigious, well-paying Christmas/ New Year shows to look forward to, only uncertainty. Without regular work coming in, Billy—having spent much of his earnings on a variety of vanities—found himself relatively cash-strapped. A commercial for Cherry Ripe (an Australian candy bar of legend) gave him some cash in the bank and what would be his only release for the whole of the following year, a phantom red flexidisc of the commercial’s jingle. Left stranded in the dust of 1966, a year that had promised (and delivered) so much but which had a sharp, unexpected sting in its tail, Billy was bereft. To his friends and Jackie Holme, he showed his usual fighting spirit, but already he had started defaulting on credit repayments and rent. It had been a three-year rollercoaster ride since he’d left Brisbane, and though he didn’t want to admit defeat, his options were limited. Billy packed a suitcase and blasted his red Aston Martin up the New England Highway to Brisbane, back to Fegen Drive, Moorooka.
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Chapter 4
1967–69 Thorpe’s wild years
WHERE HAS BILLY THORPE DISAPPEARED TO? Our headline dares to ask the question, and not even his manager—he of the piercing stare—can answer it. No one has heard from the Sydney pop star since he left town suddenly in his Aston Martin sports car just days before Christmas. The chirpy singer, who is reportedly engaged to gorgeous model Jackie Holme, has taken a tumble down the charts since the cancellation of his tremendous live TV show, Channel Seven’s It’s All Happening. It seems that the upheaval of 1967 has taken its toll—Billy’s been trampled underfoot by wild fans, he lost his voice, busted his collarbone and there were nearly as many riot police at his Perth shows as there were screaming young women.
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It must be hard for this dynamic singer to deal with the ups and downs of fame, but he’s an old hand at it—he started singing professionally before he was a teenager and was a TV star in Brisbane where he grew up. Come back to us Billy Thorpe, wherever you are. We love you. SYDNEY POP STAR VANISHES No one’s heard from Thorpie for a while, have they? The pop belter has had a troubled year, but even so he’s got model Jackie Holme to console him, just in case his sports car, flash flat and speedboat don’t do the trick. Call us! POP PATTER Our favourite screamer of the day, Billy Thorpe, seems to have fallen off the face of the earth! He didn’t even show up to the big annual Christmas bash the Harrigan family threw for their roster. Happy New Year, 4P! We haven’t forgotten you yet. ✿ The press in Sydney and Melbourne were a little perturbed by Billy’s sudden and total disappearance in the first weeks of 1967. Go-Set called Billy in Brisbane and he assured them that he was just visiting his mum and dad, without Jackie, and taking ‘time off from the hectic life of a pop star’ to think things out. Billy had to reassess a few different aspects of his career. The adulation he’d
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initially received with It’s All Happening was waning, and popular music was beginning to diversify in Australia. Bands were starting to reject the notion of mass teen acceptance and simply wanted to play raw, sweaty rock that would appeal to a broader audience. Some, like the Easybeats, combined sophistication and hard rock in a way that would see them become a globally famous band that year. To compound Billy’s feelings about the collapse of his television career was the news that his old mentor and ‘rival’ Johnny O’Keefe had been signed to Channel Ten to present a new music show, Where The Action Is. What lay ahead for Billy was a series of trials he could not have expected. All Billy had ever known musically was to keep it raw and exciting as often as possible—‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ notwithstanding—and he was hip. His old Brisbane buddy Lobby Loyde was playing in several bands around Melbourne, with a stinging sound he owed in part to a powerful thousand-watt amplifier. Such radical ideas were not immediately on Billy’s radar—he simply wanted to work. So, when John Harrigan rang him with the news that the ABC wanted him to present a new radio show called The Sunday Club, Billy returned quietly to his Point Piper apartment in the first week of February, back with Jackie again. The ABC promoted Billy’s new show heavily on air, and when he arrived at the ABC’s William Street studios on Wednesday 22 February to pre-record the show, there was a tribe of girls waiting outside the gated car park to welcome him back, shrieking his name. For a time Billy’s whole world was contained in those few square kilometres of Darlinghurst and Kings Cross, between
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the office of Eileen Harrigan Promotions at 141 William Street, his favourite haunt the Whisky A Go Go, which also happened to belong to the Harrigans, his usual eateries and nightspots, and the ABC studios. John Harrigan offered him as many nights at the Whisky as he could possibly desire. He was going to need a band but it wouldn’t be the Aztecs, either by name or membership. Billy had a sinking feeling, and so he left town in March for some shows in Perth. Perth loved Billy, as it had proven in 1965. He had just turned twenty-one—much older and wiser than when he’d last been there—but of course he was ‘rock royalty’ (as he was everywhere he went in Australia) and there weren’t many places he could go without attracting attention. On one of his long evenings out in the western capital, Billy chanced upon the Hole in the Wall club, which specialised in jazz and attracted a mostly gay clientele. It was here that he met one of his most efficient and mercurial musical sparring partners—Warren ‘Pig’ Morgan. Morgan was playing in a group called Beaten Tracks, which also featured the legendary Dave Hole, whose own rise to prominence as a fine blues slide guitarist would take almost another twenty-five years. After a little good-natured ribbing, Billy and Morgan hit it off. Morgan invited Billy to jam onstage with the band one night and they worked over ‘Kansas City’ and ‘Stormy Monday’ for the small, appreciative audience. Morgan was pulling out Jimmy Smith-style leads on his B3 Hammond and clearly playing to impress—and it worked: the pair kicked on into the broad daylight and Billy gave Morgan his number. Arriving back in Sydney after his brief but exciting visit to Perth, Billy stumbled out of a cab near his new home in Double
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Bay and caught sight of a newspaper placard reading ‘POP STAR BANKRUPT’. ‘I wonder who that poor bastard is?’ he thought to himself, before finding out the hard way that it was in fact him. It was a relatively small amount of money that forced Billy into bankruptcy that first time. A string of small debts, for purchases ranging from clothes and shoes to guitars, had caught up with him and he even had to consider selling his beloved Aston Martin—all for a total of $333.70 in unpaid debts. It wasn’t all bad news of course—it never really was if Billy was telling the story. John Harrigan had given Billy the run of the Whisky A Go Go, and within days of his return, a new band—not billed as the Aztecs—had been pulled together. Billy wanted to get the best guitarist around. Englishman Mick Liber was Billy’s first choice. ‘I first met Billy in ’65 when I came to Australia and I was playing in this band Python Lee Jackson, and he came down and asked me if I’d join his band,’ Liber remembers. ‘I said no. I was playing in a blues band at the time and I didn’t know who the fuck he was. A few years later he had this TV show, It’s All Happening, and Python Lee Jackson had played that quite a few times so we started knocking around together. He had a Ferrari or an Aston Martin or something, I think, with a fridge in the back, and then I was working down in Melbourne, then I came back to Sydney and he had a gig at the Whisky and we worked together there for about six months.’ Liber had departed Python Lee Jackson in August 1967 and was working every night between two bands, Billy’s and another group, Gulliver Smith’s the Noyes. His former colleague from Python Lee Jackson, Adelaide boy Dave MacTaggart, joined in
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the fun, thanks to an open-door hiring policy for bassists that had Billy thumping through with Dave until Paul Wheeler showed up, again on Liber’s suggestion. Jimmy Thompson, from Tony ‘Velvet Waters’ Worsley’s band the Bluejays, held down the beat. ‘We were playing soul mostly,’ says Liber. ‘A little blues, but mostly soul. We were also doing Chuck Berry, Elvis, that sort of stuff. It impressed me just how professional he was. We had good times. The gig was fuck-all really. We’d just go up to the Cross, do this and that. Billy was a very arrogant person. It’s like he knew he had to be that way. He wasn’t like that with me so much. I guess he knew where I was at, but with other people, he could drop them dead with just a statement. Any heckler in the audience he would just cut them dead. Completely.’ This group, which is often and incorrectly described as a line-up of the Aztecs, was never actually advertised as such. Liber makes the point: ‘The band wasn’t called the Aztecs, I don’t believe. It was just “Billy Thorpe”. At one time anyway, it was Johnny Dick on drums, Jimmy Nolan on keys, Paul Wheeler and myself.’ Wheeler, who had auditioned for Liber’s previous act, was a gentle soul with glasses and an almost painterly approach to the bass. He could handle ballads, soul and R&B with equal dexterity, and after two songs Billy offered him the gig full-time. By March 1967, New Zealand group the Action had gone about as far as they could go in their homeland and took the trip across the Tasman. Landing in Sydney was a mind-blowing experience in itself for the band, and within two or three weeks of starting at Harrigan’s club, the Action was knocking ’em dead at the Whisky as well; there they soon encountered Thorpie. They were a classic
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Motown-style soul band, tight harmonies with a psychedelic edge. Lead singer Silva—half Pacific Islander, half Portuguese and all soul—had joined the Action shortly before they shipped across the Tasman to join the Sydney scene. Snake thin and charismatic, he had a stage presence that impressed Billy enormously. Of Billy, Silva says he saw ‘this guy in this suit and he was just about the coolest guy we’d ever seen. Really well dressed and really singing this soul stuff. When I first saw Billy Thorpe play he was doing that sort of “Oop-Poo-Pa-Doo” sorta stuff and soul kind of things. And obviously he was giving it one hundred per cent. It was just an amazing moment. We were aware, without really knowing it, that he was a really big name.’ In July, Billy was interviewed on an ABC radio show, during which he made the pronouncement that he intended to invite a documentary film crew to film him taking LSD and capture the subsequent trip. This statement immediately provoked controversy, and Harrigan was on the phone to Billy straightaway to find out what the hell he was thinking. Billy had been ‘dosed’ (the tripper’s equivalent of a Mickey Finn) by a US marine at a Kings Cross party in the autumn of 1967 and, in his own words, ‘loved the experience’. When he spoke to ABC radio about it, he brought the wrath of the federal police down upon himself. The announcement was not taken in the educational spirit in which it was delivered; the New South Wales government issued a statement saying that they would ‘prosecute Mr Thorpe’ if he went ahead with his plan, despite possession of LSD not being illegal in the state at the time. The ‘trip’ was already a big part of rock mythology by then; the teachers and acolytes of lysergic acid had been talking about
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the drug to the mainstream media—even the Beatles’ Paul McCartney spoke of trying it. Although it had not yet been made illegal (which it eventually was at the end of 1967), the public furore meant Billy never went through with his plan. From early April, Billy was playing six or seven nights a week to crowds of American servicemen on the infamous R&R (rest and recreation) leave from Vietnam. He was befriending some of these young US servicemen and they were telling him about music, who to listen to and what to buy. It was Eric Clapton, or more specifically the power trio, Cream, that Clapton fronted with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, that really turned Billy’s head around. ‘After hearing “NSU” and “I Feel Free” I came close to ending it all by jumping out the window. What the fuck was that? What kind of music is this? How does he play like that? How can you get those sounds? Where did that come from? Who else plays like that?’ Cream’s debut album had been released in the UK in December 1966 and by early 1967 import copies of it were making their way to Sydney’s hipper record stores. Billy, a fanatical record buyer, would have been up on the latest albums out of the UK and US anyway; in addition, the US troops who came to see his show would request songs by artists that Billy wasn’t aware of, and being a naturally curious fellow, he would make a point to find out more. As it was, his nightly repertoire veered madly between Sam & Dave and Robert Johnson and all points between. His love of black R&B, soul, pop, blues and country meant that his set lists were strange, but the boy was on the J curve, heading upwards and inculcating himself and his audience with the idea that no
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one musical genre could render another obsolete—in fact, that the many roads of popular music all led back into the blues. Billy Thorpe had found the Blues for himself. Billy took on Melbourne once more at Swingers in Coburg on 26 August, and the audiences were impressed with this new, looser outfit. The music scene was changing incredibly swiftly in Melbourne and Billy took notice. He had brought his new influences to bear on his live shows but was still yet to leap into writing and performing original songs. Billy was still dispirited after the bankruptcy, which had been widely publicised in the media, and his financial situation was compounded when three men presenting themselves as agents of the Official Receiver in Bankruptcy turned up on Billy’s doorstep while he was out. Dave MacTaggart was at Billy’s place in New South Head Road, Double Bay, when the trio, dressed in white dustcoats, arrived. They had to hand a comprehensive list of items, which a later police report suggested had been compiled from newspaper and magazine descriptions of Thorpie’s possessions published during the bankruptcy hearing. The men helped themselves to five thousand dollars worth of possessions, including two guitar amps, twenty suits, two guitars, a fur coat, a tape recorder valued at about six hundred dollars and some other personal items. When Billy found out about it, he was of course livid, but once he’d sorted out the fact from the fiction and deduced that he’d been screwed, he gave a detailed list to the police and had to leave it at that. No one was ever arrested for the theft. In November, LSD was added to the list of prohibited substances, and so began the long slow decline of the exciting
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illicit drug culture that the Americans brought with them. For Billy, Sydney was drying up in other ways too. Whatever Sydney had promised to Billy that day in 1963 when she lowered her nipple to his waiting mouth, it was clear that promise had withered. It wasn’t one thing or another, merely a combination of factors. The bankruptcy hadn’t broken his spirit but it had caused some self-doubt and self-examination. Billy could always leaven this introspection about his parlous financial state with some pride in his previous achievements. Yet, in the last weeks of 1967 and into January 1968, it was obvious to all who knew Billy that it wasn’t happening—not music, not fame, not one charting single for nearly two years. Some much-needed encouragement came via Vince Melouney. Vince had moved to London in late 1966 to work with the Bee Gees as they began to take their career to the next level. They’d been unable to do much with their singing in Australia but, upon returning home to England, sparked real interest in the UK media, who were keen to welcome back these prodigal lads. Vince told the Bee Gees/Cream/Eric Clapton manager Robert Stigwood about his old mate Billy Thorpe, and Stigwood was curious enough to make a note to call on Billy when he was next in Sydney. Stigwood was staying at the Chevron Hilton when Billy met him for a lobster and champagne lunch in early January. They discussed Billy’s stalled career as a recording artist, and how things seemed to have slowed down for him in Sydney. A basic agreement was reached which did not quite extend to the promise of management or financial salvation, but it did involve Stigwood offering his help to Billy if he was ready to take the step out of his
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comfort zone in Australia and move to England. Billy was thrilled by this turn of events. Stigwood’s help, while conditional (and ultimately fruitless), was the first concrete offer of assistance by a real industry player. In the meantime, the work at the Whisky kept coming. With Stigwood’s offer still ringing in his ears, Billy had the opportunity to shore up his finances with as many as seven shows a week at the Harrigans’ club. It also kept his mind occupied when he wasn’t pondering what the future in England might hold for him. There was a run of Melbourne dates booked, and these would be the last he would play in Australia for the foreseeable future. His work here was almost done—or so he thought. After the two weeks down south, Billy would spend four days back in Sydney before he headed off to London to pursue his dream of international stardom. It seems inconceivable now, but he was little more than ten years past his first shows as a professional singer and still only twenty-one. But as it happened, things didn’t go as planned; it was Liber’s laissez faire attitude (as Billy termed it) towards the Melbourne shows that would change the course of events and cause something magical to happen. Liber never showed up at the airport, according to Billy’s account in his second book, Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy). Liber was a fantastic guitarist but projected a certain attitude that Billy described as ‘unreliable’. He claimed later that Liber’s girlfriend hadn’t seen him for at least two days; as far as Billy was concerned, Liber’s failure to show up was effectively the guitarist’s resignation.
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Liber disputes this version of events: ‘I was playing lead then and he was getting better and better on the guitar. Then he decided to go to Melbourne and I just said, “Ah, no fucking way I’m going to Melbourne.” In his book, he said I didn’t turn up to the airport which isn’t true. I just couldn’t be fucked to go [to Melbourne]. In fact, just after that I went to London and had a good time there.’ Either way, Wheeler, Thompson, Billy and Jackie Holme got on the plane to Melbourne for two weeks of shows without the guitarist. Once there, Billy began to realise what a gift he’d been given: the freedom to break out of any restraint he’d ever known musically. One of the joys of Clapton’s Cream period was that Clapton had taken the hard option of being lead guitarist with no rhythm base over which to compose stunning riffs, hooks and solos, and he’d succeeded brilliantly at it. Clapton was a master of tone and feel, with a gift for using effects pedals and amp settings to draw incredible tone and gain. Billy was no Eric Clapton but he knew he could pull off this three-piece lark. Piece of piss. The shows were booked and many were sold out—there was no gamble in it anymore. Billy could do whatever the hell he wanted. He rehearsed with Paul and Jimmy, exploring the outer reaches of volume like he’d never done before. Big Strauss amplifiers. Billy’s Les Paul. He would handle it. On that first night, the crowd was split roughly fifty-fifty between fans of his early sixties pop material who were hoping for a ballad or two, perhaps ‘Love Letters’, ‘Word for Today’ or ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, and younger fans, curious to hear how the modern Thorpe sounded. It had been a long time, nearly a year, since he’d last played a show in Melbourne and there were
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plenty of fans there who wanted the old beat stuff like ‘Poison Ivy’. The problem with that expectation was that neither Paul nor Jimmy knew the old material. Billy had no interest in playing those songs now—they were part of the past, and he refused to live in that place. The rest of the crowd seemed not to care much what he played but before long Billy was aware that coming to Melbourne had been a gamble for him, that this was not to be the end of his Australian career before he took off for the other side of the world in search of his big break. That first show was a make or break point for him—the crowd was slow clapping, bellowing boos, screaming encouragement and catcalling. The audience also faced off among themselves, shoving and trading punches. Someone shouted out, ‘Play some fucking music!’, and it was like a light switch went on inside Billy’s head. He reached right back into 1958 with a scorching eight-minute version of ‘Be-Bop-ALula’. It was so intensely loud that the crowd nearly all developed tinnitus on the spot. The front ten rows could feel Wheeler’s bass patting their hearts and rearranging their internal organs. Shocked, some of them staggered out and demanded their money back before the gig was even over. Those who stayed simply went crazy for what he was doing. It was hard, electric blues and Billy’s voice, guitar and persona became the one stream of energy. Right then and there, he shed that old skin that had been keeping him in check since 1965. Suddenly Billy had discovered a brandnew audience. His was a display of raw power, the kind that only the English and American bands were currently drawing on. His guitar playing was raw and riff-heavy. It was boogie. It was metallic.
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The bottom end was gut-wrenching. It was blue, it was lewd and it was FUCKING LOUD. Melbourne loved Billy and, in return, he embraced the city completely. At that moment, Billy decided that London could wait. Billy returned to Sydney on the Monday morning and straightaway went to see Ma Harrigan. ‘I’m moving to Melbourne, Ma,’ he told her. He quit his Whisky residency, his only security, and packed up his belongings. Both Ma and John thought the Melbourne move was a positive one, and certainly a better idea than the move to England he’d been talking about since January’s meeting with Stigwood. The Sydney music scene was beginning to lag behind what was happening in Melbourne, where the venues were bigger and the PAs were better. Sydney was being taken over by American servicemen on leave from the Vietnam War, and the live music scene was driven by cover bands playing the country music, soul, rock and R&B popular among soldiers and sailors. The big venues catered to the American dollar—drinks and cover charges were more expensive—which drove the kids away from the Cross in favour of the emerging suburban beer barns, where serious drinking rather than live music was the top priority. It was a drinking culture that was taking over, where pubs began to replace clubs and discotheques as the favoured haunts of the young. Another benefit of being in Melbourne was that Billy and Lobby Loyde, who was now leading the band the Wild Cherries, were able to renew their friendship. Billy was getting guitar lessons from Loyde to improve his soloing and rhythm-playing interchanges, but in September invited Loyde to join the Aztecs.
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‘When he came to Melbourne they were actually on their way to England,’ Loyde told writer Troy Colvin. ‘We had a jam, and so for a couple of years I played in the Aztecs. It was good for him and good for me, because I realised where I wanted to go. From the Wild Cherries to the Aztecs is a strange deviation, the Wild Cherries were quite psychedelic.’ It wasn’t until August—nearly seven months after he’d left Sydney—that Go-Set reported Billy’s move. Billy and the Aztecs had also left the Harrigan family behind and joined Michael Browning’s Melbourne-based Australian Entertainment Exchange. Browning then agreed to take on the Aztecs as a management client as well as booking shows. The response by fans had been nearly overwhelming. He played weekly at Sebastian’s on Exhibition Street, Berties on Spring Street, 54321 in Dandenong, Wildside in Yarraville, Max’s Place on the corner of Punt and Toorak roads in South Yarra, That’s Life on Chapel Street, Prahran, Wheelers on Degraves Street in the city, Ringwood Town Hall and Kew Civic Centre. Billy returned to Sydney in December for a week of shows at the Here in North Sydney, and his new Melbourne-based band was once again being billed as ‘the Aztecs’. Billy knew that the brand name still carried some weight, and the response to this new line-up of the Aztecs was practically ravenous. Since 1965, Loyde’s reputation had been increasing to the point that he was widely acknowledged as the best guitarist in the country. For Billy, having Loyde in the group expanded the possibilities further. What Billy was aiming for musically was something along the lines of Fleetwood Mac, Spooky Tooth or the Yardbirds: electric, progressive blues that factored in the influence of soul and heavy rock. By this
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time, Max Merritt was outdrawing Billy in Sydney by two to one, but with Merritt having announced his plans to go to England in 1969, it was widely accepted that Billy would steal the crown. Critics and fans agreed that Billy was now the ‘yardstick’ of the Australian scene. He’d gone over big, had massive hits and then bottomed out quite a few times, but persistence was just one of his finer qualities and he refused to back away from a challenge. The new line-up of the Aztecs was the first to supply the thundering power he now wanted from a band. Loyde was also the loudest guitarist around, Paul Wheeler was himself no shrinking violet in the volume department, and drummer Jimmy Thompson played hard, simple patterns on a stripped-down kit, leaving Billy room to sing his arse off. Audiences found this new version of the group exciting, impressed with how Thorpie had reinvented himself so successfully. Gone were the copyist sounds, the slavish deference to rock and pop, and in its place was a bedrock blues-based groove that was changing the direction of music. At the very same moment, in England, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham were making a similarly heavy extract of blues and rock. There’s no doubt that had Billy gone to England in 1968, he could well have joined the illustrious ranks of blues singers who made it very big. England was still on his mind. ‘Nobody’s gone over there and cracked it, nobody who’s been a good player,’ Billy told writer Ed Nimmervoll. ‘There’s no reason why we couldn’t go over there and do there what we’re doing here which is working.’ Loyde agreed. ‘We’ve got no idea of when we go over there of being big. A lot of people want to take us [to the UK] at the
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moment and we know that what we’re playing, they’re playing over there. We haven’t got dreams of becoming big pop stars or any of that crap. Once you’re over there you’d progress. We’d dig to go over there to play. I’d dig to go to the States and see all the good players who are doing it. Then you come back to Australia and you’re really a good player and you can play your own scene in your own country but you’re so much better because you’ve seen where it’s at. There’s no competition here.’ The band members were all united and moving in the same direction musically too. Drummer Jimmy Thompson said, ‘If you are completely involved in a thing musically, emotionally, physically—the whole lot—obviously it’s going to be good visually. This is where you get individuality. It used to be where you were too stiff to move. What a drag. Get in there and feel comfortable.’ ‘The group is important now,’ Billy told writer Geoff James in mid-1969. ‘It was something that has evolved. We began as a trio, Paul, Jimi [sic] and I, picked up Lobby so I could switch to rhythm guitar—thank God!—and we have not looked back. I am sick of people always comparing Australian groups with those from overseas. A band is as good as it sounds whether they play at Woy Woy or the Fillmore. We play nearly all blues and nobody thinks we sound like anybody else, so that’s cool.’ Billy’s feelings about the music industry in Australia hadn’t changed. He was continually frustrated by how parochial and backward-looking it all was. ‘There are idiots in this game from top to bottom. People in the business who really know what’s happening are such a minority that they may as well not exist. Even people like DJs, they can make ridiculous statements without
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any fear of contradiction. Half the time they haven’t even heard the band they’re making such prophetic statements about.’ It seems that in 1968, DJs were still prone to mouthing the usual banalities about music, making strange and stupid comments about album covers or an artist’s hair, and it was clear they still didn’t quite understand the blues and where it stood in the scheme of popular music. ‘Things have changed in this country for blues players,’ Billy said. ‘Look at Bay City Union. The thing is with blues now is that it is being accepted.’ Another major factor in the development of the Aztecs’ wall of sound was their—admittedly modest—drug intake. The band as a rule were not heavily into narcotics, certainly not of the kind that had become more easily available in Sydney during the height of the war in Vietnam, and Billy was too much of a professional to get completely ripped before he would play. But their exposure to LSD had come in 1967. In addition to his experience at a Kings Cross party, Billy was given, with Loyde, the real deal—Sandoz Laboratories LSD-25—allegedly supplied to them at a party by a Melbourne psychologist. According to Loyde, ‘He said, “You guys are into psychedelic drugs, you ever tried LSD?” And he had Sandoz liquid, the real thing. And that was fan-fucking-tastic. That was intense. Well, after that I was writing things like “G.O.D.” and shit.’ Loyde also claimed that the acid experiences he and Billy had broke down the connection to both band and audience. ‘It completely destroyed my Aztec lifestyle because I could no longer turn a blind eye to the audience and to the music. I know that sounds rude, but I was turning a blind eye to it because I was
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drinking a bit, smoked a lot of pot. It was fun being onstage, it was a great band to walk onstage with because it rocked like hell, it was as loud as buggery, and it was intense. But I was missing the Wild Cherries. See, the Wild Cherries, we were taking a little bit of LSD and smoking a bit of pot and we were quite a psychedelic band. The Aztecs was a hiatus from that. The Aztecs smoked a bit of pot, but they drank a lot of booze. A bottle of Scotch every night, y’know.’ Three days before Christmas, the Aztecs, along with Johnny Farnham, Max Merritt, the Virgil Brothers, Ram Jam Big Band, Johnny Young, and the Mantra, played at the 3XY Pepsi-Cola Happening at the Melbourne Velodrome. The show was well attended and Billy’s raw, heavy sound captured the imagination of the older kids at the show. The diversity of the acts on the bill at this show demonstrated how diverse the music scene was becoming at the end of 1968, and just what effect a return to the blues was having on the development of Australian rock’n’roll. ✿ The Aztecs’ work schedule was as punishing as ever during the long hot summer of 1969. New venues continued to open around Melbourne and the band played a minimum of five shows a week, and sometimes two or three on a Saturday night. That meant playing for an hour or more in one place, then pulling down all the stage gear and wrestling it through the back of the club, out into a laneway behind the venue, loading the van, piling in and moving on to the next gig. It could have been disastrous overexposure for
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any other band, but they were drawing the punters and the crowds in Melbourne loved them dearly. The shows were never just in the city either—they could play Coburg at 9 pm, then drive out to Dandenong for a midnight show. Generally, they could rely on a booking first at Sebastian’s then at Berties, since they were owned and booked by the same company. In late May, Billy and the band performed on the bill with Johnny O’Keefe at Life on Chapel Street in Windsor. The two spoke amicably together about one thing and another. It seemed to Billy that JOK had lost that burning desire to be the King of Rock in Australia; his ambition had nearly killed him several times and had precipitated several severe nervous breakdowns. Billy’s res pect and affection for his old mentor and rival were apparent, and O’Keefe admitted that he thought Billy was turning into a world-class rock act—it was the sort of praise that he rarely gave anyone, either in public or in private. In June, the Aztecs shared the bill with Bon Scott and Vince Lovegrove’s band the Valentines, Dream and Max Merritt at the opening of another new Melbourne disco, Traffic, on Flinders Lane. The opening show was a success, and the venue became one of their regular Saturday night gigs. Billy and Bon got pissed together and joked and carried on with each other as they did every time they crossed paths. Bon openly admired Billy’s voice and often told people what a great singer he was. Likewise Thorpie thought Scott to be a wonderful singer, and he could not have imagined just how much of an influence he would have on Bon’s later work as a singer.
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Little was written about Billy in the popular music press during this time. His style was not easily understood by the younger music scenesters who wrote for the pop press of the day; Billy and Loyde gained a reputation as two stubborn, funny and occasionally prickly fellows who took music very seriously. The endless gigs had built the band up into an incredible, even unforgettable, live experience. The Loyde/Wheeler/Thompson line-up was a powerful one and the group’s dynamism was the envy of younger contemporary bands. With their increasing popularity, the line-up was a significant draw for any live venue, but they hadn’t yet recorded an album. Since June, the Aztecs had been playing every six weeks at the Canberra Park Royal Hotel, at a gig hosted by the Young Qantas Club for its fifteen hundred members, which meant a mostly older group of people. Billy was pleased to see that his act had broader appeal than just filling discos with kids in Melbourne—if he could get suits and evening dresses up and shaking it, he was clearly doing it right. Plus, it was a good gig to have: highly paid, with free accommodation, food and booze—the kind of gig bands dream about. On one occasion, the band was booked into another gig the following night in Queanbeyan, outside of Canberra, which Billy later mythologised as a violent stand-off between paying punters and local lads who weren’t admitted to the gig. The story Billy tells in his second book of Lobby Loyde laying into the louts with his guitar, swinging it like a battleaxe, makes for great copy, but Loyde himself dismissed the story as pure fiction. With the year drawing to a close, the gigs became more plentiful. Promoters booked their venues heavily in the seven-week period between Melbourne Cup Eve and Christmas. On Wednesday
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17 December, the Aztecs played a benefit gig at Uptight (at the Camberwell Civic Centre) to assist the Freedom From Hunger Campaign, and a pre-Christmas school break-up spectacular at Beaumaris Civic Centre. That week, word had travelled via the music press about the excessively violent end to a free show put on by the Rolling Stones at a place called Altamont, near San Francisco. A young man had been stabbed to death and the fans were beaten with weighted pool cues by Hells Angels bikers. The last weeks of 1969 offered mayhem at live shows, deaths by drug overdose, and other drugrelated misadventure; the Altamont experience, as captured in the Maysles brothers’ film Gimme Shelter, seemed to be one more nail in the coffin of the ethos of ‘peace, love and music’. Australian music fans had no reason to be quite so pessimistic. Billy and the Aztecs were to appear as part of the entirely Australasian line-up at the Ourimbah Pilgrimage for Pop, just north of Sydney. The rebirth of Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, and their subsequent domination of Australian rock in the 1970s, was underway.
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Chapter 5
1970–71 Aztec is an energy
Something new and terrifyingly loud happened at the dawn of the 1970s for Billy and the Aztecs. It began in the same fashion as similar musical developments in other western countries, as music began to diversify in the months following events like Woodstock, the Isle of Wight Festival in the UK, and to a lesser extent Altamont, which although marred by violence had also been notable for its incredible size. Six hundred thousand music fans had been attracted to the one-day festival. All these events pointed to one thing—wherever you went in the world, young people wanted, even demanded, music festivals. Australia was no different. In the January sunshine of 1970, the Aztecs rose up on stages everywhere like the feathered chiefs of some New Age tribe to blast out the heads of their fans. With the band’s by now virtuosic line-up including Lobby Loyde, the music took on a higher quality. Yes, it was hard-driving blues rock
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with an edge that some would later call ‘heavy metal’ (though that nomenclature had yet to be applied to a specific group of bands), but even Billy could see that there was something pagan about the experience of playing thunderous Norse-god rock through wildly underpowered PA systems while an audience who were at least as wasted as the band rolled around, teeth gnashing, stripped to the waist and beyond, screeching with laughter or freaking out terribly. The Australian festival circuit began in earnest in 1970, and soon names like Myponga, Wallacia, Ourimbah, Narooma and others would become a kind of currency among those in the know. Such gatherings have since become somewhat predictable and oversold, but in 1970, Australia was just starting to establish its own ground rules for successful, enjoyable events. It’s commendable that even then festival organisers recognised that they need not book a slew of second-rate US or UK bands to draw a crowd. As far as local audiences were concerned, a first-class bill featuring twenty of the best Australian pop, rock, folk, blues and even country-rock bands was enough of an incentive to bring people to the gate. Festival guru Lee Dillow, who had known Billy since the early days in the Cross, and had briefly in 1969 been Thorpie’s road manager, would go on to help organise Odyssey at Wiseman’s Ferry the following year. The organisers of Ourimbah were the members of a band known as the Nutwood Rug. They were, as the legend goes, expatriate Americans with a shadowy history who had emigrated en masse to Australia. One version of their story has them as a collective of well-off trust-fund kids and draft-
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dodging musicians from Los Angeles who were previously in a US band known as Captain Reefer and the Desert Siren. The band, which had appeared regularly in Sydney clubs since mid-1968, was quite popular, though it appears that doing the rounds of Sydney clubs was the extent of its gigging activities. The group was also associated with Ubu Films, an underground film movement who were promising to release a Nutwood Rug album that had allegedly been recorded but never issued. The members also happened to own the farm property where the festival was held. Billy had worked with the band prior to the festival and praised them as being ‘the genuine California acid rock, blues sound’. Ian McFarlane further quotes Billy as saying the band was ‘the stonedest bunch of guys I’d ever met’, a compliment coming from Thorpie. The Ourimbah Festival in 1970 was in any event reasonably well attended, and both musicians and punters praised its organisation and vibe, describing it as a very pleasant and somewhat stoned festival groove for everyone who played and the estimated eight thousand people who attended. Rather than reporting on the cultural shift that was taking place, the less enlightened news desk editors of the tabloids belonging to Murdoch and the Packers saw in the festival something else of more potential interest to their readers: young people removing their clothing and dancing, possibly ‘drunk’ on marijuana. On the Saturday evening, two photographers from the Sydney tabloid paper Sunday Mirror, sent there to get something salacious for the next day’s cover, were offering people twenty dollars to take their clothes off for the benefit of their readers. The ‘straight media’ of the time had no idea what young people going topless at a festival actually meant
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in sociological terms. In any event, they had barely any takers for the offer of twenty dollars, no surprise given that it was already dark and cold. In early 1970, heads, hippies, tourists, freaks and cool kids were universally suspicious of the straight press. The unruly, hairy spectacle of nudity would soon enough become inevitably popular at such events. The Sun’s Saturday edition reported the event as ‘Topless Pop!’, while its rival the Daily Mirror went with the headline ‘Happy Hippie Valley!’ Such inanities meant little to the artists who appeared at the gig, and they themselves were happy with the show. If anything, it proved that Australia was developing its own identity when it came to these events. Copperwine’s Wendy Saddington wrote a little piece for Go-Set in which she extolled the event as a ‘flash, a quick look at how life should be’. Never to be outdone by anyone, Billy’s showbiz instincts allowed him to take command straightaway and he rocked the crowd with a pounding set. Though it’s said that some strong hash and good quality acid were powering both crowd and performers, the Aztecs were tight and focused, delivering a scorcher of a show. Someone from Max Merritt’s band went hard early on the acid and eventually had to be helped to a tent to mellow out, and their set suffered a little as a result. Jeff St John’s Copperwine turned out to be a huge crowd pleaser, and thanks to Saddington, the band’s new singer, they took three encores, the most given to any act on the bill. Billy was mildly aggrieved at this, but his ever-increasing confidence in the live band didn’t allow him the time to dwell on it. Besides, Billy was never obsessed about running order so long as he was close to the top of the bill and allowed to give the crowd his
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absolute best. Chain also played a blinder on the Saturday night. The celebrations went all night, and an all-star jam followed on the Sunday afternoon, led by Billy and featuring Wendy Saddington, members of Chain, Merritt and even compere Adrian Rawlins, who merely grunted his way through part of the jam. One of the unintended ramifications of the festival was that it highlighted dramatic problems with the Australian music industry. It was an early rock festival for New South Wales, and it boasted the best acts the country had to offer, but, as noted Australian music writer Clinton Walker pointed out in a 1980 treatise on the Australian music industry, ‘not one of them could boast a current record. The local recording industry had failed to meet the challenge of the new decade.’ Indeed, in early 1970 the local recording industry had fallen so far behind its American and British counterparts that Australian acts had to settle for releasing mostly live albums recorded under less than ideal circumstances, leaving them at a disadvantage when trying to compete with international artists for airplay and sales. On those occasions when a band did get into a studio to make an album, it was usually an exercise in writing an acceptable amount of filler that would shore up one predetermined single, which was hopefully the killer. However, record sales were never the incentive for Australian bands up to that point; there just wasn’t the audience to sustain it unless you were, say, Johnny Farnham, and few artists had had the opportunity to create a studio masterwork of the kind that regularly appeared in America or Britain. Australian radio was unadventurous and timid, relying for its playlists only on chart music and hit singles on rigid rotation, as
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management tried to meet commercial expectations for advertisers. With a few exceptions, radio in the capital cities of every state was entirely unwilling to expand into the FM band which had revolutionised both the way US record labels could promote less commercial styles of music, and the manner in which audiences heard music on the radio. It must have been a source of some irritation to Billy, as it was to Max Merritt, who had often been forced to compromise when recording his music. After all, as far as musicianship went, Merritt and his band were much admired by other artists and were widely considered the ultimate musician’s musicians. Yet he had not been able to present his music in the kind of setting he wanted for it. Both Billy and Max had had to settle for songs recorded live in the studio with few overdubs and no sonic colour or excitement. But in terms of live music, the emerging festival scene underpinned other, less obvious, changes to the music industry. It highlighted the simple fact that Australian audiences were more than happy to pay good money for a two- or three-day festival that featured only local acts. A new confidence was emerging along with a stronger sense of identity. The Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds contest, which offered aspiring bands the chance of an English tour supporting international acts—and the possibility of lucrative recording contracts—was a huge affair in the late 1960s. Many bands saw the Battle of the Sounds—perhaps too optimistically—as a true shot at success. Understandably, the UK was a real target to aim for, but it is nearly impossible to find many examples of Australian acts that actually succeeded in breaking into many international
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markets in the early 1970s, apart from the Bee Gees who were hardly a good example of a local act made good in the UK. Clinton Walker aptly describes such attempts as ‘suicide missions in search of international success’. After all, Thorpie had had every intention of breaking the UK in 1968 with the help of Robert Stigwood, but he had been won over by the Melbourne scene and saw no real advantage in leaving behind everything he’d achieved. ‘I stayed,’ he said, ‘because the blues thing I found happening in Melbourne was far more interesting than anything I would have been going to overseas.’ ✿ Another long-awaited change sent violent spasms through the music industry in May 1970—the longstanding dispute between record labels and radio stations over airplay royalties came to a head. For years, the two parties had been at loggerheads over whether radio should pay for the music that record companies supplied to them. It was a simple deadlock—radio didn’t think it should have to start paying for the music it had previously got for free, and labels in turn resented giving radio networks free music while they raked in advertising revenue. As the old deadlock tightened, record companies refused to allow records made by Australian or British acts to be aired on radio. The obvious drawback was that recording artists then had to rely on touring for income and had to find other ways to promote themselves. This further led to independent (or ‘indie’) labels being formed to release new music
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so that radio could satisfy mandatory local content requirements without having to pay for any of this Australian music. In May, Billy went into the studio with a beautiful and bloodyminded idea for his next album. Every member of the band—Billy, Loyde, Pig, Paul Wheeler and new drummer Kevin Murphy— turned up for the recording session on the first day and promptly dropped acid. While engineer Ernie Rose looked on (quite possibly in despair) the band jammed their way through freak-show versions of three Thorpie originals, ‘Mississippi’ (clocking in at nineteen minutes and forty-five seconds), ‘Goodbye Baby’, ‘Truth’ and a screaming twenty-four-minute take on Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson’s ‘Gangster of Love’. It was a bold, bolshie move, typically Thorpean. Billy had longed to record something more progressive to move his career along, and to capture the ferocious volume of this incarnation of the Aztecs. For the release of this album in 1970, the Aztecs were signed to the Infinity label, an offshoot of Festival Records in Sydney which was intended to capture a share of both the ‘progressive’ and the ‘heavy rock’ market. The two were neither mutually exclusive nor did they have to all be pastoral acoustic guitars and flutes to get the heads buzzing. Billy titled this new album The Hoax Is Over to reflect his feeling that this was the truest distillation yet of his innermost musical ideas. While Billy celebrated the making of one of his best studio albums yet, the music business was practically eating itself whole as radio and record companies kept fighting. This in turn created another business entirely—new live music promoters emerged from the woodwork, promoting an increasing number of venues in
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Melbourne and Sydney, like the T.F. (Too Fucking) Much Ballrooms in Melbourne which were directly responsible for broadening the profile of acts like Daddy Cool and Spectrum. By the time the record ban was resolved in October that year—to the satisfaction of the musicians for once—record companies were impelled to sign a host of acts to meet the renewed demand from radio. Groups like Tully, Tamam Shud, Chain, Flying Circus and others who had been trading on their reputation as live bands were launched to greater national popularity. Suddenly there was a real music boom going on. During this period, Lobby Loyde and Billy had a falling out over Loyde’s new relationship with Jackie Holme. She had accompanied Billy to Melbourne in 1968 but in the intervening two years they had grown apart. By the time she and Loyde started seeing each other, Billy and Jackie had already split. Though, in the spirit of the times, they tried not to let it destroy their friendship, it caused a good deal of friction between the two old friends. It wasn’t the final straw but Loyde soon quit the Aztecs in order to form his own band, the Coloured Balls—a move that no doubt would have come organically anyway. Lobby was far too big a personality in his own right to be anyone’s lead guitarist, and he had his own fertile ideas to pursue. This had only been highlighted for him by the latest Aztecs album. ‘In listening to it [The Hoax Is Over], I kind of thought: not intense enough for me. I wanted to go somewhere more intense. Coloured Balls music was in my head.’ The music scene thrilled and mushroomed on into the new year. In 1971, Australian music was enjoying a real renaissance, spearheaded by the success of Spectrum. A revitalised Chain with
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Matt Taylor had a number one record in Melbourne, and Daddy Cool’s ‘Eagle Rock’ swung with a rock’n’roll/blues revivalist beat. Billy and the Aztecs played the Odyssey Festival which took place over the Australia Day long weekend—a time that has since become linked with the quintessential Aussie summer rock festival. Held near Warragamba Dam west of Sydney, Odyssey, in a foretaste of Sunbury and other festivals, featured mostly Australian bands from Sydney and Melbourne. The headline act was to be the Kinks. Also on the bill was Copperwine as well as Spectrum, Daddy Cool (both making their first appearances outside of Melbourne) and Fanny Adams, a group which featured a crew of ex-Aztecs fronted by Doug Parkinson. Testament to the ethos of the festival and the entire era, the festival’s MC—Adrian Rawlins again— performed a hippie wedding onstage at which the bride and groom vowed to ‘love, tickle and groove with, and delight’ one another. Rawlins pronounced the happy couple ‘co-equal partners in a cool scene’. Despite the optimistic crowd forecasts of forty thousand stoned soul picnickers, only about seven thousand showed up. Technical problems on the Friday meant the first band didn’t take to the stage until well into the evening, but to make up for it, the music continued right through the night. Billy now had more big-payday gigs coming in, which meant more money to put back into the Aztecs. It seemed that the industry had created a much more visible and viable culture for Australian bands. Daddy Cool’s ‘Eagle Rock’ single went over big everywhere and when the band’s debut album, Daddy Who? Daddy Cool, was released, people were queuing up before the record stores had
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even opened for business. The album went gold six times over and, in the process, the modest Daddy Cool actually changed the way Australians thought about and supported their favourite bands. Though he had not had such success in recent times, Billy was not reliant on the trappings of fortune either. He knew better than most how fickle fate could be: ‘The trouble was that one day you’d be playing huge concerts and the next day you’d have to play some small place to only a handful of people. It tends to bring you down.’ The varying quality of venues and their PA systems meant that bands were being frustrated in their creative endeavours and couldn’t always present the same show. Spectrum, a fascinating and much-overlooked band from this period, reinvented themselves as the Indelible Murtceps with a pared-down line-up; they played a completely different repertoire requiring less equipment, reserving the Spectrum experience for bigger venues. By contrast, Billy’s response to the problem of differing clubs and auditoriums was simply to turn up his amp. Some audiences reeled away in shock from the noise, but the sheer volume attracted a tougher, younger audience. This new audience had been created in part by changes to licensing laws in Melbourne, so that pubs could present live rock music. A new clan of promoters emerged to create more demand and more venues. New places were opening up every week and Thorpie was right there to lay claim to them, packing out the hotels that dotted the city’s street corners. Most of the pubs already had the rooms, they simply needed public address systems (which were very basic at the time), a groovy name and a couple of bouncers and they were in business. With the right
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booking agent and a host of venues across the Melbourne suburbs, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs changed the music scene. The endlessly revolving rhythm section chopped and changed again. For some time, things had not been going well for drummer Kevin Murphy. His crazy lifestyle finally caught up with him and he forgot to turn up for a show. A replacement drummer, Steve Innis, was found and duly deputised for a few shows, but it was always going to be a temporary situation. ‘He’s not exactly what we were looking for,’ said Thorpie to Go-Set, who were by now publishing something Aztecs-related every week without fail. It was blind DJ Grantley Dee’s drummer who stepped in. Gil Matthews, the in-house recording engineer for the Melbournebased label Havoc, was known to serious Melbourne jazz fans as the Pocket Krupa—the child prodigy who had toured America, aged eleven, before the birth of rock’n’roll in the 1950s, battling drums with Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich and Louie Bellson. He had been made an honorary Mouseketeer by Walt Disney and had gone on to a serious career as a pro drummer while still at school. Born and raised in Melbourne, educated at Carey Grammar in Kew and with the kind of instinctual head for music that was the envy of many, Gil was still in high school when he fronted a band for a television show hosted by former Olympic swimmer John Conrads. Billy Thorpe and Gil Matthews had been in each other’s orbits since the early 1960s. Throughout these years, Gil had worked with Levi Smith’s Clefs, the Vibrants, Max Hamilton and the Impacts, and more recently with Grantley Dee. The requisite Aztec nickname—‘Rats’ or ‘Rathead’ in Gil’s case—came about because
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of Billy’s joking assumption that a rat is a full-grown mouse, or a ‘mouseketeer’; in any event, ‘Rats’ it was. Gil’s reputation came with him. Perhaps in part due to his jazz background, Gil was no acid-guzzling head. In fact, he liked a beer and a cigarette and took care not to get dosed by any of the other Aztecs who were quite evangelical about LSD. Despite his reluctance to join in the psychedelic fun, Gil had a perverse sense of humour and an uncanny ability to clear a room with a single fart. At one Aztecs gig to which Gil had supposedly turned up unannounced, Billy noticed him wandering around, paradiddling and popping his sticks on every available surface. ‘He could be our new drummer,’ Thorpie noted to Morgan, who retorted, ‘That’s interesting. He’s not playing anything.’ Thorpie later went on record to say that Gil approached him, claiming that he could play better than Innis. Billy already liked what he’d seen and Gil came down the following week and sat in during a two-set gig at Sebastian’s. He was offered the drum chair on the spot. He had a distinctive thunderous style and, most importantly, was a maniac. Immediately, the stage became a battleground as the band’s volume went even higher. Gil played effortlessly and with panache, but was not afraid to pummel the kit either. Thorpie was dazzled by the manner in which he seemed to draw so much from the shells without expending a lot of energy. That’s not how Gil remembers the exertions of that first gig, but he enjoyed the challenge. It was a matter of watching what Thorpie and Pig were doing and keeping the dynamics flowing. For the kids in the front row who perched happily beside his kit, the volume must have been tremendous.
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Frequently, the workload was similarly larger than life. ‘We once did five gigs in one day . . . We had one van, one roadie and two stacks of twelve-inch speakers for the PA and that was it. There were no monster PAs in those days. We did five gigs in one day and I can remember us all at four o’clock in the morning, looking at each other saying, “Man, I’m fucked.” And we were just fucked. I could easily get through two or three—it wouldn’t bother me, but five was rooted. So . . . I joined the Aztecs with the thought that I probably won’t be staying too long because I’d come from a cabaret situation and my gig with Grantley Dee was still on, the cabaret thing, we’d go and do gigs at the Red Bluff Hotel. I went from that and being told what to wear and what to do, keep the volume down, blah blah blah, to this fucking monstrous rock’n’roll thing where no one gave a fuck. If anyone said anything, Billy would just tell them to get fucked. Record companies didn’t tell you what to do, the management didn’t tell you what to do, the band basically was its own boss which was very different to the cabaret thing. In the cabaret scene, the record label would tell you what to record, tell you which song was going to be the single. ‘When I joined the Aztecs, it was Warren Morgan on keyboards, Paul Wheeler on bass, myself and Billy. Then Warren Morgan left because he had a duo with Phil Manning, they formed a little duo called Pilgrimage. Then Bruce Howard joined, he came from [New Zealand band] the La De Das. I think that’s the best Aztec line-up for mine.’ That was March 1971. By May, preparation for the forthcoming Melbourne Town Hall extravaganza was underway. The line-up
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was already being advertised—Chain, the La De Das, Daddy Cool, Wild Cherries, Lotus and Healing Force were on the bill—and Pig had to join the Organ Guild of Melbourne in order to be allowed to play the Town Hall’s enormous pipe organ. The Town Hall show was filmed for a TV special, and the black and white footage shows fans waiting outside in the June cold before the doors swing open and the fans leap up the stairs in waves. On the night, the curtains opened and there was Pig perched high above the stage, manipulating the stops, with a single spotlight burning on him. As soon as Thorpie, in white shirt, waistcoat and denims with his hair braided, launched into ‘Somebody Left Me Crying’, a huge wave of subsonic noise blew through the building. Billy reckoned it was like standing on the wing of a 747 taking off. Backed by the skyscraping organ, drums and bass, Billy picked up his black Les Paul and peeled off a series of squealing blues licks. As the organ faded into the heavens, the Les Paul was screaming with feedback. The band kicked into ‘Time To Live’, creating a vast, beastly roar from one guitar and bass, drums and keyboards. Behind the group’s backline, an enormous plastic creature began to inflate. ‘What do you think of our beast?’ Billy asked the crowd. ‘It’s not even halfway up.’ The starfish (or octopus—no one remembers exactly what it was supposed to be) was constructed from triple-ply drycleaning plastic and inflated by four industrial vacuum cleaners. The rock group Tully had had a similar creature onstage with them a year or so before. Morgan enjoyed the creativity of the idea, if not the execution. ‘We just didn’t have time to organise it—we just went out and did it.’
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When the album of the Melbourne Town Hall show, Aztecs Live, was released, one critic stuck the boot into Gil’s drum solo, saying it resembled milk crates being tossed around. Though he was unimpressed with that particular assessment, Gil noted the sound problems the band faced during the recording. ‘There’s one section where they recorded the organ from the ABC mics up on the roof. Then there’s another section where they turned off all the other mics and just recorded the organ and Billy’s guitar by itself. It’s like a simulated human ear in the hall—fantastic. When the rest of the band comes in, it’s such a rotten sound.’ Morgan also had his reservations about the gig. ‘We started off with all the old gusto and discovered very quickly that you can’t play with the Town Hall organ. We hadn’t had any rehearsal, and the volume—everything was just wrong. It could have been a major concert.’ Just two weeks later, Pig and Billy had a blow-up. Nothing major, just a kind of confrontation born of dissatisfaction over something minor and the two—who were housemates—didn’t speak for the rest of the day. Then the next day, Pig went to Billy’s room to tell him he was leaving the band. Thorpie clearly thought Pig had come to apologise or clear the air, but fell off the bed when Pig told him of his decision. ‘I went down to see [Billy] to tell him I was going to shoot through. I said, “You know, people around town are saying you’re going a bit crazy, old mate.” And as I’m getting chewed out by my missus for leaving the band, I kid you not, I can hear Billy in the bedroom playing that [mimics riff of “Most People I Know”] on the acoustic guitar.’
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However, Billy was also concerned for his friend. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked Pig. A plan was already in place: the Aztecs’ manager Michael Browning had suggested Pig should make his own solo album. Pig was slightly taken aback by the idea but once Browning had made the case for it—Pig was a phenomenally popular and talented musician who had been responsible not only for the Aztecs’ keyboard sound, but was also highly rated for his work with Chain—Pig agreed. ‘Downunda [the album] was because of the Town Hall concert. Our manager came to me and said, “I think there’s enough interest in you to do a solo album. Would you like to do one?” and I said, “Yeah, I’ll be in it.” About a week later, the Aztecs were playing at some pub [and] on the men’s toilet [door], it had the sign saying “Puffing Billy” so the following day—we were living together in Brighton at the time—I went out and we were in the backyard having a few beers. I went and spoke to Billy and said, “I’ve been offered this.” And I knew that he knew that I’d been offered this thing and I get this vibe that he wanted me to talk about it at least. So I said, “Billy, you know I’ve been offered this solo album . . .” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Would you like to be part of it and if so, would you like to be Puffing Billy?” And he said, “Only if you’re prepared to be Thumping Pig.” I said, that sounds fine by me. Everything we did was fairly spontaneous like that. We’d just go ahead until someone stopped us and in those days people generally didn’t. We came up with the formula that we’d have one solo each on it. We didn’t quite have ten tracks on it. In those days if someone had an idea to do an album, it’d be about eight to ten tracks. On reflection, most of the tracks are of what you’d call commercial length, they
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weren’t lengthy you know, three, three and a half minutes each. Billy did one, I think we each did one without the other being involved, and then we’re sharing about six or seven of the tracks. There was Big Goose on bass, the late Goose [Barry Sullivan, of the group Chain], Gil Matthews on drums, Phil Manning on guitar, Billy and myself. That was it.’ The names stuck and, with some creative punctuation added, the act had a name: Thump’n Pig and Puff’n Billy. John Sayers engineered the album, which was recorded mostly live and in the order that the songs appear on the album, at Bill Armstrong Studios. Indeed, rather than being strictly a solo album for Morgan, the project took on a Thorpie-heavy aspect, if only for the fact that four of the songs were written by either Billy, or Billy and Pig— and, in one instance, a Thorpie co-write with Wendy Saddington (‘Mothers and Fathers’). In August 1971, Michael Browning became aware of the negotiations for a rock festival to be held out at Diggers Rest near Sunbury, about fifteen kilometres past Tullamarine airport. The company that was putting the festival together was Odessa Promotions, run by John Fowler, who worked for Channel Nine, and Jim McKay. Their idea was to put the festival on with an allAustralian bill, charge a reasonable entry fee and film the acts, then edit the footage together for a concert film that would hit the cinema circuit within six months. ‘The background of it was that there was a very strong pubrock scene in the Melbourne suburbs in the early 1970s—the beer barns where Billy was the king,’ says Browning. ‘One in particular was the White Horse Hotel in Nunawading . . . that was kinda like
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The Aztecs at Sunbury. Top: This shot, taken by ESP’s lighting guru Peter Evans, shows the Aztecs (left to right: Bruce Howard, Paul Wheeler, Gil Matthews and Billy) being photographed at the Sunbury site, the Duncan family farm near Glencoe, to promote the event in October 1971, some months before the festival. Above: Billy, Bruce Howard (left) and Lobby Loyde (right) offering fans a personal, open-air acoustic performance on the hill near the stage, Sunbury 1972. (Photos courtesy of Peter Evans) Previous page, clockwise from top right: Billy is profiled in Everybody’s magazine as a contender for Australian pop artist of the year, 1965. Normie Rowe was the biggest national singing star, but Billy was still the king of Sydney. The medium is the message. Billy branches out into television, with the announcement that his pilot show for It’s All Happening has been picked up by Channel Seven. (TV Times, March 1966) Like the Beatles, the Aztecs were recipients of a sponsorship by Vox Amplification during their meteoric rise in 1964. ‘We loved those amps,’ says Vince Melouney (far right). (Courtesy of Yamaha Australia and Vox Amplification) Counting the cost of fame: Billy displays injuries sustained during an onstage encounter with an enthusiastic Tasmanian fan in 1966. (TV Times, August 1966) Tony Barber, Billy, Vince Melouney and John Watson inspect the vinyl pressings of their first Parlophone hit single, ‘Mashed Potato’, at the EMI factory in Sydney, June 1964. (Music Maker magazine, August 1964)
This early Capricorn Records-era promo shot of Billy captures his aspirational late-seventies rock star aesthetic perfectly. Billy was later heard to dismiss big hair as a bad idea. (The Glenn A. Baker Archives)
There’s a star, man. Another promotional photo, for the 1981 Elektra album 21st Century Man, shows Billy’s fastidious attention to futurist detail. (The Glenn A. Baker Archives) Facing page, from top: Aztec reunion, 1993. One of Billy’s oldest and dearest friends, Sir Wayne Martin, poses backstage with the reunited band members. Left to right: bassist Paul Wheeler, Warren ‘Pig’ Morgan, Billy, Sir Wayne and drummer Gil ‘Rats’ Matthews. (Courtesy of Sir Wayne Martin) Billy at Sir Wayne’s Kings Cross pad, with his old mate Sammy Gaha (right) and an unidentified female friend, 2005. (Courtesy of Sir Wayne Martin) A trim Billy backstage at the Sydney Entertainment Centre during the Golden Stave Charity Luncheon, 5 June 1998, with Jimmy Barnes and Richard Clapton. The event raised more than half a million dollars. (www.bobking.com.au)
Shown here at Kings Cross landmark the Piccolo Bar, during the promotion of his first book, Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll, Billy talks to journalist Angus Fontaine about the wild old days. (Courtesy of Angus Fontaine)
Lobby Loyde and Billy lead the Aztecs—Warren Morgan (left), Gil Matthews (behind Billy), and Paul Wheeler on bass (second right)—into the maelstrom during Loyde’s Hall of Fame appearance in 2006. (www.bobking.com.au)
Together again, loudly: the Aztec chieftain and the legendary Lobby Loyde during the latter’s induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame on 16 August 2006. Both would be dead within a year. (www.bobking.com.au)
Just a normal dad. Thorpe, shown here with (from left) wife Lynn and daughters Lauren and Rusty, was a devoted family man who tried his best to give his children a normal upbringing despite the rigours of rock’n’roll. (www.bobking.com.au)
The storyteller at work, 12-string guitar on his knee. Billy entertains the audience in December 2006 at the Basement, the Sydney nightclub where he recorded the posthumously released live album Solo: The Last Recordings. (www.bobking.com.au)
the western suburbs drinking kind of gig. He did a residency out there and just built up this huge following which was very much a cult following in the sense that there were certain rituals like the “suck more piss” chant—they’d get on each other’s shoulders during the gig. That spread out a little bit to other beer barns and Sunbury was the climax of that—it was obvious quite early on that all those people were going to go and Billy was always going to be the king of that. Which is what happened.’
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Chapter 6
1972–75 Sunbury says, Suck more piss!
They came in cars, in convoys from out of state, from every direction and point of origin, barrelling across the sun-flattened fields of Victoria. As they approached the Duncan farm along the dirt track known as Watsons Road, the dry ground beneath their tyres crunched. Every bit of grass was brown. The Australia Day weekend for some began much earlier in the week, as hairy young men with little more than a dirty felt hat, a singlet and a guitar thumbed their way from points east, west, north and south to a common destination. Cosmopolitan, independent young women from Sydney boarded the overnight train at Central on a Thursday afternoon bound for Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station, then an hour’s onward journey up to Diggers Rest. It wasn’t just hippies, heads or ‘fans’. There were sharpies, pissheads, potheads, speed freaks, Jesus freaks, petrol heads, bikers, blues fans, Kiwis, schoolkids, dealers, the plain
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curious and the plain crazy. They carried food and clothing; some only had the one change of clothes and a duffel bag full of clinking brown bottles. Some took clean underpants, some didn’t. There were those who thought it might be a good idea to bring a tent or at least a swag and a toothbrush. As people got off the train at Diggers Rest, there was Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum wandering around with a two-man film crew, firing off dazzlingly inane questions. Most of the kids regarded him with suspicion—Meldrum was then strictly a print media personality and a record industry legend, and thus a known quantity and a celebrity only to some. There would have been nothing like joy on their faces when they saw the camera pointing at them. Some even spun away from it, ignoring his banter—maybe they didn’t want their mum knowing they were out for the weekend with a large crowd of deranged festivalgoers. Photographer and journalist Rennie Ellis was also there. His loving eye for the hedonism of such events captured the gentle rolling thrusts of pissed young men dancing by a fence. Another photo captured three young men in what appeared to be the challenge and prelude to a punch-up; in the corner of the frame, two more young men dashed up naked from the creek that ran behind the stage, ready for the fray. ‘Two days of beer, dope and music produced many anxious moments,’ Ellis wrote later. Down behind the main stage was Thorpie’s tent, the biggest and best on site, better than the dusty, dirty tent where the production crew sweated over the finer details of the first day’s running order. By contrast, Thorpie’s tent had a floor, some Persian rugs, air mattresses and some eskies. Thorpie’s two dogs wandered about
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freely. The showers were working, but most of the festivalgoers had already set up their little spot and made a dash to the creek to cool off, where scenes of pastoral nakedness straight out of the Woodstock movie’s hairy pubes shots were being re-created, to the delight of cameramen, photographers and casual perves. Off site, just up the road from the festival, the local pubgoers were reeling from their first encounters with real ‘longhairs’. Most were quite surprised at how polite these young animals actually were, though if they knew that some of these city types—these ‘poofters’—had been afforded the best education Old Melbourne money could buy, maybe they wouldn’t have been so taken aback. The Victorian police began getting itchy feet. Their blue serge pants chafed in the heat, and their pith helmets made them look like the English army under siege at Mafeking. The coppers were arresting people at the Diggers Rest Hotel, dragging people out without cause. The crowd dispersed as the cops barged through dragging a kid by his hair, twisting sunburned arms up behind backs and flinging young people into the waiting paddy wagons. It was a sight. The locals were bemused—though unruly drinkers blueing with the constabulary was hardly unheard of in country Victoria. No one was really going out of their way to cause trouble, but the cops had either anticipated it, wanted it or needed it. One young bloke protested to an officer, who simply smirked then booted him into the back of the wagon. Back down onstage the first band of the day, Madder Lake, was already lighting up the crowd as best they could while all around them the audience appeared to be setting up camp, an army of foot soldiers, ready to do their bit for the cause. Kids in singlets
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took up their vantage points. Watermelon rinds, brown bottles and fag ends were everywhere, along with flattened cans and flies. The fair-skinned and sun-shy huddled under whatever shade they could find. Sunbury, for better or worse, was kicking in. ✿ Sunbury is not, as has been routinely claimed, the Australian Woodstock. Australian music fans were still finding their feet and for many, Sunbury—both the festival itself and the subsequent film—was the first glimpse into a local version of the same experience young people the world over were having. While the tag ‘our Woodstock’ is misleading, it was Australia’s first encounter with a real rock festival, admittedly with locally popular rather than globally famous bands. But it was the scale of Sunbury and the PR work that went into the event that made it so special. The advertising for the event had even extended to broadsheets in Melbourne and Sydney, as well as the various music papers. Radio stations in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide also promoted the festival. It was to be expected that there would inevitably be some negative publicity before the festival gates had even opened. So negative was some of the media coverage that the police had taken the step of issuing a general warning to attendees, saying they could not guarantee their safety. The press at the time deplored the effect alcohol was beginning to have on rock audiences, who had until quite recently seen bands in unlicensed venues under the more benign influence of marijuana.
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Sunbury began on Saturday 29 January 1972, when the gates to the 660-acre Sunbury property belonging to farmer George Duncan opened at 8 am. There was already a strong police presence as fans piled off the first train of the day from Melbourne; a queue of cars two miles long waiting to be waved in. A ticket for that weekend would have set you back six dollars, or you could get a day ticket for a dollar. When asked to put a figure on the attendances that year, John Fowler said, ‘The papers put it from between twentyfive and sixty thousand. How can you tell?’ There were no major ‘international’ acts on the bill the first year, though in subsequent years acts such as Queen (prior to becoming a global entity), Free and Deep Purple appeared. It certainly was the launching pad for Thorpie’s dominance of the Australian music scene over the next three years, but as far as being a purely ‘Australian’ event, it should be noted that a large number of the musicians present were from New Zealand, like Max Merritt and the Meteors, the La De Das and Mike Rudd. The Pilgrimage For Pop Festival at Ourimbah in 1970 had a similarly Australasian line-up. The truest assessment of Sunbury’s legacy is that the subsequent film and album of the event effectively ‘nationalised’ what up until then was a regional—mostly, with a few exceptions— Melbourne-based music scene. ‘Melbourne was an island unto itself musically,’ Billy said. ‘Most of the bands that were heard here were unknown anywhere else in the country and yet they were playing to thousands of people. I mean, we used to play five gigs on a Saturday, and we weren’t the only band doing that either. That scene didn’t spread nationally until the Sunbury Music Festival.’
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Billy, Pig, Rats and Paul were all looking forward to the event— and not just because they were headliners. Festivals were not a new prospect, but a festival as well-organised as Sunbury was a rare thing. ‘We all took it on board as being an experience, not to just go there and do the gig but to actually get there in tents and be part of the whole thing,’ says Michael Browning. ‘We had our camp set up near the creek there not too far from the stage and we were there the entire time the festival was on. We all wanted to be a part of Sunbury and we were. I don’t know how many times the Aztecs actually played on that first weekend—as I recall it was just the once. It may have been twice.’ At the very same time as Sunbury was happening, some eight hundred kilometres away in Adelaide a predominantly Australian line-up of groups (including bands that were shuttling between Sunbury and South Australia) played to almost as large an audience at the Meadows Technicolour Fair. Thorpie and the boys were advertised as playing at that festival as well but Browning dismissed this: ‘There may have been another festival on that weekend, but I’m sure that Billy wasn’t booked for it. They may have advertised his name out of wishful thinking on their part.’ Still, as the documentary of Sunbury—shot by Cambridge Films—showed, it was overturning the dominant philosophy that in order for a festival to be a true success it needed international artists. It also showed that what many Australians demanded from ‘their’ bands was authenticity and honesty: that particular strand of authenticity was evinced by hard-rocking blues bands, more mellow country-ish rock, blues wailers like Wendy Saddington or Phil Manning’s solo stuff. It couldn’t be too fancy in any case.
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Bands like Pink Floyd could fill any Australian sports ground or major indoor venue, but their musical influence could hardly be felt anywhere. The area, famous for snakes, was dusty and dry. Various public-service announcements ventured that drinking water ‘or whatever you’ve brought to drink’ would be a good idea. The heat baked the crowd as they ate Chiko rolls or drank warm beer out of longnecks. The Indelible Murtceps and Michael Turner in Session kicked off the day, Pirana sweetened the harsh blues rock with some sweet Santana-influenced Latin rock, and a threepiece Wild Cherries played, a shirtless Teddy Toi thumping the bass while Lobby Loyde, a cigarette always dangling from his lips, wrangled and strangled his Gibson SG. Tamam Shud thundered hard in the late afternoon as dazed souls sought cool refuge in the river behind the stage. Lindsay Bjerre of Sydney band Tamam Shud was less than impressed by crowd chants of ‘We want Billy!’ throughout the afternoon. There was already a suspicion among some musicians on the first day of the festival that they were there to provide backing music to a piss-sinking mating ritual. In an interview thirty-one years to the day after the festival, Phil Manning of Chain deplored the event. ‘It was a time when the hippie thing was declining and the drunken afternoons of too much beer, sun and basic rock developed. The music went from being experimental to being just moronic entertainment for yobbos.’ Ed Nimmervoll, writing for Go-Set, was unimpressed by the ongoing crudity of some of the crowd’s antics. He saw the thoroughly wasted, the red-skinned youths staggering with flagons
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of wine in their fists, a man freaking out because he hadn’t seen his wife since they’d first arrived at the site. There were violent fights, blood was drawn and people overcome by sun, booze and drugs were being helped to their tents or into an ambulance. Such events of course are seen at most rock festivals even today. By 6 pm, as the Aztecs prepared to go onstage, the final burning rays of the sun showed an estimated thirty to forty thousand baked fans relaxing on the dusty hot grass. They had no idea what they were about to bear witness to. ‘By the time we got to Sunbury it was every man for himself,’ says Gil Matthews. ‘The volume had gone up, Billy’s guitar playing was louder and better and more busy and . . . to be a drummer in the Aztecs, you needed to be able to pace yourself physically to get through the set—it was a very demanding ninety minutes because of the sheer volume, to try and be heard. ‘The energy of that Sunbury band is just incredible. The energy level is just amazing. I think having all my rudiments and my learning and having grown up as a jazz drummer, I was able to distance myself and get through that. When I joined the Aztecs I had to completely change my style of drumming. Keeping in mind I had been a guitarist for a while too. I had to change my style just to get through the set.’ Thorpie and the boys were hands down the most popular rock band in the country and their regular shows emboldened their passion for sheer fuck-off volume. After all, Sunbury was really their audience in a way. It was the pub crowd transplanted from the cities onto the dusty, hard ground, but it was worth the trip. The blast from Thorpie was shattering, monstrous even. His hair
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tied loosely back, his shirt unbuttoned, Billy led the band like a thundering cavalry charge and many swore they could feel the ground move under their bare feet. According to former manager Michael Browning, ‘He was without doubt the best communicator I’ve ever seen onstage. He was a genius. He could have the crowd doing anything. I’ve never seen anyone get a crowd to respond the way Billy could. A wonderful voice, a wonderful showman—probably the best that I’ve ever seen. He was incredibly powerful onstage. His concept of the volume thing was calculated—he always considered it to be a dimension and not just for the sake of it, and there were times when he went over the top, but overall, he had the right idea. A lot of the bands that have followed, including AC/DC and Midnight Oil, followed that same principle, that same dimension of sound. He was a truly great performer. He always looked the part too. He could be down to his last two hundred bucks, and he’d go out and buy a pair of red Italian leather shoes.’ As Billy pulled out the blistering leads and crunching power chords, crowds had climbed up onto the lighting towers in shades of Woodstock and Altamont; the rigs shook as people danced as if possessed. The crowd gave their undying love to Thorpie, they danced and leaped about, swinging on the wire fence that separated them from the stage. Later on there would be those who sneered at the devotion shown to Billy and the Aztecs that day—there was the view that the group produced mindless yob boogie music for those who only cared about visceral reactions for their kicks.
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Meredith Connor was just fifteen years old and had only recently arrived in Melbourne from Wellington, New Zealand. ‘Music was the one thing that my friends and I had shared growing up, and we listened to music all the time. So when I came to Sunbury, I was just blown away. Most of us had already been introduced to Woodstock the movie and there had been smaller music festivals happening in New Zealand. But it was the moment when he played “Most People I Know”—that song just brought everyone together at that exact moment. Whatever anyone else was doing at that exact moment, it became clear that this song was iconic. Of course, when I went back to school a month later, everyone was singing that song. Everyone knew it.’ Also among the heads at Sunbury was a young Jimmy Barnes, who’d hitchhiked all the way from Adelaide to be there. He too was barely fifteen years old but completely in thrall to the Aztecs. After an hour and fifteen minutes of blistering rock, the Aztecs came off stage to massive applause. Molly Meldrum was there waiting with the camera crew to interview Billy. ‘I feel really good,’ Billy said. ‘I had no idea that the band had become this popular. Something like this really gives you an indication. We’ve seen it go from a hundred people to thirty or forty thousand, which is amazing.’ Molly mentioned that the line-up comprised only local bands, and Billy forthrightly gave his opinion that for too long the cultural cringe had meant that music festivals imported minor overseas acts and billed them over superior Australian bands. ‘You don’t need any overseas names. It has to be obvious. The only way to promote Australian music is to make it purely Australian. It’s good to bring
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in an overseas group if it’s a big group but most of the festivals and things that have been on have had second-rate overseas bands instead of top-class stuff. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t use our bands here. It’s been proven we can draw.’ Max Merritt had taken to the stage earlier on Saturday afternoon to cries of ‘Thorpe, Thorpe’ and a somewhat muted reaction, but Max’s impassioned take on Otis Redding’s ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ won the audience over. In a backstage interview after the Meteors’ set on the Saturday afternoon, Billy and Max discussed the prospects for Australian bands overseas. The Meteors had gone to England in 1971 to try to crack the market there, and Max revealed to Billy that they’d been struggling away, meeting only indifference, and were happy to return to Australia. Max knew that Billy planned to make that trip himself, with plans already in place for the Aztecs to go to England in 1972. ‘It’s a thing you can’t rush into,’ Max advised Billy. ‘You go over there and wait it out. You can’t just walk in and expect to be accepted. It takes at least a year. It’s not that you’re dissatisfied with the Australian scene—I mean, it’s tremendous. The point is, you’ve just got to try it.’ ‘I just want to go overseas and continue working, like we’re working here,’ Billy told him. ‘I’d dig some more gigs.’ After the high point of the festival shows, the band returned to Melbourne and continued their rounds of the pubs there; they could see the difference in attendances as a result of word of mouth following their Sunbury triumph. The release of Live At Sunbury had an even more powerful impact. The album became a monolith of Australian blues rock. It would sell more than eighty thousand copies and took the Aztecs’ name deeper into Australia
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than they’d ever anticipated. It became the favourite party album, a soundtrack to barbies and piss-ups. It was belting out everywhere and was a calling card not just for the Aztecs but for heavy Aussie blues rock. If you were around during that time, you would have heard it coming over the fence or through your floor. It really was that ubiquitous. As Gil Matthews told Ian McFarlane, ‘We were having a good time just playing rock’n’roll, but I don’t think we said, “Hey, we’re the biggest band in the land.” We didn’t really care, you know?’ Following the Sunbury triumph—of both the gig and the subsequent hit album—Thorpie knew he had completely asserted the dominance of his group in Australia. Even in the absence of nationalised record charts, the Aztecs were number one everywhere. In May that year, manager Michael Browning went ahead to England to prepare the way for the group to conquer other, less forgiving markets, like the UK, that tended to be impervious to hyped bands from Down Under. There, in the land of Melody Maker and the NME, where hipness fluctuated as wildly as oil prices, Browning was working feverishly for the group and had a recording deal in place with RAK Records, the label belonging to producer and mogul Mickie Most. Home to artists like Suzi Quatro, Kenny, Herman’s Hermits and later to Hot Chocolate, Smokie and Racey, and distributed by EMI, the label had hitherto enjoyed modest success with its signings; Thorpie promised to be an adventurous fit with Most’s quiet achievers. The band also had their first English music festival to look forward to. They were booked to appear at the Great Western Festival in May 1972 but for reasons unknown were removed from
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the billing. It seems that the Aztecs were in no position to make the move from Australia at that time, though it is unclear whether it was for personal or financial reasons or a combination thereof. In any event, the Great Western Festival went ahead without the Aztecs appearing. The plan of attack had been that the Aztecs would travel to the UK in early May, play shows for two weeks, then return to Australia for live dates for the rest of the year. The large number of Aussie dates would give them the necessary money to fund another trip to England. The cancellation of the festival date and some other, smaller shows booked for them was a major loss of momentum because manager Michael Browning had been talking the group up to prominent UK and European booking agents who were interested in seeing the Aztecs in action. Even though ‘Most People I Know’ enjoyed quite a bit of radio play in England as disc jockey Alan Freeman’s hit pick on the BBC, and on Radio Luxembourg, where it was chosen as the Power Play for a week, the venture was queered from the off. The main problem was that while blues-based pop by bands like Slade and Status Quo were hugely popular among teenagers, the slightly older English audiences were being seduced by a different kind of sound than that offered by the primordial, guitar-driven Aztec juggernaut. Artists like David Bowie and Lou Reed had captured the imagination of pop music fans there, with a trend towards a certain whimsical, occasionally surreal science-fiction pop. It wasn’t all bad news for Billy at this time. In April 1972, he met the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life— Lynn McGrath. Billy was sitting in the back seat of a cab on Punt Road in Melbourne when he saw a girl with long auburn hair and
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wearing white jeans riding past on a motorcycle. He ordered the cabbie to follow her. The driver did as he was told, and no one was more surprised than Billy when the girl on the bike turned out to be the petite, gorgeous twenty-one-year-old receptionist at Michael Browning’s office. Billy had had his eye on her for a while, and when it happened, the courtship seemed effortless for Billy, who’d never really contemplated settling down until that point. He’d dated a number of women since splitting with Jackie Holme, but with Lynn— who became known to all and sundry as ‘Gook’—it really was a bad case of good love. Thorpie went mad on the girl and soon they were living together. They would marry in 1979, in Las Vegas. The November 1972 farewell shows, including a massive sellout frenzy at Festival Hall that boasted seven thousand fans stomping the dance floor and singing along to ‘Oop-Poo-Pa-Doo’, were a huge success and the proceeds from that show took care of the ridiculously high cost of international airfares. The gig went a little sour when fans destroyed some of the venue’s seating and Billy was arrested (and his passport seized) on an unrelated matter concerning the landlady of the house where he’d been living. She claimed that three thousand dollars worth of damage had been done to the house. ‘I still can’t understand why she was pissed off,’ Thorpie wrote in the liner notes to Lock Up Your Mothers, fairly cackling at the memory. ‘We only painted the interior bright enamel red. It looked great.’ Even without their manager in the country, sheer pulling power and financial backing saw the group reimburse Festival Hall for the damage caused by fans. They also lodged three thousand dollars with a solicitor to handle the case with the landlady and,
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on Sunday 12 November, the band departed Melbourne on an Ansett flight to Sydney, then boarded a Qantas flight for London, via Hawaii and Los Angeles. Present were Paul Wheeler, Bruce Howard, Norman the roadie, Billy, Rats, and Michael Browning’s sister Coral. It would prove to be a tumultuous four-day journey across the globe. First, Thorpie was strip-searched in Hawaii, while Bruce lay on the plane, comatose, with the cleaners working around him. Discovered after a frantic search and revived with coffee, Bruce then found he had misplaced his passport, so the band took the opportunity to look around Hawaii for the day while the matter was resolved. Late that night, they took a connecting flight on to Los Angeles, where capers occurred involving rental cars, illicit substances and several instances of covering many miles on the wrong side of the road. ‘We went through LA and stayed one night,’ Coral Browning recalled. ‘Rats rented a big American car, and then got us lost in Watts, in South Central Los Angeles, which was a very dodgy area at the time.’ That night in the hotel, Coral—being a self-confessed ‘mother duck’ to the band—washed all their socks and hung them up to dry in the bathroom for the next day’s flight to London. ‘I can’t believe I did that, but it was better than sitting with them on a plane with stinky feet.’ The full-tilt boogie slowed to a chilling crawl in London, where the mid-November temperatures were icy. Coral Browning set up housekeeping with everyone for the duration of their stay at a tiny rented flat in Putney, while the boys took turns sleeping on the couch or mattresses on the floor. Money was tight. Coral
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took a job at the newly opened Hard Rock Café at Hyde Park Corner, but even so, everyone was subsisting on cheese, raisins and baked-bean pie. Anticipated gigs at prestigious London clubs like the Marquee, Roundhouse and the Rockhouse in Billy’s hometown of Manchester fell through suddenly. Likewise, a planned recording session was also cancelled. The group still had one ace in the hole—two gigs at the Speakeasy club in West London. The Speakeasy had opened in 1966, and was owned by legendary London gangsters the Krays. It was the definitive cool spot to hang out for music-industry types and it was one of the best places to see a Beatle in London. Jimi Hendrix had played gigs at the Speakeasy, as had Bowie and Marc Bolan; one of Billy’s favourite bands, King Crimson, had made their live debut there. It must have seemed pretty right to Billy that he would get to play at this legendary night spot where Aussie scene makers were known to congregate. Browning had been drinking there regularly since he’d been in London and was on first-name terms with the manager, Nino. But as it turned out, there was to be only one live show for the Aztecs at the Speakeasy. Go-Set’s Michelle O’Driscoll attended the show and filed a report. ‘Considering the cream of the music industry make up the Speak[easy]’s small audience and Thorpe and the Aztecs were hustling for a lucrative recording deal, I figured they’d drop the volume and display some of their fine musicianship during their two shows there. Not so.’ Mick Liber, whose post-Australian rock career had seen him scale significant heights in London with the group Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, turned up to see them play and was shocked by the
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absolute pounding volume. ‘England wasn’t ready for that,’ says Liber. ‘They were really fucking loud. The band came over and they’re all living in this box in Chelsea or wherever, four of ’em crowded into a room and Billy said, “We’re gonna kill ’em ’ere.” Which they did. They went to the Speakeasy, which was like the club I used to hang in and they just turned up the volume. They blew themselves out. I couldn’t say to them, you know, “Cool it.”’ ‘Yes, the gig at The Speakeasy was most memorable,’ recalled Coral. ‘Yes, Billy played way too loud (of course, I loved it), but the club owner cut the power, and kicked us all out . . .’ Also present in the tiny club that night were Aussies Peter Doyle, Darryl Cotton, Peter Miles and Ronnie Charles. They were all appalled at how loud the band played in a club no bigger than a lounge room. Set at stadium levels, the amps were buzzing, the guitars and vocals blending together into a sharp note that had the audience plugging their ears with their fingers. In an interview with Go-Set several months after their return, Michael Browning and Billy presented a different spin on it. ‘I got to know the people there [at the Speakeasy],’ Browning said. ‘I told them the group was loud and uncooperative. They said if they were too loud, they would cancel after the first night. It was a two-night spot. For a joke, we said we got the boot. From a PR point of view, it was better to say that we got the boot.’ To add to the confusion, Billy’s perception of the gig was quite different to the general version. ‘We got a really good reaction from the crowd. Becky [Jeff Beck] was down there a little while before us and halfway through, Nino came up and pulled out the plug.
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We weren’t really loud. Same as we play at Sebastian’s and Berties. As far as England goes, we’re not really a loud band. At Speakeasy they really only play incidental music for the posers who want to show everyone they can dance in time. English people aren’t very good dancers you see.’ In hindsight, Browning’s impression of their English exile is of an opportunity lost. ‘Well, we had the record deal with RAK Records. “Most People I Know” got a lot of airplay on Radio One so it was off to a pretty good start, but the British just didn’t get it and as a result of that there was no basis for any live performance or anything like that, unlike today where an artist can go over there if he or she has a big following in Australia and fill a venue based on expat audiences. You just couldn’t do that in that period. So they did the gig at the Speakeasy where Billy—in typical Billy fashion—decided to turn up the volume to levels never heard anywhere in England, the land of the Who and Jimi Hendrix, you know—all those people . . . It was so loud that the owners came up to me halfway through the gig and said, “You’re going to have to finish up.” We got told to move on, basically. That was just Billy though. Common sense just didn’t prevail at all. It was a case of, “We’re here to make an impression, let’s just go in and deck ’em.” Just knock them around the head. It just didn’t work. Billy was a wonderful guy but he did have a little bit of a Napoleon complex where he would just go straight in. He was very passionate about things and was prone to making rash decisions sometimes that weren’t necessarily good commercial decisions.’ Had the Aztecs touched down just a few short years later, when their pounding gain might have been appreciated more by
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the punk movement, things might have worked out differently. After the furore at the Speakeasy (or lack of it, depending on who you talk to), the remainder of the band’s twelve-week stint in London was entirely uneventful, apart from an invitation to lunch with Richard Branson on his houseboat and a visit to the country manor where wunderkind producer Mike Oldfield was recording his Tubular Bells album. At least the gig at the Speakeasy hadn’t been reviewed in the English music press, which spared the group any further national ignominy, although as Browning noted, ‘Billy would walk into the butcher shop and the guy would say, “Wow, you got the boot from the Speakeasy.”’ The news seemed to filter back to Australia quite quickly. ‘Most People’ was still being played on the radio but frustratingly for Browning, who had by then spent nearly six months in England trying to break the band through, it wasn’t selling at all. Browning’s groundwork, forethought and forward planning would, in other circumstances, have struck gold. Trevor Churchill of Rolling Stones Records (the Rolling Stones’ personal record label which was distributed by Atlantic) was interested and Richard Branson’s fledgling Virgin label, which was about to go global with Tubular Bells, had also expressed interest. Derek Taylor, the legendary press officer of the Beatles and the Byrds, was working for A&M as an artist and repertoire man. He had signed Humble Pie, Steve Marriott’s band, to the label and there were some definite similarities between the Pie and the Aztecs’ blues-based material. In any event, their stay in England was a case of perfect mistiming. The boys kept writing songs and visiting record label bosses for morning tea or an afternoon scotch and a session with
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Billy and his acoustic guitar, but to no avail. Billy steeled himself to go back to Australia, having failed in his bid to get an English or European record deal; the Australian music press had been gleefully reporting as much in the group’s absence. ‘That period in England was frustrating because the track that we’d placed so much faith in [“Most People I Know”] didn’t really achieve anything and as I said, without chart success there was little else that could be done,’ Browning says. ‘There wasn’t a pub culture there that could sustain us, that we could go into and say, “Okay, let’s just start from the bottom and start playing around.” The only place that we could get a gig was the Speakeasy. If there’d been a round of clubs that had the facilities that Billy needed—and he needed big sound systems—I mean, there were pubs around but they were dinky little places that weren’t set up for Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. So yes, it was frustrating that we weren’t able to make progress.’ At the time there was a general reluctance on the part of Australian artists to attempt to crack the American market, but in all likelihood, had Billy gone to the US then instead of the UK, he could have built a major career there. ‘It probably would have been a better bet,’ admits Browning. ‘In those days it was pretty well unheard of for Australian artists to attempt America. Canned Heat’s manager liked Billy, liked the band and we’d done a festival gig together in Wallacia. He went back to spread a little bit of goodwill about Billy with people like Lillian Roxon—he was letting people over there know that the only thing really happening in Australia was Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. I spent a fair bit of time with him and we explored the various possibilities, but
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in those days it was easier and more logical to go to England. America, particularly the Bay Area, would have been much more accepting of Billy.’ ‘In London we were able to get to know people on a daily basis through Michael, who had met everyone prior to our arriving there,’ said Billy at the time. ‘It got to a point where it was very easy to get a normal five per cent record deal for five years because we got a really good reaction from people there. I was going around plugging Pig’s tapes and Phil Manning’s tapes and I was singing some stuff to them with my acoustic. It was very easy to get people to listen to what we had to play. But what we wanted was a lease deal whereby we play on and produce our own masters and lease them to a company for fifteen per cent as opposed to five per cent.’ There was no shame in not making it in England. Every major band Australia had ever produced up to that time had attempted it; while artists like Slim Dusty, Rolf Harris, Olivia Newton John, the Seekers and the Easybeats had triumphed there, Normie Rowe, the Masters Apprentices, Axiom, Doug Parkinson’s In Focus, the Groop, the Twilights and Max Merritt had all been disappointed. There was no formula to adhere to, no right or wrong way to break through. A well-timed telegram saved the band from further boredom. The organisers of Sunbury sent word that the big slot for 1973 was all theirs, with an offer of ten thousand dollars and airfares home to Melbourne thrown in to sweeten the deal. Needing no further convincing, the band returned home gratefully to a long hot summer of open-air shows.
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After the small failures of the English trip, other problems were emerging. Bruce Howard, the band’s keyboard player, was beginning to show signs of ‘slipping into the ozone’ as Billy put it. He was frequently muffing his parts live and Browning gave him a few subtle warnings. The Thump’n Pig and Puff’n Billy album, Downunda, was only weeks away from an Australian release, and the single ‘Captain Straightman’ was released in January 1973, going to number 28 on the national charts. The song was Billy’s riposte to the Australian government’s less than civil manner in dealing with Joe Cocker’s drug bust in early 1972. It became clear when the album was released that Downunda epitomised the Aztecs’ struggle to bridge the gap between their live set and their studio work. The songs were intricate, reflective, carefully crafted and beautifully captured on tape. The music press was universally forthright with their praise. But with the Aztecs about to headline Sunbury ’73, other signs of trouble in the ranks were emerging. Bass player Paul Wheeler, who had got married earlier in 1972, only to be separated from his wife by the UK tour, naturally now wanted to spend more time with her. Billy was already toying with the possibility of a line-up change, but just days away from their second Sunbury Festival appearance was not the time to do it. Michael Browning’s response to the hot demand for the Aztecs was to ask for as much money as he thought he could get for his client. ‘We were hotly pursued by the Sunbury Festival to come back and headline,’ says Browning. ‘We got paid at the time some large amount of money. It had everyone up in arms,
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put it that way. I had the entire music industry on my back about it for demanding and receiving an extravagant fee which they presumably thought was going to stop them from getting on the festival at all or getting paid. Somehow I got what he was worth. It was a ridiculous argument at the time I thought. There was a lot of that jealousy that went down but again, Billy was the king of the festival that year too.’ The group’s appearance at Sunbury was again hailed by Melbourne pundits as the premier performance of the three-day festival, though Australian Rolling Stone handed that mantle to Max Merritt and the Meteors, saying the Aztecs’ set was simply ‘an endurance test’. But the crowd was happy and excitable and the hugely popular Australian comedian Paul Hogan, as the MC for the festival, kept them in stitches between the sets. Once again, though, the event was about volume. The ‘brash, loud’ Aztecs conquered once more through an exciting combination of sheer air movement and another scorching Australia Day weekend. During the Saturday night performance, the crowd sang along happily with ‘Gangster of Love’ and anticipated keenly the calland-response bits in ‘Oop-Poo-Pa-Doo’ while heavily tattooed blokes stormed to the front of the stage to see their heroes in action. Billy, though, thought the performance was awful. ‘I didn’t dig Sunbury,’ Billy told a reviewer later in the year. ‘We didn’t play particularly well. I hated it and I thought it was terrible. There was no vibe. We were being compared with what we exactly did last year.’ Few seemed to notice that during the show Billy deliberately yanked the lead out of Bruce Howard’s keyboard mid-set, an act
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which must have made clear to Howard that his position in the band was very tenuous indeed. Browning vaguely remembered something along those lines taking place onstage. ‘[Pulling the plug out], that would be a very “Billy” thing to do. I couldn’t confirm or deny that for you to be honest but it sounds right. Billy spoke plainly and he didn’t waste time. He was pretty out there. If someone was holding it back, he’d let ’em know.’ Afterwards, Mackenzie Theory played, the perfect comedown music after the full-tilt sonic assault of the Aztecs, and the Theory, despite their own misgivings, made a big impression on the crowd. The Aztecs played again on the Sunday afternoon, and once more gave the crowd exactly what they expected. Everyone left the festival happy, except perhaps the artists. Billy told one interviewer he’d had to ask repeatedly for their fee before being given it. He’d also noticed that acts belonging to different agencies weren’t associating openly with each other and he believed that a segregation was creeping in. He’d also heard managers exhorting young bands to try to get the audience involved, just as Thorpie had done in ’72, as if that was the key to the kind of popularity that the Aztecs had enjoyed since. Partly as a result of what had happened onstage at Sunbury, Bruce Howard was out of the band just a fortnight later. Billy had already called Pig on the Tuesday after Sunbury and asked him to consider returning to the fold. As Morgan says, it was as much of a surprise to him as to everyone else, except the band perhaps. ‘Never in my wildest dreams, really [did he imagine returning]. Although I’d always imagined playing with Billy again, I never
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thought I’d be doing it again so soon. Apparently everyone else knew, or suspected, except me. Obviously for Bruce to leave, there had to be some kind of bingle and it seemed to happen over Sunbury.’ In late March, the new line-up played the Down Under Rock 73 festivals in Brisbane and Sydney, then Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth in early April, alongside the Coloured Balls and Madder Lake. The reception for the Aztecs was fervid, but the Coloured Balls also attracted much adulation. There was a distinct rivalry between Lobby Loyde and Billy, though the old friends took pride in their relationship and each was openly admiring of the other in interviews. The crowd gave Thorpie his due, and the band showed much determination to break the stultifying routines set up in 1972 prior to Sunbury ’73. They cut long jams short and each member of the band picked up some percussion or played something a little different, anything to hold off the stagnation Billy was clearly feeling. Still, the Aztec attrition continued. In April, Paul Wheeler was handed his marching orders from the group; in a telephone interview with Go-Set, he explained why it had happened, and noted his disapproval of the way the Aztecs did business (although the journalist at Go-Set wrote the article without actually directly quoting Paul. As Wheeler saw it, the group had priced themselves out of the live music market to the point that every gig they did now had to be an ‘event’. Since they could not just go to a pub and simply play a show and earn decent money, they had to organise shows that delivered in terms of sound and style with a venue that suited the exercise. Since the Aztecs basically ran their own
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touring company, the band’s own money was continually being sunk into paying the crew and transport costs. It wasn’t that they didn’t get paid but the returns were in some cases less than they would have earned simply playing at a good-sized Melbourne venue like the White Horse. ✿ Post-Sunbury ’73, Billy reflected on the previous year’s achievements. He had reason to be proud of what he’d done, even though the old familiar problems had resurfaced repeatedly, mainly due to lack of preparation or total absence of it—in fact, most of 1972’s endeavours had verged on chaos. Already 1973 was shaping up to be a big year for the band, when they would capitalise on the new year’s early wins. Of course, Billy was already thinking bigger. As much as the Aztec name had provided him with a springboard to success, it was at times also a millstone that represented all that had gone awry for him. He was toying with an idea he termed the ‘Diggers Rest Orchestra’. Taking its name from the location of the farm near Sunbury from whence so much of his success had sprung, it was mooted to include vocalists Leo De Castro, Doug Parkinson and Wendy Saddington, but Thorpie also wanted to pull Lobby Loyde in again, and in the fashion of the time have two bass players and two drummers—just like the Grateful Dead. In short, it was to be a massive onstage freak-out that would blow the minds of all who would see it. He posited the idea that former Aztec drummers Johnny Dick and Kevin Murphy would be included, as well as Teddy Toi. Though the Diggers Rest Orchestra did not
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immediately eventuate, the idea nonetheless continued to nag at Billy, and would later be realised spectacularly. Browning and Thorpie also put their heads together on an idea to micro-manage Billy’s empire more carefully with the establishment of Aztec Pty Ltd, a company that would tour the band and absorb much more of the profits, which were now growing steadily. On Easter Monday 1973, the band set up onstage at Melbourne Town Hall again, this time with firmer arrangements for songs and less jamming. Toi, back on board after quite a few years, was to play a bigger role in the sound than just providing the bottom end. He was immediately offering up harmonic ideas and experimenting with effects like distortion and a ring modulator, which in those days was normally a studio effect that created cascading feedback and resonance over the notes being played on the bass. The difference in sound during rehearsals was striking. There was initially to be no support band and the Aztecs would play for more than three hours, according to a press release. On the night, however, the Red House Roll Band opened. Then Toi took the stage by himself, launching into a fuzz-laden bass solo that caught the audience’s attention. By the time Billy took to the stage, the crowd was clearly enjoying the show, which had stripped back the old dynamics and appeared to have taken on the influence of other styles of music, such as funk. Billy barely reached for his guitar the entire first half, but reviews of the gig noted that the sound was muted and his voice buried in a murky sludge. By the time the band came on for the second part of the show, things had improved out of sight. Billy’s voice was cutting
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through more clearly and he played guitar the entire time. They ended the show with a medley of hits to keep the crowd happy. Compounding some of the band’s frustrations over takings was the situation with their label, Havoc Records, which had been in a state of chaos for some time. In May, Billy quit Havoc Records, as did the company’s top producer Rod de Gruchy. Billy could no longer stand the uncertainty of an independent label. He needed a major one to help him realise his visions. On 16 June, it was announced that Atlantic had signed the Aztecs to a deal and the first single, ‘Movie Queen’/‘Mame’, was released. While it cracked the Top 40, it had almost no impact long term, though the live shows at the same time were all sold out. Also in June, after a much-heralded show at the Camberwell Civic Centre which saw the band kicking off from a darkened hall to a blazing opener with ‘Captain Straightman’, the Aztecs embarked on a nine-show tour of New South Wales, including a matinee show in Sydney. The band’s new direction had critics labeling them ‘more melodic’ and ‘percussion driven’. However, at the end of a riveting evening show at Sydney’s Capitol Theatre on 17 June, Teddy Toi completely demolished his bass guitar at the end of the set, while Pig tipped his piano over. The stage plunged into darkness with the broken instruments feeding back, and the crowd went crazy. In late August, the Aztecs teamed up with Sherbet for Operation Rock Lift, a series of concerts in Queensland. Today it sounds like an odd pairing—the kings of teeny bop pop and the ‘aggro bandit’ Aztecs—but the concerts were hugely successful. The tour also included Ross Ryan (‘My Name Means Horse’) and Band of Light,
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and the audiences seemed to appreciate all the acts equally. The first show of the tour, in Southport, Surfers Paradise, was sparsely attended—about two thousand kids showed up, along with the police and a large number of noise complaints. Michael Browning narrowly avoided being arrested when he refused to shut the concert down at the police’s request. Billy was particularly bummed about the police intervention, but the next night’s show at Festival Hall in Brisbane was a sold-out affair and the crowd was wildly generous, giving Ross Ryan a standing ovation and encores, and more ovations for the other acts. The Aztecs then did some additional shows at the Chevron in Surfers Paradise. The band coffers were steadily filling up during the tour, but they also found some enjoyably expensive ways to blow off steam. Gil Matthews, in his liner notes for the best-of compilation Time Traveller, relates that the band ran up an $1800 room-service bill in Surfers for a champagne fight that lasted two days. The next stop was the Bundaberg Civic Centre, which attracted a crowd of nine hundred, despite slow ticket sales. Two days later, the tour touched down in Cairns for an open-air show at a speedway. Despite a few false starts and the usual noise complaints, underage drinkers and straights, the tour also drew attention to the fact that there was a huge audience in Australia for shows of this kind, regardless of their affection for or loyalty to particular bands. These young crowds were relatively cashed up and enjoying the same sort of festivals as young people worldwide. After the Queensland tour was over, the band went back to the studio to continue working on the album. They were still
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struggling to make their ultimate recorded statement. In fact, they hadn’t really ever done a ‘proper’ studio album as the Aztecs; ironically, the Thump’n Pig and Puff’n Billy album, Downunda, had come closest to the kind of record Billy had wanted to make with his band. The problem lay in how to best capture the raw power of the band in a studio setting. It wasn’t impossible, but it transpired to be difficult. The band released a follow-up single in September, ‘Don’t You Know You’re Changing’/‘Yes, I’m Tired’. By late September, the group was back at Sydney’s Capitol Theatre with Sherbet, ready to rock. Billy’s hair had been cut short for the shows and it seemed to reflect a new thirst on his part to change the status quo. The band then moved into Melbourne’s Armstrong Studios for a three-week block booking, twenty-four hours a day. Warren Morgan remembers that the band played a lot of darts during the sessions, so it was obviously a relaxed time for the group. Gil Matthews, who was also producing the album, had to marshal the wayward group of individuals in the studio; he remained in control of the session because he wasn’t dipping into the same goodies as the rest of the group. The Kirov Ballet was touring Australia during the same period and, thanks to the Aztecs’ association with lighting designer Rodney Currie—who had also worked with the Australian Ballet— they were brought into the studio where the band was working. Accompanied by KGB agents, the dancers and principals were offered brandy, and soon the rockers, the ballerinas and the heavies were dancing madly, pissed as newts. ‘There must have been six girls that looked like gazelles,’ recalled Pig. ‘One of [the
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men] had a thick brown leather coat on, he was a KGB man and the interpreter.’ Pig described the conditions under which they recorded the album. ‘It was good to come back to the Aztecs. At that time I was sort of twiddling my thumbs, so that was perfect. Something always crops up. They wanted me back and that led to More Arse Than Class. That was recorded with a budget, sad isn’t it? It was open slather. Very expensive, drinking, smoking and dart throwing. More Arse Than Class came out of a totally different place—we had more money to spend and we were a very well-known band around Australia at that time. You’ve got Ernie Rose, who’s a very well-known engineer who’s since worked with Farnham and that was his first gig. The band’s on acid and our drummer’s got his arms around Ernie’s waist saying, “Who’s that playing drums?” and there’s Ernie explaining patiently that it’s Gil that’s playing the drums. That was his first gig, and it was quite something. If you walked in with your tape recorder, you’d get that album pretty much straight up.’ ‘I still love More Arse Than Class—that’s a great record,’ says Gil. ‘Some of the shit that took place in the studio with that record . . . It was a party. For me, something happened when I joined the Aztecs—not so much with Bruce Howard but later on when Pig came back [in], I would say to people that the only way I can explain it is that Australia had its own Three Stooges—Billy Thorpe, Warren Morgan and Gil Matthews. Because the shit that went on, the parties we had, the lunacy was just unbelievable. Billy always talked about it. Whenever we got together later, it was always him remembering that period, the stupid shit that took place in that
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period. We didn’t really do any harm to anyone, but we were just this band—imagine going to a Scout camp and there’s no supervisors. Just looning around. It was just nuts for years.’ Upon the release of More Arse Than Class, the band proved that they could be just as effective in the studio and, importantly, capable of subtleties that their ear-battering live shows could not evince. Melbourne DJs gave the album plenty of coverage and it went to number 12 on the Australian album charts and even higher on a city-by-city basis. Gil Matthews’s engineering and production skills came in for much praise but he did lament the fact that he wasn’t able to pull a drum sound that he considered representative of his own talents. Nonetheless, his fine production work drew even more offers of work from other bands. The minimalist silver and black embossed cover did not actually give the name of the album, it simply read ‘AZTECS’. True to form, the inside gatefold photograph featured the naked buttocks of Toi, Thorpe, Morgan and Matthews, their Levis and Wranglers around their knees. While the album didn’t exactly make things easier for DJs, who weren’t allowed to say its name on air, its overall hard-rocking feel was augmented by more unusual studio tricks, and Ernie Rose’s excellent engineering made all the difference. ✿ Thorpie was once again about to make history back in Sydney with a show that brought to fruition his ‘Diggers Rest Orchestra’
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idea. On 16 November 1973, Thorpie and the Aztecs played a three-hour set in the newly opened Sydney Opera House. The evening was in three parts, an acoustic set, followed by a suite entitled ‘No More War’, replete with sound effects and capped with an audio recording of an atomic explosion, and then a set with guest musicians including Lobby Loyde and former Aztec drummers Kevin Murphy and Johnny Dick in addition to Gil Matthews. ‘I don’t remember much about that Opera House show, to be honest with you. I do remember actually walking off stage and sitting in the front row to watch the other two drummers working onstage. That was the only time I ever actually saw the Aztecs play,’ Gil says. The set ended with a three-way drum battle, the purest tribal rumble of Aztec energy, and for Thorpie it was ‘the end of an era in Aztec rock, and having together onstage that night all of the principal members of the band was magic’. Quite why the gig was considered forgettable by some band members is a matter of some debate, but any post-mortem was set aside, because the third Sunbury gig was coming around again. Once more, the band took to the stage. The event no longer consisted exclusively of Australasian bands but Billy would never have consciously pulled back on the throttle where such a show was concerned. He revived ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ for the ’74 Sunbury show, and once the Sunbury album was released, the driving blues take on the song became a live staple for the band. So too did a cover of Wanda Jackson’s 1960 hit ‘Let’s Have a Party’, which actually went to number 27 on the charts.
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The entire Aztecs show that year was recorded and partly issued, but Warners held back on releasing a planned EP of live songs, mostly because Thorpie had been writing songs that contained considerable profanity. While rock music fans today are unlikely to blanch at the use of words like ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’, in 1974 Thorpie was being arrested ‘every second week’ at gigs for using the f-word. So when the band proposed to Warners that they release songs like ‘Forget About the Bullshit, We Have Come to Fuck Your Mind’, ‘You Can’t Go Around Saying “Fuck” Onstage’ and ‘Suck More Piss’, the label was understandably reticent to assist with the promotion of songs whose titles couldn’t be repeated on radio or in the press. Gil Matthews believes that not only did Warners refuse to release the tapes, they actually got rid of them. The recordings of the Opera House show were issued by Warners as Steaming At the Opera House later in 1974. Meanwhile, changes continued in the band. Former Aztec drummer (circa 1965–66) Johnny Dick rejoined the band, which also saw him reunited with his old mate Teddy Toi, so for a time the Aztecs joined the ranks of dual-drummer acts, a popular conceit at the time—both George Harrison’s touring band and the Grateful Dead, among others, featured two drummers. A company called 7 Records bought out the Havoc name and its extensive back catalogue from Rod de Gruchy, as well as the estate of jazz musician Frank Smith who had originally started the label. The new label set about re-releasing all of Billy’s Havoc material on a budget price compilation, The Billy Thorpe Rock Classics, which featured ‘Somebody Left Me Crying’, ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’,
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‘Dawn Song’, ‘Most People I Know’, ‘Oop-Poo-Pa-Doo’ and others. It had no liner notes or other information but the cover featured the now-famous shot of Billy in the flow—his hair in pigtails. In June, the group parted ways with manager Michael Browning. Each party is adamant there were no hard feelings around this decision—rather it was precipitated by the simple expiry of the contract and a medium-term plan for the Aztecs to continue to manage themselves, ahead of a mooted group move to the United States in 1975. Browning had taken up the chance to open a franchise of the very successful English Hard Rock Café, and he set to work on building that business. The Hard Rock Café in Melbourne featured many new young bands and it wasn’t long before Browning had bumped into his next client, a group of Sydney lads and their new lead singer, Bon Scott. In September, Billy became a father for the first time. It seemed that the wild man of rock was being shaped into a devoted family man. Even though his career was still important to him, he was smitten with his gorgeous red-haired baby daughter, whom he and Gook had named Rusty. She would often appear in magazine photographs with her proud mum and dad. Billy’s parents were thrilled to meet their first grandchild when Billy and Lynn took Rusty to the elder Thorpes’ home in Tewantin, near Noosa on the Sunshine Coast. Billy hired Robert Raymond as his personal manager and the gigs abated somewhat, with only Melbourne dates to keep them occupied. The band had always managed to occupy themselves hilariously and sometimes constructively—this time, they all took up karate lessons. Ambitiously, Teddy Toi took on a black belt and
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lost, breaking his ankle. Sunbury ’75 had come and gone without much to recommend it—the English hard rock band Deep Purple had supposedly ‘killed’ the festival dead with their demand for an excessively high fee in cash before they would take the stage, and there were reports of fights between the road crews of several different bands, not just AC/DC’s and Deep Purple’s as is often reported. By then Billy didn’t care about Sunbury anyway; he was bored by the ritual of it. But touring commitments called, and within a few months the line-up of the Aztecs changed again, as Pig and Johnny Dick departed to concentrate on a group called the All Stars, who would go on to back up Stevie Wright and John Paul Young. Soon it was back to a power trio for Thorpie: simply he, Toi and Rats toured in the summer of 1975 to fulfil the band’s last live commitments for the near future. Robert Raymond hired Malcolm Stanton to play keyboards for the band and invited English guitarist Derek Griffiths to come on board, to fill out the band to a fivepiece once again. Billy was already looking to the horizon for inspiration. His interest in the Australian market was waning rapidly. He wanted a new challenge to rise to, and more opportunities—the kind that Australia could no longer offer him. Billy asked Robert Raymond to start contacting American labels, managers and booking agents with a view to perhaps setting up shop there for a while. America was beckoning Thorpie, and he set off in late 1975 for a two-week visit to scope out Los Angeles and visit some of his friends who lived there. He saw a rock scene flourishing wildly, where bands
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regularly made the leap out of the downtown LA rock clubs and into stadiums within a year of being discovered. America had exactly what Billy wanted, and he returned home to Australia with a plan beginning to take shape in his mind.
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Chapter 7
1976–82 American Aztec
As the summer of 1976 cooled off, Thorpie was in an unusually introspective place. Never one to allow himself to be overwhelmed by negativity, he nonetheless had to reassess his position. There was a story going around the Australian press that Billy had returned from his recent US trip immensely dissatisfied with his career and had decided in a fit of pique to disband the Aztecs. In fact, Billy was not behind the split of the group—it had simply been a matter of money. The costs of touring Australia were huge, and only exacerbated by the very popularity of the band. But it’s also likely that the US trip had set in his mind the idea that the Aztecs were on their last legs musically. Juke’s Christie Eliezer posited the idea in an article in 1976, saying that ‘the Aztecs’ disintegration was nothing to weep about: the band had been musically treading water for far too long’. It’s doubtful that Billy would have agreed with Eliezer’s precise wording, but he probably would have registered the truth behind
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it. The instability of the Aztec line-up continued as players came and went; in recent years only Gil had been the constant. Gil was dedicated to all aspects of the band—even when he wasn’t producing the albums, he was still playing a pivotal role in addition to his seat behind the kit. Billy did talk with Gil about what he was going through, but he tended to internalise most of his frustration and simply fed it into his performances. He never gave less than his best to audiences, since he abhorred unprofessional behaviour in anyone, and he was fortunate to be accompanied by his reliable bandmates, Pig and Rats. Even so, Morgan was an in-demand session player and was regularly being offered lucrative live gigs with a growing number of bands including his alma mater, Chain, who up until about 1973 were his chief interest after the Aztecs. Finally, in late January 1976, Morgan left the band again, as did Johnny Dick, which ended the dual-drummer line-up that had persisted for close to a year. Morgan and Dick were now playing in the All Stars band who backed the increasingly successful John Paul Young. That band now featured more Aztecs than the Aztecs themselves could boast: Mk I Aztec Vince Melouney, Warren Morgan and now Johnny Dick. There were other factors at work besides the transient nature of bass players, guitarists and keyboardists. Billy’s career as a recording artist was on the wane, even though most Aztecs shows were full or close to sold out. It was a stagnation, albeit one that Billy would not easily admit to anyone. After all, he had tried every conceivable angle—he continually reassessed his approach to his music, bringing in new musicians at regular intervals, and
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allowing each band member room to move within the songs. He was frustrated, too, partly by his inability to keep up with other hit bands. It was all about keeping the music coming; it had flowed for years with relative ease but eventually—inevitably—it began to slow down. ‘See, the conditions in this country don’t allow for musical progression. The industry is just so small and restricting, it’s like a dog chasing its own tail. You’ve got to get out if you want to progress,’ Billy said, revealing his contempt for an industry that he felt he had helped shape but which had turned its attention to newer acts. Thirty-five years later, another of his many statements about the Australian music industry still rings true: ‘I tried to bring about the climate I needed by generating changes within the industry itself. But I’ve given up now. The arseholes that run the scene will never change so why hang around?’ Billy had indeed been an agent of change in the Australian music industry—he had forced the issue with promoters on a number of matters, including door deals and better PAs in hotels, and he took on bookers at their own game so that he was one of the few artists who had direct control of his career: how he was managed, represented and how he sounded had been for some time down to his own design, even though he was following what he had learned from managers like Michael Browning. People listened to what he had to say, and even though he had ceased to be ‘fashionable’, he still had intelligent, pithy quotes ready for every journalist who called him. He enjoyed a certain cachet with and was often quoted by the music press, which was
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expanding rapidly in Australia in the early seventies. The country now boasted numerous music magazines and papers. Industry starter Go-Set had recently closed up shop, but there was Australian Rolling Stone (the longest running franchise of the magazine besides the US flagship), Juke, RAM and a selection of city and regional titles that fed off specific local scenes. Each of them wanted to talk to Thorpie, who made it clear that he’d had enough of the industry. ‘I’ve done all I can in Australia,’ he said. ‘Simply, I’ve no more horizons left. Like it was great making number one on the charts and heading the bill at Festival Hall but once you do that about a hundred times it loses that something.’ He tried to reinforce the fact that he wasn’t simply some jaded, spoilt rock star but that he was in need of a bigger canvas to work on; in a word, America. The germ of the idea of moving to the US had been planted—at least partially—by the acceptance of ‘Captain Straightman’ into the first annual American Song Festival semi-finals back in 1973, where it went on to win in its category. Billy had gone to the US specifically to play the song at the festival, and the way he was treated there, being feted by US record company people, set Billy to thinking about making the move. He had always been quite open about his intention to relocate anyway, but England had proved barren ground and he was looking for further opportunities in a country where there were no limits—in America there were more cities to play, with more venues, the chance to tour with better-known acts and the possibility to build yourself a large following in the process. It was also home to most of the world’s major labels as well as the hardnosed management and influential bookers and promoters
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who—if they saw potential—would offer that shot at the bigger ‘big time’. ‘[In Australia] I find that as soon as you become successful people tend to lose respect for you and identify less with you and they start to drag you down. When I compared this industry to the situation over there, that’s when I realised that for my own sanity I had to get out,’ Billy said. Like many Australian artists, Billy had no international profile to speak of, apart from his expat friends in Los Angeles and London who had gone to see him on the few occasions he came to town, but he had the drive to establish a broader reputation. Then much as now, Australian stardom means little or nothing in those allimportant international markets where bands can only succeed based on the opportunities they’re afforded. The thirst for recognition in the United States and Great Britain was nothing new—early in Johnny O’Keefe’s career the mercurial singer had courted it and fallen flat. ‘America is actually as degenerate as it’s advertised to be,’ said Thorpie, perhaps considering the pitfalls of his personal decision to take on the US market. ‘But there’s no place in the world a musician can get so many breaks. There are just so many openings there, in that people are willing to listen to you even when you have nothing to say.’ Billy did have something to say, but he had some insecurities about his own songwriting. He felt that now, in the era of soft rock, when denim-wearing longhairs wrote songs that used mandolins and pedal steel guitars, blues-based rock might conceivably be a waste of time—if only because he could see the writing on the wall. There was a change sweeping through the music world, revealed in the songs that were selling and being played on the
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radio. When weighted against Billy’s natural rock inclinations, it’s hard to imagine him embracing such inoffensive musical styles as country-rock, yet as Juke reported several times in 1976, Billy had just such an album planned. In 1976, other Australian acts were rising to greater prominence and bigger album sales. Little River Band had formed that year and were already getting plenty of attention both at home and in the US, where their sound drew comparisons to the Eagles and Elton John. Though they never broke internationally, the Skyhooks had come from far behind the pack to build a huge following nationally, despite some rocky beginnings which included being booed off stage at Sunbury ’74. Their lead singer Steve Hill resigned soon afterwards and was replaced by surfie carpenter Shirley Strachan. With barely concealed sarcastic glee, the band created huge waves with their tactical image, which owed a debt to glam rock in look only. This positioning made them seem edgy by comparison to the old blues rockers; more pop acts like Sherbet, Hush and the Ted Mulry Gang were likewise poised for superstardom. But it was Sydney hard-rock band AC/DC (now fronted by Thorpie’s old mate Bon Scott) that represented the most significant challenge yet to his crown. The friendship between Scott and Billy lasted until Scott’s death in London just four short years later, but there was always a kind of rivalry there too—insofar as Scott possessed a similar manic presence to Billy with his small stature and energetic demeanour. The association between Billy and AC/DC stretched back to the 1960s when Thorpie had befriended George Young, older brother to Malcolm and Angus. Their stellar rise overseas
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had been helped immeasurably by the efforts of Thorpie’s former manager, Michael Browning. Billy of course never gave in to public jealousy about the accomplishments of other bands—he outwardly encouraged new bands and was mostly unfazed by other acts. He wasn’t entirely guileless when it came to criticising other bands (usually the more popular ones), and like all the greats of rock history he sought the chance to exploit any weakness in other artists in order to make his own position more secure. More than anything else Billy had always held his own. Never one to be unfashionable, Billy razored off his facial hair and ditched the denims in favour of a new image—beardless, no doubt to remind his audiences that despite his prevalence and prominence in Australian music since the early 1960s he was still a young man. Trimming off the whiskers and dressing with more panache made him seem youthful again and he cultivated a less raucous, almost considered approach to his songwriting. He told one journalist that he was ‘getting a flash for clothing again’ and had hired a Melbourne designer to create some clothes for him. Now he was ‘buying something new every two or three weeks’. The appearance of the Gold compilation that year seemed to draw a line under the Aztecs’ career, and in some ways it was indeed well past twilight time for all the varying line-ups of the so-called ‘Sunbury Aztecs’, a group that featured no less than twenty-three different members in total. And Billy already had another album in the works. In the studio to work on the album that would become Million Dollar Bill, Thorpie dispensed with blowsy hard rock and blues in
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favour of funkier pop songs, a snatch of disco, a Little Feat-style roots/country feel and, moreover, what seemed to some observers a sop to American AOR (adult-oriented radio play). It was to be his first overture to other markets, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by reviewers and critics. It also at least yielded a song that remains both favourably and warmly associated with Thorpie, the light, skimming jazz changes of ‘It’s Almost Summer’, which developed out of Billy’s experimentation with open tunings on his guitar. Ed Nimmervoll noted in his Juke review that the inclusion of Chris Jagger’s ‘Don’t Need No Protection’ was ‘tailor made’ for Billy’s voice, but that otherwise the album was recorded ‘too quickly’. Nimmervoll’s counterpart at RAM, Anthony O’Grady, gave it the thumbs-up, saying that Thorpie sounded positively ‘low-key’ and was ‘not grabbing every spotlight that’s available’. By comparison to More Arse, Billy was so chilled out that he sounded practically horizontal in places. The album is often overlooked when examining Thorpie’s back catalogue, but it illustrated several facts: Billy had the ability to move with the times, keep the tempo back and even bring the guitars down a little. He could also write adeptly in a variety of styles. Mostly though it served as a signpost to all and sundry that he was readying his repertoire for a bigger market. Back on the road again throughout January and February to promote the new single ‘It’s Almost Summer’ and the B-side ‘Drive My Car’, Billy was joined by Rats, Billy Kristian on bass and Englishman Derek Griffiths on guitar—the group that was now dubbed ‘Million Dollar Bill’, the Aztecs being unofficially ‘over’. Of course, they wisely reverted to the Aztecs name once Pig Morgan
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rejoined the group in April. ‘It's Almost Summer’ proved to have legs, staying in the charts for nine weeks—indeed, seeming to last as long as that year’s Indian summer. It had been timely and relatively popular as a single, but it would be the last time a Thorpie composition would trouble the charts for almost four years. Billy’s old running mate Sammy Gaha returned to Australia during this time following a string of hit singles and some sobering experiences of his own at the hands of unscrupulous producers and composers in France. He hadn’t seen Billy for quite a few years and was struck by how much Billy’s stage craft had developed. ‘I came back here and found the scene totally different. The only good things happening in the scene at that time were guys like Billy, that we really wanted to check out. Here’s something which I’ll tell you. What I loved most about him and admired about him was in those days he didn’t play guitar much—I knew he could play, I’d seen him strum a few chords and he was good, and then I went overseas and came back and I had a gig at the Lifesavers Club in Bondi, and Billy was doing the next night. So I came down to see him and he was like, “Oh, mate—good. I’m glad you’re here.” And he’s got this nice Les Paul on, and I said, “Who’s doing guitar?” He says, “I am.” I went, “Fair dinkum.” He said to me, “Wait and see, mate. Wait and see.” Then he came out and just knocked me out. The only other guy that did that, that had that kind of energy—for me—was Steve Marriott from the Small Faces and Humble Pie. In this period of maybe ten years, this guy had gone from not being known as a guitarist to just being loud and proud, swinging it around. It blew me away, I gotta tell ya.’
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Now that the Aztecs had reconvened, it appears that Billy had reverted again to playing as loud as he wanted, as Gaha recounts. ‘So I get down there and they’re setting up and Norm’s there setting up the gear and he looks at me and says, “Have you got your ear plugs?” Bill comes out and he starts playing the first song, then as he starts into the second one, he starts to crank it up and it’s real loud. Norm just looks over at me and gives me the thumbs-up. All of a sudden, boom! The amp blows. I go up to him and say, “What’s wrong?” He said, “Oh, the amp’s dead. That’s the second one this week.” So they had to wait forty minutes while someone goes and gets another amp. I said, “Beautiful, Bill.” He said, “You wait—I’ll get this one and make it three for this week.”’ Billy capitalised on the pleasure of playing with the revived Aztecs by going straight back into the studio to record another album, Pick Me Up and Play Me Loud, produced and engineered by Gil Matthews. During the album’s production Billy confided to Gil that his heart was no longer in the Australian record industry. Where could he go from here but down, he asked his old friend. It was a question that Billy must have given much consideration to. He couldn’t ignore the trend his singles and albums were taking, particularly since his fans were often confounded by the semiregular release of some cash-in compilation of his older material that only offered them the opportunity of buying something they already owned. Again, creatively restless and feeling discouraged, Billy put his songs through many layers of inspection—he pulled apart ‘Most People I Know’ and gave it an overhaul, and the heavy funk of ‘Bass Balls’ and ‘Movin’ On a Sound’ showed further evidence of
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an attempt to ‘Americanise’ the Aztec sound. What quite a few people failed to initially notice was that the cover of Pick Me Up actually called it a ‘Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs’ album, rather than another solo effort à la Million Dollar Bill. The cover, a painting of Billy with his glasses morphing into two kangaroos on either side of his head and yet another kangaroo hitchhiking with a guitar, seemed contrived, as though he was conspicuously attempting to nail his ‘Aussie’ credentials to the mast for an overseas market. The album was released in September 1976, and toured on almost immediately following the recording. In spite of everything, he still loved performing. The simple pleasure of delivering a song to an audience was the most enjoyable part of the day. The hours when he wasn’t onstage were always brimming over with promotion, rehearsals, examining contracts, proofreading artwork for a new album or simply sitting down with his guitar to write or jam with Warren Morgan, or anyone else who happened to be close by. But even though there were plenty of shows that year, the reviews were mainly lacklustre. Critics panned the performances, carping at what they perceived as Billy’s ‘excessive’ posturing and his steadfast refusal to cave in to trends, even though he was not above a radical image change every six months or so. His heart was not in Australia for the remaining months of 1976, even as the Aztecs traipsed around the country for what would be the last time for nearly ten years. Then, suddenly, it was over, and in November Billy quickly left Melbourne for Adelaide with Lynn and Rusty. There was no reason to wait for America’s invitation. Billy’s time had come. At age thirty, he felt he was hampered by his past,
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roped in with guitar leads, hemmed in by walls of amplifiers and the anticipation of a crowd wanting more of the same old pisssucking bullshit. But any artist who is content to stagnate in the past would never take the opportunities Billy was preparing to take. He left Australia in December 1976, ready for anything. ✿ Initially overwhelmed by the American experience, Billy and family could only take it all in. They were warmly welcomed by expat Aussies with barbecues and booze-ups and soon they were immersing themselves in everyday life—finding a home and settling Rusty into a new school. Meanwhile Billy was looking around at record companies, talking to A&R people. The Thorpes also began building further connections with the so-called ‘gum-leaf mafia’, the large numbers of Aussies living and working in Los Angeles in various creative endeavours— predominantly music, art, television, film and fashion. At various points in the 1970s this enclave included Glenn Wheatley, Brian Cadd, Olivia Newton John, Melbourne songwriter John Farrar (who in 1978 would gain considerable fame as the composer of several key hits from the musical Grease) and his wife Pat Carroll, Rick Springfield, Darryl Cotton, Russell Morris, Helen Reddy and Jim Keays, as well as expatriate Kiwis Max Merritt and Kevin Borich. During that first year, Billy played only a few shows, at the invitation of Australian friends, and money was tight for a while. In late December 1977, Billy and Lynn returned home in time to
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see in the new year on Australian soil. Billy had a series of shows around the country, which began with an open-air concert in Adelaide in front of a six thousand-strong crowd who seemed mightily pleased to see him. It had been nearly twelve months since he’d left Australia and even though he’d said plenty about his need to escape the limitations of the local live circuit, he still needed that circuit to keep the money coming in to support his new American way of life. For more than a month, Billy toured around Australia. From Adelaide to Melbourne, at every venue—football ground, pub, club or tent—the welcome was warm. As he made his way up the coast to Sydney and Brisbane, every gig was sold out. The irony of his situation was that despite his protestations, Billy very much had a future in Australia—it just depended on how badly he actually wanted it. After all, embracing that scene would have been a betrayal of his relentless vision and his sometimes ad hoc planning. His goal was to make it in America no matter what, even if he had to privately admit to himself that he might not manage the first few years in America without the money it was possible for him to earn at home. As the Courier-Mail noted on 7 January 1978, ‘the attendance figures prove that Thorpe, who became a major force in Australian music in the 1960s, still has amazing drawing power’. His final shows in Australia were 18 and 19 January at the Jindalee Hotel in Brisbane, and one night at the Alexandra Head land Surf Lifesaving Club on the Sunshine Coast. Billy, Lynn and Rusty also visited the elder Thorpes in Tewantin. It was to be Billy’s last visit to Australia for two more years.
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Back in the US, Billy was starting to get a few shows around the country. On Saturday 21 October, he played a club called The Old Lady on Brady in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Though the audience was hip to his look, dug his singing and freaked out on his accent once he actually spoke to them, the show was not a spectacular success. Billy was learning the hard way that it wasn’t enough to just be good, you had to have something. No one but Billy could figure that one out—it was up to him to do it for himself. Back in Los Angeles, he would get in his car and drive, taking a pad and pen with him in case inspiration struck. He knew that something new was required. He could no longer fall back on the old songs—that ‘Oop-Poo-Pa-Doo’ shit wouldn’t fly here under any circumstances, and he was working hard at fine-tuning for an American audience. He dreamed of a bigger, ‘wider’ sound, one that incorporated elements of the stuff that he loved, but which he was technically not quite capable of writing. He would buy new cassettes for the car, and found himself returning again and again to his preferred sounds—progressive rock, both the pastoral/cerebral acts like Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans and the more hard-edged King Crimson albums like Starless and Bible Black and Discipline; Hawkwind’s Silver Machine; and the spaced-out concepts of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals. The life of a working musician in a ‘music city’, be it Nashville, New York, Austin or, as in Billy’s case, Los Angeles, comes down to just hanging out with other musicians you like, and being in the right place at the right time. Billy spent time with his mate Allan Clarke. Clarke was one of the original Hollies from Salford,
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near Billy’s birthplace of Manchester, and Billy had met him during the Aztecs’ abortive visit to England five years before. At Clarke’s behest, Billy was invited into the studio where Clarke was working on his album, Legendary Heroes (released in 1980). There Billy played a guitar solo, and was introduced to the studio owner Spencer Proffer, who was producing the session. A few weeks later Proffer and Thorpie were again introduced, this time at a party—by none other than Alan Parsons, the EMI engineer who had worked on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album and had then gone on to produce Pink Floyd’s seminal space-rock masterpiece, Dark Side of the Moon. As Proffer drily notes, ‘For a moment, we [he and Parsons] were friends.’ The fervent young Aussie made an impression on Proffer, who described him as ‘a stellar guitar player and a wild man with a brain’, a statement which sums up the impression Thorpie left on most people he met. Munich-born and US-educated, Proffer, twenty-eight, was already a successful record producer with his own studio, which he had dubbed the Pasha Music House. Proffer had started out as a songwriter with A&M and his first hit came at age seventeen, with Gary Lewis and the Playboys’ version of his tune ‘Picture Postcard’. Proffer later worked with Tina Turner, Allan Clarke, Dave Lambert (formerly of the Strawbs) and the splendidly named German band Randy Pie. At that same party, Parsons told Billy that he had plans for his own science-fiction-based musical career under the name the ‘Alan Parsons Project’, with his manager Eric Wolfson, who would produce their albums. Prior to this, there had been talk about Parsons and Thorpie working together on an album, and Alan
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wanted Proffer and Thorpie to consider working together since he was now going to be unavailable to work with Billy. Thorpie and Proffer immediately bonded over science fiction, Omni magazine and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, the hip book on the universe and a major bestseller of the period. It was the era of Star Wars at the movies; Battlestar Galactica was the number one TV show; and space was the current frontier of the mind for the hippie generation. Thematically, Billy was interested in science fiction but also the possibilities of futurism. He subscribed to numerous magazines including Omni, the futurist magazine published by Penthouse founder Bob Guccione. ‘I’m a futurist in the sense that I’m not a static person,’ said Billy in a 1979 US radio interview. ‘I don’t like to live in yesterday and am very much living in the now which gives you a healthy consideration of what is coming. To look at what’s going on in the world today and not feel some threat of doom is terribly naive. I’m not a doomsday prophet or a fatalist but given what’s going on in our time right now, an awareness of space and space exploration and the fact that you can turn on your television and see Jupiter and Mars—I think we are living in what used to be the “comic book” future. It’s now a reality. People are definitely conscious of being outside the planet. In the sixties, they were looking in themselves. In the seventies, they were looking around and now they’re looking out. It’s an escapist mentality that is going on in the world right now.’ ‘Billy is one of the brightest human beings, both intellectually and creatively, that I’ve ever met,’ Proffer later said. ‘When we decided to work together, we really wanted to come upon an approach to break his career in the US so that he wouldn’t have
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to start over totally. We really spent a lot of time getting to know each other, and establishing a pulse on what was happening in society, and how we could make an impact on that with music. The seminal event that charted our course together was going to see Close Encounters.’ The night of their second meeting, Proffer and Thorpie ditched the party and drove to a nearby movie theatre where they watched Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Afterwards, they drove around for a while, talking. Back at Proffer’s Coldwater Canyon home, the pair turned on the tape machine and started jamming on guitars. As midnight crept past, the narrative of Children of the Sun began to take shape. ‘There was a space orientation that pervaded almost every form of life,’ said Proffer, ‘but yet no one in the industry hit the “celestial sphere” in music. Okay, they hit it with album covers—ELO, for example, put a spaceship on their cover—had laser shows, but they were singing songs that dealt with other subject matter [like] “Last Train to London” . . . Boston had a tremendously successful debut album, but they sang love songs, yet the band put the space theme on the cover. So we thought it would be really hip to take the last scene in Close Encounters one step further, and tell a story on record. That was the birth of the Children of the Sun.’ That night, Billy crashed on Proffer’s couch and the next day, they reviewed what they’d done. They already had one completed song and a bunch of ideas jotted down. Because of Proffer’s newly inked production deal with Polydor, the German wing of the label Polygram, there was virtually unlimited time for them to construct and record this epic concept in the Pasha Music House
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studio. The deal with Polydor included seven album budgets prepaid to Proffer in the form of an advance. (However, there was no guarantee that Polydor would in fact release Billy’s album once it was finished, even though the label had essentially given him the budget to work with.) Thorpie and Proffer went to work on the album immediately. ‘Children of the Sun was very spontaneous,’ Billy told one radio interviewer later. ‘Spencer and I had come into the studio to make a fairly conventional album, but after cutting [the song “Children of the Sun”] I said, “God, we’ve got a real story here.” We stopped recording, I pulled some of the other songs apart and “Children of the Sun” became an entire side.’ ‘We really went into the Twilight Zone to put our heads into the space and sonic spectrum to make [the album],’ says Proffer. Billy also copped to the strongest influences on the writing and production of Children. ‘[M]y influences started to come out. And the strongest era that came out of my head appeared to be, you know, ’67 to ’69 or ’70. English rock. Yes, King Crimson, early Purple, early Floyd. In terms of writing with a guitar—and as a player that played guitar or lead guitar on the albums I was going to make—[my influences] were Hendrix, the Floyd, not so much Cream but the early King Crimson, Yes. Radio really picked up on that side of the album. And it opened up a big door for me. A light went on in my head and I realised that there was a large audience in America that, to a degree, was starved for that kind of material. I mean, Floyd only do an album every now and again, and Zeppelin, and Yes, bands of that genre.’
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‘The thing I noticed [in the US] was people’s reactions very much to the Close Encounters/Star Wars syndrome,’ Billy said. ‘For me, there isn’t any great depth or any great lesson, or any magic story to the album, other than it’s an escape. It’s something for me to sit back and blow a number with and relax to, rather than have it as ambience music. We spent a lot of time on production but it’s a trio basically with most of the production work spent on the vocal harmonies. It’s not a terribly “deep” album recording wise. We spent a lot of time trying to get a state-of-the-art sound and I think there’s something there to listen for. I don’t want to put a story on the thing. I don’t want to put a label on it. I would just like people to listen to it and get off on it for whatever reason. I could have done ten cuts of rock’n’roll, it could have been shuffle, it could have been anything. As it happened, when we were making it, it seemed that a few of the tracks seemed to relate to one another, and before we knew it we had a theme and then before we knew it we had a side called “Children of the Sun”. I’m dying to go out onstage and play it.’ Sad news came from Australia on 6 October 1978—Billy’s boyhood idol, Johnny O’Keefe, had passed away as the result of a heart attack following a suspected overdose of prescription drugs, a death with more than a little similarity to the passing of O’Keefe’s own idol, Elvis Presley. Like Presley, O’Keefe in his last years was reputed to carry a briefcase full of prescription drugs on which he kept himself going. After the years of maniacal behaviour, his welldocumented success and failure, numerous breakdowns on and offstage, it still came as a shock to Billy that JOK had passed away at forty-three, a relatively young age. Billy remembered his friend
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with a combination of sadness and rueful mirth, recalling how O’Keefe had, in the great tradition of all the chronically insecure stars, tried to knobble the Aztecs before their first appearance on his television show by offering them the services of his barber. Nonetheless, JOK—however flawed he might have been—had been Billy’s friend, mentor and, eventually, a rival. But Billy was busy with his new project. Of the session musicians contracted to work on the album, bassist Leland Sklar—a true veteran of the LA studio scene who had worked with artists like Crosby, Stills and Nash and Ry Cooder among many more—was the first to receive the call to work with Billy. Drummer Alvin Taylor, George Harrison’s road drummer in the US, was offered the gig too. While the basic tracking for the album did not take especially long, Billy and Proffer spent considerable time in the studio to craft the album. It is excellently produced and bears all the hallmarks of what would come to be considered eighties production values, particularly the more pop/rock songs on the first side. Proffer said that ‘creating a lot of drama’ was one of the main thrusts of the sonic sheen of the album. It begins with close to three minutes of sound effects—synthesizers and tape effects as well as the dramatic use of stereo panning, to give the impression of spaceships flying ‘from left to right’. He elaborated on the level of detail that had been required: ‘We recorded [the album] on 46-track by linking two 24-track machines together, so we would have optimum separation and sonic brilliance in our stacked vocal harmonies.’ Over the final month that the album was being mixed, Proffer was calling in favours with every label executive he could find.
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Eager to make the listening experience unforgettable, Proffer and Thorpie decked the studio with candles and incense and lowered the lighting. In spite of the ambience, every one of the A&R people passed on the project, which perplexed and infuriated Thorpie. But the good news was that even without major label interest, a deal could still be done. All it took in the end was a chance meeting with Frank Fenter and Phil Walden at another label party to give Billy and Proffer the result they wanted. Fenter’s CV was of particular interest to Billy. In the 1960s, the South African-born Fenter had been the chairman of Atlantic Records in the UK, and was directly involved in launching the careers of artists like Yes, Led Zeppelin and King Crimson. He had directed, at a distance, the Australian arm of Atlantic, which had signed Billy to one album, More Arse Than Class, so Fenter would have been familiar with the Thorpe/ Aztecs brand, if nothing else. ‘Frank Fenter was Phil Walden’s partner—Phil Walden being the father of Capricorn, the guy who started it all,’ Billy said. ‘Frank had been involved with Atlantic . . . in England. He was very much into this kind of music. And they heard my record on their way back to Macon one day on their jet and they called us as soon as they got back because we had made the record and then were shopping it around to various record companies trying to get a deal. And quite frankly with no success at all. I was turned down by every single record company in the business. I was told, “This material will never get played”, “It’s crap”, “It’s indulgent”—forget it, you know? Capricorn turned around and said, “We think it has the makings of a good future.” And they put everything on it.’
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Walden, who had once managed artists like Sam and Dave, Otis Redding and Percy Sledge, knew what to aim for. Thorpie had great potential on a number of levels, including the ever‑expanding FM format, which in American terms meant actual album play as opposed to a limited airplay chart of singles from commercial chart acts. Walden and Fenter’s label, Capricorn, was independent but had experienced major financial success with the Allman Brothers in the early 1970s; their enviable roster also included Wet Willie, Black Oak (also known as Black Oak Arkansas), the Marshall Tucker Band and, separately, Bonnie and Delaney Bramlett, whose daughter, Bekka, would later work with Billy in the Zoo. Billy had the US record deal he’d always wanted, and with it came the sort of star treatment he had only experienced periodically in Australia—limousine rides, first-class flights or chartered planes—which was aimed at satisfying the whim of the artist but as always was tacked on to what Billy owed the label. Billy wanted to play along but he also wanted to work, to fill good-sized US clubs, live rooms and certainly stadiums at some point. When Children of the Sun was eventually released in May 1979, it did what no one expected it to—it charted. It went straight in at number 39 on the Billboard Charts and immediately began getting serious airplay from FM stations right across the US. Radio play for the album, particularly in Texas and Oklahoma, cemented Billy’s reputation in that part of the US. Due to the rigid segmenting of audiences by playlists and the sort of material certain radio stations insisted on, Billy was not a hit in every part of the US market, only in those areas where the album was
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on constant daily rotation. Sales were firm. ‘Every station that had the balls to play the record got such a tremendous phone response that within one month after release, we had the number one record on the only ten rock stations in America that would play the album, and in particular the song “Children of the Sun”,’ Proffer ventured. Still, nothing was straightforward. ‘Unfortunately, Capricorn were in a very bad position financially at the time,’ said Billy. ‘Nobody realised that. And when the record was number 40 nationally in the charts, or number 38, and the single was in the number 30s, the company folded. And I was stuck in that situation, not that I had anything to do about it, and switching labels to Polydor, because they were the parent company and we were an “assumable asset” so I ended up with Polydor. But only for the rest of that album. With the success of that album, it changed a lot of things. That I wasn’t shopping anymore. Labels were calling us. Elektra had been involved in a project with Spencer Proffer, and through him, a guy called Kenny Battiste came down to the studio and heard the record and that was the introduction to Elektra. And they immediately loved the project, loved the idea and it was pretty much signed then and there.’ Given that Children of the Sun was released in 1979, it is in many ways ahead of the game. American listeners clearly thought so and the album shifted five hundred thousand units, making it one of the most successful albums Thorpie ever released. His image shifted accordingly. ✿
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In July, Lynn gave birth to a second daughter, Lauren. Billy was thrilled to be a father again. Rusty was now in primary school, and it meant everything to him to be able to provide a solid foundation for his family. Even though he now had huge commitments with shows all over the country, he always made time for his children. He made it a point to ensure they had a normal routine, and the kind of social life the family enjoyed in California always involved everyone else’s kids anyway. Back in Australia, Gil Matthews continued to succeed in music. Throughout 1981, he was gigging regularly with Ross Wilson’s postDaddy Cool outfit Mondo Rock; they were proving a popular live draw and their albums were selling well. The band’s single, ‘State of the Heart’, was then at number one and the band was touring throughout Victoria to promote it. The last thing Gil expected was a call from Billy Thorpe. ‘I was up at Mount Buller with Mondo Rock. I’m in the bar in the chalet—all of a sudden this announcement comes across the PA: “International phone call for Mr Matthews.” I get on the phone and it’s Thorpie! “How ya goin’, Rat Boy? Ya gotta come over, mate—it’s gonna be fuckin’ great, you need to come over, the album’s fuckin’ number one, don’t worry about the money, mate, I’ll get your passport.” I’m like, “Billy, I’m up in the snow with Mondo Rock, I’m enjoying myself, it’s great. We’ve got the number one record.” He just went on and on at me to come over. So eventually I went to America.’ In early May, Billy met Gil at the airport in his car, a handmade Canadian job called a Brickler with gull wing doors like a Mercedes. Gil was initially impressed, but his marvelling ceased when the
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doors—operated by compressed air in hydraulic arms—ran out of puff and left them locked in. ‘The number of times we had to crawl out the back of that fucking car,’ Gil says. ‘So I get off the plane, and I’m already feeling jetlagged as hell and he takes me straight to a record company convention at the Century Plaza in Century City, and the whole shebang had been hired out by all the different record companies . . . So we go there and I’m getting pissed out of my brain with this American guy. At one point, Billy pulls me aside and says, “You know who that is, don’t you? . . . That’s Jimmy Webb. You know, ‘By the Time I get to Phoenix’, ‘Macarthur Park’!” So I’m getting pissed with Jimmy Webb. He asked me if I wanted to play on his album! We stayed at the Plaza for about twenty-four hours, and the next day we’re all shuffled downstairs into a big dining room, like the Brownlow Room. There were two thousand people in there and there’s this band onstage, this little fat guy with dark sunglasses in a tight suit and a big, tall, lanky guy in sunglasses, they’re both chained to this briefcase and the little bloke is doing cartwheels across the stage. I’m thinking, “What the fuck is this?” It was the Blues Brothers. I’d never heard of them. All I know is Steve Cropper’s playing guitar and Tom Scott’s playing trumpet, Duck Dunn’s on bass and that was good enough for me. This was before they made the film [The Blues Brothers]. Here I was having just come from seeing Joe Camilleri at Bombay Rock [a popular Brunswick, Melbourne, venue] to seeing the Blues Brothers.’ With Rats’s ‘Welcome to Los Angeles’ party over and done with, Billy, Lee Sklar and Gil started rehearsals the next day at the former Charlie Chaplin Studios soundstage—now belonging
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to A&M Records—at the corner of La Brea and Sunset. It was not just some dingy Hollywood rehearsal studio; inside the soundstage was a full-blown production rehearsal set featuring a dazzling light show and onstage sound quality that knocked Gil out. He realised at that moment just how far Billy had come since he’d been in America. ‘So we’ve got David Bowie’s lighting guy [Eric Barrett] and we’re rehearsing on Charlie Chaplin’s soundstage. Fleetwood Mac were rehearsing [for the Tusk tour] in the soundstage next door and across the way, there’s Stanley Clarke [jazz bassist]. Mick Fleetwood’s riding his motorcycle around on the lot. That was my welcome to America. This was a real eye-opener. ‘I didn’t really know Lee Sklar very well at the time but you know, he’s played on about two thousand number-one albums. I was using Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro’s practice kit for the rehearsal. Lee becomes a great friend of mine, he takes me to some of his daytime sessions that he would do. He’s what they call a triple-rate session guy in LA, he made a lot of money playing on sessions and would play two or three every day—that was his day gig. I ended up going with Lee to this studio where the sessions for [Pink Floyd’s] The Wall are going on.’ The entire Children of the Sun tour ran for three months, with extended stays in the south and southwest, Oklahoma, Texas and Arizona, places where the album had been well received and promoted on regional FM stations. Gil was amazed at just how big the whole tour was, and to this day retains a copy of the tour manifest, which details the PA and lighting requirements, the riders, the guarantees for each show, gate receipts and a complete itinerary. The group had the use of Linda Ronstadt’s bus for the
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duration of the three-month tour, as Ronstadt was appearing in a popular Broadway production of Pirates of Penzance. ‘It was the red-carpet treatment, you know. For me, I’d come from playing with Mondo Rock in these pubs where your feet stuck to the fucking floor, and it stank of stale booze, to this major tour. Incredible. Incredible stuff. And Billy and I, being Australians, we liked to party. But the Americans didn’t understand our lingo, they didn’t get us.’ The tour went from strength to strength. They played a huge show in Dallas, Texas—the Farewell to Texas Summer gig—at the Cotton Bowl on 26 August. The line-up for the show included headliners Rush, the Canadian progressive rock band of whom Billy was a fan, boogie rockers Foghat (another act with which Billy had been compared for years) and Little River Band. Backstage at this show, so an old story went, there was a scrap about Billy refusing to take the stage before LRB. Gil Matthews confirms the story. ‘There was a big fight between Glenn Shorrock and Billy because it was like, “Who’s gonna support who?”, you know. Rush was number one on the bill but was it going to be LRB or Billy Thorpe first? Billy had the number one album in Texas—Children of the Sun.’ Billy—who had pulled similar stunts before—was in full roar at this time, glowing with his album’s success. This was his crowd, he reasoned. This was the territory where his album was moving off the racks at great speed. But Little River Band—not to put too fine a point on it—was in fact huge in the US. They’d already had four of the six Top 10 US chart singles they would enjoy.
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Eventually, so the story goes, Little River Band caved in and went on before Billy, and played their hits and some new songs for the crowd. They made it tough for him to follow, but he went out there and owned that stage, just as he always had. At the heart of Thorpie’s personality was an insecurity about his talent, which prompted this remarkable admission from the man during a radio interview in 1979, during promotion for Children of the Sun: ‘I’ve never liked my own voice or been able to stand seeing myself on the television,’ he said. ‘I’ve just started to become a guitar player at last, and would much rather hear myself play guitar.’ Even so, Thorpie was not shy about his ambitions for this phase of his career. Inspired by the enormous spectacle of Pink Floyd’s The Wall tour, he wanted something similarly large-scale. ‘If I’m successful in America, I’ll have the budget to do the stage show of the decade. To me, [Pink Floyd] are the state-of-the-art criteria of what should be done. And it was done with taste and panache and it was wonderful. With all my success in Australia, I could never have bought the kind of amplifiers I wanted, and I could never stage things. I’ve got to be able to play to seventyfive thousand people before I can get something that goes eighty feet into the air. I think there’s a Cecil B. DeMille in me that has to come to fruition.’ By the time Billy’s first tour for the album was over, Children of the Sun was receiving incredible amounts of FM airplay all over the South, not just in Texas. The single would become one of the most added songs to radio playlists that year, and the reviews from around the US—mostly encouraging too—came rolling in. At last
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it seemed that not only was America ready for Billy Thorpe, it was crazy about him. In September 1979, journalist and photographer Rennie Ellis—like Billy, a former habitué of Kings Cross who in 1971 had published an iconic book of photographs of the area—went to interview Billy at Robert Raymond’s home in Malibu. Billy rolled up in a green Mustang convertible with a vanity plate reading ‘AZTEC’. Thorpe was ten days into a twenty-one-day fast at the time and looked ‘trim, taut and terrific’, according to Ellis. Tanned, his blond hair longer than it had ever been, he seemed like the macrobiotic archetype of the newly health-conscious LA star. If Ellis and Thorpie discussed anything that was vaguely in depth, it didn’t make it into print, since the article eventually ran as little more than a puff piece in the Australian Women’s Weekly, but Billy did manage to dismiss much of what had gone before in Australia, telling Ellis that he didn’t own a single copy of any of his old albums and didn’t listen to any of the old hits—he went so far as to tell the journalist he didn’t like most of them anyway. It seemed to Ellis, just as it had to others who interviewed him during this time, that Billy was not only looking ahead, he was attempting to put the recent lack of interest in his Australian career down to the typical variables of that market—the old complaints, ‘too small, too few rewards’ for all his hard work—but what Billy would have known full well was that his audience from the early seventies hadn’t so much gone on to follow other artists (though of course, many had) as they’d simply grown up. The Sunbury kids now had young children, mortgages and other more pressing concerns. It was a hard fact for Billy to admit to, but his audience
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had in some ways matured beyond anything he could do to keep them interested. He let slip that he had worked on coming to America for years before he began telling the Australian press of his plans. ‘Robert [Raymond, manager] and I decided to come here at least two years before we actually did. It was part of a grand plan and its schedule is running beautifully at the moment. There was a point where I had to get out of Australia because I was going nuts—just running round in circles doing the same thing. I wanted a career change and that meant totally changing my music . . . creating a new image.’ He revealed how the family had survived the first few months in the US. ‘I got a very good publishing deal and that’s how I kept myself and the family alive [before the release of Children of the Sun] when I arrived here, I had very little music relative to the American market so I started writing songs, something I’d never really got into in Australia.’ Billy had indeed become prolific as a songwriter during his first years in the US. He wrote at least two songs a week, sometimes more if he was on a roll. Songwriting allowed him to investigate his own mind to a greater degree, and it uncovered much in the way of material he had gleaned from years of reading. He’d also been gathering other material during this period that would serve him very well, mainly from an incident that took place in New York City early in 1979, before the album had been released. Billy had gone to Georgia to Phil Walden’s home to celebrate finishing the recording, mixing and mastering of the album. After the party, which Billy describes in great detail in his second book,
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Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy), Billy went on to New York to fulfil some promotional duties. An Australian friend took him out for dinner at an Italian restaurant, and then on to a disco for some dancing. He was by his own admission high on cocaine when he went off by himself, dancing around the club, when his ankle turned, and he fell over and broke his elbow in two places. In agony, he was taken to a nearby hospital. During what might have otherwise been a routine medical procedure of having his arm put in plaster, Billy became agitated, partly because of the pain he was in, as well as the cocaine racing around his blood. Because it was a Friday night and the hospital’s emergency room was filled with gunshot victims and people in dire need of attention, the two orderlies looking after him decided to have him sedated and shipped off to Bellevue for the weekend. Bellevue is a Manhattan psychiatric facility for the criminally insane, either prior to trial or before incarceration elsewhere. There is no reason to suggest that Billy had done anything ‘criminal’—although using cocaine might well fall under that category, it’s unlikely the hospital staff knew he was under its influence specifically. It is most likely that he was sent to Bellevue simply because it was a busy night and the previous hospital didn’t have the resources available to deal with him. More disturbing though is the fact that Billy’s heart apparently stopped during his first night in Bellevue, and he had to be resuscitated. Given his later medical problems, it’s entirely pos sible that Billy Thorpe in fact had a heart condition that he did not know about. For his heart to fail based solely on cocaine use would have meant a few years of solid drug abuse, and there is
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almost no evidence to suggest that Billy—despite his self-confessed ‘maniacal’ behaviour, befitting a rocker of his stature—was a fullblown cocaine addict. That long weekend he spent in the hospital strapped to a gurney with round-the-clock doses of morphine to numb the pain of his injury, surrounded by madmen, impatient orderlies and doctors ready to dole out the hardest hitting sedation possible, must have been a necessary wake-up call for him. He developed the scenario for his second book by using this ‘lost weekend’ as a powerful narrative device that allowed him to recall a series of events from the previous ten years of his career. There’s certainly no point in trying to establish whether what he wrote about seeing at Bellevue actually happened—the two drug-addled Hispanic brothers who had allegedly murdered a family in cold blood, or his conversations with a NYC detective who happened to be a Vietnam veteran who had spent R&R in Sydney in the late 1960s. Whatever the reality, it was a powerful series of events. He would also have been acutely aware of the fact that no one knew where he was that long weekend, or what had happened to him. The anxiety he would have felt about his wife and children must have been nearly overwhelming. He was discharged from the hospital on the Monday afternoon, and once his head had cleared, he returned to his hotel room, checked out and got on the first plane home to his family. Lynn was enormously relieved to see him. She’d spent a terrifying weekend unable to locate him, and no one from the label’s New York offices had the first idea where he might have got to.
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Back home again, he was in a better place. That weekend was a turning point for him. His health once more improved and he made a concerted effort to stay away from drugs like cocaine. He continued with martial arts every day, and made his fitness a priority. As his arm healed and he was able to pick up a guitar without pain, he re-dedicated himself to that craft too. He’d started young with the instrument, had left it in its case for years while he stood at the microphone with his left hand behind his back in the style of the time, and had only gone back to it again out of necessity in 1968. Then, with the inspiration and encouragement of Lobby Loyde, he had taken his rhythm playing to a fine level and had started really wailing on the guitar as a soloist (even if opinion was varied among other Australian guitarists as to his ability as a lead player). In any event, temporarily losing the use of his arm had made him relish the idea of taking up playing again. As he came around to writing the songs that would become his next album, 21st Century Man, he noticed how quickly his lead playing came back, then improved further. Proffer remarked to Billy on how much his playing had expanded as they recorded the new album. His guitar style was now much more precise, tight even, with a butterfly vibrato and an expressed preference for a cleaner, sweeping tone more redolent of David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s meticulous, powerful guitarist. Inspired by the success of some of his fellow Australians in LA, Billy kept on writing songs. He penned songs for artists as diverse as Ringo Starr, Leo Sayer, Leif Garrett, Wet Willie, Love Machine, and the Osmonds (the song, ‘Midnight Dancing’, was
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recorded but never released), and also co-wrote songs with Brian Cadd and Barry Gibb. When Children of the Sun was released in Australia late in 1979, according to Billy, the silence was deafening: ‘I had a song screaming up the charts in thirty-eight or forty [US] states, [I was] headlining my own tours, on the cover of every magazine, doing Tonight shows and I couldn’t get arrested in Australia,’ he claimed somewhat sadly, and ultimately erroneously. ‘There was still a feeling that anyone who left the country was a traitor. I decided to concentrate on the States. I made four albums, one platinum, two gold. I toured all over the States and South America.’ Despite his melancholic predictions about how the new album would fare in Australia, he did have some small cause for celebration. For the first time in four years, one of his singles— ‘Wrapped in the Chains of Your Love’—entered the Australian charts, only going as high as eighty-five nationally, where it trembled tenuously for three weeks before disappearing. Children of the Sun, on the other hand, put in a stronger chart appearance, eventually going as high as forty-four on the album charts, where it stayed for eleven weeks. While it may have seemed insignificant at the time—Billy had higher hopes for his new, slicker sound in Australia than just a Top 50 showing—it was a respectable turnout, given that popular press of the time and later would have it that the album was a total failure here. It wasn’t, but it didn’t sell twenty-five thousand copies either. In 1980, Australian label Blue Goose put together a double best-of album, Time Traveller, which covered Billy’s career from the outset with the Aztecs all the way up to the late 1970s, including
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some previously unreleased tracks, but omitted any reference to Thorpie’s subsequent US career. The package, with its cover depiction of Billy’s various incarnations, also featured hilarious liner notes from Gil Matthews which hinted at the madness of the Sunbury era. Time Traveller performed similarly to Billy’s latest album, notching up forty-two on the charts where it stayed for fourteen weeks. In September, yet another compilation, It’s All Happening, was released—this time from the Select label. It compiled mainly the Mk I and II Aztecs’ Parlophone recordings, with excellently informative liner notes by Glenn A. Baker. The cover was Billy at his dapper sixties TV star best. It’s fair to say that while the omission of any of the US songs from the best-of collections would hardly have been deliberate, many self-confessed ‘fans’ would have nothing to do with Billy’s American recording career. As far as many of his fans were concerned, his US recordings virtually didn’t exist. The common misperception in Australia that Children of the Sun had ‘underperformed’ in a number of other territories, such as Europe and Asia, may also have been fed by what happened next. In mid-1980, Polydor Records took a look at their long list of artists who hadn’t met expectations for overseas sales, and advised Billy that he was being dropped from the label. Given that his first album for the label had performed well in the US—radio play continued and Billy had clocked almost three hundred thousand sales in seven months—it was a blow Billy hadn’t anticipated. Allan Clarke, who had recently secured a deal with Elektra Records for the release of his album Legendary Heroes (on which Billy had played), apparently put in a good word about Billy’s
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songwriting ability to the label’s A&R man, which led to Elektra’s offer to retain Billy for the release of 21st Century Man. Also in 1980, Billy’s old mate Angry Anderson and his band Rose Tattoo arrived in Los Angeles to record an album. The album featured guest appearances from Thorpie, and Lobby Loyde who unexpectedly turned up with the group. The recording went ahead very smoothly with much input from Billy, who’d suggested a studio and producer; the band themselves were very pleased with the result. However, when the group returned to Australia bearing the unmastered tapes, the response from their label, Albert Productions, was somewhat muted. In fact, the formidable duo of Vanda and Young made it abundantly clear that they didn’t like the feel or sound of the album and refused to release it. The band returned to the studio in Australia and recorded another album, Assault and Battery, which neither the fans nor the band were entirely fond of. The Los Angeles album was shelved and remained an inch deep in dust until Gil Matthews’ label, Aztec Music, released it in 2008. One thing Billy did have in spades was offers of live work. He toured Children of the Sun for as long as possible, though it did occur to him early in the piece that he might not get the opportunity to present the live show to people exactly how he intended it to be. He landed quality support slots with Nazareth and other big ‘metal’ or hard-rock acts but, as always, he chafed against being relegated to opening act. It wasn’t that he was humiliated by it, but he had done some hard yards already in the US and it dented his pride slightly to have to open for bands whose lead singer had been shitting yellow back when Billy had been having his first hits in Australia.
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In the wake of the success of Children of the Sun, Billy had his concept mapped out thoroughly, and it followed on organically from that album into what would become 21st Century Man. The song ‘She’s Alive’ was written during the recording of Children of the Sun but was not used. ‘I actually wrote it for one of my daughters. I was obviously inspired by her birth. It was always frustrating to me, you know, having two beautiful daughters, probably the love of my life and never being able to capture anything about them. I was writing these banal lyrics about trying to get a recording and publishing deal here in America and Spencer [Proffer] said, “Forget about all that crap and get down to what you really care about.” One night during Children of the Sun, I sat in the studio with a Mellotron [an early tape-operated “sampling” keyboard made famous by the Beatles single “Strawberry Fields Forever”] and wrote most of the lyrics. I told Spencer that I was really onto something and wanted to put it on that album but unfortunately we’d finished it. When the opportunity came to get it on this record, it was easy to relate it to the style and context of the other songs.’ Like its predecessor, the follow-up had to deliver more of that sonic sheen that had so characterised Children’s appeal to headphone listeners and heads in general. Starting with the simulation of an atomic bomb explosion worked to further reinforce the apocalyptic nature of the album, even if lyrically it seemed much more ‘street level’ than poetic. Proffer and Billy used twenty-four different synthesizers to build the layers of the ‘explosion’—that effect alone made it popular at stereo stores, which used the track to demonstrate the low-level frequency range of speakers, since it made them thunder impressively.
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Proffer’s love of stereo panning and abstract musical motifs coming and going made for an encompassing musical experience. ‘[On Children of the Sun] there were sound effects that you would hear only briefly, and then [they] would reappear, or [a] certain harmony structure,’ said Proffer. ‘We used the exact same vocal harmony structure and approach on [21st Century Man]. Those are subliminal links that only the truest fans of the project might pick up on, but we were real proud of it.’ Even though Proffer and Billy had mapped out the album thematically to link it to its predecessor, it is glaringly unusual that no video footage or visual promotion of any kind was done for either of the first two US albums. The video age was well and truly alive, even if MTV was still several years away. There were television shows in the US, UK and Australia that regularly played ‘video clips’ of bands, usually miming the song on a set with a two- or three-camera set-up and with some basic visual effects added during editing. As it turned out, however, there was indeed a visual component to the music, but it would be realised live. Proffer, an atypically forward thinker, had mused on ideas for touring the new album that would not have occurred to most music producers. Perhaps it’s because he was far from your average engineer/producer. Proffer was great with words as well as ideas, and within the schematic suggested by the albums’ themes of ‘science fantasy’, he came up with the idea of a laser light show. ‘We had a touring laser show in 1980 that choreographed the storyline for both Children of the Sun and 21st Century Man,’ said Proffer. ‘We ran that show in planetariums all over the world [sic] to really encapsulate audio-visual entertainment. It was too expensive
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to mount the laser show on video itself, although we approached RCA Videodisk and a number of other companies, and said it would represent sufficient abstract entertainment to warrant tremendous repeatability, if we could get it on the air. But it proved to be too expensive a process to put on the air, so we just toured it in a way that would have been cost-prohibitive to do with the band. To have the touring planetarium show run in nine cities simultaneously . . . we found to be a very exciting merger of the music and visual mediums. We were a bit ahead of ourselves in that a number of people thought we were crazy doing this too. There were people that really thought we had jumped off the deep end. I mean, I was telling them I wanted to put this on Broadway, in the true sense of combining the mediums. And they just kept screaming, “Hit single! Hit single!” This project had more depth than just necessitating a hit single.’ Anticipating much greater success with his follow-up album, Billy called back to Australia and imported some more Aztecs into the US. ‘He called up Warren Morgan and Billy Kristian, and we had a few American backing guys as well and we toured again,’ says Gil Matthews. ‘That old Aztec lunacy started right up as soon as the tour got underway. The first fucking thing that happened was that we were meant to start in Los Angeles. I’ve caught the plane and Pig’s not on it. He’s missed the plane. I get to LA and Billy says, “Where’s Pig?” I said, “I dunno—he didn’t make the plane.” “Ah, fucking cunt,” says Billy.’ Pig Morgan had taken a later flight out that same day, except his destination was now Denver, Colorado, instead of Los Angeles. He rang Billy as soon as he arrived. Billy was stunned. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ he asked his old mate.
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‘I’m in Denver,’ came the sheepish reply. ‘What the fuck are you doing there?’ Billy demanded. ‘You’re supposed to be in LA!’ All was not lost. On the flight Morgan had started talking with a man who was part of the local chapter of the Hells Angels biker group. ‘The Hells Angels ended up going for a ride to LA, with Pig and his gear on the fucking back of a bike,’ says Matthews today, shaking his head. ‘That’s Pig, mate. Pig can do whatever Pig wants, and that’s how it was. Aztec lunacy. Every day, it was a case of, “Oh, what the fuck?”’ Pig arrived in plenty of time to do the rehearsals, and it all went well from then on musically, but the classic Aztec mischief was also transferred Stateside. The Americans hardly knew what to make of them, but the shows were very well received, even though Billy didn’t have the budget he needed to carry out the flourishes he had hoped to bring audiences. In 1981, things began to slow down again. In March, Billy turned thirty-five and it seemed to give him pause. He returned to Australia to play shows for the first time in two years, and was more than a little taken aback at the number of ‘old’ people who recognised him in the street. While the always youthful Billy sometimes appeared to live in a ‘Peter Pan’ world, his audience was ageing in real time. It wasn’t that Billy didn’t have responsibilities of his own, he was just living a different life to the people who had been buying his records and going to his concerts since the early sixties. ‘There’s a psychology involved in knowing somebody for a long time,’ he admitted to TV Week’s Alan Webster. ‘People come up to me at the airport and they look about forty-five years old
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and say they remember me. It’s frightening. Because you’ve been around so long people tend to think you are much older. I mean, I’m thirty-five but people think I’m fifty-five! ‘I realised America was a challenge, that there were no challenges left for me here, and people were taking me for granted because I’d been around so long. But in America if people didn’t like me it was just that. It wasn’t because of something they’d read or heard about me or something I’d done in the past . . . I’m established in America now. I’ve reached that level where I automatically get airplay. I’m over the first hurdle and off and running.’ However confident Billy sounded to Australian reporters, Stimulation, his third US album, hadn’t exactly delivered more hits. On this album, the ‘sci-fi androgyny’ even carried over to several incredibly high-pitched, almost feminine vocals. Billy was of course simply breaking out of his comfort zone and it was no more than any other artist of the period would have done. Disco and country music were the two most popular music forms among the wider listening audience that year, even though in the cooler parts of town, the young people were listening to the so-called New Wave bands, punk and post-punk artists and singer-songwriters who had something to say and a new—or at least interesting—way of saying it. ‘With the second side [of Stimulation] . . . I tried a slightly different approach. We open up the second side with a track called “Syndrome DOA”, which is an acoustic . . . Well, it’s got an African flavour to it.’ Billy had been inspired by a documentary he’d seen about Ethiopia, and the North African motif was one that would surface again later. ‘We used a couple of African drummers on it. It’s
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very “chanty”. Lots of voices singing the chorus and there’s a big percussion breakdown in the middle of it.’ As always, it made sense to Billy to keep developing his songwriting and image collectively as an artist, no matter what the consequences. Without the safety net of his faithful Australian audience, he had to keep pushing himself to renew his approach to music each time he made an album. This time, he’d gone as far as to record nearly every instrument on the album himself. He played bass, guitar and keyboards and programmed the ‘drums’ on some of the songs. ‘On a couple of tracks on the second side, we used a drum machine and a drummer together. And it’s very effective.’ Making records that allowed him to experiment kept him interested, and he took the crowds with him. That desire to innovate is what allowed him to succeed as he did in America. As the eighties progressed, Australian bands had really started competing for radio play in the US market. Little River Band was so big in the late seventies in the US that audiences were often surprised that Glenn Shorrock didn’t have an American accent. Olivia Newton John, with whom Billy and Lynn were close, was likewise huge there not only as a singer but as an actress; her innate charm and success in Grease had made her immensely bankable in Hollywood. AC/DC was also becoming enormous in America’s South, where their unreconstructed rock’n’roll was becoming as much a part of teenage culture as it was in the Australian suburbs. There can be absolutely no doubt that Billy wanted that same success, and he tore after it with his usual flair. He had had years of insecurity in Australia, followed by years when the money rolled in and out in disproportionate amounts.
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Mushroom took a punt on Billy’s US songs in 1981, releasing the single ‘In My Room’/ ‘She’s Alive’ in February and another, ‘Just the Way I Like It’/‘Rock Until You Drop’, in October. Neither single even registered on the Australian charts, but Thorpe went back to Australia to promote them in October, culminating that tour with an appearance at Tanelorn Festival which is still talked about today. The Australian reviews for Stimulation weren’t quite as dire as has been hinted at since; rather, the reception was simply subdued, and no one could figure out why Billy was working so hard to break America when he could have been pushing the rock’n’roll barrow here, making a living and keeping the audiences happy. The Telegraph in Sydney cited the ‘heavily instrumented . . . breath-grabbing number’ ‘Rock Until You Drop’ as being the sort of approach Billy should continue to take, saying that the title track, with its echoing vocals and slightly reggae-ish instrumentation, was ‘an area that perhaps he should leave alone’. Rolling Stone’s Toby Creswell was less kind to Billy’s new album, describing side one as ‘watered down heavy metal and boogie’ and accusing Billy of writing lyrics that ‘rarely rise above trite’, although he praised the more contemporary sounds of side two. Bruce Elder reviewed the album for the short-lived magazine Record, and suggested awkwardly that now Johnny O’Keefe was dead, Billy was the heir apparent, even though he then dismissed the album as ‘half-masticated . . . boring . . . heavy metal schlock’. He rather unkindly used the title of the song ‘Syndrome DOA’ as being something of a prophetic metaphor for Billy’s music and career. Meanwhile, 1981 had been a bumper year for a new wave of Australian bands: the Sunnyboys and the Church, Men at Work
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and Serious Young Insects, all of whom had released albums that year. The Sunnyboys had recorded with Lobby Loyde, so Billy was more than aware of them, and he was aware of what was going on in music. ‘It feels just the same here,’ he said, displaying some sour grapes. ‘There’s a whole lot of new bands . . . I see a lot of style but not much guts. I stopped being involved in trends ten years ago when I realised I could create my own.’ In late 1981, Billy began working with Proffer on tracks for the songs that would comprise East of Eden’s Gate. Making use of Gil while he remained in the US, Billy had him drum on several of the tracks, but even at the outset of production it seemed something had gone awry. Whether Billy was lost for ideas or had simply pushed his idea of a trilogy too hard, it was obvious that the new album wasn’t going to be easy to pin down. Materially, Billy abandoned altogether any pretence of continuing themes from previous albums. East of Eden’s Gate, which was released through Proffer’s House of Pasha label, also featured Earl Slick, the fabulously tasteful rock guitarist who had worked with David Bowie, John Lennon and Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter. During its making, it was reported that Billy was making a ‘synthesizer’ album along the lines of Neil Young’s Trans, but other than that mention it seems to be truly the nadir of Billy’s American recording output. Even today, there is very little information available about the album’s performance in Australia or the US, and it appears to have sunk virtually without trace almost immediately after its release in 1982. It wasn’t even released locally in Australia, but was available only as an import, which in a way would have guaranteed its poor reception. Mushroom was no longer willing to take a punt
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on Billy’s US releases because after Children of the Sun there was no audience left for his albums, even though his fans still turned out in their hundreds to see him play whenever he toured. Session and live gun guitarist Jeff ‘JK’ Northrup was working around Los Angeles when he got the call from Thorpie’s manager, Robert Raymond, to play with Billy on the US leg of the Stimulation tour. JK joined his friend Bruce Turgon (bass) and Frankie Banali on drums for a lengthy tour that included prestigious support slots with a variety of rock artists, like Cheap Trick, whose blend of power pop and hard rock had proved immensely appealing to a younger rock audience; Scottish hard rockers Nazareth; and gun-toting Republican rocker Ted Nugent, an American artist with whom Billy had been relentlessly compared for years, even before he’d arrived in the States. Of all Billy’s albums, East of Eden’s Gate is one of the two he made that can truly be described as ‘failures’ in a commercial and artistic sense. Hurriedly conceived, hastily written and recorded and, ultimately, poorly promoted, the failure of Eden’s Gate still cannot be described as being the ‘end’ of Billy’s career—it was simply a time of great change in the music industry and, for whatever reason, he had misjudged the musical climate. He would not be the first artist to make that mistake, but even so the failure must have seemed especially egregious to him. It would be nearly five years before Billy would make another album.
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Chapter 8
1983–87 Beyond Eden’s Gate
After the diluted public response to East of Eden’s Gate, Billy and Proffer still spoke regularly and maintained a good friendship but their working relationship had all but ceased, apart from Billy’s occasional contributions as a vocalist or guitarist to something that Proffer might be working on. Even so, it would have been apparent to Billy and everyone else around that Proffer’s star was on the rise. In September 1982, Proffer was selected to produce an album for metal up-and-comers Quiet Riot, who’d just been signed to CBS Records. The band was still reeling from the loss of their friend and former guitarist Randy Rhoads in a light-plane crash during the March 1982 Ozzy Osbourne tour of America. Rhoads had quit the group on the advice of a friend to join Osbourne’s band for the tour, though he did so with a heavy heart. Proffer took the band into the studio, and re-energised them with his wonderful theories and ideas, all the while recording their Metal
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Health album, which spawned a massive hit single—a cover of Slade’s ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’. The song hit the charts all over the world upon its release in 1983, and Proffer’s stock as a producer had just risen dramatically. The Slade cover was the kind of single that Billy needed but didn’t want. He was tired and bored with trying to outpace consumer demand with his music. In January 1983, Billy went back to Australia to tour as part of a four-piece band, with Gil along on drums, Bruce Turgon on bass and Jeff Northrup on guitar. The shows were as always well received by fans, and Billy’s sound had risen to new heights of technical proficiency. He and Northrup traded lines on the guitar and the sound was hot. But at almost thirty-seven, Billy wasn’t in the mood to keep pushing his career so hard. He was having to ask himself some hard questions about his career potential in the music industry, which is only kind to artists over thirty-five provided they have achieved global success well before that age. It must have been hard for him to see a clear future path after years spent chasing what he wasn’t going to get—not at this juncture. A less buoyant man might well have become depressed about it. But, true to his inherent optimism, he began to ponder the ways in which he could keep his family afloat in the absence of income from touring, songwriting and recording. Royalties kept arriving piecemeal in the mail, the sole financial legacy of the sixteen years of his career he’d worked, lived and recorded in Australia. It was certainly better than nothing. Billy had been bankrupted before, but that was before he had met and married Lynn. He remembered how hard that path had been for him personally and, now that he had a
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wife and two children to support, he was determined not to fall back into that trap. By 1984, the costs involved in touring and promoting albums had to be absorbed by Billy himself, who was now without the fallback position of a record deal. And by 1985, in Billy’s own words, he was ‘exhausted and creatively burnt out’. After almost thirty years as a professional artist, the music industry had completely lost any appeal for him. He had seen the flights of musical inspiration of the 1970s give way to the soulless, heavily produced ‘tweety bird’ singers that would come to dominate the charts of that era. And as the offers for shows and recording jobs dried up, so too did his desire to keep chasing record deals, performing and recording. While Billy recognised that there was still great music being made in the 1980s, he couldn’t imagine the competition being very kind to him. He wasn’t interested in poodle-perm metal, coke-fixated industry wankers or dancing around neon lights ankle-deep in dry ice. He was now close to forty, an age that radio programmers and MTV had deemed unacceptable unless you happened to be Mick Jagger. In 1985, former Aztec Tony Barber was enjoying newfound success in an entirely different field. He had long since quit playing music professionally, though he often picked up the guitar at home. Tony’s creative imagination had always been fed by comic book fantasy and he enjoyed creating stories and toys for children. From the early 1980s, Tony had developed a successful range of children’s toys called the Puggle Doll, which had in turn received interest from American toy manufacturers wanting to license the
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toy range in the US. They’d offered him a contract to look over, and almost immediately Tony could see that there were the usual clauses that didn’t quite work in his favour. Knowing that Billy had for years been organising his own US deals after being stung several times, Tony turned to Billy for help. ‘I’d made it my business to build my knowledge of contractual law because I’d always organised my own deals and never employed a lawyer. Tony . . . thought I’d be the person to tell him in straight language what was actually happening to his business in America. I found that his contracts were very close in structure to royalty deals. I was immediately on top of the situation and actually enjoyed working through the negotiations,’ Billy said. Buoyed by Thorpie’s skilled help in renegotiating his US deals, Tony made a proposal to him: that the pair should form a company and develop children’s toys, music and learning tools. Billy agreed to the idea almost straightaway. ‘I’d been on the road for five years and I was exhausted,’ Billy said. ‘Suddenly I had an opportunity to step away from the music industry for a while but keep myself active at the same time. It was a perfect situation for a workaholic like me.’ The result was Zipper Dedodah Inc., a company in which Tony and Thorpie would be partnered to bring to life the sketches and ideas of the former, using the creativity, drive and business skills of the latter. They worked together for several months on a huge range of ideas under the umbrella of the Sunshine Friends brand, including books, stuffed and electronic toys, music and other associated concepts.
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Once the proposals had been written out as a presentation for toy companies, Tony and Thorpie arranged a meeting with the board of one of America’s largest toy companies, Mattel. They presented a total of nine toy concepts to the manufacturer’s board. The board’s director was so impressed by the visual and conceptual elements of the duo’s presentation that he announced they would pay US$2,000,000 for all nine toy ideas. ‘They wrote out a cheque for $100,000 on the spot to show us they were serious,’ Billy recalled. ‘Within a few months, we had half a million dollars to get our projects underway. It was like a bizarre dream come true.’ Billy used his share of the money to fulfil a long-held dream of owning his own recording studio. He built a 16-track digital recording studio at the family home in Encino, which he would then use to not only create sound effects for the Sunshine Friends toys, but to demo new songs and record advertising jingles for television. It was a sound business decision on Billy’s part. Billy and Tony conceived a whole range of toys and related products, including children’s books, videos and music for one of Tony’s creations, The Lost Forests, which was released as a book and accompanying animated video, while three subsequent titles— Flying’s Easy, Double Trouble and Marco and the Book of Wisdom—each came with a cassette featuring children’s songs that Billy wrote, produced and sang. The reward for the work that Thorpie was putting into Sunshine Friends was the contract with Mattel, and interest from other, equally prestigious corners, like Disney and Hasbro. Billy was travelling the world, doing deals and feeling a great deal of pride in his work. He had proved himself successful in another arena
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of life that didn’t involve getting up onstage, and for a time, he barely felt the old pull of the live arena. In the early days of the partnership with Tony, Billy embraced his new corporate side with no small amount of passion. He found himself on the road again in a different capacity—as a businessman known for being hardnosed and capable of dealing with the biggest toy companies and electronics manufacturers in the world. Negotiation was one of his strengths and he worked hard to make the business stronger. He would fly all over the world, from New York to Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore and Taiwan, for conferences, investigating the developments of other toy companies as well as assessing the rapid changes in electronic technology and how they could be applied to the toy business. ‘I’d be ironing out a tough deal with this team of clever businessmen in the Sony headquarters and couldn’t help but chuckle to myself, thinking that if only these guys in the suits knew about the real rock’n’roll maniac sitting across from them,’ said Billy. However committed Billy and Tony were to their Sunshine Friends range, the American market failed to make them rich. Mattel remained dedicated to the pair’s conceptual skills though and retained them as consultants, which in turn allowed them to investigate other fields, such as animation, Disney thrill rides, electronic effects and a host of other toy possibilities. In any event, as the business side of the partnership shrank in size, Thorpie could always be found in his home studio, recording the electronic books for the toy range as well as advertising jingles. In this capacity, he came across the legendary Mel Blanc, the voiceover man responsible for some of the most instantly identifiable voices
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in cartoon history—Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and Porky the Pig. ‘Those sessions were hilarious. To hear Daffy Duck tell Bugs Bunny to go fuck himself, then fart, is beyond hilarious,’ Billy remembered, gleefully. ‘But to hear a gay Yosemite Sam coming on to Bugs who’s dithgusted is ridiculous.’ Thorpie and Tony’s consultancy work soon expanded well beyond Mattel, as they worked with Hasbro, Worlds of Wonder, Universal and Disney on a variety of projects. Frustratingly for both, their work did not seem to resonate with consumers. Billy was keeping the family provided for with more jingle work as well as producing demo sessions for himself and others. One of Billy’s best friends was writer Herb Wright, who in the 1970s had worked on The Six Million Dollar Man alongside Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry to develop characters for a television show called Questors. That show had fallen over due to creative differences between Rodenberry and the network, but some of the characters that Wright developed, including a race of aliens called the Ferenghi, were revived as part of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that most widely loved television show. Wright was not only a mate, he was a fan of Billy’s music as well, particularly the Children of the Sun album. ‘Yeah, he used to hang out at my studio sometimes,’ said Billy. ‘He would come around, hang out, smoke a joint and listen to what I was writing.’ Wright was working on a new project for Paramount Television, a TV series based on War of the Worlds. ‘I’d had a four-year break and that was just what I needed. I’d been in the music business all my life, since I was a little kid. I’d never had a job. They needed someone to write and score the music for the show,’ said Billy.
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‘Herb had heard a lot of what I’d been playing around with in my studio, so I made a demo and got the gig . . . the idea of producing a spacey soundtrack was right up my alley—the next step from where my album trilogy left off.’ Indeed, it was a perfect fit. At Wright’s urging, Billy submitted a demo reel of instrumentals to Greg Strangis—the producer who had taken the step of conceptualising War of the Worlds as a TV series. The ‘instrumentals’ were actually some old demos Billy hadn’t used, which he cleaned up, removing the vocals and adding some overdubs and sound effects to the mixes. ‘They liked it and suddenly I had a contract to score sixty half-hour programs—about three years of work. The show was incredibly successful in its first season, and it ran four times a week in the US on repeats after the first season had officially aired.’ The success of the show brought Billy to the attention of Hollywood producers and writers, and the offers of work kept coming in, for more diverse things such as documentary scores and several major Hollywood action movies. ‘War of the Worlds got me into a very powerful clique. Once you’re in the circle of soundtrack producers, the work just pours in. ‘I was in the studio eighteen hours a day. It was satisfying in a creative sense—I was learning to arrange music for orchestras, working with the latest computer technology—but it was so frustrating for someone who basically still wanted to hammer out a rock’n’roll feel on a guitar.’ In addition to his workload with War of the Worlds, Billy was now in demand for other television shows and produced soundtracks for episodes of Eight Is Enough, Colombo and even
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Star Trek: The Next Generation. ‘It was an education,’ said Billy. ‘That’s what I went to America for—not specifically to do sound tracks. There’s always been these sort of opportunities for me. I ended up doing that for about three years and it was incredibly lucrative. There’s a lot of money in scoring for television.’ Another facet of it that Billy enjoyed was that the work allowed him to be relatively autonomous, to manage and stick to his own schedule. ‘They pretty much just left me alone,’ he said. As much as Billy appreciated the learning curve, inevitably he got bored with it. Encouraged by the success of his soundtrack work, he was happy to pick up his guitar once again. He also took tentative steps back towards recording his own music. During 1987, he began polishing up some unreleased songs left over from his last recording sessions that resulted in East of Eden’s Gate. He revisited some older material, penned some new songs and tried to expand on the concept. The result was recorded and released in an album called Children of the Sun—Revisited. Critically, it didn’t go over well; it was lacking in inspiration, and had nothing new to offer audiences who had so happily received the original. Billy returned to Australia again for a one-off Aztecs re-formation featuring Matthews, Morgan and Wheeler at the Melbourne Music Festival, and stomped heartily through a long set that included renditions of ‘Most People I Know’ and ‘Oop-Poo-Pa-Do’, which were filmed by the promoters and released as part of a various artists’ video compilation, Under a Southern Cross. Central to Billy’s sense of pride in his work was that he wanted to be the focal point for adulation, craved it even. The chance to work in television was an experience he enjoyed immensely, but
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it only fed a part of his ego. He needed the feedback of an audience, the anticipation of a crowd or the thrill of nailing that solo in the studio. As it turned out, though, the job wasn’t going to be forever. As Billy completed work on the second season of War of the Worlds in late 1989, he learned that the show wouldn’t be renewed by the network for a third season. He wasn’t especially upset by the news, even though it cast a little more uncertainty on his financial prospects. In early 1990, Thorpie’s old mate and fervent disciple Jimmy Barnes showed up in LA; he was recording his album Two Fires at the Encino studio belonging to the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, which was literally around the corner from Billy’s place. ‘We had a barbecue and we invited a whole bunch of our Aussie mates and Thorpie of course, because he was living there at the time,’ says Jimmy. ‘He was late coming to the barbie, and I said, “What kept you?” He said, “Oh, someone threw a bomb through my window.” Apparently, he’d been lying in the lounge room watching TV and got up and went to bed and five minutes later, a bomb flew in through the window and blew up his front room. They found out later that it was some group that were living next door they were trying to blow up and they got the wrong house. So Thorpie turns up a bit rattled, going, “You won’t believe what happened to me last night!” He was never short of a great story.’ Seeing Jimmy at work in the studio in the wake of his phenomenal success as a solo artist post-Cold Chisel stirred Thorpie into action again. He knew that he had to break out of the cycle of simply working at music to earn money, because what he really wanted to earn was pleasure—the pleasure of playing
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live, being loved and applauded and, of course, getting paid for it. While he continued to write songs for himself in his studio during the brief periods between more lucrative sessions, he kept thinking back to how good things had initially been in America for him on the back of his US albums, going out with stadium rock bands and playing shows. At this crucial juncture, it was Lucy Fleetwood, daughter of drummer Mick Fleetwood and one of Rusty’s friends from Campbell High School, who brought a connection that would mould the next two years and take Billy back out on the road, doing what he loved most.
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Chapter 9
1988–94 Billy joins the Zoo
Through their daughters’ friendship, the Thorpes and the Fleet woods became fast friends—it took ‘about sixty seconds’ to forge a friendship between Billy and Mick Fleetwood. Billy later described their connection as ‘a personal and music chemistry’. Being musicians and foreigners in Los Angeles, it was inevitable that they would form such a close bond; they also had a group of mutual friends as well as similar musical backgrounds, heavily rooted in the blues and rock’n’roll. Billy and Fleetwood together were quite a double act; the diminutive English-born Aussie and the durable, much-loved lanky drummer of Fleetwood Mac referred to each other as ‘the Admiral’ (Fleetwood) and ‘Number One’ (Billy). They were the embodiment of Monty Pythonesque lunacy: ‘British and camp’ was how Billy put it. ‘We were kindred maniacs,’ he said. Having been trapped in the netherworld of studio recording for nearly four years, Billy was ready to make music again and so
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was Fleetwood, whose main band had been on hiatus for some time. They were fated to work together, and Fleetwood happened to have just the band to make it work. The Zoo had been a ‘side’ project for Mick Fleetwood since 1983, and had at various times included players like Kenny Gradney (Little Feat), Eddie Van Halen and Albert Collins—even Roy Orbison had sat in with them at one Los Angeles blues jam. ‘Mick invited me down to see the band play at this little club in Hollywood, and Eddie Van Halen and Roy Orbison were there, sitting in. I got up and had a sing. Mick said, “I’ve been thinking about doing something serious with this band and I’d like to do it with you.” So by early 1990, we’d started to scope out what kind of music we wanted to play.’ It was the perfect opportunity for both Billy and Fleetwood. Due to the sheer scale of Fleetwood Mac’s touring activities and the huge amounts of money involved, motivation for Fleetwood had become a problem. Like most musicians, he enjoyed touring enormously and the Zoo had become his way of working on new musical ideas without having to convene the various egos of the Mac in a studio. Billy could see that Fleetwood was into the idea but didn’t have such an organisational bent as Billy. After all, Thorpie had managed his own career and booked his own gigs for years now, and this ‘gold-plated’ opportunity was too good to pass up on any level. The formal offer to join the Zoo actually came via Fleetwood’s personal manager Dennis Dunstan, another Australian who was central to the Zoo’s success. He had known of Billy for years, and when he heard about Fleetwood’s plan to
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involve him, he started telling Fleetwood some of the more outrageous tales of Thorpie’s years as a rock star in Australia. Billy and Fleetwood discussed how this new line-up should work. The first thing they agreed on was that the sound would be hard rock. Second, Billy would be the lead singer and songwriter of the band, and they should have a female singer as well—not for duets but more along the lines of Fleetwood Mac’s revolving lead singer policy. Within days, Fleetwood had found the girl he wanted for the band. He asked Billy to put together a basic backing track that would represent the sound of the band, so Billy called guitarist Billy Burnette who was then in the running as lead guitarist for the group. Together they wrote a song called ‘Shakin’ the Cage’, laid down a guide drum track, bass and guitars. A week later, Bekka Bramlett showed up at the studio. Billy was immediately taken aback by Bekka, who at just twenty-one resembled a Miss World contestant but had the voice of an Aretha Franklin. Bekka was not just a looker, she was a rock’n’roll blueblood whose parents happened to be Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, who as Bonnie and Delaney rocked audiences all over the US, UK and Europe from 1969 until the early seventies. The Bonnie and Delaney revue show had been notable for the calibre of its guest stars, including George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Gram Parsons, Bobby Keyes, JJ Cale, Leon Russell and many more. Bekka’s mother had been the only white Ikette that Ike Turner had ever considered hiring and it was Bekka’s powerful combination of blues, roots and soul ability that caught Billy’s ear. ‘In my opinion,’ said Billy,
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‘pound for pound, Bekka Bramlett live was then and still is the finest white female blues rock singer I’ve ever heard. Bar none.’ Bekka had previously worked with Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Gos and the Moody Blues as a backing singer and was looking to step into a front woman’s role. Billy took her into the studio and played her ‘Shakin’ the Cage’, and Bekka assured Billy that she would ‘sing the shit out of it’. Billy got goose bumps, and once Bekka had passed the audition, he rang Fleetwood and together they laughed over their good fortune at finding this fabulous girl. Into the mix of musicians being assembled for the recording of an album came legendary bass player Kenny Gradney, and Isaac Assante, Paul Simon’s Ghanese drummer, who would play percussion. Both Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, who by this time had not worked together in years, came together to sing backing vocals on several of the tunes featuring their daughter. As a matter of course, Billy rang the founder of Mushroom Records, Michael Gudinski, in Melbourne, and told him about the project; in a move that hasn’t been paralleled since by the otherwise cautious Gudinski (although Fleetwood’s involvement would have made the decision easy), he offered Billy an Australian deal on the spot, not having even heard a bar of a song, and fronted up $50,000 into the bargain. While 1991 had been a quiet year for Fleetwood, there was a tentative offer of a one-off show in Tasmania. Fleetwood figured that since Billy was an Aussie, he would be able to help with arranging crew and assistance in the country. By chance, Billy’s return to Australia was officially marked by his induction into the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Hall of Fame.
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It was an honour that Billy hadn’t anticipated and one that he felt legitimised his position in Australian rock’s pantheon of greats. The show in Tasmania was cancelled after the Zoo arrived in the country, but since the money for the show had already been paid, the group decided to treat it as a holiday rehearsal away from LA. ‘We ended up being there three weeks, and the end result was that Billy, Bekka and myself realised that because of their vocal marriage, we’d put together a proper band,’ said Fleetwood in an interview at the time. Upon their return to Los Angeles, Billy kept writing songs. After all, it had been years since he’d had such an interesting musical project. With typical alacrity, Billy was energised by the possibility of recording alongside a true heavy-hitter of the music industry. This is borne out particularly by the songwriting credits on the album—all of the songs were written by Billy, with two co-writes, one with Billy Burnette and one with Bekka. With permission from Fleetwood, Thorpie took the songs to Phil Walden who the previous year had restarted the Capricorn label that had originally given Billy his toehold in America. Walden was impressed with what he heard and offered Billy another deal, perhaps bearing in mind the disappointment Billy had felt when Capricorn had collapsed nearly ten years earlier. Billy’s input on the album was huge, to the point that it can legitimately be considered a Billy Thorpe album that happens to feature Mick Fleetwood, Delaney and Bonnie, and Kenny Gradney. The songs bear all the hallmarks of Thorpie’s writing style, including the title track, ‘Shakin’ the Cage’, which was to become an actual
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US hit and one of the most played songs on American AOR chart radio in 1993. The group toured quite heavily doing small club shows to audiences of two hundred or so, honing their performances in the process. Reviews of the period describe Billy as a ‘heavy metal’ singer—which is not necessarily far from the truth, but clearly they were unfamiliar with the idea of ‘hard rock’. The band’s first major arena debut was an appearance at the Atlanta International Music Festival in Piedmont Park. It was a free event that specialised in urban blues, rock and funk. The Zoo slotted right into the line-up and proved a popular addition. For live shows, they recruited guitarist Gregg Wright, who had worked with Michael Jackson; bassist Tom Lilly, a former member of David Lee Roth’s band; and drummer Brett Tuggle, formerly of the Dixie Dregs. ‘The old Zoo had fun, but it never lasted long, while this Zoo has a sense of focus and purpose and, hopefully, a future,’ Fleetwood told one reporter. ‘But we’re very dependent on how the record does [it hadn’t charted yet] and whether we can keep things alive by playing to people.’ Thorpie was a different man when he returned to Australia in late 1991 with Fleetwood and the Zoo. Being the lead singer of someone else’s band didn’t faze him, nor did the fact that he hadn’t played an abundance of shows in Australia since the late 1970s. People still showed up to see him play with a rock band, and Thorpie expressed his amazement: ‘I thought that perhaps only a couple of old hippies would remember Billy Thorpe. Being embraced like this is so strange, because I ran away from Australia not even wanting to turn back for a final glance. I had reached the stage
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where I really wasn’t sure who Billy Thorpe was as a musician. I got stuck in one bag, being the loud rocker with the wall of amplifiers, and knew that I had to broaden what I was doing. I thought the only way out was to leave the country and start again.’ The Mushroom deal for the release of the Zoo’s Shakin’ the Cage didn’t prove successful, and Billy privately laid some of the blame for the album’s lack of success in Australia on Mushroom’s lack of promotional drive behind the album. Then, in 1992, something odd happened. Bill Clinton was announced as a presidential candidate at that year’s Democratic Convention and used the Fleetwood Mac song ‘Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)’ as part of his campaign platform. Immediately, sales of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours took off. As Clinton’s popularity soared, pressure for the then disbanded group to re-form increased, from both the record company and the management. The group could not ignore the momentum that was building around them as Clinton swept into the White House. They seized the opportunity and performed the song at the new president’s inauguration ceremony. The result was that just as the momentum of the Zoo was increasing to the point where it could have become a successful live act with radio play to back them, they had to take a back seat to Fleetwood Mac. At home in Santa Monica, California, Billy pondered what could have been and decided that it was for the best. It had been an exciting run in America, and it all added to the list of experiences that Billy had enjoyed, even if there was something of a pattern emerging, with each project that he immersed himself in either collapsing under the weight of his own frustration or
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being derailed by external forces. He had not wanted to become an institution either—he simply wanted to be a star, and now that he was in his forties, perhaps it was time to ponder other avenues. By late 1992, he had clocked up close to seventeen years in the US, and though he often returned to Australia to visit his parents, he hadn’t performed his old songs there under his own name for almost ten years. Throughout his professional career Billy, like many Australian artists, had lost momentum at some critical junctures. A series of clumsily managed attempts at building a following in the US, or lost opportunities such as the rising then falling fortunes of the Zoo, had put him out of sorts. However, Billy was not prone to serious introspection to such a level that it might endanger his other work, and his natural optimism meant that he could press on regardless of failures. Michael Gudinski had been asking Billy about his considerable back catalogue and the extensive library of unreleased live tapes that the Aztecs had recorded at literally hundreds of shows, with a view to perhaps releasing it. This was just the project Billy needed to occupy his time and, since the home studio wasn’t getting much use, he started going through the hundreds of boxes of tape, some of which he’d never actually listened to all the way through. He made a rough list of what he liked the sound of, and began tidying up a selection of tracks. Billy had used an early version of digitalrecording technology in his television work and so he laboriously transferred everything to digital, in the process cleaning up all the usual noises—pops, clicks and other unwanted frequencies—for mastering. It was a huge task. ‘I spent eight months working on
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it,’ Billy said. ‘But it was worth it. It was the project that became Lock Up Your Mothers.’ ✿ It was a different kind of Brisbane institution that got Thorpie thinking about playing some live shows in Australia again. Music promoter Andrew McManus was involved in organising performers to play at the closing of Boggo Road Gaol—a notorious prison in Brisbane’s southern suburbs. For some months, he had been regularly faxing Billy to get him to agree to re-form the Sunbury Aztecs to play the show, provisionally known as Jailhouse Rock. Billy could not or would not commit to the gig initially, possibly because the Zoo was then taking priority. But he eventually agreed, perhaps swayed by the increasingly large carrot being waved by the promoter. ‘I don’t want people to think that Billy Thorpe is back trying to re-form a band that was big twenty years ago, for a career as a golden oldie,’ he told journalist Mark Demetrius somewhat defensively in 1993. ‘That’s not what I’m about. These dates will be the only ones we do . . . but this is an amazing band: it’s got an energy I haven’t experienced anywhere, and I’ve played with a lot of the great players. There’s magic to it, it’s a joy to be a part of it and it probably won’t happen again.’ The show, which involved a number of other Aussie rock acts—the Divinyls, Spy Vs Spy and Rose Tattoo—was hugely successful. Each band’s performance (apart from Spy Vs Spy) was released on video and later DVD. Billy couldn’t help but feel
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triumphant, particularly since his old headmaster at Salisbury State High School in Brisbane had once told him that he would ‘end up in Boggo Road’ if he didn’t sort his life out. Billy would remain in Australia for another three months following the Jailhouse Rock show in August. In late September, the Aztecs reconvened for the annual Purga Creek Rage ’93, a weekend-long bikers’ convention hosted by Odin’s Warriors Motorcycle Club on a farm near Ipswich, Queensland. The event had been running for several years at that point, and attracted a huge crowd of motorcycle enthusiasts and music fans. The weeke nd’s line-up included the Painters and Dockers, the Radiators, the Poor Boys and Josie Jason and the Argonauts, as well as a retinue of attractions like skydivers, a wet T-shirt contest involving contestants without T-shirts, and strippers wearing nothing more than the warm stares of the crowd. Billy had coincidentally heard about the gig from American bikers in 1991 when the Zoo had played at the annual Harley convention in Detroit, Michigan. He joshed Ronnie Gibson of Brisbane’s CourierMail, saying, ‘I’m told they want to make it a family weekend—we’ll soon fix that.’ The Aztecs stepped into ‘Oop-Poo-Pa-Do’ at exactly midnight and from there they went hard for ninety minutes; though onlookers observed that they were all looking their age—except for Billy who seemed to be defying his forties rather well—the sound was classic Aztecs, that familiar blend of balls-to-the-wall blues rock which had never transcended fashion for this particular crowd. They played all the hits and left the stage well after 1.30 am, as
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the crowd staggered back to their tents, ears ringing after two blistering encores. On his return to Australia, Billy brought with him the large pile of tapes he had been working on for Gil Matthews to remaster. Billy had cleaned up a large selection of tracks on his own for the collection that was shortly to be released as Lock Up Your Mothers— although in typically ribald fashion, Billy’s preferred working title was Bend Over Beethoven. With a back catalogue of singles, B-sides and enough unreleased material to rival most major bands’ entire output, Billy and Rats pulled together a superlative three-CD set that was culled from a vast selection of material—in some cases of varying quality—from the peak of the second chapter of the Aztecs’ career in 1969 through to 1975, which included tracks from two Sunbury concerts, the Sydney Opera House show, Melbourne Town Hall, and even an ad the Aztecs had recorded for Yamaha motorcycles during the making of More Arse Than Class. Billy was installed at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Sydney’s Double Bay, where Gudinski had bought a thousand nights of accommodation for use over the next few years, and set up office. Billy and author Murray Engleheart wrote a comprehensive and unswervingly loving set of liner notes for the album; indeed, it made for a compelling listen. After all, it was the first time that any Australian band with such a huge live reputation and following had attempted such an overview of their career, coming years before acts like the Beatles, Rolling Stones or the Who had attempted to assemble the results of their careers. Mark Demetrius, reviewing the set for Rolling Stone, hit the nail on the head: ‘If ever there was an album crying out to be played loud, this is it.’
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He further noted that Thorpie’s place in Australian musical history was assured. Showing a striking lack of faith in Billy, Mushroom only pressed up twenty-five hundred copies of the album, but on the day it was released the label discovered there were close to fifteen thousand orders for it. Billy was livid: ‘So I said to Gudinski, “You fucked it up. You’ve got to start pressing it up.”’ To promote the album, Billy and the Aztecs circumvented the usual methods and went straight to television, where a stunning appearance on Hey Hey It’s Saturday on 2 July had fans hitting the record stores to grab a copy. As Paul McHenry noted in his excellent fan biography Thorpie!, it was ‘a stunning reminder that neither Thorpe’s talent nor material had lost its bite’. This was followed two weeks later by an appearance at the Palace in St Kilda with the Powder Monkeys, a Brisbane band who some had compared to the Coloured Balls. Billy reached a long way back in the shows, which ran over two hours in length. He tempered the newer, hard-rock numbers in the set with covers like ‘World Keeps Turning’ (a nod to his mate Mick Fleetwood’s first incarnation of the Mac), Elmore James’s blues classic ‘The Sky Is Crying’ and a lengthy instrumental blues jam on the Beatles’ ‘Oh Darling’. The first pressing of Lock Up Your Mothers sold out in less than a month, all without a great deal of promotion—word of mouth was proving to be enough of an incentive for most buyers, who were clearly aware that Thorpie was back. The album even hit the charts, heading into the Top 10 in Melbourne, an unexpected
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delight for the group who had not had an album in the charts for nearly two decades. The Age newspaper in Melbourne approached Billy about a cross-promotional contest where a reader could win the chance to have Billy play at their backyard barbecue. ‘I said to them, “If you give me the front page, I’ll put the Sunbury Aztecs back together”,’ Billy said. ‘We had about four or five thousand entries and what was strange was, the girl who won the contest had been a dancer on my TV show in the sixties.’ The show was a great success—Billy’s appearance drew a crowd of nearly a thousand onlookers, as well as news camera crews, to the street where he was playing with the Aztecs. The Aztec re-formation was prime-time news fodder, and, as a result, the same promotional idea was repeated in Sydney and Brisbane, with similar success. The original idea of a one-off Aztec re-formation quickly blossomed into a total of ninety shows around Australia. Billy made it clear to the band and everyone else that his involvement would be contingent on the re-formation gigs being a finite proposition. He felt an aversion to the idea of peddling the Aztecs ad infinitum: ‘It just gets to a point where it all starts to look a bit sad,’ he said, ruefully. Buoyed by the success of the best-of album, Billy took the band back into the studio to record three new songs for another CD, to be entitled The Best and the Rest of Lock Up Your Mothers, a single CD of fifteen tracks, comprising the new songs and some of the material previously released earlier in the year. Almost immediately on its release in November 1994 the album was panned, not for the new songs, but simply for the fact that eleven
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of the fifteen tracks had already appeared on Lock Up Your Mothers. On Sunday 13 November, the Aztecs appeared with Russell Morris at a free concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne, a return to the place where Billy had experienced the biggest crowds of his career—in 1965, he’d played to sixty thou sand here and in 1972 to an estimated two hundred thousand concertgoers. It felt like a homecoming party, but Billy had no immediate plans to relocate back to Australia. ✿ The year culminated with a surprise appearance on This Is Your Life, in which Billy nearly fainted on the spot. Even his mum, who was in her eighties, showed up for the broadcast. Also present for the show were all the original Aztecs, and Billy was almost overcome by tears and laughter several times. One immediate result of the screening of This Is Your Life was that representatives of Australia’s biggest publishing houses began calling Billy up the next morning and offering him lucrative deals to produce a ghost-written autobiography. But Billy had a better idea. When he’d arrived back in Australia for the Jailhouse Rock show, he landed first in Sydney and was struck by just how much it had changed, how the city’s new highways, overpasses and tunnels had destroyed much of the area in which he had spent his formative years. The old clubs were all gone, the Whisky long since bulldozed, the long row of three-storey commercial properties with the Pink Pussycat smack bang in the middle had been torn
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down, and in their place a huge Coca-Cola sign had been slung on the side of a brutal hotel’s face. The tramlines had been torn up or partly submerged beneath layers of tarmac, the Canberra Hotel had been erased from the map, and on the corner of Victoria Street and Darlinghurst Road, the Kings Cross Theatre—his second home, where the Harrigans had directed the action and the Aztecs had owned its creaking wooden stage—had been redeveloped into a spectacularly ugly hotel so charmless that virtually no one drank there by choice. At home in LA, Billy had been writing down memories, ideas, scraps of events that had taken place in that small, vital part of a city far from where he now lived. He had always been a voracious reader, chewing through everything he could lay his hands on—whether it was science fiction, crime thrillers, practical books on everything from cars to boats and, of course, anything to do with Kings Cross. He had discovered a vast range of books that dealt with the Cross: Kenneth Slessor’s memoirs which were set in the years leading up to the Great Depression, Dulcie Deamer’s sadeyed remembrances of the times when husbands and wives slept rough in the drains down at Rushcutters Bay Park, and the Sydney poets who eulogised the area, whether writing about its eccentrics, like Rosaleen Norton or Bea Miles, or of its seamier side. Billy returned to the US to have an operation; he had developed a cyst on his throat and it needed to be removed. For nearly four months after the operation, Billy could barely speak, and it seemed like the perfect time to begin shaping his earlier writing attempts into the first draft of what would become his first book, Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll: A year in Kings Cross 1963–1964.
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For a talented, fast-talking spinner of stories, it was no hard task for Thorpie to re-imagine those far-off days again. In his mind, he travelled back to his old haunts around Kings Cross, Woolloo mooloo, Darlinghurst, Edgecliff and Double Bay, revisiting friends, enemies, and minor characters from his pivotal first year in Sydney. A narrative emerged, and Australia began to work on his mind once more.
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Chapter 10
1995–99 Australia, a slight return
On the morning of 27 July 1995, William Thorpe senior passed away aged eighty-nine at the home he shared with Mabel, his wife of nearly sixty years, in Tewantin. William had lived a good, long life, a fact that had often given Billy hope for his own longevity. Both his parents had been very active and healthy right up to their eighties, and Thorpie’s musician mates reckoned he too could count on a good innings. When his mum rang him in Los Angeles to give him the news, Billy was distraught. He left Los Angeles that evening, grieving all the way back to Brisbane for his father whose love, support and pride in his son had never wavered, not through average school reports, the active dislike of his high school principal, bankruptcy hearings, and rumours of drug use and general depravity. Bill Thorpe had been an exemplary father and loved his son dearly. During that long flight back to Australia, it occurred to Billy that
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perhaps the time had come to consider returning home for good. Now that his dad was gone, he had to look out for his mum who had—just like her husband—supported her only child unreservedly. The funeral for Billy’s dad was held in Tewantin. It’s possible to gauge the impact of his father’s death by the fact that just two days later, on the evening of 5 August, Billy’s green Jaguar was pulled over by police on Charlotte Street in Brisbane, where he’d been catching up with friends, and he was breath-tested. Police came away with a reading of .097, a high blood-alcohol level, and Billy was arrested and charged with drink driving. He appeared in court on 19 August, was fined $500 and disqualified from driving for two months. The magistrate declined his request to be able to keep his licence for one more day in order to visit his mum in Noosa. Outside the court, Billy flashed a half-hearted peace sign to a photographer and told a reporter from the Courier-Mail that he intended to return to live in Brisbane. ‘Now that Dad’s gone, I would be coming back fairly regularly anyway to see my mother. She’s ninety. I love it here—always have. So yes, I am planning to come back here to live.’ Regardless of his licence being cancelled, Billy drove up to see his mum again before returning to Los Angeles on 21 August. In July 1996, Billy returned to Australia to tour. He planned to be in the country for some months, and he immediately began auditioning players for a new band, as he was somewhat loath to simply slap a new coat of paint on a bastardised line-up of the Aztecs. He envisioned something fresh; younger musicians, new arrangements and bookings that were a little more selective.
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Considering the vast array of young guns for hire around both Sydney and Melbourne, he attempted to check out as many new bands as he could, as well as acting on recommendations from other artists and producers. In the end, he pulled together a band that seemed to reflect the influence he himself had had on Australian rock music. The rhythm section—always Thorpie’s main consideration—comprised drummer Paul DeMarco from Rose Tattoo and Judge Mercy’s bassist Andy Cichon. Then Billy spoke with Randall Waller, the guitarist and lead singer of the very highly rated seventies Sydney band Avion, who had recently returned to Sydney after a long stint in London. Waller, a highly regarded triple threat as a singer, songwriter and lead guitarist par excellence who would later go on to play with American country singer Shania Twain, was the perfect foil for Thorpie. He added great harmonies and blistering leads and further suggested the addition of another young-gun guitarist of his acquaintance, Steve Edmonds. Billy had already heard of Steve, who had at one time been in Jimmy Barnes’s live band. With his tasteful Hendrix/Blackmore-influenced picking, Steve was a natural choice. The band rehearsed for two months before a lengthy tour of Australia’s east coast in July and August, performing classic Aztecs numbers but generally offering up a sleek selection of new songs that Billy had been working on. Billy was always in two minds about his old material; he was justifiably proud of his back catalogue but he did grow tired of the expectation that he would just keep trotting out the classics no matter what. It didn’t necessarily aggrieve him as much as it made him realise that this
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was how audiences kept guys like him in check; by demanding the old hits in roughly chronological order, with enough clichés in the banter to fulfil their wishes. Of course, Billy refused to put up with this bullshit. He was quite fond of cutting smartarses in the audience down to size, and almost never passed up the chance to drop words like ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’ into the show when dealing with them. At one of the shows, at the Mount Pritchard Community Club, Billy was appearing with the Delltones, the much-loved vocal group who’d had plenty of hits but were hardly a good fit with Billy’s whip-cracking live band. Commensurate with the old public safety and liability laws regarding how loud a band can get onstage, there was a limiter device which registered the decibel level: if the volume level continually pushed above 92 decibels, the device would automatically cut the power to the PA system. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before the combined power of the band crashed the PA’s decibel limiter. Immediately, Billy began berating the promoter of the show from the stage and cut the set short, at just under halfway through. Backstage, he was fuming and the management of the club were in no mood for it, telling Billy that he had been registered as playing at over 116 decibels during the set (well above the level at which sound can cause permanent hearing damage). Disappointed punters left the venue; some demanded refunds, which were then offered to everyone who’d attended. The venue then instigated legal action against Billy. Despite such hiccups, 1996 was shaping up to be one of the most pivotal of his career, and certainly he’d received more
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Australian press coverage than he’d had since the early 1970s. His first book was about to be released by Australian publisher Pan Macmillan. As preparations began for the book’s media launch, someone—it may have been Billy, or it may have been someone in Harry M. Miller’s PR office—suggested that actor Jack Thompson would be the man to MC the launch. The actor, who enjoyed a larger-than-life reputation not dissimilar to Thorpie’s, was a sterling choice. It turned out that he’d once won a prize at Surf City for dancing the Stomp and the award had been handed to him by Billy himself. Billy couldn’t remember this specific event, having given away many such prizes on the dance floor at Surf City. The second and most important part of the book’s release involved finding a venue in Kings Cross to host the party. The changes which the Cross had undergone in the thirty-two years since the events described in the book occurred were of course dramatic. It was still the black-lit neon strip of old in some ways, but what was lacking were the majority of landmarks mentioned in the book, such as the Chevron Hilton, the Hasty Tasty, El Rocco, the Whisky, the California Milk Bar or the Texas Tavern. The Bourbon and Beefsteak wouldn’t do the trick, but Billy suggested the Mansions, a venerable old joint on Bayswater Road, right next to Billy’s first Sydney flat. The Mansions was where Chips Rafferty, another of Australia’s more successful acting exports, had held court every day right up to his death in 1971 on the footpath outside. The notoriously inebriate Sydney poet Christopher Brennan had likewise frequented Mansions in the 1930s, and his tough eye and even harder pen were turned on the Cross many times. As author Anne Summers noted in her speech at the 2000
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launch of Louis Nowra and Mandy Sayer’s excellent anthology of Kings Cross-inspired poetry and prose, In the Gutter . . . Looking at the Stars: ‘The Cross will never inspire writing that is light or trite. The romance of the place is that it embodies the tougher, edgier side of life. It is a place of risks, full of gamblers who seldom win much and who often lose everything, including their lives. Sometimes this can become depressing, but it sure beats the sounds of the suburbs.’ Jack Thompson was flown to Sydney from his home near Byron Bay, and was duly installed at the Sebel Town House, with a limousine at his disposal for the two days he would be in town for the launch. Around lunchtime on the day of the launch, Billy dropped in at the Sebel, a place where he’d revelled many times, and paid Jack a visit. Soon, Jack and Billy, who’d never been introduced before, were best mates, drinking beer at a fantastic rate and really tying one on. Billy, ever the professional, decided to back off from the grog because he didn’t want to be shitfaced at his book launch. Jack, however, was undeterred and kept drinking. Despite his ‘pre-show nerves’, Billy was loving Jack’s company and by the time they were due to leave for the launch, a few minutes’ walk from the Sebel, Jack was insisting that since the limo was paid for, they might as well use the bloody thing. Billy laughed in agreement, though it’s said that while he was downstairs waiting for Jack, he got on the phone to promoter Michael Chugg and said: ‘I’m a bit worried about Jack. He’s pissed as a fart.’ The ebullient Chugg, one of Thorpie’s oldest mates, just laughed. ‘For fuck’s sake, Bill, get over it. He’s a fucking actor for Christ’s sake.’
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Jack seemed unsteady by the time he got to the car, and the way he was behaving had Billy getting even more nervous. Jack made the limo driver do a circuit past the Mansions, and Billy was nearly climbing out of his skin by this stage. Finally, he instructed the driver to pull over and the two of them stepped out of the car onto the footpath. All of Billy’s nerves vanished when Jack threw an arm around his shoulders and, shooting him a piercingly sober stare with those famous blue eyes, proclaimed, ‘It’s show time!’ They entered Mansions and the launch was on. The book received plenty of praise, although a few brickbats were lobbed at it as well. Some criticism was aimed at the use of a fiction-style narrative, but Billy had already issued a caveat in the foreword of the book to let the reader know that a few names had been changed ‘to protect the innocent’. Regardless, the book was a huge success and became one of the top sellers of that year, eventually shifting eighty thousand copies—an astonishing feat for any Australian book. Billy’s gift for storytelling was well known to his friends and family, but he had to make a choice about how he represented his early days in Kings Cross, not just for an audience but for himself. The first draft clocked in at over 170,000 words. It wasn’t quite a memoir, nor was it a simple autobiography. It was a dizzying, funny combination of good research and pure imagination—for example, his take on the formation of the Aztecs is reasonably correct, while it was anyone’s guess as to how accurately he portrayed those early days spent loitering in the clubs of Kings Cross and fighting with coppers, not to mention his adventurous sex life with his girlfriend ‘Pepper’ and her friend Natalie.
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Sir Wayne and Little Sammy appeared as themselves: decent, funny friends who really were in the thick of Kings Cross life; indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that at least some of what Billy wrote was factually correct. But as former Go-Set writer Ed Nimmervoll notes: ‘It was incredibly smart what he did with the books. It’s not that it’s all just fiction either—I mean, an element of it obviously is, but you can’t actually pinpoint him on it and say, “Oh, that didn’t happen” because he was very clever about where he exaggerated, because you know, he’s either alone or he’s with people who aren’t around anymore, who can’t verify the exaggeration. The reason Billy wrote in that fictional way was because that was how he wanted to be perceived. He was always the showman and in his books, he was telling his life as he wanted to see it . . . He tried to portray himself as this Kings Cross prodigy. He was part of that excitement . . . A big part of it.’ Jimmy Barnes, who had always idolised Billy, was similarly sceptical about the contents, but he did at least say something to Billy about it. ‘I said to him, “It’s a great book, but how come all the chicks are after you, the police are asking you for advice and you run the whole scene?” He just smiled at me, and said, “Because it’s my book.”’ His one-time manager Michael Browning had heard about the book’s inception and impending publication, and told Billy he was very keen to read it. When he actually received his copy from the author, he found the book’s thriller narrative pretensions and exaggerations too much to bear. ‘They basically annoyed me. I’d start reading it and then have to put it down. Going from fact to fiction like that—I don’t really know what he was trying to do.
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Billy never let the truth get in the way of a good story. He was one of these guys that, if he sold a hundred records, his version of how many he’d sold would be more like a hundred thousand. But to be fair to him, that’s what it was like in the old days of show business—that’s what you had to do. Frank Sinatra did it as well. You’d tell people that you’d sold a hundred thousand records and some of them will believe you and before you know it, fiction becomes fact and the “facts” go into print and the public record. That was just a technique that carried over from his early days.’ To be fair to Billy’s remembrance of things past, there was no overt sense that he was totally rewriting anything historical (apart from maybe his sexual exploits), and it would be difficult indeed to comb through his boasts looking to catch him out. More than once in the book, Billy talks with a good deal of honesty about his own shortcomings, and still manages to put himself in some funny situations. Besides, he knew just how to tell his story—there was plenty of violence, sex, revenge beatings, threesomes—and any publisher of crime thrillers would have considered it a cracking read with bestselling potential. Billy’s version of his first year living in the Cross has its origins in the sort of mad yarns he was known to tell journalists, friends and musicians he met. Billy was notorious for his tall tales, but with no desire to deceive, merely to entertain people. He wanted simply to be liked as a man, and loved as an entertainer. He captures in delirious detail the grottiness of Sydney’s red-light district. Billy himself certainly had a dark side, a quick temper and a foul mouth at times, but the image that he projects of himself in Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll mirrors the fact that he was very
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young, impressionable and thrilled by his growing stardom. He had lived through exciting times, and whether or not the secondary narrative of the book regarding Natalie and Pepper is pretty much fictional (many of his friends and associates believe it to be so) does not detract from the fact that he tells the story of the early Aztecs days with warmth and an overall accuracy, and no one this author spoke to objected to it vehemently. In 1997, Billy returned to Australia for more shows and was also working on his second book, another plot-driven thrillerish ‘memoir’. The first book had been so popular that Pan Macmillan had offered Billy a further two-book deal, which added immensely to Billy’s newfound confidence as an author. ‘The second book was very difficult to write,’ he said. ‘I had the first one to compete against. The narrative was different—it was multi-platform, timewise. I took it as a challenge.’ He continued to read voraciously and made time to research his own history in Australia to fill out the new book with a greater amount of detail. He had been surprised to observe the level of fondness with which the popular press wrote of him in those last days he’d spent in Australia in the seventies—but it was also clear that the general public approved of him totally. He was beginning to appreciate how much goodwill still existed for him. When he appeared on the popular TV show Club Buggery with HG and Roy, aka Greig Pickhaver and John Doyle, it was a special night. Pickhaver, a native of South Australia, had briefly worked as a roadie for Billy and the Aztecs in the early seventies before making his way into acting and comedy.
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✿ Billy had never really been drawn on his political opinions but through his friendship with actor Bryan Brown, he was learning more about the process of change and, in particular, how an individual with a public profile can make news. In 1999, Australia’s government was planning to hold a referendum which would establish whether Australians wanted to rid themselves of their old colonial ties, ditch the English monarch as their head of state and become a democratic republic. Billy, having been brought up to speed on the issue by Bryan, was keen to be involved, and along with author Thomas Keneally, Bryan Brown and ABC reporter Philip Williams, he attempted to summit Mount Kosciusko in order to plant the Republic of Australia flag on the country’s highest mountain. It was a bold idea, and even though the weather on the day didn’t hold up and the climbers eventually had to abandon their flag-planting mission tantalisingly close to the summit, it still raised a good deal of awareness about the cause. The failure to plant the flag, however, would also prove emblematic of the overall failure of Australians to dispense with constitutional monarchy. During the climb—‘out where groupies fear to tread’—Philip Williams playfully asked Billy whether republicanism and sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were a formula made for each other. ‘I think everything’s a formula—sex, drugs and rock’n’roll is a metaphor for some of the good things in life,’ Billy answered cheerfully. ‘I think these kinds of adventures fall into that category. This is definitely beyond a stunt. It really feels like an adventure.’
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Life was an adventure. It was 22 August 1999, and things were already changing for Billy. His public profile was growing by the week. Billy took Lynn to Morocco for her birthday, and they rented a two thousand-year-old house in the Kasbah, the ancient central market in the heart of the city. Their girls were arriving soon for a party Billy had planned for his wife, the scale of which she wasn’t fully aware of. Someone at the Australian consulate had heard that Billy was planning a surprise party for his wife, and had colluded with Billy to make it into a significant event. Friends and family came from all over the world and the party was to be held in the Royal Palace of Morocco. Billy and Lynn arrived at the palace on the night and were ushered through fifteen-foothigh gold doors. As they looked around at an enormous banquet hall, doors opened at both ends of the room and a Touareg band struck up a song, before the Moroccan orchestra began to play. Through the doors at one end of the room came the Australian ambassador to Morocco with Rusty and Lauren. Michael Chugg and his girlfriend were there too, as was Bryan Brown and his wife Rachel Ward. Lynn was so overcome by the experience that she fainted. Billy was overcome too; he hadn’t quite anticipated falling in love with Tangier the way he did. It was a completely awe-inspiring experience for the whole family and their friends, who danced and partied well into the next day. ‘It was like the Arabian Nights tales,’ Billy said, recalling that evening some years later. He and Lynn spent a month in Morocco, living with Berbers in tents. The experience moved Thorpie in many ways, not least
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of which was the music he started to write based around the emotions that Tangier conjured up. Back in Australia for the release of his new book, Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy), Billy was once more astonished by the reaction the advance copies of the book were receiving— although once again his recollection of events as laid out in the book differed from how some of the other protagonists remembered them. Aztec Gil Matthews loved the second book, but was somewhat startled to discover that Billy’s account of their first meeting was a complete fabrication, based on an anecdote that Gil himself had told twenty years before, and one he’d heard from someone else at that. ‘When I was twelve years old and touring America, I went to the drum clinic Buddy Rich held where Louie Bellson and all these great drummers were performing. And Billy took this story . . . about when Buddy walked into the room late, and did this perfect double-stroke roll across the table, down the leg, across the wall and just said, “Beat that, ya cunts” and then just walked out. Because that’s what Buddy was like—the most arrogant person you’d ever meet alive, but he was the best drummer in the world bar none. Billy took that anecdote and if you read what he said in the book, that’s how he supposedly met me. But it was something that had actually happened to me, a story that I’d told him about when I was twelve years old. ‘I should point out that when Billy had the launch . . . in Melbourne at the Forum, I went down there and there was Michael Gudinski, all these people . . . and I’m sitting there, reading bits of the book and in the book, Billy’s got Grantley Dee in there as being “the blind Aboriginal DJ”. I went up to Billy afterwards and
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said, “Mate, Grantley Dee was Jewish and white—[but] he was blind, you got that bit right . . .” Everybody was in hysterics.’ People were also asking questions about the story of Billy’s stay in a New York mental hospital. Gil was in a position to positively confirm it, as he could indeed remember having heard all about this very event during the Children of the Sun tour. ‘He told me that when he went to New York, he . . . fell over, or something, and he finished up in Bellevue. And the whole thing just came out in the second book, the story is exactly what happened to him. He was just chucked into this nutty room where he was . . . a patient for a broken leg or something.’ Despite the variations in Billy’s version of events depicted in the book compared to the memories of some of the others who were there, Most People I Know was still a runaway success and remained in the bestseller lists for much of the year. It followed the general formula of his first book, Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll, but it also gave some insight into Billy’s insecurities, even if it wasn’t meant that way. It also confirmed that Billy’s talents as a storyteller were being honed to a much greater degree. Though he was capable of self-analysis in his work, his honesty was undermined by his tendency to withhold certain aspects of his personality. He began work on a third book, which he intended to be much more autobiographical in nature than the previous two. Thanks to the strong sales of Most People I Know, Billy was once more playing the role he loved most: the media personality that music writers, journalists and gossip columnists could easily contact for a quote. He was once more a player in Sydney, with a
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large circle of influential friends and, with the publication of the book, had become part of the city’s cultural soul. Still, he had yet to develop a definitive musical statement that would be the pinnacle of this part of his career. Of course, he knew it would come. It was just a matter of time.
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Chapter 11
2000–05 21st Century Man
The year 2000 had always held a special place in Billy’s heart. Back in the 1970s, Billy had told everyone that the Aztecs would be playing at Ayers Rock (Uluru) at midday on 1 January 2000 but, as it was, he saw the new year in more sedately. He was in preparation for a tour of Australia as part of the Ultimate Rock Symphony, a show that promoter Andrew McManus had put together specifically for the Australian market, featuring artists like Alice Cooper, Roger Daltrey of the Who, Paul Rodgers of Free, Peter Frampton and Gary Brooker from Procol Harum; representing Australia were a Mancunian named Billy Thorpe and Glasgowborn Jimmy Barnes. Rehearsals began in Melbourne on 16 February. Billy was in superb form. He had impressed everyone with the power of his vocals, and compliments from Daltrey in particular had him glowing. He and Daltrey bonded immediately and struck up a firm friendship.
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The first night of the tour was in Perth on 20 February, and Billy was completely in his element. He arrived two days before the show for full production rehearsals. It felt good to be back in Perth, the scene of some of his wildest shows in 1965, when thousands had turned out to see him arrive at the airport, and the police turned dogs loose on a crowd of noisy teenage girls. Then, every stitch of his clothing had been torn, he’d been trampled, the girls had overturned seats and gone wild. In the intervening years, those girls had gone on to become mothers and even grandmothers. Though he was recognised in the street near his hotel, things this time around were calm—just how he preferred it. On the first night at the cavernous Burswood Dome in Perth, the sound bounced around and though there were some missed cues—nothing more than the usual first-night-of-tour nerves—the show went off very well. They’d all performed exuberantly, and there were calls for an encore so Roger Daltrey strapped on his acoustic guitar and returned to the stage to play the Who’s ‘Squeeze Box’. Before long, Billy and Frampton were trading licks and the night ended on a high note for everyone. The show moved on to Adelaide Entertainment Centre on 25 February, and the audience was more boisterous and the sound much improved. At the after-show party, some of the orchestra members arrived at the rooftop pool area bearing instruments and nothing else whatsoever. Some people ended up in the pool fully clothed, while some wound up there in the nude state they’d arrived in. The entire outfit was moved up to Sydney for the next three shows—Newcastle, Canberra then Sydney—and Billy was in his
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element. He showed Daltrey around town, and the party continued on the bus for the trip to Newcastle. At the sound check, Billy and Peter Frampton backed up Daltrey on a version of ‘My Generation’ that they’d decided to play that night. The show was evolving outside of its original design and everyone agreed that it was working very well. The actual concept of the show got Billy thinking about pulling together something similar himself. He envisioned a show in two parts on the same evening, featuring the cream of Australia’s first and second wave of rock’n’roll bands. He stowed the idea away. After the Newcastle show, Billy rode back to Sydney in a van with Daltrey, Frampton and several of the road crew. They managed to get lost going back to the hotel. The next day, several members of the cast including Billy came down with a nasty case of food poisoning, and Roger Daltrey suffered minor injuries in a car accident. A doctor attached to the tour advised that the injured and ill participants be given the night off, advice which the insurance firm covering the tour followed. The show at Canberra’s Bruce Stadium was cancelled at the last minute. Punters were already making their way to the show when local radio stations broadcast the news that the show had been cancelled. The last date of the show was in Melbourne, and at the tour’s final after-show party, Billy and Roger Daltrey swapped contact details and promised to stay in touch. Daltrey was as good as his word, and within days of arriving back in England, invited Lynn and Billy to stay at his Sussex mansion. Thorpie returned to Melbourne’s Crown Casino in September, and though the show had been advertised as a presentation of
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new material, he played five songs he had written about Tangier and then turned up the amps for some serious rocking. He headlined the Great Southern Blues Festival in Narooma in early October, taking the stage late on Saturday night and absolutely captivating the four thousand people in the audience from the first note. The response to ‘Oop-Poo-Pa-Doo’ was deafening. In the year since the Ultimate Rock Symphony, his live performances weren’t only getting stronger again, he was also regaining his confidence as a guitarist and singer. He wasn’t afraid to throw new songs into the mix either; when he played ‘Midnight in Tangier’, the crowd fell into a respectful hush. Each time he show cased any of the new songs, they were very well received, and it established in Billy’s mind the idea that the eventual release of the Tangier album (which was a long way from completion) might well be a commercial success and re-establish his reputation as a pioneer in Australian music. Billy put in another Melbourne appearance at Carols by Candlelight at the Myer Music Bowl in December and completely upstaged everyone after his solo acoustic performance of ‘White Christmas’ by launching into the first four words of ‘Most People I Know’. It was Billy’s turn to be surprised when the audience started singing along with him. He stood back and let them sing, strumming his guitar while his face stretched into a grin. The audience sang the entire song with only a few prompts from Billy. Then he went into ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. Long after the Ultimate Rock Symphony was over, Billy started to work on the framework of the idea he’d had during that tour. After the Ultimate Rock Symphony had finished in 2000, he’d
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been approached by the ABC about a television series of six onehour episodes they were producing on the history of Australian rock music, beginning in the 1950s, called Long Way to the Top. The show, conceived by producers Paul Clarke, Greg Appel and Larry Meltzer, had been in development since 1997; Billy’s involvement in Australian music since the early days meant he had a somewhat atypical perspective on the way rock’n’roll had developed in Australia. He was interviewed extensively for the show and offered his usual intelligent, pithy assessments on people, bands and events he’d observed during his long career. The producers even named one of the episodes ‘And Billy killed the fish’, a reference to the apocryphal story about an Aztecs show during the 1970s that, due to its sheer volume, killed all the tropical fish in the aquarium at the Bondi Lifesaver. Other versions of the story have the noise either cracking the fish tank or destroying it altogether, leaving the fish gasping on the floor. It is entirely possible that something catastrophic happened to the venue’s famous fish tank, but the exact truth of the story has been lost. The Long Way to the Top series screened on the ABC every Wednesday night for six weeks in August and September 2001, and proved to have wide appeal. It was the most successful documentary series ever made on Australian music, and it was the first time that Australian television had attempted to tell the story by bringing together the various strands of Australian rock music from its embryonic stages right through the seventies and eighties—when Oz Rock™ had taken on the world—and on to the twenty-first century.
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Recalling his idea, Billy wanted to put on a two-part concert that would be filmed for the ABC and use the name of the TV series, Long Way to the Top. Thorpie’s idea was to present a show in two halves in which the top bands of the late fifties, sixties and seventies would all play a short set of their most popular songs. Billy drew up a shortlist of bands he thought would like to be involved; he naturally imagined that the Aztecs could in a way provide the centrepiece for the show as they were one of the few Australian groups to survive the huge shift in popular music out of the late 1960s—even though the only constant was Billy himself. Billy took the idea to Michael Chugg and Amanda Pelman, who immediately saw the show’s huge potential. They set to work on realising the concert in a practical way. There were vast considerations: some artists had more or less retired from live music, and these were the ones who would reward audiences with a memorable concert they were unlikely to ever see again. As it transpired, Pelman and Chugg had little difficulty in obtaining most of the names they were after. Since the 1990s, ‘nostalgia’ rock shows were attracting huge ticket sales throughout the world, as the rock’n’roll generation were more often than not cashed up and willing to invest in seeing the bands they had thrilled to in their youth. The range of artists Billy envisioned being involved was staggering, as he not only wanted the obvious big names, he also wanted to bring in artists whom he considered had had a major impact on the development of Australian rock, even if they hadn’t had across-the-board success. Perhaps the most impressive thing was the fact that he got nearly everyone on board, with a
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few exceptions. The Easybeats had been badly stung by their re-formation shows in 1986, and nearly every member of the band said no, except Stevie Wright. Wright’s life had taken the long road down since the sixties, but he knew a good opportunity when he saw it and signed on. Max Merritt agreed to do the shows, as did Judy Stone, Lucky Starr, Kevin Borich, Col Joye, Little Pattie, Normie Rowe, Lonnie Lee, Chain, Ray Columbus and the Invaders, Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls, Spectrum, Russell Morris, Marcia Hines, John Paul Young, the Twilights and Axiom (making Glenn Shorrock one of the few artists to appear twice besides Billy), Brian Cadd, Daddy Cool (although eventually it was just Ross Wilson who played), and the Atlantics, the Australian progenitors of the surf music craze and a seminal influence on the pre-Thorpe Aztecs. The shows, which traversed Australia, were billed as a ‘oncein-a-lifetime musical event’—and for the thousands of baby-boomer rock fans who turned out at $135 a ticket, it was just that. ‘Long Way to the Top started out as a show and eventually became a twenty-four-hour party that was occasionally interrupted by a show,’ Billy said. Some of the bands had clearly not aged well, physically or musically, but it was striking to see how youthful Billy looked up on that stage. For the set of the Mk I Aztecs (appearing on the bill as ‘The Original Aztecs’), Billy dressed in a tight black suit just like he used to wear onstage at Surf City—the same outfit, right down to his boots. Clean-shaven and with his hair done in the old style, he looked at least fifteen years younger than anyone else on the show.
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Though O’Keefe had long since passed away, it was apparent to more than a few on the bill that much of what had happened to Australian music since the Wild One had first taken the stage would not have happened quite the same way without him. Most of the early acts in Australian rock music had vanished into obscurity, testament to the gap between the birth of rock’n’roll in Australia and the rising phenomenon of nationalised radio, album and singles charts, and television. Apart from Col Joye’s pioneering act, O’Keefe, the ‘father figure’ of rock, had by sheer force of will stamped his footprints all over the scene before anyone else had the balls to do it. He would have been sixty-seven that year had he lived, and knowing JOK, would have stolen the show even from Thorpie. The reprising of the legendary Sunbury Aztecs line-up of Morgan, Wheeler, Matthews and Thorpie proved momentous. They revisited songs they hadn’t played in thirty years and as the show moved around Australia in August and September 2002, the reviews—besides the usual sneering of some younger critics who misunderstood the context and saw it as purely an exercise in nostalgia without musical validity—centred on the raw power of performances by Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls, and Billy and the Aztecs. After its huge success, there was talk of restaging the event in subsequent years with an even broader range of acts representing later periods of music. As it turned out, it wasn’t to be: the Long Way to the Top concert tour remained a one-off event, which is perhaps just as well, since planned revisions to the show, including touring lesser-known acts, may have taken the edge off the experience for audiences.
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✿ Early in 2002, Billy received a phone call from Tim Rogers, lead singer and songwriter for the brilliant Sydney band You Am I. Billy had been keeping an eye on the band’s progress for years and considered them very worthy heirs to the Aztec energy, even though their sound had been filtered as much through sixties beat pop as it had through the powerhouse influences of the Who, the Beatles, the Kinks, Rolling Stones and Big Star. Furthermore, Billy admired Tim Rogers’s uncompromisingly headstrong opinions and his fiery take-no-bullshit stage presence. In fact, of all the current crop of Australian rockers, no one reminded Billy of himself quite so much as Tim. There was definitely admiration on both sides. Tim wanted to sound Billy out about participating in the soundtrack of Bryan Brown’s latest movie, the David Caesardirected Two Hands. The film was a comedy ostensibly based on fact; it told the story of a Sydney criminal—played by Brown— whose illegitimate business dealings attract the interest of US mobsters who then try to muscle in on his scene. The film dealt with the same period in Sydney when Billy had been the king of the Cross’s music scene at the Whisky. The offer from Tim was irresistible. However, the lead time for the soundtrack recording was limited, and Billy was only able to do one song, written by Tim Rogers. ‘We were originally going to do another song with Billy called “Where The Wind Don’t Blow” but we were actually working right up until the last minute,’ said Tim. ‘We were really stuck for time.
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He was busy, and I was leaving the country. We were going to do some stuff together, collaborate, exchange lyrics and so in the end we had so little time and we could only do “Sometimes I Just Don’t Know”, which was written for him. He was kinda like the patron for the whole project really. I rang him very early on, and almost asked for his blessing on certain things, so that was really important. It gave us the confidence to go ahead with a lot of things. And he’s a good friend of Bryan Brown. It all kinda fit very nicely. I went and saw him a couple of times . . . and I think when I got home from one of his shows, I really started piecing that song together.’ Billy was on a high following Long Way to the Top. It proved that his instincts for such projects were good; however, not all of his schemes and plans were so successful. He continued to toil on the Tangier project and was sinking nearly all his income into it. Gil Matthews was alarmed by this, because he felt that his old mate’s financial indiscretion bordered on madness. He felt he had to say something about it, even if deep down he knew Thorpie well enough to know he probably wouldn’t listen. ‘Billy had a bad thing about money,’ Gil says. ‘I’ll give you an example: Billy had met this bloke who worked for a distribution company and he got the idea of putting out compilation CDs, giving them to this guy—“He’ll go out and sell them and we’ll make a fortune. Rats, can you lend me twenty grand to start this up?” So I did. I paid his airfares, put the twenty grand in his hand but I never got any accounting from him. I basically blew my twenty grand and didn’t see anything for it.’
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Gil was philosophical about the money—though his wife was not quite so sanguine. ‘When we were touring with Billy, she didn’t even want to talk to Billy or see him in the house. She was like, “He’s ripped you off.” . . . [A]s far as I’m concerned, it happened and that’s the end of it. I will never invest in anything again because once bitten . . . but if it wasn’t for Billy, I never would have been in the Aztecs. You see? Without all that arrogance and the ego and the attitude, he wouldn’t have been Billy. That’s the way he was.’ Billy again approached Gil with a new project, asking Gil to get involved as a financial backer. ‘He wanted me to put a quarter of a million dollars into it. I had to say no,’ Gil claims. Thorpie’s spendthrift ways meant he was stretched to cover his bills. ‘Billy was stuck with looking at ways to make an income to support his lifestyle. I remember saying to him, “Why don’t you move out of Sydney, buy a place or build something? Build a studio in the basement. Then at least you’ll have a house.”’ Thorpie wasn’t in a position to heed his bandmate’s advice, either because of his stubbornness and pride, or perhaps fear. Billy was intensely secretive about certain things, as much as he was brutally honest and direct about his other shortcomings. ‘Billy hid his financial troubles from a lot of people,’ says Gil. ‘He hadn’t put aside anything, hadn’t done anything to secure his family’s future.’ More than anything, Billy wanted to live his life in high style—it was what he was used to. At the same time, his financial state was perilous and he certainly feared there might be another bankruptcy hearing in his future. He’d already been through that scenario,
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and it was humiliating and painful. The papers had reported his earlier financial problems with great glee, and he was embarrassed to have his personal monetary situation speculated about in the press. But his pride would not allow him to take a back seat. He wanted to be in the thick of it, playing shows, working with new bands and being the centre of the action. He was a socialite at heart too; he loved meeting people, making connections, and finding new ways of funding his enormous Tangier project, which was increasing in size all the time. At a show at the Doyalson-Wyee RSL on 2 October 2004, the band threw a sensational show—Paul DeMarco pulled out a drum solo that astonished even the most jaded of observers, only to then be upstaged by Clayton Dooley’s wild keyboard solo that saw him nearly tip his instrument onto the heads of the front row. Billy angrily reprimanded security for putting a young woman into a headlock for the capital crime of sitting on the edge of the stage. Even after that ugly incident, the band’s performance earned them several encores. Later that month, Billy flew to Alice Springs with the band for the opening ceremony concerts of the Alice Springs Masters Games at Anzac Oval on Saturday 16 October, playing alongside former Ol’ 55 lead-singer-turned-actor Frankie J. Holden and saxophonist Wilbur Wilde. The concerts, which ran for the week of the games, were sponsored by the Northern Territory government. Billy headlined Bandfest, a ‘classic’ rock show at the Castle Hill Tavern in Sydney on 29 November, with Kevin Borich and Richard Clapton. The new line-up of the group was Pig, guitarist Dai Pritchard, Paul DeMarco on drums, and standing in on bass
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guitar was Paul Christie of Mondo Rock. Billy worked the crowd hard, giving the amp a good workout, then he and Dai played ‘Midnight in Tangier’ on acoustic guitars, Billy laying down the African drone while Dai played tastefully over the top. Of the new songs he continually added to the set, it was always the Moroccaninfluenced material that received the warmest response. He’d added covers to the set—Spectrum’s ‘I’ll Be Gone’ and AC/DC’s ‘Long Way to the Top’—and they too went down well with the crowd. The following month, he appeared at Melbourne’s Crown Casino Showroom. Despite the cabaret-style table-and-chairs seating, the Aztec army were out in force, sucking piss at the bar before staggering back to their tables. The band was slightly different again, with keyboard whiz Dooley (of Sydney band the Hands) back on keys; on bass was the legendary Jackie Orszaczky, whom Billy had befriended in Melbourne during Jackie’s days in Syrius, the Hungarian rock band. He again opened with five songs from Tangier and these were again rapturously received. He stormed through another unbelievably loud set and though the foundations were not cracked, he had a good shot at it. Billy was still hard at work on his third book, which he’d given the working title of ‘The Little Pommie Bastard’. This time, he was not concerned with creating a fictional-type narrative so much as he was with getting the whole story down. He talked about his early life in some detail, and even claimed that the Thorpe family had, in the course of deciding to leave Melbourne, considered emigrating to New Zealand. How different things might have been if that had been the case. The manuscript, which remains unpublished, is a rewarding and revealing read—the stories of
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Kings Cross are not nearly as bold or sensational as their telling in Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll and he delves deeply into the disappointments he experienced in America during his diminishing success as a recording artist. ✿ On Boxing Day 2004, the world awoke to the horrific news about the Southeast Asian tsunami that—over the course of subsequent days—would be revealed as one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. Artists including Billy were keen to organise a fundraiser and in February 2005, Billy and the Sunbury Aztecs joined a host of big names—John Farnham, Daddy Cool, Cold Chisel, Michael Franti, Taj Mahal and others—at the Myer Music Bowl. Billy brought Mike Rudd and Bill Putt of Spectrum onstage for ‘I’ll be Gone’, and told the audience to check out his website and sign a petition for a Spectrum/Aztecs/Daddy Cool show soon. Michael Chugg took to the stage and pulled out the old ‘suck more piss’ line which some of the audience agreed with (in principle anyway). Some were amused to see Billy putting on his reading glasses to check his amp settings, but then he’d made a spectacle of it in previous shows as well. It was a charitable start to a formidable year for Thorpie. In April, he appeared at Canberra’s Hellenic Club and took the stage without a word, showcasing five tracks from Tangier. After the Moroccan magic had been woven, he remarked, ‘That was the Thorpie of 2005, and this is the Thorpie of 1970.’ The band stormed through ‘Rock Me Baby’ with ferocious near-Aztec volume, and
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Billy kept the audience in stitches with recollections of his antics in Queanbeyan in 1970 before stampeding through two more hours of hits. They even played ‘Poison Ivy’. Sadly, Jackie Orszaczky had been diagnosed with cancer and could no longer tour with the group. In February, Cold Chisel’s bass player Phil Small had been formally introduced to Billy at the Moonlight Festival in Western Australia, and in May he was surprised and pleased to receive a phone call from Paul DeMarco, offering him the bass spot for several shows. ‘From the moment I rehearsed with him in his studio in Surry Hills, I could sense Billy’s professionalism. To be honest, I was in awe of him at the time but he made me feel completely at home and one of the family. He gave his all onstage and delivered from the heart to his fans and yes indeed, he certainly was fucking loud! My ears were ringing for two weeks after the shows,’ Phil says. Billy continued to talk about the still-unreleased Tangier project in almost career-defining terms. ‘I love all the old stuff, I love playing it and I know people come along wanting to hear “Most People” and I love playing that song. I do. But I want to do Tangier for people. To keep just playing the old stuff is moronic.’ He talked of presenting the album as a stage production, complete with a plan to bring Moroccan dancers and musicians over for the show. Alice Cooper offered Billy a support slot on his 2005 tour of Australia, and Billy was very well received at shows in Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Billy opened the show with ‘Children of the Sun’, and made a big impression on the crowd with a more eclectic set that included ‘Million Dollar
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Bill’ and ‘Rock Me All Night’. Though some critics questioned the wisdom of hitting an audience with material they would be unfamiliar with, the response from audiences validated Thorpie’s decision to play whatever the hell he wanted to play for them. He had a back catalogue brimming with great songs and was determined to air out some of the songs that had laid untouched for twenty years or more, and it worked. Billy’s instincts were working just fine.
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Chapter 12
2006–07 The bitter taste of Tangier
The album known as Tangier was, Billy believed, his chance to issue notice to Australian music fans that he was still capable of delivering a major late-career-phase album. If nigh on fifty years in the music industry had taught him anything, it was that older rock’n’roll artists were eminently able to turn out great albums in their middle—some might say, old—age. For example, Bob Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind had been instrumental in reasserting his dominance as the greatest, most prolific—if not always the most consistent—rock artist of the twentieth century. Dylan was fifty-six when he recorded it. Likewise, Johnny Cash had created a series of four magisterial albums of stripped-back material with producer Rick Rubin and had, before his death in 2003, made it plain to all that it didn’t matter how old you were, it was about making a dignified artistic statement that kept the old fans happy and brought new fans into the fold. Dylan had achieved it by
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coming to a new place with his music that reflected the three distinct phases of his career but which carried the imprint of his accumulated wisdom. For Cash, it had taken an unexpected collaboration with a producer known for his work with metal and rap artists; moreover, Cash had been open-minded enough to adopt a new approach and bold enough to tackle material by other, younger writers like Nick Cave, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and Will ‘Bonnie Prince Billy’ Oldham. Between Dylan and Cash, there was ample inspiration available to older artists. Tangier would be Billy’s opportunity to show Australian and international audiences exactly what he was capable of. It was an ambitious project all over, and in concept and execution, it was a typically bold move. It required more than just a studio. Billy planned to record in Morocco, where the country’s king—a noted music fan—had personally approved the use of a thousand-yearold building for the sessions. Billy had been to Morocco three times now, and each time he visited, he’d been further swept up in the beauty of it all. He confessed to one interviewer that the blending of rock, classical and North African music had in part been inspired by No Quarter, the album of Moroccan-inspired rock music by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. There was a clear line to be drawn between that album and Tangier, though Billy’s restlessness made the project hard to finish. Once he’d put the final touches on it, he was convinced it would be hailed as a masterpiece. On 29 March 2006, Billy celebrated another milestone: his sixtieth birthday. At the same time, Gil Matthews was hearing
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some alarming things about the state of Billy’s health—from Billy himself, from Pig, and from the Aztecs’ loyal long-time roadie Norm Sweeney. Billy, Lynn and the girls had been celebrating Christmas at Jack Thompson’s family home in Byron Bay when Billy suffered his first heart attack. ‘I knew through Pig and Billy that he’d had a heart attack at Christmas up at Jack Thompson’s place,’ says Gil. ‘He was taken to hospital and he just brushed it off—“Nah, I’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.”’ It’s not at all uncommon for men who undergo their first heart attack to ‘ride it out’, or deny that the pain they’re experiencing is anything more than indigestion or ‘stress’. Gil had heard that Billy had reacted vehemently against the idea of being taken to hospital. Doctors say that the first three to six hours after a heart ‘event’ are critical in determining a patient’s chances of survival, depending on the level of initial damage to the heart. Since Billy’s heart did not fail him completely in the first place, he was placed under observation and finally discharged once the usual tests had been performed. The problem with the moderate damage of nonfatal cardiac arrest is that the heart begins to change shape and becomes enlarged, leading to less effective distribution of blood, and the slow decline of the organ is guaranteed. No doctor could have accurately predicted Billy’s life expectancy after this heart attack, as there are any number of variables with heart disease. What is of interest is that the heart attack he’d had at Jack Thompson’s place was not in fact his first ‘heart attack’. The key to this lies in his book Most People I Know, in which he reveals that while in Bellevue Hospital in 1979 his ‘heart . . . had stopped’. Without doubt, Billy’s heart condition had been around longer
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than anyone had known about and it’s possible—given his at-times guarded nature—that Billy had been experiencing chest pains for up to five years or more, but had dismissed them. Billy had been a smoker of course, but had quit years before, and as photographs taken between 2000 and 2006 show, he was in good, if not great, physical condition. He practised martial arts every day and lifted weights, he was conscientious about his diet and had no association with drugs apart from the odd spliff. Following this turn of events, he immediately went into damage control mode, putting more emphasis on eating well and exercising. It was likely that stress was at least partly to blame for his ill-health. His long hours in the studio and heavy investment in the ongoing Tangier project had taken their toll. Gil for one knew just how much stress his old friend was under and he also knew that Billy’s innately secretive personality meant that few people—apart from some friends, Lynn and the girls—knew just how serious his health problems actually were. Gil heard one rumour which chilled him: Norm Sweeney had himself been unwell, and in the course of commiserating, Billy apparently let a few things slip including the fact that he’d recently had a second heart attack. ‘Norm told me that Billy had had another heart attack and that it was kept secret from lots of people . . . I was also told by Norm that there were packets and packets of Aspros everywhere in the studio.’ After a heart attack, many people begin taking aspirin (digitalis) regularly to thin the blood and reduce the likelihood of another blood clot occurring. In the wake of such events, the rest of 2006 takes on a poignant cast, not least of which was the fact that in the last few years,
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Lobby Loyde’s health had not been too crash hot either. Loyde, a heavy smoker for more than forty years, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2006. His treatment was going to be long, painful and expensive and, like many musicians, his financial state was far from secure. With the assistance of the music industry’s benevolent association, Support Act Limited, a group of Loyde’s friends and admirers, including Billy and Michael Chugg, put their heads together to discuss a Melbourne benefit concert to raise money for Loyde, just as they had for the much-loved Rose Tattoo guitarist Pete Wells before his premature death from prostate cancer in March of that year. Wells’s former Rose Tattoo bandmate Ian Rilen also succumbed to cancer in 2006, and it was becoming abundantly clear that there was a desperate need for some kind of fundraising support mechanism for the number of musicians in dire personal circumstances—be it health-related or financial. Billy was deter mined to get behind it in a big way. A whole raft of Australian music legends turned up to help out. Chain, Blackfeather, Broderick Smith of the Dingoes, You Am I’s Tim Rogers, Sarah McLeod and the re-formed Madder Lake all took part. Much to everyone’s surprise, so did Wendy Saddington who’d been out of the music scene for years. She showed up to the rehearsals bearing a bottle of water with which she blessed each member of the band. Though everyone was touched by Wendy’s gesture, Billy couldn’t resist having a dig. ‘Where’d you get that water from, Wendy?’ he asked the singer. ‘I got it from the Ganges,’ Saddington replied, smiling.
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‘You know there’s buffalo shit in that river, don’t you?’ Billy teased. Loyde’s benefit gig was held at the Palace in St Kilda on 29 August, and it was never going to be any kind of tearful backslapping event. True to form, the legendary guitarist showed up for his own tribute and played unapologetically loud and hard, as though to dispel his natural discomfort with such outward displays of love and affection. He looked tired and unwell onstage, particularly next to Billy who seemed more youthful and carefree than ever by comparison. The pair of them traded guitar solos all night, and the simpatico understanding that had existed between them for decades was still intact. ✿ Once Billy returned to Sydney, the focus went straight back to Tangier. Sammy Gaha was invited over to Electric Mountain, Billy’s recording studio in Surry Hills, for a listen to some of this new project. ‘I was very interested to hear Billy’s record,’ Sammy says. ‘I went up to the studio one day and he played me some of this stuff. Oh boy, it was mighty. He went to me, “Sammy—you speak Arabic.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Here—have a look at this. You ever been to Morocco?” I said, “I played for the king of Morocco in 1972.” He said, “Would you like to come with me when I go back?” I said, “Beautiful. I’d love to.” He said, “Right—you’re coming with me.” It never eventuated.’ Sammy suggested that the album should be called Moroccan Roll and while he couldn’t recollect what Billy’s precise reaction
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was to that suggestion, there’s no doubt that he would have laughed heartily at Sammy’s idea. Gil, however, still wasn’t sold on the Tangier project. He had his private doubts about the wisdom of pursuing it so hard when it seemed that no one with money wanted to touch it. ‘I heard some of it and yes, Billy had come a long way from the point of view of his playing and his production skills in the studio. I mean, it sounded great. His guitar playing and singing were fantastic. I still think, “How are you going to recoup it?” He put everything into it, he put his life into it. And he wanted another quarter of a million to finish it off. I didn’t speak to Billy about this but I was told that he had a financial guy looking into various ways of raising the capital and the guy had been working on it for twelve months, and it looked like there would be a few backers who would do it.’ Billy was devastated when the interest from the backers for Tangier fell through. ‘The money wasn’t coming in to finish it,’ said Gil. ‘Billy was stuck with looking at ways to make an income to support his lifestyle and the only thing that he could do was to go out every three months and do some gigs and that’s all he had.’ In October, Billy kicked off on the presciently named Last Blast tour with Lobby Loyde in tow, and Blackfeather opening. It was the kind of bill not seen around Melbourne for close to thirtysix years, and the crowds showed up and stayed until the last note. There were three shows in Melbourne city and another five in the country, and Gil showed up to play on one of the dates at the Churchill Hotel. Gil had noticed that while Billy was just hanging around in the car or at the pub before the show his skin was clammy and
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pale, yet onstage he looked the picture of health. Something didn’t seem right to him, but Gil didn’t pursue it. He was later told by Norm that Billy had been applying some makeup before going onstage so he wouldn’t look so pale under the lights. Billy and Lynn went back to Los Angeles in November for John Farrar’s sixtieth birthday, and Coral Browning was there. ‘The last time I spoke to Billy . . . was . . . here in Malibu, and we partied and sang and laughed a lot, a memory I cherish. When they left, he gave me a big hug, and said, “Goodbye Blanche.” That’s what he called me—I called him “Bum” or “Ferdie”.’ The visit to Los Angeles was a short one, as Billy had to return and prepare for two prestigious shows at Sydney’s Basement nightclub, near Circular Quay. Daughters Rusty and Lauren had seen their dad in preparation for the show for some weeks beforehand. He had been perched on the couch playing the guitar for six or seven hours a day as well as practising his singing. It was clear to his daughters and wife that this was going to be a special show. Billy had decided to take advantage of the Basement’s in-house recording facilities as well as their video production suite and have both shows filmed and recorded. The intense preparation he had committed to the show paid off in spades. In front of one hundred and fifty guests—friends, family and fans—Billy pulled off two spectacular shows in a row. ‘He just floored us that night,’ his daughter Lauren told a Daily Telegraph reporter. ‘Most of the audience was his family and friends; because he was always off on tour, this was a chance for an intimate get-together. We were all gobsmacked by how good
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he was. His singing, his playing, his storytelling, he had really practised that.’ Indeed, the recordings of both shows demonstrated Billy’s wonderful rapport with his small, select audience. He was relaxed, witty and in the mood to talk about things. He touched on his early days, the support of his parents, the Aztecs, his years in America—all subjects he’d been pondering of late. He wanted this show to be a document of a time and place—here he was in his sixtieth year, still able to captivate an audience with just a guitar and that voice. In the footage, Billy is indeed looking well, happy, relaxed and in charge of the show as always. His anecdotes flowed freely, the songs were well rehearsed and the crowd was receptive to his jokes and asides. The Basement’s sound engineer Chris Mysinski was really impressed with the shows he had seen. For about two weeks, he worked on the sound recordings of the Basement show for Billy before arranging to drop them around to Billy’s Surry Hills studio one afternoon in early December. ‘Billy went out of his way to welcome me into his studio and he sat me down, gave me a drink and we talked all afternoon. He showed me around his studio and played me the tracks from his album that he was working on. He was such a nice guy.’ Christmas that year was a real celebration. After the ups and downs of the year, the Thorpe clan pulled more tightly together. The year had ended on a high note; Billy was justifiably proud of the Basement tapes and he played them for the family several times. He began arranging to have the tapes mastered, and set to work on designing a cover for the live album. At the front of his
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mind at all times, though, was Tangier. Billy needed this project completed—this was the most important work he’d ever done. Some of the tracks on the album were very simple, just Billy and Jackie Orszaczky. Jackie was now in a bad way, and Billy was devastated at the news. Jackie had written orchestral arrangements for Tangier and was intimately connected to its inception as Billy considered him one of the few musicians who understood exactly what the project meant to him. Early in the new year, Billy spoke at a function hosted by New South Wales premier Morris Iemma and MP Virginia Judge that saluted Jimmy Barnes for his charitable work in the community. He gave a broad outline of the ideas he had for increasing the fundraising power of Support Act Limited (SAL), the charity which was still assisting several of his dearest friends through terminal illness. He told the assembled journalists, musicians and politicians that he would be making more specific announcements in the near future. He had outlined his plans already to some of the board members of Support Act, and said he would like to ‘explore [the board’s] suggestion of setting up a Billy Thorpe trust fund under the SAL umbrella if for no other reason than as the brand name on which to hang the super benefit.’ Billy had been deeply moved by Lobby Loyde’s perilous situation (the guitarist was about to be evicted from his home) and he feared that ‘there are going to be plenty more Lobbys and Petes in the not too distant future and the public will soon grow weary of fundraisers for old musicians . . . I felt something needed to be done now that affords more meaningful grants to those who
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genuinely need it . . . And that takes real money. Hence the idea of a super benefit that produces a super SAL fund and negates the necessity of doing a benefit every time one of our musical brothers or sisters goes down.’ Billy had a busy 2007 planned. There was one gig in January, at the Tamburlaine winery in the Hunter Valley on Saturday 13 January. Billy played an acoustic set of songs, then returned to the stage with the full band to a packed house of summer revellers. February was a big month of shows. Billy went to Wollongong for a solo acoustic show at the Rydges Hotel on 9 February and drove home afterwards, feeling revitalised again by the solo show experience. The following week he and the band left some rumpled ears on the carpet at the Dee Why RSL on Friday 16 February, and at the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL in Sydney’s west the following night. Billy had a couple of solo shows in country Victoria on 21 and 22 February and then two band shows—one at the Shop pingtown Hotel in Doncaster on Friday 23 and the next night at the Chelsea Heights Hotel. On the Sunday night, Billy played what was to be his last show, at the Westernport Hotel in San Remo. It was a solo spot, and the crowd went berserk. Billy played with real fire and the audience was jumping. He was loud and raucous on the acoustic guitar as well. There were other gigs planned; the following week, Billy would be off to Brisbane for another couple of shows. Also in the third week of February, Billy formally joined the board of Support Act and immediately set about doing what he could to speed up the consideration of applications from musicians
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in desperate circumstances. However, Tangier still occupied a good percentage of his thoughts. He spoke to Gil about it; the Aztecs drummer was typically blunt in his assessment of the situation. ‘The amount of money he spent on that was lunacy. In this modern age, you can’t recoup that sort of money anyway. Add another quarter of a million to what he’d spent on that album and it’d be close to a million dollars. How’s he gonna get that back? That’s why none of the major labels got involved in it, you know. Billy’s attitude was, “Oh, we’re gonna do a movie with this thing, we’re gonna do a stage show, blah blah, and it’s gonna make a million dollars.” I’m sorry but it ain’t gonna happen. You can put an album together and you can believe it’s gonna make a million dollars and be successful but that doesn’t make it happen. It could be a fucking flop for all he knew.’ Author Debbie Kruger, who penned the excellent Songwriters Speak: Conversations about creating music, interviewed Billy. ‘I’m in the middle of something I’ve been writing since a trip to Morocco for my wife’s fiftieth birthday. I wrote this musical piece called “Tangier” with a tuning I’d never used before. It’s an hour and a half suite for voice, acoustic guitar and orchestra. And it’s fucking great. It’s Children of the Sun twenty years later. I’ll do it here, hopefully with the Sydney Symphony and some Moroccan players and some Arabic players, some dancers. So I’ve just found that what I enjoy doing is writing musical works. Rather than having to stuff lyrics down the throat of every piece of music that comes along. Rather than having to stuff a back beat and a rhythm section down the throat of every piece of music. Some pieces of music and melodies are meant to stand alone, are meant to be orchestrated,
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are instrumental. I’ve been doing nothing but writing. I’m halfway through a third book as well. What seems to happen is when I sit down to write a book, the musical muse arrives, and when I sit down to write music the book muse arrives. For the first time my creative life is in line with where I’ve known my life is for a long time but [I] either wasn’t mature enough or never had the desire to align them. The real me hasn’t been seen or heard yet. With this album quite a lot of it will be heard for the very first time.’ In mid-February Billy caught up with Norm and Sir Wayne at the 18-Footers, the Sydney Flying Squadron’s open boat sailing club. They nattered about the old days, Billy cracked some blue jokes and everyone was laughing into their lunch, just as they always did. Billy spoke to Norm about the upcoming shows they had planned; two band shows, one in Brisbane at the KedronWavell Services Club and one the next night at Seagulls at Tweed Heads, followed by a leisurely acoustic set at the Plantation Hotel in Coffs Harbour on the following Wednesday. Billy wanted to organise another lunch at the club in a few weeks’ time with Little Sammy and Sir Wayne, to talk more about the old times. ‘He wanted to get some stories from me and Sammy,’ said Sir Wayne. ‘Because the things we used to get up to . . . We didn’t go out to get into fights in the old days, you know. We just wanted to meet some chicks and have a few drinks. People didn’t believe the stories I would tell about them days.’ On the evening of Tuesday 27 February, Billy was at his Darling Point home with Lynn. Around 9 pm, he received a call from Warren Morgan. Billy went to bed relatively early as he hadn’t been feeling well that day. Some hours later, he woke up
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Lynn, complaining of terrible pains in his chest. Lynn called an ambulance and Billy collapsed on the bed, unconscious. The attending paramedics got a faint fluttery heartbeat started and rushed him off to St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, only moments away. Norm Sweeney had been on his way to Brisbane in the truck with the band’s gear when Billy was first admitted to hospital. He’d left early so he could take his time with the trip. He was only two hours out of Sydney when Lynn rang him with news of Billy’s collapse. Norm then rang Sir Wayne Martin at his East Sydney apartment. ‘The phone rang. It was Norm. He said, “Listen, Billy’s wife just rang me and said he’s got pains in his chest and they’ve taken him to St Vincent’s.” I said, “Oh, that’s five minutes from my place. I’ll get up and go and see him.” Norm said, “Look mate, I’m gonna turn around now. Wait until I get there and I’ll ring you, then you can come up.” A little while later, Norm rings. I asked if everything was okay. “You’re not gonna believe it, Wayne. I’m at the hospital now. He passed away five minutes ago.” I said, “Christ. You’re fucking joking.” He says, “No, Wayne. I walked in and kissed him on the forehead and said, that’s from Sammy, Wayne and myself.” So I went up there. I said to Billy, “You’ve gone to a better place.” I said to Norm, “He’s alright. He’s gone to the happy land.” For me, Sammy and Norm, it just . . . it just fucking . . . fucking blew us away.’ At the exact moment Billy was being rushed into emergency, his mate Jimmy Barnes was upstairs in the same hospital lying awake in bed. Jimmy was recovering from open-heart surgery. He
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only found out about Billy’s death when it was being broadcast on the early morning news. ‘I was getting out of St Vincent’s the day he was brought in. All the joy of getting out of hospital was gone. I later found out that as I was recovering in the same hospital, he was dying in the same hospital. If I could have run to his side, you know. Just to be there. I literally expected him to be around at least another twenty years, I was absolutely shocked. ‘Billy’s death had a huge impact on me, on my family—my kids loved him. He’d boss them around. My kids used to laugh at how much I’d follow him around and listen to him, because I don’t do that to anybody. He was one of the few people that I’d sit back and listen to because you know he gave me great advice.’ Gil too was deeply saddened by his dear friend’s passing, but not necessarily surprised. In fact, he was surprised at how angry he felt. ‘The whole Moroccan thing killed him in my opinion. It just killed him. He’d been at that stupid thing for five years. In his mind, it was resurrecting his career and I don’t blame him for thinking that.’ The news made its way rapidly around the country and newspapers set up condolence and tribute pages that attracted thousands of entries from people of all ages and all walks of life. People recounted their meetings with him: students from his primary school and high school days, those who knew him from the early days of Surf City and the Cross, Melbourne fans who recalled his first shows in their city and his subsequent eight years as the reigning rock hero. The Sunbury stories were told widely; it had been the first rock festival for many young people in 1972, and Billy had ruled the grassy slope and the stage and the creek behind.
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Tributes came from the US and UK, France, Germany, Holland and Japan—anywhere fans of Australian music lived. Billy was a name they knew and he represented a sound they all loved. Most of all, sympathy flowed to Lynn, Rusty and Lauren. Billy had been removed so swiftly from their lives that all seemed to fall about in disarray. The studio was closed down and the equipment auctioned off. Stories flew around the media in the ensuing days about how and why this had happened. A stray comment from Gil about Billy needing heart surgery and not having the money for it turned into a sort of slanging match. But there was no ‘war’ breaking out between the family and the Aztecs. They were all feeling the same way. The media did what it does best and muddied the waters even while providing touching tributes on websites laden with slideshows of Billy in his prime, clambering the peaks and striding the globe deafening people. Even Prime Minister John Howard—the man who once claimed to like Bob Dylan’s music ‘but not his lyrics’—said earnestly, ‘He earned his great success with the Aztecs and shot to national prominence with a string of brash albums and songs and powerful performances at the Sunbury Music Festival. Billy Thorpe was an accomplished guitarist with an unmistakeable voice. Perhaps though his fans will remember him for one thing above all else—the ear-splitting volume of his concerts.’ Midnight Oil-lead-singer-turned-Labor-politician Peter Garrett said, ‘He came back from the States and he just continued to build his presence. He was a wonderful contributor to the music industry and he also had a real vitality and dynamism as a muso. He was an incredible singer, a really, really fine loud guitar player.
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I think he’s going to be very, very sorely missed . . . I’m still in shock myself.’ On the Sunday after Billy’s death, a public memorial was held at the Sydney Entertainment Centre where Thorpie’s great mates Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown, Michael Chugg and Patricia Amphlett spoke movingly about their friend. Jack Thompson recounted how Billy had invited him onstage at the Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival in 1999 and relayed his words to Billy just before going onstage: ‘I’m shitting myself, Bill.’ And then Jack drew a harmonica from his pocket and laid out a perfect blue note, the kind of blue you only see in rainbows.
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Epilogue
Billy Thorpe’s time on earth was hardly some fleeting glimpse of a heavenly meteor. Thorpie, always the source of independent light in every room he walked into or out of, had the joyous maniac’s gleeful stranglehold on life. It is unlikely that he left us without a struggle; after all, he was given many opportunities to imprint himself on the Australian psyche, and he took every single one of them. It was not in his nature to waste any chance to be seen and heard. His musical career wasn’t so much an arc or even a trajectory as it was a kinetic, anarchic, loud and often hilarious outworking of pure will. Even though he gained and lost traction on the charts numerous times, he still succeeded as few Australian rockers of his vintage did. His was a journey made possible through constant reinvention. Taking risks, tussling with new sounds and styles, keeping his outlook positive and persisting with both his talent and
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the grandest of visions were some of his greatest gifts, even when they didn’t quite connect to create the experience he intended. But the narrative of the Thorpie story, despite its literal end in the early hours of 28 February 2007, does not conclude here. In the weeks following Billy’s passing, his songs were once more being heard on the radio, and there were tributes on television with footage from Sunbury once again reminding everyone regardless of age that Thorpie had not only once been the soundtrack of a generation but had written the songs that encapsulated the feeling of being young, which in itself never grows old. His name was invoked in newspapers and magazines all over the world, and some writers even remembered to mention that he had never stopped playing music. Music journalists opined on his ‘legacy’, though few had done any research into Thorpe’s major contributions to Australian rock history. Most chose to dust off the ‘piss-sucking Colonel Custer leading the Electric Light Brigade’ image and regurgitate those familiar myths and legends that, to be fair, Billy had himself traded on at times. American fans heard of Billy’s passing, and many of them expressed surprise when they discovered that Billy’s years in the US had represented only a small part of a long, successful and prolific career in another country. Judging by the clumsy obituaries he received there, his American sojourn had become little more than a footnote in the cursory and often revisionist assessment by modern music historians of late seventies and early eighties rock music. Because many music writers prefer to laud the now dominant work of new wave, punk and post-punk rock artists from the same era, bands like Rush, Nazareth and Journey and artists
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such as Billy Thorpe were given short shrift, simply because they did not fit into the revised popular notion of late seventies music— even though these performers had filled arenas across the US and sold hundreds of thousands of albums. Prayers were said for Billy’s soul in the mosques of Morocco, according to his manager Michael Chugg—whose next order of business was to announce that the Tangier album would be finalised as a matter of course. The announcements about the album Billy had worked so hard on and would never see released paled alongside the media attention directed to the state of his financial affairs. In the face of such intrusive speculation, Billy’s family retreated into silence, devastated by the passing of a husband and father whose life’s work was now being reassessed by music critics and historians. With newspapers claiming that she had been left penniless, Lynn packed up her belongings and moved out of the Darling Point home where she and Billy had lived. It seemed unfair that a man who had done much to assist his fellow musicians, particularly those like Lobby Loyde who were in the final stages of cancer, had been so swiftly cut down himself and that his family had been left with few assets to fall back on, apart from Billy’s studio equipment, guitars and, of course, his back catalogue. The week after Billy died, Lobby Loyde personally went to see Michael Gudinski about speeding up the release of the tapes recorded at the Basement in Sydney. Another piece of archival treasure was being readied for release by Gil Matthews’s Aztec Music label, a reissue of the band’s seminal 1971 Melbourne Town Hall gig, Aztecs Live (originally
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released in 1972). The interview Billy gave Ted Lethborg—who penned the insightful liner notes for the reissue—had been his last. The album also featured an additional live version of ‘Long Live Rock’n’Roll’ from the 1972 Rosebud festival and six additional studio sides cut for the short-lived Havoc label. It was a fine reminder that Billy’s legacy was being curated and cared for with genuine passion. On 21 April, less than two months after Billy’s death, Lobby Loyde passed away, but not before the self-described ‘rock’n’roll pensioner’ expressed his profound sadness that his old mate Billy had unexpectedly predeceased him. Like Billy, Loyde kept working right up to the end. In June that year, the tapes of Billy’s Basement shows, recorded before Christmas 2006, were released on the Liberation Blue label as Solo: The Last Recordings. His daughters, Rusty and Lauren, appeared on television and in print to promote it. The two-CD album ran to nearly two hours of music, anecdotes and the sound of an audience being thoroughly won over. It was bittersweet to hear him sounding so alive and joyous, revisiting and documenting his musical emergence from those far-off childhood days, singing those old faithful songs that had defined that era as much as it had brought him into the public eye. It was the sound of Thorpie reeling in the years, peeling away layers of loud guitars and shrieking audiences. His career was now book-ended; once more it was just him and a guitar—though, of course, he still played the acoustic guitar rather loudly. In February 2008, Hungarian-born bassist and composer Jackie Orszaczky passed away. Orszaczky, who had slept on Billy’s
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Melbourne lounge room floor in the early 1970s while his band Syrius toured Australia, had invested a substantial amount of time and musical energy into the orchestrations for Tangier. In the week after Thorpie’s death, the Queensland ministry for the arts had approached Chugg Entertainment about setting up a memorial scholarship in Billy’s name to assist young musicians. The plan was approved. On the evening of 12 August 2008, the inaugural winner of the Billy Thorpe Memorial Scholarship, managed by the Arts Queensland board, was announced at the Q Song Awards in Brisbane. There to award the scholarship to the inaugural winner, Michael Gavriel, were Michael Chugg, Amanda Pelman and Billy’s daughters. It was proving to be an inspired idea and, like the G.W. McLennan award—named for another Brisbane songwriter taken too soon—it offered a substantial amount of real industry support in addition to a ten thousanddollar cash component. On 24 September, Michael Chugg told attendees of the annual ‘Music in the House’ luncheon that Support Act Limited would be establishing a Billy Thorpe Foundation. The foundation would continue to build on the framework Billy had spoken about at the same event in 2007 with plans to assist musicians in poor health, as well as organising fundraising events to boost the Support Act coffers and get the money to where it was needed. In December, Gil Matthews’s Aztec Music label released Long Live Rock’n’Roll (Long May It Move Me So), which featured five songs from the Aztecs’ February 1972 Moomba Festival show (attended by a record-breaking crowd of two hundred thousand people). Also included on the album are three songs from the
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November 1972 Melbourne Festival Hall ‘Farewell to the Aztecs’ show, recorded just days before the band departed for their unsuccessful tilt at the UK market. The fate of the as-yet-unfinished album Tangier continued to be a hot topic of conversation in Australian rock circles. The stories about its enormous cost, scope, and potential impact on audiences kept the interest alive right throughout 2007 and into 2008, as periodic announcements were made about the progress of Billy’s final masterpiece. In February 2009, it was announced that the release of Tangier was ‘imminent’, and that listeners could expect to be ‘blown away’ by it. At the time of this book’s publication, the album had still not been released. In June, Billy Thorpe was voted one of one hundred and fifty Queensland icons by the state’s citizens, his name appearing alongside Charles Kingsford Smith, author David Malouf, Sir Joh and Powderfinger. Gil Matthews has several more Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs reissues planned, including The Hoax is Over and Steaming at the Opera House, two key Aztecs albums which have long been out of print. There are still many more unreleased hours of music in Billy’s own personal archive, much of it live recordings from the thousands of shows he played in Australia, England, South America and North America, along with the work he created as a composer of television music, a jingle writer and singer and a toy developer, which will keep emerging for years to come. We can only wait to finally hear his last studio album, Tangier, the project that some people say pushed him further than his body was willing to go.
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All it takes is to hear that voice again, that rasping bellow that could soar into a pure falsetto with ease, and to hear the whirlwind of noise that followed the Aztecs and you understand why audiences from Tanelorn to Tulsa stomped, grooved, freaked out and shook the ground with tumbling dance steps. Billy Thorpe got blood moving through the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people everywhere. His energy, the Aztecs’ energy, was always being honed, and he never stopped performing. It was his life, his reason to get up in the afternoon, a good excuse for not going to bed at all. It is that unrelenting vision and his irrepressible self-belief which ensures that the influence of ‘that Thorpe fellow’ can still be felt and, yes, heard. Pick him up and play him loud.
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Discography
The earliest Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs singles for Linda Lee/ Festival and Parlophone/EMI are available on the Festival compilation It’s All Happening, which has sadly never been reissued with Glenn A. Baker’s superb liner notes. Many of Billy’s singles from the period following the break-up of the Aztecs Mk I have not been re-released either and remain hard to find. A visit to any reputable second-hand record store in Australia will turn up the numerous EP releases assembled during the mid to late 1960s as well as some of the various compilations that were issued during the heyday of the Sunbury Aztecs. Since Gil Matthews’s Aztec Music label began reissuing the output of the Sunbury Aztecs, there’s now a sizeable portion of Billy’s 1970s back catalogue available for the interested listener. Of particular interest are the previously unreleased Long Live Rock’n’Roll, The Hoax is Over (soon to be released), Aztecs Live
DISCOGRAPHY 305
at Sunbury, Aztecs Live at Melbourne Town Hall, More Arse Than Class and Downunda. Much of Billy Thorpe’s late 1970s and early 1980s output, including Million Dollar Bill, Pick Me Up and Play Me Loud, Children of the Sun, 21st Century Man, Stimulation and East of Eden’s Gate, has not been reissued in Australia. The latter-day Children of the Sun—Revisited isn’t highly recommended except for completists.
306 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Sources
All attempts have been made to correctly attribute quotes in the book to either the rightful author or, if authorship is unclear, the publication from where the quote was taken.
Chapter 1 ‘I couldn’t get enough of music . . . ’, page 10, from Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www.thorpie.com. ‘She could have gone toe to toe with him . . . ’, page 22, Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll, Billy Thorpe, Pan Macmillan, 1996. Extract from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1996. ‘He was a delightful student . . . ’, page 23, Garth Knudsen to Courier-Mail, 29 February 2007. ‘The dances are school dances . . . ’, page 24, taken from an editorial letter written by principal Bob Mackie, published in the Courier-Mail, November 1958. ‘My parents did a wonderful job . . . ’, page 27, from Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www.thorpie.com. ‘It was this show . . . ’, page 27, Billy Thorpe on ‘The Source Radio Network’, interview with John McGhan, September 1980, transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www.billy-thorpe.com. Thanks to Michael Mandy. ‘Brisbane at the time was unbelievable . . . ’, page 28, author interview with Robb Richards, August 2008. ‘Rock’n’roll was an us-and-them mentality . . . ’, page 28, Billy Thorpe interview with Noel Mengel, Courier-Mail, 2001. ‘Through that regular association with the Planets . . . ’, page 30, from Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www.thorpie.com. ‘For the respect and friendship . . . ’, page 33, ibid. ‘Billy was the biggest around town . . . ’, page 34, author interview with John Blanchfield, February 2009. ‘I was there at their farewell . . . ’, page 34, ibid.
Sources 307
‘Here’s where fate either deals you a hand or doesn’t . . . ’, page 36, from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll, Billy Thorpe, Pan Macmillan, 1996. Extract from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1996.
Chapter 2 ‘Music, musicians, poets . . . ’, page 41, from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll, Billy Thorpe, Pan Macmillan, 1996. Extract from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1996. ‘I had met Lenny Bruce . . . ’, page 42, author interview with Sammy Gaha, February 2009. ‘. . . a hustler and swift as a fart . . . ’, page 46, from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll, Billy Thorpe, Pan Macmillan, 1996. Extract from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1996. ‘We weren’t much . . . ’, page 49, Tony Barber to Dean Mittelhauser, as quoted in The Livin’ End . . . 1, used by permission of Moonlight Publishers and the estate of Dean Mittelhauser. ‘I couldn’t believe it . . . ’, page 50, ibid. ‘This guy came up . . . ’, page 50, ibid. ‘Mate, Billy could tear you . . . ’, page 53, author interview with Sammy Gaha, February 2009. ‘He was such a sweet bloke . . . ’, page 53, author interview with Sir Wayne Martin, February 2009. ‘I came away awestruck . . . ’, page 54, Tony Barber to Dean Mittelhauser, as quoted in The Livin’ End . . . 1, used by permission of Moonlight Publishers and the estate of Dean Mittelhauser. ‘I remember it wasn’t until . . . ’, page 54, Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll, Billy Thorpe, Pan Macmillan, 1996. Extract from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1996. ‘We used to all take a big role . . . ’, page 55, author interview with Vince Melouney, August 2008. ‘He just let us go . . . ’, page 57, Tony Barber to Dean Mittelhauser, as quoted in The Livin’ End . . . 1, used by permission of Moonlight Publishers and the estate of Dean Mittelhauser. ‘Ted Albert was one of . . . ’, page 57, author interview with Vince Melouney, August 2008. ‘The group’s unity . . . ’, page 62, Adrian Rawlins, ‘Show Going’, Music Maker, November 1964. ‘They were so good . . . ’, page 62, Tony Barber to Dean Mittelhauser, as quoted in The Livin’ End . . . 1, used by permission of Moonlight Publishers and the estate of Dean Mittelhauser. ‘In our business we have to be noticed . . . ’, page 63, from ‘A Hairy Proposition’ by Jim Oram, Disc magazine, 29 July 1964. ‘He was always a big hero of mine . . . ’, page 67, Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll, Billy Thorpe, Pan Macmillan, 1996. Extract from Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1996. ‘It caught everyone unawares . . . ’, page 68, Tony Barber, quoted from No 2 Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, used by permission of Moonlight Publishing.
308 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
‘Harrigan had us convinced . . . ’, page 70, Tony Barber, ibid. ‘Towards the end . . . ’, page 70, Tony Barber, quoted from Go-Set, ‘Aztecs Yesterday & Today’ (author unknown), 4 August 1973. ‘The first year’s fun . . . ’, page 70, Tony Barber, ibid. ‘We sank a lot of money . . . ’, page 71, from Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www. thorpie.com.
Chapter 3 ‘I learned about the Offbeats . . . ’, page 76, author interview with Ray Hoff, July 2008. ‘When we got to the hotel . . . ’, page 79, Billy Thorpe to Glenn A. Baker, liner notes for It’s All Happening LP, EMI-Albert’s production, 1981. ‘It got to be a nightmare . . . ’, page 80, from Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www. thorpie.com. ‘Once I got into it . . . ’, page 82, from ‘Billy Thorpe in beach row’ by Scott Derrick, TV Times, 12 January 1966. ‘The reaction of surrounding . . . ’, page 82, ibid. ‘Oh, yes—I certainly do . . . ’, page 86, author interview with Neil Sedaka, May 2008. ‘I only do three numbers . . . ’, page 86, Billy Thorpe to Frank Courtis, TV Times, 1 June 1966. ‘Fabulous! . . . ’, page 89, Billy Thorpe interview with Probe! magazine by Peter Cashman, 1966, quoted in Thorpie!, Paul McHenry, used by permission of Moonlight Publishing. ‘The thought of it upset him . . . ’, page 89, John Harrigan to TV Times, 15 August 1966. ‘in the fashionable Sydney suburb . . . ’, page 90, Billy Thorpe quoted in TV Times, ‘For Billy Thorpe, it’s all happened’ by Lenore Nicklin, 28 September 1966. ‘Rubbish . . . ’, page 90, Billy Thorpe, ibid.
Chapter 4 ‘I first met Billy in ’65 . . . ’, page 97, author interview with Mick Liber, October 2008. ‘We were playing soul mostly . . . ’, page 98, ibid. ‘The band wasn’t called the Aztecs . . . ’, page 98, ibid. ‘. . . this guy in this suit . . . ’, page 99, author interview with Evan Silva, June 2008. ‘After hearing “NSU” and “I Feel Free” . . . ’, page 100, Billy Thorpe, Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy), Pan Macmillan, 1998. Extract from Most People I Know by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1998. ‘I was playing lead then . . . ’, page 104, author interview with Mick Liber, October 2008. ‘When he came to Melbourne . . . ’, page 107, Lobby Loyde interview with Troy Colvin, first published on www.messandnoise.com as ‘Lobby Loyde: Turn It Up’, 22 April 2007. ‘Nobody’s gone over there . . . ’, page 108, ‘Will the real Billy Thorpe please stand up’ by Geoff James, Go-Set, 30 August 1969. ‘We’ve got no idea . . . ’, page 108, Lobby Loyde, ibid. ‘If you are completely involved . . . ’, page 109, Jimmy Thompson, ibid. ‘The group is important now . . . ’, page 109, Billy Thorpe, ibid. ‘There are idiots . . . ’, page 109, Billy Thorpe, ibid. ‘He said, “You guys . . . ’”, page 110, Lobby Loyde interview with Troy Colvin, 22 April 2007. ‘It completely destroyed . . . ’, page 110, Lobby Loyde, ibid.
Sources 309
Chapter 5 ‘. . . not one of them could boast a current record . . . ’, page 119, Clinton Walker, Australian Record Industry Guide, 1980. ‘I stayed because the blues thing . . . ’, page 121, Billy Thorpe, Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy), Pan Macmillan, 1998. Extract from Most People I Know by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1998. ‘In listening to it . . . ’, page 123, Lobby Loyde interview with Troy Colvin, 22 April 2007. ‘He’s not exactly what we were looking for . . . ’, page 126, Billy Thorpe, Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy), Pan Macmillan, 1998. Extract from Most People I Know by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1998. ‘He could be our new drummer . . . ’, page 127, Billy Thorpe, ibid. ‘We once did five gigs . . . ’, page 128, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘There’s one section where . . . ’, page 130, ibid. ‘We started off with all the old gusto . . . ’, page 130, Warren Morgan interview with David N. Pepperell, Go-Set, 17 March 1973 ‘I went down to see him . . . ’, page 130, ibid. ‘Downunda [the album] was . . . ’, page 131, Warren Morgan from ‘The Record Pig thumped and Billy puffed’ by David Bland, Go-Set, 6 October 1973. ‘The background of it . . . ’, page 132, author interview with Michael Browning, September 2008.
Chapter 6 ‘Two days of beer, dope and music . . . ’, page 136, Rennie Ellis, quoted in a caption for a photograph of Sunbury at the Rennie Ellis exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, 2008. ‘The papers put it . . . ’, page 139, John Fowler, the Age, 25 January 1973. ‘Melbourne was an island unto itself . . . ’, page 139, Billy Thorpe, Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy), Pan Macmillan, 1998. Extract from Most People I Know by Billy Thorpe reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Billy Thorpe 1998. ‘We all took it on board . . . ’, page 140, author interview with Michael Browning, September 2008. ‘There may have been another festival . . . ’, page 140, Michael Browning, ibid. ‘It was a time when the hippy thing . . . ’, page 141, Phil Manning to Steve Waldon, the Age, 25 January 2003. ‘By the time we got to Sunbury . . . ’, page 142, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘He was without doubt . . . ’, page 143, author interview with Michael Browning, September 2008. ‘Music was the one thing . . . ’, page 144, author interview with Meredith Connor, January 2009. ‘I feel really good . . . ’, page 144, Billy Thorpe talks with Molly Meldrum and Max Merritt at Sunbury, quote taken from the documentary film Sunbury Rock Festival, originally released in 1972 by Odessa Pictures. Currently available on Umbrella Entertainment DVD. ‘It’s a thing you can’t rush into . . . ’, page 145, Max Merritt to Billy Thorpe, ibid.
310 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
‘We were having a good time . . . ’, page 146, Gil Matthews to Ian McFarlane, liner notes to Aztecs Live reissue, Aztec music, 2007. ‘I still can’t understand . . . ’, page 148, Billy Thorpe, from the liner notes to Lock Up Your Mothers, Mushroom Records, 1994. ‘We went through LA . . . ’, page 149, author interview with Coral Browning, November 2008. ‘Considering the cream . . . ’, page 150, Michelle O’Driscoll, Go-Set, 12 December 1972. ‘England wasn’t ready for that . . . ’, page 151, author interview with Mick Liber, October 2008. ‘Yes, the gig . . . ’, page 151, author interview with Coral Browning, November 2008. ‘I got to know the people . . . ’, page 151, author interview with Michael Browning. ‘We got a really good reaction . . . ’, page 151, Billy Thorpe to Michelle O’Driscoll, Go-Set, 12 December 1972. ‘Well, we had the record deal . . . ’, page 152, author interview with Michael Browning, September 2008. ‘Billy would walk into . . . ’, page 153, ibid. ‘That period in England was frustrating . . . ’, page 154, ibid. ‘It probably would have been . . . ’, page 154, ibid. ‘In London we were able . . . ’, page 155, Billy Thorpe to Australian Rolling Stone, September 1973. ‘We were hotly pursued . . . ’, page 156, author interview with Michael Browning, September 2008. ‘I didn’t dig Sunbury . . . ’, page 157, Billy Thorpe to Australian Rolling Stone, September 1973. ‘[Pulling the plug out] . . . ’, page 158, author interview with Michael Browning, September 2008. ‘Never in my wildest dreams . . . ’, page 158, Warren Morgan to David Bland, Go-Set, 6 October 1973. ‘It was good to come back . . . ’, page 165, Warren Morgan, ibid. ‘I still love . . . ’, page 165, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘I don’t remember much . . . ’, page 167, ibid.
Chapter 7 ‘the Aztecs’ disintegration . . . ’, page 173, Billy to Christie Eliezer, Juke, September 1976. ‘See, the conditions . . . ’, page 175, ibid. ‘I’ve done all I can . . . ’, page 176, ibid. ‘[In Australia] I find that . . . ’, page 177, ibid. ‘America is actually as degenerate . . . ’, page 177, ibid. ‘I came back here . . . ’, page 181, author interview with Sammy Gaha, February 2009. ‘So I get down there . . . ’, page 182, ibid. ‘The attendance figures . . . ’, page 185, ‘Thorpe proves he can still pull’, Courier-Mail, 7 January 1978. ‘For a moment . . . ’, page 187, Spencer Proffer to David Gordon, Recording Engineer/ Producer magazine, 1983. ‘a stellar guitar player . . . ’, page 187, ibid. ‘I’m a futurist . . . ’, page 188, Billy Thorpe on ‘The Source Radio Network’ interview with John McGhan, September 1980, transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www.billy-thorpe.com. Thanks to Michael Mandy. ‘Billy is one of . . . ’, page 188, Spencer Proffer to David Gordon, Recording Engineer/ Producer magazine, 1983.
Sources 311
‘There was a space orientation . . . ’, page 189, Spencer Proffer, ibid. ‘Children of the Sun was . . . ’, page 190, Billy Thorpe on ‘The Source Radio Network’ interview with John McGhan, September 1980, transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www.billy-thorpe.com. Thanks to Michael Mandy. ‘We really went into the Twilight Zone . . . ’, page 190, Spencer Proffer to David Gordon, Recording Engineer/Producer magazine, 1983. ‘My influences started to come out . . . ’, page 190, Billy Thorpe on ‘The Source Radio Network’ interview with John McGhan, September 1980, transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www.billy-thorpe.com. Thanks to Michael Mandy. ‘Frank Fenter was . . . ’, page 193, Billy Thorpe to DJ ‘Malcolm’ on WRCN Radio, New York, November 1980, transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www. billy-thorpe.com. Used by permission. ‘Every station that . . . ’, page 195, Spencer Proffer to David Gordon, Recording Engineer/Producer magazine, 1983. ‘Unfortunately, Capricorn . . . ’, page 195, Billy Thorpe to DJ ‘Malcolm’ on WRCN Radio, New York, November 1980, transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www.billy-thorpe.com. Used by permission. ‘I was up at Mount Buller . . . ’, page 196, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘The number of times . . . ’, page 197, ibid. ‘So we’ve got . . . ’, page 198, ibid. ‘I didn’t really know . . . ’, page 198, ibid. ‘It was the red carpet . . . ’, page 199, ibid. ‘There was a big fight . . . ’, page 199, ibid. ‘I’ve never liked . . . ’, page 200, Billy Thorpe on ‘The Source Radio Network’ interview with John McGhan, September 1980, transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www.billy-thorpe.com. Thanks to Michael Mandy. ‘If I’m successful . . . ’, page 200, ibid. ‘Robert [Raymond, manager] . . . ’, page 202, Billy to Rennie Ellis, Australian Women’s Weekly, November 1979. ‘I had a song . . . ’, page 206, Billy Thorpe to Home Brew Radio, July 2005. Used by kind permission of www.homebrewradio.com.au. ‘I actually wrote it for . . . ’, page 209, Billy Thorpe on ‘The Source Radio Network’ interview with John McGhan, September 1980, transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www.billy-thorpe.com. Thanks to Michael Mandy. ‘[On Children of the Sun] there were sound effects . . . ’, page 210, Spencer Proffer to David Gordon, Recording Engineer/Producer magazine, 1983. ‘We had a touring laser show . . . ’, page 210, ibid. ‘We ran that show in planetariums . . . ’, page 210, ibid. ‘He called up Warren . . . ’, page 211, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘There’s a psychology involved . . . ’, page 212, Billy quoted in ‘Ageless Thorpie’s Winning America’ by Alan Webster, TV Week, 21 November 1981. ‘With the second side . . . ’, page 213, Billy Thorpe to DJ Drake Hall on KTXQ Radio, Dallas, Texas 10 August 1981, transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www.billy-thorpe.com. ‘On a couple of tracks . . . ’, page 214, Billy Thorpe to DJ ‘Malcolm’ on WRCN Radio, New York, November 1980 transcribed by Michael Mandy and archived on www.billy-thorpe.com. Used by permission. ‘It feels just the same here . . . ’, page 216, Billy Thorpe, ibid.
312 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Chapter 8 ‘I’d made it my business . . . ’, page 222, Billy Thorpe to David Sly, ‘Just a Little Crazy’, Sun-Herald, 6 April 1991. ‘They wrote out a cheque . . . ’, page 223, ibid. ‘I’d be ironing out . . . ’, page 224, ibid. ‘Those session were hilarious . . . ’, page 225, from Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www.thorpie.com. ‘Yeah, he used to hang out . . . ’, page 225, Billy Thorpe to Home Brew Radio, July 2005. Used by kind permission of www.homebrewradio.com.au. ‘I’d had a four-year break . . . ’, page 225, ibid. ‘Herb had heard a lot . . . ’, page 226, ibid. ‘They liked it . . . ’, page 226, ibid. ‘War of the Worlds . . . ’, page 226, from Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www. thorpie.com. ‘It was an education . . . ’, page 227, Billy Thorpe to Home Brew Radio, July 2005. Used by kind permission of www.homebrewradio.com.au. ‘We had a barbecue . . . ’, page 228, author interview with Jimmy Barnes, October 2008.
Chapter 9 ‘British and camp’, page 231, Billy Thorpe, from Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www.thorpie.com. ‘Mick invited me down . . . ’, page 232, ibid. ‘In my opinion . . . ’, page 233, Billy Thorpe interviewed on Home Brew Radio, July 2005. Used by kind permission of www.homebrewradio.com.au. ‘We ended up being there . . . ’, page 235, Mick Fleetwood to David Sly, ‘Mick the zoo keeper’, Adelaide Advertiser, 28 March 1991. ‘The old Zoo had fun . . . ’, page 236, Mick Fleetwood, ibid. ‘I thought that perhaps . . . ’, page 236, from Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www. thorpie.com. ‘I spent eight months . . . ’, page 238, ibid. ‘I don’t want people . . . ’, page 239, Billy Thorpe to Mark Demetrius, Drum Media, 28 October 1993. ‘So I said to Gudinski . . . ’, page 242, Billy Thorpe, ibid. ‘a stunning reminder . . . ’, page 242, Mark Demetrius as quoted in Thorpie!, Paul McHenry, courtesy of Moonlight Publishing. ‘I said to them . . . ’, page 243, Billy Thorpe interviewed on Home Brew Radio, July 2005. Used by kind permission of www.homebrewradio.com.au. ‘It just gets to a point . . . ’, page 243, Billy Thorpe, ibid.
Chapter 10 ‘Now that Dad’s gone . . . ’, page 248, Billy to Courier-Mail, 19 August 1995. ‘The Cross will never . . . ’, page 252, from Anne Summers’s speech at the launch of In the Gutter . . . Looking at the Stars: A literary adventure through Kings Cross, edited by Mandy Sayer and Louis Nowra, Random House, 2000. ‘It was incredibly smart . . . ’, page 254, author interview with Ed Nimmervoll, February 2008. ‘I said to him . . . ’, page 254, author interview with Jimmy Barnes, October 2008. ‘They basically annoyed me . . . ’, page 255, author interview with Michael Browning, September 2008.
Sources 313
‘The second book . . . ’, page 256, Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www.thorpie.com. ‘I think everything’s a formula . . . ’, page 257, Billy to ABC radio reporter Philip Williams, The 7.30 Report, ‘Mountaintop Republicans’, ABC, 10 August 1999. ‘It was like the Arabian Nights tales . . . ’, page 258, Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www.thorpie.com. ‘When I was twelve . . . ’, page 259, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘He told me . . . ’, page 260, Gil Matthews, ibid.
Chapter 11 ‘Long Way to the Top . . . ’, page 269, Billy Thorpe’s official website bio, www. thorpie.com. ‘We were originally . . . ’, page 271, Tim Rogers, as quoted in ‘Dirty Deeds: Track by Track’ by Erin Free, FILMINK magazine, July 2002. ‘Billy had a bad thing . . . ’, page 272, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘When we were touring . . . ’, page 273, ibid. ‘He wanted me to . . . ’, page 273, ibid. ‘Billy hid his financial troubles . . . ’, page 273, ibid. ‘From the moment . . . ’, page 277, Phil Small, quote from tribute to Billy Thorpe from members of the band Cold Chisel, www.coldchisel.com. ‘I love all the old stuff . . . ’, page 277, Billy Thorpe interviewed on Home Brew Radio, July 2005. Used by kind permission of www.homebrewradio.com.au.
Chapter 12 ‘I knew through Pig and Billy . . . ’, page 281, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘Norm told me . . . ’, page 282, ibid. ‘I was very interested . . . ’, page 284, author interview with Sammy Gaha, February 2009. ‘I heard some of it . . . ’, page 285, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘The money wasn’t coming . . . ’, page 285, ibid. ‘The last time I spoke to Billy . . . ’, page 286, author interview with Coral Browning, November 2008. ‘He just floored us that night . . . ’, page 286, Lauren Thorpe to Kathy McCabe, ‘Gone, but still rocking’, Daily Telegraph, 7 June 2007. ‘Billy went out of his way . . . ’, page 287, author interview with Chris Mysinski. ‘The amount of money . . . ’, page 290, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘I’m in the middle of something . . . ’, page 290, Billy to Debbie Kruger, Songwriters Speak: Conversations about creating music, Limelight Press, Sydney 2005, used by permission of the author, www.debbiekruger.com. ‘He wanted to get some stories . . . ’, page 291, author interview with Sir Wayne Martin, February 2008. ‘The phone rang . . . ’, page 292, author interview with Sir Wayne Martin, February 2008. ‘I was getting out . . . ’, page 293, author interview with Jimmy Barnes, October 2008. ‘The whole Moroccan thing . . . ’, page 293, author interview with Gil Matthews, August 2008. ‘He earned his great success . . . ’, page 294, former PM John Howard as quoted in ‘PM saddened by Aussie icon’s death’, the Age, 28 February 2007. ‘He came back from . . . ’, page 294, Peter Garrett, ibid.
314 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Bibliography
The following references were used during the research of this book.
Magazines Australian Post Australian Record Collector Australian Women’s Weekly Billboard Cash Box Daily Planet Drum Media Everybody’s Magazine and Disc Gas Go-Set Juice JUKE Let’s Meet 2 (Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs fanzine), available from E.C. Productions, www.ozmusicbooks.com The Livin’ End . . ., 1 September 1983 Music Australia Guide Music Maker New Idea On the Street
People The Picture RAM (Rock Australia magazine) Rolling Stone (Australian edition) TV Times TV Week Variety
Newspapers The Age Adelaide Advertiser Canberra Times The Courier-Mail The Daily Telegraph The Mirror Newcastle Herald The Sun Sunday Mirror Sydney Morning Herald The West Australian
Bibliography 315
Books Coupe, Stuart, 2002, The Promoters, Hodder Books, Sydney Cox, Peter and Douglas, Louise, 1994, Teen Riots to Generation X: The Australian Rock Audience, Powerhouse Publishing, Sydney Hayton, Jon and Isackson, Leon, 1990, Behind the Rock, Time/Life Books Johnston, Damien, 2001, The Wild One: The Life and Times of Johnny O’Keefe, Allen & Unwin, Sydney Keays, Jim, 1999, His Master’s Voice, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards Kruger, Debbie, 2005, Songwriters Speak, Limelight Press, Sydney McFarlane, Ian, 1999, The Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards McHenry, Paul, 1997, Thorpie!, rev. edn, Moonlight Publications, Bendigo, available from E.C. Productions, www.ozmusicbooks.com MacIntyre, Iain, (ed.), 2006, Tomorrow is Today: Australia in the Psychedelic Era, Wakefield Press, Adelaide Spencer, Chris and Nowara, Zbig, 1987, Who’s Who of Australian Rock, The Five Mile Press, Melbourne Thorpe, Billy, 1996, Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll: A year in Kings Cross 1963–1964, Pan Macmillan, Sydney Thorpe, Billy, 1998, Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy), Pan Macmillan, Sydney Wilmoth, Peter, 1993, Glad All Over—The Countdown Years 1974–87, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne
Websites www.allmusicguide.com www.arts.qld.gov.au/funding/billy-thorpe.html www.billy-thorpe.com www.blues.org.au www.coldchisel.com.au www.countdown.com.au www.debbiekruger.com www.fasterlouder.com.au www.homebrewradio.com.au www.messandnoise.com www.milesago.com www.musicaustralia.org www.poparchives.com.au www.powerhousemuseum.com www.screensound.gov.au www.supportact.com.au www.territorystories.nt.gov.au www.themusic.com.au www.thorpie.com www.whiteroom.com.au/howlspace
316 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Index
A&M 153, 187, 198 Abbey Road 187 ABC 95 AC/DC 143, 170, 178, 214, 275 Action, the 98–9 Adelaide Entertainment Centre 264 Age, the 243 Albert Productions 208 Albert, Ted 57, 58 Alice Springs Masters Games 274 All Stars 170, 174 Allman Brothers 194 Altamont concert 114, 115 American Song Festival 176 Amphlett, Patricia 35, 269, 295 Anderson, Angry 208 Animals, the 79 Appel, Greg 267 ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Hall of Fame 234–5 Ashton, Gardner and Dyke 150 Assante, Isaac 234 Assault and Battery 208 Atkinson, Geoff 32 Atlanta International Music Festival 236 Atlantic label 162, 193 Atlantics, the 43, 269 Auckland 36 Australian Entertainment Exchange 107 Australian music industry 110–11, 119–23, 124–5, 175–6 Australian Rolling Stone 157, 176 Australian Women’s Weekly, The 83, 201 Autry, Gene 9 Avion 249 Axiom 155, 269 Aztec Music Label 208, 299, 301 Aztec Pty Ltd 161 Aztecs Live 130, 299–300
Aztecs, the 44–8, 49, 50–2, 54, 55, 58–72, 73, 76–7, 79–88, 104–18, 122–70, 173, 180–2, 211, 227, 239, 240, 243, 248, 263, 268, 269, 270, 276, 294 Baigent, Colin 45, 56, 69, 71, 76 Baker, Ginger 100 Baker, Glenn A. 80, 207 Banali, Frankie 217 Band of Light 162 Bandfest 274 bankruptcy 97, 101, 273 Barber, Michael 55 Barber, Tony 48–51, 52, 54–5, 56–7, 59, 62, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 84, 91, 221–4 Barnes, Jimmy 144, 228, 249, 254, 263, 288, 292–3 Basement, the 286–7, 299, 300 Battiste, Kenny 195 Beach Boys 43 Beach House 46, 47, 51, 54 Beaten Tracks 96 Beatles, the 51, 54, 56, 57–8, 64, 65, 70, 78, 81, 153, 187, 241, 242, 271 Beaumaris Civic Centre 114 Beck, Jeff 151 Bee Gees 71, 102, 121 Bellson, Louie 126, 259 Benedeto, ‘Last Card’ Louie 41 Benton, Merv 84 Berry, Chuck 30, 74 Berties 107, 127 Big Star 271 Bill Armstrong Studios 132, 164 Bill Haley & His Comets 29 Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas 64, 79 Billy Thorpe Foundation 301 Billy Thorpe Memorial Scholarship 301 Billy Thorpe Rock Classics, The 168
Index 317
Birdland, Brisbane 2, 30–1, 34 birth 5–7 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh 27–8, 29 Bjerre, Lindsay 141 Black Oak 194 Blackboard Jungle 18, 28 Blackfeather 283, 285 Blackpool 8, 9, 10, 11 Blanc, Mel 224–5 Blanchfield, John 34 Blue Goose 206 Blues Brothers 197 bodgies 18–19, 28 Boggo Road Gaol 239 Bolan, Marc 150 Bonham, John 108 Borich, Kevin 184, 269, 274 Bowie, David 147, 150, 198, 216 Bramlett, Bekka 194, 233–4, 235 Bramlett, Delaney and Bonnie 194, 233, 234, 235 Branson, Richard 153 Brennan, Christopher 251 Bridge, Dave 59, 61 Brisbane 16–17, 19–20, 24, 27–8 Brisbane Stadium 19 British Motor Corporation 19 Broadhurst, Kevin see Vogue, Brian Brooker, Gary 263 Brown, Bryan 257, 258, 271, 272, 295 Brown, Ray see Ray Brown and the Whispers Browning, Coral 149–50, 151, 286 Browning, Michael 107, 131–2, 140, 142, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 158, 161, 163, 169, 175, 179, 254–5 Bruce, Jack 100 Bruce, Lennie 42 Buchanan, Tony 85 Burnette, Billy 233, 235 Burns, Ronnie 78 Byrds, the 153 Cadd, Brian 184, 206, 269 Cale, JJ 233 Cambridge Films 140 Camilleri, Joe 197 Canberra 265 Canberra Park Royal Hotel 113 Canned Heat 154 Capitol Theatre, Perth 79 Capricorn 193, 194, 195, 235 Captain Reefer and the Desert Siren 117 Captain Straightman 176 Carlisle, Belinda 234 Carroll, Pat 184 Cash, Johnny 279–80 Cashman, Peter 89 Cave, Nick 280
318 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
CBS Records 219 Chain 119, 123–4, 129, 131, 141, 269, 283 Channel Nine 32, 33, 132 Channel Niners, The 22 Channel Seven 67, 84, 85, 86 Charles, Ronnie 151 Cheap Trick 217 Checkers, Chubby 69 Chequers 45, 87 Chevalier, Maurice 9 Children of the Sun 189–200, 202, 206–9, 210, 217, 225, 260, 290 Children of the Sun—Revisited 227 Christie, Paul 275 Chugg Entertainment 301 Chugg, Michael 252, 258, 268, 276, 283, 295, 299, 301 Church, the 215 Churchill, Trevor 153 Cichon, Andy 249 Clapton, Eric 100, 104, 233 Clapton, Richard 274 Clarion label 74 Clarke, Allan 186–7, 207–8 Clarke, Paul 267 Clarke, Stanley 198 Clefs, the 126 Clinton, Bill 237 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 189 Cloudland Ballroom, Brisbane 1, 31 Club Buggery 256 Coasters, the 55 Cochran, Eddie 2, 30 Cocker, Joe 156 Cold Chisel 228, 276, 277 Coleman, Ross 87 Collins, Albert 232 Coloured Balls 123, 159, 242, 269, 270 Colvin, Troy 107 Conde, Franz 84 Connor, Meredith 144 Conrads, John 126 Cooder, Ry 192 Cook, Colin 84 Cooley, Spade 11 Cooper, Alice 61, 263, 277 Copperwine 118, 124 Corvettes, the 88 Cotton, Darryl 151, 184 country and western music 11, 13, 21, 43 Courier-Mail 3, 185, 240, 248 Courtis, Frank 86 Cream 100, 104 Creswell, Toby 215 Cropper, Steve 197 Crosby, Stills and Nash 192 Culliton, Tony 84 Currie, Rodney 164 Cutler, Sam 115
Daddy Cool 123–4, 125, 129, 196, 269, 276 Daily Mirror 118 Daily Telegraph 286 Dale, Dick 43 Daltrey, Roger 263–5 Dark Side of the Moon 187 Dartford 9 Day, Doris 78 De Castro, Leo 160 de Gruchy, Rod 162, 168 Deamer, Dulcie 245 Dee, Grantley 126, 128, 259–60 Deep Purple 139, 170, 190 Delltones, the 250 DeMarco, Paul 249, 274, 277 Demetrius, Mark 239, 241–2 Derrick, Scott 82 Devlin, Johnny 44, 74 Dick, Johnny 75–6, 84, 87, 98, 160, 167, 168, 170, 174 Dig We Must 84 Diggers Rest Hotel 136 ‘Diggers Rest Orchestra’ 160–1, 166–7 Dillow, Lee 116 Dingoes, the 283 Disc magazine 56 Disney 225 Divinyls, the 239 Dixie Dregs 236 Dooley, Clayton 274, 275 Down Under Rock 73 festivals 159 Downes, Mike 75, 76, 84 Downunda 131, 156, 164 Doyle, John 256 Doyle, Peter 78, 86, 151 Dream, the 112 drugs 110, 203, 204 see also LSD Duncan, George 139 Dunn, Duck 197 Dunstan, Dennis 232 Dusty, Slim 155 Dylan, Bob 279 Eagles, the 178 East of Eden’s Gate 216, 217, 219, 227 Easybeats, the 81, 83, 95, 155, 269 Ed Sullivan Show 83, 85 Edmonds, Steve 249 Eileen Harrigan Promotions 96 Elder, Bruce 215 Electric Light Orchestra 189 Electrons, the 49 Elektra 195, 207 Eliezer, Christie 173 Ellis, Rennie 136, 201 EMI 58, 74 England 149–55 Engleheart, Murray 241 Epstein, Brian 56, 58
Eurythmics 228 Everybody’s 56, 63, 80, 81 Fabian 30 Fanny Adams 124 Farnham, Johnny 111, 119, 165, 276 Farrar, John 184, 286 Fenter, Frank 193, 194 Festival Records 32, 57, 122 Fleetwood, Lucy 229 Fleetwood Mac 198, 232, 233, 237 Fleetwood, Mick 229, 231–3, 234, 235, 236, 242 Flies, the 78 Flying Circus 123 Foghat 199 Fowler, John 132, 139 Frampton, Peter 263, 264, 265 Franti, Michael 276 Free 139, 263 Freedom from Hunger campaign 114 Freeman, Alan 147 Furber, Mike 78, 90 Fury, Billy 56 Gaha, ‘Little’ Sammy 42, 43, 53, 182, 254, 284–5, 291 Gaha, Tony 42 Garland, Judy 68 Garrett, Leif 205 Garrett, Peter 294–5 Gary Lewis and the Playboys 187 Gavriel, Michael 301 Geary, Tony 63 Geoff Doyle and the Resonets 49–50 Gibb, Barry 206 Gibson, Ronnie 240 Gilmour, Dave 205 Gimme Shelter 114 Go-Gos 234 Gordon, Lee 29–30 Go-Set 87, 89, 90, 94, 107, 118, 126, 141, 150, 151, 159, 176, 254 Gradney, Kenny 232, 234, 235 Grateful Dead 160, 168 Grease 184, 214 Great Southern Blues Festival 266 Great Western Festival (UK) 146–7 Griffiths, Derek 170, 180 Groop, the 155 Guccione, Bob 188 Gudinski, Michael 234, 238, 241, 242, 259, 299 G.W. McLennan award 301 Hands, the 275 Hard Rock Café 150, 169 Harrigan, Eileen (Ma) 35, 47, 56, 57, 63, 106
Index 319
Harrigan, John 35, 45, 46, 47–8, 54, 56, 57, 62, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 95, 96, 97, 99, 106 Harris, Rolf 155 Harrison, George 58, 168, 192, 233 Hasbro 225 Hasty Tasty 41 Havoc label 126, 162, 168, 300 Hawaiian Eye 46, 51 Hawkwind 196 Healing Force 129 health 203–4, 281–3 Hendrix, Jimi 150, 162, 190 Here, the 107 Herman’s Hermits 79, 146 Hey Hey It’s Saturday 242 Hill, Steve 178 Hines, Marcia 269 Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds 120 Hoax is Over, The 122 Hoff, Ray 73–6 Hogan, Paul 157 Holden, Frankie J. 274 Hole, Dave 96 Hole in the Wall (Perth) 96 Holme, Jackie 90–2, 93, 94, 95, 97, 104, 123, 148 Howard, Bruce 128, 149, 156, 157–8, 165 Howard, Prime Minister John 294 Humble Pie 153, 181 Hunter, Ian 216 Hush 178 Iemma, Morris 288 Ifield, Frank 55 Iliffe, Gwen 2, 22, 23 Iliffe, Jim 22, 23 Indelible Murtceps 125, 141 Infinity label 122 Innis, Steve 126, 127 Isackson, Leon 42 Isle of Wight Festival 115 It’s All Happening (album) 207 It’s All Happening (television show) 84–7, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97 ‘It’s Almost Summer’ 180, 181 Ja-Ar 85 Jackson, Michael 236 Jackson, Wanda 167 Jagger, Chris 180 Jagger, Mick 9, 115, 221 Jailhouse Rock (show) 239–40, 244 James, Elmore 242 James, Geoff 109 James, Peter 34, 35–7, 43 Jeff St John and the Id 78, 86 Jimmy Hannan Show, The 33, 35 John, Elton 178
320 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Johnson, Robert 100 Jones, John Paul 108 Jones, Valentine 45, 47, 48 Josie Jason and the Argonauts 240 Journey 298 Joy Boys 49 Joye, Col 30, 49, 67, 74, 269, 270 Judge Mercy 249 Judge, Virginia 288 Juke 173, 176, 178, 180 Keays, Jim 184 Keneally, Tom 257 Kenner, Chris 65 Keyes, Bobby 233 King Crimson 150, 186, 190 Kings Cross 39–42, 245, 251–2, 253–5, 271, 293 Kings Cross Theatre see Surf City Kinks, the 81, 124, 271 Kirov Ballet 164–5 Knudsen, Garth 23–4 Kommotion 84 Kravats, the 88 Kristian, Billy 180, 211 Kruger, Debbie 290 Krupa, Gene 126 La Boheme restaurant 2, 31–2 La De Das 128, 129, 139 Laine, Frankie 29 Lambert, Dave 187 Last Blast tour 285 Led Zeppelin 193, 280 Lee, Laurel 84 Lee, Lonnie 74, 269 Lee, Sammy 42 Legendary Heroes 187, 207 Lennon, John 216 Lethborg, Ted 300 Lewis, Jerry Lee 3, 21, 22, 25, 30, 43 Liber, Mick 97–8, 103–4, 150–1 Liberation Blue label 300 Librettos, the 64 Life 112 Lilly, Tom 236 Linda Lee label 45, 49, 51, 57 Lindsay, Reg 1 Little, Jimmy 55 ‘Little Pommie Bastard, The’ 275 Little Richard 30, 32 Little River Band 178, 199–200, 214 Little Rock Allen (stage name) 1–4, 23 Live at Sunbury 145–6 Lock Up Your Mothers 148, 239, 241, 242 The Best and the Rest of Lock Up Your Mothers 243 Logie awards 77 London 149–55
Long Live Rock’n’Roll (Long May It Move Me So) 301 Long Way to the Top 267 tour 268–70 Los Angeles 170–1, 186 Lotus 129 Love Machine 205 Loved Ones, the 78 Lovegrove, Vince 78, 112 Loyde, Lobby 26, 95, 106–7, 108–9, 110–11, 113, 115, 122, 123, 141, 159, 160, 167, 205, 208, 216, 269, 270, 283–4, 285, 288, 299, 300 LSD 99–100, 101, 110–11, 122, 127 Lyde, John Baslington see Loyde, Lobby McCann, Toni 84 McCartney, Paul 100 McFarlane, Ian 117, 146 McGrath, Lynn ‘Gook’ 147–8, 169, 183, 184, 195, 204, 214, 220, 258, 265, 281, 282, 286, 291, 292, 294, 299 McHenry, Paul 242 McKay, Jim 132 McKeig, Maggie 56 Mackenzie Theory 158 Mackie, Mr 24–5 McLeod, Sarah 283 McManus, Andrew 238, 263 MacTaggart, Dave 97–8, 101 Madder Lake 137, 159, 283 Manchester (UK) 6, 8, 17, 150, 186 Manning, Phil 128, 132, 140, 155 Mansions, the 251–3 Mantra, the 111 Maphis, Joe 27 Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel, Melbourne 15 Marriott, Steve 153, 181 Marshall Tucker Band 194 Martin, Sir Wayne 41, 42, 52, 53–4, 253, 291, 292 Marvin, Hank 43, 44 Masters Apprentices 155 Mattel 223, 224 Matthews, Gil ‘Rats’ 126–8, 130, 132, 140, 142, 146, 149, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 174, 180, 182, 196–7, 198, 199, 206, 208, 211–12, 227, 241, 259, 270, 272–3, 280–1, 285–6, 290, 291, 293, 299, 301, 302 Max Hamilton and the Impacts 126 Max Merritt and the Meteors 45, 75–6, 85, 139, 145, 157 Meadows Technicolour Fair 140 Melbourne 105–7, 123, 265, 275 Melbourne Music Festival 227 Melbourne Town Hall 128–30, 161–2, 299 Meldrum, Ian ‘Molly’ 136, 144
Melouney, Vince 44–8, 51, 55, 57, 63, 65, 69, 71, 102, 174 Melzer, Larry 267 Men at Work 215 Mengel, Noel 28 Merritt, Max 75, 80, 108, 111, 112, 118, 119, 120, 145, 155, 184, 269 see also Max Merritt and the Meteors Mersey Sound, the 79 Metal Health 219–20 Michael Turner in Session 141 Midnight Oil 143, 294 migration to Australia 13–15 Miles, Bea 245 Miles, Peter 151 Miller, Harry M. 251 Million Dollar Bill 179, 180, 183 Missing Links 45 Mix, Tom 9 Mondo Rock 196, 275 Moody Blues 234 Moomba Festival 301 Moonlight Festival 277 Moorooka, Brisbane 17, 20, 92 Moorooka State School 20 More Arse Than Class 165–6, 180, 193, 241 Morgan, Warren ‘Pig’ 96, 122, 127, 128, 130–1, 140, 155, 158, 162, 164, 165, 166, 170, 174, 180, 211–12, 227, 270, 274, 281, 291, 292 Morocco 258–9 Morris, Russell 184, 244, 269 Morrison, Van 79 Most, Mickie 146 Most People I Know (book) 103, 202–3, 256, 259, 260, 281 ‘Most People I Know’ (song) 130, 147, 152, 153, 154, 169, 182, 227, 266 Mott the Hoople 216 MPD Limited 85 Murphy, Kevin 122, 126, 160, 167 Mushroom Records 215, 216, 234, 237, 242 music festivals 116–17, 120, 124, 139 Music Maker 62 musical fashions 43, 177–8 musical influences 9–11, 21, 27, 186, 190 Musicians Union 29 Mysinski, Chris 287 National Bandstand 80 Nazareth 208, 217, 298 Neil, Steve 33 New Zealand 36, 41 Newton John, Olivia 155, 184, 214 Nimmervoll, Ed 108, 141, 180, 254 Nine Inch Nails 280 Noble, Johnny 45, 47, 57 Nolan, Jimmy 98 Normanhurst Boys High School 44
Index 321
Northrup, Jeff ‘JK’ 217, 220 Norton, Rosaleen 245 Nowra, Louis 252 Noyes, the 97 Nugent, Ted 217 Nutwood Rug 116, 117 Odessa Promotions 132 Odin’s Warriors Motorcycle Club 240 O’Driscoll, Michelle 150 Odyssey Festival 116, 124 Offbeats, the 74, 75, 76 O’Grady, Anthony 180 O’Grady, John 40 O’Keefe, Johnny 18–19, 30, 50, 55, 67–8, 74, 95, 112, 177, 191–2, 215, 270 Oldfield, Mike 153 Oldham, Will ‘Bonnie Prince Billy’ 280 Omni magazine 188 Operation Rock Lift 162–3 Oram, Jim 56 Orbison, Roy 232 Orszaczky, Jackie 275, 277, 288, 300 Osborne, Ozzy 219 Osmonds, the 205 Ourimbah Festival (Pilgrimage for Pop) 114, 116, 117, 139 Page, Jimmy 108, 280 Painters and Dockers 240 Parkinson, Doug 124, 155, 160 Parlophone/Albert signing 57, 64 Parsons, Alan 187 Parsons, Gram 233 Pasha Music House 187, 189, 216 Peck, Sue 91 Pelman, Amanda 268, 301 Penthouse 188 Perkins, Carl 27 Perth 96, 264 Phillips, Sam 21 Pick Me Up and Play Me Loud 183 Pickhaver, Greig 256 Pilgrimage 128 Pink Floyd 141, 186, 187, 190, 198, 200, 205 Pink Pussycat, the 41, 42, 244 Pirana 141 Planets, the 2, 28, 30–3 Plant, Robert 108, 280 Platters, the 77 Playboys, the 79 Police Boys Club 44, 84 Polydor 189–90, 195, 207 Poor Boys, the 240 Powder Monkeys 242 Powell, Michael 40 Presley, Elvis 18, 21, 27, 29, 43, 191 Pritchard, Dai 274–5 Probe 89
322 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Procul Harum 263 Proffer, Spencer 187–90, 192, 195, 205, 209, 210, 216, 219–20 Profumo, John 60–1 Puggle Doll, the 221–2 Purga Creek Rage ’93 240 Putt, Bill 276 Python Lee Jackson 97 Queen 139 Questions, the 86 Quiet Riot 219–20 Radiators, the 240 radio 4BH 19 Rafferty, Chips 251 RAK Records 146, 152 RAM 176, 180 Ram Jam Big Band 111 Ranch Party 27 Randell, Lynne 80 Randy Pie 187 Rawlins, Adrian 62, 119, 124 Ray Brown and the Whispers 45, 69, 79, 81, 82, 84 Ray Columbus and the Invaders 62, 269 Ray, Johnnie 29 Raymond, Robert 169, 170, 201, 202, 217 RCA 74, 75 Record magazine 215 Red House Roll Band 161 Redding, Otis 145, 194 Reddy, Helen 184 Reed, Lou 147 republicanism 257 Revell, Digger 55, 59, 77 Reznor, Trent 280 Rhoads, Randy 219 Rhone, Marty 78 Rich, Buddy 126, 259 Richard, Cliff 43 Richards, Dig 74 Richards, Keith 9 Richards, Robb 28 Rilen, Ian 283 Risby, Col 75, 76, 84 Ritter, Tex 9 RMS Strathaird 13–14 Robbins, Marty 77 Rodenberry, Gene 225 Rodgers, Paul 263 Rogers, Tim 271–2, 283 Rolling Stone 215, 241 Rolling Stones 55, 79, 81, 114, 115, 241, 271 Rolling Stones Records 153 Ronstadt, Linda 198–9 Rose, Ernie 122, 165, 166 Rose Tattoo 208, 239, 249, 283 Rosebud Festival 300
Roth, David Lee 236 Rowe, Normie 34, 77–8, 79, 80, 81, 89, 155, 269 Rowles, John 85 Roxon, Lillian 154 Royce, Jon 63–4 Rudd, Mike 139, 276 Rumours 237 Rush 199, 298 Russell, Leon 233 Ryan, Ross 162 Rydell, Bobby 85 Saddington, Wendy 118, 119, 132, 140, 160, 283–4 Saffron, Abe 254 Sagan, Carl 188 St John, Jeff 78, 86, 118 St Kilda Park Primary School 15 Saint Ledger, Mary 3, 4, 22, 23 St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney 89, 292 Salisbury State High School 24–5, 34, 240 Sam and Dave 100, 193 Sayer, Mandy 252 school 10–11, 13, 15, 17, 20, 23–4, 34 science fiction 187–8 Scott, Bon 78, 112, 169, 178 Scott, Tom 197 Screamin’ Jay Hawkins 61 Screaming Lord Sutch 60–1, 62 Searchers, the 49, 64, 65, 79 Sebastian’s 107, 127 Sedaka, Neil 86 Seeger, Pete 35 Seekers, the 155 Serious Young Insects 216 7 Records 168 Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll 41, 67, 245, 251, 253–6, 260, 276 Shadows, the 43 Shakin’ the Cage 237 Shapiro, Helen 90 Sherbet 162, 164, 178 Sheridan, Tony 57–60 Shorrock, Glenn 199, 214, 269 Sidney Myer Music Bowl 244, 276 Silva, Evan 99 Simon, Paul 234 Sinatra, Frank 29 Sing Sing Sing 67 Sklar, Leland 192, 197, 198 Skyhooks 178 Slade 147, 220 Sledge, Percy 194 Slessor, Kenneth 245 Slick, Earl 216 Small Faces 181 Small, Phil 277 Smith, Broderick 283
Smith, Frank 168 Smith, Gulliver 97 Smith, Levi 126 Solo: The Last Recordings 300 ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ 32, 68–9, 70, 71, 77, 83, 95, 167, 266 Songwriters Speak: Conversations about creating music 290 Southeast Asian tsunami, 2001 276 Speakeasy, the 150–2, 153 Spectrum 123, 124, 125, 269, 275, 276 Springfield, Rick 184 Spy Vs Spy 239 Stanton, Malcolm 170 Star Club 46 Starr, Lucky 269 Starr, Ringo 205 Status Quo 147 Steaming at the Opera House 168 Stewart, Dave 228 Stigwood, Robert 102–3, 106, 121 Stimulation 213, 215, 217 Stone, Judy 269 Strachan, Shirley 178 Strangis, Greg 226 Strawbs, the 187 Summers, Anne 251 Sun, The 118 Sunbury Festival 132–3, 135–45, 155, 156–8, 167, 170, 293, 298 Sunday Mail 18 Sunday Mirror 117–18 Sunnyboys, the 216 Sunset Disco 46 Sunsets, the 45 Sunshine Friends 222–4 Sunshine Records 66, 78 Support Act Limited (SAL) 283, 288–9, 301 Surf City 35, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 79, 251, 269, 293 Auckland 36 surf music 42 Sutch, Lord see Screaming Lord Sutch Suzie Wong’s 74 Sweeney, Norm 149, 182, 281, 282, 286, 291, 292 Sydney 43, 66 Sydney Opera House 167 Sydney Stadium 79 Syrius 275, 301 Taj Mahal 276 Tamam Shud 45, 123, 141 Tanelorn Festival 215 Tangier 266, 272, 274, 276, 277, 279–80, 282, 284–5, 288, 290, 299, 301, 302 Taylor, Alvin 192 Taylor, Derek 153 Taylor, Jimmy 85
Index 323
Taylor, Matt 124 TC’s Sound Lounge 34 Ted Mulry Gang 178 Teen Beat 2, 32–3 Telegraph 215 television 21–2 Them 79 They’re a Weird Mob 40 This Is Your Life 244 Thomas, Rocky 85 Thompson, Jack 251, 252–3, 281, 295 Thompson, Jimmy 98, 104, 105, 108, 109, 113 Thorpe, Lauren 196, 258, 286, 294, 300, 301 Thorpe, Mabel 5–9, 12, 13–14, 26–7, 33, 169, 185, 244, 247–8 Thorpe, Rusty 169, 183, 184, 185, 196, 229, 258, 286, 294, 300, 301 Thorpe, William Henry 5–9, 12, 13–14, 16, 26–7, 33, 169, 185, 229, 247–8 Thorpie! 242 Time Traveller 163, 206–7 3XY Pepsi-Cola Happening 111 Throb, the 50, 78 Thump’n Pig and Puff’n Billy 131–2, 156, 164 Toi, Teddy 75–6, 84, 87, 141, 160, 161, 162, 166, 168, 169, 170 Tony Worsley and the Blue Jays 66, 81, 98 Tornadoes, the 43 Toto 198 Traffic 112 Tuggle, Brett 236 Tully 123, 129 Turgon, Bruce 217, 220 Turner, Ike 233 Turner, Tina 187 T.V. Fairsky 49 TV Times 82, 86, 89, 90 TV Week 77, 81, 212 Twain, Shania 249 21st Century Man 205, 207–10 Twilights, the 155, 269 Two Hands 271 2UW radio 63 2UW theatre 56 Ubu Films 117 Ultimate Rock Symphony 263–6 Uluru 263 Under a Southern Cross 227 Universal 225 Uptight 114 Valentines, the 78, 112 Van Halen, Eddie 232 Vibrants, the 126
324 Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth
Vibratones 44–5 Vietnam 83, 100, 110 Vince Melouney Sect 71 Virgil Brothers, the 111 Virgin Records 153 Vogue, Brian 45, 57 Walden, Phil 193, 194, 202, 235 Walker, Clinton 119, 121 Waller, Randall 249 War of the Worlds 225–8 Ward, Rachel 258 Warners 168 Watson, John 45, 69, 71, 76, 122 Webb, Jimmy 197 Webster, Alan 212 Wells, Pete 283 Wet Willie 194, 205 Wheatley, Glenn 184 Wheeler, Paul 98, 104, 105, 108, 113, 122, 128, 140, 149, 156, 159, 227, 270 Where The Action Is 95 Whisky A Go Go 96, 97, 98, 103, 106, 244 Whitman, Slim 23 Who, the 152, 241, 263, 271 Wild Cherries 106–7, 111, 129, 141 Wilde, Wilbur 274 Williams, Hank 2, 43 Williams, Peter 75 Williams, Philip 257 Wilson, Ross 196, 269 Withers, Brian 84 Wolfson, Eric 187 Woodstock 115, 138 World War II 5–6 Worlds of Wonder 225 Worsley, Tony 78, 98 Wray, Link 43 Wright, Gregg 236 Wright, Herb 225–6 Wright, Stevie 170, 269 Yes 186, 193 You Am I 271, 283 Young, Angus 178 Young, George 178 Young, John Paul 170, 174, 269 Young, Johnny 78, 111 Young, Malcolm 178 Young, Neil 216 Young Qantas Club 113 Zipper Dedodah Inc. 222 Zoo, the 194, 232, 235–6, 237, 239, 240
