VINYL AGE, PART THREE: 'A.B.' (AFTER BEATLES)
EMI had the Beatles on its Parlophone label, and though it took a few singles through 1963 to break the band in Australia, when they did break here over the summer going into ’64, it was probably a bigger a paradigm shift than Elvis in the first place.
In response to Beatlemania, Festival in ’65 enjoyed a run of hits by Ray Brown and Whispers. But Brown just as quickly faded. Festival was straight away also sourcing material via the new, post-Beatles independents that were equally quickly springing up, like Brian Vogue’s little Linda Lee label, which proffered Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs and Johnny Noble and the Aztecs. Normie Rowe arrived at Festival via Sunshine Records, the label run out of the backroom of the old Cloudland Ballroom in Brisbane by Ivan Dayman, who managed the Melbourne-based Rowe and booked a network of acts and venues all over the country. The Sunshine label was crucial to Festival’s ongoing success in the 60s, as were other new regionalised indies like Spin, which Nat Kipner developed out of Ossie Byrne’s Sydney recording studio after splitting from Dayman in Brisbane, and Clarion, in Perth. |
EMI got its local Beat content via a production deal with Alberts, one of the oldest and most powerful music publishers in the country. Young tyro Ted Albert wanted to move beyond sheetmusic and into recording, and did so, most successfully, with the Easybeats and the head-hunted Billy Thorpe. Leasing master-tapes to EMI to put out on Parlophone, Alberts became a force on vinyl too, and would indeed remain so ever more.
The major labels may have all been based in Sydney, but by 1966 it was Melbourne that had become Australia’s music mecca. Maybe it was the launch of Go-Set magazine out of Melbourne at the start of ’66 that cemented it. The city already boasted the moodier, more mod vibe, along with the biggest circuit of suburban dances and city discos, the most powerful new breed of entrepreneurs, and being the home of big national TV programs like Uptight and The Go!! Show, which made Sydney’s long-standing Bandstand look as stodgy as it really was. Adelaide bands moved to Melbourne: the first of them, the Twilights, signed direct to EMI. EMI also ended up with the Seekers after they left Australia and W&G. Brisbane bands like Lobby Lloyde’s seminal Purple Hearts bypassed Sydney and moved to Melbourne. Perth’s Johnny Young moved over. |
Ron Tudor left W&G around the same time the Seekers did, to go to Astor, and W&G was never really the same again after that, although it did form the In Records label subsidiary which in 1966 proffered the best new band of the year, the Loved Ones. Astor, in a mirror image, handled the Go!! label, which had grown out of The Go!! Show, and in 1967, Astor launched the best new band of that year, the Masters Apprentices, who’d also moved to Melbourne from Adelaide.
In Sydney, Spin scored for Festival in ’66 with the Bee Gees’ breakthrough hit, “Spicks and Specks,” their twelfth single! Spin, because it operated out of its own studio, was about the only Australian label at the time releasing semi-purpose-built albums. Otherwise, it was only the biggest hit acts that were privileged enough to cut an album, and even then those albums were usually little more than a couple of singles plus filler. Acts like Jeff St.John and the Id, Steve and the Board, the Bee Gees and Ronnie Burns all released higher-quality albums on Spin. |
The other majors in Sydney were less astute. After Johnny Devlin left RCA he was replaced by Ron Wills, the man who’d produced “Pub with No Beer” after folding his own Wilco label, and RCA would become, again, much like its US parent, quite country-orientated. CBS too continued aping its American parent with a penchant for MoR pop, hitting with solo singers like John Rowles and Lynn Randell, but also, it has to be said, the slick, soulful rock of the Groop, the group that proffered the next best Australian rock songwriter of the 60s after the Easybeats’ Vanda-Young team and the brothers Gibb, Brian Cadd.
Philips veered wildly from one extreme to the other. On one hand, it allowed the anarchic, magnificent Missing Links to actually cut an album, and on the other, it released Charlie Munro’s groundbreaking 1968 Australian modern jazz classic, Eastern Horizons. On yet another hand, it finally hit paydirt with MoR singer Kamahl, and Kamahl would be Philips’ backbone for some years to come. |
Orthodox Australian rock history says that 1967’s Summer of Love didn’t really reach Australia till around three years later. Or that it took a number of years to gestate here. One of the keys to the psychedelic or acid rock revolution was the move onto albums. Overseas, album sales started surpassing singles in 1968. In Australia, we didn’t even albums charts till 1970. The record companies were scrabbling to catch up with the new technology. CBS built the country’s first automatic 12” album pressing plant in ’68, and the first product hot off the line was Warners’ Camelot soundtrack, which was a big hit. (When Warners or WEA eventually opened an office of its own in Australia, its product was manufactured and distributed at first by CBS.) EMI was the first to move into serious production of local rock albums, in 1968 releasing the Twilights’ concept album, or Sgt Peppers knockoff, or – truthfully – abandoned (Monkees-like) TV show soundtrack, Once Upon a Twilight. The album was a flop, but as Australia’s first album with a gatefold cover, you could at least roll joints on it.
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The album was made much more possible by improvements in local recording studios, which were having to catch up with, tool up for this new world of stereophonic sound. When Festival moved to a new headquarters in Pyrmont in 1967, a new, four-track studio was built there. As soon as early 1968, Bill Armstrong’s Studios in Melbourne installed one of Australia’s first eight-track mixing desks. The first spawn of it was Procession’s second single for Festival, “Listen”.
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In Melbourne in the late 60s, the likes of the James Taylor Move or Lobby Loyde’s Wild Cherries or Running, Jumping, Standing Still or Procession or Cam-Pact were lucky to cut the odd single, let alone an album. It is one of the tragedies and shortcomings in Australian rock history that acts like these, and the Purple Hearts, could not develop to the extent of recording albums. Procession’s first album of ’68 was a live one because as so many musicians have subsequently moaned, Festival was so parsimonious it made a tradition of putting out inadequate live albums simply because they were cheaper to produce than studio recordings.
By this time, Sydney and Brisbane were awash with American servicemen on R&R leave from Vietnam. It was a bit like WW2 all over again. The Americans always bought change. They always pumped up the local music scene and sex industry, and this time they bought with them the modern drug trade too. American organised crime arrived in Australia in the late 60s along with Kentucky Fried Chicken. In Sydney, in Kings Cross, the Whisky-a-Go-Go was jumping to the funky rock’n’soul of Max Merritt and the Meteors, Jeff St. John and Yama, and the Levi Smith Clefs, while just around the corner at the Mandala Theatre, the new head bands like Dr Kandy’s Third Eye, Tamam Shud, Tully and Nutwood Rug were fully tripping out. And it was the Sydney-based major labels that innovated the move of Australian rock onto album. In 1969, Tamam Shud recorded (live) a soundtrack for the Albie Falzon surf movie Evolution, and CBS leased the tapes to put out on album. EMI poached the Masters Apprentices from Astor and the La De Das from Philips and the two bands respectively delivered Masterpiece and the concept album The Happy Prince (this also an expensive flop). EMI also released debut albums by the Flying Circus and supergroup Axiom in 1969, both in a country-rock vein. |