Dig. David Nichols S.

started playing music in 1964:

      I bought a bass guitar from Suttons, a white Fender bass. I was working at Australian Motor Industries, getting parts for cars, and I started to take lessons in bass guitar. You always start with your friends. I was going out with fellow countrymen – all Maltese – and a guy had bought a beautiful set of drums, all sparkly, red and white, and I got the white bass. It was all colour and movement. So we just tried to play – all very unusual stuff, very weird.

      The band was called the Drollies: ‘Remember how we used to have little troll dolls on our pencils and they used to dangle off the F.J.s? They were the days, squire, I tell you.’¹⁷⁷

      We finally got seven songs together . . . we were the worst band in the world for all time . . . We were on first, supporting the Wild Colonials, Normie Rowe, Spinning Wheels, Lyn Randell, Bobby and Laurie and the Rondells and a band called the King Bees which I finally joined . . . It really would have been great if it had been 1971 or 1972. I reckon we sounded like Captain Beefheart doing Little Richard songs, which is fantastic. I had a tambourine. I had all the movements . . . We got things made, we all had blue suits with purple lining, it was just ridiculous – all for this one job. The band broke up after the job because we were so awful.¹⁷⁸

      Before and after Beatlemania, there were hundreds of groups around the country like the Drollies. Some were closer to getting a bite of the cherry than others, and the process of success and failure owed far more to chance than it did to ability, of course: John Finlay, manager of Channel Nine’s talent booking subsidiary Southern Talent Services, told Young Modern seven big names to watch out for in 1964. These included Johnny Ioannou, a Greek singer ‘not long in this country’; Tina Lawton, a folk singer; Toni Hendry and Janice Kaye; the Folk Three; and the Del Rios.¹⁷⁹ None of these acts made any great impact; neither did the Four Tones, whose ‘Tennessee Stomp’ was issued on Young Modern’s own record label. This was similar in concept to the label started by Everybody’s magazine in Sydney, though it predated it; the YM label was only distributed in Adelaide.¹⁸⁰

      FRESH, ORIGINAL, DYNAMIC AND DEFUNCT

      In 1964 Young Modern was trumpeting itself as ‘a fresh, original and dynamic magazine for youth – the teens AND twenties – who are the spearhead of our nation.’¹⁸¹ It announced its transition from fortnightly to weekly production in what appears to have been its final issue, in mid 1965.¹⁸² With hindsight, this was clearly the passing of a great institution. Had it survived a little longer it surely would have provided a valuable ongoing account of the rise of the many talented Adelaide and other Australian musicians of the late 60s. Along with the increasingly exciting local scene, Beatlemania – which Young Modern was belatedly beginning to notice –would probably have sustained it for years; the magazine’s publisher Ron Tremain was instrumental in bringing the Beatles to Adelaide. Adelaideans had been lucky in the early 60s, whether they realised it or not (some, like John Dowler, obviously did); they’d had their own magazine, which spoke directly to them on a number of important issues.

      It may seem a banal generalisation, but it is no less true for that: the 1960s were a time of enormous change for pop music and youth culture. Any objective observer at the time, lacking our hindsight, would surely have been convinced that rock and roll – that primitive, slightly silly and slapdash form – was a fad that would pass, albeit too slowly, and the serious and deep popular music of the 60s would be based in folk and jazz. There might even be some who still feel this was the case.

      The evidence assembled in this chapter shows that, even at this early stage in modern rock/pop music, Australian artists were not passive recipients of international sounds, and did not necessarily merely fabricate local versions of the work of artists from the northern hemisphere (that is, from Britain or North America). The ‘indigenous’ (Anglo working-class) element in folk music, the experimental aspects of jazz, the locally relevant aspect of surf music – these and other strains of popular music were all at work on local pop and rock and roll. Few Australians would have demanded only to hear local artists play local music, but equally few Australians would have denied the ability of Australian artists to entertain their own people. By various means, new bands and artists would come forth in the second half of the sixties to express youth and social issues, either directly and overtly, or simply in radical sounds and styles. As the Seekers, Frank Ifield and Rolf Harris had already done, some of them would go on to make a mark on the wider world; others would make their biggest mark in Australia itself.

      From The Legend: The Illustrated Story of the Bee Gees, written by David English and illustrated by Alex Brychta, ©1979 The Legend Company.

      3 I Feel As Good As If I Were Dead

       THE BEE GEES

      As the mammoth, five-author, bone-dry ‘biography’ published in 2000 attests, the Bee Gees’ story is much bigger than a short chapter in this book can or should even try to cover. In any case, the most revealing account of their career – for its vivacity and, for that matter, its semi-official status – remains The Legend, David English and Alex Brychta’s comic-strip version of the group’s story up to 1979, in which the Gibb brothers are depicted as animals: Barry as a lion, Robin a red setter and Maurice an (‘eager’) beaver. English, the president of their 1970s label, RSO, was close to the Gibbs both professionally and personally.

      There is no doubt, however, that the Bee Gees’ story is integral to the development of Australian pop and rock music. Even if it is accepted that the Bee Gees were not really an Australian group (‘British, of course,’ decrees English rock historian Vernon Joynson, a little too gleefully¹), their impact on the Australian scene was multifaceted and emphatic, as was its effect on them. The Bee Gees’ Australian period encompassed their most formative years; Australia allowed the brothers contact with the mainstream media, more time in small but functional studios than they would otherwise have enjoyed, and access to a range of artists through whom they developed their writing, performing and production skills. Such a wealth of experience would not have been readily available to them if they had continued to live in Manchester, let alone on the Isle of Man, where they were born. That the Gibbs recognised this is born out by the fact that in the early 70s they arranged for their younger brother Andy to work for an extended time on the Australian pop/tour circuit. They seem to have wanted him to replicate their own experience, probably as a prelude to his induction into the Bee Gees, though Andy’s successful solo career in the late 70s and his death a decade later ensured this did not take place.

      For the Gibbs, Australia was a proving ground. Barry Gibb said as much in 1969:

      The nine years’ struggle was the best thing that could happen to us. Our success now is probably due to the experience we gained throughout that period. If we had’ve had success in Australia right from the beginning we probably would not have developed our song-writing ability, and have just rested on our laurels.²

      It should also be borne in mind that the Bee Gees who had their first international hits in the late 60s – the band which included guitarist Vince Melouney and drummer Colin Peterson – were two-fifths Australian born, and every band member had spent most of his life in Australia. Peterson was a sufficiently integral member of the group that his presence as a Bee Gee no doubt kept the band intact after the temporary departure of Robin Gibb in 1969, and his later sacking probably precipitated, or perhaps merely confirmed, the demise of the original group.

      By the late 1950s the Gibb family were Brisbaneites (they apparently lived in Cribb Island, or in Redcliffe, or both of these lower-class suburbs) when the brothers’ performing career began in earnest. Initially, Barry was the most comfortable