Dig. David Nichols S.

      Doug Ford was born in Casino, NSW (not far from Port Macquarie) and came to Sydney to attend the Radio and Television School, where he was hassled and eventually dismissed from his apprenticeship because of his long hair. John Jones approached him and ‘said they were reforming the Missing Links.’⁴ (In 1970, Ford claimed to have spent six months of 1965 at the Conservatorium of Music where he was ‘taught basic jazz’ in 1965 before he joined the Missing Links.)⁵ Ford recalls that the Links would go to extremes in their stage act, with outfits made from chaff bags dyed pink or red, with holes cut out for their arms and heads, hessian trousers and cowboy boots: ‘Nobody else was doing anything like that’.

      The Missing Links have a 13-month recording history: from March 1965 to April 1966. One single by the original line-up; four singles, a covers EP and an album by the second version. In mid 1965, the Links were signed to Philips, whose staff were clearly open to unusual sounds: it would soon be Pip Proud’s label too. Anderson remembers visiting their offices:

      I remember going in there one day after I’d had my first taste of grass . . . I squatted down – there was nowhere to sit, with albums on all the chairs in this guy’s office – so he sat at his desk and I squatted down on the rug. The next minute he was saying, ‘Are you all right?’ I was still in the squat position, but I’d fallen onto my back and I was staring up at him. People were looking into the office and he was looking down and going, ‘Are you all right?’ That might be the reason we only did one album for them!

      What is actually surprising – and possibly further evidence of Philips’s adventurousness during this brief period – is that the Missing Links got to make an album at all. This was a period in which many groups were denied the opportunity to produce an album until they had chalked up a number of chart successes with singles. Even a major live drawcard with chart successes, like Doug Parkinson In Focus, was not given this opportunity – and it was clear that group, unlike the Missing Links, had a large repertoire, thanks to their peerless songwriter/guitarist Billy Green. Add to this unusual situation the fact that various members of the Missing Links believe that Philips manufactured only small quantities (hundreds of copies) of the group’s releases, and it seems likely that Philips either did not know what it was doing, or was doing something other than trying to make a hit group out of the Missing Links.

      The Missing Links is an uneven album, with crazy covers ranging from Dylan (“On the Road Again”) to Chris Montez, off-the-cuff originals and a couple of R&B standards – and a backwards-played “Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut” for good measure, alongside an orthodox forwards version. Anderson sees the backwards song – which was released, improbably, over two sides of a single – as an attempt to recreate the improvisational insanity and unearthly quality of the Links live: “We heard the tape playing backwards as it rewound, and I said ‘That’s our sound, man, that’s what we sound like live! Release that!’ They said ‘You’ve got to be kidding’ and I said ‘That’s what people like!’ When we’d end up smashing instruments, all that shit.” Of the rest of the album, Anderson says:

      It was just microphones hanging from the roof of the studio. The fastest, loudest noise to get to the mike won. I think we sounded a hell of a lot better live, a lot gruntier and more menacing. Sometimes that sound comes through, but it was pretty primitive recording. Pretty basic.

      But we didn’t know we were doing an album! I know I wrote ‘Wild About You’ and ‘Speak No Evil’ at the time. ‘Driving Me Insane’, I always loved that song. When Hutch [drummer Baden Hutchens] brought it in he was like, ‘You sing it!’ and I was, ‘No, you sing it, man!’ And when you listen to his drumming . . . that was our sound. A lot happened on that track that was just like we were. Yeah, I loved that.

      ‘Some Kind of Fun’ is more or less done the way Chris Montez did it, just a bit rougher. It was just a matter of, ‘Oh, let’s put that down’ – I don’t even know if we thought we’d recorded it, because it didn’t take long to put something down. All of a sudden it was ‘That’s enough, we’ve got enough for an album.’

      Anderson understandably sees this as a pity because, as he remembers it, the band had more potential than could be translated to record:

      There was something happening musically in that band that was . . . you’d get carried away. We used to break things up and stuff, but it was contained within the music, it wasn’t a matter of [we’re] gonna run out and hurt someone . . .

      But it might have seemed quite scary. Like when you’re riding a motorbike, it’s not scary to you, but when you ride past someone really fast they go . . . ‘Shit!’ If you look across at someone else doing a hundred miles an hour, when you’re going the same speed, it doesn’t matter – you’re on the same wavelength. You can reach over and touch the other person.

      I didn’t smoke a lot or drink a lot onstage in those days, it was definitely the music . . . Oh, there were pills, the methedrine gets you going . . . but I just loved the music, and being free of those limits like ‘twelve bars and then back to the chorus,’ you know. I loved it, there was a real freedom going on.

      The Missing Links split for the last time in late 1966, because, Maggie Makeig claimed in Everybody’s, their ‘producers and managers all want to make them sound like Normie Rowe’.⁶ This seems unlikely, if only because it would have been impossible. Realising as so many did at this time that Sydney was not the place to do the things they were doing, Ford and Anderson relocated to Melbourne to start a band that was initially known as the New Missing Links and then the Running Jumping Standing Still.

      The Missing Links’ legend was revived early – appropriately, though, for a group that seemed bigger than the sum of its parts, this was not because of the activities of its former members. Ross Wilson, who had never made any bones about his garage-rock roots, was involved in the Missing Link record label with Keith Glass and David Pepperell in the mid 70s: the name was a direct reference to the group. Wilson also masterminded the soundtrack to Oz, Chris Löfvén’s ‘rock and roll road movie’, and arranged for the singer-turned-actor Graham Matters – he’d been a member of the Adderley Smith Blues Band in Melbourne – to sing the Missing Links’ ‘You’re Driving Me Insane’ for it. Meanwhile, unbeknown to almost anyone, Brisbane’s Saints had been playing ‘Wild About You’ in their live set since 1974.

      Individual Missing Links benefited little from this (particularly as a dogsbody at EMI listed the songwriting credit for the Saints’ record version of ‘Wild About You’ on their first album as ‘Unknown’). Former Links went on to seemingly mundane and ‘straight’ day jobs – aside from Anderson, who has become a well-known television actor, and Doug Ford, who joined the Masters Apprentices and, with Jim Keays, wrote some of their biggest hits.

      It is distinctly possible that the Missing Links remain so highly regarded and beloved largely because they were able to record an album and they took to the task of making it with devil-may-care gusto. Certainly, their outsider status was a major part of what Anderson and Ford thought they were about, as Anderson recalls:

      ‘Long haired poofters’ is what you’d get called . . . ‘animals.’ There was the sharpies, and in Melbourne there was the mods and whatever, surfers and mods and everyone hated bloody longhairs. It was pretty dangerous.

      It was fine during the day, walking round the city. Doug and I used to taunt people. One day we went to a department store and I pretended to be blind . . . He led me round and I’d pretend to speak this stupid language and he’d pretend to be translating for me. We had a lot of games. We weren’t exactly keeping a low profile.

      As much as the band may have been an anomaly, the Missing Links’ legacy has been pervasive over the intervening fifty years. As we shall see, many later groups similarly refused to keep a low profile – with often spectacular results.

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