Dig. David Nichols S.

women into it for sexual activities.⁶¹ This was only part of Humphrys’ hijinks:

      One sunny June day outside the loading bay, Gerry found an old had-it wooden recorder that some musician had turfed in the drain. He patiently repaired it with wire and sticky tape and played jazz on it. Immediately. ‘Far out, man!’ he said to me, and to my surprise he disrobed and got on the top of the rubbish cart and we wheeled him nude into the workshop.⁶²

      This story is both wonderful and somehow terrible, because it seems to mark the way in which Humphrys was exchanging his creative role for that of a mere showman. As we will see in chapter 8, he remained a figure in early 70s Melbourne before returning to Britain, more or less permanently, in 1977.

      TWO POP EXPOSÉS

      There were pop shows, and there were also shows about pop on television. At least two one-off productions from the mid to late 60s enlighten us about this phenomenon in great detail, and set the agenda for this chapter with their rapid montages of exotic cynicism and flamboyant glibness. One is the 1967 television pilot Approximately Panther, directed by Tony L. Lamb. It provides a perfect picture of mid-60s Australia and where it positioned itself as part of the world, and more particularly a portrait of Melbourne, ‘the Mecca of Australian music’ at this time according to Jim Keays.⁶³ Approximately Panther was founded on the vibe generated by the Melbourne-based music magazine Go-Set, though it pushed a little further than the ‘teens and twenties paper’ (of which more later). The program begins with an over-the-top montage of soldiers, people farewelling an ocean liner, a headline trumpeting ‘girl in space’; it then switches to footage of young people, Gerry Humphrys, the Rolling Stones, the edifice of Melbourne’s major railway station in Flinders Street, a violin on a chair, a guitar in a tree, an old car, a new car, a ticking clock, people in a club, and a pinball machine. The show’s host is typing at a table in a small room with books in the background. ‘I’m Douglas Panther,’ he announces, ‘Go-Set’s drunken reporter.’

      The show juggles the probably impossible task of delivering an exposé of 1960s youth while at the same time catering to the same youth. Lamb also flags various marketing possibilities for an Approximately Panther TV series, as Panther asks about the spending power of an eighteen-year-old and explores possibilities of cars, fashion and guitars. One of the strangest elements of the film is the inclusion of the Beatles’ clip for ‘Penny Lane’ with occasional and seemingly random bursts of teenage screaming on the soundtrack – another example of Australian ambivalence towards international pop success.

      We see Normie Rowe going to London, and the girls who saw him off at Essendon Airport; Panther tells the viewer that Melbourne has become Australia’s ‘teen mecca’, an excuse to segue into the Loved Ones’ ‘Everlovin’ Man’ being played by a 3AK DJ hamming it up in the studio and a montage of DJ faces with a monkey’s face thrown in. Panther is next seen atop a rubbish tip writing his genius work on a portable typewriter. The Loved Ones’ filmclip for ‘The Loved One’ follows, blended into footage of a DJ playing it on the radio and Gerry Humphrys’ excruciatingly poor miming covered up slightly by tree foliage in front of his face. We’re then given a brief tour of Melbourne ‘discotheques’ (pronounced ‘discotheek’ on the soundtrack), including the Garrison and the Thumpin’ Tum. The group Running Jumping Standing Still (with Andy Anderson, once of the Missing Links) is seen, while an unidentified person claims mysteriously on the soundtrack that ‘you can pick up girls, there’s always girls there . . . there are even some of them that are licensed.’ The film ends with footage of people at a party in a Victorian-era house drinking from the bottle and dancing to a stop-start pop song. Tellingly, if you want to see all this frenzied decadence as some kind of furious romp raging against the Vietnam war and the last flickering moments of innocent delight, a candle is burning down.

      The Snap and Crackle of Pop was an exposé in Sydney TV station ATN-7’s documentary series Seven Days. Broadcast in June 1968, it’s an hour-long report that reveals the kinds of resistance pop musicians faced in the 60s. Seven Days attacks on a number of fronts, shocked at Lobby Loyde’s Wild Cherries and their preference for improvisation, shocked at Max Merritt and the Meteors’ hair, shocked at how easy it is to film a woman’s sequined underpants when she is dancing and your camera is on the floor. It’s the usual mixture of prurience, squeamishness and jealousy. That said, it provides a multi-faceted overview of the pop scene at that moment in time, from the far-out to the very staid, and to that extent it seems truthful.

      A narrative thread that runs throughout the program is the story of a group, the Climax 5, who are temporarily under the wing of Pat Aulton, now transformed from the folk songwriter of early-60s Adelaide into a producer of quick and snappy 45s for Festival. Aulton is himself reasonably dismissive, if not of the Climax 5 themselves, at least of the pop process and his own ‘ears’ when it comes to picking a hit. The progress of the song is followed from two of the group’s members – Nick and Mick – playing it to both Aulton and Jack Arthur at Leeds Music. ‘We use a group sound for the teenyboppers . . . it’s not raucous and noisy, it’s just a happy little song,’ says Aulton.

      The Climax 5’s record ‘is one of the 200-odd records released in Australia last month’, our host, writer-director Lance Peters, tells us as he stands, looking slightly appalled, in Edels record shop. The Climax Five are just another of those pop groups with ‘kidney- or heart- or pelvis-shaped guitars . . . occasionally one of the members is a girl . . . she’s the one with the short hair.’ The groups are dressed by ‘that well-known tailor, St Vincent de Paul’ (a second-hand shop) and the music is ‘made up of 90 percent exploitation and 10 percent hallucination.’ The groups, Peters persists, are ‘motivated by such components as sexual frustration, parental neglect, war, despair and occasionally even talent.’

      ‘Individualism is out, collectivism is in’, according to Peters, and we see some brief footage of the appropriately named group Unknown Blues. The process, we are told, is to ‘buy a guitar, learn a few chords, write a few songs, and then try them out on a music publisher.’ In this scene, like many in the film, the camera performs a loving close-up on every participant’s cigarette.

      Flash to the Executives, at this stage a highly successful club group, and more loving camera work on their cigarettes. One year previously, we are told, an industrial designer named Harry Widmer made a bet he could promote a new group (an ‘unknown industrial product’, The Bulletin suggested),⁶⁴ and the fresh-faced youngsters we see before us are currently enjoying the outcome of this boast. ‘Every group that’s got a top record, we copy it,’ claims one band member. The Executives’ philosophy seems to be: ‘Doing so much material, you must eventually end up with material that’s your own’. The group toured the US in 1968.⁶⁵ Ten years later former Executive Ray Burton would confess that he didn’t really like the rest of the band ‘as people’. But, he noted, ‘it was a ticket to America, after all.’⁶⁶ The song ‘My Aim Is to Please You’ is the Executives’ greatest pop moment; much later, a version of the group would contribute the lively theme song to the soap opera The Young Doctors. Burton’s songwriting work is discussed in chapter 8.

      The Snap and Crackle of Pop shows us the Executives playing at Cronulla Surf Club in Sydney’s south, a venue run by their manager. A teenage dance, we are informed, brings them $150 a night; a one-night club date nets $200 and a school function $80. So the group make between $80 and $1800 a week, split – after deducting costs – between performers, manager and road manager. ‘It’s no bonanza’, we are told, ‘and popularity is a fickle mistress.’

      The film offers a midway proposition between the Climax 5 and the ultra-commercial Executives in the form of Doug Parkinson and the Questions, whose loud amps – ‘almost to distortion level’ – are clearly an issue for Peters. ‘You’ve got to have volume and punch and drive and a feel,’ comments Parkinson, ‘and transmit it to the audience.’ Another member of the Questions – who were, at this time, on the very brink of changing the name of their group to Doug Parkinson In Focus, following a court case over their name – suggests that ‘at the rate we’re going, about 90 percent of the pop musicians today are going to be deaf in five years, either from the band they’re