Dig. David Nichols S.

JAZZ, FOLK AND POP AROUND AUSTRALIA

      Those Young Modern readers who did see political change in the air may have thrilled to the words of local folk singer Paul Brand, who told the magazine:

      Life should be regarded as a comprehension of all the body can see and do. In suburbia, however, it seems man is content with married life, a family, and a home. They are in a rut – a great unthinking rut.’⁸

      Brand was a popular proposition in Adelaide in 1962. He released an LP, Feeling Folk Blues, and like many of his folk cohort he also sang trad jazz with a local band, Dick Frankel’s Jazz Disciples.⁹ His ‘only future plans’ in 1962 were ‘to learn all I can about jazz in any way possible, and to convey these feelings back to people.’¹⁰ When he played his own version of folk music, at the ‘beaty’¹¹ Catacombs Coffee Lounge in the tiny inner-eastern suburb of Hackney, for instance,

      There was virtually no sound from the audience – no conversation, no shuffling of feet, just an occasional clinking of a coffee cup. Occasionally the door leading from the street opened, and more people entered, quietly finding themselves a seat at the crowded tables. When he had finished, the applause was quite outstanding – exuberant and sustained.^12s

      Brand’s back and forth between jazz and folk might seem unusual today, but this pairing was a major drawcard for young Australians in the early 60s. The Brisbane Folk Centre at the Geographical Society Hall, with its ‘twelve largish tables’ and ‘dim lighting (candles)’, featured numerous acts playing a range of music from traditional songs to classical guitar; attendees also played chess or dominos or sang along with the performers.¹³ Evening events – such as singer Paul Marks’s shows with the Melbourne New Orleans Jazz Band – might involve a solo singer performing folk and blues songs to their own guitar accompaniment, and then a second set with the jazz band behind them. Marks, who worked as a hospital theatre orderly, a labourer and a postman, had begun Paul Marks’s Blues Band in 1956, and recorded for the Swaggie label in 1958.¹⁴

      As we will see, certain pop or rock groups, like the Seekers and the Loved Ones, would evolve from the Melbourne branch of this scene. One of the more unlikely success stories was that of Sydneysider Gary Shearston, who went from the protest folk scene of the 60s – and a commercial TV show – to a top ten hit in Britain in 1975 with a version of Cole Porter’s ‘I Get a Kick out of You’.¹⁵ Back in Adelaide at the dawn of the 60s, however, Paul Brand saw no value in striving for crossover between folk, pop and rock and roll; indeed, he was withering about what he (or perhaps Young Modern) called ‘r and r’, telling the magazine, ‘I fail to see how the average-minded person can absorb all this r and r, much less even try to appreciate it.’¹⁶ A similar attitude is expressed from a different angle by Christopher Koch’s fictional Brian Brady: ‘I just want to dig those old bush songs up and sing them, and travel the country. Pop music’s nothing but concocted crap’.¹⁷ The real folk singer Martyn Wyndham-Reade had a similar attitude, sympathising with people he was sure were ‘sick and tired of being belted over the head with rock and roll and the other garbage they hear.’¹⁸

      The contrast between jazz ‘beatniks’ and rock was plain to most, and jazz was seen as a more cultured pursuit, as one writer to TV Week, signing themselves ‘Intellectual’, suggested:

      You should go to a rock ’n’ roll dance and see some of the rough types that get there. Then you should go to a beatnik gathering. They are peaceful and intellectual. Perhaps their fashions are different, but weren’t rock ’n’ roll fashions also different when they were first introduced?¹⁹

      The Red Onions, from Melbourne, are a perfect example of a trad jazz band with youth appeal, a sense of humour, and an approach that would later seem to fit perfectly with mid-60s rock; indeed, a breakaway section of the group would go on to form the Loved Ones. The Red Onions’ star was Englishman Gerry Humphrys (also spelt Humphreys and Humphries), who was profiled thus in Young Modern:

      Clarinet . . . 22 years . . . shaved off his beard to a wigmaker, received 7/6, then bought a Modigliani postcard print, copied it, and sold it as an original for 15 gns, for which he promptly purchased a clarinet for 2/6 and an old pair of wellington boots. Likes . . . old faces and opportunity shops.²⁰

      Some of the content of this profile may be true, as indeed may be the assertion that tuba player Kim Lynch ‘was left an estate which included a tuba captured from the Comanches during the Battle of Agincourt.’²¹

       “And I’ll bet they waste all their time painting pictures and writing poetry.”

      Nigel Buesst’s film Gerry Humphrys – The Loved One, completed in 2000, included interviews with Humphrys (who by this time had returned to his native England, where his Australian fame meant nothing and where he opted not to use his musical talents) and with those who had witnessed his achievements. Buesst comments that Humphrys ‘entered our world, blew up a storm and seemingly disappeared.’²² Humphrys said he had relocated to Australia in his late teens because:

      I wasn’t getting on very well with my stepfather . . . My father was killed during the war, there was a certain amount of friction [at home] at the time . . . We used to receive regular food parcels after the war . . . Billie Bluegum was my favourite teddy bear . . . I was always in touch with Australia, very fond of it. April 1 1957, I left for Australia.²³

      Humphrys’ circle included Gordon Dobie, who remembered Humphrys as owning nothing but ‘the clothes he stood up in and his clarinet,’²⁴ and Adrian Rawlins, who reminisced about spending time with Humphrys in 1959 when ‘he’d only fairly recently arrived in Melbourne . . . Gerry seemed to me a typical kind of jazzo.’²⁵ Another informant on the Buesst film about Humphrys, Sue Ford, recalled a café called Reata which, true to the stereotype of this era, featured ‘glittering sort of candles in Chianti bottles’, where she listened to Humphrys’ ‘wonderful improvisations’ on clarinet.²⁶ Ross Hannaford, who would be an even bigger pop star than Humphrys within a decade as the guitarist in Daddy Cool, was ‘in love with the Red Onions’ and was lucky enough to find himself a day job assembling planet lamps with Humphrys (‘a very funny man’) and other band members.²⁷ The Red Onions Jazz Band played southern suburban Melbourne middle-class haunts such as Ormond RSL and Beaumaris Yacht Club (Humphrys was known to sleep on the beach at Beaumaris).²⁸ Humphrys was the band’s raconteur,²⁹ and while the group was promoted as New Orleans jazz, it also had a darker, Celtic or medieval tinge.³⁰ An unidentified interviewee in Buesst’s documentary tells us:

      There was a distinctive Melbourne bohemian push . . . they were true bohemians, they were folk singers, they were artists and musicians . . . there was a gallery in East St Kilda that had a party every week at midnight.

      Koch’s fictionalised assessment of the folk scene is typified by ‘the Loft’, whose atmosphere combines a nascent form of patriotism and identification with the working classes’ lot – presumably the province of a young middle-class clientele –with a faked nostalgia for the 19th century:

      Three storeys above the Darling Harbour docks, it really had been a grain loft, years ago. Gordon Cartwright, the middle-aged ex-carnival man who ran it, had leased the top floor of one of the old brick warehouses here to cash in on the folk phenomenon . . . A heavily symbolic sack of wheat hung near the stage. Nearby, in the western wall, a door opened onto space. Its old loading platform and beam-and-tackle were still suspended three floors above the lane, and an appropriate nineteenth century portscape glimmered out there, like Doré’s London: the lamps and stone mushrooms of the Pyrmont Bridge; the lights of wharves and ships.’³¹

      Posters of famous folk artists like the Seekers are to be found here (though their inclusion in this pen-picture may have been to assure any sceptical readers that