WHAT’S BEEN DID AND WHAT’S BEEN HID
WHAT’S BEEN DID AND WHAT’S BEEN HID
A Narrative History of Australian Rock and Pop 1956 to the Present.
Interview by Allison O’Donoghue
Pics supplied by MGS.
What Michael George Smith doesn’t know about Australian music isn’t worth knowing. Big claim you might think. Not really. MGS has been in the music industry practically all his working life, from performing in bands like Adelaide band Scandal, (he is a native of SA) who had a hit with How Long (has this been going on) in the late ‘70s - to the surf band The Atlantics in Sydney, with many more incursions within the music industry in between. MGS has been here and there forever.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have known MGS for over 25 years. We met at street press paper, On The Street (OTS) and were both founding members of The Drum Media, which is now called, The Music. And MGS is still there tapping away, interviewing local and international artists and promoting up and coming garage bands. It’s safe to say he is in a prime position to collect information on the machinations of the Australian music industry.
The beauty about interviewing an old friend and colleague is you ask a question and get a monologue. Besides, I had him trapped in a car for 1½ hrs as we travel to Victor Harbour for the 60 birthday party for Laurie, the former roadie from Scandal. And for the first time since I’ve known Michael, I get to see him perform. What a treat!
MGS in action in Scandal.
So, what do you do when you accumulate a wealth of knowledge? You share it, of course. MGS has written what can only be described as the complete anthology of Australian rock n roll music from the 1950’s to present day. What started out in 1995 as a short essay on the state of the music industry grew into a behemoth, and pulling it altogether has been a labour of love. Eighteen years later, he has written four volumes and is onto his fifth. Every spare moment has been devoted to research and writing the anthology, and it just keeps growing ever bigger. The advantage of taking your time in gathering information is making the necessary amendments as musical legends and giants within the Australian industry drop off the musical perch. MGS pays homage to their contribution within the music industry as well as pull up old interviews to review anything he might have missed or seemingly wasn’t relevant then, but with the passage of time, has become very important.
MGS explores everything rock n roll, including independent record labels like the little known Alberts, who started out as a music publishing business and branched into a hit factory. They were responsible for putting Aussie bands on the world map by producing, recording and promoting the likes of: The Easybeats, Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, John Paul Young, The Angels, The Choir Boys, Rose Tattoo, and of course AC/DC. Way too many to mention. They made stars of producers Harry Vanda and George Young who produced hit after hit. Alberts are about to celebrate 50 years in the music industry and continue to produce stellar Australian music, like their latest triumph Goyte with his worldwide hit, Somebody I Use To Know.
There was no need for me to run a commentary or editorialise, I simply transcribed what MGS said, as he traversed many topics, on many related tangents. And we only scratched the surface. I doubt anyone has been in such a perfect position to record the complete history of Australian music as veteran music industry journalist Michael George Smith.
Michael with legends of the Australian music industry.
What inspired you to take on this venture?
MGS – To be perfectly honest, I thought that this was going to be a quick book and then I could get on with writing my novel. Essentially, I had written an essay, which was published in Overland, looking at the state of the music industry. A friend said that I should do something with this, the idea being to write a history of Australian rock n roll and document all the important things. I thought if I was going to do this properly then I had to give it some context and delve deep.
What is the meaning of the title?
MGS – The title comes from an old Donovan song, and I just thought it summed up how the history of Australian rock and pop has been perceived to date. Sure we laud various bands and what they’ve achieved, but there’s so much more that has been forgotten, even about the obvious, better known bands let alone the vast army of bands and artists that have all contributed to this extraordinarily rich and diverse musical legacy. The books become an attempt to uncover some of that – and of course once you start digging, there’s SO much that it’s got way out of hand and gone from a “quick” one volume exercise as I naively thought when I began, to a five or six volume encyclopaedic exercise that has taught me so much and hopefully shines a light on a lot of great music. And not so great - every country creates as much dross as gold, but you’d be surprised at some names that created dross in one line-up and gold in another!
Do you follow certain people, like who was in what band, who played where and with whom etc? Like Bonn Scott who started in The Spektors and then moved onto The Valentines in WA before joining Fraternity in SA and then of course, AC/DC?
MGS - In some cases, but it doesn’t really matter in the greater scheme of things. What was more important was how they got their sound, what was influencing them, how they evolved, and how far they actually got with their careers, because a lot of Australian music was released O/S that no one really knows about. The common wisdom is that all the independent labels arose in the late ‘80s early ‘90s as a consequence of punk and new wave. Not so. Australian music has always been about independent labels, whether it’s the big ones like Festival, but there were many others like Astor in Victoria.
ACDC. 1977.
Was that a surprise to find these little labels getting international recognition? Give me an example of the bands that flourished internationally.
MGS – Absolutely!When I was doing research into labels I discovered a plethora of little labels. A band like Masters & Apprentices is a good example, they got signed to Astor Records in Melbourne and that was by accident rather than design. They recorded a demo in Adelaide and sent it off to Astor who essentially cut, pressed and distributed the record. The first time Jim Keys and the rest of the band knew that they had a record deal was when Jim heard Undecided on the radio at the drive-in.
What? They didn’t tell them?
MGS - No, they didn’t. They didn’t formerly sign with Astor Records and yet they ended up having their first four hits through that particular label. Astor was a subsidiary of a Gramophone company, so it was just a tiny little label. And then you had other little independent labels like, Go Records and Commotion, which were record companies associated with television stations. They were closely linked to TV music programming. Reg Grundy for instance, who was better known as a producer but also had his own record label, RG Records who distributed fairly significant ‘60s acts. So there were lots. There was East in Melbourne, a tiny little recording company who recorded bands like The Loved Ones.
In Adelaide, there were heaps of Independent labels and recording studios like, Peppers, and Nationwide Records started off here. Sweet Peach who Fraternity signed to, which was Bonn Scott’s band before he joined AC/DC. The list goes on.
Did the Masters & Apprentices get royalties for their songs or were they ripped off?
MGS - Those early songs were written by the guitarist in the band and not by Jim, but no they didn’t get paid royalties but their touring fees went up. It does become murky at times, but they could make a lot of money touring.
You started your career as a musician in Adelaide in the ‘70s. What was the live music scene like back then? Were there a lot of music venues?
MGS - You could play six nights a week if you wanted. There were no shortages of venues. However, not quite as big as it was in the ‘60s where bands like Masters & Apprentices and The Twilights could play four times a night if they wanted to and they did, playing gigs all over Adelaide. It was a huge live scene in those days. My band Scandal did over 100 gigs in six months just in Adelaide alone. We were well and truly saturated until we signed with Mushroom Records and moved interstate. You played and played and played until your fingers were raw and that’s where you learnt how to play and where you learnt to develop your sound that ultimately defined you as a band and helped form an identity. If you’re lucky enough to have a few songwriters in the band you could develop original songs.
Adelaide was musically prolific at that time, did other States standout in regards to live music?
MGS - It would be safe to say every state had its own thriving live music scene but the most powerful city was Sydney, partly because this was where all the major record companies were located, but it was also where all the major television stations were based, at a time when music and television were interlinked.
The impact of Six O’Clock Rock with Johnny O’Keefe cannot be overstated. It was on the ABC, which meant he had a national audience. It’s what made him a national identity. Bandstand comes a long a little later and makes Col Joy a national identity. That’s the interesting thing, right throughout Australian rock history, until the last decade, television was right there along side music. Essentially, television and music were born at the same time in 1956 and up until the last decade, were significantly linked.
How much ground do you cover? People hopped from one band to another, so do you focus on the individual or the band?
MGS - Depends on whether they are presenting themselves as an individual or a band member. Johnny Young was in a band called Company, but in terms of his significance it was his solo career that you have to chronicle. What I do is look at where they came from, what the scene was like at the time, where the musical inspiration came from and the direction they were heading, and why they headed into that particular style etc. Then you’ve got the types of sounds that influenced them like the American or British sounds. It was pretty typical to record a song that was already a hit O/S that was inevitable because record companies had copyright to these songs and a deal with the publishers, so if they were successful songs O/S then they would get local artists to reproduce them.
Most people would be forgiven in thinking that bands always played in pubs but this was didn’t happen til much later. When and how did bands gravitate into the pub scene?
MGS - The dance halls were absolutely packed every weekend. The kids went nuts for live music. It wasn’t about sex, drugs and rock n roll that came later. It was all about rock n roll music, and especially not mum and dads music. It was all ages and it was held in dance halls, scout halls, town halls, and police clubs. The pub was where your mum and dad went. The kids went to the discothèque, which had nothing to do with disco. It was what dance halls were called in the UK and because we followed whatever America or England did we also called them discothèques, which were unlicensed. The agents at that time were booking crooners at the nightclubs but the kids weren’t interested, they wanted to dance. It wasn’t until the end of the ‘60s when bands started playing in pubs. Actually, Billy Thorpe was one of the instigators for playing in pubs, he convinced a pub in Melbourne to let him use it for a Saturday night gig, and guaranteed an audience, and it was a success, so all of a sudden publicans saw the dollars they could make and that’s when alcohol and live music merged.
Then the opposite happened - the oldies took over the dance halls and the youth took over the pubs. What a great swap. Thanks Billy Thorpe.
Michael was one of those lucky Ten Pound Pom’s who came to Adelaide in the ‘60s with his family and stayed in the Migrant Hostel in Smithfield for three weeks until his father got a job and found a house in Elizabeth, which quickly became a British suburb, named after the Queen, and where the likes of Jimmy Barnes and brother John Swan et el all grew up, formed bands and took Australian music world by storm.
What music were you listening to growing up in Adelaide?
MGS - I came to Australia from England in 1964, and I was listening to The Beatles and The Hollies bands like that, and being English, I was ridiculously Anglophile and thought all Australian music sucked. My first experience of Australian music was Johnny O’Keefe with Sing, Sing, Sing which was totally cabaret of course and the total antithesis of what I’d left in the UK which was Manfred Man, The Rolling Stones etc, the cutting edge of pop at the time from Top Of The Pops.
It must have been quite a musical culture shock for you?
MGS - Oh yeah, it was quite disastrous for me. I hated Australian music. To be honest, it took being in an Australian band to finally come to terms and accept Australian rock n roll for what it was.
And what is Australian rock n roll? Is there a definitive Australian sound? Is it the vernacular or the sound that separates our music? I mean, if you listen to the vernacular of AC/DC its very Australian. Or Ted Mulray with Jump In My Car, how Australian is that? How do you define Australian music?
MGS - Oh yeah, AC/DC were very Australian, which is funny coming from a couple of Scottish lads but then again they tuned into the vernacular very early on, but really it’s the sound. There is a sound, and it’s got to do with the way you mix the instruments. At the time it was a distillation of what was happening in the US and UK. British migrants were creating a lot of Australian music and the bias was towards the English sound, which tended to focus on the rhythm section, whereas the American sound was a lot softer, would you believe. There was something about the way the Americans mixed their records, for all that wall-of-sound stuff, strangely it was a softer sound. There’s something about the mix of the snare kick, bass drum, the bass guitar, and in particular the rhythm guitar and how it was emphasised that made it sound so different. The Easybeats sound is the rhythm guitar and the lead guitar with Stevie Wright’s amazing voice, but it starts with the sound. AC/DC, well that’s Malcolm and the guitar and that’s a lesson he got from George his older brother, which goes back to Chuck Berry.
Our sound is derivative and can be traced back to O/S influences, so what makes us unique then?
MGS – It’s how loud we played that separated us from the rest of the world. For instance - Richard Lush a producer from EMI at Abbey Rd, originally a tape operator for one of The Beatles albums saw a job going in Sydney for a producer so he applies and gets it, one of the first bands he records is Sherbet. Ultimately, he became the architect of the Sherbet sound, but the first session he ever did with them he couldn’t believe how bloody loud they were, this is back in 1972. Again, that’s another very distinctive Australian thing to record very loud. We like it loud. You don’t go in and try and build your sound, you go in with the sound you already want, blasting and reaching the sweet sound and it’s literally the volume that actually resonates with the instrument and gives you a certain sound. There’s a point where you reach the sweet spot, which is a volume thing. 90% of Australian musicians have been trying to reach the sweet spot through volume and then it’s a mix of the instruments. So you got two things that make the Australian sound, the way the instruments are mixed and the sweet spot.
In the early days a lot of Australian bands crashed and burned O/S. What weren’t they prepared for when they got there? Why couldn’t they make it?
MGS - The bands were prepared, by that I mean, well rehearsed and competent, but what they didn’t get was backup. They didn’t have the right backup from their record companies or their own management. The managers didn’t know the market place they were going into, and their record company were not prepared to give them support. Australian record companies weren’t looking at the big picture, they only saw the small picture.
They were too provincial. Is that because it was outside their realm of reality and they just couldn’t perceive they could be world players or were they just green?
MGS - They were as green as the rest of us. Management were green, the record companies were green, and we were all green and clueless. Local distributors were only designed to distribute international content for the mother labels in the US or UK. So they didn’t really know how the system worked or how it would benefit them in the long run. It was also the tyranny of distance. It took a long time for information to get here and vice versa. But it’s also taken a long time for the Australian industry to really understand how to be a world player.
Going back to the Masters & Apprentices, they took themselves to England. They won the Battle of the Sounds which got them a free trip to the UK for a couple of weeks work and contact with record companies blah, blah, but for some strange reason that never actually eventuated. Instead, they worked their butts off, saved up and took themselves to the UK, booked themselves into Abbey Rd and cut a record. They paid for it themselves. So again they were independent even though they were signed to EMI by then, who cut and pressed the record and distributed it over here but didn’t do any promotion for them O/S. And of course the English arm of EMI didn’t really know them from Adam, and therefore didn’t really spend any energy on them. As it happened, French radio picked up a couple of tracks and all of a sudden they got a bit of traction.
Which tracks?
MGS - I think it was Turn Up Your Radio, not sure off the top of my head. They didn’t have any infrastructure, they didn’t have decent management or booking agencies to get them work over there. So they came back in order to generate some more money to go back to England and try and build on that. The record starts getting noticed by other labels in the UK and Europe and they get an offer from the American label United Artists, which was prepared to give them a significant advance in the $1000’s to sign with them. So the guys thought they should pass it by EMI and see if they could match it. EMI said, “We’ve already given you $500 towards making the next record, what more do you want?” EMI fronted up another $500 and with that money, they cut what would be their last album, which was Panama Red that featured, It’s Because I Love you.
Again, it was a lack of vision, that ‘over there’ barrier. Panama Red was a huge hit album for them it should have done well O/, so what happened?
MGS – It was only big in Australia, nowhere else in the world, for the simple reason that they didn’t have any back up. If you’re going to have success O/S then you need a PR machine to put you on the map. It was a lost opportunity. That’s where bands like the Bee Gees were incredibly lucky when they met Robert Stigwood, a fellow expat Australian who owned the company set up by Brian Epstein. He went on to produce and promote them and they became megastars. They had the right support.
The Bee Gees were already famous in Australia from TV appearances, which bring us back to the link with music and TV. How important was that link?
MGS - Very important. In the UK you could cut a record and next thing you were on Top Of The Pops. Essentially, it was the same way that Countdown evolved. The music industry was based around the idea that you cut a record, perform on Countdown and you were virtually guaranteed success because it gave you maximum exposure. Everybody was watching Countdown.
Especially me. I lived in the county and we only had one TV channel, the ABC. I remember a little known program could GTK, a five or ten minute segment before the news that featured Australian music. Pre Countdown. I remember it clearly, B&W, grainy vision with terrible sound, but pure gold.
MGS - Oh yes, Getting To Know (GTK) I remember that show. What followed on from that was Countdown, which was also on the ABC. In the ‘70s Countdown helped to create a national touring circuit, and it didn’t matter where you were based, on the strength of an appearance on national TV they could tour Australia and fill venues. After Countdown basically fades away, so too does the national touring circuit. Then its resuscitated again by Double J in Sydney which then became Triple J national, then we suddenly had a viable touring circuit again, because kids all over the country could hear the record and when they popped up in their town or city, they were guaranteed an audience.
Have you noticed any overarching themes come through in your research?
MGS - The short sightedness of the local industry in relation to the international market is a recurring theme. A band called Kahvas Jute that no one remembers now, was a very powerful psychedelic rock band, they cut one album, Open Road in the ‘70s for Festival records, it did quite well but were never heard of again, they disappeared without a trace. But musicians pop up again in various line-ups like bass player Bob Daisley went on to play with everyone from Gary Moore to Ozzy Osbourne to Ritchie Blackmore. That’s also a recurring theme, bands disbanding, never to be heard of again. Bands are incredibly volatile. If you’re lucky you can get a group that can ride the wave of success, locally and internationally and survive as a unit, if they can manage their massive egos for the greater good, but it doesn’t always work out. By the time some bands get into the studio to make the second album its all but disintegrating.
Which era do you think had a seismic shift on the Australian music scene?
MGS - Every era impacted in different ways. You’ve got a series of things happening. In the1970s there was the rise of “serious” bands like Spectrum or Chain that made only albums. These bands weren’t looking at making singles or music for radio airplay, these were serious artists making albums. Spectrum is a classic example. They had a hit with I’ll Be Gone, a great, great song, but they resolutely refused to put that song on their first album because it wasn’t what they were about, they were about making albums not singles, which made life very difficult, because people were buying the album for that single. So they released it as a single then put out the album without the hit song. Which was heresy in those days.
That’s heresy nowadays. But they were probably following international trends when albums were all the rage. Interesting, we’ve come full circle because now it’s all about the single and not the album. People upload the song they want from iTunes and don’t have to buy the whole album, which might be crap. I’ve made that mistake plenty of times and wasted a lot of money in the process. I’m all for the album, but admit I’d rather just get the single first.
Have you noticed any identifiable Australian waves?
MGS - In terms of waves we tend to reflect international trends so no, there is no identifiably Australian waves to speak of. We tend to follow what’s happening in the UK or US, so you know, there was disco wave, new wave, new romantics etc. But you might be surprised to know that The Angels created a brief wave in Seattle, becoming a cult band just prior to Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. I’m sure all those guys went to see them and were influenced by their sound.
Wow, I didn’t know that. When was this?
In the late ‘80s bands like The Angels and Celibate Rifles developed a cult like following in Seattle and some West coast towns.
Well, that’s a wave. But haven’t we created our own International waves? What about INXS they must have created a ripple at least. They filled stadiums.
MGS - Yes and no. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones created waves and filled stadiums long before INXS, but they were one of the first Australian mainstream bands along side AC/DC to break through internationally in a huge way. But you could say The Beatles were the first real stadium band when they played Shay stadium in the Sates. The Beatles changed everything. If you watch the footage of the gig there’s a point where John Lennon leans over to talk to one of the guys in the band and says, “I can’t hear a fuckin thing. What’s the point?” Because they couldn’t be heard over the screaming. So until the technology improved they were always going to be drowned out by the audience, and because of that they had to build bigger PA’s so they could be heard.
Is that when the Marshall PA system came out?
MGS - Jim Marshall was a drummer and an electronic engineer who saw there was a need for an amplifier that allowed your instrument to be heard over the screaming. By the late ‘80s Australia was at the cutting edge of synthesised sound. The Fairlight synthesiser was built in Sydney and sold to people like Stevie Wonder.
I didn’t know that either. This interview could go on and on. MGS is the font of all knowledge when it comes to the music industry, but alas we’ve arrived at our destination. I watch as MGS sets up for the gig then proceeds to launch into Deep Purple’s - Smoke On The Water and its clear by the volume he’son a quest to find the sweet spot.
The complete anthology of Australian musical history will be published when he’s finally finished. Thus far he has covered 1955-1993 and is still going.
Volume 1 – 1955 - 1963
Volume 2 – 1964 - 1969
Volume 3 – 1970 - 1976
Volume 4 – 1977 - 1983
Volume 5 – 1985 - 1993
If you have any information that may assist MGS to fill in the gaps, or if he hasn’t got to you yet, you can contact him on 02-4782 2654 or email him on [email protected]
Extract from the SMH.
"The artist Victor Peralta, a Uruguayan Australian entered the 2012 Archibald with a portrait of Michael Smith. This is what the Sydney Morning Herald had to say: “A local exhibition of artworks that were rejected for the Archibald, Wynne and Selman art prizes has given fledging artists a chance at success.
The Real Refuse, which is currently in its 16 year, opened on Monday at Darlinghurst’s TAP Gallery. Peralta won the People’s Choice award at the Real Refuse back in 2010 for his portrait of Michael Smith, associate editor of The Drum Media. Ironically, this was the first painting ever done by the Katoomba based Peralta, who by day is a draftsman in the civil engineer field. The prize was a solo exhibition at the TAP Gallery where he exhibited 100 pieces and sold over half of those, raising money for the White Ribbon Project in the process."
