I tried hard to maintain our relationship with Dieter Heisig at Kinney Records, but in 1972 Germany didn’t rate much of a mention on the international music scene. We’d encountered problems because we’d chosen the name Sopwith Camel for our band, and were promptly threatened with legal action by a big American band who had beaten us to it. Bloody awful name, anyway!
After so many years as a defiant expat, I suddenly started getting homesick. I was reading the Australian newspapers at the British Consulate, and became enamoured with this iconic political giant named Gough Whitlam. I’d lived in self-imposed exile for several years because the Australia of my youth had been a cultural wasteland. I was becoming increasingly excited about Gough Whitlam’s brave new Australia. He really seemed to be hauling the place out of the dark ages.
I decided to return to London for Christmas, to be with Lois and all my English friends. I needed to talk to Lois about going home. She was living down in Kent; the snow, the house with the bay windows and the hazy streetlights in the dense darkness of an English twilight made it all look like a fairytale. I was having such a wonderful time I was tempted to give London one last shot. However, Lois thought that we should return to Australia. I headed home to Berlin to agonise over this.
I can’t remember what went wrong, but I was arrested at Dover and hauled off for deportation. I remember some pig of a customs officer completely dismantled my Gibson and left it in several pieces on the bench. My prized guitar! By now I’d had a gutful.
I was thrown into the brig of the cross-channel ferry with an aristocratic Austrian girl and we sailed for Calais. Oddly, this became the most romantic adventure of my life. There is something about being in a situation like this with a beautiful foreign girl—again, it’s very Casablanca. We started making love deep in the hold of the ferry and reached Calais in the middle of the night.
I’d phoned Volker about my dilemma, and he managed to leave a prepaid ticket for me at the station. I boarded the train with the Austrian princess (well, she was a princess to me), and we made love all the way to Marseilles. There was heavy snow that year, so the whole train was frosted over and had a very Agatha Christie feel to it. We parted ways in the south of France, pledging undying love.
I suddenly felt very alone. My Berlin residency and work permit had expired—I was a stateless refugee. The train to Germany was almost deserted. My precious guitar, my only possession, was in pieces. The Austrian girl had given me enough money for just a day or two. The train was hurtling through East Germany, the point furthest from Australia. There was a snowstorm raging; it must have been minus 30 degrees outside.
We approached the West Berlin border and I heard the East German border police board the train. They were dressed in uniforms that bore an uncanny resemblance to the old SS outfits, and came stomping down the corridor of the train in their jackboots, shouting. I really believed that this was it for me, the end of the road. The man in charge barged into my compartment.
‘Show me your papers!’ he barked at me in guttural German. He was a real bastard. It was like being interrogated by the Gestapo.
I decided to play the dumb Aussie abroad.
‘I can’t understand you,’ I said. ‘What are you saying?’
But he was no fool; he could see by my papers that I’d lived in Berlin for two years. Just when I thought I was about to be hauled off to Siberia forever, he exploded into laughter, speaking in a strong Aussie accent: ‘You dumb bastard—yer fucked, aren’t ya?’
I was in disbelief but persisted with my dumb Aussie act.
‘Cut the crap, arsehole,’ he said. ‘Mate, yer up shitcreek in a barbed wire canoe without paddles. No fuckin’ residency papers, eh?’
I found out that while he was born in Dresden, his family had emigrated to Moorabbin, where he’d lived for fifteen years. He spoke English with a perfect Melburnian accent. Crazy.
‘Yer so fuckin’ lucky you got me, arsehole. C’mon, I’ll take yer into the office and give you new papers, yer fuckwit.’
This was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. I was still reeling as he stamped my papers for another twelve months.
When I arrived back in Berlin, Volker was totally besotted with Andrea and their courtship had no place for me; three really was a crowd. Georg and Sabine remained in New York City. Siggi was now a part of a fairly heavy drug scene. I must say, this period of my life turned me off the culture of hard drugs.
Clearly, it was time for me to leave. Lois met me in Amsterdam, and we set sail on P & O’s Oriana, bound for the great south land. I’m glad I returned by ship: I revisited the Canary Islands, and Dakar on the westernmost tip of Africa.
I’ll be forever grateful that I was fortunate enough to have lived through those remarkable times in Europe. Having written it all down, it hardly seems real at all.
Lois and I arrived back in Australia in 1972 and for a time I moved in with her family in Chatswood. They were lovely people, but I needed my independence and began planning my next move. Alas, my long hair prohibited me from finding a job. This was a real culture shock; I had forgotten about Robert Menzies’ ultra conservative Australia. It was like a giant step back in time. The good news was that I had returned just a little too early. The influence of Whitlam was already quite strong; soon enough, there was no better place to live in the world than Australia.
One day, while on a job hunt, I passed the Phonogram Records offices in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst. I always carried a demo cassette of songs in my back pocket.
‘Why not?’ I figured, and went inside.
I asked to see their A&R man (as in artist and repertoire, the person who signs new talent), and was ushered into the office of a guy who listened to about three of my songs and immediately produced a record contract.
‘Take it home and read it,’ he suggested. ‘If you like it, come back tomorrow and we’ll sign a three-year deal.’
I was flabbergasted. I rode the train to Chatswood in a state of shock.
Despite the fact that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, and had no legal advice, I returned the next day and signed the contract.
Soon after, in mid-1972, I walked into the Sydney offices of music publisher Essex Music. There I met John Brommell, whose title was ‘professional manager’—essentially, he was the liaison between a songwriter and the administrator of their songs. A pretty damned essential person, especially as I was on my way to ‘turning pro’.
‘Brom’, who passed away in 2013 as I was writing this book, was one of the few music industry heavies who demonstrated an understanding and compassion towards local musicians. John had been a drummer in a successful group called The Cicadas; I think that explains a lot. The man was a legend. He also listened to my tape and loved it. He asked me about the Phonogram deal.
‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ an angry Brom told me. ‘You should sign with us at Essex and then I’ll get you out of this shitty deal with Phonogram.’
I was of course, very confused. I didn’t quite know what to do or who to believe. John’s boss, Barry Kimberly, scoffed at the idea of any sort of advance payment for me. John was so pissed off that he pulled $200 out of his own pocket.
‘Here,’ he insisted, ‘take this.’
There was something incredibly charming about this great big ocker. I wanted to trust him, and thank Christ I did! Against his boss’s wishes, John signed me to a two-year deal with Essex—and dealt with the Phonogram ‘problem’.
‘If Phonogram has any objections,’ John said down the phone, ‘then go ahead and sue us. Bye bye!’
John set up an appointment to see David Sinclair and record producer Richard Batchens at Festival Records, the label for such successful acts as Johnny O’Keefe and the Bee Gees. Billy Thorpe and pop stars Sherbet recorded for Infinity Records, part of the Festival empire. Sinclair and Batchens were a right couple of desperados. I was quite shocked at how much they were drinking when we met. I guess this was the beginning of my two decades of decadence.
We went to the corner pub near Festival HQ, which they’d christened the ‘Pyrmont Hilton’. They ridiculed me for being a wimp, but there was no way I could keep up with their alcohol intake. I was very nervous, and didn’t want to get drunk. I was starting to take my career very seriously and didn’t want to screw up.
For the second time in recent history, I was presented with a recording contract, and told to have a read before signing it. I still have that contract; looking back, Festival must have killed themselves laughing at the demands I eventually made. There is nothing in that contract about royalty payments or accounting or anything technical. I insisted on weird abstractions like spelling out the rules of play between myself and the producer, and vetoing who could and could not play on my records. Nothing about money. They signed off on my demands swiftly—and that was that. A record deal.
The stress on Richard Batchens must have been bloody awful; it was usually a terse environment in the studio. Every album I did with him—from 1973’s Prussian Blue to 1977’s Goodbye Tiger—felt like being locked in a bunker with a lot of very suspect bits of artillery. Whenever a bomb went off, it produced probably the fieriest sessions in the history of Australian recording.
I signed the Festival contract mainly because of the utter disappointment I felt when the Kinney deal fell through in Munich. I wasn’t going to muck around for another five years. As we all know, sometimes this is as good as it gets; I guess fate and destiny have a way of forcing your hand. To be fair, however, in 1972 Festival was probably the best company around. The staff was all getting on a bit, having been a major force in the early rock’n’roll days of Johnny O’Keefe. The building in Pyrmont, especially the studio, felt a bit dated—even the decor resembled some old black and white movie from the 1950s.
There’s been a myth that I had an acrimonious relationship with Festival but this was simply not true. What happened was that the ‘powers that used to be’ at Festival robbed me of several chances of international success, which I’ll get to in time. But the general staff at Festival were a wonderful bunch of loonies.
Sydney was rife with acoustic folk clubs in 1972, and I forced myself to perform as much as possible. This type of performance was totally different to playing in a loud rock band. It’s like standing naked in Wynyard railway station at peak hour; I was terrified.
There was a club in the cellar of the YMCA in Oxford Street, called PACT Folk. This is where I first met many of the local ‘folkies’ like Mike McLelland, Terry Hannigan and John J. Francis. Music identity Glenn A. Baker was managing an act called Paul Pulati; Glenn promoted folk concerts called ‘Woodsmoke and Oranges’. There was a tremendous sense of camaraderie at these gigs, and because I still looked a bit of a kid, the others watched out for me.
In order to cope with my stage fright, I used to drink way too much. Unfortunately my drinking was about as skilful as my finger picking on the guitar; most gigs ended up a mess. The Sydney folk scene was a bit of a fantasy, really; it was like being transported to a faux Greenwich Village in the 1960s.
I hung out with Terry Hannigan and sometimes crashed at his place in Chippendale. We’d drink a lot and sit around his kitchen singing each other’s songs, behaving like textbook beatniks. Terry had this unnerving habit: he’d fix you with a fiendish look when he’d sing his songs, staring right into your eyes. It was really off-putting. I’d soon meet the singer Jeff St John, who went on to have his own stellar career; he had a similar trait. I understood that this intensity was born of their passionate obsession with their music, but it didn’t make it any less irritating.
Sydney was thriving with the most weird and wonderful eccentrics. Singers Wendy Saddington and Leo de Castro—who recorded the first version of ‘Heading in the Right Direction’, later a big hit for Renée Geyer—were two of the most colourful characters on the local scene.
I remember more about Wendy herself than I do of her music. I was sent around to her ‘pad’ in Paddington to play some of my songs—her presence is something I’ll never forget. Her little abode seemed almost like a gypsy caravan, very cluttered and dark with lots of fascinating bric-a-brac scattered around. Without seeming unkind, she reminded me a little of Rosaleen Norton, the ‘witch of Kings Cross’, an artist and occultist. Wendy really had a startling presence.
Leo was not just eccentric, and by his own admission quite crazy, he also had a volatile temperament—the guy could be like a naked flame near an LP gas tanker. I say this affectionately, because Leo really is a very warm human being, and one hell of a singer. There’s much talk nowadays of ‘emotional quota’ and, believe me, Leo had excessive ‘EQ’. He would regularly appear at my gigs, very intoxicated, and we’d duet on the J.J. Cale song ‘Magnolia’ and would continue singing and playing until they were packing the bar stools on top of the beer-sodden tables.
The hippest venue in town was the Kirk Gallery, a derelict church in Surry Hills that had been transformed into a trendy folk club. The club played a big part in my early attempts at becoming a serious performer. I’d realised that artificial stimuli were counterproductive to my performance, so I was trying to get on stage sober and overcome my dreadful stage fright. This was good because I remember a lot more about the Kirk Gallery days than some other periods of my life and career!
There was a very strong and warm camaraderie between artist and audience. The artists’ room out the back was frequented by fantastic inner city hippie girls, all dressed in their ‘op shop’ hand me downs—they were as gentle and flowing as pixies in a children’s book. The usual performers at the Kirk were from a rather small clique who played various venues in Balmain and the Cross—there was a little folk circuit all within a 20-kilometre radius.
However, I was restless. I didn’t want to be a folkie. I wanted to be a rock singer. I can’t remember who sent me to audition for a jazz/rock band called Sun, but the audition was held in the legendary Yellow House in Potts Point, owned by renowned Sydney artist Martin Sharp and frequented by other celebrated artists. It was early 1973 and Sun were about to part ways with their singer, a woman called Renée Geyer, so somebody came up with this cockamamie idea that I should replace her. I confidently bullshitted my way through a bit of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman—both jazz greats—and tried to sing like a hybrid of rock-blues growler Captain Beefheart and jazzman Leontopolis Thomas. Amazingly, I got the gig.
Sun had an album with RCA records and were quite well known; they had aspirations of becoming some kind of Oz jazz all-stars. I played lots of gigs with Sun over the next few months—proof that I can sometimes fool all of the people all of the time. We were qu
ite big on the uni scene and to be fair, there was a certain validity to our music; in a ‘naive painter’ sense there were always some great creative ideas flying about when we played. But this was not my niche. I knew I had to get a rock’n’roll band of my own and hit the road.
Still sans band, I was introduced to established industry figures like Billy Thorpe and promoter Michael Chugg and started playing solo. In 1973 I played some supports to Thorpe and his band the Aztecs, and also one of the big pop acts of the day. ‘Thorpey’ and his fans intimidated the hell out of me, but it probably worked in my favour; the concerts became classic ‘David and Goliath’ scenarios.
I played alone on a beaten up acoustic guitar, and was so nervous I’d pee about twenty times before stage time. I couldn’t drink booze for fear of making an ass of myself, so my stage fright was at its worst. But I guess because I had very long, flowing hair and a gentle persona, the little girls loved me—or at least took pity on me. The audience knew what was waiting, anyway: Thorpey and the band’s stack of amplifiers that looked like the Berlin Wall. Billy played louder than any other human being before him (or after him for that matter). I always felt for the Aztecs—they looked like they were in the most excruciating agony from this gargantuan wall of sound. But the Aztecs weren’t just brash, they were the wildest musos I’d ever encountered. (Seriously, they make today’s pussy rock stars seem like bank tellers.)
I’ll never forget the last night of that tour. The poor sucker who’d promoted the tour attempted to impress Billy and the band with a lavish spread. Billy and the Aztecs stormed into the room and proceeded to trash everything: the furniture, the food, the booze, the carpet—they even had a food fight with some innocent bystanders. It was wild.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 6