I had been writing well, but became a little distracted by my studio work with INXS. It slowed down my songwriting, which was embarrassing because I had negotiated such an excellent deal with WEA and was expected to deliver a quality album.
Cold Chisel guitarist Ian Moss started coming around to my flat in Vaucluse and attempted to write with me, but these ‘sessions’ usually ended up as drinking binges with Mossy blazing away on guitar at 5 a.m. One day I went down to the communal washing line to apologise to my hard-working neighbours Helen and Bill. Helen was a schoolteacher, Bill an accountant clawing his way up the corporate ladder. I knew they woke up around 6 every morning.
I was apologising profusely when Bill stopped me.
‘Wasn’t that Ian Moss?’ he gushed.
‘Yes,’ I replied and started my apology all over again.
‘I’m honoured to be woken up by Mossy,’ Bill confessed.
I found out that Bill had courted his wife at the Bondi Lifesaver, and he hated having his soul sucked dry by the corporate world. He said my nuthouse was like an oasis of dreams. I lived in the flat in Vaucluse for about seven years and Bill and Helen were treated to an endless parade of my friends.
I was trying to write an epic ballad about the history of Bondi. Being a child of Bondi, the trams and stories about the famous eccentric Bea Miles and the images you’d see of the suburb were ingrained in my memory. I had tentatively titled the song ‘Bondondo Rondo’, in honour of a block of flats in North Bondi.
Back in LA, Michael Hegerty was playing with a band of Mexicans. After a wild night in Pasadena, Michael called me at 3 a.m. on Australia Day and started raving sentimentally about ‘the good ol’ days of Bondi and the Lifesaver’.
The very autobiographical ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ then came to life.
Having spent a great deal of time struggling with the original lyrics, the new, improved words poured out of me, thanks to Michael.
Mark Opitz and I originally thought it would be great if Cold Chisel agreed to be the band on my album. This made perfect sense; Mark was Jimmy Barnes’s best friend, and their A&R man and producer, and I’d been hanging out a lot with Ian Moss.
As fate would have it, however, Chisel scored the support on Ted Nugent’s American tour. I eventually persuaded Mark to let me have a go with INXS. They were definitely ‘flavour of the month’—‘The Loved One’ reached the Top 20 and hits followed with ‘Stay Young’ and ‘One Thing’—but they were a relatively untested unit in the studio.
However, Mark agreed to at least give it a trial run, and this part of Australian rock history was set in motion, pretty much by default. It also changed the entire artistic course of my career, and definitely made The Great Escape the interesting album that it is.
I was really pleased with quite a few songs on the album. ‘I Am an Island’ was written out of sheer stubborn tenacity. Hard rock songs are not really my forte, but I desperately needed an epic rock’n’roll blast to end my live sets. I laboured over that song for many weeks, sitting there with a primitive drum machine playing the feel over and over until I finally cracked the magic riff.
The lyric is my satirical take on the Darlinghurst art school set. I’d seen a piece of graffiti on a wall near the school; it read ‘No man is an island’. With perverse glee, I turned the whole thing around, taking a sardonic view of pseudo-intellectual plagiarists. Another song, which also took ages to come together, was ‘The Universal’.
But the most curious song on the album was ‘Flow in Motion’.
In early 1982 I was determined to start getting my spiritual house in order. I began buying books on Taoism, and began tai chi classes every week. Jon Farriss was living with a tai chi instructor, and Jimmy Barnes and Mossy were also very enamoured with all things Oriental, especially Taoist and Buddhist philosophy. ‘Flow in Motion’ was my creative response to this newfound philosophy.
When we came to record the song, Mark Opitz was having problems with his girlfriend and split for a couple of days, leaving Jon, bassist Garry Gary Beers and myself in Sydney’s Paradise Studios with Dave, the assistant engineer. We ran amok. We had food fights in the rec room upstairs and Garry stripped off to record nearly naked. I filmed the lot.
Madness aside, this was the most creatively free environment I’ve ever worked in. We would just sit around the studio and start playing when we felt like it and Dave would roll tape. ‘Flow in Motion’ was the result of wild experimentation and equally wild ideas. Jonnie was crucial, as was Ian Moss, who also joined us in the studio.
Also in Paradise Studios was the last manifestation of Sherbet, who were recording their final material. In an impetuous moment their guitarist Harvey James abandoned ship and joined my album and my band, Mossy by this time having left for the States. Harvey played most of the guitars with the studio band, until Mossy returned earlier than expected and added some fantastic parts of his own all over the record.
Paradise was like a music factory—Mark Opitz was producing both my album and a new Chisel album, while members of Chisel were playing with me. Jimmy Barnes sang backing vocals on ‘I Am an Island’ and Don Walker played on ‘I Fought the Law’. Within a couple of weeks of Mossy’s return my album was finished.
Mark Opitz proposed calling the album The Great Escape. At first I thought it was a little corny, and there was that Steve McQueen movie of the same name. The term was a throwaway line in ‘The Universal’; to me it was another term for dropping out of society. I thought it through and figured that if I compromised and went along with the proposed title, then I could ensure that the cover image reflected my real meaning, capture more of a Byron Bay-hippie vibe.
Philip Mortlock was the guy in charge of art and graphics, and I spent some idyllic weekends at his weekender in Kurrajong, kicking back while taking a plethora of photos with Roger Scott, all with a quasi-surreal feel. (Roger was married to Christine Hegerty.) We drifted for a while, not coming up with the perfect image. Mark started to apply some pressure and we decided that the cover image would be bright and colourful, not quite in synch with my original concept.
Again I thought it through. I’d spent much of the past decade arguing with my last record company, which hadn’t helped my career. I truly believed in the quality of my work, and wanted my songs to be heard by as many people as possible. Being belligerent about an album cover wasn’t going to help make this happen. Ultimately, I went along with everything the new record company wanted to do, much to their shock. The enfant terrible they’d heard about was suddenly Mr Nice Guy.
The people who worked at WEA Records in the early 1980s were, in my opinion, the best collection of people to ever work for an Australian record company. I truly respected them. The end result was that The Great Escape remains one of my biggest selling albums. The irony was that the record was sometimes much darker than even Dark Spaces, but clever marketing camouflaged this. The album reached gold status within a couple of months of its release in early 1982.
There was an interesting back-room drama. Cold Chisel had a band meeting and for whatever reason, their manager decided that Chisel’s musical contributions should be erased from the tapes and all mention of the band erased from the cover. But the cover had already been printed and the album manufactured—this was a huge heart-stopper for me.
Were it not for the intervention of WEA’s chairman Paul Turner (a gruff old bloke nicknamed The Dog), it would have been a disaster. A compromise was reached that Mossy, Jimmy and Don’s work would remain on the album but all mention of them would be erased from the album’s cover. I was obliged to keep this secret for some time, at least until Jimmy spilled the beans one night on Nightmoves.
I bumped into Mossy just after he’d read the Rolling Stone review of The Great Escape, which mistakenly gushed with praise for Harvey James’s guitar playing. Mossy was pretty grumpy that he’d never be credited with what we all feel is some of his best playing.
My own record done, I wanted to get started on the INXS album. I made it known that I needed Alex Vertikoff, the American engineer from Hearts on the Nightline. Chris Murphy was in partnership with Michael Browning (ex-manager of AC/DC) and together they’d formed Deluxe Records. Deluxe was a low-budget operation, quite a contrast to WEA’s spare-no-expense approach for The Great Escape. I foolishly agreed to $2000 in advance and $2000 on completion of the INXS album, but asked for a relatively high 3 per cent royalty.
I was obsessed with INXS and was beginning to spend more time on their project than promoting my own. We were going out a lot and partying; I revelled in their youthful decadence.
The first official session was at a pokey little rehearsal studio in the centre of Sydney. Michael Hutchence was fashionably late, and Andrew Farriss turned up with a cassette full of musical ideas. Listening to Andrew’s tape, I wondered how I was going to transform it into an album of songs. They were really just abstract vignettes.
While Andrew and I debated this, Jon started bashing away at the drums, then Tim joined in on guitar and the rest of the band started jamming. Michael appeared and began singing nonsensical words. I stopped talking to Andrew and stood there, astounded at how this song came pouring out of them. Soon enough, with just a little help from me, ‘Stay Young’ was born. Too easy!
Michael was living in Kirribilli with his girlfriend Vicky—a model, of course—and we would have our meetings there. At our first meeting, Hutch was having trouble with his broken down old tape player and asked me to fix it. I had a look, but it was too technical for me.
‘Sorry, mate, I can’t help you,’ I told him.
‘I thought you were a record producer!’ snorted Michael.
We all cracked up.
‘Michael,’ I had to ask, ‘what do you think a record producer actually does?’
I think Hutch had ‘record producer’ confused with ‘electronics engineer’.
I asked the band to bring a couple of favourite records around to Michael’s so we could have a think tank—they brought in everything from Roxy Music to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a sort of urban sound collage produced by Talking Head David Byrne and Brian Eno. Out of this emerged the INXS sound.
Alex Vertikoff arrived from LA and moved in with Diane and me. On the first day of recording at EMI Studios in Sydney we were all excited; the loonies were about to take over the asylum. INXS might have been penniless, but their attitude was fantastic.
Every day Alex and I bounded into work full of energy and busting to get into this INXS record. There was the occasional domestic bickering, which can happen with three brothers in a band—but even the bickering was fun!
I enjoyed playing producer and running a tight ship, and mostly kept everyone away from the temptation of drugs and alcohol. As it was, Andrew would get very grumpy about anyone being out of it in the studio.
As a trade-off for all this good behaviour, I promised a huge party night in the studio, with girlfriends, when we recorded the title track ‘Underneath the Colours’—but only if everyone would stay straight for the serious recording days. Everyone duly had a wild time, but we were all a bit too out of it and nearly didn’t get the track down at all.
I had two days left to record Michael’s vocals, over the course of a weekend. Michael was extremely nervous and couldn’t perform to anyone’s satisfaction, even though the building was empty. We tried everything. We ran an absurdly long cable to remote parts of the building—all over the place, in fact. I tried to become invisible, but he was freaking himself out. Nothing worked. I guess I’m one of the few people outside the band who witnessed firsthand just how emotionally and psychologically fragile Michael was. He simply had no confidence in his musical ability.
I pledged to Hutch that I’d tell Michael Browning we needed an extra $10,000 to hire Paradise Studios and record his vocals in the ‘live’ room, which had an ambience like a shower recess. It was the only place he felt comfortable.
Alex and I met with Browning at his office in North Sydney. As soon as I arrived, Browning took me aside and told me to abandon the INXS record and produce a heavy metal band for him instead. I declined. He duly launched into a rant about his credentials of working with AC/DC and that he knew a successful act when he heard it. His new heavy metal band was going to be world famous. And I was a loser for not recognising this.
‘Michael,’ I snapped back, ‘INXS are going to be the biggest band in the history of Australian music. You’re the one that doesn’t know shit from shinola.’
When he asked me to leave, I asked for the $10,000 to finish the INXS album. Browning picked up his phone and hurled it at my head. Luckily, his aim was off. I was unaware that he and Murphy had had a dramatic falling out the week before—that was the background to our ridiculous argument. Murphy intervened, and I got the $10,000, took Hutch into Paradise and successfully recorded his vocals and mixed the album. Underneath the Colours was ready to roll.
There was a real buzz happening around my album The Great Escape, which was high on the charts. I needed to get back on the road, my second home. I assembled a band around Harvey James, with Mark Meyer on drums, Cos Russo on keyboards and Mary Bradfield on vocals. Bassist Graham ‘Thommo’ Thompson had just left Broderick Smith’s band in Melbourne, and agreed to play with me, so I invited him to stay with us. We went into rehearsal and then straight into a video shoot for ‘I Am an Island’. I was madly busy.
At the insistence of WEA Records I also took on a new manager, another whose identity I’d prefer not to reveal. Although the tour was very successful in terms of audience numbers, we seemed to be losing money like a leaky bucket. I’d made the band a proprietary limited company, with each band member sharing equally in the profits, which, thanks to this guy, eventually left us $60,000 in the red.
We started the tour playing to full houses everywhere, but bleeding money. Chris Bastic (later the Mayor of Randwick) came on board as tour manager and he really saved my sanity, because this spiral of debt dragged on for months.
I was beginning to live very excessively because I couldn’t cope with the pressure of the debt. My grand plan for 1982 had been to buy a house, but that quickly went up in smoke.
The Great Escape tour wasn’t all bad. The band played with loads of soul and there were lots of funny moments. En route to Melbourne for the hundredth time, the highway patrol pulled us over. Chris Bastic was driving and the police ran a routine check on him. They found $2500 worth of outstanding fines in his name, and hauled him off to jail. We were in a no-horse town, seemingly a million miles from anywhere.
This led to a major blow-up with my new m
anager. We needed a hefty amount of money to bail Chris out, and were running late for that night’s show in Melbourne. It took hours to find the guy and talk him into going to his local police station in Melbourne to pay the bail. It was a pretty simple request but it took forever. We barely made the sold-out gig.
Still, life on the road had its pleasures. At the Old Melbourne Hotel, I was partying with a girl in my room and made three trips downstairs to ask one of the other band members if he wanted to join us. At 1 a.m., a very pretty girl wearing only a bath towel answered his door; at 3 a.m. a different but equally pretty girl, also wrapped in a towel, answered the door. At 5 a.m. a third girl answered the door; she was naked. I never did find out if he was entertaining all three at the same time.
Harvey James and I went AWOL in Byron Bay and awoke in a hippie commune, way off the beaten track. I’d passed out in the back seat of the rental car still fully clothed, wearing a heavy leather jacket, with my long hair dirty and matted. I found Harvey inside a shack with a number of hippies; they were still comatose. I wandered through dense scrub in a daze and came across the most idyllic mountain stream. I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the beautifully clean water. I didn’t care that it was freezing. It was like having God come down to bathe my sins away.
Then I heard noises. I looked around, and half a dozen beautiful, naked, giggling hippie girls plunged into the stream, with Harvey in hot pursuit. Harvey and I lay back in the water with these incredible women splashing around us and swore that we would never leave. And we very nearly did stay.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 15