The Pimples

The Autobiography of Rock Guitarist, Graham “Lizard” Boyle

Please note that this is a work of fiction and the characters depicted in it do not intentionally bear
any resemblance to any living person.
Occasionally I have mentioned an historical or actual existing person by name, but their part in
the story never took place, as this is completely and entirely fictional.

It is dedicated to all the musicians and popular music personalities from the Sixties up until the
present day.
You gave me a great life and I hope this valuable Pub Quiz resource gives something back.

By Graham Lees
2020
 I found my old photo albums last week. From the Sixties! There were some beauties in
there, and all.
They say that if you remember the Sixties, you weren't there, but I remember a lot of it,
and I have the photographic evidence, now, to prove it.
There were eleven big volumes, each containing a hundred pieces of card with six 150 x
100 mm photos on each side. These were better known as “six be fours” in that peculiar
Victorian pronunciation of the word “by”.
Twelve hundred photos in each of the first ten volumes while the eleventh had about
twenty pages blank at the back. About twelve thousand eight hundred glossy prints, by the time
you took into account those which had already been plundered to lend, give or barter (blackmail)
with.
And about half still had their negatives which had to be coaxed from the greaseproof
wrappers by soaking them in water.
A great find.
Anyway, I was down the boozer, the one near the tram depot at Preston, later in the week,
and Porky was there, as usual, propping up the bar. I mentioned to him that I'd found it, because I
knew he had a good scanner and I had some idea of putting together a bit of a slide show to give
the boys a bit of a laugh.
“Yair, well,” drawled Porky. “I bin finking abaht doin' a book. Abaht the band. Wiv these
photers an' your little bloody stories, coupled wiv my talent, I reckon we could do a good ‘un.”
Old Porky was in the band, too. In fact, he and I were together in the old Pimples before
Roger drowned and we split up. Together, we put the group back together piece by piece,
breaking some hearts and spirits on the way.
The Pimples were a good pub band. We had a following, plenty of bookings all over
Melbourne, but mostly in the middle bit where town is and everyone went to have a good time
on a Friday, Saturday or the sessions on Sunday. Wednesdays and Thursdays were a little
quieter, unless the Pimples were on stage.
The magazines said we were going somewhere, but it was a tough trip. We went through
band members at an alarming rate. We'd advertise in the paper for the position of whatever muso
we needed and get about fifty phone calls. Only about ten or twelve would actually front up, five
or six would be totally useless, two or three complete dickheads and occasionally one who'd
show some promise.
But after missing the first three band practices, we'd consign him to the “wants to be a big
star on stage without doing the practise" bin.
But eventually we added three more reliable blokes who didn't think it was going to be
easy, they were not God's gift to rock ‘n’ roll and women, and who were not starry eyed about
being in a group with Porky and Lizard from the Pimples.
 Porky's suggestion that we do a book sort of struck the right chord with me, from as soon
as he said it. I knew he hadn’t really been thinking about it, that he just said it on the spur of the
moment. He was always doing that.
One time we were coming down the Hume Highway from a series of gigs in Albury and
the Murray River towns, the car in front of our old Kombi hit a ‘roo.
That evening Porky wrote the song which later became our biggest hit “Roadkill". Tune,
words, chord progressions, guitar riff and a middle eight which I couldn't improve on. All Wally
had to do was decide how he was going to arrange the notes of the chords and plunk them off on
his Fender bass. And Barmy would do whatever we told him to on the drums.
The words were mainly “Roadkill, Roadkill, oooh-ooh, Roadkill”, so Bedlam wouldn’t have too
much difficulty with that.
But Porky's most creative bit of the whole song was the story about how he'd arrived at the
theme.
“Well, I was watchin' the news on the ABC an' there was a geezer what reckons he was
drivin’ over from Adelaide and he spotted these two chicks hitchin'. He had his missus in the car
or he would've offered them a lift. Anyway, when he got to Melbourne, a bloke what ‘e knew
told him two chicks were found near the border wiv their froats cut. They'd been fumbing up
from Sarf Ostraya. So I ‘ad this idea for a song in the back of my mind, in fact, I was finkin'
abart it when we saw that ‘roo go flyin' off that geezer's bumper.”
It was complete excremus bovinillius, but Porky insisted it was true.
He had a tendency to dress things up, gild the lily. Exaggerate. Tell porkies. But that wasn't
how he got his nickname. No, that came from a different source altogether, long before his
imaginative mind started creating songs which nearly every group and solo act in Australia
wanted. (I say “nearly” because we never got any applications from the Seekers and the
Easybeats made a couple of derogatory remarks about us. Both denied and unsubstantiated, but
although they became good mates with us, they always seemed to prefer their own
compositions.)
We were having breakfast at the Queens Hotel in Bendigo, where we'd done a show the
previous night which had been a wild success. The Pimples were really popping, as we used to
say, and there was a number of cute, available young girls who didn't seem to be expected home
that night. So we offered them room and board, as any young gentlemen should be expected to
do. All eight of them.
One of them was about fourteen, pretty juvey and very talkative.
“Have you got a cold or something?” she asked Porky. “Because when we were doing it
last night, you were grunting like a pig!”
“How do you know how pigs grunt when they're having sex?” I asked. “Have you knocked
off many in your short career?”
She went bright red and went back over to where the food was laid out on the sideboard.
She came back a few minutes later with three rashers of bacon and a gammon steak. We pissed
ourselves laughing.
 Anyhow, that is how he got his nickname.
By the way, I didn't take my camera along in those early days so I don't have any
photographs of that.
But I will admit that those early days were not all the slog and rejections that other groups
report. We had loosely formed up at school and by Year Twelve had already done a few gigs at
the Police and Citizens, the dances organised by old Father Boyle for the young people at the
parish and School Socials. If it hadn’t been for the law on “persons younger than the age of
eighteen” performing on a stage in a premises where “alcohol is sold, served or otherwise
delivered” we would have already been in the pubs.
By the way, Father Boyle, Porky and I were not in any way related, that we were able to
ascertain in those pre-Ancestry dot com days. But even until last month, people asked us if we
were. Not our good friend Father Boyle, he died back in 1997 and we played at his wake, much
to the Archbishop’s disgust. The fact that nearly everyone is now disgusted with the Archbishop
isn’t associated with this story, fortunately.
But more recently, a lot of people wondered whether we were related to Susan Boyle.
The only thing we have in common with that lady is that we were all born in the United
Kingdom, Porky in London, me in Portsmouth and Susan somewhere in the wee highlands of
Scotland. She sings beautifully and melodically, whereas no one ever accused us of that. But it
never stopped anyone asking.
Porky used to say he and I were separated at birth and that Susan was the daughter of our
cousin. And one dim reporter actually published the story, not checking his facts which every
journalist is supposed to do. And it is an easy feat, what with Google and all the databases
available, least of all the aforementioned Ancestry dot com.
But other than his dad and mine both served their country during World War Two, we had
no connections. His dad was in the Royal Fusiliers, London Division and mine was in the Royal
Navy aboard destroyers until they were both captured in 1942. His dad was captured at Salerno
and taken to Silesia. My dad had his ship torpedoed in the Atlantic convoy and hauled from the
water by some Canadians, who in turn, were sunk by a German ship and the naval personnel
taken back to the Fatherland to serve out their war near Munich.
Just background. To cut a long story short, we were not even likely to be connected. Not as
Siamese twins or by any other familial ties. Just two better-than-average students at North
Preston Tech with a shared love of Chuck Berry’s music.
And we have stayed best mates ever since.
Also in the original Pimples were my cousin Archie and a Croatian boy called Roger
Zitnanski. So we called ourselves “Three Boils and a Zit” but the kids in or class soon changed
that to The Pimples.
Archie was not surnamed Boyle, he was on my Mother’s side, a Perth family called
Forrest, not related to anyone famous like John, Alexander or Twiggy. But he adopted the name
as we thought it would get a few laughs.
 And just as we were making it big in a post-Tech College world, with the promise of a
record deal and months of work piling up, Roger fell out of his uncle’s yacht on Port Phillip Bay
and his body was recovered two days later.
He and Archie had been inseparable at school. A couple of months after Roger died, my
cousin joined the Army as an officer cadet, just before the first cadre of instructors were shipped
off to Vietnam.
Within a year, he graduated, rose rapidly to the rank of major and received a bravery award
defending Bien Hoa airbase during the Tet Offensive.
After he was discharged in 1988, he came and saw me about rejoining the group, but his
tastes and the music we were playing then were vastly different and he joined a jazz quartet as
drummer.
So in 1963, two Boyles, minus a Zit and a Forrest set about reviving the group. It wasn’t
hard getting work. The Beatles had just hit the scene and most rock’n’roll in Australia was
Johnny O’Keeffe, Col Joye, the Joy Boys and Little Patty. All from Sydney.
We were in Melbourne, and determined that until we had a presentable line-up, that was
were we going to stay.
We knew the kids, their tastes, the influential people in the industry and the geography.
They wanted rock’n’roll but they didn’t want the groups trying to invade us from the north. Billy
Thorpe, Ray Brown, the Easybeats, the Atlantics and all that stompie-wompie-real-gone-surfer
music!
The hard thing was finding musicians who were halfway decent, and who fitted in to were
we were determined to go.
Most of the applicants, as I said, were ruled out immediately. Students who only knew
three chords, couldn’t keep up a steady beat for a whole song, who were prone to silliness on
account of drinking too much or smoking shit. Others who kept ringing to say they couldn’t
make it to practice but would definitely be there next time. And who would repeat the exercise
before the said “next time.”
There were a few who couldn’t play an instrument but insisted they were fabulous singers,
had great rhythm and could play drums. These nearly all turned out to be tone deaf, couldn’t
count the beat or had St Vitus Dance and just went crazy when a chart was placed in front of
them.
But there were a few who were acceptable, mostly older guys who wanted things done
exactly as their former groups had done them. These fell into two categories, as well.
The first group tried to treat us like we were kids and didn’t know what we were doing,
although our track record was already more impressive than theirs. They changed tunes, lyrics
and tempos to better suit them, and were sleaze balls who treated and spoke to our fans as though
they were dirt bags.
The second group were the religious nuts. Both the Christian kind or the zealous types who
wanted to do only songs which fitted into their niche. While they had the ability and versatility to
do the stuff we were playing, they would fight actively against our choice of songs, our lifestyle
and the venues we had already contracted to.
At last, one warm November day, two lads came into my Mum’s lounge, sucking Passiona
from bottles.
“Barmy. I play drums. I couldn’t bring my set on the tram, so I hope you have something
for me to play here. And this is Wally, me mate. He don’t say much, but he’ll frighten you with
his skill on the Fender Bass.”
Wally grinned cheekily and I noticed a glimpse of intelligence when he shook his hair and
I could see his eyes. I immediately like him. I introduced myself as Lizard, but added that my
given name was Graham.
“Me name’s really Ken. Ken Waltham. Wally’s me nickname. For obvious reasons.”
“Nah, I don’t get it!” Porky trying to be an arse, as usual. “If yer name’s Ken, then where
d’yuh get Wally from?”
“Take no notice of Porky. He’s trying to be a boofhead, but he can’t even manage that
properly.”
Wally looked at me, then Porky.
“Porky? Then your name must be something like Gavin or Gareth. Or Glenn! That’s it, I
bet it’s Glenn!”
“Ow’d you know that?” Porky was gobsmacked.
“It said it so in the ad: Phone Graham or Glenn Boyle. If he’s Graham, then you must be
Glenn!”
Porky looked suitably abashed.
“And my mate’s Barry Layter, but when he signed his name at the employment office, the
girl thought he had written Barmy. So it kind of stuck.”
Barmy was tooling with the drum set in the corner which Archie had sold me for ten quid.
“Are youse two brothers, then?”
This was not the first time we had been asked that, not by the power of ten to the fifteenth
power, but it was the first time Porky made the Siamese twin remark.
Anyway, as they were leaving, Porky said the usual Melbourne farewell.
“See you later.”
“ I prefer to be called Barmy. Layter’s me Dad’s name!”
We knew they were in, then. Not only because they were the best of all our auditioners, but
because they had our daft senses of humour. They could give and take everything we handed out.
 There was never a time that I can remember being on the bones of my arse. Porky was the
same. Our parents, while not being wealthy, were middle class Australian, hardworking,
Christian, honest people, like everyone was in those days.
Except the aborigines. They were always different, excluded from everything, even
statistics which said that everyone in Australia was middle class, hardworking, Christian and
honest.
There were always those who bucked the trend, mostly New Australians. Not Western
European New Australians, like Poms, Micks, Frogs, Krauts, Cheeseheads and Dagoes. The
really foreign ones like Indians, Lebanese and Chinese who’d been here a long time and even the
White Australian Policy had let slip under the radar.
These were all viewed suspiciously as being lower class, dishonest and Hindu, Muslim or
Buddhist. Not that anyone had ever observed them behaving in any lower class, dishonest way.
But they weren’t Christians so they had to be those sorts of sinners who stole, lied, beat their
wives and children and probably even drank their bathwater!
But, that being aside for now, our folks were all pretty good citizens. Worked hard all day,
had a beer during the six o’clock swill on the way home from the office, shop or factory, went to
the footy or races on Saturday, while their wives stayed home, cleaned the house, did the
shopping and prepared delicious, colourless meals, cooked to the limit of their lives and
nutritional value, and always very wet from not straining the cabbage or sprouts properly.
And they had surplus cash. Enough to buy a television set, a Hoover and a Simpson or a
Pope washing machine. And a Victa mower and a Holden or Ford motor car. (My father had an
Austin A40 but he had the excuse of being a Pom. Porky’s family had a Hillman Husky. Same
reason.)
No one we knew was filthy rich, even Dad’s boss at the radio station, who always made
sure all his workers were paid and his bills settled before taking out his own salary.
And he once told me, when I was about nine, that the word “salary” came from the same
derivative as the word “salt” because at some stage in English history, salt was more valuable
than gold and people used to accept it in lieu of wages.
I never knew whether he was dinkum or pulling my leg, but I have retained that bit of
information, unverified and undisputed, until this very day. One day I will Google it, just to find
out for sure. Although why I should doubt the word of such a paragon of virtue is beyond me!
I do know that he used to slip the occasional one to his secretary and give her a fiver more
than he paid his announcers.
Anyway, Dad wasn’t an announcer. He was a book keeper, as they were called then. An
accountant. Which sounds slightly less colourful these days than “book keeper” did then. And he
got a decent wage which kept us in little luxuries like a holiday at Lakes Entrance each year, a
brand new Australian made Maton guitar and the aforementioned imported English car.
And my mother wasn’t the stereotypical 50s-60s mother depicted in television sitcoms like
Happy Days. Although she had a passing resemblance to Marion Ross who plays the
stereotypical 50s-60s mother, Marion Cunningham, she was more like that mother in Family
Ties who is a university degreed practitioner in everything from Architecture to solving all the
problems in her family. Her son’s acquisitive nature, her husband’s bland stupidity, her younger
daughter’s alarming tendency to tomboyishness and her vacuous elder daughter’s obsessive
attitude to her hair, fashion, moronic boyfriends and other people’s affaires de coeur.
But my mother had a normal, functioning, hardworking, Christian and honest family who
didn’t follow the stockmarket trends, the fashion and gossip columns or the fixtures list for the
NFL. She did, however have another similarity: her husband worked for a radio station.
But Mum worked in the purchasing department of a large, inner-Melbourne department
store, mainly dealing in fashion, perfumery, sports equipment and musical instruments. Oh, and
other odds and ends like kitchen and dining ware, furniture, garden tools, toys, window dressings
and for the six months of winter, Christmas decorations.
You see, for those of you to whom Australia is a complete mystery, Australia has its
Christmas in the middle of summer. We spell summer with a lower-case “s” here, too. Although
it is actually a proper noun, we have decided to do this so it won’t get confused with other
calendar events such as “Wednesday” “October”, “Easter” and the most important, “Melbourne
Cup Day”.
The only time it is permissible to spell summer with a capital is if it is used as an adjective,
such as “Summer Fashions”. The same goes for winter and autumn (which we don’t refer to as
“Fall” as the trees generally are evergreen and don’t shed their leaves except into the rain gutters
and tram tracks).
Spring, as a season, gets capitalised when it is used an adjective, but also when it is the first
word in the sentence.
But enough of Australia’s calendar conventions.
Mum’s Christmas decoration purchases were made in winter to give the stores and homes
and offices in Melbourne plenty of time to buy them and hang them before the compulsory
Christmasisation in early October. Also, as most of them were bought from England, their
stocktaking could not take place until well into April, when their decorations actually came
down!
My Dad used to say his Aunty Dora’s tinsel and paper chains stayed up until August Bank
Holiday in her home in Weymouth, but Mum used to say “Stop it, Len!” when he said that,
which was at least three times a year.
She also used to say “Concentrate! Focus on the subject, and for God’s sake, count!”
This was when she was teaching me the piano. Her paying students got the same directive,
minus the very mild blasphemy.
Yes. Mum was a music teacher, and a very good one. Nearly all the kids from Coburg,
Reservoir, Heidelberg and Preston who aspired to be musicians, trained with either Mum or Mrs
Gum, her good friend and former band colleague. They were known collectively as the Gum-
Boyle School of Music.
Needless to say, she taught me, Porky and Roger, while Mrs Gum’s husband taught Archie
to play percussion instruments, including the drum-kit and a wide range of instruments which
most people collectively call the xylophone. These are a series of resonators made of metal,
wood or other compounds and are struck with sticks. They include the already-mentioned
xylophone, the marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel (called “chimes” in Australia and Britain
because it was soon after the Second World War and the German name was a bit too obvious for
the sensitive Commonwealth citizens.)
When Archie did a number on his marimba, I would invariably get behind the Billy Hydes
and Porky would revert to rhythm or second guitar.
We were versatile to say the least and we really missed Archie after the recruitment boys
got him.
Being a pianist as well as rhythm guitarist, I had a go on Archie’s marimba, but those little
hammers never seemed to go where I intended. Besides, Archie could hold two sticks in each
hand which gave a fuller sound, but for me, the intervals always seemed to be a bit short or wide,
producing what is technically termed in Australia “a clam!” So I took the up the “Wuss” method.
Using one hammer in my right hand and one in my left. Not the same.
After the band reformed, we found that the only instrument, other than the drums, that
Barmy could play was the Irish pipes, and we seldom found any need for that particular type of
sound. He had learned to play them in the Boy’s Brigade where they had a pipe and drum band,
organised by Father Boyle, who was notoriously ecumenical to go with his Gaelicness.
But he could get vocal harmonies which soared. And plunged and swirled. And lots of
places in between, like shallow duck-dive and the merest wriggle. In a few weeks, he was doing
most of our lead vocals, except where the song needed variations on the theme, in which case
Porky or I would front the microphone while Barmy carried on like a pork chop on the twiddly
bits.
Anyway, enough of the distractions.
I was telling you about the photo albums, in case you forgot.
Dad had at last agreed to go into an aged person’s facility and I was cleaning out his
garden shed. I found a mandolin which looked like it had only been strung a few months ago and
four hundred science fiction books from the sixties. They had been science fiction books in the
sixties, but now the silverfish or some other paper-loving bugs had chewed their way through the
text pages, leaving only that awful, foul tasting four-colour process ink and glossy cardboard
cover stock, which even Lepisma saccharina discard.
There were cartons of sheet music, also similarly devoured by these hungry little bugs.
Melbourne insects must have gathered for regular musical evenings while the more imaginative
among them enjoyed some fantasy and space travel. All in Dad’s shed.
The reason why the photo albums were still intact was that they had been put in giant
Tupperware containers. You know, the kind you buy in Bunnings with the tight lids which break
your fingernails when you try to remove.
It is a shame that the other paper wasn’t stored in a similar fashion as they would have
brought thousands of dollars in a a collectors fair or the antique shops in Bleak City. But Mum
had probably not known about the appetites of Melbourne’s paper-eating population or the
invention of insect repellent strips and the effect of a damp, humid climate on perishables.
The mandolin, on reflection, must have been a very recent addition to the shed, as there
were none of the telltale little mounds or holes made by termites, borers, woodworm or white
ants. A quick check of Leonard Joel’s web pages put the value at between $1,000 to $25,000, so
that is a workable figure for me to go on. The half devoured receipt told me that it was bought
for eleven pounds, two and six in 1958, from Theo’s Music, in Stirling Street, Perth.
It was still in it’s case, which showed little sign of wear and apart from a lot of dust, added
to the value considerably. From $1,035 to $25,035, probably!
In the accessories compartment were an array of tortoiseshell flat plectrums, metal finger
and thumb picks and the aforementioned paper receipt for eleven pounds two and six.
I mentioned the mandolin and the sheet music to Dad on my twice-weekly visit to the aged
persons home, but he was a bit vague about them.
“I think they were your mother’s. Or Uncle Stan’s, if they came from Perth. Anyway she’s
gone now and probably won’t need it anymore. Probably organising a harp orchestra or
something where she is.”
I told him about the photos, too, and he looked pleased.
“Yes, you always wanted to be a musician, but I am glad you got a real profession as a
photographer. There’s a lot of money to be made in photography. Weddings, fashion, tourism
and on the beaches at St Kilda and Brighton. You’ve done alright out of it, haven’t you?”
I was going to say that I made music my carer, but he hadn’t a clue. He would have argued
with me and gone all surly. Dementia had just got a hold of him, but prior to that, he was a fine,
loving gentleman who looked after his wife, my mother, during her long, teminal illness. And
when she passed on, he seemed to relax, lose his grip and just let nature take its course. He was
pushing 98!
I know he missed her badly and believed that one day he would be able to sit in his
favourite heavenly armchair and listen to her sing The Andrews Sisters, Vera Lynn and Gracie
Fields songs while accompanying herself on the celestial piano.
They whiled away many evenings like this while she was still with us. And then they
would have a cup of Ovaltine and go to bed. He always gave her a goodnight kiss, right up until
the night before she died.
I am sure that if he is right after all, the practise will continue in their eternal music room.
“Bring them in. You had some good ones there. I often used to browse through them, down
in my shed.”
Pardon? Most of them were of band members and young ladies in a state of partial or
complete undress doing things Dad and Mum would never have construed as having had
anything to do with sex, and which even I found difficult to believe, much less perform.
Dad must have started browsing from the most recent when our love lives became more
conservative and less imaginative! and unphotographed. Those earlier snaps, particularly the Box
Brownie ones, would have nearly singed his fingers. Just as well I had my own darkroom. The
woman at the chemist shop would have refuse to print them. Or made a set for herself as well!
 But you never bought this book to learn about the war-time generation growing old. You
bought it to read all the juicy bits about a bunch of early baby-boomers, their exploits in the
hormone-driven sixties, the peace protests of the seventies, the money-grabbing eighties, the
money grabbing nineties, the new century and their eventual demise into old age, still in their
floral print shirts, dirty sandals, threadbare jeans and long, mangy, thinning hair.
Well, I presume you did, so I will continue with the story where I left it in 1963, with
Roger drowning, Archie joining the Armed Forces and Barmy and Wally becoming band
members.
By the way, although we have had the same line up for over fifty five years now, Porky
and I still refer to Barmy and Wally as the “new guys”. Bedlam will always be “The Young
Bloke” even though he is only fifteen months younger than me and a year younger than Barmy.
Roger still lives on in our memory and Archie often comes along to our gigs, and sits there
with Mark Holden, Ross Ryan and Doug Ashdown, reliving those heady days of the sixties and
seventies. He lives just up the road from Red Symons and the two of them sometimes drive up
together in the same car to listen to us and the other relics of the time that beat was king in
Melbourne.
So I suppose I had better explain how Bedlam got to join us.
We were at the indoor pool in Brunswick, trying to keep ourselves fit, despite all the fish
and chips, beer and Choc Wedges. Barmy was doing bombies off the high board and Wally and I
were doing laps. Porkie was in the gym because two very attractive young ladies who looked
promising had just entered, with towels around their necks, tight little shorts and almost non-
existent crop tops.
In the sixties, women generally didn’t enter the free weights room of a gym, partly because
of the smell, and partly because they would never have gotten to lift any weights, other than to
put them back on the racks.
The muscle-bound misfits who took them off the racks to heft them about and show off,
never put them back but just dropped them when and where they finished with them. If no
women entered during the day, it took the fitness instructors up to an hour to replace them.
That was, once the budding Arnold Schwarzeneggers had gone home to where their mums
had just finished tidying their bedrooms and putting the copies of “Men’s Health” and “Muscle
and Fitness” back into the bookshelves.
There was a young fellow, probably a couple of years younger than us, sitting in a corner,
playing Woodie Guthrie songs on a battered nylon-stringed guitar. His playing was crap, but
when he started singing “Old Stewball”, he had a rare quality in his voice: he could actually sing!
I mean, real singing! Like with vibrato, holding the tune and not wavering off-key like
most buskers around Melbourne. Wally and I dried the water out of our ears and called out to
Barmy, who was terrorising some bikini-clad women sitting near the edge of the diving pool.
Immediately, Barmy started the harmony and the young bloke pitched his voice higher to
compensate. I came in with a tenor and Wally dropped to a baritone-bass which I never knew he
was capable of.
 The sound was incredible! In that old brick building, the reverberations and echoes
accentuated the quality and I dare say there wasn’t another venue in Australia which could have
made us sound so good.
Porky came through from the weights room.
“What’s going on? Sarnds like Bedlam in ‘ere!”
We asked the young fellow if he would like to audition with us, as he obviously knew a
treble clef from the hole in his bum, judging by the way he controlled his vocal range.
“Nah. Not interested. Youse tuppenny-ha’penny groups don’t interest me.”
Porky picked up the old nylon six-string Arrow and let rip with the smoothest, coolest
rendition of “Frog Went a-Courting”. The youngster immediately picked up the lyric and we sat
there spellbound as the two teenagers performed the well-known folk song.
As they finished, the kid muttered: “Okay!”
“Okay, what?” asked Barmy.
“Okay. Give us your address and where you practise. I’ll give you a go, but I’m doing my
matric next month and I won’t make any promises!” “Matric” was the Victorian Matriculation
Examination for entry to tertiary level education.
By the end of November, he was our regular singer, with every other band in Melbourne
trying to lure him away from us.
But there was a snag. Peter Beldon, or as we nicknamed him, Bedlam, partly because of his
name, and partly because of Porky’s initial comment, was still only seventeen. The law said to
play in a pub, you had to be eighteen unless accompanied by your legal guardian.
He had only just turned seventeen, too, so it would be the best part of a year before he
became legal. Trouble was, he only looked sixteen.
Wally mucked about with his hair and a pair of scissors and we fitted him out from Porky’s
wardrobe. This made him look older and less like a schoolkid, but his newly issued driver’s
licence gave him away. The fuzz let him off the first time they came in the Beaky, were we were
doing a Sunday session gig, back in the days when this place used to really groove. They had
their eye on him and we knew we wouldn’t get away with it a second time.
But good fortune came to our rescue. Bedlam’s older sister, Wendy, came back from a stint
in the air force and instantly became The Pimples’ biggest fan. She accompanied him to all our
gigs and had a letter from his mother saying she was allowed to regard herself as his legal
guardian.
As we were all in awe of her, due to her being eight years older and her nice arse, we
welcomed her. On a couple of occasions while the others went for a wee or a meal or a drag on a
spliff, she sang a duet with me, but she wasn’t very good and admitted it.
Being brash and just nineteen I tried to put a good spin on it and told her that it didn’t
matter, her talents probably lay elsewhere. She would find them, one day, I said, and asked if I
could help. She looked at me curiously and asked in what way.
“Well, for all I know, you could give an incredible blow job!”
 That ruined it for us, and she never did another duet with me. In fact, I don’t remember her
speaking to me for years.
However, last year we went over to her house and we had a good laugh about it.
Well, not actually about what I said, but more about what a silly little bugger I was back in
the day!
However, she wasn’t able to come with us on our first national tour and we thought
Bedlam would have to stay behind too. But by then, we had a manager, who, although we
thought at first he was a bit of a ponce, usually solved all our problems, either with money, his
contacts in the music industry or with the application of something we were often lacking.
Good sense!
He was about thirty five, a former DJ at Dad’s radio station, and had matinee idol good
looks. Or so he informed us. We didn’t know what a matinee idol was supposed to look like and
took him at his word.
Anyway, he became Bedlam’s legal guardian for the few months until the boy became a
man, in the eyes of the law.
And that was when things really started happening for us!
 Up until then, or now, where you are reading in this book, we had mainly played in
Melbourne, with a few very short tours to places like Sale, Traralgon, Moe and Morwell, to
Geelong, Colac and Anglesea, and to Ballarat and Bendigo. Once we went from Mildura, right
along the Murray to Albury, performing on five consecutive nights and Saturday afternoon,
Saturday night and two sessions in different towns on Sunday!
In these country towns where the people were generally starved of decent rock‘n’roll, we
got a huge welcome. They had heard of this bright, new band and it’s exciting music and I think
some of them actually showered and ran a comb through their hair before driving their Holden
Utilities down to the venue, at least half an hour before we were supposed to appear. The place
always stank of Old Spice aftershave as these were very important events.
By the time we got there, three quarters of them were pissed as lizards, some of them
already passed out or vomiting in the dunnies.
If you work hard all day, ploughing fields, shoring (in the country vernacular), chopping
down trees and shooting wildlife, you get liquored up quickly.
Not that the bush Aussie has a low tolerance to alcohol! Far from it!
But if they know they are going to the pub in the evening, they save up their thirst all day,
dehydrating themselves on the assumption that all those bodily reservoirs, dry gulches, streams
and rivulets will be filled to the brim later. After all, Victoria Bitter or Fosters Lager were a darn
sight more good for you than warm rainwater from the tank out back of the shearing shed
(shoring shed?)
So here would be anything up to three hundred kids aged between fifteen and twenty one, a
few younger ones who had snuck away from their parents and some older toolies, pervy glints in
their dull eyes, drooly grins on their faces and wearing their finest patched singlets and sweat-
stained Akubras, hoping to gang-bang some wayward chick from the local grade-ten high school.
But when we came on stage, whooping like Red Indians as we did, their dim-witted faces
would register disappointment.
Well, we assumed it was disappointment. With the great Aussie thousand-yard-stare, the
broad brimmed hats, the lank hair falling over their faces and the wispy strands of adolescent
hair sprouting from their chins and upper lips, it was pretty hard to tell.
What they were expecting, we will probably never know. They don’t say much, these bush
kids. A lot of them never learned the social niceties, like how to talk.
But it certainly wasn’t five teenagers dressed in paisley shirts, skin tight trousers, wide
belts with massive silver buckles and pointy-toed, cuban-heeled, elastic-sided boots. They
probably expected shiny, golden haired gods or a choir of angels with wings.
But when we broke into our “first-up” song, “Ripper, Mate”, with its lightning guitar riffs,
deadweight bass, punchy lyrics and Barmy’s long drum roll ending in a resounding crash of
every cymbal on the kit, the kids abandoned their disappointment and stood on the tables,
screaming, weeping, pulling straggly bits of hair from their faces and soaking their trousers, and
each other, in a beer-and-urine mix.
 Depending on their enthusiasm, the speed which the waitresses could keep our glasses
topped up and our energy levels, we would play from eight o’clock until midnight, when the
local policeman would stride purposefully up to the power box and pull out the little porcelain
fuses from their sockets.
Sometimes a neighbour would complain that the din was putting her cows off producing
milk, that the hens had abandoned their eggs to huddle away to the far paddock to escape the
noise, or that it was upsetting their sleep as they had to be up at three o’clock to mow their hay,
shuck their corn or drive the potatoes into the Victoria Street Markets in Melbourne.
On these occasions, the cop would arrive a bit earlier, niggly that it encroached on his own
drinking time, and walk up to stage, blow into a microphone (which we turned off when we saw
him coming) and announce the unwelcome news that he had complaints and was closing us
down early.
Then the kids would race to the bar, buy a few jugs or 26 ounce bottles of whiskey, which
they would consume on the way back to their seats, and a carton of cans or stubbies for the
home-bound trip.
When the barstaff turned off the lights, they would stumble out to the Holden Utes parked
out the back, start their motors and get on-the-spot tickets for drunk driving from the local
policemen’s colleagues, waiting on the street.
A few smarter (or dumber, I don’t know) youths would help us out with loading the gear
back into the van and ask us stupid questions, like did we know Lawrie Barclay from Ray Brown
and the Whispers because he was a sort of cousin as his sister had married his mother’s nephew.
But they would try to keep us talking until the cops got fed up waiting and went back to the
station to process all the DUI charges.
But the pay was normally fabulous. Harley Brownlow, our ex-DJ manager, made sure of
that, and invested quite large sums into promoting the show, getting everything exactly right and
maintaining the lifestyles of the town’s bookies.
And there were normally two or three underage or barely legal sheilas waiting in our beds
when we got back to the hotel. They would often be fighting among themselves, pulling each
other’s pigtails and searching for our stashes, which up until our first trip overseas, consisted of
Carlton Lager and Craven-A Filters.
We would be pretty shagged because of the energy spent on doing a three and half hour or
four hour show with a ten minute interval three times to unload all the lager.
So after putting up as good an encore to the main show, which didn’t involve guitars,
vocals or drums, we would drop off to sleep, ensuring our watches, wallets and jewellery were
safely stashed in the safe in Harley’s room. Sometime in the night, these groupies would silently
disappear. Wally woke up a few times but the rest of us slept through.
He reported that without fail they would rifle through our drawers, check out our pockets
for cash (we never carried any, Harley paid for everything with a thing called an American
Express Card or a cheque) and then nick our boots, Jockettes or sometimes a shirt.
 When he was awake, Wally would make the girl put back whatever she had half-inched,
but we nearly always found stuff missing when we arose at about ten thirty the following
morning.
One night Porky found all his stuff missing, including his overnight bag, clean underwear
and shirts, swimming trunks and beach towel. Only his shaving and tooth kit was still in the
bathroom. The little bitch had probably made a fortune on-selling it to her school chums, as our
mums always made sure we had name tags sewed into everything. Provenance like that is often
hard to come by. Say-so is not accepted in Rock Band souveniring.
Fortunately there was a Myer in the town and we left Porky in the motel, wrapped in a
blanket, and Harley bought him some daks and a tee-short. Not knowing his foot size, he got him
some thongs until our mate was decent enough to go into Clarks and get new pair of daisy roots.
Porky posed for a photo in his daggy Myer gear but the best one was when he modelled his
steel toe-capped Macks, balancing on one foot with the left one a few inches from Barmy’s bare
arse!
Sometimes we would drive back to Melbourne after a show, particularly if it was in the
north and not too far out. I say “we” but I really mean Harley’s boyfriend who was or roadie,
procurer, driver, porter and sound technician. His name was Bert Sweetnam, but we always
called him Sweetie, partly for the obvious reason, but also because of his surname. He was a bit
effeminate, but in a punch-up, I would always want him on our side.
And a few times we did get into a punch-up. Once in Ringwood, a few motorcyclists with
leather jackets and more Brylcream that is decent, started taking the mick. We didn’t bother
about reacting but one of them started getting a bit too cheeky. Sweetie advised him to shut his
cakehole and he came over and tried to get him in an armlock.
Like a coiled spring, Sweetie hurled the lout about six feet through the air and then
performed a very neat bit of dental extraction on his front incisors, using nothing other than the
sharp edge of his hand.
I have a photo in my second album of a leather clad ape flying through the air and another
with him sprawled over a pile of tyres with a lot of blood on his tee shirt.
Afterwards, Barmy muttered something about his being pretty handy, and with a charming
smile, Sweetie patted his arm.
“When you are of a loving disposition like me, you’ve got to be, Dear Heart!”
Generally, if anyone wanted to start a fight with us, there were enough friendly forces to
put an end to it immediately, especially after a gig. Sometimes though, we got beaten up badly
when a large bunch of rockers or surfies would find a reason to take exception to us. But I like to
think that we generally gave as good as we got, especially with Sweetie present. At least we
never had any broken bones or ruptured spleens of anything, and a few bruises soon healed. At
least our egos never suffered.
 But now it was time to try our luck nationally.
We had got into the top ten six times in the last two years and produced three albums.
“Knock It Off, Sport!” had spent three weeks at number one in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth,
five in Brisbane and made number sixteen in Sydney. We were hovering around the thirty two
thousand sales mark nationally and Bert Newton himself presented us with our gold disks on “In
Melbourne Tonight.”
The other singles had done really well in Melbourne and Perth, all getting into the top ten.
We had a strong following in Adelaide, too, mainly because we drove over there one weekend
and did a show with the Twilights and Zoot. We were very well received and that is the main
part of the reason we did our Australia-wide tour.
Bobby and Laurie were supposed to be our main support act, but piked at the last minute.
The Moovers (love those bands with double “O”s in their name,) and Gerry Barclay and the
Holy Grail stepped up to bat instead.
I reckon that was what made them into such big stars of the sixties, but they don’t
subscribe to that opinion, instead saying it was their warming the crowd that pushed us up the
ladder.’
Anyway, even before we started rehearsing, we were all great mates and that tour was
probably the most successful ever.
It covered a wide area of Victoria, two concerts in Sydney, one each in Wollongong and
Newcastle, thirty shows in Queensland including five in Brisbane on a hot, wet week in January
and then Broken Hill and Canberra on the way back to Melbourne. There we spent three nights
in our own beds before setting out to Adelaide and Port Augusta before our two tour buses and
truck made the long Nullarbor haul to Kalgoorlie, Perth, Geraldton, Bunbury, Albany and
Esperance.
Kalgoorlie loved us so much, we did an open air gig on the return journey, at the
racecourse, and a dust storm wrecked a few thousand pounds worth of our sound system. We
were fully insured, but the promoters there came up with five thousand newly printed dollar bills
and gave Harley a further five in a cheque. Love those gold-miners.
In early 1966, ten thousand smackers was a huge sum!
But we had a bit of a scene in Esperance. Lynn Verity’s manager. Henry Fisher, had been
giving her a hard time ever since she stayed out late with a boy in Albany, and clouted her
around the ear. She went to the local police and filed a report and three police officers came
around to investigate. He was stonkered and belted one of them, breaking her jaw. The other two
cops, men, took exception for some reason, and laid him out cold. He spent the rest of the tour
and the following four years, cooling his heels in the prison in Albany.
Lynn has never heard from him since, nor wants to. Someone said he went overseas on his
release. Another rumour is that he overdosed.
Anyway, now I have told you about the end of the tour, I suppose I should describe the
beginning.
 After rehearsing at a large warehouse in Dandenong, next to the place they build the trains
and trams, we climbed on board the two huge American GMC buses, all forty six of us. There
were twenty five musicians and solo vocalists, six roadies, five managers and Harley’s staff of
promoters. There was a luthier and a wardrobe lady who was also rushed off her feet. Three
drivers other than Sweetie and the other roadies who all took turns at the wheel.
For much of the trip, I sat up front of the truck, listening to Stu or Larry talking about the
old days. They had driven the equipment trucks for everyone from Bill Haley, Johnnie Ray and
the Everley Brothers to the Billy Graham Evangelical Crusade. Stu, who had spent some time in
the USA told me he was one of the pall-bearers for Buddy Holly, but he did tend to bullshit a bit
and couldn’t verify that.
But in the buses, they mostly drank beer, played blackjack or slept. We were always tired.
Other than in Western Australia and South Australia, we sometimes only had fifty to a hundred
miles between gigs, and once we hit the town, it was all systems go.
While we helped the roadies unload the truck and cart it into the venue, Harley would run
around like a blue-arsed fly (while in Western Australia, he learned to rush about like a cut
snake!)
He would have to verify the motels we stayed at, arrange catering, fetch our mail and other
stuff from the town, make sure the promoters had done their job, talk with the proprietors or
council representatives in charge of the venue, suckhole up to the other artists’ managers to get
them organised, call in on the sound testing, and argue, threat, bully, cajole and sometimes get
physical with people who were not pulling their weight.
And there were more than their fair share of them. One of the other groups was bone idle.
So useless in fact, they couldn’t even spell their name properly, adding an extra “O”.
But the rest of us realised the importance of acting as a team and pulled their weight. Once
someone lost a hand grip on a huge amp and broke one of the roadies’ feet, but normally
everything went according to plan.
No names, no pack drill, but I apologised most sincerely and took him a bottle of
Bundaberg while he was in hospital.
Now I remember this next bit quite clearly and without the need for prompts from my
photo albums.
On the way back from this hospital, or really nursing post, as there were only five beds and
no operating theatre, I called in to the post office.
Among the stuff waiting there for us, catalogues, electricity bills, and mounds of fan mail,
all of which Harley insisted we personally answer, were three of those awful orangey-brown
envelopes with little windows of half-clear greaseproof paper.
These windows saved the typist having to print the address on the front. Instead, they
would fold the quarto sized sheet into three and fit it into the nine be four “manilla” pouch, so
that the address at the head of the letter would neatly line up and be displayed through the
already-mentioned greaseproof window.
 Nobody ever realised that quarto is eight and a half inches by eleven inches. When folded
into three it is three and two thirds inches meaning that there was half and inch to the sides and
one third of an inch at the top where the inserted sheet could go within the envelope. This meant
that there was a distinct possibility that some of the address would fall outside the little window
area.
Ah, but, I hear you say, they could allow a lot of space around the address and then it
wouldn’t matter if it didn’t fit exactly!
But, you will hear me reply, the envelope manufacturers never thought of that, They tooled
their machines up in the year 1923 and by 1965, where still using the same equipment. In 1923,
the typewriters all used a font size known as Pica, which allowed for twelve character to the
linear inch. As their typewriters were not computerised, they had a system known as Unicode,
which meant that skinny characters such as “I” were made as wide as broad characters like “M”
and “W” by squeezing the latter and making the “I”s conform by including very wide serifs.
By the 1960s, because flickery fluorescent tubes replaced the old carbon filament light
bulbs in the offices, they decided to increase the font sizes to the European printer’s measure
known as Elite, where only ten characters made an inch. This made them easier to read and
reduced the number of office workers suffering photolepsy and migraine by a tiny margin of
0.0137 across the entire English speaking world.
Now that you know all that, you will be anxious to know just who typed these addresses
onto the letters which required window faced envelopes in which to convey the addresses of
these erstwhile recipients.
Thousands of offices around Australia, would be the obvious answer, but in this case it was
specifically one in Canberra called “The Department of Labour and National Service”.
Yes, Wally, Porky and I were all invited to register for Nashos!
Why we had to register is still a mystery to me. The department knew all about us, our
names, our birthdates, our addresses, employment, nationality, medical records, educational
standard and whether we were left handed, preferred a blue taw over a red one when playing
doogs (marbles to New Australians) and whether we used Sorbent or Kleenex toilet tissue. (I
notice that the supermarkets carry many more brands these days, including one called “Who
Gives a Crap”. I hope that the pop culture we played a huge part in forming never inspired such a
distasteful name!)
So why did we have to register?
It was a cruel joke designed to pick out the trouble makers among us. Those who would
refuse to protest against having to register, against National Service, against an authoritarian, un-
Australian government and against the very Establishment which holds the fabric our society in
place.
They knew instantly if you never registered and summonsed you to the courts who had all
the information readily available which you would have entered on their forms had you not
refused to do so! Bastards.
 And then they smugly claimed to hold a lottery to draft young men by drawing birthdates
out of a barrel. This was an absolute farce as many people will attest. Two young men with the
same birthdates should expect to be called up. Say one was the son of a politician, or a medical
student or a Young Liberal and the other was a factory worker, an apprenticed printer or a
farmer’s son (unless he was also the son of a politician or was a Young Liberal).
Who do you think would have his birthdate pulled from the barrel and who wouldn’t.
Remember this is not a trick question!
Both had the same birthdate. Day, month and year. Maybe same hour and minute, same
city and maternity ward!
Oh, that was a rhetorical question so there are no correct answers and no one of you failed.
Anyway, we were supposed to register within fourteen days. I did in Geraldton. Porky did
in Mullewa, Western Australia, at a sub post office attached to a petrol station while we stopped
to get a pie and a Passiona. Wally and a singer from another band did theirs in Perth.
So we were all perfectly legal.
By the time Barmy had to register, we were all overseas and although he had a
commitment to do likewise, he never quite got around to it.
There were several ways to have your conscription deferred.
Study at a University, commit to serve a period of six years in the Citizens Military Forces,
feign a medical condition (which seldom worked. They knew everyone in Australia was in peak
condition), be blind, in a wheelchair or if your dad was a politician, produce a note were the best
known methods.
One or two got exemption by speaking in a foreign language at their interview and
pretending not to speak English. I knew a bloke from Malta who got exempted that way. He was
an English teacher who later taught my friend's daughter to read.
If you were married before a certain date, it was also grounds for exemption. I don’t know
why, as I knew a lot of couples who were living in permanent relationships but not married.
Equally, a lot of marriages lasted a couple of years before breaking up.
I know that Harley would have married Sweetie if he had been allowed to, but by the time
it became legal in the next century, they had both passed away. Sweetie got AIDS from being
raped while in prison and Harley decided life wasn’t worth living without him.
Another way to avoid conscription was to feign complete lunacy (or mental handicap, as it
is politely called nowadays.)
A bloke from Preston was led in and stood there dribbling while his older brother
convinced the recruitment board that he was not fit to serve. They didn’t believe him. When he
went in for his medical, upon loosening his trousers, he began to urinate. He got his brother in a
headlock and raised his fist as if to strike him until a sergeant pulled him off, trousers still round
his ankles. But they persisted.
Then he grabbed a female clerk by the shoulders and rubbed his unshaven cheek against
hers, then planted a big, wet kiss on her face, covering her lips, chin and nose.
 That clinched it! She was fifty three that summer, prim and proper in her tweed suit and
sensible shoes, and no man had ever kissed her before. She immediately ordered that he be
exempted on medical grounds.
He was told to visit a consultant at Kew Mental Hospital, who found him to be perfectly
sane and capable of holding down any position in the public service.
He went back to his job as a head chef at the Astoria and never heard from the Department
again. Obviously that exemption held, despite the psychiatric report!
One of the female soloists who called herself Violetta, said that she thought trying to get
out of military service was despicable and unpatriotic. No one knew whether she had a surname.
She never said and nobody cared much.
She actually used the words despicable and unpatriotic! We should all be proud to go and
serve our country in its hour of need.
I asked her when she was going to volunteer and she nearly burst out crying.
“They don’t need me, they need soldiers!”
“You mean combatants!”
“Huh?”
“That means you go into combat with people shooting at you!”
“They won’t let women go, or I would!”
“So why aren’t you serving in a support capacity. A nurse, signaller, typist, radio operator?
Or a cook or in the pay corps? You would still be a soldier.”
But that was too much for her tiny, undeveloped mind to absorb. So she blurted out:
“What they are doing is dishonest!”
“Yes. I agree. Claiming to conscript by a random method when everyone knows they pick
and choose who they want. Very dishonest!”
She shut up then and pretended to read a book but she was either a very slow reader or she
was just covering her embarrassment because she never turned a page until the next lavatory stop
eighty miles later.
She tried to talk to another girl on the tour, Lynn Verity, but this rather sensible lady just
said she wouldn’t discuss the subject and her whining was only consolidating the opinion she
already had on the subject.
I was only nineteen and found this Lynn Verity quite fascinating. She only seemed to be in
the business to earn some money. Although she was quite sociable and a helluva singer, she
never really seemed to dig the scene. We backed her, mostly singing quieter songs like “When
will the Good Apples Fall” and a song I really liked “Did He Mention My Name” which was
written by some Canadian. Ian Tyson or Gordon Lightfoot, perhaps.
She was always reading. Studying Marine Biology or some similar subject but I often saw
her reading Dickens. One day I thought I would try and move in on her and ended up discussing
“Hard Times.” But she was a little intense for me at that stage in my life.
 Still, she would often come over and chat with us and tell us about how the fish were dying
in Port Phillip Bay.
Porky, who still grieved over his lost bandmate, told her that it wasn’t only the fish. Our
bass player, too, had died in that same inlet of water.
The tears were genuine, so was the hug she gave the old Porker.
But this was witnessed by her manager who was a nasty piece of work. For ever after that
on the tour, he picked on Porky. I don’t know whether he harboured fantasies about Lynn
himself but every excuse he could find, he made a nasty comment, ridiculed or complained about
him.
Okay, Porky is a pretty out there sort of guy and although I love him dearly, sometimes he
gets on my goat, too. But this geezer was just nasty, as I keep on reiterating.
One day on the bus, he petulantly stuck his foot out as Porky walked down the aisle. Porky
crashed to the ground and hurt his left hand while falling. Just as well, because Porky was right
handed. As he got up, he turned around and crashed his right fist into Henry’s face, which burst
like a basket of eggs.
“I was just going to call ‘im a childish wanker!” Porky told me later. “But ‘e’s probably
not even mature enough to masturbate! So I just ‘it ‘im.”
I had to take over the lead guitar temporarily while the rhythm player from Anytime, Babe
strummed the chords. Porky’s hands were so swollen he couldn’t even play the keyboards for
three days.
Anyway, he stopped picking on Porky and looked away whenever he approached. But he
took it out on Lynn instead, culminating in his doing his doogs completely and ending up, as I
have already told you, in the Pokie in Albany.
But generally, apart from that couple of arsewipes, Henry and Yvette, we all got on really
well, although I lost about three hundred to Gerry Barclay in Blackjack. But the sonovovabitch
deserved it. He had taken the time to learn how to count cards, while I never had the patience.
Besides, I never played cards unless I had a skinful, which would reduced my focus even more.
Gerry was an intellectual. He was related to the comedian Sir Lionel Barclay and looked a
lot like him as well. He did a perfect imitation of his famous uncle’s signature character, Lady
Simone Numbnut and had us in stitches one night in Innisfail when he dropped his singing
performance and did three quarters of an hour on stage impersonating Lionel. The audience
actually thought it was Sir Lionel and were mystified why such an august and well known person
would be travelling with this ragtag motley crew.
The Evening Advocate took exception to this and encouraged its readers to demand their
money back for false advertising. They published an editorial condemning the promoters for not
only allowing this to replace the popular music band, but also called into question plagiarism and
copyright laws.
Harley, who was also the manager of Holy Grail, told me later that Sir Lionel had replied
to the Advocate saying he was surprised and proud of his nephew and they should treat it as a
compliment that he should choose that village as the venue for such a popular piece of
entertainment.
And it was popular! The audience, while a bit puzzled, roared and clapped and screamed
louder than for any other act on the whole tour.
 Doing the first part of the tour was a bit of a doddle. The kids in Victoria knew us well, or
our songs, anyway. We often appeared on In Melbourne Tonight and it is rumoured that Gra-Gra
Kennedy might have had a little crush on one of us, but I am not bothering to verify which one.
All I will say is that he was the best looking, best educated, most mature and charming
member of the group, and came from a musical background. But I can also say without fear of
contradiction that although he was flattered, he was also dead heterosexual and actually found
women more attractive than the rest of the band put together. Although Bedlam was more
popular with these budding women, that was only because he was younger than the rest of us and
it is a known fact that females have that mother hen instinct and want to protect the junior males
of their species.
The various radio stations, 3AW, 3AK and 3UZ, particularly, played our songs at regular
intervals throughout their programmes, more so during drive-time and early in the evenings
when teenagers were in their rooms, supposedly doing their homework.
On average our songs were probably played fifteen or twenty times a day on these stations,
not bad considering the opposition in Melbourne alone, to say nothing of the few other
Australian bands, including the Easybeats and Thorpey from Sydney. And then there was all the
Pom and Septic (English and American to those of you whose education was not as complete as
mine). So we were pretty popular.
It was said that in the month when “Lick It, Don’t Kick It” was in the numbers one and two
spots on the 3UZ charts, you could never wait more than two songs before hearing us, if you
turned your dial right along the Victorian AM band. Who the fuck compiles these statistics?
More to the point, who thinks them up to be compiled in the first place?
It was well known that we were all Footscray fans and often wore their colours on stage
(which is one of the reasons we sometimes got into fights!) When we arrived in a country town,
there would be blue and red streamers up everywhere, balloons in shop windows and a lot of
people wearing the VFL club’s scarves and guernseys.
If we stopped at a milk bar or greasy spoon, we would be mobbed. And remember, there
were five groups, five soloists and a duet with us, all having charted within the previous six
months! It was chaos in larger provincial towns, but a helluva lot of fun.
Generally the fans were quite well behaved. Oh, a few tried to tear our shirts off us and
pull us to the ground. Well, the blokes that is. The female members of our entourage were treated
with total respect, other than Katie Drury, the drummer for the Holy Grail, who it was rumoured
was sleeping the handsome guitarist in the Pimples, you know, the really intelligent, smart one!
He wasn’t sleeping with her, but had, if you get my drift. On two occasions. But they were
both uncharacteristically drunk at the time and on one of the aforementioned occasions, neither
can remember anything about it except that when they awoke in the morning, one had the other’s
bum in his face, while the other had what she said felt like teeth marks on her arse.
There is a photo of that, too. Not the bite wound, just the bottom-to-face bit. Porky would
often sneak up and snap away with my camera whenever I got into a situation where I wasn’t
using it myself. Unfortunately, the entire strip of negative is missing on that one. I believe it
made a small fortune recently when it went up for auction and was snapped up by a pornography
web site owner.
The other occasion was much more memorable and both enjoyed it very much, but agreed
that it had to end there or get serious and probably end off in divorce several years later because
they were totally incompatible.
There are a few photos of that, and I sincerely hope my Dad never discovered those or it
might have hastened his eventual dementia.
In Mildura, we had over two thousand fans trying to get into the hall which could only take
seven hundred. Partly because of a stuff up where the promoter thought we were doing two
concerts and partly because an over-active scalper had found a way to make a lot of extra money,
we found ourselves playing three concerts on a Thursday. One at seven thirty, one at ten thirty
and the final at one thirty in the morning. Technically it was on the Friday, but don’t get
pedantic!
During the times we were not playing, we went to our motel across the road and tried to get
some shuteye. Harley arranged it so that whoever performed last in the second show, would go
on first in the third, etcetera and distributed it as evenly as possible so we all got maximum
breaks. The soloists and minor groups were only playing spots of about four songs, but these
were bumped up to twenty minutes each to give us more famous artists less performing time.
As they all had revolving playlists and plenty of material rehearsed, they actually saw this
as a benefit. In fact, one of Lynn’s songs, written by someone called Young and Wright, actually
re-entered the Mildura charts the week after her act. We called her The Little Darling of
Sunraysia for the rest of the tour! She really was a great performer.
It must have been a nightmare task for Harley to arrange all that and get it right to the
satisfaction of the local paper, but it went off as though it had been planned like that all along. A
lot of criticism is heaped on the band managers from time to time, but the fact that he took it in
his stride and never panicked, tells me that he deserved his eighty percent share of takings (I am
only joking! The Pimples got twenty percent of the profit on that tour, the other two big bands
got ten each, the others shared twenty percent. The roadies, venues, publicity, etc., were paid out
of before-profit earnings.)
As I said, I often used to ride in the cabin of the truck to give the co-driver a little bit of
time in one of the buses. I learned a lot from these drivers, not about jamming gears, fuel
economy and rotating tyres, but about life on the roads. Long hours with the sun in your eyes, the
need to go on when your head aches, you have a blinding cold or fiery diarrhoea.
What it was like to not see your wife for four months and then come home and find her and
the saucepan lids had run off with another bloke and were now in Darwin or Auckland.
The itinerant life didn’t really appeal to me and although it was normally a barrel of laughs,
I couldn’t have done it for years at a time.
One aspect of this tour through country Victoria which amazed me was the number of girls
with venereal diseases. Now called Sexually Transmitted Disease, it was something I had not
encountered in Melbourne, probably due to the class of the company I kept.
 But out here in the sticks, Harley had to delay our set off time in the morning at least twice
a week while some poor chap went and got penicillin injections.
I never realised the extent of the sexual revolution, even though my bed was seldom empty.
I believed it was just me! Oh, and the other musos on tour. Not the masses of people out on the
street!
But to have contracted syphilis, these girls must have had other sexual partners, although in
a small town, with a couple of promiscuous floosies, the thing could reach epidemic proportions
in no time flat.
And the shame, the fear of parental discovery, the fact that the doctors would report the
infection, and the name calling, bullying and disdain from other kids, would mean that it often
went untreated. Often, it was only detected by the nurses at the cottage hospital, who could not
prescribe antibiotics, and it may be a week before the doctor emerged bleary eyed from his
hidey-hole at the country club.
And blind ignorance that it was so easily treated would have been a big factor. The kids
these days do not have such things to worry about. Partly because the AIDS epidemic meant
more people used safe sex methods and the fact that kids spend so much time taking selfies and
whatever else they do on their Smartphones means there is less time for hanky panky!
In the sixties, in country Victoria there was only the local library, footy and beer to take
your mind off your dick! (Or vagina, if I don’t want to appear sexist!)
As I have stated previously, I found Lynn Verity fascinating. She was attractive, no doubt,
and that was why I thought might have a bash at cracking on to her, and she realised what I was
up to. But she put me in my place well and good by snuggling up to me and thanking me for
being like a big brother to her, confiding my feelings and chatting to her about things she was
interested in.
I was left in no doubt what she thought about me, that she had no intention of letting us get
romantically involved.
One warm afternoon in Mount Isa, I played her a song that I had written about a girl
several years ago when I was in high school. The girl had wiped the floor with me, and I entitled
it that: “(You) Wiped The Floor With Me”.
She thought I had just written it about her and got quite upset, apologising to me over and
over. At first I didn’t catch on but when I told her it was about a girl I was at high school with,
she settled down a bit and asked if I intended recording it.
I had not even considered it and unless the others wanted to include it in our repertoire, I
wouldn’t even have suggested it on an LP. But when Lynn loved it so much, I gave it to her and
she sang it for the rest of the tour. And when she got back to Melbourne, she recorded it as a B
side to “Like a Brother to Me” which she told me was actually about me.
Now, as you know, I have written quite a few songs, hits for The Pimples, me as a soloist
and quite a few other people. But that little seven inch vinyl single she gave me is still one of my
prized possessions.
 Sadly, Lynn died in 2011 of breast cancer, but we remained close ever since that tour. You
probably saw the death notice I put in The Age.
Jim Oran from Everybody’s magazine thought Porky had written “Wipe the Floor”,
although we never knew why. The promo material, the DJs and even the record label itself gave
the writer’s credit in parenthesis to L. Boyle, not P. Boyle. (We both had real Christian names
starting with “G",) Maybe Jim refused to believe I was really as talented as I am. Or maybe one
of us should have changed our name by deed poll so the confusion wouldn’t exist.
I wonder if other groups who had members with the same surnames had the same
problems. The Kinks, The Hollies, The Beach Boys or maybe The Carpenters!
I never dated other entourage members after that. Katie and I were definitely not right for
each other and Lynn and I liked each other too much.
That’s what we called it back then. “Dating” someone. It sounds like you put on your
Sunday School suit, went around to their house and politely asked her parents if you could
accompany their daughter to dinner and a show, or the high school prom or whatever.
Normally, it meant taking them to drive in, groping them like mad and then driving to a
secluded spot to hopefully end the evening with your underdaks getting caught up over the
handbrake!
But neither was I celibate. Even if I had any desire to be, that resolve would have been
abandoned when the nightly parade of nymphs appeared as if by magic in your motel room. And
they always seemed to know which room was their favourite band member’s! I never heard of
anyone accidentally being in Katie Drury’s room when they thought they were in Billy Shiner’s.
But I believe the girls got their share when they wanted it, too. I know Violetta, who
argued with me about conscription, hoped to get into Harley’s pants, and crept up to his door in
the night. When Sweetie answered she got all confused and thought she had the wrong room.
When Harley got out of bed, stark naked and put on a white towelling robe, she started to cotton
on that the two men were an item.
She nearly walked out on the tour there and then.
Lynn told me that Violetta thought they were disgusting and “pre-verted”, but as usual,
Lynn wasn’t interested in her opinion and told her so, which made her even more surly than ever.
How anyone could have missed the signs was completely beyond me. While not overt or
exhibitionist, the two conducted their affair quite openly and they are the main reason why I have
never felt anything but warmth for same-sex couples who genuinely love each other.
I think poor Violetta felt inadequate when it came to butch masculinity as she was a weird
girl in many ways. Neither Harley nor Sweetie exhibited either Alpha Male nor what is termed
Beta Male idiosyncracies. Sweetie definitely had Omega Male traits. He was a PhD in
Astrophysics from Harvard, and could have had a very lucrative career, but chose to follow
Harley.
Harley was no-where near as well-educated. But he had an innate organisational skill
which time and again proved a blessing. He was neither a tough disciplinarian nor a slack-arse
when it came to efficient man-management.
 If you were categorise me using the Greek alphabet, I like to think I would be the typical
Delta Man.
A Delta male is a normal guy who just tries to be as successful as he can and who tries to
find someone who will be able to understand him. He doesn’t have the same amount of self-
esteem as an Alpha male but he tries to be the best version of himself. When he is in the
company of many people, he will say what he thinks even if a woman he likes is there.
Violetta was a clear Gamma Female. So no wonder she hated me. She mistook Harley’s
confidence for being a brutish bully whereas he was a born leader. She needed a man to throw
her onto the haystack, tear (not gently remove) her underwear from her and give her a jolly good
seeing to. Broken bones and bruised hips were just an occupational hazard to her tastes in sex.
As such, whenever she encountered a man for whom she had no respect, she got into a sulk
when he proved he was superior in intellect of talent. That is why none of the men on our tour
really appealed to her.
She settled on Stu about three quarters of the way around. He was older than everyone else
and just took what he wanted, normally asking quite politely, but ignoring rejection. They stayed
together for about a month after the tour ended and the last I heard, she ran a music school in
Frankston.
She was, however, a very talented pianist and could turn her hand to almost any
classification of instrument. I heard her play guitar, violin, accordion, trumpet and trombone,
flute and clarinet, which in a rare burst of intelligent humour, she once described as “the ill-
woodwind that nobody blows any good!”
About Sweetie. Harley was very lucky to have him, both as life partner and assistant. I
never heard them fight nor argue, but that was almost certainly because they were such excellent
managers. I don’t know, nor want to know what they did in private, but that is where they kept
everything other than their professional personae.
But this gentleman, and I call him that for a good reason, was always fair to everyone,
unless they were unfair to him, as that lout in Ringwood found out.
He had a few black belts in various martial arts and used to run the Melbourne Marathon
every year. He had played Australian Rules in the Tasmanian Football League and could stand in
as MC if Harley was not available.
Totally likeable, capable and the sweetest man I have probably ever known.
 As you have probably gathered, Porky was my “main man” to use the American idiom. He
and I were there from the beginning, had very similar upbringings and families, identical tastes
in women, music and movies and we were both lousy card players. The only difference was I
know when to say “enough is enough”.
Porky was a bit more extroverted and a bigger risk taker than I.
Wally and Barmy were also very well matched. I suppose they were drawn together as
drummer and bass player as both were important to setting the beat whereas Porky, and less
usually, I, would go out in an improvisation and totally lose it. The rest of the band would, on
these occasions, sit back and wait until the offending musician had completed, settled down and
gone back to the familiar riff or chord progression.
Although they were both very keen Foots-a-cray supporters, they had originally met
playing soccer. Strange, because Porky and I were both born in England and you would assume
we knew more of the round ball game.
They both followed Heidelberg in the Victorian competition and if we had a couple of
hours to spare, they would grab their ball and dribble around, passing to each other with the sides
of their feet in deft, sweeping kicks which would have everyone else running onto the field,
trying to take the ball away from them.
Soccer was not so big in Australia in those days, but Wally and Barmy gradually organised
some of the blokes from the bands into a team of sorts and one Sunday afternoon in Port
Augusta, we played a local side and to our credit, drew one-all.
Outstanding as a goal keeper was Gerry Barclay, whose size filled up most of the space
between the posts. But surprisingly, it was our own singer, Peter “Bedlam” Beldon, who scored
our goal. Having never played before or even watched a match on television, he trapped the ball
at the edge of the penalty area and belted it with his right foot so hard that although the
goalkeeper got his hand to it, it never deviated in its path and went straight and firmly into the
net.
As an aside to this little anecdote, in England, Bedlam was engaged to the former wife of
Arsenal’s centre forward before she died in a light aircraft crash. But that was five or so years
later.
So right through Western Australia, even though some days it was above the century, we
would try to seek out opponents from among the local teams. Without going into “asterisk and
footnote” bit, a century was 100 degrees Fahrenheit, around forty Celsius.
However, the only time we got another team to meet us, we got washed out in a drenching
downpour which lasted three hours.
This was in Busselton on the south west coast of the Indian Ocean.
I remember being absolutely drenched, my cotton shirt and shorts weighing three times
their dry weight, trying to wade up a pitch which was only six inches above the waterline on a
good day, and three inches below on this afternoon.
 The whole entourage watched on, though, standing with upturned chairs over their heads to
keep off the rain. We abandoned it, scoreless, after twenty minutes and the Busselton boys were
quite startled when the girls invaded the shower room afterwards.
Not just the singers, drummers and wardrobe girls. When they saw them charge into the
dunnies, a couple of dozen local would-be groupies followed them. We had quite a party, which
was rapidly turning into an orgy, before the Club Managing Director came in and with an
incredibly loud voice, shooed all the ladies back out into the rain!
Spider, the keyboard player from the Moovers always head his head in a book. One
morning on the coach he read aloud that if you took just twenty three people at random, the
probability was that two of them would share a birthday.
Of course Violetta immediately argued with him, saying that the law of averages would
make that a very unlikely statistic, virtually impossible. She went into a sulk when someone
suggested we put it to the test.
Spider protested that he had no opinion, he was just reading what was in his book.
There were exactly double that number in our convoy, including staff. Forty six all up.
I felt that the likelihood would probably diminish, the greater number of samplers we got,
but was very curious to find out how we went. Harley was on our bus with all his insurance
certificates, and we asked him if we could see them to get the birthdates of the people in the
other bus as well as the truck drivers.
Of course, he refused to release them as some of them might contain confidential
information, but as administrator, said he would compile the list.
It caused a great deal of astonishment when we discovered that the number was not
diminished at all. It wasn’t even in proportion to the factor of two.
Seven of us had birthdays on the same day! April 10.
In fact only Lynn Verity and I would not celebrate our birthdays on tour! We were both
July babies. December was the most common month, prompting a lot of amateur mathematics to
decide that it was probably Easter cosiness caused by all the chocolate, bunnies and eggs.
Spider said that Easter was a derivative of the word “estrogen” which meant fertility. But
that was also disputed by Violetta, because most of the tour were born in the southern
hemisphere.
Anyway, it was decided that April 10 would be the official birthday party for the tour. We
did a kind of Secret Santa to buy presents for each other, even those who were not celebrating
their birthdays.
And then someone looked up the date in a diary to see what day of the week it fell. By a
freak coincidence, it turned out to be Easter Day. We had a doubly grand celebration. Or so they
tell me. I don’t remember much about it.
 This discovery and whole conversation produced some other weird theories. Such as the
reason for so many of us having birthdays during the Zodiac dates of Sagittarius was that was the
artistic birth sign. Lynn pointed out that it was the sign of the archer. But someone else had a
magazine which claimed Sagittarius people were temperamental, passionate and dynamic.
Henry Fisher asked Harley not to divulge his birthdate, but Barmy went and grabbed the
dossier from Harley’s hand. He stared in astonishment and then pissed himself laughing.
“You’ll never guess! April the first!”
Anyway the birthday party went as planned, nine days after Henry’s birthday, who by then
was better known as Prisoner Zero Nine Four Three Eight, Fisher, H.
A giant cake was ordered from a bakery and we all had a day off to relax.
The tour was ending on the twenty fourth, the day before ANZAC Day, to let those
members who had served or had family who they wished to remember to do so in their own
towns.
I don’t know whether other tours were this successful. Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs did a
tour later that year with Ray Brown and the Whispers, Jade Hurley, Digger Revell, Lynn
Randell, Bev Harrell and Marty Rhone. It was moderately successful, by all accounts, but way
too cumbersome and I believe several groups disbanded soon afterwards.
The Easybeats were at the top of the charts, and the Surf music craze was still in top flight.
Normie Rowe, also a Melbourne boy, was still a civilian and Johnny O’Keefe and Col Joye were
being regarded as over the hill.
But this group of misfits from Melbourne and Adelaide, with a few support acts from local
towns, was a roaring sensation. Bobby and Laurie, when told what they had missed, organised
their own tour soon afterwards but never attained the momentum we did.
I think, having consulted Porky and Lynn in some depth, that we had exactly the right
dynamic. We nearly all got on with each other so well, a tribute in fact, to Harley’s managerial
and interpersonal skills. With only two exceptions, one major and one minor, we had no
problems. Even those two never really effected the majority, and while one was a case of severe
personality disorder and the other was just immaturity, it never stopped us having a ball of a
time.
And when we compared notes after the road trip was ended, we all agreed that our greatest
triumph was the triple-whammy in Mildura.
Oh, Bedlam reckons it was Busselton and the shower room incident after the rained-out
soccer game. But he was the youngest bloke on tour and probably the most popular. His vote was
deemed ineligible because at 17, he was too young to vote.
And I have most of it on film, much of it now digitised and backed up on both my and
Porky’s hard drives.
 I thought that when the tour was over, we would have some time to ourselves, Take a
holiday, maybe and do some painting and drawing.
When I was at primary school, I had been interested in model rail after a visit to a cousin in
Perth. He had a pretty intricate layout in his living room and I had often thought I could build
one up in the same way.
After all, I had the money to do with whatever I wanted. So I made up my mind to go
down to a shop I had seen in Swanston Street where they sold electric model trains, rail, even
buildings made of plastic which you put up alongside the track, imitation grass, fences and tiny
plastic people which you could paint up to make village scenes. This really appealed to me.
So after a good night’s sleep, I decided that the very next day, I would venture forth into
the city and visit this shop. I had an idea there were a couple of other shops around, one in
Brighton, another in Croydon and maybe even one in the Flinders Street Station buildings
opposite Central Walk.
But at twelve thirty, Porky was on the phone.
“Liz, ‘Arley wants us in Crabbie’s studio tomorrow, first fing. ‘E wants us to dig art any
stuff wot we’ve written and bring it wiv us. Just bring your guitars. They’ll ‘ave everyfin’ else.”
“Oh, no! That’ll be an all day session, at least!” I groaned. “We only just got back and I
wanted to spend tomorrow shopping for some stuff. New clothes, model rail and stuff.”
“Well, I’m just sayin’ what ‘Arley said. Take it up wiv ‘im!”
I knew Porky was cranky about it, too. The weather was still fairly good for Melbourne
and I knew he had hoped to do a little hiking and camping with his Dad, who had been an
infantryman during the war and had stayed in the Army right up until they emigrated in 1956.
The pair of them loved to spend time together and that was the reason Porky still had so much
Cockney accent.
I tried to ring him but he wasn’t either at home or in his office. His secretary just repeated
the same message Porky had and when I raised objections, she repeated exactly the same, that I
would have to take it up with him. She took a message for him to call me back as soon as he got
back in.
But he never called and when Dad and Mum got home, we went to a pub on Preston High
Street for a few beers before going to dinner at a nearby Hotel. My shout because I was pretty
flush with funds.
The following morning I got a lift into town with Dad, who needed the A40 during the day.
Actually, he didn’t need the A40 because he had sold it a couple of years ago and now had a
Morris 1100 which he was considering updating to an Austin 1800. Mum didn’t think he should
because the Morris was easily big enough for the two of them now that the family had left home.
 Dad pointed out that theirs could barely be termed a “family” as there was just me, an only
child. And I hadn’t “left home”, I had just been on tour for four months and had returned a
couple of days ago.
“Well, you know, what I mean. His career is taking off and he won’t be asking you to drive
him around any more’”
“When was the last time Graham asked me to drive him around?” I could detect a note of
exasperation in Dad’s voice. They often had these conversations. You couldn’t really call them
arguments because neither of them ever put their heart and soul into it.
“He just did!” Mum’s voice rose by five decibels and about half an octave. “He asked you
to drop him at Crabbie’s in Elizabeth Street!”
Dad was quite willing to say no more, but Mum wanted her four ounces of flesh. Never
enough for a whole pound, just a quarter.
“Admit I am right!”
“No, you said we don’t drive the family around any more so we don’t need a bigger car.
Then you said Graham just asked me to drive him around. You can’t have your bread buttered in
both sides of the coin!”
Eh?
“Anyway,” continued Mum, not settling for any rational explanations which both proved
and disproved her point. “He’ll probably leave soon and go shirking off with some girl!”
“Shacking up!” I corrected. “The expression is ‘Shacking up’!”
“Mind your own business. Your mother wasn’t talking to you!”
Eventually we got under way and Dad dropped me at the corner outside the Victoria
Markets, outside the Rechibites Headquarters.
But Mum was right. I would be leaving soon, although I did not know it at that time. And I
would be away for years.
Of course, as usual, I left my guitars in Dad’s car and was called up to say I would catch a
tram and come and get them, but Harley had a better suggestion. He ordered a Silver Top to
collect them.
Time is money! He needed us to cut an album in a week.
A whole week? We should do it in a couple of days. Six songs a day!
But what twelve songs?
Arguing about that took us until three in the afternoon and even then, none of us was really
happy with the selection, or “playlist”, as we would call it today.
I wanted to include “(You) Wiped The Floor With Me” and get Lynn over to help with the
vocals.
 “I fort so!” said Porky. “You’ve got a fing for ‘er, ‘aven’t you?”
I ignored it but Harley told me why it wouldn’t be a good idea.
“I have taken over her management, since Henry’s incarceration, and she is in the next
studio as we speak, recording ’Floor’, and ‘Like a Brother to Me’.”
“Did they incarcerate him?” exclaimed Bedlam. “That’s a bit harsh. He only hit that cop,
never diddled her or anything! I’d have thought a few years in the pokie would’ve been all he
got!”
We ignored him and got back onto the task of deciding which songs to include. I didn’t
like my song title being abbreviated to simply “Floor”!
We settled on sixteen, and Bolshie, the studio manager explained that we probably
wouldn’t need all of them, but some may not record as well as we sung them on stage.
But they did. They all sounded much better, due to better techniques, better acoustics and
because we were not half pissed when we recorded them.
A week later we were still going on the fourth song. We changed the words on nearly
everything, invented clever new riffs, did “lets-try-this” repeatedly, did each song about twelve
times, killed a whole case of scotch and sent out for a total of eighty two cups of coffee and
nearly two hundred doughnuts. My fingers were nearly worn away and Bedlam shut up
completely, saving his voice for singing.
We listened to the acetates and then prepared to do them all over, incorporating a bit of one
take, three bits of the second, most of the fifth, etc.
“No need!” Bolshie said. “I can mix bits, even different tempos. I can’t do anything about
your key changes as yet, but I was reading about equipment they have at Abbey Road which
will.”
“Okay, the next LP we do will be recorded at Abbey Road!” predicted Harley, and it came
true because the following November, we caught the tube to St John’s Wood and made
“Wandsworth Common”.
Anyhow, in April, in Melbourne, armed with the knowledge that there was a thing called
mixing, we knocked off the remaining twelve songs in ten days. Bolshie had a lot of work to do,
but we had a week off.
Starting with a thrashing The Bombers took at the hands of St Kilda at Windy Hill.
Then we were off to New Zealand for a six city tour in ten days as the Kiwi chicks were
champing at the bit to get their hand on our bodies. We did twelve shows with Lynn and a new
signing of Harley’s “Purple Mo”.
Local bands made up the first one third of the show, and without fail, every one included at
least one Pimple’s hit! Top marks for originality. Or Suck-holing!
The album came out three weeks after we got back to Melbourne.
 I had better explain. Long playing records, called “Albums” were pressed onto vinyl, but
the original sound was on strips of acetate called “tapes”. When these were mixed, compiled and
ready to go, they were physically “cut” into a wax disk, from which the pressings were made.
The outcome was variously called “twelve inch”, “LP”, “Long Playing Record” or “album’,
depending on who was saying it, what country you were in and whether the speaker could only
remember one of the names.
These revolved (actually “rotated”) on a record player with the speed set to thirty three and
one third rotations (called “revolutions”) a minute’
They could contain from as few as two songs (one to each side, or one song if you didn’t
mind stopping halfway through and turning the disk over) to about thirty if the songs were short
enough. It all depended on how tight you were able to pack the grooves in.
This last term was used by the Sydney band “The Groove” who had a hit in 1967 with
“Simon Says” and a year later, with “Soothe Me”, which Porky insisted he wrote in grade seven
but couldn’t prove.
Singles were seven inches in diameter, compared with the twelve inches of an LP. Twelve
inches is the old money for about thirty centimetres.
Your task is now to work out how many centimetres in diameter a seven inch single was.
Here is a clue: an inch is approximately two and a half centimetres.
Singles had one song on each side, discounting very long songs again, which required
flipping the disk halfway through.
Then there were “EPs”, extended plays, which used the microgroove technology with the
improved vinyl used on LPs. These normally carried two songs on the “A” side and two on the
“B” but sometimes variations occurred.
How much simpler are CDs, MP3, Spotify, etc.
Anyway, two songs had been selected from the original sixteen. Bolshie could not
determine which tracks were worse than the others, so he pressed them with all we had recorded.
But two, in his opinion, excelled and he made these a single. The “A” side was “Girl in a
Blazer” with “Badger” on the flip.
“Girl in a Blazer” went straight in at number five, then topped at Number One for three
weeks before “Morning Town Ride” displaced it for The Seekers.
“Badgers” a silly child’s song I wrote while having my tonsils out in 1962, remains
popular to this day, with literally hundreds of Australian artists recording it. I know Slim Dusty
never released it, but Anne Kirkpatrick reckons she has a tape of her and her dad singing it when
she was about fourteen or fifteen.
It started life as a guitar solo, when I first discovered Hank Marvin and the Shadows,
became a blues harp number shortly afterwards and then some hastily written words were added
when we did a performance at Royal Children’s Hospital in 1965.
 Most of the songs were Porky’s creations, with a few joint efforts between me and him,
Wally and him and one which we all hated by Bedlam. There was also a Vanda-Young
composition, which Harry always mentions when describing how successful his partnership was
with George.
Just think, in his eyes, we were a major part of the Easybeats’ notoriety!
I bought Dad a new Austin 1800, or to give it its proper title, which nobody else ever has, a
BMC ADO17. It was a beige sort of colour, which Mum called “fawn” and Dad called “khaki”,
pronouncing it correctly, unlike the Yanks who insist on saying “cacky”, which always makes
me think of excrement. Sorry, that’s “do-dos” for you.
Actually, I bought it on the spur of the moment and I didn’t have Dad in mind when I
bought it.
I was on the tram home when a truck hit the side of it on the intersection of Bell and
Gilbert. It derailed and although it was spitting distance from the depot, it took about an hour to
clear, so I decided to walk the mile and half home.
Nobody was hurt and the police said they had enough witnesses, but no replacement buses
showed up, either, so I set out on what my Nana used to call “Shank’s Pony”.
On the way I began to get a bit shagged out and as I passed by a dealership, I saw this
particular car in the front showroom. I recalled that Dad had some brochures on this model and I
thought I would take a closer look.
So I went in and bought it, then and there! I had my cheque book, the salesman verified
that I was the celebrated Graham “Lizard” Boyle and got a cover note from an insurance
company and sent off the rego papers in my name.
As I drove out of the yard, I considered the daft thing I had just done.
But then, with my characteristic, rapier-like mental speed, I decided to present it to Dad,
when I got home.
Boy, was I popular! Dad put about two hundred miles on the clock that evening, driving
around to show all his mates what a magnanimous son he had. I came with him, of course,
basking happily in their praise and admiration. People who had thought I was a self-centred
arsehole and openly criticised my music prior to this, became number one fans, rushing out the
following morning to buy our LP!
Great decision, that, and all thanks to the M&MTB’s crappy old W2 tram not being able to
withstand a gentle knock from a Coles truck!
And it moved “Girl in a Blazer” a couple of steps up the charts when Stan “The Man” Rofe
mentioned my loving family ties and my generous act in “Go-Set” a couple of days later. I could
do no wrong!
 But Harley wasn’t going to let grass grow under our feet. Not while we were charting in
Australia and New Zealand. He wanted us in the mix of things, internationally.
Crabbie set up a meeting with Parlophone and some other British record labels he thought
would view us kindly, and who personally owed him favours. As if anyone in this industry
honours favours, but that is what he told Harley.
Among my photos are many pictures of us arriving or departing on Qantas or BOAC
aeroplanes, but we never took any, nor even informed the press that we would be out at
Essendon Airport that cold September morning. We didn’t want anyone to know in case anyone
raised any objections.
You see, a couple of weeks earlier, Porky and I received our draft papers to attend the
recruiting barracks in North Melbourne on November 19. If the National Service press-gangers
had found out, they would have had a field day, with ranking officials pontificating how it was
vital to the country’s security and everyone had to do their bit to maintain it. The capture of a
couple of highly popular music stars, attempting to sneak out of Australia, would have resulted
in headlines like “Nobody Escapes Their Duty”.
As it was, a week after we left, Everybody’s reported that “Pimples Pop Off!” while
Alberts said “Pimples Feel The Squeeze”.
Much better than “Pimples Get Pinched”!
If our exit from Australia was low-key, then our arrival and welcome in London was under
the doormat! Get it? Low-key? Doormat?
EMI had sent a driver to pick us up. He stood there looking embarrassed, holding a card
which said “Melbourne Group”. He would have looked even more embarrassed if the card had
read “The Pimples”.
But as soon as he saw us, longish hair, mod gear and with suntans, he took a punt and held
the sign up high so we wouldn’t miss it.
“Yes, I thought it would be you. Nobody else who could have been you had suntans!”
We crowded into the minibus parked out the front where the “Reserved” bays were. It was
almost impossible to get one of these, we learned later, and we felt post-datedly privileged. But
to get to the mini-bus, we had to run across thirty yards of the heaviest rain we had seen since
Cairns. But while theirs was warm, this Pom stuff was just above freezing.
“Soon have you at your digs, and get a nice hot cuppa into you,” the driver said, amicably,
but Porky beat him to the punch and pulled one of his duty-free bottles of Chivas Regal from his
Qantas bag and passed it around.
It rained the entire seven years we were in England. It never let up, even for a minute!
Actually, I tell a lie, because in Birmingham once it hailed and up further north, it snowed
incessantly.
The British live, as you know, in a cold climate. Even the southern tips are further north of
the Equator than the extremities of Tasmania are south of it. Well, without consulting an Atlas, I
reckon that would be so.
 But they always act surprised and excited when it snows.
Not like Canadians who have different categories of adjectives for snow, ranging from
“darn” to “F*** the b***** c***ing s***house, sunovabitching, two timing, four-flushing, no
good, for Chrissakes”. No terms of endearment or welcome, or even neutral. Just condemnatory.
Not so, though, the To-and-Froms!
“Ooh, Justin, came and have a look at this. It’s snowing! Oh how lovely! Just like a
Christmas Card! Do you think it will lay, I do hope so!”
There are not many nouns which can be ascribed to “lay”. Eggs, bricks, ammunition and
girls spring to mind, but not snow.
It doesn’t “lay”! It either freezes into ice or melts into slush. It goes all brown and yellowy
and soaks the bottom of your jeans, wicking its way up towards your groin. Filthy stuff!
But the British have something called a “stiff upper lip”.
If you have ever kissed a Grenadier Guardsman or one of those dolly birds along Kings
Road or at Carnaby Street, you will know what I mean.
Mott the Hoople might have considered “Chelsea girls are the best in the world for
company”, but don’t try kissing one. You will get more passion from puckering up to a letterbox!
And those damn bristly moustaches don’t help matters either. While they are no longer the
fashion for men, most women still sport them!
So being a great fan of English weather, I was well equipped to really make the most of my
stay here. Harley had rented us a “maisonette” which had six bedrooms and four bathrooms, two
large (to English standards, pokey to Australian) reception areas and a kitchen, but with a fridge
and a small oven in each bedroom. It had at one time been Frank Ifield’s pad and still had some
of his personal stationery in a bureau drawer.
It was just down Wandsworth Bridge Road from Stamford Bridge where Chelsea plays and
about two miles from Sloan Square on the District Line or Number 11 bus. It was the same if you
walked or rode a bike, but that is adding unnecessary description to a pretty nondescript place.
And although we often walked it, we were not going to trust those lousy drivers not to
hurtle their Minis and Anglias at us on bicycles. Not on those narrow streets.
Porky’s accent got worse and worse. He discovered rhyming slang and when he couldn’t
find a word in his new vocabulary, he would make one up.
“I say, luv, you got an ‘arp to ‘ave a short order at this divine between my garden?”
Roughly translated, this was “Here, love, do you have a minute to have a look at this
growth between my toes.” Harp and spinet was “minute”, short order (cook) apparently meant
“look”, divine (oath) was “growth” while garden (hose) was “toes”.
Fortunately, he grew out of it and reverted back to his more casual way of speaking.
More than likely, he just forgot about, amid the panic conditions we lived in during our
London era. Harley never lived with us, or he would probably have got us a bit better organised.
He lived a few blocks away in more fashionable Chelsea. Fulham in those days had a working
class reputation.
We never had time to even wash up our dishes, let alone cook anything. We lived on
cornflakes and instant coffee, Wimpy Burgers and the inevitable fish and chips.
I though Melburnians were fond of their sliced up, fried nearly black potatoes and their
dehydrated, tasteless bits of cod, but you should see the Poms! The chippies are opening up as
you set off to work in the morning and are the last living souls around on the streets in London’s
suburbs.
This is about quarter past ten at night because London closed down at twenty two hundred
hours when the pubs shut. This was back in the sixties and seventies, when England still lived in
the grip of Queen Victoria. Although she had been dead for well over half a century and another
decade to boot, she still reigned in Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons and would have
in the House of Lords if anyone could be found alive and awake.
Queen Victoria, it is said, refused to pass a law banning what lesbians practice, but was
very enthusiastic about anti-homosexual behaviour among men. Not that she sympathised, mind
you! She didn’t have enough imagination or street-cred to understand what physical activity two
women alone could get up to in a bedroom.
She also decreed that ale-houses, gin-mills and the like, open for only two hours at
lunchtime and from four until ten in the evening. The reason for this again was she had no
imagination.
“That will give workers sufficient time to have a refreshment after work and with their
lunch, whatever time their shifts occur.”
And then she added “We are not amused!” just because it was expected of her.
Strangely, though, she allowed the boozers at Billingsgate, Covent Garden and Smithfield
to stay open all hours, because the fishmongers, greengrocers and butchers there worked around
the clock. So she wasn’t completely daft.
But one evening I walked into a pub in Finchley in North London after ten thirty in the
evening and it was still in full swing. People supping bevies, falling off bar stools, playing shove
ha’penny and trying to look down the barmaid’s bodice as she pulled their beers.
“I thought you were supposed to close at ten o’clock!” I told mine host as he poured me an
ouzo and coke.
“We did. These are all just me mates ‘aving a bit of a knees up!”
“I have never met you before, and yet you are serving me.”
“Yair, well, anyone who buys a drink orf me is me mate.”
“But what if Old Bill comes in?”
“Oh, ‘e prob’ly will from time to time. Actually, there they are over there at the darts
board. That’s the station sergeant frowing his arrers now!”
Somehow, this weird little country manages to keep functioning, despite this.
 Anyway, I was telling you about how we were rushed off our feet before I became side-
tracked.
Harley organised a woman to come in three times a week to drop cigarette ash all over
everything, put her feet up, read magazines and help herself to our Irish Breakfast tea.
She classified herself as “the char” but when I looked up the word in the dictionary, it said
it was a cleaning lady and was derived from the word “chore” which meant a job or task
performed on a regular basis. Because of her propensity for consuming vast amounts of her
employer’s very expensive tea, the expression is used in the slummier parts of the home counties
to denote that awful brown, sugar-laden, milky drink they all seem so fond of.
By the way, I also found out that not only was salt once more valuable than gold, tea was
too. I assume that this was because it was such a rare commodity because the charwomen drank
all of it.
This title must have become another of those traditions in name only, because all the while
she was there, I never once saw her do any work. A few of our groupies used to come over while
we were out and do a smashing job of washing and ironing our clothes, making our flat
presentable, clean and filled with freshly picked young ladies.

We were out all hours of the day and night.

A typical working day, and they were all working days, was:
Seven a.m.: Get out of bed, shower and shave and clean the teeth, brush and blow-dry the
hair. Search for clean clothes, polish our boots. Have a cup of instant coffee made from the ten
pound caterer’s tin and water from the two gallon urn. Bowl of Cornflakes or “Weetabix”.
Eight a.m.: catch taxi, tube or bus to recording studio at Abbey Road, St. John’s Wood, an
inner suburb owned by drug cartels, robber barons, record companies and member’s of
parliament. I don’t know why property prices were so high. The place was full of undesirables.
Two thirty p.m.: grab a Wimpy (English equivalent of a hamburger but tasting nothing like
one) or Scampi and chips (Scampi is a sort of small, marine dwelling crustacean with no meat on
it) for lunch. Drink three pints of light and bitter for nourishment because it is impossible to get it
from pub food in England.
Three o’clock p.m.: Mad dash by taxi to rehearse and record a television interview and
performance. No need for microphones or guitar leads as these are mimed straight off your
records.
Five o’clock p.m.: Crash wherever you can in a hotel lobby, railway station or laundrette
for fifteen or twenty minutes as a sort of “power-nap” to get you through the evening’s
performance at places with names like “Talk of the Town”, “London Palladium”, “The
Roundhouse” or “Golders Green Hippodrome”. (I never did find out what “hippodrome” meant,
but I always have a mental picture of large riverine ungulates flying in and out of a big, semi-
tubular hangar.)
 Ten Thirty p.m.: heavy drinking session at Ronnie Scott’s, the Nebuchadnezza Club or The
Establishment Club, where the film about Christine Keeler and John Profumo was made. This
used to be owned by “Pete” of “Not Only But Also” fame, Peter Cooke.
Barmy reckoned the Neb was only named as a wager between a sign writer and the club
owner that he couldn’t get that many letters across the narrow frontage and the club owner won
because the tradie left off the “R”. He reckons the owner himself told him this.
One o’clock a.m.: Hit the feathers back in Wandsworth Bridge Road.
Next day, more of the same.
Harley kept good his promise of recording at Abbey Road, and it was a very productive
time. We recorded all of “Wandsworth Common” there in November and December, all except
that weird curiosity that was recorded with Stan Tracey, live at Ronnie Scotts which only got a
name on the day we sent the acetates off to be cut into a record.
“Forty Thieves.” It neither sounds Arabian nor has lyrics which in any way reflect a
connection with the underworld. Barmy wrote the tune and plays vibraphone alongside Stan’s
piano, with a short passage of Wally’s bass. The rest of the piece he played drums, apparently
with his Fender still around his neck. Porky and I made a clatter with our pint glasses at the very
end, otherwise we were not too certain what was going on.
But “Forty Thieves”?
One day at Abbey Road, Ringo Starr wandered in and gave us all a slice of his Kit Kat, one
of those eight slab ones. He hung around the sound kiosk for about an hour and helped carry out
the cups of tea. Then George stuck his head around the door and called “Psst, Ringo!” and he
went off, nodding approvingly at us.
Another time, we saw Gerry Marsden swear at the dustman’s cart outside where he wanted
to park his car.
So exciting. I couldn’t make up my mind for a long time whether to put “Never a dull
moment” there, so I eventually decided on both. Never a dull moment!
At Christmas, Porky stayed with some rellies in the East End. Collier Row. And went to
the football at Upton Park to watch the Hammers play on Boxing Day.
I went down to visit Aunty Dora in Weymouth. Bedlam came with me on the train.
But it wasn’t very bright and festive because Aunty Dora was in hospital in the terminal
stages of lung cancer and Uncle George spent the whole time with her. My second cousin, Jen,
came over in the morning and cooked dinner for eleven of us. Bedlam and I went to the pub with
her husband and her brothers, Ken, Len and Den. Uncle George swore they didn’t do that
deliberately and that the names Jennifer, Kenneth, Leonard and Dennis never rhymed like their
diminutives did. English people always Christen their children with a name that is immediately
abbreviated and the long one never used again.
My Mum and Dad always call me Gra. Porky calls me Liz.
We all trooped around to the hospital in the afternoon, leaving Jen and her sisters-in-law to
wash up. Bedlam scruffed a National Health nurse after she knocked off work at three thirty. At
least he had the decorum to take her back to the bed and breakfast and not do it in the hospital.
We stayed in a B and B because Aunty’s house was full of her children, in-laws and their
children. Aunty died on New Years Day.
 Sir Lew Grade, born Louis Winogradsky, was a British media proprietor and entrepreneur
in the last half of the twentieth century. The Poms called him an “impresario” which was
surprising. Entrepreneur is a French word, while impresario is Italian. Normally they like their
posh words to be French, while we prefer the American-Italian. Take “courgette” compared with
the Aussie “zucchini” and “aubergine” against our “egg-plant”. But “impresario” Sir Lew was,
and so he’d stay in the minds of millions of Englishmen, including Sir Paul McCartney who
sings “some important impresario” in “No Matter What the Man Says”. It is firmly cemented!
Originally a dancer and talent scout, Lew’s interest in television production began in 1954
when, in a partnership, he successfully bid for franchises in the newly created ITV network. This
eventually became ATV and I admit I don’t know why and really couldn’t care less. If you want
to know, Google it, but I am not going to lose sleep or hair over it.
Up until then, the government controlled BBC said, did and showed exactly what they
wanted with no commercial interests competing against it at all. Because of this, it became
frightfully boring. Their radio stations were even worse, well into the sixties, until “pirate radio
stations” forced them into the latter half of the twentieth century.
Anyway, by 1967, Lew Grade owned everything in television and film in England that was
already screwed up by the BBC. Except for what Paul Raymond owned, and he was a bit dodgy
with strip clubs and porn movies and such, not seemly for someone who was to become a Baron.
But he was big, he was powerful and he could make or break you with a clap of his hand.
He was imaginative enough to accept the 1960s phenomena, the Beat Revolution, with
Mary Quant, The Kinks, Twiggy, Peter Sellers and of course the Brian Epstein stables. The
Beatles, Cilla, all that mob. They knighted him in 1969.
In the 1980s, long after we had left, so we cannot be accused of anything, he fell from
grace a bit when ATV Midlands was ordered to dump him. He was far too powerful for the BBC
to allow standing, so with one final, all-out push, they settled his little red wagon once and for
all.
But his influence lives on. The film and television industries would have been a sad and
less colourful weird mix of comedy, music and war movies than it was. Many recording stars
really owe their very existence to the exposure they got from shows like “The London Palladium
Show”, a variety show which Lew loved and watched avidly. This show had a bewildering lot of
name changes and I think it ended off “Sunday Night at the London Palladium”.
After all that, you probably thought that I was going to announce that Sir Lew took a
personal interest in us and ended off managing us and making us millionaires.
No such luck, but we did appear on “Palladium” on Independent Television. (“Palladium”
was the only word which remained constant on the title. Oh, and “the”.) And the only thing he
wanted to change, even if only for the one show, was our name. Harley didn’t even bother to ring
all of us to get a consensus. Porky and I were snoozing on a couple of sofas at the studio when he
popped in and I just said “An unconditional NO! And that goes for Porky!”
Sir Lew had in mind calling us “The Platypuses”! For Chrissakes! Imagine trying to live
that down in the fifties, much less the sixties.
Only the best acts went on there, classy performers like Mike and Bernie Winters, Norman
Wisdom, Liberace and Topo Giggio.
We were not the first Aussie act there. Our predecessor at the Fulham flat, Frank Ifield,
was a smash hit there, as were our fellow Melburnians, The Seekers. But I like to think we were
among the most watched.
We did the title track from “Wandsworth Common” and “Ripper Mate”, finishing off with
“Girl in a Blazer” which they cut into for a commercial break after the first verse and chorus.
The crowd loved us and the switchboards lit up. That, by the way, is a lie. Switchboards in those
days didn’t “light up”. They just clicked when a call came in. And “lit up” is pretty emotive for
four hundred calls in the next three days as people rang in to find out a bit more about this bunch
of uncouth colonials with the very distasteful name.
They were all given the number of our publicity agent, who reported no increased activity
until we found his phone service had been discontinued for unpaid fees.
But the best indication was the sales figures, which drove the charts, and the number of
times our songs were requested on radio stations.
Phone-in request programmes were very popular in those days because, frankly, the BBC
didn’t have a clue what the current popular trends in music were. They still played Tennessee
Ernie Ford’s “Ballad of Davy Crockett” and “Around the Corner, Behind the Bush, Looking for
Henry Lee” by Jo Stafford. Patty Page was still the Singing Rage and topping them all, Vera
Lynn was still meeting them again, twenty two years after the war.
That is where the Pirate Radio Stations came in. Radio Caroline and Radio London were
the chief protagonists, with Radio Luxembourg right up there with them. But Caroline and
London broadcast from boats just outside the three mile limit, which in those days, was highly
respected. It marked the end of British waters and International water. The BBC had no control
over these stations, and that really upset them.
When I say “really upset them”, I am not talking like “Hitler really upset Europe in the
1930s” or “the American Civil War really upset the slave trade.”
No, I am talking about REALLY upsetting them. They flew into rages, ripped out furniture
and fittings, tore up paper and scattered the bits. They wet their trousers and had to be sent to bed
with no pudding! They constantly harped on to the House of Commons, to the Lords and even
threatened Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, that unless these Pirate Stations were closed down
they would tell their mums and then he’d be sorry.
 But there was nothing they could do. They broadcast from international waters and you
could not legislate against where radio signals would penetrate. The suggestion was even made
that all radios sold in Britain be fitted with limiters banning them from receiving on those
wavelengths.
If they had stopped to consider earlier, fighting fire with fire is always the best form of
defence than merely sooking.
And so in 1967, the BBC opened up Radio One and paid more money and offered better
conditions to these Pirate DJs and allowed them to play songs that people actually wanted to
listen to!
The Pirates still operated but to lesser effect. In 1966, they sold two million of their pre-
decimal pounds worth of advertising. When you consider that a bacon sandwich cost a penny
three farthings and you could have a night out up West, a slap-up feed for two and a great show
on Tottenham Court Road, with still a tanner change from half a crown after paying the taxi, that
was big money!
But the BBC’s Radio One stupidly didn’t accept commercial sponsorship, or they could
have paid off the national debt and covered the cost of entering the European Common Market.
All this pop activity did us no harm whatsoever. Kids were buying our records, watching
our TV appearances and flocking to our live performances. The screams were just as loud at our
shows as for the Beatles.
But although this didn’t change the weather, we were making money. Throughout the
sixties, groups were being ripped off by managers and venues. Either by sheer bastardness and
greed, or by naivety, or maybe by being too desperate to become famous, I don’t know, but
Harley was a tough bargainer.
But although at first some venues thought he was bluffing when he asked for more money,
once he had withdrawn our services, they realised fifty percent of nothing was a lot less than
fifteen percent of a lot! Harley realised this, and also realised that his own lifestyle required he
get a good fifteen percent, too!
Now it was time for us to go on the road again. These days you can fly back to London
after each show for less than you would spend in petrol and hotel tariffs, In those days it meant
hiring a minibus or van and roughing it.
But January and February are very lucrative in Britain. There is sweet fuck all to do when
it gets dark at four o’clock and stays like that until nearly ten the following morning. There were
no floodlights so there was no football, telly was all Z-Cars and The Banana Splits Show in black
and white, and unless you like war films or westerns, Sir Lew’s offerings at the “flicks” were all
you had.
 So came the great tradition of Pantomime. A children’s story, such as “Jack and the
Beanstalk” or “Babes in the Wood” would be produced using male actors as ugly old women and
perky young girls as Peter Pan or Dick Whittington. There would be pantomime cows (two
blokes in a cow costume) and catch phrases such as “Oh no she isn’t!” and the audience would
reply “Oh yes she is!”
Terribly camp, as the British say. But the Poms love it. I know a few troupes have tried to
introduce it in Australia with little or no success. Just a few ex-patriate Poms in areas such as in
Joondalup in Perth, Frenchs Forest in Sydney and Melton in Melbourne bother to attend, but
without their television stars brightening it up, they are sad and sorry affairs.
And venues which in summer are hives of activities make reasonable money even in
winter, because of this. Bournemouth, Weston Super Mare, Southend (Sarfend to the Londoner)
and Scarborough come to life after dark, starting, as I have already mentioned, soon after four
o’clock.
But on non-panto evenings, these venues like to keep the place aired, windows open and
the heating left on. So they put on shows using singers and acts not appearing in the pantomime.
That is where we came in. Three nights a week in Bournemouth netted far more than a full week
at the Caulfield Boozer. People used to come down for a winter weekend getaway, see a panto
on Friday night, go bowling or roller skating or playing Bingo on Saturday evening and then
want entertaining on Sunday before hopping on a late train back to Leeds, Birmingham or
London to start work the following morning. Hotels offered specials for midweek
accommodation, so the ranks of unemployed would flock there on weekdays, flush with funds
from the dole, stay a few nights then vacate the place ready for the weekend full-tariff set.
They are not silly when it comes to extracting the pound from your pocket, are these
Pommy “impresarios”.
We did most of the winter at “Slophouse on Sea”, or Eastbourne as it is commonly known.
A very elite class of people live there and this is reflected on weekends when the tourists come
down from London, Kent, Sussex and Wiltshire. But during the week, it was a different story
when the kids arrived on their Vespa scooters and rooted all over the beaches, piers and
promenades. The penny arcades, the pubs and the public lavatories nearly burst at the seams with
thousands of P J Proby and Lulu lookalikes.
I think that was an unintended slip on my part in the wording of that last sentence. P J
Proby was a Texan singer who could get no work in the USA so came to Britain like we did,
hoping to make it big. And he did, mainly because he was a couple of sizes larger than his
trousers, which he liked to have the seams sewn up, going very sparingly on the cotton. They
would split on stage and the girls would squeal, he would get his jollies and everyone was kept
happy.
 So “burst at the seams” was one of those accidental slips that a 1960s psychologist would
probably write like a thousand page thesis on! And if he was English, get paid about ten million
pounds in research grants to do so.
Good work if you can get it!
And, by the way, I have got a photo of Jimmy (his real name was James Marcus Smith) in
the green room at Fairfield Halls in Croydon, sewing up his maroon corduroys. He was banned
from appearing on the BBC, subsequently, as they considered it “lewd”.
But as the miserable winter weather and blinding rain turned into spring miserable weather
and blinding rain, the bookings started coming in from the dominions. Belfast wanted us,
Glasgow needed us, Manchester was crying out for us and Liverpool was desperate for us. They
all loved their Aussie Pimples.
We went back into Abbey Road and recorded another single, “Stuff This, I’m Off” which
the label rejected and made us rename and reword. It ended off called “Or Else I’ll Leave”.
Adele did a great version of this on one of her tours, but changed the words back with the one
exception. She sang “Fuck This, I’m Off!”
It was backed by the jaunty “Paddle Steamer Blues” which was not blues, not Dixie Jazz or
anything like anything anyone had ever heard before. It was almost Rap, but interesting.
Donovan loved it, and said so, which was the reason nobody ever asked his opinion on anything
again.
It reached number eighty one and then disappeared. I looked on YouTube and there is no
video under any of the titles, not even Adele’s.
However, a sly tape of us performing at Eastbourne made it’s way to the Pirate Stations.
This was called “Count Your Blessings” and was nothing to do with the hymn by Johnston
Oatman. Porky wrote it while on his first LSD trip and says he hasn’t a clue what it is about. But
he produced a tape recording of it one day and we did it for a lark one wintry St Valentines Day
in 1967.
One station played it, alternating with Knights in White Satin by the Moody Blues, all one
weekend, claiming these two songs would change the Earth, bringing peace, prosperity and
human kindness to everyone.
No wonder a lot of these off-shore broadcasters went broke that year.
But it would have nice if they had fulfilled those predictions.
 In May, Harley cheered up. The sun came out for nearly three minutes that day. It is quite
an unusual sight for an Australian to see when the sun breaks through the cloud while it is still
teeming with rain. As you know, in Australia, it is either clear blue skies or black raincloud.
Very seldom do you get a combination of both.
Not in England. Because it is required to rain constantly, it has been known that the sun
can break through on occasions. Everything in England is weak and insipid, the beer, the tea and
the clouds are no exception. So a break in the clouds is a feasible occurrence.
So Harley drove down to Gatwick to collect Sweetie, who had stayed in Australia, looking
after our affairs there. When he got back to Chelsea, he brought with him a big surprise.
Lynn Verity! She was still doing really well in Australia but the powers that be thought she
had what it took to make it in England. She didn’t, as it happened, but instead enrolled at the
Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge where she continued her studies into Marine Biology.
But like Brian Epstein’s relationship with Cilla Black, Harley felt sort of paternal towards
Lynn. Although both Harley and Eppy were gay, they felt some attraction to these safe, straight,
talented women and lavished their attention on them.
He signed Lynn onto every performance we did, making it a condition of getting us, on
many occasions.
That suited us, too, as we all loved Lynn like a sister and reckoned no other backing group
was good enough for her.
Rod Stewart begged her to go out with him, even getting down on one knee and proposing
when she said no. He was not well known and most people considered him a bit of a drip in
those pre-Maggie days.
Rod was more than half serious, too, Lynn said. She thought about lying to him and saying
she was my girl, but decided that might complicate things if she found a man she did want to
have an affair with.
I pointed out that I was not exactly celibate myself, and people might have started feeling
sorry for her having such a prick for a boyfriend if I was seen with other women. Besides, I
didn’t want to inhibit my chances with the women I was meeting, either.
It was decided she stay in our Fulham flat, which meant we had to moderate our
behaviours slightly. No farting in the living areas, remaining reasonably clothed at all times,
including keeping our dressing gowns closed when we weren’t wearing underdaks, and not
including too many profane or obscene words. Blasphemy has always been acceptable in
Australia, especially in cursing, so nobody thought to include that.
Lynn automatically introduced moderation in some areas. For example strange plant-like
things started to appear in our fridge. Carrots and cabbage and once even a cauliflower. Things
our mums used to buy and turn brown and unrecognisable before putting them on the dinner
plate with our chops or our steak. Things that had to be boiled or eaten raw instead of grilling or
deep-frying.
And colourful things, too! Like apples, plums and apricots, which turned out to be
delicious when eaten raw and even better when stewed with lots of sugar and baked in a pie or
crumble.
Although that left a lot less room for beer, Wally discovered that if you put it on the
balcony, it got just as cold! It is freezing outside and other than the danger of it turning into ice,
this was an excellent arrangement.
Lynn introduced us to new places in the high street. The greengrocers shop, the bakery and
the delicatessen. She never ate meat or fish and refused to buy processed foods in tins or packets.
Fish fingers, sausages, Spam and TV dinners were out! Instead she would make us omelettes,
salads, risottos and stir-fries. The only concession she allowed to tins was baked beans, which
she said were good for our bowels. But that wasn’t allowed to be an excuse for public flatulence.
Bedlam moved in with Barmy, who had the biggest room, and we discovered the bunk bed
in my room broke up into twin divans, so with a bit of swapping and changing, along with a lot
of fumigating and scrubbing, we turned the sixth bedroom into a boudoir for Lynn. The fifth
bedroom was filled with our guitars, drums, amps, keyboards and also became a repository for
old magazines and newspapers until Lynn chucked them out.
The groupies stayed away for a while after Lynn moved in. They didn’t feel comfortable
about her at first, but gradually, in ones and two, started to return. Basically timid creatures who
just like the warmth of their quarry, they were frightened by this new addition to the herd and felt
threatened by her.
But Lynn made it clear to them that she had designs on none of us. And on none of them,
after one girl, who swung both ways, tried her luck, only to be sent cracking!
They started helping her with shopping and cooking and still did all our laundry, made our
beds and cleaned up after us. It was a common sight to see Emma vacuuming, Doris and Jacqui
at the kitchen sink and Freda pressing our shirts, while Jane and Francie tucked in our sheets,
smartened our doonas and pulled dirty underpants out from under the beds.
I know some groups treated their groupies atrociously, not only in the bedroom, but
domestically, swearing and even hitting them. When a couple of members of an (unnamed)
Geordie group came around after a gig one night, we had to chuck them out because their
behaviour to the girls was so disrespectful. These people were our friends, our fans, our public,
our income!
And we always put on an equally good show on stage. One night in Eastbourne when the
temperature dropped to thirty five below freezing point, it was snowing a blizzard and the buses
stopped running, only eleven people turned up at the Winter Gardens. Some of the other acts got
out and fooled around on stage, carelessly playing a very minimum and not concentrating. One
smartarsed kid refused to go out at all and sat watching telly in the Green Room.
Porky fair ripped into them!
“These are your fans!” he stormed. “They are paying your wages! You will still be paid,
even if no one turns up! And they’re decent people ‘oo’ve bought a ticket to ‘ear you so ‘ow dare
you let them down. You’re scumbags, all of you! If anyone else finks they can bludge off, I’ll
speak to the management about getting you frown art of the show. There are plenty of uvver
bands out there who would ‘ave their balls cut off if it meant getting a job like this!”
But they still moaned and groaned about it. Still, they do have to live up to their reputation
of being whinging bloody poms!
Lynn recorded the old Lolita hit, Sailor, which Norman Newell had translated into English
for Petula Clark. Studio musicians backed her and it charted at around the high seventies.
Peculiarly, the B side was Island in the Sun, from the film of the same name, starring Harry
Belafonte. I say peculiarly, as in 1968, Pet took Harry by the arm during a song, to become the
first white woman to physically contact an African-American man on US television. Quite
spooky, when you view Lynn’s record in that light.
Talking about translations (well, I just barely mentioned them) we often bumped into Mike
Sarne, who had a hit with “Come Outside” some years before, featuring Wendy Richards from
“Dad’s Army” and “Are You Being Served”. Mike was pretty busy with translating English
songs into various European languages, and he offered to rewrite “Wandsworth Common” into
German so we could take it into Europe. He ended off doing eight of the songs and we released
them on an LP with six of the original numbers. This went into the German charts at number
nineteen and stayed for eight weeks, peaking at number four.
The Easybeats only ever made it to number ten in Germany, but beat the lederhosen off us
in Holland, where Harry and Dick had the advantage of being Dutch. I am not gloating, but the
German market was a good one to crack and we considered it a fine feather in our caps.
Although Mr Sarne did all the hard work and promoted the crap out of it for us!
He was lovely man who took his work very seriously. Writer, singer, actor, quiz host,
translator, film director, he still lives with his wife Anne just around the corner from Harley’s old
house in Chelsea.
Men like Mike were the exception, rather than the rule in England. Happy, hardworking
and cheerful, he took people as they were.
I just mentioned that Harry and Dick were Dutch and that the people of the Netherlands
embraced the Easybeats into their bosom. You have probably seen some of those Dutch women
with their clogs and scarves and full bodices. And their bosoms. Not a bad place to be!
 But not the British. Porky and I were British born. George, Snowy and Stevie from the
Easybeats and all three Bee Gees were. I believe Olivia, John Farnham and a host of others were
all born in England, but the Poms treated them with derision. The Seekers were different, but
then, they weren’t known for Rock’n’Roll. And they introduced people from the British Isles to
the folk music from the British Isles. They did! Check it out. When did a British folk song make
number one in Britain before the Seekers?
Since then, Kylie has made it bigger and for longer than any other Australian in Britain,
indeed the whole world, and I will not allow anyone to take away from that achievement.
But it was her role in a television soap opera which propelled her into the limelight.
If there is one thing the To and Froms love better than their Andrews Liver Salts, Bounty
Bars, a snowfall and horribly sweet tea, it is their television soap operas.
Coronation Street, East Enders, Crossroads, Emmerdale, General Hospital, Howards Way,
The Practice, Neighbours, Home and Away . . . The list is endless. Even The Bill was more of a
soapie than a police drama!
But Kylie hit the top in that genre and went on to prove she could sing and dance better
than anyone else, too. Another Melbourne export!
But we found it pretty tough going to break through. The “impresarios”, record company
executives, booking agents, venue owners and worst of all, the media, thought we were objects
of ridicule, to make fun of, rip off, take advantage of.
While Harley made sure we were never fleeced or robbed, there wasn’t a lot he could do to
keep the newspapers and magazines off our backs.
Thank god that Jimmy Saville liked little girls! We found out about him and Rolf Harris
early on and protected Lynn from them, and when they crossed paths with Harley or any of us,
they steered well clear.
Rolf has been a bitter disappointment. Unbelievably popular in Britain and Australia, his
ego and his hormones always got in the way of common sense.
We reported Jimmy to the BBC on a number of occasions and the police at least once that I
know of. Nothing was done, but he never played any of our records and refused to have us on
Top of the Pops when he was hosting. Tony Blackburn made up for that deficit, though. He liked
our style and the respect we always showed.
Cliff Richard got some bad treatment a few years ago, but nobody believed a word of it.
Once again, a decent man, respectful and honourable, his only “sin” was that he didn’t conform
in one particular way, so sections of the media decided to have it in for him. You can still be gay
and be a Christian, English and a nice bloke, all wrapped up in one pale package, you know!
 Cliff’s “sin” was to join Mary Whitehouse and her Festival of Light, which aimed to keep
the telly free from gratuitous and unnecessary sex, and Cliff agreed with her. My Uncle George
agreed with her, so did Harley and Sweetie. So did millions of other decent English people.
But some gay lobbyists felt betrayed by his doing this, and you can have perverted gays
like any other section of the community. It wasn’t very many of them but enough to cause a stir.
The ordinary man on the street didn’t care, only those who wanted to force their point.
But along came bands and popular artists like us and introduced naughty words on prime
time telly. And we shouldn’t have, but we did.
Maybe that was why Jimmy didn’t like us, not because we dobbed him!

Anyway, so much for that. I was telling you that we were in big demand in the great
amorphous mass that is known by Londoners as “Up North” and by people who lived up North,
as “The North”.
Harley left us under the administration of Sweetie, and spent the next two weeks on the
phone.
Sweetie seemed to love England. He drove us out to Cornwall, Devon and Somerset and
introduced us to their strange cuisines and even stranger drinks. Cornish Pasties, with meat in
one end and fruit in the other, which was picked up by a handle made of twisted pastry. Some
horrible little doughy, floury things which stood about an inch high, but were cut in half and
delivered to your table with butter, strawberry jam and cream. Sweetie was “mother” and spread
these condiments for us, making them two inches high, but still nasty and floury tasting. Scones,
he called them.
But in Taunton we had our first Scrumpy. This rough cider, the barman told us, was made
from fallen apples and nothing else. “Fallen", as in dropped out of the tree. Not as in “fallen
women".
When Wally asked what sort of apples, the barman told him that any and all sorts were
used: Cox’s Orange Pippins, Galas, Bramleys, anything and everything all included. Even the
bruised ones! They were pulped and pressed into juice and then let nature take its course. There
is a lot of yeast naturally in apples, on the skin, too, and everything is put in. After about two or
three weeks, the yeast has fermented the apples and the alcohol forms. Then it is strained off and
put into bottles. From there on in, it is up to you.
He showed us the stuff he had laid down last October when the crop on his trees fell. It
stank! He had it in old oak barrels and I asked him what it cost to buy these wooden containers
with the metal hoops around them.
 He laughed and said that he didn’t think they still made them. His dad and grandad had
used these same casks.
But when we sampled the stuff he had strained off the previous week, it tasted strong, rich
and sweet, although he promised us no cane or beet sugar had been added. He wouldn’t let us
buy a barrel, but we got four two gallon glass bottles in Sweeties rented van to take back with us.
We also found a place which made “Perry” out of pears, but it was a bit girly and while
Lynn drank a couple of pints of it, we preferred the apple variety.
But one night in Taunton, we were all so pissed on it, we didn’t want to go on stage.
Sweetie filled us up with black coffee so strong that the sugar floated on top and refused to
dissolve. The following morning’s paper gave us rave reviews and said in that columnist’s view,
it was the finest performance we had done since arriving in Great Britain.
When we got back to London, Harley had everything planned for our northern tour. There
wouldn’t be time for Scrumpy, or sampling Yorkshire pudding, Lancashire Hotpot or Treacle
Tart. We would be working our sweet little arses off.
Because he got to it late in the season, he had to take whatever was available, and just co-
ordinate it as best he could. Sometimes we would do a concert in one city, drive a hundred miles
to another for the next night’s show, then return back along the same motorway for a gig twenty
miles beyond the first! Then the fourth concert might be halfway between the first and second
towns.
Still, he had a good crew of roadies, a lot of them Aussies who he picked up in Earl’s
Court.
When I say “picked up” I actually mean recruited. Harley was strictly a one man type of
bloke!
Us, Lynn, an Irish group who preferred to be named BeJeezus but who were billed as
Murphy’s Angels, another group of Aussies from Perth, called imaginatively, The Sandgropers,
and a duet from Margate who wanted to bring their own band. The singers were brilliant, a bit
like Bobby and Laurie, but the band was shite.
That’s a Pommy word I picked up over there. I asked how it differed from our word for
excrement, and got told it had an “E” on the end of it. The general consensus, though, was that it
sounded more effective and rhymed with more other words in those songs they sing on the
football terraces. Fair enough, next time I’m stuck for assonance, I’ll bung an “E” on the end and
see if that helps!
We did thirty six shows in forty days. We had a total of six days off. If your math does
extend that far, on a couple of days we did a show at one o’clock and another, in a different
town, at seven thirty. Sometimes sound checks consisted of blowing in the mics, saying “One.
Two.” and hoping for the best!
 Fortunately, two consecutive days off in Liverpool meant we could visit all those exciting
places we had heard and read about from the days when the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers,
Cilla and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were unknown outside of this town. NEMS Enterprises
shop, Penny Lane which was actually a tram depot before the song, Aunty Mimi’s house and
Quarry Bank High School, where John started his first skiffle group.
And, of course, the Cavern Club, where the Beatles met Brian Epstein, where Cilla worked
as a receptionist in the cloakroom, and which Tony Hatch described as “a cellar full of noise” in
the song “Downtown”. Eppy used the phrase as the title of his autobiography, but the cynical
John Lennon always referred to it as “A Cellar Full of Boys”.
It was filled in, back in nineteen eighty one while constructing the underground railway.
Afterwards, they excavated the old club and sold five thousand bricks from the arches and walls
for five pounds each. A further fifteen thousand were built into a new Cavern Club on the same
site.
But when we went there, years before this happened, it was closed for Easter. But a poster
said the Hollies were playing there, but doesn’t give times or dates. I have a photo I took of the
billboard.
One exciting day in Birmingham, we opened for Herman’s Hermits, but while the band
were beaut blokes who shared their haslet sandwiches with us, Peter Noone was in a bit of a
touchy mood and didn’t even tip his cap to us. Apparently this was very unusual for him and
Leck said that he was pissed off because the Beatles were outcharting “There’s a Kind of Hush”.
Barmy said it would probably have helped if they had raised their voices a bit, in that case.
Although Barry grinned, none of us thought it very funny. We only reckoned he smiled because
both their names were Barry and they both played drums.
The crowd, who started off impatient for their hometown heroes, soon warmed to us and
we actually got a few screams. One girl tried to climb on stage and grab Bedlam’s leg, but
Barmy, who was in fine form that day, said Harley had paid her to do it.
That said, we went down quite well, as did the others in our tour. They loved Lynn’s
singing and her interviews on late night telly were exceptionally popular. She became the star of
our show, except in Dublin and Galway, where BeJeezus (sorry, make that Murphy’s Angels,)
stole all the applause.
Now, I don’t remember getting the ferry over to Belfast. I remember coming back from
Cork to Swansea, but I am damned if I can recall sailing from Glasgow. For years I puzzled over
this until I was looking through the photos and I found one of us getting on a propeller driven
aircraft and the caption said “Paisley, May 1967.” That must have been why!
I have mentioned the disrespectful way the media treated Australians in those days before
Australians owned the British media. I made it sound as though we Antipodeans were singled out
for harsh judgemental comment, but that is not so.
 Oh, and by the way, I said “antipodeans” because here is a little chain of islands with very
noisy, annoying people in it hanging a thousand kilometres off the coast of New South Wales
who are desperate for recognition and like to be included. They don't like to be called Australians
but don't mind being lumped together as antipodeans
Actually I should have said “south coast of New South Wales”. Sydneysiders are
enormously jealous of Victorians, South Australians and Western Australians, or “Sandgropers”
as our friends reminded us. They have “south coasts” while New South Wales particularly, and
most of Queensland only have east coasts. “East Coast” sounds boring and very, very
establishment, whereas “south coast” sounds all exotic and interesting, wild in a reasonably
urbanised way and somewhere you would want to go while on holidays when you are in your
teens or early twenties.
So they call the bit of shoreline which is immediately below their city “The South Coast”,
with capital initials, jus so you don’t think the arrow pointing north on your map has somehow
been printed out of whack.
So the scruffiest bit of New South Wales, (and by association, the scruffiest bit of
Australia) called Wollongong, is known by Sydney people as “the South Coast”, and by the
people who live there, “Illawarra”. I don’t know if this is dual-naming, as the aborigines in
Western Australia are now doing, and maybe “Illawarra” is their tribal language name for
“Wollongong”. Wollongong sounds aboriginal to me, so I suspect the indigenous Australians had
nothing to do with it. It is more likely the Europeans who are too embarrassed to say they live in
Wollongong. And too embarrassed of their northern city-dwelling neighbours to call it “The
South Coast”.
Then there is the New South Wales “North Coast” but I won’t go into that now. However, I
do, however, approve of the term “Northern Beaches” when referring to those magnificent
shorelines of Avalon, Mona Vale, Narrabeen, Dee Why and even Manley Beach.
But back to the media.
In England, you will hear the term “the great unwashed” about two hundred and fifty times
a day. Newspaper articles are rejected by the editors if some comparison between the gentry and
“the great unwashed” is not made. For some reason, everybody thinks there are people who
should fall into this category, and although they would be very unlikely to have ever observed
their hygiene habits, they like to use this elitist way of not having to explain away the lower
socio-economic classes.
We knocked about a fair bit in England, slept with all kinds of girls and kipped on many
strange couches and sofas belonging to all classifications of people. We never bothered to put
them into pigeon holes other than “good bloke” “great lay” “bit of a twit” “up herself” and
“drinks like a bloody fish but not a bad singer”.
 The media liked to make jokes about how the average lower middle class Pom bathes
every second Tuesday, whether he needs it or not!
I never encountered anyone who I slept with, at, near, or in conjunction with, who was not
fastidious about showering regularly, cleaning between their toes and behind their ears, brushing
their teeth and regularly shampooing. And what is the obsession the English have about their
finger- and toe-nails?
Those genitals I encountered were always delightfully odour-free and fresh, as I suspect
most were. These were common-or-garden-variety people who regarded themselves as classless,
normal human beings. Not pompous twits, Sloan Rangers or public school boys.
But, however, in the couple of days they call summer each year, when people take their
scarves and overcoats off to travel by British Rail or the Tube into the city to work, you will
notice many grubby collars sticking out of pin-striped jackets. And the terrible state of these city
gents’ dental work, reflected in their breath, should cop a mention here, too.
If I never read the phrase “the great unwashed” in a British media again, it will be one time
too many.
Not only this, but their attitude to what school you went to borders on the obsessional.
Designed to make you feel inferior if you simply got a cracking good education at your school,
instead a jolly fagging, nightly rogering, beastly tuck shops and spotted dick in the dorms. And
you have to have the old school tie to announce to the world that you were raped by a bunch of
older boys and had your life made a misery by brutal bullying masters.
And on top of all that, THEY ARE PROUD OF IT!
In Australia these days, the opposite is the case. Private schools, or what the British call
“Public Schools” which they are definitely not, get a hell of a criticising in the press as being
elitist, expensive, too sport orientated, too academically orientated, too much business studies,
too much art studies, and generally just plain bad for developing teenagers.
Despite the fact that these “reporters" cannot spell, use proper syntax, tense and grammar
which they would have if they’s gone to a school where the main emphasis was not on how to
apply for the dole! Or get a job at a newspaper.
Anyway, much of these problems have now been solved in Britain, or have been put on the
back burner while they try to sort out the mess their ungovernable country has got itself into.
 The Northern Irish press were very kind to us. So were the people. Nobody tried to take
Harley for a pup, nobody promised then didn’t deliver and there was no ridicule, no nastiness
and no bullying. The people of Northern Ireland couldn’t have been better audiences.
But all that changed in Eire, when we did our first gig in Dublin.
The act used to go a bit like this.
First up came the local act, who had their own following. So the halls were normally pretty
full when the show started. Then, when the couple of hometown acts had finished, The
Sandgopers came on.
But during their first song, the crowd started drifting off, in ones and twos, first, then with
intensity.
We got a bit alarmed, because while they were not a known international act, they were
pretty good and very competent musicians, trained at the Perth Conservatorium, in those days on
the campus of the University of Western Australia.
We wondered that maybe they objected to the strong jazz influence of their act, but they
didn’t return when Chas and Jerome from Kent bounced onto the stage and we stood in the
wings, playing our instruments while they performed in front of a curtain hung about three
metres back from the edge.
Then we had a break for twenty minutes to get a cup of tea and a hobnob and assess how
the performance was going before the big acts came on.
We were dead worried because we supposed the audience had only come to hear their local
lads. But Bedlam popped out to get some cigarettes from a machine in the hall, well away from
the bar area and which apparently had not been discovered by the general public. He went and
stuck his head around the corner and the front lobby, the bar and the pavement out front was
teeming with kids!
He came back and told us, and sure enough, when Murphy’s Angels, who had reverted to
BeJeezus while in Erin’s Isle, ran onto the stage, the auditorium was full.
That was okay then. The group they had come out for on this miserable night, the Pimples,
would play to a close-on full house after all.
But again, when Lynn came on, nearly half of them left and stood in the foyer. We backed
her and I did a couple of duets with her, a bit unhappy that she only got a reduced audience.
But when her bracket was over, they filed back in, more than ever this time. The house was
packed! We breathed a sigh of relief although we were a bit amazed at how these folks were so
selective.
We played the first number to a dead quiet audience and then, in the second number, we
tried to get them to join in. Bedlam clapped his hands over his head, I did a little dance and
nearly fell off the stage, and Barmy put on a great act swinging his sticks, leaping up off his stool
and really put an all-out effort into his harmonies.
But still very little response.
In the third number, Bedlam climbed down off the stage into the audience, as far as his
microphone lead would allow and tried to get some girls to dance, but they had no enthusiasm at
all.
By the end of our set, there was about half the audience left, the rest walking out as though
they were leaving a pub. Not rushing to get out, nor turning back to get a last glimpse. Just
walking out as if it was a dance at a local scout hall!
I asked Michael, the keyboard player of BeJeezus what it was all about.
“Well, it doesn’t bother me, but youse lot are Protestants!”
It was the same all over Eire. Both concerts in Dublin, one each in Sligo, Galway,
Limerick, Killarney, Kilkenny and Waterford. The country towns were a little bit less obvious
but it wasn’t until Cork did we get a standing ovation and curtain calls. The Echo remarked on it
too, querying why they had discriminated so unfairly. I am sure Father Boyle would have been
most upset, too, because at dances we always pulled a bigger crowd in the parish than he could at
all three masses on Sunday put together.
Anyway, Porky’s over-the-top genuflecting probably didn’t help!
But in Cork we got mobbed as we left St Anne’s, Shandon, the Church of Ireland building
with the famous bells which they encourage the public to play.
Some with-it campanologist had written the changes to “Girl in a Blazer” and a crew from
the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, known as Coimisiún Craolacháin na hÉireann, came
and filmed us playing it and all having a good time. The camera crew then took us to a local inn
where I played McGinty’s Goat on a banjo and did what they said was a passably good accent.
The TV blokes paid for all the Smithwicks and we had to return to our hotel to sleep it off
before going on stage. The segment had been shown on the evening news with me on the banjo
and the audience wouldn’t let us go until I repeated it for them.
I remember that as the happiest evening on the whole trip around Ireland, a beautiful sunny
evening until after ten thirty. Light enough to play skittles outside without a light on!
The following day we caught the scruffy old ferry back to Swansea, travelling down the
river about ten or twelve miles before striking the Atlantic Ocean. These days, they tell me, there
is a bus to a new ferryport right on the ocean, about forty minutes out of the city.
We caught up on a little shut-eye on the trip and as soon as we arrived in Swansea, we
went straight to the Grand Theatre. Nobody turned up and Harley realised he had booked the
following night, and the remainder of the tour subsequently. So we got our sixth night off and all
went to a really posh restaurant.
Porky remembered his gran used to cook a dish called Welsh Rarebit, with eggs and
cheese. But when he asked the waiter if they served it, he shrugged and said “If it’s not on the
menu we don’t serve it!”
Not exactly the way to treat about twenty five celebrities, I would think.
So that was our tour of the British Isles. We did more later on, but by then we knew what
to expect.
It was a lot less miles than our Australian tour, covered more performances on far less
time, paid less, was colder, more miserable and it rained constantly.
But it was exciting and we learned a lot! Our fellow performers were a lot of fun and on
the last night in Cardiff, we all came on stage together and played Waltzing Matilda and Land of
Hope and Glory.
 Then it was back into the studio again.
While we were touring, it was expected that we would write anther dozen songs or so, but
we were always too shagged out, too busy or having too much fun. Porky and I collaborated on
one while on the long haul between Aberdeen and Glasgow, and Barmy and Bedlam came up
with quite a good parody of “Jerusalem” which was immediately rejected as being both
blasphemous and Anti-British. We do it all the time in Australia now, and I bought a steel guitar
especially for the middle eight.
So we dug into our store of old songs, rejects and miscellaneous scribblings and came up
with a few which, with a little work and a better knowledge of the British market, we intended to
use. Wally also had a couple, very heavy on the bass and sung in an octave which eluded
Bedlam, probably deliberately, so he sang one and we did a Righteous Brothers kind of thing on
the other with Bedlam and my lowest register baritone. The lines were too long for Wally on this
one and he couldn’t get a deep enough breath to complete them.
Then one of my second cousin’s son’s from Weymouth came up to London to try to sell
some songs to publishers and we put him up on our sofa. We asked him to let us look at his
songs and he sat at the piano and played us what he had written. He was obviously a trained
musician but not a pianist and definitely not a singer, but his songs had real promise. Two, in
particular, suited Bedlam’s vocal register and captured the spirit of the band, so we worked
together on them, late into the night, and again next morning.
We signed a contract with him to get first refusal and took him with us to the studio, where
our producer went over some other songs with him and I must say, he did okay out of it.
If you ever wondered about that name “Gary Tugwell” in the credits, you will now be
enlightened.
He is my second cousin Benjamin’s son and because he turned up at exactly the right time,
he now had a career as songwriter, producer and musical director to some pretty big names in
English showbiz.
He worked for the Beeb for a while on some Television specials, but they were so rigid and
he was so freeform that they soon parted company. Amicably, but definitely!
We used him on the songs he wrote. He was a classically trained violinist, but his songs
were more Country and Western with a bit of an Irish twang, so the fiddle made them much
more Texan in essence.
The LP was delayed time and again, because of one thing or another, mostly to do with the
studio but once because of our own carelessness.
One song Porky and I had written had a middle twelve which when I played it a few times,
it began to sound like the theme from The Dambusters, a 1955 war film about the RAF in World
War Two.
 I told Porky and he listened to it and admitted he might have been influenced by one of
those late night movies. It was sped up to about six times the original tune as used in the
soundtrack, and that was why none of us spotted it earlier. So, halfway through the cutting of the
album, we had to go back in and re-record that middle twelve bars.
Then the studio went over all our stuff with a fine toothed comb to make sure we hadn’t
plagiarised on any other compositions.
Using that expression “fine toothed comb” always makes me think of the Pommy way of
saying it, Fine tooth-comb”. I even saw it printed in the Mirror or the Sun or one of those
rubbishy broadsheets.
But maybe the English do comb their teeth! I prefer to brush mine.
They also mishear and therefore misuse other saying. “Common, or garden . . .” is a
phrase used by horticulturalists, twitchers (ornithophiles), lepidopterologists, entomologists and
other botanists. But commentators have corrupted this, too. I heard reference on a BBC Radio
programme to “a commonal garden thief”. Someone who steals commonal gardens, presumably!
“Ran amuck” is used instead of “ran amok” (from an Arabic word meaning in a murderous
frenzy”.) I was most alarmed to hear that students regularly go around with the intention of
killing people at the end of the school term. But at least they should get the correct spelling of the
word!
So many incidences (not “instances”). “For all intensive purposes” is gaining popularity, as
is “on tender hooks”.
I heard a news reporter on television say “the government today did a complete three
hundred and sixty degree turn on its funding policy”, when in fact, the following story revealed
that they had only reversed their direction. Map reading and geometry were not her strong suits.
If we make mistakes in our songs, we get hauled over the coals by studios, DJs, music
critics and English professors. But if you write news articles for your living you can run amuck
with language, like a commonal garden variety politician doing a three hundred and sixty degree
turn, for all intensive purposes.
But make sure those hooks stay tender!
A pastor in my father’s church used to say “being pacific” (specific), “I transgress”
(digress) and “extract revenge” (exact).
You hear “hunger pains” instead of “pangs”, “escape goat” instead of “scapegoat” and one
that continues to be used in Britain and Australia: “integral part”. This redundancy is nearly
always mispronounced in-teg-ral, with the emphasis on the middle bit. But how can it not be a
part if it is integral or vice versa?
 We have a beautiful, easily-learned language which should serve us faithfully and well. It
has taken centuries to make and perfect. Why do we treat it like a loathsome beast and torture it
so?
And I make the point that it is easily learnt. I learnt it as a child of three or four, and could
communicate with my parents and the kids next door. But when I tried to learn Indonesian
recently, I really struggled with it and have difficulty making myself understood in Djakarta or
Bali, even after a year of lessons. See? Nowhere near as easy to learn as English which was
simple, even for an infant!

But I have transgressed again, haven’t I? Or digressed.

This all happened a long time ago, now. Over fifty years, in fact. It is sometimes hard to
remember that I was not quite twenty years old when we arrived in this strange, cold, wet
country.
Being so young though, I found it easy to adapt and very quickly began to enjoy myself.
My best mate nearly all my life, Porky, was with me, as well as the others, who were pretty
special, too. We had known Lynn for close on eighteen months by now, and at that age, a year
and half seems like forever.
And we had quite a lot of money. I know we did, as I had access to my own passbook,
although Harley giroed it into my account, taking out the various National Health and Insurance
payments as they came due. He also worried about our taxation, which, honestly, took a huge
percentage of our income. That first year, I paid three times as much as I actually got. I believe
that some people paid in excess of ninety percent! And there were fewer havens in those days.
So Harley began to look offshore for somewhere to look after our money. I don’t
completely understand why, but he chose a Caribbean country who were very anxious to bank
our money. I think it was one of those who had recently gained independence from Britain and
were being punished financially by the Mother Country.
They paid a good rate of interest, too. The earnings had to take a bit of a circuitous route to
get there, but there was no hanky panky about doing it. It wasn’t illegal, but you needed a fair bit
of cash to begin with before it was worth it.
We kept our personal accounts with the Midland Bank, who made it pretty difficult even to
withdraw ten pounds. You had to queue in a long line to see a teller with a mournful face who,
when you deposited money, was as quick as the greased variety of lightning. But if you plucked
up enough courage to withdraw any, he could take anything up to half an hour, just as a method
of dissuading you!
 But the most annoying thing was, they could somehow sense if you intended taking money
out, and immediately after the person in front of you had been served, they would snap up a sign
which said “Position closed. Please use next teller”.
Sometimes that teller would actually move to another desk further along and open it to
customers! Even if he didn’t, everyone who was waiting behind you would rush to the desk
which was opening and you would be at the back of the line again.
That happened to me twice in the one visit once, so I got a cheque account. I haven’t the
energy to describe the rigmarole that was, so I will leave it be.
But in those days, Poms were very suspicious of cheques. Even if they trusted you had the
funds, they would hide it in a Very Safe Place. They would leave their cash on their bedside table
or hall bureau, but cheques, even for small amounts, were hidden, and in a different place each
time to foil would be thieves.
This meant that they invariably forgot where they had stowed them and then they would
come around or phone you and ask if you could cancel that one and write another. Even though a
crossed cheque meant that unless you were the payee, you couldn’t collect the funds, they had a
paranoia about them. I was delighted to see that cheques are almost redundant in Britain these
days and people transfer funds via the internet.
Oh, there I have done it again. You don’t want to know about the idiosyncrasies of the
relationship with British people and their pounds, shilling and pence, do you? Even if you are
interested, you have no way of letting me know in time for me to extend this diatribe. And I am
not going to alter what I have written just to accommodate you, anyway.
Maybe I will one day write a whole novel on the vagaries of the British Financial and
Fiduciary System in the middle of the twentieth century, then you will be in your element, won’t
you?
Meanwhile, as we say in the performing arts industry, the show must take place, or
proceed, or carry on (or whatever it is!)
 My cousins down in Weymouth firmly believed that Gary only got his songs published
because of my largess. He was good, they admitted, but they had had known him all his life and
were not prepared to believe he was that talented nor capable of doing anything without someone
else making it possible for him.
I had enough trouble convincing my own parents, who, after all, still believe that if it was
not for Porky and my cousin, Archie, who were talented enough for all three of us without me
needing to put in anything at all, we would never have got where we are.
But Uncle George, Benjamin and his wife Clare credited me with the whole thing.
I tried to tell them that Gary had tons of talent, accumulations of acumen and shedloads of
salesmanship, and he would have sold his songs to the first publisher he visited. The fact that we
desperately needed top quality songs and they were virtually presented to us by him was in no
way a case of us doing him a favour! The reverse, in fact.
Lynn Verity, Johnny Webb and the Spiders, the Castles, Mo and the Sideburns all recorded
his songs immediately they discovered him. But Ben and Clare insisted that my influence had
“made” him.
And they threw a big party for us down in Weymouth! We asked for time off from the
studio and Harley arranged that a BBC performance which should have been made in Shepherds
Bush was done in Exeter instead, taking advantage of their better facilities for OB (outside
broadcast) and the wonderful coastline to show off our rapidly fading tans.
It seemed like half of Weymouth came to the party. I met people who didn’t have a clue
who I was, but expected me to know them. They didn’t know who the Tugwells were, either and
one chap told me he wondered who was throwing the shindig and what it was in aid of.
“Gary Tugwell? Nah! Never ‘eard of ‘im! I knew a Barry Trigwell in the markets but he
was about seventy when war broke out. I don’t suppose it’s him!”
“No,” I agreed. “I don’t suppose it is.”
“No, of course it wouldn’t be. He was killed when a buzz-bomb hit his lavatory during the
blitz! Must be someone else!”
The lads all did really well for themselves that weekend. Groupie-wise, that is. There must
be something in all that wind blowing in off the Gulf Stream Drift which gets the young females
horny. Bedlam fell in love and Wally wrote to one lass, who he met there, for about three years
until she told him she had been married for the past eighteen months.
Jen, who was Dad’s cousin and about forty eight, got the hots for me. Her marriage to a
sailor didn’t seem to be an impediment, nor were our close blood ties. She made an awful fuss of
me and I heard someone trying the handle of my room in the night. Fortunately there was a
corridor lock on the door and I had engaged it.
 She offered to give me a massage, which in those days was very kinky. There was no such
thing as a masseuse or masseur. It wasn’t decent to contact someone’s skin with your hands, not
even if you had been formally introduced. Only physiotherapists were permitted to do massages,
and then only if there was no other treatment, medical or surgical!
She walked into the bathroom when I was in there, but fortunately I was still in my pyjama
trousers, cleaning my teeth. She gripped me around the chest and told me how good it was to
have me staying with her. She pressed her body up against mine and it felt like one of those Lilos
which had last been pumped up a year ago. She smelt a bit like one, as well.
I could see what she was doing in the mirror and thought I would give the old girl a thrill,
something to remember me by, at least until her husband got home from sea.
So I let her hand slip down to my buttock and give it a squeeze. I felt cheap, and now I
know what it must feel like for a girl who is trying to fend off a drooly old man.
So I said brightly “Anyway, Aunty Jen! My girlfriend will be waiting for me. I had better
hurry up and get dressed.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Lynn. You met her last night!”
“Oh! I didn’t realise!”
I can tell you, being in no doubt about your integrity and ability not to blabbermouth it all
over town, but there was one way Jen could have had her wicked way with me. I won’t actually
tell you what it was but it did involve paying for my services with her hazelnut slice. It was damn
good and, purely on the memory of it alone, I have been tempted to drive back to Dorset and
surrender up my body.
I said a few paragraphs ago that my father always though the worst of me in any situation.
Once we had parked on a street in Pakenham while Mum went into a shop to buy some
wool for a Great Australian Crocheted Shawl Blanket she was making. For some reason we
couldn’t understand, this wool had to come from this particular shop in Pakenham, so we drove
down there in the Morris 1100.
As Dad and I sat in the car while she shopped, an old dero came up the street, drunk as a
lord, yelling obscenities and lurching from kerb to shop window. He staggered into a local
hostelry about fifty yards down the road, and then seconds later, came sprawling out onto the
footpath. He went back and pushed open the swinging door and let rip with some of the filthiest
language I have ever heard. Apart from being drunk, he must have suffered from coprolalia or
something.
 Anyway when he staggered up towards our car and saw we were sitting in it, he came over
and cussed us to high heaven, trying to get a reaction. He banged on the windows and doors,
kicked the fender and thumped on the windscreen.
Experience has taught me to completely ignore these people as they are hoping you will
react. So I sat there, my best thousand yard stare on my face, looking like I was freshly arrived
from Warrnambool or Moe.
He realised he was getting no response from us so turned and wended his way down to
where a couple of women were coming out of Coles with their trolleys, and started harassing
them.
What did you say to him?” Dad asked me.
“I never said anything,” I declared.
“Well, you must have! A bloke doesn’t speak like that unless he’s provoked. You have to
watch yourself, Gra. You’ll get into a lot of trouble if you give people lip like that!”
This may be a Boyle trait, a sort of idiosyncracy which comes genetically from a common
ancestor. When Porky was reading my typescript to ensure he appeared in the best possible light,
he commented that his dad did the same sort of thing.
“We was at this footy game when these kids from school came walking around the grassed
area where we was sitting” he said. “They were grade seven kids and a lot bigger than me. I tried
to look inconspicuous as I knew they’d recognise me, what wiv me ‘air, an all!
“As they passed by, one of them cuffed me over the ear’ole, even though me dad was
there. There was no way I was gonna react, so I just took it.
“Dad turned to me and said ‘Gor blimey, you’re a silly little blighter, sometimes!’
“I asked him why he said that and he said ‘Well, you must have done somefink. Stuck yer
leg out or somefink! ‘E wouldn’t ‘ave ‘it you for nuffink!’”
I wonder if Susan or Father Boyle’s dads ever did anything like that!
But it goes some way to explaining why Gary’s family had no confidence in him. They are
related to my Dad.

Autumn then winter came and the weather got slightly colder, a lot colder and then bloody
freezing. We ran up a huge gas bill.
Bedlam, Wally and Barmy moved into a vacant house down the street a bit and Porky,
Lynn and I shared the big place. Gary moved in and between the four of us, we got some serious
songwriting done.
 Gary and Porky started to date two sisters from Holland. I mentioned Dutch bosoms earlier
and, sorry, I am going to contemplate them again here. As the body heat increased, the gas bill
reduced more and more.
On Boxing Day we went back to the Winter Gardens in Eastbourne, but now they
incorporated Bedlam, Porky and me in the Pantomime as well. It was Little Red Riding Hood.
Porky was the wolf, because it seemed to suit his personality best. I only had a small part.
Porky observed that was applicable because I only had a small part, anyway! I was the original
Grandma before the wolf ate her up and hopped into bed to pretend to be her. Bedlam was the
handsome woodcutter who killed Porky at the end and gave Miss Hood a massive kiss at the end.
I though it was Wendy Richards, Porky always believed it was Barbara Windsor, but
Bedlam kept the programme and it definitely says it was Polly Martin.
Do you remember her? She was that little, saucy, blonde Cockney in “When the Cat’s
Away” on TV in the early eighties.
She complained to the director that Bedlam’s kiss wasn’t passionate enough, so Porky
stepped up to show him how it should be done and very nearly got arrested.
“If I wanted bleedin’ Rolf ‘Arris, I’d ‘ave arsed for bleedin’ Rolf ‘Arris!” she told the
director, who simply said “There, there my love. He was only trying to help!”
Porky got a slap from her, nevertheless.
So we were working five nights a week, including the band’s appearances. Mostly, on our
two days off, Porky, Barmy and I would drive back up to London to work with Gary, who
enjoyed having the big house to himself the rest of the time. Oh, with Deidre, his Dutch duchess,
of course.
Some of his best work was done there during that time. He wrote a few good tunes as well!
Lynn had decided to take time off from her music career to take in some winter vacation
lectures at Cambridge by Professor Wilton Peppergreen from Canada. He was a leading authority
on marine life in the Great Lakes, which Lynn said was similar to Port Arthur in many ways,
both being almost enclosed bodies of water.
She had met the good professor in Melbourne on a sabbatical and she was impressed with
him. And he was smitten with her, too. He played piano a little and loved to listen to her sing.
She loved to listen to him talk, and I am very happy for her that they got engaged at Easter
and went back to his University in British Columbia, where she eventually got a PhD in her
chosen field. They married in Melbourne a year later. The others went back for it, but Porky,
Wally and I were still running from the National Service Department.
Happy for her, but a little sad for me, as I loved her very much and missed her. In those
mad, crazy days, I depended on her for my sanity.
 The media always billed me as “the serious one”, mostly because my antics were not as
outlandish as Porky’s, Bedlam’s or Barmy’s, but actually Wally was the most serious. He had a
sense of humour, for sure, but in a sort of passive role, whereas the others were very active. I
was, if you want to pigeon hole me, the commentator. With me, it was verbal jokes rather than
custard pie humour. But to be honest, Wally simply got overlooked by the press and the girls.
Aspel, Parky, Clive James, Frosty and a few other interview hosts noticed this and in
fairness, always tried to include him in the group, but he never volunteered a comment, nor said
much when asked a question directly.
I also tried to involve him, as most questions were directed at me, being the chatty one. I
would say “What was that you said the other day that made us all laugh, Wal?” and he would
reply “You tell him Lizard. You do it better than me!”
On Clive’s show, he came alive one night, and did an hilarious impersonation of the
opposition leader, Edward Heath. The audience laughed so hard it took the crew about three
minutes to settle them down before filming recommenced.
Unfortunately, they cut out a lot of the audience response, during which Wally did more
impersonations with his facial features and mainly his eyebrows.
Mike Yarwood invited him to the Palladium to reenact it, but we had other commitments.
The BBC sent around an OB van and Mike impersonated “Clive” to Wal’s “Heath”. When the
impromptu interview started, Wal pretended that he was not Ted Heath the politician, but Ted
Heath the orchestra conductor. However, as rib-tickling as that was, the BBC cut it, as the real
bandleader was quite ill at the time and died later that year.
But I am sure, when I look at old tapes of Yarwood’s excellent impressions after Mr Heath
became Prime Minister a year later, that a lot of the gestures and eyebrow raising was directly
lifted from Wally’s performance.
Clive James did enjoy having us on his show to chew the fat. This big, hearty journalist
from Kogarah in Sydney opened the way for so many Aussies in the UK in the sixties and
seventies. I have all his books and when I have time now, I often like to sit on my enclosed
balcony overlooking Hobsons Bay and enjoy some of his witty comments.
His description of a very famous romantic novelist remains one of my favourites: "Twin
miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into
the White Cliffs of Dover."
He is about eight years older than me, but remains one of my heros and a good friend. He
insists in living in that cold, old country, which is a tribute to his devotion to the hand that feeds
him.
Several times, Wally tried to get a job as an impressionist, but his lot was to be the bass
player for The Pimples. Everybody smiles when they remember his Ted Heath, and I think there
are four clips of it on YouTube, with one of the cutting room floor footage of the audience, and
one of his Mike Yarwood interview. Someone at the Beeb has got good taste to salvage it!
 We were starting to gain acceptance in the minds and tastes of the British record-buying
public. Two songs off our third Abbey Road album made it into the top ten. We almost made it
to number one, but had the misfortune to come up against “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)”,
by Peter Starstedt.
Britain had been suckholing up to the French and Germans for years, desperate to get into
the European Common Market and was pulling out her big guns. “Where Do You Go To” told
the tale of a young Italian in France and his relationship with a former friend who had risen
though the ranks of French and European society. It was a simple waltz tune with guitar and
Parisian-style accordion at the beginning and end.
This and efforts by Petula Clark and other perennial favourites from England, were
toadying up to the French, in particular, to show how cosmopolitan they had become since the
war.
They hadn’t, of course, and still made disparaging remarks about “Frogs,” “Jerrys”,
“Dagoes”, “Wogs” and of course Monty Python’s “horrible little Belgian bastards”. But on the
surface, with no Charles de Gaulle opposing them, they “Europeanised” and crawled
demeaningly.
And in so doing, forsook their Commonwealth. I don’t know why, but for some reason, the
Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and Indians still clung to Mother England’s apron
strings, when any mature nation would have realised they were no longer wanted.
We were part of that, to an extent. Their Market was bigger than ours. Not as big as the
United States, but since the British Invasion by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Tom Jones,
among others, Britain was the next step up the ladder. And now it looked like being a rung into
Europe.
As far as I was concerned, it was a haven for draft dodgers from Australia and New
Zealand. We met quite a few Americans who had arrived in England, via Canada, to get out of
their conscription. It seems where military action is, the first casualty is the people of those
nations. Not the victims of violence. No, the victims of the war-mongering politicians and
generals who dream of leading armies of men prepared to die for their dreams of glory.
Before Harley packed us in a plane and shipped us over there, he checked out whether our
obligations to National Service in Australia would affect our acceptance and visa requirements in
the United States.
The United States Consul didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and didn’t even
know that Australia and the United States were signatories to the South East Asian Treaty
Organisation. He had to get the Australian Consul in Washington to saunter down to the
Pentagon and ask.
He was duly arrested pending investigations as they thought he was handing himself in as a
draft dodger. When he produced his Australian passport and diplomatic immunity, they scratched
their heads and said Germany wasn’t involved in Vietnam. It took him weeks to eventually get
through to them that Austria wasn’t part of Germany, Australia had nothing to do with Austria,
and that Vietnam wasn’t the issue, extradition laws were.
But finally, we got clearance, a Presidential Certificate to say we were not to be arrested
and “Green Cards” to say that we could perform work of a nature that an unemployed citizen of
the United States of America could not do to equal or greater effect.
Of course, Elvis, the Doors, The Eagles, Jimi Hendrix and dozens of others could have
performed our songs and probably have sold a damn sight more than we did, but that seemed to
be implicit on the condition that we were “original”. We wondered what the hell that meant!
After all that, we didn’t really feel like going!
But the money was good, the venues were twice the size of the football grounds we were
playing at in England and the radio stations were screaming out for us. They loved The
Easybeats, Robbie Porter, Thorpey, The Seekers, Helen Reddy. They were going to love The
Pimples.
One of the first things we noticed in America, other than that it wasn’t raining, was that a
lot of men stood with their thumbs tucked under their armpits with their fingers bent into a fist.
That is, unless they were wearing braces (which they alarmingly called “suspenders”) over their
shirts with no pullovers, and then they would tuck their thumbs through these and curl their
fingers up. It seemed like a national obsession.
This fashion has become obsolete now, and men in the USA either put their hands in their
pockets, like Australians, clasp them behind their backs like Poms or let them dangle by their
sides like Irish dancers.
But no armpit-thumbing any more. That belonged to the fifties and sixties. I am glad,
because once I had no problem doing it in the proscribed manner, but with arthritis now a
constant companion, I cannot do it without wincing. Soon, I suppose, I won’t be able to do it at
all.
But not only did they treat their forelimbs differently, they walked differently as well.
Not the mincing, bent-knee march of the British, more like an Australian with
haemorrhoids. Like my next door neighbour back in Preston, who used to wince when he bent
over and had to sit down one buttock at a time.
They all looked like they were more at home on a horse than an “auto” as they called their
cars back in those days, an abbreviation of “automobile” but without enough detail to tell you
what they actually meant.
And their clothes all had a place name. Argyle socks, which they spelled “sox” making it
impossible to speak about only one sock. You had to say “one of those sox” or “half a pair of
sox”. But that was all part of being an American.
 And Bermuda shorts, which were worn over your shorts, which without the island name,
meant your boxers. They never wore Y-Fronts like the English or Jockeys like we did, and when
I tried them, I didn’t like all that air around my bits. Besides, all that extra fabric in the legs and
trunk meant that you couldn’t wear your jeans form-fitting and cool.
Even the name “jeans” is an abbreviation of Genoa trousers. Even “denim” is an
abbreviation of the French “serge de Nîmes”.
Tuxedos were named after a park in New York.
They get “Jersey” from the island which looks like it should be part of France, but the
English claim it is really theirs. (Just to be different, Australian Rules shirts are called Guernseys,
an island neighbouring Jersey.)
They wear Ascot ties, (which we call cravats) after the racecourse in England, Paisley
shirts after the village in Scotland. Suede comes from a corruption of Sweden. Duffel coats take
their name from a town in Belgium and Capri pants from an Island in Italy.
I only recently found out that Millinery, the collective term for hats, comes from Milan and
the Polish people who flocked to Pennsylvania in the years after World War One brought with
them the garish “Polka Dot.”
Finally, everyone knows that the swimwear fashion “Bikini” came from the atoll in the
Marshal Islands where, at the time it was released, it was in the news because the Yanks were
trying to blow it to bits with their nuclear bombs.
That is all the origins I know but no doubt there are more. They have a clothing shop
named Colorado, one of their states, so there almost certainly are.
I must make mention of “pants”. An Englishman calls his lower underwear his “drawers”
and Aussie calls his a variety of names, ranging from “undies” (short for underpants), “Reg
Grundys” (after a television “impresario”) “Jocks” (short for the brand name Jockey) or
“underdaks”.
There is a ridiculous story attached to this name. Apparently in England there is a very
expensive, high quality brand of clothing named after the initials of founder Alexander Simpson
and an initial and final letter of his business associate Dudley Beck.
Australians call their scruffiest, cheapest, most ragged pair of trousers DAKS, just to be
absurdly supercilious, and “underdaks is the obvious extension.
Just so you know and next time it comes up at a Pub Quiz, you will get the answer right.
But to an American, trousers are “pants”, which is changed to “panties” for women’s
knickers. They never use the word “trousers”, even in menswear shops.
And now they have singularised “pants”! I saw in a women’s catalogue online recently,
that they had for sale a women’s “pant” in various colours, on special.
 “Pant” in it’s singular form is a verb, and means to breathe in a rapid and shallow manner.

But as soon as they learned we were a rock and roll band, they immediately told us “WE
invented rock and roll!”
Porky used to ask their permission to practise the art, not being an American, and asked if
there was any copyright of patents on it. They don’t have sarcasm in America, because it is not
an American invention, so gets ignored. It is most likely a French invention, from the word
“sarcasme”, which has nothing to do with the word’s origins, which are Greek ‘to tear the flesh”
(sarkasmos). I am not making that us. Check it out!
Americans also fondly imagine they invented the motor car, too. The French invented the
internal combustion engine and it was successfully developed by a German. Two Italian
gentlemen decided that “explosive gases” should be used to propel wagons or carts and lodged a
patent in England, a Belgian invented the gas-fuelled engine while an American, George Brayton
did suggest using volatile liquids as they were easier to handle, but did nothing about it.
This suggestion was developed by three Germans to build a four stroke engine and Karl
Benz, another German, patented a gasoline fuelled two stroke. Yet another German invented the
compression ignition diesel engine. An American, Robert Goddard, launched the first liquid
fuelled rocket and still more Germans developed the jet engine.
I think that proves that it is basically a European invention, with very little help from the
good old US of A.
“Ah, but we invented mass production!”
Erm, you didn’t! You used the method to build motor cars before anyone else, that is
undisputed. Henry Ford did on the T-Model!
But Chinese engineers in pre-industrialised times used to mass produce weapons out of
bronze, Carthaginians produced warships on a large scale and Venetians used pre-fabricated
parts to assemble their ships in a line, turning out one a day.
Even Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press is an example of mass production. He
used it as early as 1450.
“Benjamin Franklin invented electricity!”
Bollocks. He experimented with it is all. Electricity couldn’t be invented. It happens
naturally and people knew about it in its static form. He simply realised that lightning was
electricity. Electricity was synthetically created over two thousand years ago with vinegar in clay
pots with copper plates and an iron rod.
Now having debunked what most Americans consider to be sacred truths about the
importance of their nation, let us consider Thomas Edison. Now there is an inventor!
 He was born in Milan! Fortunately, though, it was not the Milan in Italy, but a smaller one
in Ohio, to a Canadian man and an American woman, so he is allowed to consider himself a
Septic Tank.
He held patents for 1,084 inventions and nine designs.
Once, Britain held the top spot when it came to inventions, but they have been a bit slack
lately and let the United States beat them, mainly through the enormous number of electronic
gadgets, from microwave ovens to the internet. Japan, once famous for its ability to duplicate and
market inventions within days, now comes in second place.
South Korea holds claim to third place, mostly in agricultural improvements, an area in
which Britain always topped the list. Germany invented more everyday items, from accordions
to x-ray machines, while Taiwan comes next with such things as bubble-tea and instant noodles.
China has always contributed well, and continues to do so. Their best inventions are
alcohol and the toothbrush. Both very popular in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia. It is claimed
that Collingwood football club supporters invented the toothbrush and that if anyone else had, it
would be named the “teethbrush”.
France, Britain and India come next, along with Canada and its sparkling array of medical
inventions, from wheelchairs, insulin to pacemakers. They also seem to like easily removing
clothing as they also invented the Wonderbra and the zip fastener.
That should also come in handy at the next pub quiz.
But the Americans are great people. They try so hard to please, without appearing
obsequious. They are the genuine article. In fact, another great American invention is “what you
see is what you get!”
In America, you don’t need to conceal your firearms! It is perfectly legal to carry them in
most places, and so they do, toting bloody great machine guns up the main streets, strapping
sidearms to their thighs and displaying their full collections in the back of their utes which they
call “pick ups”.
This is not like the Valiant AP5 or the HQ Monaro coupe, which are famed for their ability
to send any teenaged girl into a saggy mess to be easily picked up by the driver. Or so the driver
believes.
They are pick-up trucks, about the equivalent of a tradie ute in Australia, which can carry a
huge variety of tools or an extended Mexican family of twenty-two quite comfortably. Or an
arsenal of personal security firearms for the peaceloving Yank.
The wheels on these range from about two feet in diameter up to infinity under Monster
Trucks, a rather silly exhibition where special under-chassis convey the vehicle over otherwise-
insurmountable obstacles on gigantic wheelsets.
 It is probably even more popular than baseball, but easier to understand, thus delighting
and thrilling the entire population.
Another use is to either enclose the tray or put a cabin on it to carry passengers, camp in
and do strange things, out in the “woods”, which is what Americans call the bush. The US Army
calls them Technicals because they cannot for the life of them, think of a suitable name.
But I was telling you about that great invention, the phrase “what you see is what you get.”
Or in computing terms, “WYSIWIG”.
A lot of people have forgotten about this description of the Macintosh computer’s
interface, with Windows and Linux nowadays using almost identical ways to access the
processing power. But wasn’t it exciting seeing a little rodent shaped thing being pushed around
a table and the cursor flashing around the screen. And Menus! I nearly wet my trousers, or pants,
knickers, jockettes or y-fronts when I first saw one in operation. Cast your mind back to the time
you first witnessed it.
That was probably the most impressive American Invention since bubblegum!
Americans are genuinely genuine, too. They honestly believe in the supernatural and over
80% claim they believe that Jesus Christ was the son of a god. Only they say “is” the son of God,
because they believe he still exists in spirit form, and because they claim that this god is so
important, he needs a capital letter. He is officially a proper noun in the USA.
And Christianity longed since ceased to be just another religion. It is far more than that. It
is an industry, a form of entertainment, way of life and even has its own field of science, called
“Creation Science” with attendant mathematical equations.
In the section of their holy book, “The Bible”, which is indexed as First Kings, Chapter 7
and verse 23, it state that King Solomon ordered a “Molten sea, ten cubits from one brim to the
other: it was round all about (perfectly round) . . . and a line of thirty cubits did encompass it
round about.
This suggests that the Bible states categorically that the ratio of the circumference to the
radius in 3:1. Three times the radius. Not twenty two over seven, as it is in Australian or English
schools. Or what we like to call “pi” after the Greek character which looks like a capital T with
two uprights. It is not named after the fact that most pies are round, or rectanglar with round
corners.
The Earth, they say, is only a few thousand years old and created immediately before huma
beings were magically placed here because God got lonely. The dinosaur bones and fossils were
put in rocks and stuff to test our faith in, and by, the said God.
So, armed with this strange belief that words in a book are more likely to be correct, rather
than easily provable formulae, they set about changing cubic capacity and mass as well.
 This is best expressed as “when you buy twenty gallons of petrol in America, don’t expect
to get so far on it as in England”. Not because of the size of the German-invented internal
combustion engine, the size of the car or the fact that that there are more traffic cops vying for
the prize of stopping the most drivers for minor misdemeanors and you have to accelerate away
afterwards, consuming more petrol.
While these things must be taken into account, the major contributing factor is that their
gallon is lower in volume. In fact, the US gallon is point eight three two six seven (0.83267) of a
British gallon. A little over four fifths!
No wonder they are reluctant to switch over to litres, as the people would realise they have
been short served for all these years and demand some money back!
Oh, and they have two different gallon measures, a wet and a dry one. Stuffed if I know
why!
And they differ in mass measurements as well. The American “hundredweight” (cwt) is
lighter than the British one. But this is more to do with the British stuffing up. A Pom
hundredweight is one hundred and twelve (112) pounds, while an American equivalent is exactly
one hundred (100).
This has got to do with another confusing British invention called the “stone” which is
fourteen (14) pounds, and a hundred weight is eight (8) of these, rather than simple rounding off
and the more commonsense approach to nomenclature.
Twenty (20) hundredweights equals a ton in the UK, despite of their heavier
hundredweights. In the US they call this the “long ton’ whereas their lighter ton is called the
“short ton”. These sound like items on a Chinese menu!
Even though long and short are normally used for linear measures, not mass or weight, this
makes sense to them so we will have to just scratch our heads and be confused.
Airplanes have crashed in North America because the Septics have confused Pom gallons
with US gallons and, sticking to instructional manuals, have underfuelled them.
In Canada, where half the people are French anyway, they once mistook litres for gallons
and the plane barely reached the end of the runway!
They say Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language. I think
their common ground is in trying to outdo each other in being absurd. So far, the Yanks are
ahead, their stocks taking giant leaps forward with the presidential election of Donald Trump.
That is a feature to which Britain will never aspire. Forget Brexit! That is only politicians, not
your average voter.
But you thought this book was to be the history of a famous Australian music group who
played that American invention, rock and roll, didn’t you.
 So I will indulge you, now, instead of the rest of the readers who find trivia facts far more
interesting, either because they are more academic, or go to more pub quizzes than you..
We started out from New York. Or more accurately, in New York. First we had to get
interviewed. Customs had to make sure we were not carrying contraband. Then Immigration
ensured we would not overstay our visas, take jobs off Americans who could do the same job as
us and determine that we had no criminal record, were not wanted as spies and did not intend to
engage in criminal activities or endanger the lives of any Americans.
Then the radio and TV franchises had to make sure we were in fact Australian, not British
or Irish or German. The Americans have a difficulty with foreign accents, so they had to be sure.
Every one of them gave us a series of questions consisting, in some form or another, of:
Q: “How do you like our country?”
A: “It looks quite nice on the travel brochures. We only just got out of the Immigration
interview so we have not had time to look around yet.”
Q: You flew from Heathrow Airport. That’s in Great Britain, isn’t it?”
A: “Yes. And Yes.”
Q: But you are Australian, not British?”
A: “That’s right.”
Q: “So what were you doing in England?”
A: “Living.”
Q: “Pardon?”
A: “Gesundheit.”
Q: “Why did you say ‘Gesundheit’. You’re not German, are you? You are Austrian.”
A: “One question at a time, please. You said ‘Pardon’, so I said ‘Gesundheit. I thought you
sneezed. But it might have been Barmy farting. And no, we are not German. We are Australian.”
Q: “But you share a border. Do you speak German, then.”
A: “I did German at North Preston Tech, but only in Year 8 to 10. North Preston is in
Melbourne, Australia. Not Austria.”
Q: “Well, let’s take a short break. We will be back right after these messages.”
After about ten of these TV interviews, we went on to the radio stations, with names like
WHAT, WANK and WTF. They don’t care what their acronyms spell, these New Yorkers, just
so long as they don’t have to say the words they represent.
And then we met the bands we thought were supporting us on our tour of the East Coast.
 But it turned out that we were supporting them! The kids would be coming to see these
American bands, not especially us. We thought that, judging by the amount they were paying us,
we were the headline act, but on the posters, we were in eighteen point type near the bottom.
Only the printer’s imprint was smaller, right at the bottom.
But we were treated like royalty! Even though we were not British, we were afforded the
best seats on the buses, the best rooms in the hotels and everyone called us “Sir”. Even the
roadies and other musos! We didn’t mind the best hotel beds and bus seats, but, hey, you can
only respect people so far before they become blithering idiots!
Now these hotels were seriously good. I think I will write that again with more emphasis.
These hotels were SERIOUSLY good. Perhaps italics would stress it better. No? Okay then, but
to leave you in no doubt about it, they were bloody rippers!
Every suite had two rooms: a bedroom with an en-suite and a reception room. It was air-
conditioned, had a phone, TV with cable, bar fridge with about fifty different types of beer and
spirits. A small oven, which we were told was a “Microwave”, an electric jug (as they were
called back then), a percolator, tea bags as well as a tea pot and loose leaf (we had, after all, just
come from Britain) and champagne in an ice bucket.
Porky picked up one of these, and said, quite innocently (I know by now when he is
innocent!) “Produce of California”.
The bellboy looked mortified!
“I am dreadfully sorry, Sir. I can’t think how that happened. I will call down for French!”
“Don’t bother,” said Porky, and handed him a dollar bill. “But if they have some VB in the
fridge, they can send that up!”
Twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the door and a room service attendant
delivered a six pack of stubbies.
“Hope we didn’t put you to any trouble, Mate!” Porky said.
“No, Sir. No trouble at all. There is a bottle shop over on the lower west side which sells
many international beers. He put some in a cab and sent it right over.”
Porky tipped him five dollars!
So now, without me having to say anything more in their favour, you understand what I
mean by SERIOUSLY good. SERIOUSLY, if you will allow me the italics.

The concerts in New York and New Jersey were sensational. They held them in football
stadiums, about the size of a soccer or rugby field. But the banks of seats all around it made the
MCG look like a teacup! There seemed to be six or seven tiers of seating, not just a few rows
wide but about twenty four. From the back of the topmost one you were nearer Britain than the
stage!
We played seventh on the bill. The six before us only did half a dozen songs each. so that
made about twenty minutes for each act. At about three in the morning, a car pulled up at our
hotel and took us to the stadium, between a mile and thirty miles away. The fifth band would just
be finishing up, so we got to listen to their last song while we were preparing to go onstage.
We were afforded three quarters of an hour, and then had the option of being whisked back
to the hotel in the stretch limousine, staying and watching the three bands after us, or sitting in
the Albert Hall sized bar in big lounge chairs and watching the concert on massive screens.
But when we went on stage, we didn’t know what to expect. Screaming, writhing, hair-
tugging girls ripping their clothes off and trying to clamber onto the stage. Rows of security men,
grim faced, with night sticks (or more likely, sub machine carbines. This is America, after all.)
We didn’t know.
But they were very polite, compared with their trans-Atlantic cousins. They sat and
listened, then, when the noise we had created reverberated away to nothing, they clapped, and
from somewhere in the vast arena, someone whistled. This happened for three numbers, then the
audience made up their minds that we were worth applauding properly and began to behave
disgracefully, liked we expected. They all stood up. Girls climbed on their boyfriend’s shoulders
with their blouses unbuttoned. Girls who were too young or ugly to have boyfriends started
screaming and rushing the stage. Seven people were taken to hospital with hysterics and another
thirteen with broken bones or serious bruising. One had a ruptured spleen. Hundreds were treated
for asphyxiation or burnt eyeballs when the guards turned on their capsicum spray to control the
audience.
These figures are approximates, using the mean average method. We did seven concerts in
the New York area, five in New Jersey and six upstate New York. Then we went to New
England and supported Simon and Garfunkel and the Mamas and Papas. Those crowds really
knew how to party! They sat there entranced, their pullovers knotted by the arms around their
necks, never speaking or moving, for the entire hour we were on. They were even more
restrained during the other acts, and when Paul and Art ran on stage, they sat as one, as though
frozen in time and space!
However, when we started inland, Albany, Buffalo, Philly, Pittsburgh, Sunbury (not at all
like the one Billy Thorpe is famous for! This was really pretty.) and then down the coast into
Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, the crowds got smaller, but more intense.
We learned to remain in the venue until the last performance and then go straight back to
the hotel. This way, we got the pick of the girls, rather than expecting them to find us. They all
stayed to the end of the concert, unlike in England or Australia, where there was always a
selection already in your room.
 The concierges did a fine job by herding the legal-aged, better-looking ones over to the
right as we approached the hotel. The others were mostly ushered away into the police vans or
given time to scarper under their own steam.
Needless to say, these hotel employees were tipped very handsomely and we formed a
great rapport with these bright young men. They would get anything for us: girls, booze, cars,
tickets to sporting fixtures, and even, on a couple of occasions, some weed. Some states frowned
on smoking this shit, others threw you in the pokie and chucked away the keys. We were careful
who we asked.
One thing, though, the further south we travelled, the better were the church choirs. Great
stuff with their intricate vocal arrangements (obviously vocal arrangements. What do you expect,
floral decorations or origami? Dickhead!), harmonies and choreography.
One town in Georgia was holding a big choral festival a couple of days after the east coast
part of the tour ended, and we arranged with Harley to fly us in for it.
They let us join in, too, showing us the steps and placing us in the sections where our
voices were best suited.
Five skinny white boys among all those huge, sweaty, Afro-American bodies, swaying in
time to the sweetest music we had ever heard!
We had five days vacation in Florida, in Miami beach. A very handsome mix of thirties-
style art deco hotels, post modern residences and ultra modern apartment blocks. A city of the
future.
Alas, a lot of the art deco is now gone, as in Melbourne, Sydney and Newcastle. Poorly
built by immigrants for the wealthy Chicago and Kansas City gangsters during Prohibition and
the Depression, they started to crumble and the city officials condemned them.
Then it was off to the South: Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas. Then
another five days in Houston, before flying up to KCMO to start the mid-western part. The
longest part, too. Seventy concerts in ten weeks. On Saturdays there were two concerts a day and
then we had Sunday off, as laid down by the state legislators. Except in Illinois, Wisconsin and
that weirdly divided state, Michigan, where Christianity was never allowed to get in the way of
entertainment.
I say “weirdly divided” not only because of the lake, which is bigger than most seas, or
Tasmania, if you like. But in the eastern section, the people are all uptight, stressed out and
business like, while, a few hundred miles away, they are all relaxed, casual and farmboy like. Or
like Tasmania, while the subject is still fresh.
After the Mid West, we had a fortnight off, and we really needed it. Bedlam flew back to
London to visit a girl he had become quite fond of.
 She was still on the rebound from a previous relationship with an Arsenal footballer who
was very well known around London.
What people didn’t know, however, was that she came home early from a modelling
assignment, and found her fella keeping goal for an equally well known sports writer from a
national daily.
Fortunately for her, Bedlam was there to trap her as she bounced off the post and later that
night, slipped one into her own net!
They seemed to be very much in love and while we were on the first legs of the USA trip,
he behaved himself very well, retiring early to watch television and drinking himself stupid
every night.
So we were not surprised when she stepped off the plane with him in Seattle, to start the
final four weeks of our tour.
I cannot remember one city from another. It was fifty something years ago, I was drunk or
asleep just about all the time we were not on stage, and the smoke from the spliffs sometimes
impaired my vision.
I do remember that in the north, around Washington and Oregon, it was cold and gradually
got warmer the further south we went.
One day, I went on stage in only my Speedos. That was Phoenix, I think. I know it wasn’t
Las Vegas, because I didn’t go on stage at either of our two shows there. I had a bout of gastro-
enteritis after eating the shrimp. Everyone said “Try the shrimp, it is delicious!” “You have to
have some of this. Never tasted anything like it!” and “If you’re not having the rest of that, shove
it onto my plate!”
I have never had a reaction to seafood before of since. I don’t know about before. I never
thought of it much. But since? I cannot look a crustacean or shellfish in the face again after Las
Vegas!
No one else got sick, and I only had a spoonful, with some pinky-orange sauce. But I must
have an allergy to west coast shrimp, and I am not taking any chances. I thought I was going to
die! I am pleased to report that I got some imodium and survived.
Eventually, after about six months, the tour ground down. We were all different people.
America is so all consuming that we had changed, irrevocably. We were not totally Australians
any more, part of us was American. You can remain Australian in Britain. As we all know only
too well, you can remain British in Australia. For decades.
But America, that was something else.
 You know how people, like Porky’s dad, can retain their Cockney accent all their lives?
Asian people, South Africans, Europeans, Russians. They all keep their accents for as long as
they live in Australia. They make a point of it, in some cases.
But I know people who lose their Australian accent in about a year, start behaving, eating,
being American. Helen Reddy is a good example. You can’t act that. She became American. She
seemed to get her accent at the immigration interview.
Our six months there never actually changed us quite into being fully fledged, card
holding, flag-saluting Americans, but we all noticed it. We had changed to a certain extent.
That six months we toured with some of the finest American rock and hippy musicians
taught us so much. We talked with them, ate with them, performed with them, and as far as I am
concerned, slept with them. Two of the sweetest women, one on the west coast, one in the mid-
west, who went on to be massively big names in the seventies, slept with me.
And I learnt from them. Not just about sex, drugs and rock and roll, but about life which
we cannot get from television, books and movies. You have to live with them.
Americans live on a very different stage than we do. Their country is about the same size,
their cities bigger, their experience, knowledge and reasoning is generally smaller than ours. But
in aspect, the sky is the limit to most Americans, even though their adherence to an outdated
form of spirit worship inhibits them.
I go back there whenever I can.
 After it was all over Harley, Sweetie and I flew to Toronto. I had some family there while
Sweetie’s mum and gran had a ranch in the north of Ontario.
My mother’s sister and her husband lived in Hamilton, just to the south on the tip of Lake
Ontario. He was in the police force, and had a red tunic and pointy-hat dress uniform. He and I
were about the same size and I have a great photo he took of me wearing it.
They are pretty casual about things like that, not at all like their anally-retentive cousins
south of the border, who have to swear under oath to kill anyone who desecrates or even tries to
touch their military uniforms. And they are even more protective of their “Stars and Stripes”. Or
“Old Glory”. They caught me accidentally giving it a sideways glance and only some very fast
talking kept me out of the electric chair!
“The lower forty eight”, they call them in Alaska, and some Canadians use the same
expression.
I asked why and was told that farms in North America are very vast and divided up into
paddocks. The forty eight (or whatever) paddocks south of the homestead were referred to as the
“lower” paddocks, so the forty eight states of the USA, minus Hawaii and Alaska were referred
to in this way.
I told them farms in Australia were massive too, but we weren’t so keen on fences. Interest
did not even flicker across their faces.
Sorry, I thought you would find that interesting. I did and assumed you were my
intellectual equals. Sorry. I was wrong!
Toronto is a great place. A bit like Melbourne in a way, except that their trams have two
separate ends. A front and a back. They don’t have a cab at both ends, so when they arrive at the
furthest point out, or “down”, they have to do a loop like the trolley buses did.
The single cab and controls and fewer door spaces make the tram lighter, increases
passenger accommodation and seating and means reductions in equipment, weight, initial price
and maintenance cost.
Also, they call them “streetcars” and “trolleys”, not trams.
They are huge, tough-looking and very smart in their red liveries, not forty different shades
of faded “tramways green” like in Melbourne.
How do I know so much about trams? You try living two blocks from the biggest tram
depot in the world without some of it rubbing off on you from your mates, their dads and mums,
older brothers and sisters who all work there!
While I was there, Aunty Mavis drove me down to Niagara Falls on the international
border of Ontario and New York state. We stayed over the Canadian side because, although I had
a visa for America, there was a long queue and Aunty’s feet were sore. So we went into a bar
with a magnificent view. She told me that in 1837, there was a bit of flap on between the United
States, Britain and a movement which was intent on Canadian independence.
A Canadian rebel force abandoned The Caroline, a supply ship, to the British. It was
moored on the American side so the British had to row over from Canada. They easily
outnumbered the guard, not realising that there were no rebels left on it. I don’t know why, but it
was being guarded a solitary American. Perhaps there was an American flag on it!
Anyway, once they captured it (hopefully without desecrating Old Glory) they dragged it
upriver to about two miles above the Falls, set it on fire and cast it adrift. It floated over the Falls
to the Niagara River below.
This action infuriated the Yanks, more than the Canadians, probably because the flag got
burnt, but I don’t really know why. Anyway, they attacked some Royal Navy ships and it turned
really ugly. The Poms said it was done in self defence, clearly a lie as only one person, an
American, was on board at the time. They said it was a pirate ship!
The Yanks made matters worse, originally, by claiming twenty two Americans were killed,
when in fact only one person was on board and died.
When it simmered down, it led to the “Caroline Test” which is upheld to this day.
Under its terms, for self defence to be a reason, the assault on one’s property or person
must be “instant, overwhelming and leaving no choice of means and no moment for
deliberation”.
In my view, that says absolutely nothing! But obviously it does to the Canucks and the
Yanks. And presumably, the Limeys, as Royal Navy personnel are called in North America.
Then the Yanks arrested a Canadian sheriff who claimed to have led the assault, causing
another international incident. He was later acquitted of all charges as witnesses confirmed he
was bullshitting and nowhere near the river at the time.
But the Pentagon has now some sort of guidance for pre-emptive strikes against or by
American military. You have to attack on the spur of the moment, without considering the
consequences, if the Caroline Test is applied!
Yes, I thought you would like that.
Aunty Mavis was a teacher of history at a high school in the suburb of London and we
whiled away the afternoon, her regaling me with snippets from their past.
But I had to fly back to London, England (as opposed to London, Ontario) because there
was some agreement regarding the release of another recording. We had written extensively
while on tour, and it was time to get it onto vinyl and the new “cassette tapes”.
 My guitars had gone back with the band and Harley and Sweetie left a couple of days
before me. I only had my suitcase and an archtop Gibson mandolin I had picked up in Arizona at
a junk shop for seven bucks.
Funny thing, a bloke in Italy, about eighteen months later, gave me a hundred and thirty
thousand lire for it, approximately a hundred quid, or four hundred percent profit. He went away,
delighted.
The action was shot, the wood all weathered and it had the name Bill Monroe scratched
into the back with what looked like an ball point pen and again written in the case.
I tried to find out who Bill Monroe was, but without Google, the task was nearly
impossible. I recently found out that he was the bandleader for the “Blue Grass Boys” and was
credited with teaching Lester Flatt to pick. That’s where we get the genre “Bluegrass Music”.
And to think I nearly left that instrument on the carousel at Heathrow! For a while there I
owned a plank of maple which would fetch, easily, twenty five or thirty pounds!
I completely forgot about it and walked out of the front doors to the taxi ranks before I
remembered and had to go back and retrieve it.
At a charity auction, recently, my red ES 355 copy from high school went for $1050
Australian.
But I have a photo of the mandolin, in its opened case with Bill’s name biroed into the lid.
I also have photos of me playing it, and an old man at the store, with mutton chop sideburns and
a derby hat standing behind me.

The studio seemed like a terrible drag after that.

The interviewers on radio and TV all wanted to know how we got on in the States. (See, I
even talk like an American now. The States! Only Americans talk like that.)
Anyway, they all wanted to know “how we got on!”
“Well, I like to take a ten foot run up, launch myself into the air and land fair and square on
it,” said Porky, with a serious look on his face. “Lizard likes to slowly climb over, one leg at a
time. How do you get on, Noel?”
Needless to say, Noel changed the subject by asking more specific questions as he gets
paid to do!
But interviews and touring are the nice things about being a musician. You get a buzz from
performing, an actual charge runs through you when the audience grooves with you.
Radio and TV are a bit like that, but not with the full voltage, and sometimes the presenter
is a real twat and you have to try and generate the buzz for yourself.
 But recording gives you no such thrill. It is just plain slog. You have to do it over and over
until you get it exactly as you want the record buyer to hear when she or he plays it over and
over.
Even pre-digital equipment, analogue tape recorders, multi-dubbing and the wonderful
world of mixing cannot give that same power to a musician. It just makes him want to go home,
light his bong and lift the cap off a bottle of Fosters. So that is what we did, more and more.
 Bedlam’s girl, Janice, kept refusing Bedlam’s imploring proposals of marriage. She knew a
lot of show business people and how they do not have the same conventions of loyalty and
monogamy as ordinary, non show-biz folks. She was scared that he would do what so many rock
stars do. Get married and then, with a faithful little wife at home turning out photogenic little
kids for the paparazzi to exploit, feel free to bang as many groupies as he could get.
She spoke to me, the “serious Pimple” and I told her that as long as I had known Bedlam,
he had always been pretty wild, but that since meeting her, he had, to my knowledge, been a one-
girl-guy.
I knew she believed me, but she also knew that with all the temptation out there, even I
could not guarantee he would keep his gun in its holster until he got home.
I could only assure her that until she joined us in Seattle, he had been celibate every night
in America. Well, I couldn’t vouch for his fist, but if he resorted to that, I’ll bet he imagined it
was Janice.
He loved being around her, and definitely sang better when she was in the audience or in
the wings. He was sober nearly all the time, took a greater pride in his appearance and even
started taking guitar lessons from Porky.
Even though he was still “the young bloke”, he really matured during this time with Janice.
Wally formed a relationship with a studio drummer. She was what they would, in the
eighties, call “nerdy”, but cute and pretty and the two of them seemed to get their pictures in the
paper an awful lot. At the cricket, in the local swimming pool, at discos and parties, and of
course, when a photographer was admitted into the studio.
But nothing seemed to really come of it. He would phone her, they would go out to dinner
or the flicks, and then he would arrive home around midnight with a bit of her lipstick on her
collar. She stayed over one night and then we never saw her again.
Barmy enquired what had happened and he just shrugged and said “She wasn’t my
girlfriend or anything. I will probably call her again when we have this last track laid down. I
don’t know!”
I don’t know whether he did or not, but I do know I never saw her again, which was a
shame because she seemed to be bringing him out of his shell.
He went back to screwing groupies.
The record, which we called “The American Ones” but which was released with the title
“Pimples All Over” was quite a sensation. With flower power, psychedelic music and all that
hippy stuff around, we made a hard rocker with more than a passing influence of Country Music.
 The BBC played it, Independent Local Radio (ILR) played it during their trial runs and it
was a big hit at discos all over the country. It went gold in December, with the Christmas rush
and four songs made it to 45.
That means two singles were released, using two songs each. Porky’s “Carolina Girls”
backed by the Barmy inspiration “Thrashing”.
My gentle ballad about being sick in Las Vegas “Chucked” was on the B side with another
Porky rocker on the front: “Wet Afternoon in Reading.”
This had a hell of a lot of really grubby innuendo, but like “Chucked” nobody cottoned on.
We still play “Wet Afternoon” and people still don’t realise what it is about. I tease Porky that it
was too subtle and he reckons “Chucked” was too intellectual.
“Carolina Girls” stayed at number three for three weeks then surprisingly, got a boost when
Hank Marvin played an instrumental version on John Peel’s “Old Grey Whistle Test”. It shot to
number one around the country the following week.
“Wet afternoon” reached seventeen but “Pimples All Over” stayed in the top twenty album
charts for sixteen weeks, right through winter.
The Inland Revenue got a massive boost from the retail tax, but our money was all
squirrelled away, awaiting us in the Caribbean.
Harley told us that we were all quite rich. He suggested that we start investing the money
in Australia. In BHP, in nickel and also in movies. Australia had recently had the Poseidon
Boom. The demand for nickel was still there, even though the speculation madness that gripped
Perth, mainly, had subsided.
Iron and steel was always a good thing, but Harley could see a new wave of Australian
films looming. He felt that comedies and adventures would lead the rush, with romances just
behind.
I think he wanted to be an “impresario” and Porky drew a cartoon of him, with a strong
facial similarity to Sir Lew Grade, but with a tinny of VB in his hand and an Akubra with corks
attached on his head.
I have a photo of that caricature, although nobody knows what happened to the original.
After the “Pimples All Over” recording and publicity was “all over”, Harley took the lads
back to Australia. Porky and I were still scared that a party of military police would meet us at
the airport and escort us off to Puckapunyal, so we didn’t go. We had a holiday in Greece with a
couple of our older, more serious groupies.
They weren’t really groupies, but we teased them about it. One was, admittedly, the
president of our fan club and the other was a writer at Richard Branson’s “Student” magazine,
for which she received payment according to how many column inches she had published. She
obviously couldn’t subsist on this and we employed her as a sort of secretary/organiser and
general dogsbody. These days, they would say she had a conflict of interests as most of
“Student” involved itself with records and the music industry.
She did contribute quite a lot about us, Lynn, The Sandgropers and other acts we were
associated with, and the editor had a crush on her and printed almost everything she wrote.
And she always had the very latest gossip on us and was responsible for a lot of those
photos of Wally and Pam.
But this all seemed to suit everybody involved. The fans were kept well informed, that was
the main thing. Our publicity machine was in top gear, which was also important, she got paid
and Richard Branson became the entrepreneur he is today, and it was mostly thanks to Jane
Brimmer.
Also, I found both her and her body a lot of very good company. She looked sensational in
a bikini and even better out of it, if you get my drift. She knew what order to use her cutlery at
dinner, could order in French or Italian restaurants and was a walking encyclopaedia of pop
music.
The perfect travelling companion for two weeks on the Island of Mykonos, out of the
British rain.
Anita, Porky’s number one fan (our fans, by the way, were very imaginative, and called
themselves “The Blackheads”) was pretty cute, too. Porky said he was attracted to her because
her CV listed her abilities as “bangs like a chookyard door”, “completing the 1969 Rupert the
Bear colouring in book” and “doesn’t talk after sex”. Her achievements were “taming Glenn
Boyle”, “changing a lightbulb naked” and “Mick Jagger.”
So we got a plane out of Gatwick and flew to Athens. We thought we saw Maurice and
Lulu at the ferryport in Piraeus, boarding another ship, but even though Porky bellowed out
“Mo! Hey, Mo!” in his great foghorn of a voice, neither of them looked up and by the time our
tickets were validated and we got on the wharf, they had set sail.
It probably wasn’t them, anyway!
But while we were on Mykonos, we ran into Bruce and Terry from the Sandgropers with
their lady friends and spent a couple of days hiking around with them. Bruce reckoned all they
needed was a few quokkas and it would have been as good as Rottnest.
We had to explain that to the ladies who looked at us, bewildered why we wanted to
compare this paradise to a scruffy little bit of sand floating off the Western Australian coast.
These non-Australians don’t understand.
 I was a bit crook about not going back to Melbourne with the others, though. I wasn’t
actually homesick, we were always far too busy for that, and London was an exciting place in
those days, especially for us.
But I would have loved to have had a beer with Dad, Mum’s chatting on in her kitchen as
she made my favourite apple crumble. Even the pizza parlours and cafes of Swanston Street
would have been a familiar sight, and smell, because all you got in London was Wimpys and
instant coffee.
But we did have a good time! The beaches, especially the “free” ones were always a lot of
fun. When I say “free”, I don’t mean they never charged you an admission price!
Ouzo was cheap and plentiful, retsina was, too, but add in the words “a worry”. Beer was
icy cold and tasty and the food was out of this world. I put on five pounds in fourteen days and it
put a new spin on Porky’s nickname.
Some Aussies on a cabin cruiser recognised us and took us island hopping. Their beer was
even colder and the steaks even tastier than on the land. The skipper was the son of a well known
Perth millionaire and when he heard that a couple of The Sandgropers were on Mykonos, he sent
out a search party. But they never found them so just the four of us went.
I still keep in touch with Smiley and Ginnie. We don’t just exchange Christmas cards, he
flops with me whenever he comes to Melbourne and I take advantage of his mansion
overlooking the Southern Ocean whenever I am in Albany.
Ginnie reckons I am blackmailing her husband. I have a very saucy photo of her on their
Mediterranean yacht, sprawled out on the deck with only a can of Swan Lager coming between
her and gross indecency.
I hope that Dad never saw that one, either. It would have made him thirsty!
We spent a couple more years in Europe, with a tour of Canada and the north east United
States and Seattle somewhere in there. We opened for Ian and Sylvia in Ontario and Gordon
Lightfoot in Vancouver and Victoria. That was a huge thrill as they have always been great
favourites of mine and a big influence on my country style. My web page shows that Gord is my
favourite singer-songwriter.
Keith Potger has a go at me about that, but I say that you can’t control the love-bug!
And we did a one-off concert in Vancouver without Gordon, featuring Lynn as our special
guest. She sang ten songs, as beautifully as when we first heard her. Her friends were amazed!
They never had a clue she was quite famous in Australia and Britain.
For several years after that she got requests to appear in charity concerts and on TV. They
still play her songs on radio and she appeared in a documentary with Anne Murray and Celine
Dion.
 Germany was very kind to us. We played at Munich during the nineteen seventy two
Oktoberfest, the one where some Brisbane boys hi-jacked a tram and got arrested. They were
lucky they were not shot, as the city was still on edge after the Olympic massacre.
Amsterdam loved us! There was a large contingent of Aussies living there for the hippy
lifestyle, with legal dope and free love and all that shit. They kept us on stage for four curtain
calls. And then refused to leave De Meer Stadion until we came out again and gave them a wave.
Stockholm was cancelled at the last minute because of a terrorist threat, and we had such a
tight schedule we could not do a catch-up concert. The tickets were all fully refunded but
Swedish laws are a bit daft, and the insurance company insisted we pay their losses! I don’t
know much about insurance legislation, but I don’t think that is how it works!
Harley says he told them to go piss up a rope! We have never been back, but in Denmark,
we were a huge hit. We have since been credited with being the reason Frederik was in Australia
when he met Mary, but I think that is pushing the boat out a bit far!
They say his mum, Margrethe, was in the audience in Copenhagen, Aarhus, Aalborg and
somewhere else vying for first-up status in the atlas. Aabenraa, Porky tells me. Two “A”s at the
front and back.
She went out and bought all our records and Frederik was brought up on our music.
Could be! She would have been around 31 or 32 at the time we were there!
Italians are hard to fathom when it comes to rock music. They have this deep spiritual
belief that their culture is classical and hate to let on if they enjoy pop (as popular culture was
called back then.)
Their own pop artists were all childish and silly. Not at all like Mario Lanza in the wartime
or Pavarotti recently. Or Frankie and Dino, who, while childish and silly, at least had some
dignity.
The French deliberately didn’t like us. Or if they did, they deliberately wouldn’t tell us.
Record sales and concert attendances indicated that they did like us, but they claim that was
mostly foreigners living in their country.
And Spain went crackers! Not only in the resorts, Mallorca, Tenerife, Torremolinos,
Malaga, but in the cities as well.
Madrid saw tens of thousands turned away from the bullfight arena because they sold far
more tickets than they had seats. We made that up to them by putting on shows for the next two
afternoons. Typical Spanish organisation.
Barcelona told us we were performing one night but told the fans a completely different
night, so that mucked us around, too.
 Seville put us on right in the middle of the Feria and we stayed until Easter and had a ball
of a time, attending Flamenco guitar lessons with some of the city’s masters. We loved it there.
Then we had to go back to London, and you guessed it, the recording studios!
We made a pittance on record sales. There are so many other “stakeholders” who have to
be paid that your seven and six for a single means about fourpence for us. And we have to do
about a hundred publicity appearances for that, too.
Why the Beatles quit touring for recording alone has always puzzled me. Hard work,
relentless pressure, tedium, coffee highs, alcohol lows, long hours, sleep deprivation, arguments
with producers, studio musicians and each other. During the Abbey Road album, John fell out
with everyone, Ringo, George Martin and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Not my scene.
The urge to create is always there and the desire to experiment with their sound must have
been the driving force, not the relaxation and fun that having a lot of money can buy.
Harry and George, from the Easybeats, know what I mean. You can only take so much.
They were the two hardest working Aussies in London at the time and spent nearly all their lives
in the studio, but still had time for a “bit of a giggle”. Not John and Paul! No wonder the Beatles
shattered.

We were at the studio when we got the news about Janice.

She had hardly left Bedlam’s side since America but had agreed to do a fashion shoot in
Ireland for Erin Wool’s Autumn Catalogue. Although it was early summer, the fashion industry
doesn’t leave everything to the last minute. This seemed like a good opportunity, while we were
in the studio, to try to revive her career.
The light aircraft had just left the airport in Cork, when something went really wrong. They
were only about two hundred feet above the ground and there was a flash, and the plane dropped
out of the sky, narrowly missing a primary school in Farmer’s Cross.
Janice hung on to life for enough time for Bedlam to get one last look at her alive, but she
was in a semi-coma and he doesn’t know whether she recognised him. She died early the
following morning.
We joined him in Cork later that day as we didn’t want him to be on his own. He was as
high as kite when we got here and never came down for a week. At one stage, Harley was afraid
we would lose him, too, and said that the combination of LSD and pot probably stopped him
from getting so depressed he would deliberately overdose.
Porky and I resumed the vocals while Bedlam mooched around the flat, finally going back
to Melbourne in October.
 Then in early December, with Labor's win beyond doubt even though counting was still
underway, we booked our passage back to Australia. Mr Whitlam had come through for us and
we were no longer wanted for National Service.
The result of our studio work, which never got released until March, 1973, was simply
titled “Janice” and included the same-name single which Bedlam had laid down the vocals for,
exactly two weeks before her tragedy.
The single and the album went straight to number one in Melbourne, taking an extra week
in the rest of the country. They were already charting well in England.
I still cannot listen to the song all the way through before getting a lump in my throat. I
picture that woman, probably the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, walking along the
Kings Road, arm in arm with our mate, Bedlam.
I have the photo framed on the mantlepiece of the apartment in Port Melbourne. And a
similar one in the albums.
You probably wonder why we don’t do the song live on stage. We can’t! We always end
up an emotional mess. But Porky always plays a flamenco version of it before the show over the
PA.
Lynn was still living in Vancouver, but flew in to spend Christmas with us. The Prof,
Wilton, came with her and she excitedly announced she was expecting a baby. She had a girl, as
you probably already know, and called her Amanda Janice. No-one ever asked her, but we know
where she got that second name.

We didn’t do anything serious for quite a while after coming back to Australia. The
English press reported we had split up, but that was not true. Porky and I did some country and
western songs and the whole band once supported Ross Ryan shortly after his successful Roy
Orbison tour.
But we were physically drained and mentally shagged out. Music took a second place to
our other interests.
To start with, Harley’s prediction about Australian movies proved correct. We had a lot of
money invested and Bill Collins reckons the only reason flicks like “Now’s the Place” and
“Bella’s Fellas” got made was because of our investment.
As you know, they did fairly well in Australia, did a lot better in New Zealand and
England, and are still shown on Classic TV here and in North America.
We put money into TV, too, mostly investing in production houses like Grundy’s and
Harper&Grigson. Because they were pretty cheap to produce, those soaps, they never took off
outside Australia.
 When Neighbours took England by storm, the TV tried showing our efforts, but nobody
watched. “Wagga” got shown in South Africa, but left the locals scratching their heads at things
we take as normal in Australia.
Bedlam and Porky co-starred in one episode of “Backways”, an Aussie western about a
fictional gold mining in 1880’s Victoria. They acted as two gamblers who tried to set up a
Casino in this tiny town of a couple of dozen, which seemed to attract more visitors than Luna
Park on New Years Day.
They were sent packing at the end of the episode by John Harwood in a stetson, who
showed up at the last minute to save the town from irreparable damage. He normally strode into
town, leaving his buggy on the outskirts, but in this one, he rode a magnificent black stallion. Or
at least, his double did!
I have the series on DVD but the lads don’t know or they would destroy it as evidence of
how awful it was.
We often went to the pub up at Preston until I decided to splurge and bought a pad at Kew,
near White Horse Road, or Cotham Street, so I would be near the trams to town. Also, Porky’s
folks had bought a place in a new development near Werribee and he had digs in North Balwyn.
I advertised for a housekeeper, putting in my real name in the advertisement, and only got
one reply. A woman named Anna, who had been one of our Wandsworth Bridge Road groupies
all those years ago.
I thought of her more as a friend and didn’t really want to employ her, but she said she was
on the bones of her arse, her boyfriend had scarpered with her car, all her money and jewellery
and a lot of other possessions. She was living in a backpackers with only a few clothes and stuff.
My first instinct was that she was trying to scam me, and I like to go with first instincts.
But there was a note of desperation in her voice which I did not think she could fake, so I drove
her to her backpackers and we picked up her clothes and bags.
She did a marvellous job of cleaning and helped me redecorate the house. Harley came
around to the warming bash and was most impressed. He had a friend in interior design, which
didn’t surprise anyone, who needed a good assistant. He introduced her to this guy and she
eventually became his business partner. They completely did the Port Melbourne place as it was
only a bare-plaster shell when I bought it.
Joanna Griggs did an episode on Better Homes and Gardens on it, and I let Anna take all
the credit, just interrupting once that it was me who paid for it!
But that was just a few years ago. I interrupted this story (I am good at that) back in the
mid seventies, when Australia was undergoing an identity change, Barry McKenzie, Paul Hogan,
Dame Edna, Norman Gunston and Alvin Purple.
 A lot of this was based on Gough Whitlam’s fresh approach to the Australian psyche. I
won’t say anything about his politics other than I never had any problem with them. I marched
against whaling with Jim Cairns, campaigned against Malcolm Fraser for the dirty way he got
Gough sacked and have never once allowed anyone to bag him or run him down.
What he did for Australia in seventy two needed to be done with no delay and he did it
within days. Reform was years overdue, the way the Liberals were running the country was
rotten and stinking and he never shirked.
His election promises were enacted within weeks, sometimes within days, and it speaks
very poorly of a lot of Australians that they treated him so badly and elected Fraser and all the
old bad habits, just three years later.
This will all happen again, mark my words! If there is one thing that Australians refuse to
do, it is learn from their history.
When the going gets tough, they whinge like a pack of Poms at a soccer-club bingo night.
They will not pull their shoulders back and face adversity head-on.
It is hypocrisy the way they honour the fallen in wars gone by. The Boer War, Gallipoli,
Tobruk, the Kokoda Track, Long Tan. Then as soon as anyone asks them to make the tiniest
sacrifice, bleat about what it will do to the economy!
We need men like Whitlam in charge. Men of honour, brave enough to grasp the bull by
the horns and shrug off the slings and barbs. We need men like those soldiers at the battles I
mentioned, who fought on through unbelievably tough times.
Climate change is a very real challenge and if we don’t do something other than whine and
moan about China not doing its share, we are doomed.
Okay, China should do something, but so should our governments, state and federal. Lead
us through hardship and inconvenience so we can emerge triumphant. Show the rest of the
world. Lead by example! Make them do something, not be embarrassed that we will hurt their
feelings.,
Not let schoolkids bear the responsibility, and then criticise them for caring about their
own futures.
Now I will have another go at getting back to 1975.
Gradually, at the instigation of Harley, who knew we were not done yet, we got gigs
around Melbourne and in the RSL and Rugby League clubs in New South Wales. We tried our
damnedest to get the Victorian state government to allow our footy clubs to introduce pokies, but
they were worse than the pre-Whitlam federal mob.
Fortunately, Dick Hamer came to office and had a little more guts than his predecessor and
things started to improve in Victoria. Abortion was allowed, the death penalty abolished,
aboriginals were given rights to their own land and Harley and Sweetie were at last allowed to
legally be in love. The Z-class trams replaced many worn out W2s, new tram-lines and
infrastructure were added, and a new performing arts centre was built.
We decided that we would reshape ourselves as one of the new breed of larrikin pub bands,
like Chisel, the Angels from Adelaide, Midnight Oil and AC/DC. They all had a headstart on us
and already had a big following so we had to make up lost ground.
Billy Thorpe reckoned we were capable of making the grade and booked us for the final
Sunbury on Australia Day, in 1975. We never betrayed his trust but never really had our heart in
it, either. He gave us a pep talk afterwards, while promising that if he held another the following
year, we would be on it. But it never materialised.
But that start gave us some impetus, and by June we had a few gigs lined up in Melbourne,
Sydney and Brisbane. It isn’t easy, rebirthing, rebadging and rebranding without changing your
name and line-up.
The older audience wants the sixties Pimples while the young ones shouted out for more
punch, more raunch and more noise!
Lynn came over after her daughter was born and was appalled! We had morphed into that
Aussie phenomena, the Pub Band. She didn’t like it one bit. Bedlam got a half hour lecture for
swearing on-stage!
“Lizard wrote it,” he protested but Lynn would have none of it.
“For a start, Lizard wouldn’t ask you to sing something he couldn’t say to his mother!” she
chided. “And anyway, even if he did, you don’t have to sing it on stage!”
“But . . . “
“If he told you to jump off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, would you?”
“Depends how much he paid me!”
“Oh, you! You know I’m right, don’t you?”
But the younger kids loved it. The ruder, the dirtier, the better. Girls passed out from
drinking too much beer and young blokes smashed up their cars driving home from these gigs.
We knew Lynn was right and toned down our act so much, the pubs stopped booking us.
We had no pull!
So we hit the RSL and Leagues clubs in New South Wales.
They wanted nostagia, schmaltzy 60s rock, and we wanted to be creative, edgy (as they say
these days) and a bit controversial.
Remember, Sir Lew Grade disapproved of us for calling ourselves “The Pimples”!
 So we continued to do the clubs, but interspersed it more and more with Country Rock.
The Eagles, America, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played it.
And so did Emmy Lou Harris, Linda Ronsdtadt and the Doobie Brothers. Hell, even the skinny
supermodel from the Sixties, Twiggy, made some records in England.
She had been a friend of Janice’s and when she learned we were interested in playing
Country Rock, she sent us a letter of encouragement. At first we didn’t know who “Lesley
Hornsby” was but Bedlam remembered her and replied with a lovely “thank you” which brought
a lump to both Lynn’s and my throat.
This genre had been around for years in America but was just starting to come to
popularity in Australia. A visit to Tamworth in 1976, after being disappointed that Sunbury was
cancelled, convinced us. I think Porky, Barmy and I were planning on heading to Brisbane and
heard about the talent quest which was a feature of the festival. Porky entered us in one of the
categories and we won. Barmy on drums, me on tambourine or bass and Porky on guitar and
bass. All of us on vocals and other bits and pieces. We got invited to join in jam after jam, and
managed to take the lead time and again.
My mandolin playing ensured the camera was on me and my little instrument most of the
time I was playing it, as it was still a novelty and most people thought it was a toy when they
first saw it.
We joined dozens of other performers on stage in what has become known as “The Jams”.
By Australia Day, we had signed up the group for gigs right down from Byron Bay to
Wollongong. Work that would take us from March until September.
We knew how that would snowball into even more gigs, especially when the nostalgia
audiences of Mums and Dads at the RSL clubs heard about us.
So we were off on the road again, not returning to Melbourne until Melbourne Cup week.
And best of all, we kept Lynn happy!
Harley too. He had been champing at the bit to make it in New South Wales, and here was
his chance to sniff around legitimately. He threw a huge party in the Byron Bay pub, only a
dinky little boozer then, and endeared himself to the locals with his fat cheque at the same time.
It was a surfer and hippy commune in the seventies, before the tourist trade discovered it,
and because of Harley’s interest in the town, he was one of the golden-haired sons. Even though
he was not born there, he is buried there, with a large headstone crediting him with his
enthusiasm in developing the town.
Don’t look for that headstone. It is on private property and not many people know it is
there.
 After the bother Fremantle had when it allowed Bon Scott to be buried there, the city
fathers ensured privacy, according to Harley’s wishes.

But I get ahead of myself, again.

Early in January, 1977, the early morning train from the Blue Mountains in to Sydney
failed to make a curve. After travelling to the western suburb of Parramatta, it took on extra
passengers and proceeded on the route to Central Station.
The train had been poorly serviced, and the track was in a bad state too.
What keeps a train on the track and guides, or steers it, are flanges on the wheels, which
hang over the inner side of the rail. Every wheel on the train or railcar has this device, even the
high speed trains in Japan, China and Europe.
It the tracks are set too far apart, or the flange is not deep enough, the train can derail going
around a bend. Both factors were present as the 6.09 out of Mount Victoria Station came into the
intersection with the line from Campbelltown.
The government of Neville Wran had taken office only months before and it predecessor
had let the railways fall into a bad state of repair. Sets of freshly lathed wheel sets had been sold
to raise money by the public transport authority, instead of replacing desperately needed, worn
down sets.
The track maintenance crews had also had their hours cut, by the government, desperate to
make the state’s finances look good before the election, which they lost, anyway.
So the wheels and the track were faulty, in need of repair and replacement, and, coupled
with the penalties which were imposed on a late running train, the L6 class electric locomotive
4620 sped into the bend and under the Bold Street Railway Bridge.
The steering wheel was in particularly bad shape and left the tracks, causing the entire
locomotive to derail. The first passenger carriage hit one of the bridge supports and split open.
The third and fourth carriages jack knifed and lay across the permanent way when the
bridge, carrying several cars, collapsed onto it.
Five hundred and seventy tonnes or bridge fell onto those carriages, killing everyone
immediately underneath, which amounted to half the total of people in those two carriages.
It was discovered later that many years earlier, when the road was realigned along the
buttresses, it was three feet higher than the bridge, so they simply poured concrete onto it to
bring it up to height, making it too heavy for the supports.
Ambulances and firemen raced to the scene, along with a lot of ghoulish spectators, who
got in the way of the rescue attempts. There were some LP gas cylinders which had been used
during the cold Blue Mountains winter mornings to heat the carriages. These were also ruptured,
which meant oxy-acetylene tools could not be used to cut steel carriage frames.
Some people died after having their crushed limbs trapped for hours, and then freed, a
phenomenon known as “crush syndrome”.
The rescue operation took two and a half days to complete, because the bridge had to
removed before the trapped people could be freed. As space inside the carriages was made, the
bridge fell further into it,
Altogether, 83 people died in that disaster, with 213 more seriously injured, affecting more
than 13,000 altogether.
The government as usual in those days, tried to blame the driver for approaching too fast
but it was found he had acted exactly to orders. Then they tried to blame track maintenance. This
was partly to blame, but the reduced hours of the crews could not keep pace with the demand.
The wheels were the prime cause, the weakened bridge supports caused the collapse and poor
road making had resulted in so many people being crushed.
The bridge had to be replaced and was built as a single span with no support piers and
other dangerous bridges were also rebuilt.
It was nearly forty years before any apology or acknowledgement was made to the
surviving victims and their families and the rescuers honoured.
But money was urgently needed to help those victims and their dependents. Many
generous Sydneysiders and from other states donated money and goods and services and we
were asked by a philanthropic concert promoter if we would perform at a benefit. We ended off
doing three and the outpouring of grief, thanks, and the support those we received showed how
community minded the people were and how, even though a corrupt government compromised
safety to save money, the people opened their hearts and wallets.
Porky and I sat down two weeks after this disaster and wrote this song, and Wally and
Bedlam joined in on it at the concerts, with Barmy standing behind his drums, hat in hands and
head bowed. It has a bit of a bluesy melody, a bit like what Dylan would have done.
Granville, 1977
On the eighteenth day of January, nineteen seventy seven
Eighty three train passengers went from hell to heaven.
From Mount Victoria station, they were bound for Sydney Town
But when they got to Granville, the bridge came crashing down.

As that lo-co-mo-tive went around the curve

The steering wheel left the rail and went into a swerve
The leading carriage left the track as it hurtled round that bend
And when it hit the bridge support, it split from end to end
The second and third carriages had nowhere else to go
They jack knifed and the overpass fell on the train below
Half the people in there, were crushed right away
And hundreds more were trapped inside on that scorching day

As word of this disaster spread, help came from far and wide
Ambulance and firemen tried to free those trapped inside.
As they worked to help the injured, some of them also died.
The air was thick with dust and gas as the train lay on its side
When all the dead were buried, they asked what failed that day.
The government tried to cover up, said the tracks were over gauge
But as the days and weeks went by, another tale was told
Cost cutting by the government meant the spares wheels had been sold.

Six months before, they all knew that one day soon they'd fail
But on that day they still were used, that's why they left the rail
There were other factors to that crash that also were to blame
That contributed to the Bold Street Bridge collapsing on that train.

They found the bridge was poorly built, too heavy for the load.
Three feet thick of concrete was underneath the road.
The rail system was rotten: the detectives realised
And the government withheld the funds with safety compromised.

On the eighteenth day of January, nineteen seventy seven

Eighty four train passengers went from hell to heaven.

We recorded it and all our share went to the fund. I believe the production staff also
forwent wages for working on it and these were duly donated.
 Our career absolutely blossomed in 1977. Harley renegotiated some of the Tamworth
contracts, not always to his own monetary benefit, but goodwill always played a part in that
brilliant mind. He reduced what I had asked for in smaller towns, where the publican owned
bigger places in larger towns, that sort of thing. He endeared himself to people who had
influence. I am sure that he just loved meeting people and that he knew if he kept it on a civil
level, everyone would benefit.
But woe betide anyone who tried to cross or double-deal him. One venue owner who tried
to alter the terms of contract on one of Harley’s deals found his alcohol supply cut off. Without
this, the local businesses refused to trade with him, as he lost his income stream. And, with no
booze, food, cleaning and laundry, a shortage of patrons soon followed.
The next year, Harley bought him out, remodelling the building and re-employing all the
staff. The hotel is still owned by his estate and is one of the biggest and best on the Central
Coast, major sponsors to an A-League club and a Rugby team.
We often think of ourselves as an Australian success story, but we are nothing compared
with Harley Brownlow, son of a major in the British Army in India.
“Golden-haired boys” the Age called us, while ensuring that everyone knew we from
Melbourne originally.
“Fusion Group to Visit” screamed the West Australian and then went on to inform its
readers that fusion was when two different genres of music incorporated into another.
The Courier Mail was more circumspect. “They have proved themselves big fish in
Australia, but can they make the grade in America?”
You put up a challenge, we will meet you dollar for dollar, and very soon we were on the
stage of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
Not the Ryman Auditorium in town, but a new resort just out of the city limits.
On the bill was a list that included Johnny Cash, The Carter Sisters, Emmy-Lou Harris,
Glen Campbell and Carl Jackson. I don’t remember any of them being on the night we were
there, but I remember Tommy Emanuel’s huge grin when he recognised us as boys from
Australia.
Robbie Porter was in the audience too, and sent a message that he wanted to see us.
Unfortunately that message was not delivered until three days later when we were in Memphis.
We got straight on the phone, and he was most understanding, having been put in that position
himself many times. We never did catch up until the end of the millennium.
But although we never got anywhere near the top in America, we can hold our heads high.
We have been on the same bill and often jammed with quite a few of our heroes, and even patted
Trigger, or at least his skin, where it is stretched over a foam likeness of him in the Roy Rogers
and Dale Evans Museum in Victorville, California.
 Apparently it was sold in 2010 for two hundred and sixty six thousand, five hundred
dollars and was returned to Roy’s ranch.
We toured all over the South that time. We started in Washington DC, where Mr Ford had
us as his guests at a party in some venue called The White House, but then never showed up.
Then we did two shows in Baltimore which we were told Mr Ford’s wife, Betty, attended and
was very impressed with “these Australian lads imitating the finest aspects of our American
culture.”
Richmond, Norfolk, Fayetteville, Charlotte, Wilmington Military base, Charleston,
Jacksonville, Orlando and a revisit to Miami, then up the other side where we watched the
Rowdies play in Tampa, then on the following day we did a concert on the same ground.
Then it was Tallahassee, Atlanta, Montgomery and Mobile before catching a plane for
Nashville and Memphis, then St Louis and on to Kansas City Missouri where we did concerts
both sides of the Missouri River which is the state line with Kansas.
From here we went south again to Tulsa and across to Okie City and then things got
strange. We played Dallas and Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin in Texas.
But we were all really nervous about our concert in a little town called Lubbock, where we
were billed in a Buddy Holly remembrance tribute.
It went without a hitch and Bedlam sang “Reminiscing” and “Words of Love”, which were
recorded and used in a compilation without our knowledge. But we let it go when we found out
the well meaning folk of Lubbock used the proceeds of this to rebuild the school Buddy had
attended.
And, after all, this was the town Buddy Holly grew up in. Possibly the school in which he
learned to write those lovely words and phrases. He probably also learnt to say “Bye-bee” right
there in one of these classrooms we helped to rebuild. And according to all those late night
interviewees, he had been a bigger influence on them than anybody, Chuck Berry and Jesus
Christ combined.
We felt we must memorialise him in some way. Besides, those songs were not on our usual
playlist and we never did them other than that one time. If they can be put to good use, well so be
it with our blessing!
After that, we did a concert in El Paso, Albuquerque (have I spelt that right?) and another
in a strange, huge bar midway between Tucson and Phoenix.
Now I would get a chance to play in Las Vegas, which I did.
By the way, when you read this, think of this city as being from Scandinavia. It is
pronounced “Lars” Vegas not “Loss”.
 I have that pronunciation on the highest authority. None less than Dolly Parton, who
admitted that she often mispronounces it so that everyone will know where she means.
And vegans do not necessarily come from Vegas. Although after my experience with
shrimp, I wouldn’t blame them if they did.
Then we dropped down to the coast and did San Diego and finished up in Los Angeles.
Other than the presidential absenteeism and missing Robbie Porter’s message, it went
pretty well. Lynn flew from Canada to see us in Vegas, San Diego and Los Angeles, and again,
we talked her up onto the stage.
Actually it was all pre-arranged and rehearsed but the audiences didn’t realise and thought
we had spotted an old friend in the crowd.
She came with us to the Roy Rogers museum too, and took the photo of me and Trigger.
We were a lot more relaxed on that tour. The bus was a lot more comfortable, had better
toilets and even a little kitchen which the driver said was the “galley”. There was a coffee
machine and a fridge which was larger than the standing room, and which someone had
thoughtfully loaded up with Australian beer. Mostly VB, Tooth’s and Swan, but if we ran out of
these and were really desperate, XXXX and West End Draught.
There was also a lot of tonic water, which we found out later was because for some reason,
they thought we all loved gin and tonic. Strangely, there was no gin. But there was, of all things,
a case of vodka.
The hotels were just as lavish, the ones in the cities. But as before, we also stayed in some
where the toilets were cleaner than the bedrooms. Little country motels which lay dormant for
months on end, gathering cobwebs, hornet’s nests, rattlesnakes and cockroaches, plus a thin
coating of dust to protect it all.
On the morning we would be due to arrive, they would dash in, whoosh some Pine-O-
Kleen around the dunny, fold a point on the end of the toilet roll and squirt two bursts of Glen 20
into the air. Then they would open the doors and windows to let the fresh air blow in and the joe
blakes out.
At nearly every place, we had to ask them to come and clean away the build-up, and at
three of these establishments, we were told there was a vacuum cleaner in the bottom of the
wardrobe.
But generally, we enjoyed this trip more than that ferocious schedule we followed of over
one hundred and thirty concerts with not even twenty five free days which we did on our last
trip, nine years earlier.
A lot of the concerts now, we were billed at the top of the poster in the biggest type, but I
think that had more to do with typography than prominence. If you have ever been involved in
this sort of graphic design, you will realise that if you justify the ten letters and one space of
“The Pimples” across a twenty four inch wide piece of paper, it will be a lot bigger than “Billy-
Bob Randall and his Rootin’ Tootin’ Swinging Allstars”.
The hotel employees, venue staff and at all the diners, restaurants and truck stops were
really smashing and polite. Even when we were told about the vacuum cleaners, it was only done
to be helpful.
The security guards were as big as before, with their armour piercing anti-tank missile
launchers, ICBMs and twenty bandoliers of ammunition, every fifth one being a tracer round so
they could monitor the trajectory if it got dark.
Strangely, with all this fire power, they still wore a night stick, or truncheon as the English
Bobbies call them.
But it was the beginning of the fast-food era. Although there always had been a Burger
King, a Kentucky Fried Chicken or a McDonalds on every city block, now there were two or
three. If you missed one, you would only have to wait a few seconds before getting to the next.
And there was always a long queue at the drive-thru (they were so fast they left off the “O”
and the “GH” to speed things up a bit when you didn’t have so much reading to do.) The
carparks around them were bigger and arranged so you only ever had the minimum walk to the
door.
We ate at these a few times. Although we had them in Australia, the variety was vastly
bigger. One day I went in to buy half a dozen donuts (without any “UGH”) and was asked “Do
you want fries with that?”
And they were all desperate for you to upgrade to “a meal”. I would think that four pieces
of chicken with mashed potato, coleslaw and gravy could be construed as a “meal” but here, you
had to include a piece of cheesecake, a slice of apple or cherry pie and a pint of lolly water! Oh,
and “fries with that!”
The people did seem to respond to it well, though. They appreciated all this effort that the
fast food franchises went to and grew much larger stomachs to accommodate it. Before, if you
saw a man with bowlegs, you assumed he rode a horse a fair bit. Now, you knew that his piles
were playing up.
While a lot of these places sold fish, chicken, beef, cheese and pork ribs, I noticed that very
few sold vegetables, other than potatoes. You would get a slice of something which might or
might not be a tomato, some pickled cucumber and a bare minimum of Kos lettuce in a burger.
So I was delighted that a couple of places sold long rolls with your choice of fillings, These were
called “Subway”, for some unfathomed reason.
 I mostly ate these while on tour. And the bread was not just your everyday “commonal”
garden variety white! They had wholemeal, high fibre, oat and barley and even flatbread which
they rolled your fillings into, like a doner kebab.
And I was impressed that this franchising company moved into Australia in 1988, with an
outlet in Perth, and quickly spread throughout the country.
Although there are a variety of options which do not productively contribute to
nourishment, they do make it possible to have lunch in the park without getting all sorts of fat
and sauce down your shirtfront.
By the way, Subway are in no way connected with this book, either through any
sponsorship deal, investment or any other financial arrangement. It is a personal endorsement
which takes into account ny tastes and preferences only.
If you saw Porky with a plate of ribs or Barmy wallowing in Big Macs, you would have no
doubt about this.
Las Vegas (still pronounced Loss Vegas by 99% or Americans, probably due to their
inefficient behaviour at the roulette tables) was glitzier and more extravagant that ever. We saw
Tom Jones there. His mate Elvis had died less than a year before, and he wore a black tuxedo
and tie to mark his respect.
But he did put on a bloody good show and invited us backstage when he recognised us
from the Palladium days. Such a nice man. He offered us beers and had a glass of wine. I asked
him if he ever drank beer, too.
“It’s not unusual!” he replied and I never caught on that he thought he was expected to say
that in response to questions. It was hours later that the penny dropped.
If you are very young, say fifty five years or less, “It’s Not Unusual” was his first big hit
back in the early sixties.
Tom had a hit with one of Curly Putman’s best compositions. So did a lot of other country
and folk singers. “Green Green Grass of Home” is probably his best known and most recorded.
In Australia, we think only Tom Jones sang it, but it has been covered by at least thirty well
known performers on record, a lot more by minor singers and hundred of times on television
shows.
Curly also wrote one of the songs on Lynn Verity’s EP, “Four Helpings of Lynn Verity”.
“Dumb Blonde” was suggested to her by Dolly Parton after a show in Los Angeles
(pronounced “Loss" Angeles.). The lady had just made a big hit with it herself and said it would
suit Lynn’s voice to a tee. Lynn used to don a wig and come on stage, singing it first up, before
removing the hairpiece to reveal her natural auburn locks.
 By the way, I had always thought “Funny Familar Forgotten Feelings” was a Putman
composition. We included it on this tour, although we never announced the composer’s name.
While I was chatting to Tom, he applauded our choice of song, but told us that it was the work of
Mickey Newberry, but that he also used to think Curly had written it.
It goes to show how influential this writer was, that other composers would inadvertently
copy his style.
 I have touched on what our fans were like in the sixties, but in the seventies, they had
completely changed.
We were not too popular with the boys, ten or fifteen years before, as they saw us as
competition. Especially in Australia. The girls knew we were accessible and had a lot more to
offer than the boys they went to school with. You know: glamour, extravagant presents,
excitement and damned good sex, borne out of experience with dozens of previous groupies.
All they had to offer was love, warmth, company, someone to escort them to our concerts
and one day marry, with lifetime security.
No match!
But now, our fan base consisted of men and women. The songs we sung were the same
songs the men played on their cassette tapes and 8-tracks in their Holden Utilities, the stuff on
the jukebox where they spent the three hours after work. The three hours they could claim they
were working overtime, but were really drinking themselves mellow enough to go home to a
good nagging, a cold supper and a turned back in bed.
And the songs the women listened to while they washed dishes, cleaned floors, did laundry
and dreamed that their man might arrive home early without lying about overtime, kiss them as
they came in the door and would maybe ring a babysitter, then take them out to dinner at the
local pub, who would be playing our kind of music on the jukebox.
And the people at our concerts reflected the lives of the real men and women, who worked,
played football, saved their money to buy a house, and made love passionately with the window
open.
When we arrived home in Australia, Mum asked me if I had thought about getting married.
I pretended I didn’t hear her, because I thought she was going to give me a lecture on loose
morals, the danger to my body and soul of promiscuity, the damage I was doing to women’s
affections. And it advised against it, nay, “forbade” it in the Scriptures!
But I had to admit that sometimes I got a bit lonely on my own. Porky had started seeing
an older woman in her forties, Wally was still having on-off relationships with musicians, while
Barmy seemed perfectly happy surreptitiously screwing other men’s wives without having to go
to the bother of getting one for himself.
Bedlam was in a sort of permanent relationship with a pretty woman who reminded him of
Janice, but made it obvious that he wasn’t in love with her. Nor she with him. He was either very
convenient to her or she kept him as a pet. She was a very publicity-conscious lawyer in
Melbourne, far more educated and intelligent than him and we honestly asked ourselves what
they saw in each other, other than that he kept her amused, bedded and with a celebrity upon
whose arm she could pose. And with him, there was the reminder of Janice.
 I was in a situation mirroring both Barmy and Wally. I found female singers and musicians
very easy to be with. For a while, I was in a very comfortable relationship with a cellist from the
Melbourne Symphony. For a while, a singer with one of Melbourne’s top jazz bands used to
hang around me quite a lot. But I also found our fans very appealing. Some of the married ones
were very much so. Quite a few had husbands who worked well out of town, truck drivers,
miners, oil drillers and sailors.
All that mining going on in northern Queensland and Western Australia was not only a
boom to the country’s gross domestic profit, but to my sex life. And that sometimes got a bit,
what you might call, gross!
I was very keen on my railway modelling and that occupied some of my non-working
hours. The band was so familiar with each other’s styles that we didn’t need a lot of practise or
rehearsals. Song writing was also there, and I was becoming more and more interested in sound
recording.
I would stay on at the studio for days after a record was made, learning, doing odd jobs, a
little mixing and gradually some serious production work.
This help was gratefully received by the technicians, as it meant I was readily available to
put down a few extra riffs, rejig a dodgy bit of voice work or add extras to the sound. Our
records got better and better because of this.
Of course, Bedlam would never admit that was me imitating him on “Brothers Unite,
We’re Going on Strike”, but in fact, I redid about fifty percent of the lead vocals and nearly all
the choruses and harmonies, overdubbing and tracking away until we had it sounding like a huge
crowd of angry trade unionists.
I remember Bob Hawke chuckling at that one and sent around a request that next time he
was in town, please could we meet him for a couple of chilled lagers.
And we did too! He thought we were card carrying members of the BLF or something, and
was most surprised to find none of us had done any jobs other than in music.
Oh, Barmy told him all about the part time job he had, cutting french fries and mixing
batter for the fish and chip shop on Bell Street while he was still at school, until Mr Hawke said
to him “Don’t you ever shut up, Mate?”
He proudly tells that story now and never fails to win admiration from his audience. Of
course, the story grew from two sentences to about six paragraphs, and as he approaches the
culmination of the tale, we all shout out “Don’t you ever shut up, Mate?”
He knows it is coming, and always grins triumphantly, believing he inspired the Prime
Minister to a great declaration of appreciation. Because Hawkey was in such a good mood that
afternoon, he can imagine no other reason for this response.
 But I did enjoy this sound recording and eventually, one of the young up-and-coming
singers asked me if I could work on an album he was making.
Charlie Ingram (no relation to the American fishing show presenter) wanted to be a singing
sensation. He was pretty good, better than half the pub acts around Sydney and Newcastle, but
his band was only as good as or worse than the other half.
Still he loved performing, as I do, and had abundant enthusiasm for it. His band was his
biggest downfall and I told him immediately on hearing them, they would have to go.
The next day, four very irate youngsters came around to my door and straightaway set
about rearranging the otherwise perfect symmetry of my face. As I went down, one of them put a
size twelve steel capped boot into my ribs while another kneed me in the shoulder. My neighbour
heard me cry out and came to his door, but by then they had crammed into a Datsun 120Y and
fled. He had their rego number and rang the police.
Charlie came around to see me and told me the problem of the band was over. They had
rung him up and told him they were kicking him out.
Then he asked what had happened to my boat race, and put two and two together. By the
time they had got their warning from the magistrate, the cops had their eye on them, and besides,
we had Sweetie and his crew to look after us.
Without his band, Charlie was a lot more controlled. He had to listen to where they were at
in the song, rather than count the beat and know where they should be. I co-opted Barmy as
drummer and a chap who played saxophone under the Bridge in the Rocks. He was unemployed
and grateful for some regular work.
We put together ten songs and I asked who was paying for all this studio work, the musos,
my time and the production.
“Oh, Dad will!” he said breezily, so I thought I had better check out this hitherto unknown
benefactor and in the process, made a friend for life.
Mr Charles Mordecai Ingram was one of the wealthiest men in New South Wales. His
holdings up near Dubbo were not measured in the new hectares or the old acres. That would
sound to ostentatious. They were measured in square miles: hundreds of square miles.
Also, his export company handled thirty percent of meat and grain out of New South
Wales and kept about a quarter of the dairies supplied. He was putting in two thousand hectares
of grapes and orchard fruits in the Hunter Valley on some land he had recently purchased thirty
six miles out of Newcastle.
He had other minor interests, such as three major shopping centres within thirty kilometres
of Sydney and another being built in the inner suburbs of Perth. And that was mainly to house
his retail outlets!
 Other than that sax player, we brought together a piano player whose style was a bit like
Jerry Lee Lewis, a guitarist and a bass player who we stole from other struggling bands. We got
a violinist who was at college with Arthur, the saxophonist, and two girls who doubled on vocal
harmonies and could play a few instruments as well. They were also buskers in Sydney.
Barmy and I did nearly all the drumming on the recordings, but one of the girls put her
hand up to do it in stage shows and soon became quite proficient. Barmy reckons his tutelage
assisted her no end.
Other than the studio work, we refused any engagements for a couple of months. I was a
slow healer, according to Porky, a wuss, according to Bedlam and “It bloody well serves you
right!” from Barmy, who thought I had been bashed up by a jealous husband!
We had resort to the Bob Hawke retort.
Harley took over their management and I became their musical director, when we were not
working ourselves.
Charlie’s record sold well. It entered the country charts at number forty eight and got to
sixteen. He got a silver record for it after about a month, not too bad for a Country Rock artists,
even in New South Wales.
He did a short tour with us later in the year, travelling to a lot of outback places in New
South Wales, Queensland and Northern Territory. We capped it off with another triumphant
Tamworth in January.
They wanted to call themselves “The Charlie Ingram Selection” and I didn’t really care.
They were commercial, good musicians and all of them were very good looking. The two girls
were stunning, one a bit like Linda Ronstadt and the other not quite so outgoing, but very pretty.
But Charlie’s brother, Daniel, who had been acting as their head roadie and manager while
Harley was otherwise engaged, suggested that they call themselves “She’ll Be Right!” and the
name really took off.
Apart from being super Australian, it really suited them. They wore reasonably smart
casual clothes on stage, looked as though they were comfortable with what they were doing and
generally gave that laconic air of the bushie who hasn’t got much time for social intercourse.
Charlie Senior proved to be a grateful benefactor. He bought a recording studio for us to
use, letting us keep nearly all the proceeds except stuff like rates and maintenance costs. We
agreed that it be available for his son’s band whenever they needed it, and of course, for The
Pimples. Otherwise we could rent it out or use it for other artists.
This meant, parenthetically, that we no longer needed to go to Melbourne every time we
wanted to make our records.
 Daniel had some mates in the advertising and television industries, and we filled our books
to the extent that we had to build two more sound studios!
We were really getting rich. Harley more than any of us.
Bedlam bought his lady into a huge law firm, Porky bought sports shops and I mucked
about with model and hobby stores. But in Australia, these pastimes are not very popular and
they were a bit of a drain. Still, I persisted because I felt sorry for all those other modellers, like
me, who couldn’t buy what they needed in Australia and had to buy overseas from catalogues.
Without the World Wide Web, that was a slow and potentially hazardous process. Our balance
sheet showed a nett profit of a hundred and seven thousand, four hundred and thirty one dollars
for the year ending 1979-80!
Wally, strangely, started a car dealership, with a cousin and his sister, They imported from
Japan and Europe and occupied a very prominent corner on Dandenong Road. That did very
well, too, and we were among his valued customers.
But the studio was a gold mine, mainly from the commercial clients. A cola giant, two fast
food outlets and three of Sydney’s huge department stores instructed their advertising agencies to
use us, not only to record their jingles, but to write them as well.
We soon got to know the best agencies around town and Porky and Wally sent them all
their business.
I started dating one of the girls from She’ll Be Right. The “very pretty” one and we moved
into a pied de terre overlooking the Harbour at Point Piper. Of course, when I was in Melbourne,
I stayed at my place in Kew.
But Robyn didn’t really like Melbourne very much, the same as a lot of Sydney-raised
people. They find it drab and boring, the weather awful and far too cultured.
So when I met Darlene at the Art Deco society in Melbourne and we hit it off like a house
on fire, I was faced with the choice of dumping Robyn or two-timing her. I chose the latter and
lived quite successfully for around three months, before Darlene wanted to see the few remaining
nineteen thirties building in Sydney.
First time we were only there for a weekend and stayed at the Sebel, but Robyn knew
something was amiss and quite correctly gave me my marching orders. It was three years before
I found out she used to invite Daniel Ingram over to stay at Point Piper while I was out of town!
Darlene only needed to know that I was finished with Robyn, and accepted that while there
was some overlap, she was no longer part of my life.
But Robyn did come out of it badly. She left the group, taking Daniel with her, and moved
to Adelaide. Daniel was wealthy in his own right, even apart from his family’s money, and it
caused a big rift between me and She’ll Be Right.
 Fortunately, neither of the Charlies saw it that way, although Arthur and Freddy (the other
girl, the drummer) cracked the shits at me.
“He was always a sex-mad little prick, since he was about thirteen,” Charlie Senior said
one night over a hot mug of Milo. “He got the padre’s daughter up the duff and was mucking
about with two other young fillies at the same time. I’m surprised you were attracted to Robyn,
Graham!”
Of course, Charlie didn’t know I was a sex-mad little prick, since I was about thirteen, too!
I told him and he laughed.
“I wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, but I was no angel when I was a young ‘un, either.
Charlie watches were he sews his oats, so he’ll be okay.”
“He’s a nice boy, Charlie! And he’s doing okay, too,” I said. “Where does he get his talent
from? You?”
“No. One son taking after me is enough. He’s just like his mother. Classically trained
singer and pianist.”
“Where is his mother, Charlie? I’ve not met her.”
“She’s up in Byron Bay. A sort of sanatorium. Early onset dementia, the doctors say. I get
up up there as often as I can. About every fortnight. She doesn’t know who I am.”
I flew up with him a month or so later and he introduced me. She thought I was from the
Salvation Army and wanted to sing hymns with me. We did, and she still had a rich, vibrant
voice but couldn’t remember all the words.
On the return flight, I noticed Charlie was crying. I never said anything, but it broke my
heart to see a man who could have had anything, grieving for the one thing which he couldn’t
have and wanted most of all.

My reputation, as a record producer, not as a seducer and betrayer of young ladies, I am

pleased to say, grew and before long a lot of musicians were asking my advice.
Not all wanted to pay for it and expected me to work for nothing, because, as they said,
when they were big hits, I would benefit then.
I was never tempted to work for nothing in the music industry. If I liked someone, I would
give them a fair go, if I thought they had real, commercial talent, I would assess them, get
Harley’s opinion and record their work.
Otherwise it was hard cash, thank you.
 I copped a hell of a load of abuse. Talentless morons wanted the Lizard touch to make
them a big star, but never had any money to back them up. And talentless morons were nearly all
bogans, surly, ready to fight you, abusive and uncouth.
They seemed to think that production would make them sound acceptable, that all they had
to do was grunt and mumble into a microphone and we could magically make them sound like
Charlie Ingram or Jade Hurley.
A friend of mine who shares the same first name and nickname as me, worked all his life
in graphic design and printing.
People would come into his shop and want a handbill or leaflet printed.
“I’m not paying for artwork. Artwork is a rip-off!”
“Well,” my friend would say, “You will need design and typestting.”
“How much will that cost? An arm and a leg, I’ll bet!”
When they were told they would often leave and they’d never be seen again, but some,
who would troll around and find out that everyone charged, would return, often with their hand
drawn or “desk-top-published” work on a disk.
When it was printed, they would complain about what it looked like.
“You supplied it!” my friend would say.
“But doesn’t it clean up and sharpen in the printing process?”
My graphic designer friend had as his motto “We can supply fresh, good quality oats.
However, they will be expensive. If you want cheap oats, we have some that have already passed
though the horse once.”
Sound recording is like that, too. Garbage in, garbage out. Quality in, quality out.
We can make good stuff better, but bad stuff always sounds worse.
 Nearly everyone in the industry has heard of Tiny Duncan.
His real name was Tony, but, like Barmy, a letter in his name was changed to give him a
nickname.
Tiny was six feet eight inches, two hundred and forty pounds and looked more like a large
brick shed than a person.
He believed he could be the next Kenny Gee and practised really hard on his instrument.
He employed one of the best teachers in Adelaide and diligently did everything he said. But the
sounds which came out of his sax were dreadful.
His teacher was one of the lads we toured with back in the early days and he asked me if I
could try to do something with Tiny, as he was desperate to make a record.
Tiny was quite wealthy and a really likeable fellow. He never queried the cost and was
anxious to come up to Sydney and do some tests.
He caught the Indian Pacific and I picked him up from the railway station and on the way
in, I asked him what sort of material he wanted to record.
“Well, a friend has written some tunes for me. One in particular could be a great hit.”
“I’m looking forward to hearing it!” I said, trying not to let him see my fingers crossed on
the steering wheel.
“I’ll get out my horn,” he said and tried to turn his massive frame around in my tiny Audi.
Of course, there was nowhere enough room and he straightened up, resignedly.
“I’ll whistle it, then!” he said and let forth with the purest, cleanest trill I have ever heard.
Roger Whittaker, Ronnie Ronalde and Fred Lowery, eat your hearts out! When I
introduced him to Keith Potger later, he said, glumly. “We could have done with him on Georgy
Girl!”
Of course, you didn’t recognise the name. Now he goes by the name Tony Haliastur and
has made three albums and a number of singles.
Look up “Haliastur.” Yes, I didn’t know that, either.
When I recorded him, he seemed dismayed that I didn’t want his saxophone, but when he
heard the acetate, he never wanted to be Kenny Gee again.
Coupled with a clear tenor voice, he has made a name for himself doing folk music, but
with most of the song taken up with his lips pursed.
Another great success story! Not as spectacular as She’ll Be Right, but Tiny makes a pretty
good living and has had his own TV series!
And to top it all off, Ray Martin described him as a Little Aussie Battler and a good bloke!
 He stood six feet eight inches tall and weighs 240 pounds. The “Tiny” nickname must have
thrown him off. He came from an old money Christchurch family and so is equally definitely
not Australian or a battler. He was a damned good bloke, though.
But it did give Ray Martin a chance to use his catch-phrase.
 Because of those charity concerts we did after Granville, Harley was inundated with
requests for us to do all sorts of “benefits” free of charge.
When a top Leagues player broke his ankle, his club asked if we would perform. No
payment, they said. It was a “charity” event.
Every CWA, church fund-raiser, footy club, little athletics and retirement village hounded
us. They all got indignant when Harley said no, we were not available.
“It’s a really good cause!” they told him. “And the exposure will do you good!”
The retirement village requests came about because of my singing “Onward Christian
Soldiers” with Mrs Ingram in the hospice in Byron Bay.
They put out a little newsletter every month and mentioned that Mr Graham “Lizard”
Boyle, from the Salvation Army (sic) sang with Elaine Ingram in the common room on Tuesday
afternoon. Staff and other patients enjoyed the interlude and Mr Boyle stayed for a cup of tea and
a lamington afterwards.
Somehow, the word was out! The geriatric grapevine is an awesome thing, and we got
requests for me to appear, either solo or with the group.
A tiny old people’s home in Strzelecki, South Australia, with twenty residents wanted us to
travel there at our own expense and perform at their Gala Fair. It would not go unrewarded as
townsfolk had offered to billet us and we would be the special guests at their Annual Dinner and
Dance. Tickets were $15 a couple, but the price would be waived to benefactors.
A Bairnsdale Junior Footy Club, who very, very recently changed their name to “The
Bombers” wondered if we could perform at half time in their under 14s grand final match against
Sale “Saints”. As we were known to be Essendon supporters, this gave us an exciting
opportunity to raise the profile of the club and to promote the benefits of participation in junior
sport.
A bus would pick us up at Bairnsdale Station at one thirty and transport us to the park in
plenty of time to watch the whole game. We were to tell the driver who we were and he would
change his route slightly to get us to the venue.
If we cared to book into the Lakes Entrance Boatel, we were invited to buy tickets to their
Dinner Dance where a number of valuable spot prizes and auctions would be held, including
their weekly meat raffle, worth twelve dollars.
The letter was typed in a mixture of ribbon typewriter and correction fluid and signed in
orange biro. There was a picture drawn on the back of the paper of a stick woman with large
round breasts which someone had fairly successfully erased using an India Rubber and some
more correction fluid. It purported to be from the club chairman who was also the town mayor.
 Of course, we declined on both counts, as we always did, by saying we wished their cause
every success, but we were otherwise engaged on that evening. Probably a job paying $2,000 at
an inner Sydney RSL club or at a News Years Eve Party at Festival Hall.
We did appear free on occasions. Every year we did, among others, the Children’s Hospital
Concert in Melbourne, the Cerebral Palsy Ho-Down in Parramatta Park and, of course, the
Telethon in Perth.
Combined with a regional tour comprising Mandurah, Bunbury, Albany, Esperance,
Kalgoorlie, Meekatharra, Broome, Port Hedland, Exmouth, Carnarvon and Geraldton, three
concerts in Perth and one at Fremantle, this was a lucrative arrangement for us. The television
company promoted our tour with free commercials and interviews in exchange for our
participation. Everybody wins, especially the sick kids at Princess Margaret Hospital.
The twenty four hour event always produced some hilarious moments and there was an
almost dreamlike quality, with children’s entertainment during the preceding day and on the
Sunday broadcast. Overnight, with the ankle-biters all tucked up, it sometimes got a little risque,
like the time The Sandgopers and us did a selection of our 1960s hits, wearing nothing but our
jockettes and socks.
We were taken to multiple locations for outside broadcast and chatted to the people, helped
Fat Cat build a money wall and were filmed splashing about in the freezing Indian Ocean at
Cottesloe.
And the subsequent tour was very relaxed, with large, appreciative audiences, and some
excellent Swan Valley wines, as well.
When I get old, I might retire to Western Australia. Margaret River, or Denmark, maybe.
But I am old now, and still in a glorified box with views of Hobson Bay from my front
balcony, and the Eureka Tower out of my dunny window!
 The demand to revert back to pub rock was always there. Harley said it was up to us, and
on occasions we did encroach into their territory. We accompanied Chisel on a series of late
nighters in Queensland and very nearly got seduced by the big money. Jimmy said we would
always be welcome on his stage, as did Billy and Christina, but we felt that we had a good, solid
bunch of fans, Australia wide, who provided us with a lot of money and who deserved our
loyalty.
Our rock and roll years were well behind us and yet we were still together. Our fans from
those days were, in many cases, still with us, having gone through the hippy era and transitional
music of the Eagles and Kristofferson to the stuff we played in the eighties.
We were twice voted the top country-rock quintet at Tamworth, and I am very proud of the
photos I have of a smiling Slim Dusty handing Bedlam the Silver Spurs on a Mahogany Boot. He
is wearing the same hat, but a different shirt in each photo, so I can identify which year was
which!

Much of our fan base was in Ireland. The people there had more of a sympathy with the
USA, who had always treated Ireland well, with tourists, visits by politicians, actors and singers.
As well as their generosity during the great potato famine of the mid eighteen hundreds. Not that
those things were deserving of their gratitude especially, but they knew it drove the English
crazy that American culture was more popular than their own.
Because in these times of improved living standards in Australia, many ex-Irish families
paid for visits for their old mums, dads and siblings to visit them, we got heard a lot on record
players, car radios and in our concerts. These folk took our records and videos back to Eire with
them and showed their neighbours, who demanded our records be released in their country, too.
They were two for the price of one: American music played by an Aussie Band. That really
infuriated the Poms.
So a big promoter in Dublin phoned Harley and asked him if we could go over there with
She’ll Be Right and a few others from Tamworth. Harley looked into his appointment book and
saw we had a few weeks without bookings in the middle of winter, 1983.
Perfect! said the Dublin impresario (I think he was an impresario. Although not London-
based, a few English newspapers called him that, although in Dublin he was known as Flash
Paddy.)
“Perfect,” repeated Patrick McSwain. “You know, Harley, it’ll be midsummer in the
Emerald Isle at that time of the year.” And he added “Begorrah!” to remind our manager who he
was conversing with.
We had loved Ireland and those gentle, music loving Catholic people from our previous
visit, so were really looking forward to the tour. A call came soon afterwards from Edinburgh
asking us to do a comedy festival. Harley wasn’t sure about that, because, although he said we
were a bunch of clowns, people probably wouldn’t pay to watch us.
We ended off going to Edinburgh, but as spectators. Although at an open mic one evening,
Porky, Barmy and I did our Three Stooges routine, proving Harley was right, after all.
So we flew into London and had a couple of days to spare, so I went down to Weymouth
and dropped in to see Aunty Jen. There was a man there who I was pretty sure wasn’t her
husband and she never introduced us. In fact, he stayed in the bedroom until about ten minutes
before I left, and was clearly in a bad mood about something.
But Jen had made some of her hazelnut slice, so the journey wasn’t in vain. And I didn’t
even get felt up!
I saw Gary briefly and he was delighted to see me, as usual. He had visited us on numerous
occasions in Australia and was now a scriptwriter for the BBC comedy “If Only I Hadn’t Done
That.”
They had made an Australian version and it had flopped badly, and Gary had come over
there to see if anything was salvageable. The BBC are not happy when those damned colonials
refuse to laugh at their comedies, even if it was “in association with the Australian Broadcasting
Commission.”
Lynn and her husband were now back in London at one of the Universities there and we
convinced her to meet us in Dublin and do a few numbers on stage. We had a bit of a practise in
a function room which wasn’t being used at the Savoy, where we were staying, and Lynn’s voice
had barely changed. If anything, it had settled down and was sweeter than ever.
Charlie very cheekily asked her if she would do a duet with him and they settled on Molly
Malone. You know, the old Irish folksong about the fictional fishmonger who plied her trade on
the streets of Dublin, and who died of a fever and no-one could save her?
There is no evidence that the song is based on a real woman. However, because Lynn and
Charlie’s rendition was so popular at those Dublin concerts, our record company’s Irish affiliate
released a hastily produced version and it went to the top of the charts within a couple of weeks.
The Dublin Millennium Commission in 1988 used the popularity this recording achieved,
and made a case for a Mary Malone who died in 1699, proclaiming 13 June to be "Molly Malone
Day".
So if you wondered what brought all that about, and why there was a sudden surge of
fiddle players, busking on the streets of Dublin banging out the song we all learned in school,
you can thank this talented pair of Aussies.
And why, on a later visit, I have a photo of a bronze statue of a buxom lass, bearing a
striking likeness to Lynn Verity, holding the handles of a flat barrow on Grafton Street.
 Nobody bothered much that we were Protestants on this tour. We didn’t represent England
now. We were Australian bands singing Australian songs in an American way. That was good
enough for them. On our last visit, we were ex-patriate Englishmen singing English Merseybeat
songs in an English way, wearing English clothes, and supported by English acts.
We were now legitimate!
We sold out the Dublin City Hall in what the Bulletin described as the “best use for the hall
since Sean Connelly used it as a garrison in the Easter Rising in 1916”.
Barmy read this out to us at breakfast and expressed surprise that the James Bond actor
was so old! I still don’t know whether he is serious some of the time, he does the “dumb
drummer” act so well!
The weather stayed fine and sunny for our entire tour and started drizzling the second day
of our R&R in Cork. Nevertheless, Charlie, Freddie (the drummer from She’ll Be Right) and I
rented some Connemara’s from a stable just outside Cork and went for a gallop across the lush
green meadows. We stopped to watch a bit of an Irish Football match and had a couple of
refreshing pints of Mackesons from a big table set up alongside the touchline.
I had a potato pastie as well, but I couldn’t finish it. They must have used a dustbin lid to
cut the pastry, I think, and there was about two kilos of potato, parsnip, peas, carrot and onion in
it, sweetened with Irish brown ketchup. If the English sauce, HP stands for Houses of
Parliament, then this must be the stuff which Guy Fawkes intended to blow it up with!
I had shocking indigestion for about three days afterwards. No wonder he was caught in
the dunnies. He may have eaten some!
Back in London, we caught up with some of our old friends from the sixties. They weren’t
interested in us, now, because we they didn’t think we could do anything for them any more.
They didn’t know about the huge money that could be made Down Under from ex-patriate Poms,
in the RSL, soccer and rugby clubs, and in pubs all over the country. They still had that attitude
that if it wasn’t in England, it didn’t deserve to exist.
A few old mates did welcome us, though, and signed lucrative tour contracts with Harley.
And Lynn announced that her lovely little five-piece family was emigrating back to
Melbourne. We were all thrilled, not the least Harley who arranged a house in Toorak, near his,
for them.
 When the recession hit in 1986, Harley had all our cash pretty securely tied up in gilt edged
stuff. He could see it coming and for a couple of years had been buying Australian Government
Bonds, gold backed securities and real estate.
When we arrived back in Australia from Ireland, a couple of years later, Harley was
looking through his papers and found $150,000 missing from one of his accounts.
He couldn’t reconcile that with his own figures and called the bank.
“You withdrew one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on August 8, Mr Brownlow,” said
the manager.
Harley checked his books again.
“No, I didn’t. On August 8, I was in Tipperary, in Ireland. I never authorised any funds to
be withdrawn. If you recall, I transferred fifty thousand to the bank’s Dublin branch and then had
the remainder, seven thousand, returned on September 28, with the proceeds of our business
there.”
“I have definite documentation of your withdrawal, Mr Brownlow. You must have been
mistaken.”
“Come on, Sid. You know me better than that. Do you have my signature on this?”
“Yes, Harley!” he returned to a more familiar tone, as Australian businessmen prefer. “It is
all correctly processed and documented.”
“How about my password?” Harley asked.
“Password?”
“Yes, password. We have password protection on all amounts over $100,000. Only you
and I know that password.”
“Oh, that! Well, we used our discretion on that and decided that, as it was obviously you,
in person, we would not invoke the password.”
“Why the hell not? Who decided? You?”
“I was in Fiji on holiday at the time. My assistant manager phoned head office and they
authorised it.”
“Ah! Now we are getting somewhere. I want you to follow this up, Sid. This is a very
serious matter.”
So two days later, Sid phoned Harley.
“Head office says there is nothing more to be investigated. The transaction was lawful, the
bank paid out the money, and takes no further responsibility.”
“We’ll see about that!” stormed Harley.
 For a year or so, Harley had retained the services of Bedlam’s girlfriend, Delores Monger,
who was a partner in a Little Collins Street law firm. He trusted her and she had already proved
her worth winning some minor contract disputes. Now he had a big job for her, which ended off
making her one of the best known criminal lawyers in the country.
I won’t bore you with all the details, although I find her methods of detection fascinating
and her court room arguments very compelling reading. Although she didn’t attempt to use her
femininity in any way to influence the judge or the jury, listening to her attacking those corrupt
banks officials made me realise that what Bedlam had here was more than your average brief.
She was super-intelligent, with a rapier like probe to her questioning and lightning responses to
the defending team’s smart-arsed attempts to discredit her. A capable, very attractive woman
indeed.
I sat near the bank’s defence team in Laurent’s bakery one day, and couldn’t repeat the
names they called her. Well, I did repeat them to Harley, who looked pleased.
“We’ve got the bastards!” he uttered, in a very unbecoming manner.
The jury found that the bank manager and his assistant evolved a plot to gradually milk
small amounts from our accounts over a period of time. Twenty grand from my account, ten
from Barmy’s, another fifteen from Porky’s and so on. That was easy because we never thought
much about money and never looked at our personal savings accounts.
Then they got greedy and started pilfering from Harley’s account. Much smaller amounts
than from us, hiding the money as cheque transactions, transferrals, etc.
But then, with success, they got bolder and bigger. When Sid wanted to extend his
Brighton house, he arranged for seventy five thousand to be transferred into his account in
another branch. The assistant thought “why should Sid get this and not me?” so set up the
paperwork for the withdrawal of the full hundred and fifty smackeroos in one hit. He forgot all
about the password agreement, as it had never been invoked as Harley was not given to
withdrawing sums that size from his savings.
While the bank manager stayed under the limit, the assistant didn’t, and never consulted
the manager, who was on holiday in Fiji. Had he done so, Sid may have recalled the added
protection and warned him off.
The bank was ordered to repay, with damages and costs which amounted to two hundred
and seventy five thousand. They had been into the band for a further forty five thousand!
They retrieved some of the initial money from the staff involved, who were then charged
with embezzlement and gaoled.
It was the bank assistant’s boyfriend and his gang in Pentridge who raped Sweetie about
five years later, giving him that terrible auto immune disease which killed him.
 And after his death, Sweetie won his appeal and was exonerated completely. His family
and Harley were given an apology by the attorney general.
The reason Sweetie was gaol could only happen in Australia in the eighties.
Sweetie was waiting in a van for his uncle to bring the Brownlow payroll out of the bank,
when the vehicle was hijacked by some hood who had raided the bank opposite on King Street.
The police pressed charges and despite all evidence, the jury found he had been hired to
drive the “getaway vehicle.”
The bank attested that an employee of Brownlow Enterprises had been on their premises,
Sweetie was lawfully in charge of the van, the bank robbers themselves swore under oath that
they had never met him before and the arresting officers admitted they had almost certainly made
an error.
Still, the corrupt police prosecutor took a dislike to Sweetie and was insistent that a person
of dubious moral standard, which all homosexual men are, was not to be believed and the jury
was heavily influenced by her. This was made up of twelve simple-minded peers who were
unable to find a reason to get out of serving on it, and found him guilty.
The appeal was set for six months, in which time Sweetie was already on his deathbed in
the secure wing of St Vincents.
Harley lost all interest in everything after that. The only time we saw him smile was when
Lynn and her children visited him.
And Sweetie’s funeral was the last official mass conducted by our oldest friend, Father
Boyle, before he, too, passed away. Porky and I wrote a special tribute to him and defied the
Archbishop of Melbourne by singing it at his funeral.
 Tiny still thought I was the cleverest bloke in Australia since they replaced the dollar and
two dollar notes for coins.
He was approached by a television production company to be a lifeguard in one of their
soap operas, and the thought of appearing on TV in this capacity really appealed to him.
A huge man, heavily muscled, but a gentle giant, wearing a pair of bright red Speedos was
bound to attract attention, and they made his boofy face up so that, while intelligence was
impossible, a kind if homely good common sense was portrayed.
But one of Tiny’s downfalls was his shyness. He couldn’t go on set unless he was
surrounded by familiar faces, so for the first three episodes, Porky, Barmy and I accompanied
him and got extras parts. We give him stick about his size down on the beach, and continued to
razz him at the pub later in the first episode.
He was to grab me by the front of my specially reinforced shirt, and hang me on the hat
rack, which for some reason, was a feature of this particular pub.
Anyway, they had never had a fully grown man hung on it before and the little wooden
hook just snapped and I dropped the six inches to the ground, quite safely and other than a little
surprised, completely unaffected.
Tiny was mortified! He had damaged his best mate, his benefactor and the bloke to whom
he owed his entire existence. The look of horror on his face was used on promotional films for
about the next two years.
Especially when I stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the bright red cheek.
He bought me a bottle of his favourite single malt Scotch and never left me alone after that.
But his reputation was made. He appeared in the rest of the series and turned up in the most
unlikely TV and movie commercials, including, inexplicably, as the husband of a women
demonstrating a new type of hygiene product.

One afternoon, as we left the television studio to have lunch, my new mobile phone rang. It
never rang much and Darlene was surprised I always carried it around. I told her it was so I could
always stay in touch should an emergency happen. She reckoned I thought it made me look
important although once I replaced the original Motorola brick, I had tucked it out of sight in a
pocket or into my diddy bag.
I was a bit surprised and when I answered it, it was my Mum, in tears. She had always
been very fond of Harley, and said she knew I would not get into any trouble when he was
around.
 She and Lynn had not heard from him for a couple of days and walked around to his house
on Bruce Street. He never answered but as his car was in the garage, they let themselves in to
check up on him.
They had been very concerned about him, especially when he started drinking heavily after
Sweetie’s death, and thought they had better check up on him.
He was face down in the bath. The police pathologist said he had been dead for two days, a
massive amount of barbiturates were in his system and he would have passed out within minutes
of his injecting them.
So soon after Sweetie’s and Father Boyle's deaths, we all went into a kind of stupor.
Charlie’s Mum had passed away five years earlier and he was taking that pretty badly, as well.
In addition, they had just determined that the police prosecutor in Sweetie’s getaway
vehicle case was the girlfriend of one of the original Charlie Ingram Selection. Charlie had that
to contend with, too. Although no direct connection could be proved, the police sergeant said that
a link was almost certain to exist.
Once Sweetie’s identity was realised, everyone at Russell Street immediately dropped all
charges, except this skinny, rat-like woman. Nobody could understand why she was so adamant
and put it down to homophobia. Now they understood and the sergeant and several officers came
to Harley’s funeral and I could tell they were hurting, too.
They came back to the little wake we had for him, and we made excellent contacts on the
force.
But we were all in our fifties, now, including Lynn. We took it very badly and I am sure it
exacerbated the cancer which had been diagnosed less than a year earlier.
It was detected early and the doctors said she had an excellent chance of surviving a further
twenty years, if she had regular checkups, kept fit and active and ate the right sort of food.
As she already did these, she had seemed to have it well under control.
But on the last night of the millennium, she refused my offer of a lift down to Birrarung
Mar, where the party was being held. She said she had a migraine and instead would stay at
home and watch it on TV. When I called in on her the following day to see whether she was
feeling better, she burst into tears.
“I don’t know how Wilton and the kids will cope, when I am gone,” she told me. “I know
you will make sure they are all looked after, but I am so scared!”
Although she didn’t die for years after that, I know she always thought about it a lot,
especially since Harley had gone, and could never really come to terms with it.
“What happens when you die, Lizard?” she asked.
 “Well, Mum would say you go to heaven and live with the Lord,” I offered.
“If I wanted to know what your mum thought, I would have asked her!” she shot back.
“What do you think. And don’t bullshit me, I will know if you are lying.”
And she had got upset because Bedlam had said “Fuck” on stage at the Boronia Pub!
“How should I know?” I pleaded. “If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be a washed up
old country and western guitarist. I would be an evangelist!”
“Don’t give me that, Lizard. You are the most deep-thinking guy I know. Even deeper than
Wilton.”
“Well, don’t come back and haunt me if I’m wrong, but I think that when you die, you just
die. All of you shuts down. Mind, body, spirit, the whole kit and kaboodle. Even when the
kaboodle is as tasty as yours!”
She smacked me in a kind of flirty way, acknowledging my compliment, but I could see
she was reflecting on what I had said.
She brought the subject up many times after that, when we were alone and made me
promise, time and again, that I would look out for her husband and children.
When Harleys will was read, we found that her children were rich enough to take care of
me.
He set up trusts to release funds at every stage of their development and education and on
each significant birthday. By the time they were twenty-one, if the investments in their names
were not otherwise compromised, they would be listed in Forbes!
The rest of us were endowed very handsomely, even those in Ireland, England and New
Zealand.
They all came over to Melbourne to attend a big public ceremony at Byron Bay on a
gorgeous spring day. There were hundreds present and some unlikely eyes were damp most of
the time, in genuine love and respect.
A few other musicians attended, other that those in the Brownlow fold. And the most
common thing they said to me on that day was how he had conducted his business in such a
dinkum, honest manner.
“I tried to get us oot o’ our contracts to join you and Harley, but that bastard we had, he
made sure we couldnee,” said one well known guitarist and songwriter we had known since the
mid sixties. “When we got back fra’ England, we could barely raise oor cab fare from Sydney
airport, yet a few weeks la’er the prick bought a couple of restaurants in New York. Must ‘a cost
him millions of bucks he extorted fra’ us!”
 Hoteliers, mining giants, financiers, actors and television personalties all rubbed shoulders
on that day. I think it was Molly who said he tried his utmost to consider the interests of those
whose livelihoods depended on him making the best decisions.
But every word was genuine. There was no suckholing, no arselicking or sycophantia. He
was loved by everyone in the country except the original Charlie Ingram Selection, minus of
course, their lead singer, who idolised him.
 Lynn never told me until the day she went in for her mastectomy that she was ill again.
Somehow she masked it well, or I was not reading the signs for some reason.
Looking back, she was teary and reserved and never played hostess to those peaceful,
delicious dinner party she used to hold, when I used to turn up fifteen minutes early to find
everyone else already there, so eagerly did we all anticipate the fun, good humour and pleasure
of each other’s company.
While we were still earning big money, her husband, Wilton, was a highly respected
member of the faculty at the University of Melbourne, on the boards of a number of conservation
groups and the Victorian Department of Agriculture, who tried to contain Fisheries in this state.
He didn’t have the income, and even with the wise investments Lynn had made, and her
continuing royalties from Australia, Ireland and England, we knew they were not rolling in it.
But once a month, every month, we would all get together for our dinner party. But not any
more. Since Harley’s death, she didn’t seem to have the energy any more and I accepted that as
reason enough.
It never occurred to me that it was more than mild depression, but, in retrospect, I should
have realised. I was probably her best friend, now that Harley was gone, and should have looked
after her better.
But she never even mentioned it to my mother, with whom she had been close, even before
our England days.
Often a woman finds it easier to talk to another woman than her men friends, but Mum just
shook her head and sobbed when I broke the news. It was the first she had heard, and even Mike
said it was hard to get her to talk about it, once they made the decision that surgery was the only
option.
Fortunately, again, they detected the symptoms early because she was sensible enough to
go to her doctor every time she felt a change happening.
Although the Peppergreens had full medical and hospital insurance, the laws in Australia,
designed to stop doctors and other health professionals from blatant exploitation, prohibited full
coverage of medical bills. There was always a gap. Often a large gap, between the amount the
insurance company would pay and the bloated bill from the specialist or hospital.
I spoke to Wilt about this and insisted that he let the band pay this excess, to which he
surprisingly agreed.
Not, he was determined to make me realise, because they needed the charity. Not because
he wanted the absolute best for Lynn, which I told him was our reason for the offer.
He found it hard to formulate the reason into a sentence, and I also have difficulty with it.
He allowed it for our benefit!
 We felt involved. We loved Lynn as much as we did each other, or our siblings. He knew
how important it was for us to contribute, to participate, and the kindest thing he could think of
was to let us.
He also knew we did not have the same respect for money. In many ways we were
cowboys, and although we all had very lucrative side businesses to our primary income source,
we considered other issues more important.
Like love, care, our responsibility to each other and what Wilton, as a North American,
described as “doing God’s work right here on Earth.”
I asked him about that, and he simply answered that it was the reason he was an
environmentalist. We are all on this planet together, so to do something small for one person,
meant doing something huge for the benefit of us all.
The spirit of James Lovelock’s Gaia!
When I explained his response to the others, they fully agreed. They loved the idea, in fact.
Lynn took some convincing but only because she didn’t think it was our responsibility.
When Bedlam said that her being worried about our stage act convinced him that we were her
concern, and that effected our earning capacity, that we had to do a reciprocal act for her.
“Look, your nagging convinced us to drop the pub rock thingy,” he said. “So we went and
made squillions in Country instead. Definitely entirely your doing. We were all dead set on
becoming the next Divinyls or something. But we didn’t and now are all filthy rich because of
you! You’ve got to let us pay!”
But what finally convinced her was when Wally told her that Harley would have insisted
he pay and would have been mortified if we didn’t in his absence.
It wasn’t done, and I want to stress this, because they needed the money. It wasn’t done
because we were generous, or that we could afford it better than her. In fact, I very nearly left
this out, because it was a very private thing between friends who had spent the bulk of their adult
life together.
It was done because we wanted to. We were, thanks in great part to Harley, Sweetie and
their love, so close.
No other bands had this, that I know. Drugs, alcohol, suicide, selfishness, jealousy, silly
disagreements, lack of love and respect for each other and just plain orneriness had broken up
every other group that we knew and a lot we never knew. We were different. Much different.
 I believe that after Mary Travers died, the only other two “major-league” groups still with
all their original members at this point in the opening years of this millennium, were The Seekers
and Dave Dee, Dopey, Beaky, Mick and Titch. And even the Seekers were separated for years
and regrouped in the nineties.
We stuck together through it all, and still perform together on odd events, even though
most of us are into our seventies.
But that is rushing ahead with things.
Lynn accepted our offer eventually, after invoking the memory of Harley. She underwent
the surgery and it was tough on her. We all were amazed at her strength and fortitude, and the
love of Wilton during this time.
Weeks of chemo, even longer with the other treatments, then the emotional problems
where we knew that even our visits were a chore for her.
We always made sure that she had everything she needed or even wanted. But the one
thing she always said would mark her recovery was the day she got on stage and sang Molly
Malone with Charlie. Or as Australia called it, Cockles and Mussels.
And in January, 2004, she did just that. We flew up to Tamworth with her at the beginning
of the “week” and we all spent a quiet few days before I had to start performing with the band.
Her kids came too. The eldest was at University, but it was still semester break, and her
younger two were on holidays from school. Wilton was there, too as he had officially “retired”
the two years before, although we used to joke we couldn’t tell the difference.
Then, on Saturday night, between our set and She’ll Be Right, Lynn came on stage in a
pale mauve, floor length gown and diamond earings which Sweetie had given her as a wedding
present, all those years ago.
We remained on stage as Charlie and his band came on and kissed her, one by one. Then
we did the same and the crowd, who were fully briefed by Porky, went wild! When it subsided,
Charlie and Lynn stood beside each other, hand in hand, and iton microphones on stands, started
singing the first verse a‘Capella.
Then my mandolin came in for the “alive, alive oh” bit. Finally the rest of the united bands
joined us and there was not a sound from the audience.
But when we tried to finish up, the five thousand strong audience would not let us leave.
They kept singing the chorus for a total of eight minutes, a tribute to a great lady, the Queen of
Aussie Country and to her charming young co-singer.
My eyes were streaming and I looked over to Porky and he was bawling his eyes out.
Of course they re-released the single. In fact, we re-recorded it and every cent of the
proceeds less production costs went to breast cancer charities.
 If you were to ask me that night of the Tamworth concert, what I regarded as the climax of
my life, I would have said being on stage with them during that curtain call.
But as the weeks went by, I realised that the careful crafting of that record, the sensitivity
of mixing and blending the voices and instruments, and the way Porky and I did the cutting and
production work on the CD, all contributed to the happiest, most joyful event of my life.
 Everything since has been pretty good, except for that short time between when she was
told that a few cells had metastasized to her lungs and the day I placed a handful of shamrocks
onto her coffin before she was cremated.
I don’t want to dwell on that at the moment, because, although it a few years ago now, it
feels like a great big piece of me went, as well.
Bedlam has grandkids, Barmy has a few on both sides of the blanket, Wally and Porky
have a few scattered around the world, from both groupies and full relationships.
I had none. Delores never wanted children and my life was always so full, I never
considered it was any sort of disadvantage.
Besides, I have Lynn’s kids who always look so pleased to see me and who I adore.
One of the boys, who Lynn named after me, has decided to make music a full time career
and plays in Archie’s jazz group, plus a television orchestra. On top of this, he works in our
studio as a muso, contributing keyboards, brass bass and trumpet.
Another of her children followed in her father’s academic footsteps and is working for the
United Nations as a climate change scientist, while the youngest is still studying law.
Charlie, who has always been like a kid brother to me, married Freddie, his drummer and is
one of the busiest country singers this side of the black stump.
In 2015, we set up the Brownlow, Sweetnam and Peppergreen Trust, known as the BSP
Foundation. It is a hard one to manage, but it keeps Bedlam out of mischief for longs hours of
the day.
Its charter is to finance, seek charity and government funding and to encourage excellence
in the fields of tolerance.
In Australia, as in a lot of other Western Countries, despite legislation against it, there
remains a lot of prejudices and bigotry about a wide variety of issues. Such as anti-LGBTQIA,
religious discrimination, racial bias, political bias and even interstate prejudices, which although
most will not admit it, do exist, mainly based on jealousy, stupidity and economic ideals.
We find that as our work succeeds, more and more, we are looking into areas such as the
bigotry against environmentalists, vegans, and livestock export. This is an area which interests
me and I take on a lot of this workload.
Lynn was a vegetarian most of her life, going fully plant-only in her diet as she realised
that animal protein made her cancer grow faster. I try to follow her lead, as I have a sarcoma
which needs excising occasionally, and I figure it doesn’t make sense to have surgery when there
are alternatives available.
 And anyone with half a brain can see the cruelty and suffering involved in livestock
exporting. Anyone who claims otherwise is quite frankly, an insensitive, money grubbing liar!
There, I have said it, and not many people will dispute it!
The same goes for climate change. When challenged, governments and industrialists claim
they are doing all that is required of them and even more. This still isn’t even anywhere near
enough.
For decades we have turned this planet into a filthy cesspit, and I am not going to go back
to the mess our parents made!
We can’t simply accept that to start doing things properly now will be enough. We have to
work to correct the situation we are finding ourselves in.
And it is just bloody stupid to say that Australia doesn’t contribute to the problem in
anywhere near the scale of China, Japan, the USA and Europe.
We must lead by example and encourage each area to clean up its own patch. These other
countries have to encourage other people to act like Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific
Nations when it comes to the environment. They should see us as leaders, innovators and
teachers. These are the skill sets we have, and they will take not the blindest bit of notice if we
preach to them without practising it!
That is the intention of BSP, not to get ribbons and certificates and awards from
Universities, Governments and service organisations.
We fund groups who clean out our waterways and oceans, we marched, campaigned and
sent electoral representatives to parliament to vote for civil rights and same sex marriage.
And although we do not ask anyone to risk jail for exposing farming and livestock cruelty,
we are always paying fines, going bail and employing lawyers for those who do.
Bunch of long-haired, radical, over-age hippies? Maybe, but we won’t stand idly by and let
you call us that. We will challenge you if you say it, right through to the High Court, if we have
to.
So watch it!
 The Pimples are now old men, as you know. We still get asked to do Morning Breakfast
Shows, benefits, charity events and reminiscence concerts. Often we do them, and we still
demand a fee for doing so, unless one of us feels strongly for the cause or can see promotional
benefit or personal conviction.
We still don’t argue amongst ourselves, we always hear each other out and take notice of
each other’s viewpoints.
Harley taught us that, our parents did too. And old Father Boyle back in Preston. We
haven’t learned by our mistakes, we have learned by other people’s mistakes.
We don’t give general advice, unless it is specifically asked for. We always ask why our
advice is sought, will it be heeded and why do they think we are able to help them.
Many youngsters thought we had easy back in the sixties. We did.
But only because we listened when our music teachers were instructing us, our school
masters were giving lectures or our parents were speaking.
It wasn’t a sequence of lucky events, nobody giving us any undeserved breaks or family
using their influence. It was because we were upfront, honest and damned good musicians. We
never owed anyone a cent, any of us, ever. We never gave or received credit.
The only “lucky breaks” we got was when that DJ came and suggested he could help us
and we didn’t say “Piss off, you bloody poofter!” Also, when Charlie Ingram handed over the
recording studio to us, which was really an investment in his son’s future. Both of his son’s, in
fact, although one decided not to benefit.
“Divine intervention?” I suppose on occasion inexplicable things happened, fell in our
path, things which could be interpreted as a “Gift from God.” How do we know. They never
came with a card attached.
Father Boyle was a great teacher and benefactor in our early days, and we all acknowledge
his encouragement. The kindness and interest shown by many other people from TV hosts down
to the lady who cooked our fish and chips on Wandsworth Bridge Road.
The great fortune when Gary Tugwell turned up on our doorstep, not seeking anything, just
looking up a second cousin in the big smoke. Even Aunty Jen’s obsession with my body and
those hazelnut slices. How I could ever have survived without those cookies, I will never know. I
have the recipe and regularly bake them and take them into the studio to have with Barmy’s
Kombucha.
Wally’s car import and retail business has meant that our vehicles have always been
reliable and perfectly maintained.
Even the afternoon we sat in the bar with the Prime Minister is deeply etched as one of the
great motivational events of our lives.
 The patience and perseverance of our recording technicians, the trust placed in us by pub
managers, events organisers and “impresarios”. the concern by Sir Lew about whether our name
was suitable for the British public.
A few words of thanks to our fellow contemporary bands. The Hermits for their haslet
sarnies, Ringo for sharing his Kit Kat, the Seekers for not treating us as annoying little pests and
for giving us the benefit of their experience. Frank Ifield for the stationary we found in his
bureau, The Easybeats for saying nice things about us to the media. Mike Yarwood for
complimenting Wally for his impersonations.
By the way, I didn’t mention it, but you all know we incorporated Wal’s talent into our act.
Not his bass playing! If we relied on that, we would have sacked him long ago. (Don’t rear up,
Wally. Only kidding! You play very nicely and one day you will be famous!). But his
impersonation of politicians and TV personalities has got us much applause when our music has
failed.
He still does that Bob Hawke impression when Barmy goes on about the job at the chippy
shop in Reservoir.
Porky has never lost his Cockney accent, and sometimes, when the gourmet reptiles him,
uses their clatter. Sorry. When the mood (gourmet food) takes (reptiles and snakes) him, uses
their slang (clatter and clang). Only Porky understands it, but he likes it as it sets him apart from
real people.
And my photo albums are occupying a big part of my life. Porky and I spend our Sunday
afternoons scanning and cataloguing them.
And of course, I wrote this biography, even though Porky tries to help me. He always tries
to put a rosy glow onto everything that happened. Which it doesn’t need. It has been a bed a bed
of roses nearly all the way.
Which brings me to our future plans.
You don’t have to worry, you will see a lot more of us yet!
In October we are flying over to Perth to do Telethon again. It is still a highlight on
Western Australia’s social calendar. We will do a few concerts in the Great South before hosting
Quentin the Quokka’s Birthday Party on Rottnest.
Then we have been invited to do the Christmas concert at Sidney Myer Music Bowl and
Porky is going to be Father Christmas in the parade. He will have four familiar looking Elves.
Porky got to be Santa because he has, over the past few years, rounded out to almost the
perfect Santa shape and he will not need any makeup to get his face to the right colour. (He’s
growing a beard, too, but it might need a bit of augmentation before the event.)
 In the New Year, we will do an inland tour of New South Wales immediately following
Australia Day at Tamworth and then a few engagements in Queensland.
They really love us there, despite us being “southern smarties”. And, as Ross Ryan says,
“don’t give a damn ‘bout nothin’ but Queensland”.
It’s not possible, even for a Banana Bender, to not love us.
We will be rectifying our long absence from Tasmania and those islands off to the east and
whose name eludes me for the moment. Anyway, we want to tour them in the autumn because
when the long white cloud settles over them, it can get pretty miserable.
Then, we will pretty much spend the winter between Melbourne and Sydney, brightening
up their miserable lives before heading west again to the tranquil Indian Ocean coast.
It’s all still go. I am turning over the studio to young Jamie Peppergreen at the end of next
year. I know that between him and Charlie’s youngster, Pip, they will maintain the success which
we had.
I have also had the blessing of my gorgeous Darlene. She has requested that I keep
mentions of her to a minumum and I will respect that. She has insisted that I look after my health
and fitness, jogging around the beach to St Kilda or alongside the light rail track to town,
whenever we are in Melbourne, and getting to the gym as often as I can.
One thing I will say say, Mum approved of her and Dad absolutely glows when she visits
him, which is often.
So, much to your disappointment and my relief, I come to the last paragraph.
Thanks for being our fans, and to all of you Blackheads out there, we love you all!
The Pimples:
Graham Alistair “Lizard” Boyle born: Portsmouth, UK July 1946
Glenn Plato “Porky” Boyle born: Romford, UK Nov 1946
Kenneth Garry “Wally” Waltham born: Reservoir, Vic Dec 1946
Barry Lee Blaine “Barmy” Layter born: Canberra, ACT Jan 1947
Peter Charles “Bedlam” Beldon born: Berwick, Vic Nov 1947

Angela Lynnete “Lynn” Verity born: South Yarra, Vic July 1947
Harley Davidson Brownlow born: Calcutta, India Feb 1931
John Albert “Sweetie” Sweetnam born: Geraldton, Ontario, Canada Apr 1934

Footnote: Wally announced his retirement from playing in 2020, when he contracted
Covid-19 while visiting Germany. He was not seriously ill, but gets extremely
tired and his “head is not right” as he explains it. His role as bass player has now
been taken by Tiny Duncan, the former saxophonist/whistler/singer/actor, who
uses up a lot more room in the van than Wal does and has to buy two seats in an
airplane.
But we don’t mind. He is a hell of a lot of fun to have around and is a
magnificent cook.
Wally still hangs around us like a bad smell and looks after the coffee
percolators in the Sydney studio. He has also written quite a few songs for She’ll
Be Right.
And his impression of Scott Morrison leaves us stitches.