Lobby Loyde and friend, 1967

The life of a touring band in the 1960s was not only by its nature tough and exhausting, but often downright dangerous too. Criss-crossing the country musicians could expect to run the gauntlet of drug busts, jealous boyfriends and car accidents as well as the sometimes unwelcome attentions of hyped-up fans and the plainly psychotic. While many reeled in the face of these challenges others took them head on and over the edge.

      The Purple Hearts were one band more than willing to embrace every aspect of the dirty rock-n-roll lifestyle. Unrepentant to the core they openly boasted of copious drug use while flagrantly sporting their unkempt clothes and bedraggled locks. For all the controversy they generated however the band’s hard-edged, amphetamine-driven R&B remains the real force behind their enduring legend.

      Burning out within a few short years various members moved on to play a role in better known acts such as The Easybeats and Masters Apprentices. More importantly lead guitarist Lobby Loyde continued to spearhead a number of musical developments exploring psychedelia and hard rock with The Wild Cherries, Aztecs and Coloured Balls before playing mentor to punks X and power pop heroes The Sunnyboys. Iain McIntyre spoke to him about cutting his teeth with The Hearts.

WILD ABOUT YOU: Do remember when you first heard Rock & Roll?

LOBBY LOYDE: Oh god mate…the 50s, early 50s.  It was pretty similar to Rhythm & Blues.  My dad played horn, trumpet, piano, drums and harmonica. He had a huge collection of blues and jazz (records) and he used to have an 18-piece band, so I’d been hearing music that was similar to Rock & Roll for years from him.

WAY: So it was a musical family?

LL: My mother played piano, but she was a classical head.

WAY: Any of your brothers and sisters get into it too?

LL: I’ve only got a sister, and it wasn’t her thing.  I guess she was into having babies and all that.  Me, I just wanted to Rock!

WAY: When did you first take up the guitar?

LL: Just before I joined Devil’s Disciples (his first instrumental act in 1963).

WAY: You would’ve been about 13, 14, or younger?

LL: Nah nah mate I was an old bugger.  About 18 or 19.

WAY: What inspired you?

LL: Just listening to Rock & Roll.  I’d been playing violin and piano since I was three.  So I knew all that stuff.  But I learned guitar by ear because the people who’d teach violin or piano knew nothing about Rock & Roll, and any of the guitar teachers that I’d go to – I could play better than them, because I was learning by ear off records.  So I guess I had a thing for it.  I liked it.

WAY: I read that you grew up in the same neighbourhood as Billy Thorpe and the Bee Gees.

LL: Yeah, we were all buddies when we were young.  It was the eternal talent quest thing.  Every time you’d walk in, if Gibby and the two little dribblers were there, you were just wasting your time because you knew they’d take (the prize) away.  Even if they were rotten they’d still get the vote because Barry was about four foot tall and they (Robin and Maurice) were about two foot tall, and they used to get up there and sing harmonies and it’d be all over for everyone else.  And if they didn’t win Thorpe did.  So if those two started you wouldn’t have a shot!  Except if it was a dirty Rock & Roll talent quest.

WAY: There weren’t many of those though.

LL: People think of Melbourne of being a hard rock scene, but Queensland was pretty progressive.  I mean, the little clubs everywhere in Brisbane with blues and Rock & Roll.  The Blues Club in Queensland was massive back in the acoustic days – dobros, acoustics and all that stuff – it was always a big thing up there.  When I first came to Melbourne I thought it was pretty poppy down here. 

WAY: So having initially started with instrumental music, you moved into playing in vocal bands with the Purple Hearts.  Were you familiar with the original black R&B performers?

LL: I probably knew more about blues than they (the Purple Hearts) did.  I didn’t realise (they knew about blues) until I heard their repertoire, and I’d heard all the original stuff years before.  I knew some of those tunes from (recordings of) prison work gangs and all that sort of stuff.  My dad had a pretty odd collection – he had 78s of all that really early 20s, 30s and 40s blues, Blind Lemon Jefferson and all that – he had the lot.

WAY: What was your take on the British invasion version of all that stuff?

LL: (They were) much more rocky, more R&B-ish, I liked it a lot.  And I liked the fact that those guys could play that sort of music and it was pretty natural to them.  They weren’t emulators, they were just influenced by it.  

WAY: I’ve certainly read Billy Thorpe talking about (himself) being a ‘whitebread’ version of that stuff, but the Purple Hearts weren’t.

LL: Well the Purple Hearts were listening to as much American stuff as they were listening to English stuff.  I mean, the only reason the English stuff influenced then was because Mick (Hadley – vocalist) and Bob (Dames – bass) came over (to Australia as migrants) with their heads full of it.  When they formed a band, the band gravitated towards the American side.  And that was basically because we could get at record collections full of that stuff.  I mean we had every bloody record that B. B King ever made – right back from the “Biscuit Boy” days, when he was a young man.  And all the Howlin’ Wolf stuff, all that stuff.

WAY: All thanks to your Dad.

LL: And friends.  I had a lot of friends who were blues nuts.  The same sort of people who were outraged when Bob Dylan bought himself an electric guitar.  I mean, it was alright for a black man to play electric guitar, but not that Bob Dylan!

WAY: What inspired the band to take on the moniker of The Purple Hearts?

LL: We were actually called The Impacts, and we did the first Rolling Stones tour (in 1965).  And there was a band in Melbourne called the Impacts, and one of the chappies in the Stones crew said, “Why don’t you name yourselves after the things you eat by the truck full?” (laughs)  Which were medals of honour, you know…

WAY: Do you think that most of the audience understood what the name meant?

LL: We used to tell ‘em it was a medal for being wounded.  They used to go “Bullshit, we know what it is mate!”

WAY: And having the name, did it… 

LL: Well it created a bit of controversy in Brisbane because it was pretty close to being a police state up there.  I mean, you used to get raided for having long hair, playing loud music, walking sideways, looking bad on a Sunday afternoon.  I mean the clubs used to cop it there – fifteen drunken cops used to stumble through the door and accuse you of using stimulants.

WAY: And that carried on right throughout the 1970s.  I was going to ask about the drug use thing, because the Purple Hearts were one of the few bands who actually openly talked about it.  Was it pretty common for most bands to use drugs?

LL: Well those who were saying otherwise were pretty much working overtime with the shovel quite frankly, because it was everywhere.  And remember you could walk into any chemist shop with a doctor’s prescription and buy yourself a hundred purple hearts, or methedrines, or dexedrine for seven shillings and sixpence.  All you had to do was say you had (puts of nervous voice) ‘A bit of a problem with anxiety.’  And they’d go “No worries.”   I mean, they were ‘Mother’s little helpers’ at that point in time, so no one ever thought anything bad about them.  It wasn’t until late in the 60s that they were banned.  But they were everywhere.

      You only took ‘em to focus on the music — it wasn’t like they were a massive thrill, because they were only five milligram little pills.  But when you’re enthusiastic about playing, and you’re not doing much sleeping and you’re doing a bit of drinking, you needed mum’s little helpers to get there. 

WAY: Bands used to play three or four shows a night at times didn’t they?

LL: When we later moved to Melbourne, well on a Friday night, we’d start out doing a few of the suburban dances that were rocking, and we’d end up at midnight the Thumpin’ Tum or the Biting Eye or one of those, or the Mad Hatter.  And then we’d be down at the Catcher playing until 5am.  We were playing eight hours a night, and you’d be pretty stuffed at the end of that – but you would never have known it if you heard us playing, because we were still rockin’ on at 5am on a Friday night or a Saturday night.  We didn’t get much sleep.

WAY: Did the fact that the band had that name cause you many problems?

LL: We never used to worry about it, because it was the actual facts.  But it was mainly every time we went back to Brisbane, I mean you’d hit the hotel and ten minutes later there’d be guys squeezing out your toothpaste and going through your books.  They were absolutely over the top about it.  Jeez they did some big raids on the Aztecs, believe me.

WAY: And this was happening to lots of bands then, not just you guys?

LL: Oh everybody.  I mean, if you played Rock & Roll and had long hair then you were a fiend. (laughs) You were definitely batting with Satan.  You were anti-Joh (then State Premier of Queensland).

      You were always getting harassed and harangued.  Victoria was pretty calm and cool, because this was a scene where you had jazz and blues and Rock & Roll for a long time.  There were hundreds of gigs in Melbourne.  I mean, when it comes to being something, it had the gigs – and everyone was pretty relaxed about it.  But in Sydney and Brisbane where you have very few places and a lot of bored police officers, they spent a lot of time harassing musos.  It was the long hair that did it, and the way you dressed. 

      It was back then that a ‘good musician’ looked like a member of Johnny O’Keefe’s Dee Jays, or Col Joye and Joy Boys with nice Beatle-type suit – not looking like some scumbag ad for second hand Levi’s.

WAY: That was also something that was notorious about the band and which seems pretty funny 30, 40 years down the track- the fact that you didn’t wear uniforms, that you wore grungy clothes.  Was that a conscious thing or was it just the way you were?

LL: Hey mate, if you lived in it – you played in it.  And sometimes you slept in it.  We weren’t a ‘dress up in a suit’ kind of band.  We used to sweat like pigs, we worked like dogs – so anything that was restricting was off!  I mean, you’d spend half the time in singlets.  Mick Hadley spent half the time with his shirt off – just his jeans on – ‘cos it was pretty hot up there.  Some of those clubs were so low, that when they whacked the lights on you felt like a slice of toast. 

WAY: You were saying that when you began in Brisbane it was a pretty happening scene.  Did the band make a big impact from the word go, or did you have to build it up a bit?

LL: We played at a little coffee shop there and we started out playing in this thing on Friday and Saturday nights, and within two months, they were taking the whole of the entire arcade and blocking it off at one end.  We were playing at one end and they were filling the arcade to the roof!  I guess it was because the Queenslanders were so bloody bored, and they were so sick of the straight rock scene that a bunch of guys playing pretty intense stuff. pretty bloody loud – and no talkin’, we just went for it.  We’d play for a couple of hours straight.  It just appealed to the people.  

      Even our first bloody Queensland single Long Legged Baby – long before it was released on Sunshine – we did a local one at the radio station, had ‘em pressed and put it out.  It hit the charts at number one.  And radio wouldn’t play it because it was a loud piece of crap.  It was Number One in the charts, but you’d have to listen in at 5am to ever hear it. 

WAY: What were some of the other venues you were playing around then?

LL: Anything Ivan Dayman had, like Cloudland Ballroom and all those joints.  They used to have their rock nights, the Seafarer’s Trade Union Club in Brisbane – that was a pretty wild, butch place, you had to watch yourself.  You could leave in a cardboard carton pretty quickly.  But on the rock nights it was bloody great, it used to be chockers to the roof – a couple thousand people.  If you were rockin’ I think you got out of there alive, if you were borin’ ‘em you didn’t. (laughs)  That’s why you learned to rock mate.  If you came from Brisbane you’d better be kickin’ some bums!  That’s why guys like Matt Taylor (later of Chain) were always intense in those days, because you had to be.

WAY: Could you describe a bit of what a typical Purple Hearts show was like?  What songs were you doing?

LL: Mate, we did anything out of the black past.  Anything of (Howlin’) Wolf’s, Sonny Boy Williamson – ‘cos Mick used to like his little harmonica.  Anything of John Lee Hooker’s – you name it, and we were doin’ it – Blind Lemon Jefferson…Jimmy Reed.  Plus the guys had a few favourites out of the English repertoire.  I know the Graham Bond Organisation – Mick and Bob were mad for that band.  I’d actually heard the original of Early In The Morning – which was kind of like a prison work song — but the Graham Bond Organisation had a version of that was sort of off-beat 6/8.  And ours sort of fell in the middle between the American and the English versions I guess.  It was more of prison song-y moan.

WAY: A chant.

LL: More of a chant and a moan, yeah.

WAY: I was going to ask you about that single, the guitar sound is…

LL: A small valve radio.  I couldn’t find anything that would make it sound sort of eastern-y violin-y – and I was muckin’ around and I put a jack plug in the front of the radio, and it went in through its little amplifier and out through a three-inch speaker.  It had the magic guitar sound.  You couldn’t HEAR the bloody thing, but put a microphone in front of it and you could record it.  It was one of those novel little things.

      In terms of getting sustain, well I don’t know if you know this, but Chet Atkins invented the fuzztone in 1957 and I had one of the originals – a ‘Gibson Maestro’ fuzz tone.  It was invented by Chet so that you could emulate violins and trumpets.  Well I don’t know what he was on at the time, because you would have to have a pretty good imagination to think that anything you played on a guitar was going to sound anything like a violin or a trumpet through that damn thing.  When Keith Richards later used one on Satisfaction, everyone in the world wanted one.  When I bought mine, they couldn’t give ‘em away.  I paid about twelve quid (£12) for mine, and they were pleased to see that a sucker bought it!  They were probably still cracking jokes about it two years later “Hey an idiot bought that Maestro thing!”

Lobby Loyde in 1966

WAY: So you picked up one pretty early on then?

LL: Yeah, I just liked it because it was really dirty and filthy.  I always had pretty good gear. I had a couple of Voxx AC-30s, a compressor – which was pretty rare in Rock & Roll in those days.  Because my old man was also a bit of a technical nut. He’d describe to me what created some of those sounds that I liked on records.  I had a ’57 Fender Strat and a ’59 – they were cheap in those days by the way because they weren’t that old.  120 quid was the most I ever paid for a guitar back in those days.  I bought a Gibson 335 original; 1967 or 68 – and I paid 150 quid for that.  Nowadays you’ve gotta kill someone to get one.

WAY: I had read about the band doing the classic ‘slashing the speaker’ to get distortion.  Was that actually something you did?

LL: I used to blow ‘em up.  Split ‘em.  I used to split the (speaker) cones.  I liked the sound, so I never bothered fixing them.

WAY: You wrote the famous letter to ‘Go-Set’ complaining about the state of amps.

LL: Mate they weren’t very reliable.  Wax used to melt out the transformers, valves used to arc across the plates and you’d blow up screen resistors.  It used to just do ‘em in because they were just so poorly designed.  The Voxx’s were designed for the Hank Marvin sound, and most of the other amps were designed for you to put the controls at ‘1’ or ‘2’ and not to really butch it out – whereas at ‘10’ they were still a bit wussy for me.  I used to overdrive them with compressors and sustainers and everything else I could get my hands on.  I used to take the full output of one amp and slam it into another one!  And the line didn’t like it a real lot.

      But that letter did good, because the Marshall company had just come to Australia and they gave me one of those to try – which I blew up pronto.  And the guy from Strauss said, “Mate I’ll build you an amp that you’ll never blow up.”  He was sorry he said that.  But after a while he actually got it right.

WAY: Could the band afford to keep replacing gear, or was it a strain?

LL: Everything in Rock & Roll’s a strain.  The promoters made the money and not the bands.  And in those days the fees were pretty bloody much like pocket money.  But bless Mr Strauss’s heart, I paid a cent for an amp.  I just paid for the first one and he took the rest as a challenge. (laughs)  In fact he made his own speakers in the end, trying to keep up with me!  He’d say, “You’ll never blow these up!” and I’d be back a day later saying ‘Guess what?’ (laughs)  But in the end he kind of perfected the whole thing.

The Aztecs used ‘em, and the Wild Cherries, and the Coloured Balls.  Mate, they were pretty bomb-proof those amps.  They kicked some bum I thought.  They were way more butch than Marshalls ever were – they’ll deck a million Marshalls.  Pity there wasn’t a big enough market here for the guy to get anywhere with his amps. 

WAY: Getting back to the band, what was the Purple Hearts’ stage show like?

LL: It was fairly intense.  We were fairly committed to hitting it as hard as we could.  And we just went for it one hundred percent.  And Mick Hadley had energy class one.  He was a pretty intense guy Mick.  And the drummer Tony Cahill, he was a killer. 

WAY: He wasn’t with you the whole time was he? 

LL: Adrian Redmond — “Red” as he was known – was our first drummer, but he had a bit of a problem with drinking and driving, and broke the odd leg here and there.  He actually had one of Brisbane’s great clubs, the Red Orb, so we ended up working for him – he became the promoter, and almost a kind of a proxy manager. 

      Tony Cahill, he was great mate.  He used to play for Screaming Lord Sutch in England.  Then he came to Australia, heard the guys, and said ‘I wanna play drums for you.’  And then one day he said, “I don’t wanna play drums with you guys anymore, I’m gonna join the Easybeats.”   So the Purple Hearts broke up that way. Tone joined the Easybeats and the other guys sort of put it in the too hard basket, you know, trying to find someone like him – ‘cos he was a powerhouse.  He just had it down.  It’s really hard to replace a great drummer.  You spend your life trying to find one who can play in time, with feel, and actually listens to the band rather than just goes the flog.  And he really listened to the tunes.  He used to do some strange stuff, like in Early In the Morning you keep hearing these press rolls with cymbal bells and things, and he used to nail all the little bells from tambourines on his sticks and stuff.  ‘Cos everything was recorded in mono, one take – no dubs in those days mate.  You played it live in the studio to one track.  Glorious mono.  And he really thought about everything he did.

WAY: You mainly recorded with Pat Aulton, and most of the recordings had a reasonably tough sound.  Were you happy with them?

LL: The first few singles we recorded in one afternoon.  And then about a year later when it was time to put a few more, we went back and did another couple in one afternoon.  And for the amount of time Festival gave us – because they thought we were a waste of oxygen, they never let us make an album.  We were pissed off because the Loved Ones were making an album in Melbourne, and we had all those sounds way before they did.  In fact most of those guys were in the Red Onions Jazz Band, and they were pretty impressed by The Purple Hearts.  There are a lot of similarities between Gez’s (Gerry Humphrys’) high notes and some of Hadleys if you have a good listen.  Mick was more butch, and less commercial.  Yeah, we were pissed that we couldn’t make an album, because our live stuff would’ve really kicked on an album.  

WAY: I guess the unfortunate thing back then was that people didn’t have Walkman’s to bootleg stuff.

LL: That’s right.  Jeez mate, I would love to find someone with recordings of us.  There were a few guys who used to carry tape recorders around, but the tape would’ve deoxidised 40 years ago.  There was nothing around in those days.  Thank god for bootlegs, that’s how you got to hear real live music, because by the time the record company’s finished with you – when they say they like you, they mean they like your crowd.  They just hate the way you look and hate the music you play, but they love your crowd.

WAY: Did you get much of a say when you got into the studio?

LL: Pat Aulton was a good bloke, he kind of saw us as a bit different and he went as hard as he could to try and capture as much of our energy as he could.  I mean there’s a limit to what you could do in mono with the early desks, and there were only four channels.  There was one mike over the drums and one in front of the kick drum.  And the amplifiers – most of them were just a pair of alligator clips on the speaker leads through the desk and the only time we got to (mike up an amp) was on Early in the Morning – because it was a little radio and they had to amplify it.  Bass was always DI-ed.

      But (Pat Aulton) got a pretty damn good representation of the band considering the problems he had.  I mean, he did great recordings with the Wild Cherries (Lobby’s later band) as well I thought.  He did all that stuff – same sort of deal, all mono.  But he was one of those guys who just got better and better and better and better and better.  I think he was probably the best production engineer that Festival had in those days.  He was a really interesting man, Pat.  He could sing like a bird too, so he was quite good for any vocal backing.

WAY: That would have been handy.

LL: Well he used to set the desk up and race out the back to have a sing of the vocal backings with the boys!  Hey, if a guy is that keen you’ve gotta give him a go haven’t ya?

WAY: So he sang on some of your stuff?

LL: Yeah.  And the Wild Cherries.  With everyone he recorded, I’m sure he got a bit on it.  He loved it.  And in those days finding engineers that actually liked Rock & Roll — one in a hundred.  (Later in 1971) when we went in to record The Hoax Is Over with the Aztecs; the engineer had on a navy blue three piece suit, a white shirt and tie, and a lovely Dagwood Bumstead haircut, and looked at us like we were germs and pus-buckets, and a waste of his valuable experience.  He really discriminated against Rock & Roll, he made rude remarks about everything all the way through the recordings.  You’d be like, ‘Shut up mate, we’ve heard it fifteen times.’  But Pat Aulton actually loved (Rock & Roll) and that was the difference.

WAY: Going back to the Rolling Stones tour in 1965, what was that like — did you get to meet the band and hang out?

LL: Oh yeah, we used to get pissed and everything else with them.  They were good guys.  Brian Jones was playing guitar then.  And to me that was the best band, because Brian was a really great fingerpicking blues player, and he was one of those intense guys.  He used to get this weird vacant stare and play.  He was an intense player.  And back in those days Keith was kind of the rhythm guitarist and Brian was the lead guitarist. 

WAY: What was it like playing to such a big crowd all of a sudden?

LL: We didn’t really didn’t notice because you just closed your eyes and went for it.

WAY: Could you hear yourself playing over the screaming?

LL: We could because we were used to crappy little PAs.  So working with the Rolling Stones was big stuff.  It was the first time I think we ever heard ourselves properly – I almost broke the band up, thinkin’ Jesus Christ we’re crook!

      But the audience were bloody great.  Rock & Roll and blues was pretty popular in those days, and Aussie bands that rocked like international bands, knocked your socks off.  Because most bands were dressed in silly suits with very frilly shirts, playing pop music – all trying to emulate the Beatles.  The Flies and all those bands – you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’d chosen the name because it sounded a bit like the Beatles.  There were a few bands like the Throb and Running Jumping Standing Still who were pretty intense.  But there weren’t many of them. The intense bands were the intense bands.  For every sixty bands you saw one who could play, the rest were bloody emulators, you know.

Doug Ford and Lobby in fancy dress at The Catcher, 1967

WAY: With the crowds, did you notice an evolution over time from the screaming thing, to people who were more into the music?

LL: Oh people were really listening and getting into it.  It became a good thing.  The audience related more to that sort of music.  You know we’d play on a Friday or Saturday night (in Melbourne) out at Odd Modd or somewhere like that and there’d be five complete absolute clones of the English rock scene, and then a couple that could play.  And the audience, they’d bop away and they’d ignore the bands – there’d be a few screaming girls down the front, always was – but when bands like us would play, they’d actually watch and listen and get a bit more energetic with the dancing.  They’d give you big rounds of applause rather than just ignore you.  Which was exciting.

WAY: Now you did a lot of country touring as well…

LL: Oh yeah.  Different out there.  They want to kill you out there.  We did a tour early on that was us, the Easybeats, Tony Worsley and the Bluejays, MPD Ltd and a few other bands.  MPD’s rubber chook probably got the most applause.  Tony’s Worsley’s white suit got a lot of applause, ‘cos of the blue lights on him – but when we came on it was coke bottles through the lights at you, and tomatoes and shit.  ‘Cos we were playing to North Queensland cane cockys who thought we were Satan’s dogs.  They reserved a bit of that for the Easybeats too, but the Easybeats didn’t care.  The Easybeats used to belt a few of them too, believe me, they were ferocious little bastards.  Glaswegians mate – tough guys!

WAY: What about the cockys’ kids, did they get into it?

LL: Oh the discrimination was definitely from the older crew, who somehow were sucked into buying a ticket.  All the youth loved it.  We ended up selling quite a lot of copies of Long Legged Baby up there.  We were amazed that we were getting airplay on little North Queensland radio stations and  absolutely none in Brisbane, it was quite strange.  For the punters, it was us and the Easybeats that they were there for – but I think Tony Worsley and all those guys had middle-ground hits up there.  They attracted a bit of a bloody Mum and Dad audience – and mate the twain should never meet.  It was a really strangely put together tour, because man there were some strange acts on it.

      The golden moment I remember the best was – we played before interval — and because we were the last on, and because we were pretty loud, all these shearers and cane cockys must’ve thought ‘this is it, we’ll fix these pricks’.  And after interval, the compere Ian Saxon ran out in his lovely white suit, and about five million tomatoes and shit hit the stage.  And mate, it just looked like something from out of one of the old slapstick comedies.  I mean, this guy had more fruit and vegetables on him than you could poke a stick at.  He just stood there, he was shocked – he couldn’t even get a word out – he just turned around and walked off the stage.  And the concert degenerated from there, believe me. 

      MPD were next on and they copped a good bollocksing, and then old Tony Worsley – well they loved him — and then the Easybeats came on and it degenerated into an all-in brawl in the front.  So it was a pretty wild concert, and it was just one of my favourites because I’d never seen so much fruit and vegetable going through the air at one time.  I mean (the compere) ran on with his arms out and his white suit on, kind of expecting them to say “G’DAY!!!” – instead they delivered a stall of fruit and veg to him.  Mate he was cut!

WAY: How far north did you get?

LL: Cooktown.  Cooktown was probably one of the best gigs, it was mainly an Aboriginal audience, and they loved it.  And it was one of the really good gigs.  It was the little towns like Ingham and Ayr and Mareeba that reckoned we were Satan God Dog.

WAY: Did you get to play to Aboriginal audiences much?

LL: Oh yeah, a fair bit up in the north.  The Aborigines have always had a thing for country, R&B, blues and intense Rock & Roll. And it communicated really well, they were great audiences up there.

WAY: We talked earlier about pep pills keeping everyone going. With the touring lifestyle did you find it became a grind or did you remain excited about it?

LL: Oh I loved it.  I mean the band wasn’t around all that long, just a few years.  You can love a band like that for a long time, and we always knew it was there until it fell apart – and the whole thing was a great pleasure.  We looked forward to the playing every night.  In those you were playing differently.  Guys today are out there to get a career together, and I can’t blame ‘em for that.  But in those days there was no career to get, because you were Australian — so goodnight Irene for any promoter putting too much into you, or any record company actually taking you seriously.  It was 20, 30 years before Australian music started to sell on the international scene.

WAY: Now you said on tour with the Rolling Stones you were pretty much accepted.  But later you did the ‘Caravan Of Stars’ tour with Tom Jones and Herman’s Hermits.  Given those guys were pop acts, what was their attitude?   

LL: Tom liked the band!  He said (puts on a passable Tom Jones voice), “I like that rhythm and blues boy!”  He said, “Those Herman’s Hermits should be going on first because they sound pretty poofy after you guys.”  Which is bloody true, because after us, they’d come on and go (sings) “Mrs Brown you’ve got a luvley daughter…” Of course the crowd went spack over them.  It was a weird collection because Herman’s Hermits were full-on teenybopper poppies and Tom had an incredible amount of elderly, not elderly, elder – I mean, they were elderly to us at the time – ladies out there.  And they hated Herman’s Hermits and us, Herman’s Hermits crowd hated us and the actual audience vibe wasn’t the biggest thing in the world.  But it was still a bloody challenge, and the more the audience stared at us the more intense we got.  So we kind of won ‘em over, but only through sheer intensity. 

WAY: And again, what was it like touring with these ‘famous people’?   

LL: Oh Tom Jones was a great guy, he was really friendly.  Herman’s Hermits didn’t talk to us.  They wouldn’t even acknowledge that we were alive.  Not that it worried us.  They were terribly clean.  Very neat hair and very shiny shoes.  Very clean guitars.  I’ve never seen guitars so clean and amps so clean in my life.  But that was their thing wasn’t it?  They were the ‘boys next door’ sort of stuff.  Lovely clean cut fellers.

WAY: Did you tour with any other overseas acts?   

LL: We seemed to do everything in Brisbane and a fair bit in New South Wales with whoever was there.  But they were never the highlights.  The Rolling Stones were probably the only band we played with that had the kind of audience we wanted to play to.  Doing those big gigs for the sake of doing them was a bit kind of suicidal really.  Unless you’ve got a ton of self-confidence and you’re an enthusiastic player, you’d get pretty depressed out there.  Because mate, you could hear the crickets chirp after the first couple (of songs).  But you don’t sort of worry if you’re intense, you just go for it.  The more you’re ignored the more you get right up their noses.

WAY: You never probably got paid anything either, supporting the big bands.   

LL: We got paid for the Rolling Stones and we got paid for Tom Jones, but Harry M. Miller was a pretty good bloke in that way because he realised you had to cover your costs.  He never paid you a lot, but he paid you enough.  He wasn’t like some of the later guys who’d give you a tour, and you’d have to drive overnight to get from Melbourne to Sydney, Sydney to Brisbane, from Brisbane to Adelaide, and then from Adelaide to Perth.  And you weren’t doin’ any sleeping – it was costing you more to stay awake than it was to do the gig. 

      The later promoters were a pretty nasty collection.  They figured that rock bands should be paying to play, and that was a pretty chaotic period.  But in the early days you got your support fee, it was union scale and all that crap.  And at least you could cover your costs.

WAY: In 1966 the band moved to Melbourne.  Why was that?

LL: Melbourne had eight million gigs.  And in Brisbane – whilst we were the reigning supremo up there –- you can’t do that if you’re there all the time.  And we had a good thing going in Sydney, and it’s not so far from Brisbane to Sydney and North Queensland was always there.  But Melbourne was kind of better, because you could to Adelaide and Perth, and you could go Sydney, Brisbane, North Queensland, and it was kind of a mid-way point and we liked the place because it was interesting.  We made a lot of friends there.  Our two favourite places, once we were away from the home town, were Adelaide and Melbourne, because of the music scenes there.

      There were a lot of great bands in Adelaide mate, Adelaide was so English it didn’t matter.  I was the lone Aussie, all the rest were poms and Scotchmen…

WAY: In the Purple Hearts?   

LL: Yep.  Well Freddy Pickard, he was a Scotsman.  You had a couple of poms up front and a pommy drummer.  I’m a first gen Aussie, I’ve got pommy parents but that doesn’t mean much.  I’m a fair dinkum you beauty Longreach boy.  But from the point of view of music fans, because they had so many English immigrants dropping out of the air, listening to what was happening over there – they kind of related to bands like us a real lot, ‘cos we had that real intensity that was happening in London.  And a lot of Aussie bands didn’t have it.  They were a bit shy, their music was terribly clean and they were playing really nice guitar.  And we were playing “get up the road you prick” music, you know.  “Go shove it up your butt, big mouth!”

WAY: So you settled in St Kilda.  What was the vibe like there at the time?

LL: Heavy duty.  Hard core.  But we were bullet-proof, I don’t know why. 

WAY: Were you all living in a (shared) band house?   

LL: We started that way, but we slowly spread out.  I started gravitating toward the Carlton side of town because the tucker was better, the coffee was better and all the rest of it.  And we spent a lot of time around Fitzroy and all that, because it a more interesting place.  St Kilda was hard core in those days – but there were some great gigs around there. 

WAY: And what were some of the venues you were playing in?  Obviously the Thumpin’ Tum…

LL: Everything.  You name it, we played it.  For some reason, the Purple Hearts – because we had a few minor hit records, I mean all of our records charted in a few places quite regularly, and while they were never smash hits – they always kept our nose in there.  And all the crew who used to do Kommotion used to really like us.  All those different TV shows that were around in those days, always gave one of our songs a gong.  So I guess if you’re on TV and on the radio, it makes it a lot easier to go out and play the “Boonies” – so we did a lot of that.  ‘Cos otherwise if you’re just there to play the Thumpin’ Tum, the Biting Eye, The Mad Hatter and the Catcher – you’re on a one-way street to suicide.

WAY: Can you tell us about the Canterbury controversy in which The Purple Hearts were banned from approaching local Girls Schools?

LL: That’s a fascinating question. (Gives a wicked laugh)  That was actually real.  That was no media beat-up.  That was some hostile parents who thought their daughters were going a bit tropical.  And they complained to a couple of headmasters, who were troublemakers, who managed to create so much crap that they went straight to the newspapers who did the beat-up.  It was the head teachers doing the beat-up, and the parents.  It was all bullshit. 

      It was because the girls were playing the wag and coming to all of our gigs.  ‘Cos we used to play at the Bowl (in the city) during the daytime and 10^th Avenue and all those sort of joints, and all the girls were whizzing off from school and coming down there.  Mick Hadley had an adoring following of very young schoolgirls in very short dresses and the parents didn’t like it one bit.  But they were just innocent rock fans. They just loved it. 

WAY: Were you living in Canterbury?

LL: Yeah, at that point in time.  Ivan Dayman used to have the Circle Ballroom in Canterbury, in an old theatre, and that’s where all the Kommotion guys used to rehearse and where they filmed the show in the early days. We lived upstairs in the old theatre and it was great.  It was a great period.  Though not according to the locals.

WAY: Doing these lunchtime gigs, would it mainly be kids who were wagging school or knocking off work?

LL: Absolutely.  There’d be some lunch hour kids there, but the rest looked suspiciously young and suspiciously dressed for school.

WAY: A friend of mine actually saw the Wild Cherries play at his high school in the late-60s

LL: We used to do those all the way through, in all of my bands – thousands of those bloody middle-class schools.  And we played a lot of parties and we’d be stunned.  You know you’d go and play all night at the Thumpin’ Tum and they’d give you thirty quid, and you’d go and play some nice party in Toorak and they’d give you five hundred quid or a thousand quid.  And you’d think, yeah this is more like it! (laughs)  We can EAT tomorrow!

WAY: And the crowds at the parties?…

LL: They were great.  They were young.

WAY: At a lot of the venues you weren’t allowed to drink so I suppose the parties would have been a bit more wild…

LL: Hey you couldn’t drink at the clubs either mate — six o’clock closing, my son. At six o’clock, everyone drove religiously out of the pub and crashed into the nearest lamp post.  They used to call Punt Road “Tow Truck City” because the tow trucks would be waiting around every corner, just waiting for the pissed people to leave at six.

      So nothing was licensed.  There was plenty of sly booze around, the people used to bring it in coke bottles, you know – get a large bottle of coke, tip half of it out and pour a bottle of rum in.

WAY: That was something I was going to ask about.  Because for adults at that time, the entertainment scene was sexually segregated, women didn’t drink in bars… But with the teens, was that breaking down do you think?

LL: Well Saturday afternoons and Sunday afternoons were the major pub gigs before they got rid of six o’clock closing (in 1966) and they were chockers to the roof with young people.  In fact there were reasonable amount of police raids, because most of them would have to have had their mother’s ID to get in the door if someone was insisting they be 18!  They looked pretty bloody young to me.  A lot of ‘em were lemonade drinkers and coke drinkers, but there were a lot of really pissed young people around in those days.

WAY: And this would have been the first time that a lot of these women would’ve gone into a pub I guess.

LL: Absolutely.  And it was like the start of something, you know?  Rock & Roll liberated a lot of those people.  (Before that) women had to sit in the little bar on the side – the ‘Ladies Lounge’.  And suddenly there was a whole generation of chicks with a drink in one hand and a fag in other hand, shouting out stuff — being kind of liberated and dancing like maniacs.

      There were more chicks at gigs than guys.  Guys sort of thought “long-haired poofs” – but that sort of wore off.  Guys wanted to beat your brains in because the chicks liked you.  

WAY: Looking back at the old Go-Sets, it seems that you and the other members of the Purple Hearts were always supportive of other bands – giving them plugs and saying you were into them.  Was there a lot of that camaraderie in the rock scene?

LL: There was absolutely tons of it, because it was like you against the world in terms of survival in the music scene.  And in those days you couldn’t pull out the ‘Hit’ section of the Herald-Sun.  When there was a Herald and The Sun, if you ever got a plug in those papers it was to describe you as a scum-bag, bag of crap, you know — music for tone-deaf dickheads.  Journalists were pretty down on Rock & Roll, and they did their level best to paint the whole scene as virtual bedlam. 

      If it hadn’t been for a bit of radio and a bit of television supporting music there would have been nothing.  Old Stan Rofe, rest his soul, was the Man who got all of us on radio – he was just a great guy, he liked bands a real lot.  And he used to play that which no one else would touch with a barge pole.  There were a few of those kind of DJs all over Australia – Tony McAllister in Queensland and those sort of guys.  They’d just play it, they didn’t give a damn.  And that was the only place you got support – the rest of the time, the media ignored you with great intensity. 

WAY: Did the Purple Hearts do a lot of TV?

LL: Yeah.  All the Sydney shows, every Sydney show that was on – we used to do them every time we were in town.  We’d do anything that was going in Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane – if it was on, we did it.  Television was quite supportive in those days, ‘cos they had no one to pay for it; so you’d just turn up and it was considered a plug for you. 

      TV was a new kind of experience.  It was the cheeky medium – and the rock shows were pretty relaxed because no one knew what the hell to expect and there was no end of people wanting to get on there, they never had to go looking for talent.  I mean everyone that was in town was ringing them five hundred times a week looking for a berth.  But they got to know you and any of those TV guys liked you, you were pretty bloody assured of being on there every time you had something out. 

WAY: And did you play live on air?

LL: We refused to mime.  We did a few mimes and it looked so bloody synthetic.  You know, the drummer’s hands are up in the air when they should be on the drums and all that sort of bollocks.  Later on with The Coloured Balls we caused a strike on GTK – the cameramen went on strike because we putting lines on their cameras from the volume, when we were only playing at “mouse fart” level. 

WAY: In the 1970s the Coloured Balls were famous for their sharpie following, but in the 1960s did you have many coming along to gigs?

LL: The original sharps?  Yeah, well of course all of Ivan Dayman’s gigs were in places like Preston and stuff – they were all over the place.  The original sharpies were a heavy duty bunch of guys – and mate if their women looked at you, you were a dead man.  So they were a very coy bunch of people, the women would give you side-long looks and the guys would be staring at ‘em with the smouldering death wish.  And if the guys looked your way, you knew that it was a quick exit after the gig.  Get the hell out of there!

WAY: How did the band protect themselves against this sort of thing?

LL: A very big road crew.  And a lot of talking.  But for some reason, and because we were an intense band, I think that they figured that we weren’t like all the other wussy pop bands – maybe we were a bit more hard core.  And we used to bung it on a fair bit, ‘cos that was safety.  You had to have a belligerent edge, just for your own survival.  You did a lot of cursing, you made a lot of rude remarks on stages. 

WAY: All that pressure got to one of the members of the Missing Links, he started carrying a gun around at one point...

LL: Well there were plenty of iron bars, guns and knives I’m sure.  That was part and parcel of Sydney.  Sydney was a tough place mate – if they didn’t like you there, you were in deep trouble.  Deep doos.  But we never had these problems, which is one of the gifted things about that band.  For some reason, we could go and play to the baddest bunch of cutthroats on the planet – and of course they always had late night drinking in Sydney.  All the clubs up there were fully licensed, it was on for young and old up there – there were truckfulls of pot, truckfulls of speed, truckfulls of alcohol and fairly intense crews.  But because we were intense, they just gravitated towards us and liked us.  There were a few bands who had that – the Missing Links, they could have played anywhere I would have thought, Running Jumping Standing Still could play anywhere.  The intense bands kind of had that edge.  They somehow related to you as being a bit more like them, than the wussy looking guys in the silk shirts.

Recommended Listening:

All five of The Purple Hearts singles can be found on the Punkville (Canetoad Records) CD compilation. Just A Little Bit also appears on the Ugly Things (Raven) compilation CD, I’m Gonna Try on the Hot Generation (Big Beat) compilation CD and Of Hopes And Dreams And Tombstones on the Big Beat CD of the same name.

Picture Credits:
All photograps from the collection of former Go Set photographer Jim Colbert. reproduced with permission.