Toni McCann, 1965

During the 1960s the majority of Australian women were the recipients of a very raw deal. Denied access to many jobs and often paid less than half the male wage for the same work most women were economically chained to their families and husbands. Socially the sexes were also largely segregated with females banned from many spheres of life and not even allowed to drink alcohol in public bars.

      Amongst the youth there were glimmerings of the changes to come in the 1970s, but the reality of the teen music scene was that women were still relegated to second class status. The enthusiasm and mania of teenage girls may have driven the popularity of the beat sound, but the only real roles they could play in its creation would be as fan club presidents, back-up singers, Go-Go dancers and girlfriends. Hemmed in by sexual stereotypes those women who did hit the stage were similarly limited to tame balladry and distinctly feminine attire.

      An exception that proved the rule was the teenage singer Toni McCann, a young woman who fronted Brisbane bands and who could yell and holler with the best of them. Iain McIntyre spoke to Toni about her experiences as a young migrant and premier act on Ivan Dayman’s Bowls circuit.

WILD ABOUT YOU: When did you first start playing music?

TONI MCCANN: I had a passion for music from the time I first saw Helen Shapiro on TV in England. I thought “Yeah, I can do that!” Then I heard the Rolling Stones and just fell in love with their R&B sound. I got to see them before I left London and it was that wild music that would just make people go crazy.

      I then went out and knocked on a few doors of recording companies in London and eventually scored a contract. I’m fairly small at 5 foot 2 inches so they were going to name me “Titch” and let me do the rock n roll thing. Everything was set to take off when my father’s plans to emigrate came through and we left for Australia. I started a little band with some others on the five week journey over on the Fairstar (an ocean liner). 

WAY: How did everything get off the ground when you reached Australia?

TM: When we arrived in Brisbane I had already created some of my own image with the bell bottoms, very long hair and so forth. This was different from the typical image of female entertainers in those days.

      I was 15 by this stage and rather than finishing school I did a talent quest at a place called Top Cats or TCs where the producer Pat Aulton introduced me to Nat Kipner who was also a producer and who ran the big Bowl shows. They liked what I did and from there I met (promoter) Ivan Dayman who had started the Sunshine label and organised a huge touring circuit up and down the East Coast of Australia.

      Ivan had brought The Blue Jays up from Melbourne and they would do their own tunes as well as back myself, Tony Worsley, Peter Doyle and the other singers who I toured with as a stable. He also toured Marcie & the Cookies with Normie Rowe and the Playboys. We worked the circuit for Ivan for very little money, although Ivan didn’t have much to do with the musical side of events and you usually only got to see him if you did something wrong. (laughs)

WAY: As a female performer the fact that you were doing your own thing and playing such tough music in the mid 1960s really stands out today.

TM: Having an alto voice I tended to sing things in male keys which was very different from the girly girly acts like Little Pattie and the rest. All the other women at the time were doing the pretty sounds and wearing the pretty dresses and doing all the things that went along with being backing singers. Women were rarely front line acts, they were usually more in the background. So when I came out with the music of the Rolling Stones and started screaming my head off people went “What the heck’s that?” (laughs)

WAY: How did you find Brisbane after living in London? Did it seem fairly parochial and behind the times?

TM: Oh absolutely. You were supposed to wear your gloves when you went out and hotels were not places for ladies and Joh Bjelke Petersen (State Premier at the time) had lines painted on the footpath and you were only allowed to walk on the left side (laughs). Looking at Brisbane now it has come ahead in leaps and bounds.

      The great thing however was that because the drinking age was 21 many venues leapt up that were just for teenagers. If you could make a record and get on the circuit then you had an airfare guaranteed because there would always be a television show to do and then Ivan’s venues to play.

      I remember when some of the big package tours came through with The Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, Roy Orbison and The Dave Clark Five. I got to play at one of those shows which was fantastic. What was funny though was that all the teenagers were on the look out for members of these bands and anyone with long hair got chased down the street! (laughs)

WAY: How did the industry react to the way you did things?

TM: I didn’t realise I was doing anything new until I did my first TV show in Sydney. It was all very exciting flying down from Brisbane. I turned up in the outfit I presumed I was going to wear and was told that I couldn’t wear bell bottomed trousers because girls had to be seen in dresses. Which seems incredible now given that singers go on TV in their underwear! (laughs) 

      I went back to the dressing room and bawled my eyes out, but it made me step up a bit and decide to change the way people thought. Nat Kipner came in and said he’d have a word with the producers. They wound up letting me wear what I wanted which in retrospect may have been a bit of a turning point in terms of how women could present themselves. From there I wound up becoming a regular on the Saturday Date show and later recorded the theme which was written by Nat.

WAY: You were possibly the only woman playing blues harp in an Australian band at the time. Why weren’t there others?

TM: Well it tended to mess up your lipstick. (laughs) You could always spot my harps because they had pink stuff all over them.

WAY: What was it like putting together your first single My Baby/No?

TM: Going into the studio with Pat Aulton was very exciting. Recording was very different to playing live as I was used to heading out in front of a big crowd of people and belting it out.

At this point in time you had very little control over the production side of things. Someone picked the songs and you went in recorded with the band, were told “That’s a take” and walked out. In my case the songs were unusual in that Mal Clarke and Royce Nicholls of The Blue Jays wrote a lot of the material rather than us just doing covers of overseas artists.

Recording back then was pretty basic as Festival Records only had a two track studio so you couldn’t overdub anything and if you made any mistakes you would have to start all over again. Thanks to that however the songs we did had a really live, raw feel.

WAY: When you did your second single Saturday Date/If You Don’t Come Back it was originally going to have Hoochie Coochie Man on it, but apparently that was vetoed due to its raunchiness. Tell us a bit about what was going on there.

TM: Most of the R&B songs were written for guys and I think the lyrics just weren’t seen as suitable for a girl. Back then B-sides were also considered throwaways. You had your hit song and then put any old thing on the back. Later on bands like The Beatles began to try and give more value for money by having double A-sides which confused the hell out of DJs (laughs).

WAY: Despite your live following the singles didn’t chart too well. Why do you think that was?

TM: Looking back I think the songs weren’t really going to be accepted by the public. People expected women to do cute songs. What I did would work in a live context, but the image didn’t really have anywhere to go in Australia in those days.

WAY: When did you decide to move on from this sound and start the duo with Royce Nicholls?

TM: Well when I started dating Royce, who was the bass player of The Blue Jays, I was very strongly told by the management that it wasn’t supposed to happen. So we both quit what we were doing and started doing a completely different kind of music. Within no time we were dubbed the “Sonny and Cher” of Australia. (laughs) We went on to record under a variety of guises and toured all over Australia and the world.

Recommended Listening

Sadly no one has yet to compile all of Toni McCann’s recordings onto one release. You can however find the songs My Baby/No/Saturday Date on the Canetoad Punkville compilation CD and the song If You Don’t Come Back on the Devil’s Children #3 bootleg CD. Songs have also appeared on earlier volumes of Devil’s Children and on the UK CD compilations Of Hopes And Dreams And Tombstones and Hot Generation (Big Beat). For the full story on Toni and Royce’s musical career check out Gavin Brown’s Saturday Date book which is available from Moonlight Publishing.

Picture Credits:

Pictures taken from Livin' End Magazine with permission of Sue Mittlehauser and Punkville CD Booklet with permission of David McLean and Toni Rutland .