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WILD
ABOUT YOU: So you originally formed as the Morlocks?
DENNIS
FIORINI: Yeah well,
we were calling ourselves the Morlocks (the evil creatures from The Time Machine) when we first started,
but thought that was a bit gruesome, so we decided to call ourselves the
Elois (the good guys from the same novel). I’ve since found out that there
was a band called “The Morloch”
WAY:
So who was the H.G. Wells fan?
DF: I think I read the book. I think it could’ve come from me, I was rapt
in the movie actually.
WAY:
So you started playing in 1965?
DF: How the band actually started, I think Mike
Dzuriek might have approached me. At
the time he was playing saxophone (before switching to bass duties), and
I just had the guitar — and so we started just mucking around and my mate
Chet (Ian Chettle), he decided to try the drums. He started playing the drums, and so there was only me, Mick, and
him and I think the first time we ever played, we played a thing called
Wild Weekend by the Thunderbirds. A classic.
Not many people know that one either.
WAY:
Were you were doing all instrumentals at the time?
DF: Yeah, we did start as instrumental. Though
we also started doing the early Beatles. What’s the thing by Peter and Gordon? — the Beatles wrote it…
WAY:
A World Without Love?
DF: Yeah! I
think that was one of our first numbers, and Wild Weekend. Then Dougie
Blair came around, he was one of my other mates, he heard it, got all
excited and raced around, got his guitar and said, ‘I’m in this’. So he plugged in too and there were four of
us.
WAY:
So you were about 18 at the time? 17,
18?
DF: No we were younger than that, I was about
16. We all had grey suits like the Beatles, plus pink shirts and pink
ties. And we played, maybe six months as a band.
WAY:
Well when did Alan Rowe come in?
DF: The next step was that — poor old Chet on
the drums —he kept losing the rhythm.
Well he was my best mate and I didn’t want to say anything, but
the other guys said, ‘Well you know, you’re gonna have to get rid of him
because he can’t keep the beat,’ and Doug had met this friend called Bill
van Berkel. So eventually, poor old Chet realised he couldn’t
keep the beat, he wasn’t much good — so Bill took his place. By this stage
we were doing dances and that; and while we were doing these dances I
was doing most of the singing and Mick was doing a bit, and because of
all that they said “Oh, its getting a bit much all this, how about getting
a singer in?” And then we got
Rowie — Alan Rowe. So we were actually a five-piece. He (Rowe) had a good voice. A bit like Eric Burdon.
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WAY:
How did you find him?
DF: He was one of our mates at school too.
WAY:
Ah well, you were getting into the lead guitar now, so you didn’t want
to be concentrating too much on vocals did you?
DF: Well this is it... I used to do both — it
was a bit hard — Mick would sing a bit and then Alan came in and we just
did the harmony parts, like the Beatles basically.
WAY:
What would your influences have been around about this time? You said the Animals… were the Yardbirds coming
in?
DF:
At this stage, a
big influence was our managers. Michael’s father was the first manager,
Andy Dzuirek. He managed us right
through, quite a few years actually.
We used to play at a dance... used to pull in four-or-five hundred...
with a band called the Emeralds, from Bendigo.
WAY:
A very, very well known band actually; as far as Battle Of The Bands and
stuff goes…
DF: Yeah they were. Never cut a record, but they were good. They were our main opposition
and they came in and they joined us. We’d done this dance in Maryborough, I think we played for three
or four years, packed out. It was really well done actually, ‘cos they
had great lighting and smoke effects — there was a guy called Jim Tanney,
he was a window decorator and he had fantastic effects for those days.
I didn’t even have my Fender then, I only had a Japanese copy type-thing.
We had crummy guitars but we had good amplifiers, we went and bought Fender
amplifiers which were the top in those days.
I started off with a ‘Goldentone’.
WAY:
They were good, but didn’t have much guts did they?
DF: It wasn’t bad… the trouble is that Doug
was using the amplifier all the time and he wouldn’t buy his own! It was a bit messy ‘cos I had this rhythm coming
at me all the time. After a few
years we said to Doug, ‘Well if you’re gonna stay in the band, buy an
amplifier.’ He didn’t want to
buy one, so he left. He bought
a car instead! |
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| The Elois, 1966 |
WAY:
Had you bought your fuzzbox at this stage?
DF: Yes I think I had, and we started to do
a little of the Yardbirds stuff. I
forget what it was called now, but it was some type of cone thing. It was just some square, tinny box thing.
It had a great sound in those days, different to anything else,
as you can tell from the record.
The
big influence which then came along was a guy called Graham Lever. Andy
was still managing us, but in a musical direction Graham was a great influence.
He got us more into the Rhythm & Blues and, combined with the
Yardbirds type stuff, it was a bit unusual.
Because the Yardbirds had a different sound, a bit like By
My Side — and we started to do songs like Psychotic
Reaction and Land Of A Thousand
Dances, except we did it with distortion, which was different.
WAY:
Was Graham Lever working at Radio 3CV (Central Victoria] at the time)?
DF: He was, yes. He’d come from 3AK in Melbourne.
When we moved to Melbourne he was working at 3UZ — in a little
orange Volkswagen doing traffic reports.
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| Pic. 4: Michelle, Coleen and friend, 1967 |
WAY:
So did Lever get you into the Battle Of The Bands?
DF: We actually won a couple of Battle Of The
Bands, we represented Ballarat.
WAY:
Were they fun?
DF: Yeah. You’d have your thousands of screaming
girls in those days, although we were a very nicey-nicey band before we
went to Melbourne. But we had
tons of girls. We had a fan club
of two-or-three thousand — that was in Ballarat, Bendigo and all the surrounding
area. And then when Graham Lever
had to go and shift to Melbourne, we decided to go with him. Michael didn’t come because of the Vietnam War — he had to pull
out because he got balloted. That’s
where Greg Heenan stepped in on bass.
Greg had come from Bendigo.
WAY:
He was in a band called The Playing Cards.
DF: I don’t quite know… he was in a lot of different
bands; he was a drummer, bass-player, lead — could play anything really,
he was very talented and a very good vocalist. He used to go with Colleen Hewitt. When we moved to Melbourne, after we’d done
By My Side, we cut another record at W&G
studios with Johnny Chester. Colleen
and a girlfriend — a girl called Michelle — did the backing vocals.
But I don’t know what happened to that... why it got put down and
never released, but there were two originals and two covers, it was pretty
good stuff. |
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WAY:
This was as the Elois?
DF: Yes. We couldn’t get a really good sound
on it. But the first recording
we did was the single (I’m A Man/By
My Side) which we cut with the Bill Armstrong Studio when it had just
started.
WAY:
Was that with Roger Savage?
DF: Yep, I think that was it, that’s where we
got the great sound from. That was Roger Savage who’d done that… and Graham
I think. We paid for that one ourselves — a dollar a minute. There was
eighty minutes, we would only have a couple of takes, so it was eighty
minutes — eighty dollars. It was a lot of money then.
A lot more money than what you’d think.
So we made that record, then we took it around — and after W&G
heard it, they decided that they’d like to give us a contract for three
years, and we started recording with them.
But especially the early music, we couldn’t get anything near the
sound we got in the Bill Armstrong studio with Roger Savage.
It just didn’t sound the same, it was too flat. And then we got the girls to do the backing
vocals to fill the sound and in the finish we ended up with something
not too bad.
WAY:
Did you come up with the original riff to By
My Side?
DF: We
just made it up as we went along really. I’d done the whole musical part of it, because I was the only one
doing the music anyway. I composed
the song musically, then Alan added a few words; Greg put the bass riff
in and Bill put the drums. And
the break in the middle… I don’t know how that came about —maybe we just
worked that out between ourselves.
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WAY:
On the other side you did I’m A
Man.
DF: It was like the Who’s version. But I think the trademark we put on it was
basically the By My Side type
of solo. I’m A Man was supposed to be the A-side, and when we did TV, we did
‘Kommotion’ with Ken Sparkes...
WAY:
And who was on that? The Loved
Ones?
DF: We played basketball with them in the studio.
We actually did I’m A Man, but we found more and more that
By My Side was the one that
people really liked. (However) everything was way ahead of itself, I think
that was why we split in the finish. I’d kind of had enough because it
was pretty hard trying to get into venues when everyone was nicey-nicey. It was very hard to get accepted, and after
a while you got sick of not being accepted.
We
used a lot of feedback, actually thinking about it now we used a ton of
feedback. We used it all the time,
I could basically control it well with the set-up I had. I learned to control it — to kind of scream
at the notes.
WAY:
When you played in Melbourne you got kicked out of the “Thumpin’ Tum.”
DF:
Yeah, it was too
loud. Too wild.
WAY:
How many times did you play there — just the once?
DF: I can’t remember. We’d did quite a few places, the Running Jumping
Standing Still were playing those, and Blues Rags And Hollers. There were a few discos like that, there was
Pinocchio’s and in Dandenong, 5-4-3-2-1.
I didn’t realise we’d got kicked out (of The Thumpin’ Tum) until
Bill told us...’cos I remember I used to have my amp full-chat and my
distortion pedal full-packet and just go right off. We must’ve blown the
whole place apart! I suppose it
was loud in those days. I upset somebody, but it went over pretty well.
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WAY:
You (The Elois) never had the long-hair look did you?
DF: No it wasn’t overlong, ‘cos we were really
country boys. And when we went
to Melbourne.. nah, we didn’t...
WAY:
I must admit that I got a shock when I saw photos of you for the first
time.
DF: You expected something different.
WAY:
I did, ‘cos I’d heard By My Side…
DF: You probably expected something like the
Creatures.
WAY:
That’s right! Or the Missing Links…
DF: We didn’t have the looks but we had the
sound. We were country boys…
WAY:
Well The Creatures were from Mildura!
DF: They were country boys, and were pretty
wild, yeah.
WAY:
So how long did you stay in Melbourne?
DF: We were there about a year.
WAY:
Was that a great time?
DF: Oh yeah, there was party after party after
party. We worked pretty hard though,
practised and played pretty hard. |
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| The Elois |
WAY:
Were you a tougher band by that stage?
DF: We had a pretty good act actually... a pretty
good floorshow. I know a few bands and they said they got a bit of a shock.
We had a good set-up with all the Negro-American stuff, it really
knocked a lot of bands out. Very fast and very hard.
A
sharpie band took to us one night, we borrowed their amplifiers and they
had our electrical cord. They played first and then we played. After we finished playing, they wanted to go
back on, but we said ‘No we’re goin’ home’ — so they wanted to fight us. They were real tough bastards. You can imagine Morlocks?— well they were REAL
Morlocks... But we had some big mates thank god. Bill was pretty tough on the drums, he was always a tough boy.
He had a few mates who were pretty tough too. |
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WAY:
So was Graham Lever with you the whole time?
DF: Up until the band decided to split. Greg, after a while, he decided to quit.
He got a job with a band called the National Breakouts at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go.
He was the bass player with us, but the job was as a lead guitarist
and lead vocalist and he was pretty talented.
Then (manager) Graham was gonna shift at that time, he was gonna
take off; so there was basically only me, Rowie and Greg left to carry
on. They wanted to carry on, but I kind of didn’t
realise that the contract (with W&G) would keep going or else I might
have kept going — but we’d just about had enough by then. We were battling. And the biggest problem was, our sound was too radical. Like you had Johnny Young ‘Step back a little,
you’re falling in love’ — tutty-tutty-tut stuff, and then we’d come along
and just blow things away.
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Recommended Listening:
By
My Side can be heard
on the Ugly Things (Raven)
compilation CD. I’m A Man is
currently only available on the Devil’s
Children Volume 3 CD.
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Picture Credits:
All photograps from the
collection of former Elois member Dennis Fiorini.
Reproduced with permission. Except Pic. 4 by Jim Colbert
Jim Colbert, reproduced with permission. |
