The Chimney Sweeps, 1967

Such was the level of enthusiasm for music in the mid 1960s that for every band who managed to release a single or play an inner city venue there were a hundred more who never made it out of their bedroom. Across the suburbs and country towns of Australia scores of dances sprang up catering to the demands of beat crazed audiences. Every area could boast its own circuit of church halls and council venues hosting a series of local heroes whose names and deeds, outside of immediate friends and family, have largely been ignored and forgotten.

      In 2002 Vicious Sloth Collectibles issued a CD that offered a rare insight into the once burgeoning world of suburban stomp and snarl. Featuring incredibly primitive R&B wailers alongside naive paeans to the changing times The Chimney Sweeps Devil Girl album was originally recorded by four friends on a mono tape recorder. The release of these songs 35 years after the event not only unearthed a heretofore unknown swag of garage classics, but also opened a door to the absolute underground of Australian rock. Iain McIntyre spoke to Chimney Sweeps guitarist John Reid about mid-sixties loserdom and the joys of raving it up in Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs.

WILD ABOUT YOU: When did you first come across the sounds that inspired your own music?

JOHN REID: In 1963 I was having my haircut at the barbers near Jordanville Station. The radio was on and began playing “From Me To You” by The Beatles. It immediately struck me as something totally new and amazing. From that point on the Mersey beat sound really took off. I’d been listening to Top 40 radio since 1959/60, but this was the first time I’d really been struck by a blossoming movement. There was a real wave of enthusiasm around this music and it had a big effect on me and all my friends.

WAY: How did the first line up of The Cobwebs come together?

JR: I’d known Alan Voss, who became the drummer, since 1958 when my family moved into Mount Waverley. It was a relatively new suburb on the Eastern fringes of Melbourne. I distinctly remember that the roads were still unmade. Alan met our singer and other guitarist Howard Allingham at St Marks Presbyterian Church. We linked up as a trio in late 1965, early 1966.

WAY: When did the band evolve into The Chimney Sweeps?

JR: We practised all through 1966 developing our sound. We always thought we were ahead of ourselves. You’d listen to what you were doing and even though it was out of tune and out of time you were still excited and thought you were going pretty well. Then our friend Carl Hartung put us on to Barend Du Preez who played bass. He would have been 15, 18 months younger than Alan and I. He was a very natural musician, always reaching beyond himself, a really gutsy player. When he came in we got a lot more impetus. He wasn’t interested in any of the Mersey Beat stuff, he was more into The Yardbirds, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, etc. So at the end of 1966 we began to head more in the direction of what is now regarded as garage punk. Songs like the original Devil Girl were recorded in a friend John Harrington’s garage, so I guess that made it genuine garage rock. (laughs)

WAY: What was the role of Carl Hartung in the band?

JR: Carl is a real fringe dweller, which is a term I use in the most positive way. Now and then he sang with us, but even he didn’t make it to all of our gigs. Carl and I were always the losers at school.  The ones on the fringes of success academically or in sport. Which is a great place to be, keep on being a loser. (laughs) We probably thought we were very unconventional and in our own small way we were mirroring the rebellion of the bands who were growing their hair and wearing way out clothes. He would get around in bare feet and apparently still does. People thought it was a little strange, but no one stood on his toes or anything.

WAY: It seems like it was relatively easy to be controversial back then.

JR: You didn’t have to go very far. You’d have to go a hell of a lot further now. It was just youthful rebellion and if you knew that something was going to stick it up the oldies then you did it. Society was extremely conservative back then. Australia was a very straight society and looked down on people who played rock music and who had holes in their jeans and bare feet. Long hair back then meant touching your ears, not going way down beyond them. Musicians were considered no hopers.

WAY: The band was purely a local affair wasn’t it?

JR: Completely. We wouldn’t have even met Barend except for the fact that my parents had sent me to a school out of the area. Even then he only lived 4 or 5 kms further up the train line. It’s probably hard for people now to quite understand just how localised your life and world was back then. How music was produced and how people made it sound the way it did was a complete mystery. People who played music were like gods from remote places. Even the bigger Melbourne bands who we saw a little of in 1966 and 1967 were intimidating to us. We were very much a suburban band.

WAY: So you had to figure it all out for yourselves?

JR: Yeah and that was a good thing. We were always being driven by our idols. They set the agenda. If they went psychedelic, you went psychedelic, even if you didn’t know quite what that was. (laughs) If they were writing their own songs, then you wrote your own songs.

WAY: From where did you draw your lyrical inspiration?

JR: There was the boy/girl thing from rock n roll. The frustration of not being able to get girlfriends and we were real losers in that respect. (laughs) There was also some social commentary which again was clearly derived from the music that was happening in 1967. Songs like Friday On My Mind and Well Respected Man. In some ways society was far less stuffed up then than it is now because there was a consciousness around trying to make things better and through music. Songs that Howard wrote like Sticks and Stones, Upside Down World, Japanese Garden and especially Colours Like Grey were very personal, emotional things about being alone and seeking solitude. They weren’t atypical observations of the time.

Pic 2: The crowd go wild at Hoadley's Battle of the Sounds, 1967

WAY: Although a lot of overseas bands were exploring these ideas it seems as though most of the local scene was still trapped in the “Boy meets girl/hates girl/is angsty about girl” mode of thinking.

JR: Once more I can’t really comment on that because we were always more influenced by the overseas scenes. Nevertheless I personally felt that Australia was never really on the same wavelength as overseas. A lot of Australian music documentaries really gloss over the realities of what it was like here. I’m not trying to be anti-Australian and maybe it was a reflection of our population, but our society didn’t seem to have that creative buzz. It didn’t have that bohemian quality.

WAY: In late 1967 you became The Electric Garden. What prompted the name change?

JR: We were trying to have a name that was more psychedelic. One of my family went over to Japan again and came back with these Japanese Happi coats. We wore those on stage a few times and thought we were pretty cool. I remember strutting around the shops in my coat, I probably looked like a complete dag. (laughs)

WAY: What was happening gigs-wise in the Mount Waverley area?

JR: There weren’t many other bands in the area. A guy put on a gig at the church hall on Huntingdale Road with the first line up of The Groop as well as The Spinning Wheels. That was probably the only time I ever saw any violence at a suburban gig. The Geordie boys, who were the local heavies, turned up and caused some trouble by pulling up fence posts and hitting each other with them at the end of the night.

      Mount Waverley just wasn’t on the circuit. Bands usually played at inner city clubs and suburban dances and there weren’t any dances in our immediate area. Although that all felt quite far away we didn’t feel as if we were missing anything. We felt as if we were big fish in a small pond. Well in our own mind anyway. (laughs)

      We never organised any of our own gigs and played roughly 15 shows in 14 months. The parties were private affairs and the dances were organised through churches and other youth clubs. These were conservative, goody two-shoes types who thought it was healthy to give the youth something to socialise at. (laughs)

WAY: Who attended these shows?

JR: Teenagers from around the area. At the church dances there were usually up to a couple of hundred people and at the parties 40 or 50. I’m not an expert on this, but I assume the same kind of thing was going on in suburbs all over Melbourne. The music was a real phenomenon and the kids who weren’t in bands all wanted to be a part of it. These dances were rare opportunities to experience the music and were magnified in our minds because they were so exciting compared to what we usually did.

      There wasn’t much alcohol involved and we’d heard about drugs, but didn’t see anything of them. If were doing psychedelic music it was because we wanted to sound like other people who were taking drugs. It wasn’t us. Unfortunately.

WAY: In 1967 Hoadleys held their annual Battle Of The Sounds and you guys took part in the competition. How did that go?

JR: It was at Festival Hall. We couldn’t hear ourselves. It was scary and it all happened in a daze. It wasn’t necessarily that big a thing, but it was so remote from we’d done before. We didn’t really have any great expectations and so didn’t properly prepare our sound or look or anything.

      Howard has a conspiracy theory that all the suburban shit kicker bands like us were just there to sort of die. When The Groop, the eventual winners, came on he recalls they took all the little amps away and put on some big ones. I can’t really remember, but he says they had roadies and set themselves up as if they were already past the post. (laughs)

WAY: Was that the only show you played outside of Glen Waverley?

JR: We did a sort of audition at the Penthouse venue for a guy who said he was a music promoter. Alan and Howard remember it being a six band line up with The Town Criers headlining and us playing 20 minutes at the start. We saw it as an opportunity, but didn’t know how to go forward with it. For me there were always dreams of success, but the pressure was there to study and get a job. Every time something didn’t work out we just crawled back into our shell.        

WAY: What sort of musical equipment were you using?

JR: Early on I must have told my parents I wanted a guitar because my father came back from Japan and out of the blue had bought me a Tseiko Model SS4L which was a pretty bizarre looking guitar with 4 pick-ups and 6 switches. A very kitsch guitar. Once the band got started we interchanged that with Howard’s Guyatone which had a much more raunchy sound. Before we recruited a bass player we would use the Tiesco six string for the bass parts. On some of the early recordings like Milk Cow Blues we had to use that. Alan always had a fairly basic kit, which was perfect for the music and the rest of us would use little 5-10 watt amps for practicing and recording. Often we would have to put a guitar and the bass through the one tiny amp. We’d just turn them up as loud as they would go and they’d sound the way they sound, which was good I think. When we played live we’d have to hire in other gear. Howard was 3 or 4 years older than us and had a license and would tow everything around in his parents Morris Oxford and their trailer.       

WAY: It was almost unheard of bands, even many overseas ones, to be making their own home recordings in the 1960s and yet you guys managed to record dozens of songs. How did this opportunity come about?

JR: My brother Rob and I had a National Panasonic reel to reel tape and so did Howard. From the very beginning of the band we wanted to hear what we sounded like. There were magic moments, the first time you learnt how to bend a string and thought you were Chuck Berry or whatever. It was exciting to hear it all back and it was also a way of gauging your own development. You’d press that button and magically you sounded like a band. We didn’t expect them to come out and I don’t even remember playing them for school friends. Howard hung on to the tapes and it is amazing that they even survived.

WAY: Tell us about the recording process. It must have been very primitive.

JR: We had one mic, which was the tape recorder mic. We tied it to a broomstick that we somehow stood up in the middle of the room. We’d then position everyone around that to raise or lower the volume of the separate instruments. Howard would have to stand up close and sing without a monitor. We couldn’t hear him and he couldn’t even hear himself which partly, only partly, explains the dud endings and missed changes. What’s funny now is that through Glenn Terry and Vicious Sloth these recordings have made it out to the sixties collectors and fanatics who want to hear those sounds. The wilder and the rawer it is the more that they like it. The very things that made it seem amateurish to us, that labelled us losers in the 1960s is now the basis of our appeal.

Recommended Listening:

21 of the songs recorded by the Chimney Sweeps, Cobwebs and Electric Garden can be heard on the excellent Devil Girl CD (Vicious Sloth).

Picture Credits:
Pic 1 taken from Devil Girl CD booklet. Reproduced with permission from Vicious Sloth and John Read. Pic 2 taken by Jim Colbert, reproduced with permission.