The Tol-puddle Martyrs, 1968

When the music of the British Invasion hit Australia in 1964/65 it made an immediate impact all over the country.  Although an existing network of regional radio and TV stations played its part much of the hype was generated at the grassroots by local fanatics, bands and promoters. Whilst any city based act hoping to make the charts and earn a living was forced to traipse far and wide, the parochial and remote nature of Australian society at this time also gave rise to a number of unique regional scenes. Each of these had their own hierarchy of bands and venues with the local stars usually more than capable of holding their own against the city based touring acts, but unable in turn to crack the Top 40 due to their humble rural origins.

      Typical of this trend, but unusual in that they had a sound and feel all of their own Bendigo based band Peter and the Silhouettes/The Tolpuddle Martyrs ruled the regional roost for much of the sixties. Iain McIntyre talked to frontman/keyboardist Peter Rechter about how the band pioneered the beat sound in North Eastern Victoria and cut a number of bona fide classic originals along the way.

PR: The first time I witnessed it was as a little boy in the 1950s when my brother took me to the pictures to see “Rock Around The Clock”. I remember the ushers coming in and telling everyone to sit down and get off the stage. People were dancing in the aisles and they shut the movie down until everyone settled.

WAY: How did Peter and the Silhouettes initially come together?

PR: I was at high school and a friend of mine Manuel Pappas was into Elvis. The Beatles were first happening and we loved all that big time so we used to go to his place at lunchtime. He had a guitar and there was a piano and we would vamp out the hits. One day he told me that he’d been asked to join a band with Kevin Clancy, who was the local barber, and he asked me to tag along. I was subsequently accepted.  Manuel played rhythm guitar, Kevin played lead, Keirin Keogh was on bass, Tony Truscott on drums and I was the singer and played Farfisa organ.

WAY: Was it easy to obtain a keyboard back then?

PR: Well, you couldn’t get one in Bendigo. It had to be ordered in and cost 400 pounds, which was a lot of money.  There was a guy in Bendigo named Alan Williams who would make amps and provide PA systems which you could hire. He made our amps. Since we had little to compare them to I have no idea as to whether they sounded any good.

Peter And The Shilouettes, 1965

PR: Well in late 1963 or 1964 we played our first show at the Eaglehawk RSL. There were other dances happening around where they had jazz bands and fifties rock n roll. Initially we didn’t get a lot of work, just the occasional gig around town and dances at Swan Hill, Echuca and so forth.

Eventually we started to build a following and decided we needed our own place. So we started a night at the Golden Square Fire Brigade Hall. Kevin lived in the suburb and through his connections convinced them to take it on. It lasted for years and I’m pretty sure it helped fund the new fire station. (laughs) The firemen would act as bouncers and run the door.

WAY: At what point did things begin to mushroom?

PR: When the British scene started to take off we were already playing songs by The Rolling Stones, The Pretty Things, The Kinks, Them, etc. Everyone else was still doing Chuck Berry and The Shadows. Then when we appeared on The Scene album and played a special on regional TV everything changed.

John Kylie, who later became our manager, and Colin James, who was the local agent, had decided to put this album together of bands from Bendigo and the local district because acts from the country never really got a look in. John knew Johnny Chester so we came down to his Melbourne studios at W&G in 1965.

      We were asked to write two songs. They wanted a ballad as well as an up tempo song and I came up with Claudette Jones and The Natural Man.  It took about a year for the thing to eventually come out.

WAY: How did the release of The Scene affect both your shows and your personal life?

PR: People began to look at us in a different way. Instead of just our friends coming along tram loads of kids would arrive from Bendigo. They even had to put on extra trams at one point to accommodate them all. You couldn’t move in the hall and the only way the kids could dance was to jump up and down ala the Pogo of the punk era. Our sets were pretty energetic and the kids would be leaping up and down and I’d be leaping up and down too. (laughs) I can also remember the first time when people started screaming and that whole Beatlemania style of thing took over.

On a personal level I found that working at the Bank the manager didn’t like long hair and coloured shirts. My parents also found it difficult to cope with a lot of things that happened in the 1960s and particularly with long hair on boys. Generally it was okay, but one time when we played in Mildura we were offered a show in Broken Hill which I turned down because I didn’t know how those miners would react to our hair. (laughs)

Peter Rechter in 1969

PR: There were a lot of fights at the Friday night dance and some people called it the “Bloodbath”. Some nights it would get hairy. After Go Set magazine came up and did a story on the Bendigo scene sharpies came from Melbourne and caused a lot of trouble. We didn’t have any Bendigo sharpies, but the local boys went after the Melbourne ones, or at least tried to. (laughs) Occasionally we would have trouble in other towns when the boyfriends would get annoyed at their girls carrying on. A few times we had to have police escorts out of places like Maryborough, but in the main things were fine.

      Eventually it got so overcrowded at The Fire Brigade Hall that the Health Department stepped in. Thanks to the head fireman, Dick Turner, also being the mayor we got to move to the Town Hall. All this wound up being on the front page of the Bendigo Advertiser with a picture of us playing there.

WAY: Despite you being and playing to teenagers did drugs and alcohol play much of a role on the country circuit?

PR: Alcohol certainly did, but I can’t remember much about drugs. There was the occasional person from Bendigo who would go down to Melbourne for a while and come back with some dope and think they were pretty cool, but that was it.

WAY: How often were you playing by this point?

PR: We were working flat out with anything between 3 and 6 gigs a week. We had the Friday night dance which continued to grow and saw us move to the Unity Hall. They gave us permission to open up the back section and a friend Tom Metcalfe did murals of the Stones and the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix on the walls to give it the feel of Melbourne venues like Sebastians or the Thumping Tum. We had bands like The Masters Apprentices and The Party Machine come up. It didn’t matter who came to town though as our regional following was so loyal that no one could take us on.

      We had a good following in Castlemaine and Echuca and we’d also travel into Southern NSW. The dances in Shepparton were particularly huge. We’d play at the Civic centre on a revolving stage with 1500 to 2000 people going ape. In most places the kids would be up with whatever was happening.

WAY: The parochialism of the time may have favoured you in regional Victoria, but how did you go when you ventured out of the area?

PR: Well in 1968, when we were playing as The Tolpuddle Martyrs, we entered the Hoadley Battle Of The Sounds and won the country final. Then we came to Melbourne and came fourth in the Grand Final for the whole of Australia. We had to do three songs in three minutes and everyone was pretty nervous.

      Out of that we got a lot of work in Melbourne playing the swinger dances at places like the Coburg and St Kilda Town Halls. We were just in the mix however with all the other smaller bands as it was hard to compete with people like The Twilights and The Masters Apprentices who were on TV every week.

WAY: When did you actually change you name to The Tolpuddle Martyrs?

PR: Well there was a line up change with Len Gaskell, who had played drums on The Scene, coming in and Manuel being replaced by Russell Hogan. It was 1967 and I had left the Bank and gone back to school. I was studying history and read about the Tolpuddle Martyrs and thought it would make a fantastic name.

      The band’s sound also became heavier and we did songs like our first single Time Will Come/Social Cell. New bands like The Yardbirds and The Spencer Davis group were having an effect on us and I traded in The Farfisa for a Hammond organ with a Leslie speaker box. I hadn’t got it when we did the single and I’m glad I didn’t because the cheesy sound of the Farfisa was perfect for those songs.

WAY: The lyrics to Time Will Come/Social Cell were quite unusual for the time in that they captured a mood of angst and protest when just about every other Australian band was still singing about girls. What inspired you to do something different?

PR: Well the Vietnam War was really happening and we were all having to put our names in for the draft ballot. A lot of guys I knew were being called up and some went across. There weren’t any protests happening in Bendigo at the time. You could speak about it, but no one would march for fear of being shunned. A lot of people however were upset and some guys said they didn’t care if they got sent to the war, but they certainly cared about it afterwards. I think our original drummer Tony Truscott had been drafted, but had a car accident and broke his leg which got him out of it. The rest of us were pretty lucky not to get called up.

      So the songs were my reaction to that and also to the way society was back then. You had your workers and your wealthy people and no middle class and everyone was being held in their place. I was thinking about those things and wanted to put my ideas on those issues across. Regardless of the sentiments it got played on radio and got up to number 8 on the local charts.

PR: Live we pretty much only did the six originals we had released plus a couple more that were recorded, but which never came out because Johnny Chester lost the acetates. No one did their own material much at this time. Even bands like The Masters Apprentices did Top 40 covers. Early on we had even recorded some covers for the local radio station 3BO to play, but had to stop because APRA (Australian Publishing Rights Association) or someone stepped in.

WAY: Most of your recordings scrub up very well with Claudette Jones being particularly explosive. How did you avoid having all your rough edges ground down in the studio?

PR: With the first two releases the fact that we didn’t have a record deal and were independent meant that there was no interference. Our manager paid for the recordings and put out our single through his own label Spiral. When we signed to Festival and did Nellie Bligh/Love Your Life we went up to Sydney and had people coming in to tell us what to do and I think the sound suffered as a result.

WAY: Did you do many TV shows?

PR: A few. The initial appearance on local TV for ‘The Scene’ special was fantastic as I was jumping up and down and tossing my legs as high as I could (laughs). Then there was a local cameraman who worked for the ‘Go! Show’ and he brought up from Melbourne this middle aged American couple who wanted to film us for their Scopio-tone machines. These machines were a simple projector and you’d put two bob in it and watch a clip of people like Dion and Dionne Warwick. We would have been on these machines all over the country, but unfortunately that fell through.

WAY: So why did it all wind up in the end?

PR: It never became a grind, but three of the guys got married. I wanted us to move to Melbourne full time and try our luck, but no one else was up for it. Then I got married as well and shifted to Melbourne to do a music degree at the conservatorium. After that I began playing with some new bands and have never really stopped.

Recommended Listening:

The Peter and the Silhouettes songs can be found on the recently reissued The Scene album, available through Moonlight Publications. The Tolpuddle Martyrs two singles have recently been reissued as a 7 inch vinyl EP through Italy’s Misty Lane records. Everything by the two bands plus a live film clip can be found on a single CD available from Peter at www.secretdeals.com.au

Picture Credits:
All photographs from the collection of the Tolpuddle Martyrs member Peter Rechter. Reproduced with permission.