From Sharpies to Skyhooks – On the cutting edge

Tell us the beginnings, Greg.

I was born in Melbourne in 1950. My parents I think had met at the Unitarian Church, nondenominational – I suspect it’s a more social kind of route, my father was in the Air Force. He joined just at the last moment when he was quite young. And I lived in Coburg for the first five years of my life when my parents were building a house up at Warrandyte on some land that they bought. I could remember going up there on the weekends while they were building it, and eventually, they moved, and I started school at Warrandyte Primary School. After that, I went to Norwood High School, which was in North Ringwood. There was a bus that went there. Perhaps Eltham might have been physically closer, but it was harder to get to, so I then went to Norwood for my high school years. This is where I first met Freddie Strauks, who became Skyhooks’ drummer. I repeated sixth form at Eltham High School. In terms of my musical formative years, my father did play the clarinet, I think, and recorder. I can remember classical music played in an ensemble at home up at Warrandyte with a few of his friends. They were generally just fiddling, but music in the family was really classical. And then at high school, I did music for a couple of years there and played in the school orchestra, clarinet. But at the same time, I had pop groups who were all bitten by the Beatles bug in the early ’60 s, and another group of friends who just started practising after school and eventually formed a band called The Spare Parts. We were all 15 or whatever – and played at the high school fete, at church dances, and parties, some other things in the Ringwood suburban area and a few other places. And after I finished high school, I worked on a chicken farm for a year, and then went to Swinburne Film and Television School in 1971. But I was always in bands at the same time, and then the Skyhooks were formed in 1973. I never completed the Swinburne course. I was in my final year, but we were recording the album and went on the road and never came back.

How did the Sharpie documentary come about? So that was your final piece of Swinburne work?

I was in the last year at Swinburne. We had to make a film to submit. Other students seemed to be doing stuff involving actors and scripts. I thought that was fraught, too many variables, and I’d seen the Sharpies out and about at various gigs and even earlier way before us being at Swinburne. Visually they were striking. If you pointed the camera at them, they looked fascinating from I guess an eastern suburbs, middle class perspective. There was a certain kind of shock value, I think, when people saw the bit of the footage, and so I had the sense that this would make making a film easier, making a documentary as opposed to trying to deal with amateur actors and so on. And so, I took a camera from the department there and went to this concert at the Showgrounds, where Lobby Loyde and a number of other bands were playing. But I didn’t have any sound facilities. Recording sound was a whole other story. Then you needed a Nagra tape recorder and so on to do that, and then you’ve got to sync it all up. I thought going into that crowd with that sort of setup could be risky. So I just had a small camera and filmed away. It was about maybe 20 minutes worth of footage all up. And I think I might have got it processed then, but I didn’t. So the film sat in the canisters for a number of years, and during that time I was busy with Skyhooks. Later in the ’70 s I met some chaps who had a studio at York Street Fitzroy. One of them I’d been at school with. We gave them the film, and they edited it down to the four minutes, whatever, and added the Lobby Loyde soundtrack to it, Lobby playing GOD. And I just wanted to finish it off and I paid them to do that, and there it sat. There wasn’t really any outlet for it. I think it was shown as a short at the Longford Cinema in Toorak Road, and perhaps somewhere else. But because we’re dealing with physical film and projectors and so on, there wasn’t an outlet for it. People who had seen it there passed on the word. The news got around. Obviously, since the internet, other people have managed to get the VHS – a few people had asked for VHS copies probably back in the ’80 s, and they filled it out that way. But it does have a life of its own, and obviously because there’s not much footage of the Sharpies. People take it for granted that everybody had technology then, but that was not the case at all.

Did you make up the narrative? It hasn’t actually occurred to me until we were speaking now, in quite explicit terms, but it does have a narrative, doesn’t it? The conclusion is the arrival of the cops, the end of the party.

No, that was what the editors put together. But I did film some stuff – the interviews at the start, I did film separately with a sound guy. ‘Who cut your hair?’ ‘Grant.’

Was that the Showgrounds too?

No, that was someone’s house out in Caulfield or Camberwell. I knew one of the guys in that gang or somebody who knew him. We managed to assemble these guys together and went down with a sound guy and did this very basic interview, which wouldn’t have gone for very long because the rolls of 16 mm film only went for about three minutes. We weren’t using the big guns – the Arriflex. Ours was a small unit and the rolls fit inside the camera, we were limited by that, I suspect with the Arriflex with the spools on the top, you could probably shoot maybe double that. So that was filmed and edited in at the front of the documentary. But the editors – I didn’t see it until they had completed it. I just gave it to them, said, ‘You do it.’

So how many rolls of film did you give them? There were two encounters with the Sharps, or were there more?

No, it was just the Showgrounds, which probably I might have shot five or six three-minute reels, and then another one for the interviews. I think the interview was short. It was a matter of trying to get these people together in the one spot and do it. It was a fairly stilted kind of experience, I think, but at least they said a couple words. And one wouldn’t expect them nor I to be effervescent with our chitchat, and I think there’s one point in the film where there’s a guy at the concert who says – and a girl who says, ‘Sharpies’. This is tribal stuff. But that’s dubbed in afterwards by – I don’t know who did it, the editors obviously did that.

So you were saying about going to the Showgrounds and not going with too much gear. Was your experience of the Sharpies one in which you felt that you had to be a careful about what you said and did or wore?

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. I remember being apprehensive, particularly because I had a camera which belonged to the film school. And I knew I was going to draw attention to myself by virtue of having a camera. I didn’t look like a Sharpie. There’s probably a few people I didn’t approach, but a lot of them played up to the camera, which was good. But I was mindful. I didn’t want to attract huge crowds around me. But no, they were good, most of them, but I was probably more apprehensive travelling there than actually doing the film.

In your everyday life and playing around the city, did Sharpies come to any of your events before Skyhooks? Did you play the kind of music that they liked, and was there any apprehension?

So that was ’74. Skyhooks were going in ’73, but we weren’t playing the style of music that the Sharpies would’ve gone for. I do remember one occasion playing in a hall out in St. Albans with the early version of Skyhooks, and there was no stage. So we were just on the floor, and there was a bunch of people, and they were standing around with arms crossed looking at us tough. We were apprehensive about what was going to happen, how to get out of there, but I think Red Symons tells a story of this bloke coming up afterwards and going, ‘Not bad’, or something like that. We got over that hurdle on that day anyway. The real awareness at that time was when we did a couple of shows supporting Lobby Loyde and Coloured Balls. So their audience was very much the Sharpie audience. And we weren’t presenting like that, so we were apprehensive as well. If things turned against you, nobody was going to protect you in the back blocks of Frankston. Turn up with your gear, you’re going to take your equipment out and get back in the car and get out of there. We were certainly aware of that crowd. A lot of them were wearing Sharpies t-shirts, but ended up wearing Skyhooks t-shirts. T-shirts back then were self-made. There was no merchandise. People would go to some shop in the city and get the letters stuck on to the t-shirt. So they were genuine acknowledgement, I think, the t-shirts. In that film the girls wearing the t-shirt with ‘Sharpies’ on it were obviously proud to advertise who they belong to, who their team was.

What was your relationship with other people who were doing the visual work, like Carol Jerrems? I suppose the overarching theme for us there is this sense that there’s a very strong presence of the visual from go to whoa. There’s a lot of other stuff that we want to tease out too, like the lyrics, and listening back to this stuff, the musical forms. There’s a sort of contrapuntal form going on in Skyhooks songs. But the way your life went was into a different kind of visual which then later involved costume and performance. Did you regret leaving photography behind for music?

No. I kept on – one of the good things about going with Swinburne is that I got into photography, although I wasn’t very good at it, but I certainly enjoyed it and I still do. It’s a nice antidote to the aural. But I think with pop music, there’s the music, but then there’s something else to look on. Back in the ’60 s, with posters of the groups I was interested in, who was actually making this music and what did they look like? And certainly I saw a lot of bands. The visual matters. The music alone isn’t enough. But I do remember in the late ’60 s I used to go with my mother and some friends to the Croydon Film Society and saw a lot of European films. So I had an interest in the visual. And I don’t think I particularly wanted to become a filmmaker, but I’d seen that this was something that might be fun to do, and somehow I got in into Swinburne and kept on going. I was interested in becoming a cinematographer more than a filmmaker. That was something I would’ve specialized in if I kept there. But in terms of the visuals and music, well, a lot of the bands at the time were blues-based, Lobby and Billy Thorpe and Carson and The Dingos. They weren’t into any kind of theatricals – well, overt, intentional theatricality. The whole experience was theatre, but it wasn’t until the glam thing came along and I went to see Gary Glitter and his band at Festival Hall, not knowing what to expect, and that was a fantastic combination of powerful music and this really strong visual image, and I thought, ‘Ah, well it can be done and not in a cabaret kind of way’. That had a big influence on what I wanted to do with the fledgling Skyhooks. I wanted to have a band that was interesting to look at, the sort of band that would perhaps hold my attention for a while. I remember making my own costumes of Lurex, the other guys went to op shops – it was tatty, but it certainly was very, very different at the time. We would perform at hippy places like at the Research Hall, which was outside of Eltham, on Sunday afternoon, a communal cooperative thing, a bunch of people perform, and we’ve got our friends to make tea and sandwiches. I guess that’s where we shared the stage, Peter, your band Serenity and Skyhooks, with Steve Hill, before Shirley joined. People would dance and smoke a bit of dope outside. I had another band called The Frame pre-dating Skyhooks and had Shirley Strachan, Fred Strauks on drums, in it, and it was a bit jazz rocky, blues, but a few original songs. But the early version of Skyhooks played there, and I remember the audience sort of rushing down to the front to check out what we were wearing. We were aware that we were dressed very differently than anyone else who was dressing down, or weren’t dressing at all for the performance. So, that had an instant impact before we played a note. It was all a bit too easy in the sense that if you have to go to the trouble of dressing up and having the guts to do that, then you get some notice.

Did you know the photographer Carol Jerrems? Or were you in different scenes in Melbourne?

I was living behind the Gumtree Curtain and playing in the city was considered a long way away and why would you want to go there, although we did play a few gigs in town. But generally it was all local, although the previous bands I was with in high school had chaps from Preston. We’d play anywhere. But my social circle in the early ’70 s was very much around Eltham, but once Skyhooks got busy, I’d moved into a shared house in St. Kilda.

Was that in Vale Street, the locale for her famous Sharpie shots?

No, that was in Mozart Street, with my girlfriend at the time. And a chap called Ian McCrae and Carol was a friend of his, and – I certainly didn’t socialize with her, but she would’ve visited the house. In ’75, Jenny Brown, who was my girlfriend, wrote this book on Skyhooks, and asked Carol to do some photographs for her, which she did. So I guess our social circles crossed over. It was flat out touring, recording, and so on. Being in the band was a social life, I guess. But Carol came and took some photographs backstage. I think there was a photograph of Red at home and – I know there’s one of me and Jenny at Mozart Street which I think Carol took. And we did play at Prahran Technical College, but I don’t know if she organized that gig. I think she was lecturing there. I remember Ian, because he gave a guest lecture at Swinburne on filmmaking.

So when Carol was taking the photos of the Sharpies and she was teaching at Heidelberg Tech – did she get you to play at Heidelberg Tech?

I can’t remember Heidelberg Tech, but I know definitely Prahran Tech. But I heard in relatively recent times that she was lecturing there or had some connection with Prahran. But I bumped into people who were at that show. But I don’t really recall whether she was in there. I knew she was taking photos of the Sharpies. But that’s about the extent of it.

We wanted to come back to the visual and the performative dimension. One of the things that strikes me, if you’ve got to choose between the camera and the Fender L, the Fender L is somatic, huh? There’s something really deeply kind of embodied about that guitar.

There was a point where Skyhooks got very busy, and I had to really choose. I couldn’t go back – I had to stay at Swinburne or follow the music thing. I asked my mother what I should do, and she never gave any of us an answer. She’d say, ‘You make the decision that’s right for you’ – we were forced to make our own decisions very early in life, which in retrospect was a good thing. Quite often I still don’t enjoy having so many choices, but at least I know I can make them. Anyway, I just sort of did the math and thought, ‘Well, I’ve been playing guitar since I was 14, and I’ve only been at film school for three years’, so I’ll stick with the music. That was the intellectual decision that was made. I don’t think I actually felt for one stronger than the other. We were on the side of longevity, and the rest is history. As for the guitar versus the camera, yeah, I think I was a bit more familiar with the guitar, whereas the camera wasn’t so easy to work with, take photographs back then. You had to take them and develop them, and it was an expensive process. It wasn’t like I was producing photographs that I thought were fabulous. So perhaps it was better to be photographed than be the photographer. Red Symons always uses the jibe that television is not for watching, it’s for being on. Perhaps there was something in that.

Do you still have your photographs? Have you ever exhibited them?

I do have them, and I’ve scanned a lot of them. But when one looks at them now, they are pretty grainy. Some of them are okay, but I used to try and take photos at gigs, and because there was no lighting and you’d push the ISO rating up, which meant you had to process the film longer in the developing tank and that produced more grain – occasionally you’d get it right, but it was a very ad hoc approach. People like Carol Jerrems had worked this out to a fine art form and she would’ve had her numbers correct, because she was fastidious in the dark room about developing and what photographs she would consider to develop, not everything. She was also fastidious about what shots she was taking – see all those rejected proofs for Vale Street. You have to be economical because film was expensive and you couldn’t just bang away. So she would sit, stand in the corner and wait for the right moment before she’d click the shutter.

You’re writing songs from your teen years, and then you move into playing, and then you go to film school. Then you make the decision to see what happens with Skyhooks, and film school gets left behind. So do you think the song writing then picks up? Does it become the creative outlet that maybe you were getting from photography? Instead of doing the visual with the photograph, the visual coming through the songs? Because your songs are famously visual and local.

To use a film analogy, with a film you’ve got the pictures, obviously, and you’ve got the soundtrack. And the soundtrack sort of sets the emotional tone. And with a song, the Lyrics to me were like the pictures. You certainly had the soundtrack, and so it’s a juxtaposition of the two which creates this other entity. I did like visual lyrics – Dylan. We’d wonder where Highway 61 was and the bleachers in the sun, you know, and imagine the woman – who was the woman with the leopard skin pillbox hat? I can certainly picture the hat. And ‘Waterloo Sunset’, Terry and Julie cross over the river in the sunset. They created instant pictures when you heard those songs – for me, anyway. I wanted to have those images and that’s why I enjoy those kinds of lyrics. So I figured that perhaps the audience would too, if one presented something with a signal form. I don’t think I was ever going to write ‘I’m having this feeling that I’m feeling’, because that’s just too esoteric. The guys in the band have to understand what I was getting at so they could play with that sort of intent. So I like songs with characters and a sense of place. You knew where this was happening. And obviously using the place names was an overt version of that, which was a device that Chuck Berry used, Ray Davies used. The blues guys did, ‘Born in Chicago’. That seemed to be mythical and had a lot of ethos to it, just the mention of these place names. I wanted to have a bit of that here, but I hadn’t been to America. I hadn’t been out of Victoria, I don’t think, so – looking at the places I had been to and did they have anything – did the names of these places signify anything more than just a street sign? And there was really only a handful of places in Melbourne that did for me, and not just for me, for other people too. So obviously, Toorak and Carlton in particular. That was picked up on when Living in the Seventies came out. It wasn’t all that I was writing about, but those songs, people connected with. That’s the idea. And how the audience viewed it, I’ve got no idea, but I did hear from people who didn’t live in Melbourne, they’d come down to Melbourne and go to Lygon Street and look at the sign and go, ‘Ah’, exactly the sort of thing that I did when I went to London and caught the bus through Muswell Hill, you know, Ray Davies’ song, ‘Muswell Hillbillies’, and obviously Waterloo Bridge and so on. It’s about placemaking, mythmaking.

Your piece in Meanjin is atmospheric, it is such a brilliantly written piece because you take the reader with you on this journey in the love affair of the guitar and what it feels like when you’re playing, the vibration, the vibe down your leg. So I guess there’s this whole package being developed that is so atmospheric, through the song lyrics, your costumes, the music that you’re playing. And we can see that in the Sharpies film too, that you see things with a particular eye, and then those images are translated into words and music.

What I enjoy reading about, listening to, it’s got to transport you away from where you are, but it’s also got to hold you, Houellebecq, Edith Wharton, whatever. In music at best, the audience will give you their trust, and you want to not break that, take that somewhere, and let them down gently when the song fades out or whatever. And I do think I always had the audience in mind. I did. The people in the front pay the expenses. The people in the back row are the cream on top. I wasn’t quite that financial in my dissection of it, I don’t think, but I did want people to respond and understand. It wasn’t easy. There were no video clips then, so if you’re going to have a visual thing, the costume, the theatrics of the occasion, then the lyrics had to connect with them so that people could understand. I tried to be as direct as I could. Maybe Dylan tried to be as obtuse as he could, but he still was using those concrete terms. The analogy of can you put it in a wheelbarrow, love, no. But Carlton, yes. If you’ve got a big enough wheelbarrow. So we’re dealing with concrete things, and people can relate to those. If I’m going to try and describe a feeling, then I’ve got to set up the situation. You can’t just say the word ‘love’ and expect it to carry, though the Beatles did. Not their best lyric. You’ve got to give a context to it and set a time and place. Because any particular play takes place in particular, in concrete time and space. People want to know that, then they go, ‘Ah, right. Now I’m here’. You go from there. And with a song – it’s got to be self-contained. You can’t say, ‘Oh, this is a song about the abstract’. I prefer them to do the talking themselves. That’s what I’ve always liked about music. Here’s something on the radio and you go, ‘Wow, that’s great. I like that’. I don’t need it explained to me beforehand. It has a kind of transparency, or fit.

In our previous conversation you were saying that one of the biggest challenges for the Hooks was going to Sydney. You didn’t know what was going to happen, with a change of place.

It wasn’t so much a challenge to go there, but I think it was a challenge to break through there, and I’d seen reviews in Go-Set or whatever of Melbourne bands like who’d gone there and got slagged, as fledgling music journalists were willing to do back then. Then I thought, ‘Well, no. I thought they were a good band’. It’d be nice for them to get accepted or anyone from Melbourne to get accepted by Sydney. I wasn’t aware of the Melbourne-Sydney divide as such, but I thought, ‘Well, if we can do well in Sydney, that’s a good achievement’. Perhaps I should have aimed higher, but that was our world then, and to go to Sydney was a big thing. Wow, the first show we played there was at the Sydney Opera House, so I thought we came in pretty well.

Listening back to Living in the 70 s over the last few days and listening to the lyrics and trying to think about the musical structure as well, because the temptation is to listen to the lyrics, I agree with Sian that it’s the combination of forces that makes it work. The reason it really works is because all that comes together and the musicianship is great. And it’s sometimes a bit funky and sometimes very clever. It’s not Zappa, but there’s this sense of composition, and there’s a kind of percussive presence. And of course the secret is that the rhythm section is lockstep, the rhythm section holds everything together. It’s as though you anticipate – it’s a time capsule, but it’s also as though it’s anticipating the end of the period that it’s seen, which is ironic because it’s also heralding and sort of ‘living in the ’70 s, here we are’, you know, that this is the ’60 s gone, whatever happened to the revolution. But there’s also a sense in which the time-boundedness is really striking. If I can put it differently, it also made me wonder if there was a kind of autocritical component in what you were doing. The word ‘sarcasm’ comes to mind, and I mean it as an art form.

We were all influenced by sarcasm and Zappa and that way of being sceptical about pretty much everything that a lot of young blokes engage in, who are sceptical about each other and ourselves, critical of each other and ourselves. Living in the 70 s came together fairly quickly. It’s a song about being uncomfortable. But the other side of that is that it just works – when we first rehearsed it, I remember thinking, ‘Ah, this just sort of works of its own accord’, and it’s one of the most satisfying Skyhooks songs to play, from my perspective anyway. It’s got the right bits and the bass line’s kind of fun to play and there’s a bit of relief in the middle and it’s got dynamics. But in terms of delineating the decade, well, we’re right in the middle of the decade, I guess. I probably thought, ‘Err – is this too soon to be writing it?’ Maybe it was early1974. But it turned out to be one of the last songs that I’d written around the time of the recording. And sometimes that can really work, by not overplaying it live. Other times some songs benefit from being thrashed out. So it had a freshness and obviously the edginess too. I do remember on New Year’s Eve ’79 thinking, ‘Well, that’s it’, playing with the final version of Skyhooks, and I think we probably played it and said, ‘Well, this is the end of the ’70 s’. And of course once that was finished, it becomes a different kind of document if you’re playing it in some other decade, if you want to take things literally anyway. There was that point where I’m thinking, ‘Well, have I lived enough in the ’70 s to make a comment on it?’ and I probably obviously decided I had. The metaphors in it are about that sense of not belonging and feeling alienated. That’s the human condition.

The soundtrack of my early life – because my parents listened to the radio – are all those songs. And I remember listening to or watching Countdown and seeing you – they are very strong memories for me. We lived in the northwest of Western Australia. My parents were members of the Labor Party, and they campaigned heavily for their friend, who was running for Parliament. So all of that whole living in the ’70 s thing, that all lines up with this very young experience for me and sends me straight there, which is the power of that music, the power of those words. Not all writing and all music is atmospheric and takes you somewhere like that.

When I started, we didn’t ever think about making records. It was playing, connecting with the audience, having people wanting to come and say, ‘Hey, great band’. And I think I instinctively knew that you had to have songs that did that, because they were the songs I liked that did have atmosphere. That’s what I gravitated towards. I wasn’t going to do something just for the sake of it. I wasn’t going to play a bunch of ‘I miss you, baby’ songs because I didn’t like that stuff on the radio. And what I did like was social comment. And the music had to back it up. That was the great thing about Gary Glitter, at the time, the music sounded incredibly powerful – two drummers, and this really primal sort of bass and slide guitar thing going on. You couldn’t say that was wimpy at all. And so I thought, ‘Well, if the music is backing it up’ – because you’ve got these opposing forces. They did the glitter, the visual thing, which doesn’t work if the music’s not strong and powerful. Or if the lyrics are nowhere, even cabaret. So, it was kind of opposing forces, and that’s what makes the alchemy of it all. But most of this was instinctive. I – and I’m sure the other guys too – had a sense of what was daggy and what was cool or exciting, more to the point, rather than cool. We were interested in excitement, I think that’s what motivated us and we wanted the audience to be excited within reason, but they seemed to get overexcited later on.

You spoke about making social comment through the songs. When you listen to those lyrics now, in the 21st century, you can see quite clearly that they’re social commentary. It’s very place- and time-specific. But when you were writing those songs, did you feel like they were a social commentary, like ‘Horror Movie’?

It was more than social. It was personal. ‘Toorak Cowboy’ was having a go at a particular kind of person who I never met, but it was someone that your girlfriend ran away with, so you put that in a song and tried to describe this character and say that they were poseurs. ‘Whatever Happened to the Revolution?’ was a comment on the idealism that was there for a moment, then evaporated, and people went back to business as usual. That’s the irony of our times. It was specific comments on situations or – ‘Carlton’ is trying to create the atmosphere of the place and a bit of a cautionary tale. And Living in the 70 s, well, that’s more introspective, in a way, but sort of – I guess it’s self-critical, if you like the schoolboy that’s grown a beard – you’re perhaps older than the situation. You’re wiser than the situation you find yourself in. No, I didn’t overtly view it as that, but instinctively, I guess that’s the way I was going. But of course the reviews picked up on a lot of that, partly because I think the music critics and reviewers wanted something that they could get their teeth in too, because the history of music journalism was just sort of beginning then. People like Grossman wanted Dylan to be reviewed in the same way that serious artists were, and up until that time, pop music was just pop music. It didn’t really warrant any dissection or analysis. So, I think we gave them the good stuff as we did with the dress-up. It was great for the colour television, which was a great carrier for Skyhooks. They went, ‘Yeah, we want that’. Then the music critics went, ‘Ah, yeah. Well, we can criticize this’. So we had a number of bases covered. And I think that just came out of – it kept our interest up. Musicians are pretty flighty and easily bored, and so, as I said, the riffs had people’s fingers engaged and you had to learn to do everything at the same time or make a bit of sport to it. And whereas if it was just very basic strumming, people are going to get very easily bored, and then they’ll go elsewhere. It was devised to hold the band together, to make solidarity.

I’m struck by curiosity about the influence of your father in all of this because of the capacity to read and construct cultural clues and cues, and the poetry. And I’m also struck by the ghost of Ray Davies. Was he big for you?

Ray Davies I didn’t know much about. But in the ’60 s, we used to play a lot of Kinks songs, ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. I certainly liked their stuff, and it seemed to me it was very English and local. It couldn’t have come from anywhere else. So it was authentic. ‘Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon’, you knew that wasn’t in Florida. It was particularly where Davies was. My father always encouraged us to express yourself on paper rather than be noisy because he was writing his thesis. There weren’t too many distractions. We used to go on bike rides around Eltham and Warrandyte and talked about Nietzsche and philosophy. I must’ve absorbed a lot of it, I wasn’t too sure, but he pointed out certain things about the world. I think it was part of being in that crowd. There were painters around that time and sculptors, and people were doing things, making things, DIY. It was after the war, people were wanting to build their lives, and they were. They were literally building their own houses. You wanted something done, you did it yourself. And maybe to be in a good band, you make your own rather than going to see something else. Do-it-yourself culture was big there. And in terms of the song writing, as a teenager, just playing other people’s stuff and realizing I wasn’t that good at it. When I crossed to Eltham, where I started playing some original songs with other guys in the band, they had a few songs with the band The Frame after that. But prior to that I used to write out other people’s lyrics, which you do when you’re in a cover band anyway. But beyond that, I’d write out Dylan’s lyrics just to see what it felt like to write those words on paper. How does he think like that? You model yourself on what he actually must’ve done at some point, he must’ve written it down. There’s something that you kind of get in an organic way that – so I did a lot of that. And then, when I’d write my own words down, I’d try and have the same feeling. I certainly read a lot when I was a kid. We didn’t have TV, so I was absorbing the classics. At high school we were encouraged to write poetry, and my father wrote poetry at home, and had it published. We never really talked about it, but it just seemed to be another thing that human beings did. He’d be quite pleased when he got something published in the Bulletin. So, I figured, you need to be a writer, though my father told me you’d never make a buck writing. Hah! But I guess you led by example, and I was fascinated by the lyrics of the pop songs I was hearing, particularly The Beatles and the Stones, obviously, and the others.

I’m thinking about the constellation of cultural forces that allowed all this to come together. So you can see that in the magical moment. You can see that in these technologies that line up and personnel, and lyrics and the audience. You had a capacity to bring together these forces, some of which is to hand, because people are living it, in Melbourne and the suburbs in the ’70’s.

The Gumtree curtain, this area around Eltham. It was an enclave, partly because of distance, and also people wanted to get away from the suburbs. It was the perception that things that were suburban were bland and caught up with money. I’m sure there were big economic reasons why people were on the outskirts and they weren’t employed in jobs where they could get loans to buy houses. They didn’t want to live like that, 9 to 5. My impression is that these were people who wanted freedom after the war. They wanted to get out there and do their own thing. People like Clifton Pugh, we used to go to his house a lot. He was a guy that was painting and building stuff out of mud brick and had a model railway track running out in the garden and through a hole in the wall, into the lounge room and back out again. Around Eltham there’s another guy, Jack Ross, I think, who had a mock Tudor house built out of ammunition boxes and bazooka rocket cases. He bought a whole bunch of them, bolted them together and used that as the walls of this house. And so when you see an edifice created out of something different to the brick veneer houses, you go, ‘Well, it can be done’, and obviously somebody had this urge to do something like that, so you can follow these urges and make them real.

It’s the folly. And the magic. And DIY.

And Montsalvat, that was a great example. Going there as a 10-year-old and it wasn’t open to the public and it was just this magical place – secret passages and a barn with hay in it and all sorts of stuff. And it’s the vision of one person or a few people. I think I really got that idea that you can create out of the visions you have. You either try and find your place within the world or it seemed to be much easier to create your own. So that was instilled pretty early on just in the circumstances I grew up in.

We know that Skyhooks ended and reformed and you played again through the years with Farnham and others and you went on to do law and do other things. Do you still write?

I tend not to because the muse has been good and it’s alchemy. It is alchemy. It’s not just about the songs, it’s everything else that flows from that. So if you’re going to play with those energies, you’ve got to be prepared to take it to the public. I don’t think it’s good to have stuff sitting around at home that you’re doing nothing with. That doesn’t feel right to me. So if I was just to sit down and write songs, I’d have to do something with them. And I don’t really want to go out there these days and perform. I know what it’s like. But if the urge was there, I guess I would do it. I think you have to be careful. You write stuff and you don’t do anything with it, and it sits there and festers. It’s interesting to hear that come back. I wouldn’t express it in quite those terms, but I always viewed it as a serious business, you know. You don’t just mess with these energies. Creativity has a life of its own. It’s like taking a block of sodium out of the water and putting it in the air, it’ll catch fire. Maybe it’d be best to leave it in the water if you really don’t want to deal with the fire. Like the Meanjin piece, I wrote that because someone asked me to do it and I didn’t care one way or the other if it’s published or where it was published. But it had an outlet. It was going to go somewhere. Like this interview. And like the Sharpies film, that was sitting around unfinished, and it was a source of irritation. I’d look at these tins of film and think, ‘Ugh’. Maybe I should’ve waited longer, I don’t know. But it was good stuff. It needs to be completed and shown. That’s why it was created. If you’re not going to do that, perhaps best not to create it. I think of art as public, performative, not private. I’m not sure about having tons of undiscovered manuscripts in the basement. Writing for the sake of it doesn’t inspire me. I leave it alone. But it’s not a need, to express. It has a life of its own, like the Sharps and the Hooks. Reading, that’s another thing altogether.