RECOLLECTIONS OF THE FOLK BOOM IN PERTH (cont.)

Malcolm J. Turnbull

 

The Quitapena folded circa 1966, but established performers and newcomers like duo Kay & Jeff or bluesman Will Taylor found alternative performing outlets at The Rendezvous - a club offering rock, pop, jazz and folk entertainment - and another all-round venue, Fabulous Mindy’s, both of which  opened in late 1965. Mervyn de Souza and Rod Popham were regulars at Mindy’s; former Melbourne coffee lounge singer Lynne St John recalls filling a guest spot there while on holiday in Perth, summer 1966-67:

The owner was delighted to have an “east coast frontliner” perform and agreed to pay me twice what I was being paid in Melbourne. However the venue had changed from its former time. I was put in a cage for go-go dancers to perform my set. It was unsettling to say the least.

 

Hans Stampfer established a new folk den, the Hookeneye, in September 1966, and managed to keep the place going for nearly a year. (The Hookeneye offered poetry reading, blues and folk). Jazz and folk meets were convened briefly at a suburban hideaway called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Subsequently, the Hole In The Wall - a theatrette which had specialised for several years in avant-garde jazz and dance presentations - served as venue for Tuesday (later Sunday) evening folk-blues meets (from mid 1967 until early 1969), featuring Bruce & Romanie, Maggie Hammond, The Newfolk, Pierce Partridge (an Englishman who played first-class guitar), the Nick Grant Blues Band, The Golliards (a group of instrumentalists from Britain who played great Flatt & Scruggs bluegrass), Murray Wilkins, Rod Popham and Hans Stampfer. (For a while, Bruce & Romanie joined forces with Wilkins and Stampfer in a popular quartet which specialised in Weavers and Pete Seeger material and rustic blues). By that time, lack of work had dictated that more than one Perth folk act make the move into rock or cabaret.

    Melidonis and Popham have both emphasised the importance of campus and church activity in nurturing interest in folkmusic in W.A. The enthusiasm of mainstream churches for folk hymns, youth services, etc, seems to have been very marked in Perth, providing a range of performing opportunities for local artists. (Rod Popham remembers arriving late for an unspecified gig one night and being rushed onstage. He started his set with the satirical ‘Away with Rum’ and was surprised at the lack of response. Only when the lights came on did he realise the first two rows were filled with Salvation Army officers in full uniform). The University of W.A. Folk Club, founded by members of The West Coast Trio (and numbering the majority of Perth’s youthful corps of performers in its ranks) augmented its agenda of campus hootenannies at Winthrop Hall - song and poetry recitals and folk nights in the refectory - with a series of tours south of the capital, taking folkmusic to the country. Performers scouted out venues, arranged advertising and promotion, manned the halls and installed sound systems, and ultimately found themselves playing to highly enthusiastic audiences. Rod Popham remembers the tours as “wonderful” with “great parties afterwards”. The concerts usually got underway after the local pub had closed for the evening. Bill Greble of The Yellowstones, a tall American anthropologist who played enviable 12 string guitar and looked like John Cleese, general acted as m.c.     

    While a coffee lounge club, Scene One, was operating at Subiaco for a short period in the late ‘60s, and an esoteric establishment, the Songwriter, is also believed to have existed for a couple of months, there are indications that the drift away from coffee lounges to Anglo-Celtic-oriented pub clubs manifested itself relatively early in W.A.

A lot of “Brits and Scots” came out and there was a move towards Anglo-Celtic music. Also Australian stuff ... Whereas all the previous [period] was beholden The Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, etc, people started singing the songs, not just imitating the artists.

    Irish tin-whistle player Frank Byrne, who emigrated to Australia in 1970, recalls first having encountered live folkmusic in Perth at the Governor Bourke Hotel. Byrne was subsequently a driving force behind Mulligans, a strongly Irish club which met Friday and Saturday evenings in the upstairs section of a licensed restaurant in Milligan Street. Mulligans was the birth-place of two folk-bands specialising in Irish dance music and bush ballads: The Ranting Boys, which included Byrne, Dublin-born Paddy Begley and Dobe Newton (who went on to play with east-coast band The Bushwackers); and The Quare Fellows, led by Mike McCauley. The Ranting Boys became resident act at the Governor Bourke Hotel until early 1973 when Byrne moved to Tasmania. (He has been credited with spearheading folkmusic’s move into pubs in the island state).   

    Mulligans and the Governor Bourke were strongly ensemble-oriented. More geared to the individual performer and a mix of music was the Stables, which operated on Friday nights (circa 1971-2), in the loft of an historic stone building near King’s Park. The Stables generally got underway late in the evening, enabling regulars from Mulligans to “kick on” into the small hours. Performers there included The Hastings Family, bluesman Steve Ellis, east-coast singer Colin Dryden, Francis Gill, Paul Carroll, Mike McCauley and Englishman John Watson.

     Frank Byrne remembers that a substantial number of W.A. folk enthusiasts worked in the mining industry and would come down to Perth for two-three months a year, wanting to hear live music. Another Irishman, Mick Flanagan, who arrived in W.A. from Bristol (via Sydney) in 1970, worked as a miner and actually founded a shortlived folk club at Kalgoorlie.

I was working diamond drilling in the bush. And I was doing 12 hour shifts and only getting into Kalgoorlie once a fortnight. But I put an add in the local paper there for anybody interested in starting a folk club and about four people came along including a couple of Geordies who were very nice singers ... I’d do one weekend and another fellah would do the other week. It was in Boulder just outside Kalgoorlie so we called it the Goldfields Folk Club. But that was all-right, that went on for a year or two. A lot of fun then I went back to Sydney.

 

Flanagan is best known for the song ‘The Conservationist’, which was recorded by The Ramblers at the National Folk Festival in 1973. Like Byrne, he eventually settled in Tasmania and became a key figure in the Anglo-Celtic revival in and around Hobart and (more recently) at Georgetown . [‘Folk Profile: Mick Flanagan’, Drumbeat, Oct 2002]

    There also seems to have been some folk activity in and around Fremantle in the late ‘60s, while Australian Tradition noted the existence of the Port Hedland Folk Inn (functioning twice weekly in the far north of the state) in 1971-72. Unfortunately information on these venues has so far proved elusive.  

    The Perth scene produced one outstanding woman singer who, sadly, never reached her full potential. Margaret Hammond combined work with Peter Harries on a Channel 9 kids’ TV show and a regular singing job (sometimes with Harries) at the Shiralee and attracted a strong following, very early on, with her Baez-style interpretations of children’s songs and traditional ballads. (“She had a purity that seemed impossible to define”). In time, Hammond’s repertoire became more varied - even slightly eccentric - anything from ‘East Virginia’ through material from Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, to ‘You’ve Got Your Troubles, I’ve Got Mine’, ‘Go Laddie Go’ or ‘Backwater Blues’. For her first single she elected to record a ballad from The Sound of Music backed with Malvina Reynolds’ hard-hitting civil rights anthem, ‘It Isn’t Nice’!  She also dabbled in jazz and occasionally fronted a local rock band. “You can catch her work and you’ll never see wild dance scenes. They stop for her”, observed an admiring Murray Jennings:

The lights go down and she steps out and about 250 kids stop their movement and cluster about the stage, calling for requests, laughing with her as she joins with them in a hand-clapping rocker, then swings softly into a ballad, later fronts up for a wild rendition of the latest from the charts. The boys get down on their knees. The girls (inexplicably) seem to tolerate this, and actually get themselves caught up in the whole thing too. Miss Maggie has a smile, a way, a talent, a strong urge to succeed, and a certain air of success about her.

 

On another occasion, Jennings highlighted the dilemma facing musicians of Hammond’s calibre - to “go east” or stagnate in W.A.:

Maggie - this girl gets better and better ... First time I heard her was ... a year ... eighteen months ... ago ... she sang - you know - Baez .... now! I see her on telly belting through ‘Bill Bailey’, then I hear her on her first record with ‘Edelweiss’ ... is there anything she is not capable of doing? ... Melbourne thought it had a find in Judy Jacques - maybe so - but Maggie, at nineteen (!) has loads of future - but she’ll have to get on the road to develop it.

Jennings offered similar advice to Rob Horrocks, a skilled singer-guitarist whose “broad musical outlook” encompassed traditional ballads and more lightweight material “associated with Streisand, Sinatra or Garland”. “There have been very very few full time singers and musicians in Perth ... Isolation and despair go hand in hand with Perth entertainers”, Jennings warned. He cited the examples of bluesman Andre de Moller and the West Coast Trio, both then “striking out for the East to see which way the wind blows over that way. Here it’s an ill wind and it’s blowing straight out into the Indian Ocean”. [Music Maker, Feb 1965; Oct & Dec 1966]  Doug Kennedy, an all-round vocalist/entertainer who served his musical apprenticeship in Perth, and whose repertoire (like Lionel Long’s) ranged similarly over folksong, C&W, and theatrical songs, was one artist who successfully gambled on “making it big” in the east. After a successful series of appearances at the Off-Stage in South Yarra and on the Melbourne television show Boomeride (along with singer Gabrielle Hartley), he was urged to set his sights on London. The result was a BBC TV show, appearances at the London Palladium, and a recording contract. Perth boy Will Taylor ultimately found work with the Beatles’ Apple Corporation in London. (The high point of Taylor’s musical career was a country rock single, ‘Sunshine River’, which reached No. 3 on the Perth charts). More modestly, Perth folkies Mervyn (now Ian) de Souza, The Golliards and The Wayfarers flirted briefly with a national audience through appearances on the talent quest Showcase. De Souza had earlier made the finals of Bandstand’s Starflight International talent quest. The Wayfarers, who earned second place on their first appearance on Showcase 65, consisted of 20 year-old Wayne Garton and two brothers, Vic and Kim White, aged 16 and 14 respectively. (Another brother, Kerry White, sang in The Twiliters).     

    As if to prove the wisdom of Jennings’ advice, The West Coast Trio and The Twiliters built up a loyal local following before striking out east, and The Twiliters did, indeed, make a major name for itself. The WCT took advantage of the 1964/5 summer vacation to trek east (with Murray Wilkins’ bass strapped coffin-like to the car-roof) and play a round of country pubs, Leagues & RSL clubs, folk clubs and TV programs like IMT and the Diana Trask Show. For a time the trio became a quartet with the recruitment of Hans Stampfer. When work and study pressure forced Stampfer and Mike Robinson to leave, visiting student Zaid Aliff joined the reconstituted trio. Regular appearances on commercial TV Variety shows (with the Channel 7 Singers for a time), as well as an ABC Special Meet the West Coast Trio, reinforced the threesome’s local popularity, and in 1966 the boys made the finals of Showcase with a rousing rendition of ‘Darlin’ Corey’. Unfortunately, national exposure proved problematic for Aliff who, it transpired, was in the country illegally. He promptly went underground and the trio was forced to disband. Wilkins and Melidonis continued to play the Perth scene as soloists for a while: Melidonis and Rod Popham teamed up as a duo for several years. (Both remain active on the Perth music scene to this day).    

    The Twiliters succeeded where The WCT could not, and they became one of the more popular and better-known products of the folk boom; certainly they were W.A.’s major contribution to the national scene. The trio as it is best remembered drew on two earlier incarnations, the original group (Stampfer, White and Maguire) which over a couple of years had been “working its way into the folkways of the town” via the Quitapena, and a duo consisting of American-born Dick McKay and Sydney-born/ Hobart-raised Greg Ferris.

    McKay and Ferris first teamed up in Hobart when McKay stopped off there while on a (hitch-hiking) trip through New Zealand and Australia. The boys subsequently reunited on the mainland and, after hitting Perth, attracted a cult following through their appearances as The Travellers. Music critic Murray Jennings was a particular admirer of the duo and its repertoire of satirical songs and folk hits (‘Lemon Tree’, ‘500 Miles’, ‘Hard Ain’t It Hard’, ‘Reedy Lagoon’, etc). “To my ears they have just enough professional polish to appeal to Mister Everyman, yet they lose nothing of the so-called ‘authenticity’ that the ‘folkier-than-thou’ ... types [seem] to demand”, Jennings informed readers of Music Maker. Following a tour of the far north, stopping off at Geraldton, North-west Cape, Broome, Derby and Darwin, the pair parted in Adelaide, McKay having decided to resume his travels and hitch-hike through India and Europe.

    The timing was opportune - Hans Stampfer had just been accepted into Medicine at the University of W.A. Following a whirlwind summer tour of the eastern states which encompassed appearances on Kommotion and The Country & Western Hour, seasons at Capers restaurant and the Peppermint Lounge, he returned to Perth, bequeathing White and Maguire “the good guitar”. (“It was the hardest decision I ever had to make”, Stampfer recalls). With offers of further work flooding in, Ferris was duly recruited into The Twiliters mk. II. (“Greg fitted in really well. He played a different style to Hans and the group quickly established a new spirit”).   

    Success was reinforced by canny exploitation of chances to play in the eastern states, including well-publicised stints at the Copperfield and Chequers in Sydney, on TV shows like Tonight and Dave’s Place, schools tours and the Leagues Clubs. “We recognised that to survive we were going to have to make it commercially. The club circuit taught us how to construct a good set. How to move audiences”, notes Maguire. Within six months of its (re)formation, the group had easily eclipsed its leading competitors and had been judged “Australia’s foremost folk group” (by the TV Times). For a time it looked as though the trio might follow Sean & Sonja into obscurity thanks to National service legislation. Nineteen year old Kerry White’s number “came up” but, unlike Sean Cullip, he was able to have his army stint deferred.  Clearly modelling themselves after the standard issue U.S. male folk ensemble, the “Twits”, as they were dubbed (generally affectionately), were influenced particularly, both in style and repertoire, by New York threesome The Journeymen. One of the earlier and more distinctive successors of The Kingston Trio, The Journeymen combined the talents of multi-instrumentalist Dick Weissman, tenor Scott MacKenzie (who would go on to score international glory with the flower power anthem ‘San Francisco’), and singer-guitarist John Phillips (subsequently founder of The Mamas & The Papas). The Twiliters unashamedly offered local audiences their own variants on such Journeymen favourites as ‘Me and My Uncle’, ‘Bethlehem’, ‘Wagoner’s Lad’, ‘Chilly Winds’, ‘Dark as a Dungeon’ and ‘In the Evening’, as well as Phillips’ post-folk ‘Go Where You Wanna Go’.

    The trio reached a peak in popularity (and visibility) in 1968, supporting Marlene Dietrich at the Adelaide Festival of Arts and on tour. Later that year they recorded their own well-received ABC television series, Good Grief, It’s The Twiliters. In the main, they were content to rely on mainstream U.S. and Anglo-American material, rousing audiences with boisterous but deft renderings of such folk favourites as ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’, ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, Tom Paxton’s ‘Bottle of Wine’ and ‘Where I’m Bound’, ‘The Ox Driver’s Song’ and ‘Green Green’. Occasionally, they gave a nod to local talent, as in their comic, self-penned ‘Creamsleeves’ and ‘Dismal Currency’, or in their sensitive reading of Adelaide writer Phil Sawyer’s ‘Thanks for the Hand to Hold’ (also covered by Doug Ashdown).

     “Very few people would have as satisfying a job as we do”, Ferris once observed. “We love to sing, we love to travel, and we don’t even mind managing our own business”. In six and a half years working together, The Twiliters produced two albums, The Twiliters in Concert (1966) and Great Day with The Twiliters (1967), as well as a handful of singles and a couple of EPs from their TV show (all on RCA). Apart from the perennial ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ and the comic ‘With You All the Way, LBJ’, they scrupulously avoided protest material and their clean-cut, politically conservative image and approach were underlined by their agreement to entertain Australian troops in Vietnam.

     The Twiliters disbanded at the end of the TV series. Realising that the bubble must burst inevitably, Maguire had already returned to University (ultimately, like Hans Stampfer, qualifying as a psychiatrist). Looking back, he remembers the trio and its heyday with affection:

We had a lot of fun. We weren’t too caught up in the technicality of the music. Each of us was complementary. Kerry was head and shoulders above us as a singer. He was very good at organising the harmonies. Greg worked out the guitar arrangements. My role was being the talking head .. Everyone felt they were contributing ... We loved being on the road ... We were little affected by folk scene debates.

    The Twiliters’ story had a tragic footnote. An offer to tour the Top End and American army bases in the Far East lured the trio back together late in 1969, but the reunion proved brief and painful. Ferris had first exhibited signs of epilepsy during the Dietrich tour (much to that lady’s annoyance). His seizures and mood changes were aggravated by the tropical heat and he had to be flown back from Malaysia to Sydney where he died a few weeks later (in January 1970). An autopsy revealed an inoperable brain tumour. White and Maguire played a few tour dates in Japan and Thailand before returning home and disbanding for good. (Kerry White died in the late 1980s. Jim Maguire is in medical practice in Sydney).

[Sources: In addition to published material cited in the text, I have drawn extensively on the West Coast columns of the monthly journal Music Maker (Sept 1963 – Dec 1967, Aug & Sept 1968, Jan 1969); on interviews with Nick Melidonis, Hans Stampfer, Rod Popham, Jim Maguire, Lynne St John [Lumsden], Frank Byrne and Frank Povah; and on material provided, from his personal archive, by Nick Melidonis]

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