This year Radioinfo will take you back 50 years to songs from 1974. It was a mighty fine year for music.
I was going to leave this song till last, but when I saw Ross Wilson make mention that October 7 1974 was the day The Skyhooks and Mushroom Record’s ground breaking and seminal Living in the 70’s album was released, and with today being the 100th birthday of ABC Radio Melbourne, where band member Red Symons worked for nearly 15 years on air, I felt it was a day for a Horror Movie.
I’ll start with Ross, who was the front man for Daddy Cool. He had decided to leave the band but was contractually stuck and so as to fill some obligations he reformed and played with them a final time at the 1974 Sunbury Pop Festival.
While he was there he witnessed two fledgling bands get booed off stage. One was the Skyhooks. The other, astonishingly was Queen.
Wilson was still impressed with enough with what he saw from the Hooks that he recommended them to a fellow called Michael Gudinski who had this up-and-coming Australian label called Mushroom Records (see insert from the album below).
Because Ross was unable to pursue his own ambitions he volunteered to act as a producer, with Graeme ‘Shirley’ Strachan recruited around the same time as band front man.
The Skyhooks embraced glam fashion and makeup, with the songs on Living in the 70’s about then scandalous themes of drugs, sex and being gay. The album took about six months to really take off via word of mouth and became the best selling locally produced album, overtaking Daddy Cool’s debut, ironically.
Six of the ten songs were banned from radio airplay, which is always good publicity. In defiance of this when new youth station Double J commenced, their first ever broadcast in January 1975 started with the Skyhooks’ You Just Like Me ‘Cos I’m Good in Bed.
Shirley, who worked for a while on Triple M Brisbane, died aged just 49 in a helicopter accident in 2001. Red will pop up on this Friday at ABC Melbourne’s 100th birthday party. Greg Macainsh, the founder of the band, its bassist and writer of most of their songs took a different path and became an intellectual property lawyer, supporting Australian musicians in a totally different way.
Greg was great mates with Glenn Wheatley. When Wheatley put his house on the line for John Farnham’s Whispering Jack album, he called in a lot of favours. One was people to appear in the video clip for You’re the Voice, which Greg now has a forever cameo in.
Horror Movie reached No 1 in 1975 for 2 weeks. There are few more influential Australian albums than this one.
Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and music trivia buff for Radioinfo.
