The revolution started 50 years ago today.
It’s October 11, 1974, and the fledgling Mushroom Records is launching the debut album by its latest signing, Skyhooks. The vibe is good, but Michael Gudinski is worried. He’s yet to pay the recording bill for the album – $13,000 – and the label isn’t flush with funds, with its biggest success so far being Madder Lake’s debut album, which sold 15,000 copies.
Mushroom desperately needs a hit, otherwise the company might be closing its doors.
The album, Living In The 70’s, gets off to a good start, entering the 3XY charts at number 18. Three months later, it will knock off Suzi Quatro’s Quatro album to take the top spot on the XY chart. The following month, it becomes the nation’s number one album, a place it will occupy for 16 weeks.
Skyhooks are the biggest local band we’ve ever seen.
Until the Hooks came along, the highest-selling Aussie album – Daddy Cool’s Daddy Who? Daddy Cool – had sold 60,000 copies. Living In The 70’s sold more than four times that amount.
As Ian “Molly” Meldrum reflects, “Skyhooks made news – they put rock [music] on the front page.”
Living In The 70’s is an irresistible tale of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Five decades later, we’re reliving the album that changed Australian music forever.
Was Shirl the luckiest guy in Australian music?
Graeme “Shirley” Strachan became Skyhooks’ lead singer in March 1974, replacing the original lead singer, Steve Hill, who quit after the band’s ill-fated appearance at the Sunbury Festival in 1974.
Like Brian Johnson six years later, Shirl walked into an Aussie band that was primed for greatness. Seven months after Shirl joined, the band released Living In The 70’s.
“I was pretty interested already,” Michael Gudinski explained. “But I don’t think they would ever have had the commercial success with Steve Hill as the singer. Shirley was an integral part. Once he joined the band, things moved pretty quickly.”
EMI rejected the band
Soon after Shirl joined, Skyhooks did some demos for EMI. But the major label passed on the chance to sign the band. In April 1974, the Hooks inked a deal with Mushroom Records.
Michael Gudinski suggested some changes, wanting Shirl to revert to his real name of Graeme, telling the singer: “This is a rock ’n’ roll band!” But the band’s bass player and main songwriter, Greg Macainsh, insisted that “Shirley” stayed.
The sputum thrown from the death throes of a decadent culture
The band’s first record company bio, written by Greg Macainsh’s then-girlfriend Jenny Brown, called them “the horniest-looking and most remarkable band to hit the public eye in years. The aim is not to soothe, but to invigorate, activate, instigate … to laugh is not the worst thing you can do when you listen to a lyric, to think may not be such a pain either.”
Guitarist Red Symons remarked, “Skyhooks are the sputum thrown from the death-throes of a decadent culture.”
I feel a little crazy, I feel a little strange
“I can’t remember why that phrase, but I guess I wanted to capture a mood,” Greg Macainsh said when I asked why he called the album Living In The 70’s. “It could have been ‘Living In Melbourne’, but I wanted to get a larger thing. I didn’t want to say ‘Living In The Universe’ or ‘Living In Eternity’, but I also didn’t want to say ‘Living In St Kilda’.”
Shockin’ me right outta my brain
Christie Eliezer wrote about how the concert hall hysteria represented an escape “of the kind of emotions which the forces of puritanism, morality and authority – both societal and parental – normally seek to contain”.
Those forces conspired to contain Skyhooks – or, at least, they tried to. Living In The 70’s features ten tracks; six of them weren’t allowed to be played on the radio. The Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters unanimously voted to ban more than half of the album due to its references to sex and drugs. The offending songs:
Whatever Happened To The Revolution? – drug references (“We all got stoned and it drifted away”).
You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good In Bed – sexual references (“You just like me ’cos I give you some head”).
Toorak Cowboy – drug references (“Well, he bought his first dope outside the South Yarra Arms, a whole matchbox full in his hot little palms”).
Smut – sexual references (“Whipping the dripping”).
Hey, What’s The Matter – drug references (“You can’t have your dope and smoke it too”).
Motorcycle Bitch – sexual references (“Open your legs, pass another bottle”).
The ban didn’t surprise producer Ross Wilson. “I expected it. It had happened to me with Daddy Cool’s Sex, Dope, Rock ’n’ Roll album [in 1972]. It didn’t matter if you had certain tracks that were the obvious singles – I knew that you had to have a single that would get by.” To get past the censors, Wilson persuaded Macainsh to change a line in the title track from “I feel like a call-girl who’s never been had” to “I feel like a good time that’s never been had”.
The ban actually pleased Michael Gudinski. “Any other record company would have been panicking about this, but when all the songs got banned, I thought, ‘This is fantastic! If they want the record, they’re gonna have to buy it; they’re not gonna hear it all over the radio.’”
And I get paid for just being a freak
Before the success of Skyhooks, music in Australia was like a glorified hobby. But as Red Symons reflects, “We legitimised the idea of being an Australian band.”
Before the Hooks landed, very few acts made a living from making music. Shirl, a carpenter, hedged his bets and continued working for his dad for three months before committing to the band full-time. Red Symons was a school teacher for a couple of days a week. Drummer Freddy Strauks had a job at Telecom as a maintenance computer programmer. He committed to the band only when Gudinski guaranteed he would make $80 a week. Even when the Hooks hit number one, Shirl was still living at home with his mum and dad.
Hey boy, it’s Balwyn calling
Skyhooks’ songs exploded the cultural cringe, opening ears to truly Australian material. Greg Macainsh wrote about his natural habitat – the suburbs – with the album featuring references to Carlton, Toorak, Balwyn and South Yarra.
“He actually mentioned Australian suburbs without a hint of national inferiority,” wrote The Music’s Christie Eliezer, who was one of the first rock writers to analyse Macainsh’s lyrics. “His style can be intellectual without being pseudo-poetical or pretentious, and basic without being moronic.”
Sammy Clyde provided a vivid description of Macainsh’s songwriting in The Nation Review: “At last it’s happened: a view of Australia from behind the bars, from the inside. No more Goondiwindi Greys, Brisbane to Beechworths, Redbacks on toilet seats, or Highway 31s. This is urban Melbourne in the flesh, minus exterior gloss. To listen to Skyhooks bite their way through Living In The 70’s is to justify the existence of Valium.”
I need another pill to calm me down
Reflecting on the mid-70’s in Australia, John Watson – who would later become the manager of Missy Higgins, Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel – said it was a time of that most dangerous rejoinder:
“Why not?”
“People were eager for change, for things that were new,” Greg Macainsh says. “They were just kind of looking, for whatever was fresh and different. And that’s what we were. And I don’t think we were different for the sake of it. We were different in a reactionary sense.”
Was this the greatest time ever for Australian music?
Living In The 70’s emerged one month before Countdown started. Skyhooks performed the title track on the show’s first episode. Three months after the album was released, 2JJ started broadcasting in Sydney, with Skyhooks’ You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good In Bed, the first song played on the station.
In March 1975, colour TV was officially launched in Australia – with Johnny Farnham introducing Skyhooks on Countdown. RAM (Rock Australia Magazine) hit the newsstands in March 1975, with Skyhooks as its first local cover. And Juke followed in May 1975, with Shirley Strachan on the first cover.
A dog named Skyhooks
The cultural impact of Living In The 70’s was immense. It became the first local album to top the national charts since Daddy Cool’s debut in 1971.
Australia’s leading playwright David Williamson observed: “Our film, television, drama, literature and music had exploded simultaneously in an unselfconscious celebration of the fact that we could and would create our own reflections on our own lives and landscapes, and Skyhooks’ Living In The 70’s album captured that mood of expressive optimism perfectly.”
The Williamson family loved the band. “We liked the originality of the music, the wry cleverness of Macainsh’s lyrics, and we liked the fact that they were an intelligent band with edge. We liked them so much that, in a rare instance of family unanimity, we called our dog after them. What greater testimonial to a band’s impact could a family offer?”
Horror movie, right there on my TV
Current affairs legend Mike Willesee took a moral stance when Skyhooks appeared on his TV show in 1975. “They sing about going to bed together, masturbation, smut and orgasms,” Willesee stated. “Many parents are disturbed.”
When the TV presenter asked, “Would it bother you if you thought that you did lead youngsters astray?” Shirl laughed, and Red replied with his own question: “Is orgasm and masturbation necessarily astray?”
“I mean, we all do it, don’t we?” Greg added.
“Come on,” Shirl challenged Willesee, “tell the people out there. Go on, do ya?”
Sexist? What’s wrong with being sexy?
Steve Hill struggled with the lyrical content of some of the songs on Living In The 70’s, particularly Motorcycle Bitch, You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good In Bed and Balwyn Calling.
“The songs were great lyrically, with the exception of those songs,” Hill said. “They were just really off.” Five decades on, some of the lyrics are certainly problematic. You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good In Bed takes a nasty turn when Shirl sings: “You imagine yourself as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend/ He wouldn’t even spit in your eye” and an even more problematic line. While in Motorcycle Bitch, “She rides a bike like she rides a man/ Slip the clutch and gimme full throttle/ Open your legs, pass another bottle.”
Whatever happened to the revolution?
“The Hooks album just sold and sold and sold and sold,” Ross Wilson smiles. “It was the start of the whole acceptance of Australian music that did have a local identity.”
But the sales success presented its own set of problems. In 1975, RAM editor Anthony O’Grady wrote about a conversation he had with a Mushroom staffer. “I don’t think it’s wise for them to make a second album,” the staffer said. “It’s just gonna get slagged.”
As the band was becoming over-exposed in Australia, Gudinski trumpeted a “$1.5 million deal” with Mercury Records in the US, a contract covering ten albums in five years.
“When they go to the US, it’ll turn out as sure as anything that they’ll be the band that everyone’s waiting for,” Christie Eliezer wrote. “And when they burst open the scene there, it will be like the Liverpool area after the Beatles … it’s the break that the Australian music industry will need. Go Skyhooks.”
Even Elton John was on board. “In my opinion, Skyhooks are most definitely ‘living in the 70s’,” he said on LA radio. “Like in the early ’60s when a place called Liverpool turned the eyes and ears of the world with the Beatles, the ’70s could very well see Melbourne become the city of tomorrow’s music world.”
Skyhooks did 37 shows in the US in 1976. Mercury released the band’s second album, Ego Is Not A Dirty Word, as the Hooks’ US debut (including two tracks from Living In The 70’s, Horror Movie and You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good In Bed). But the critics saw them as a pale imitation of KISS – a band the Hooks had never seen.
“Skyhooks, to be blunt, is without a single redeeming quality,” the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jack Lloyd wrote in a piece headed ‘Skyhooks Can Go Back Home’. Paul Westmore, of the Niagara Falls Gazette, believed the band “came off with a tired cacophonous sound that went nowhere”. While The Tribune’s Joe Raymond reviewed the band’s show with Uriah Heep: “Leading off was Skyhooks, Australia’s greatest disaster since Frank Sinatra made his last tour.”
Skyhooks never did get to release those ten albums in America. Mercury released their third album, Straight In A Gay Gay World, retitling it Living In The 70’s, but it failed to crack the US charts.
The Hooks limped home from America, more than $90,000 in the red. Red Symons exited the band after the Straight album, while Shirley Strachan departed after the fourth album. The band enjoyed some successful re-formations before Shirl died in a helicopter crash in 2001. He was 49.
Living In The 70’s remains the band’s masterwork. Fifty years on, it still thrills. As Peter Garrett notes, “Some music just jumps out of the speakers, some bands just jump out of the box, some even write their own script and break the mould – Skyhooks were one of those bands.”
And the words of Whatever Happened To The Revolution? still resonate.
“And now today everyone’s a bit older,” Shirley Strachan sings. “We’re gettin’ richer but we’re getting colder.
“We’re lookin’ for somethin’ that just ain’t there, and it don’t mean nothin’ to have long hair.
“So, when you’re ready to make a stand, open your mouth and raise your hand … Get off your arses, I’ll see you out in the streets.”
