Larry Schwartz
HENRI BOURCE has “nearly stepped off the perch a couple of times”. But the63-year-old saxophonist is determined to keep on playing in a rock ‘n’ roll band. He told his oncologist that, despite leukemia, he’s got a show to do, “so I’m not going yet”. If not by much, Bource is the oldest of
five players in a pioneering Australian rock band, the Thunderbirds. They have been rehearsing for a performance this month that will mark an almost forgotten milestone in the emergence of Australian rock ‘n’ roll.
Ten children and eight grandchildren on, the Thunderbirds have released a new album and will return to one of their early venues, Preston Town Hall, to celebrate the 41st anniversary of their “first ever appearance”.
Once they were among the biggest stars in a fledgling industry. Wild Weekend, New Orleans Beat and Machine Gun were just a few of the top-10 hits they enjoyed in their heyday in the late 1950s and early ’60s. They toured with visiting artists including Dion, Fabian, Jack Scott, Ray Peterson
and Roy Orbison.
Drummer Harold Frith, 61, founded the band when he placed a newspaper ad for players in 1957.
He remembers the stars, and says the more talented were always the more obliging. “The people who’ve got a big ego and not much talent, they’re the trouble makers. They’re the ones who are hard to get on with.”
Among the most difficult was the young Helen Shapiro. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, was courteous, less sophisticated than some. “We did his first tour around Australia, and he was that impressed with the backing that he wanted to take the whole group with him to America,” Bource
says. “But the problem was we wouldn’t have been able to get green cards. That’s why the whole thing came to grief.”
Frith adds: “Roy Orbison was a wonderful person. A real gentleman. Over here, there’s pictures of us with Roy Orbison. Later on that year, there were pictures of the Beatles with Roy Orbison. They (the Beatles) have done rather better than we have. But back then, we weren’t all that far apart.”
They credit Melbourne DJ Stan Rofe with helping them secure a recording contract, with W&G Records, by promising airplay at a time when the music industry was reluctant to gamble on local artists.
The Thunderbirds backed Johnny Chester, Johnny O’Keefe, Merv Benton, Betty McQuade, Noel Watson and Normie Rowe. They have fond memories of O’Keefe, who died in the late 1970s. “He wasn’t such a great singer, but what he was was a hell of a showman,” Frith says. “When the
Americans used to come, he’d wipe the floor with them . . . “
Touring with him was “tremendously hectic,” says Bource. “He’d turn up late for rehearsal and say, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, I’m Johnny O’Keefe’. He had a great opinion of himself.”
The band made its first TV appearance in September 1959 on The Swallows Show, hosted by Bert Newton. A Dutch migrant, who came to Melbourne from the Hague in his teens, Bource remembers the days when the Thunderbirds were regularly featured with Ian Turpie on The Go Show
and Teen Scene, compered by Johnny Chester.
Bource lost his left leg in a shark attack near a seal colony between Port Fairy and Warrnambool. “Nearly spoiled my day, it did,” he says. “I was back on air about three weeks later. Johnny Chester welcomed me back. The band used to stand on a raised platform. The camera panned over
to this Henri with one leg and all the band pulled one leg up. So there were five guys standing on one leg.”
A largely instrumental group, the Thunderbirds were overtaken by musical change. Trained jazz and classical players, they had already crossed one musical divide, to rock. Frith remembers that others of their era grew their hair and changed style. “We either didn’t or couldn’t,” he says. “And
that was the finish of us. So the English beat mowed us down.”
But the Thunderbirds never really went away. Though one joined the air force, another went to work on Bass Strait oil rigs, and yet another went on the road for a firm selling materials used by design engineers, each man kept at his music and remained in the industry, one as musical
arranger, another as guitar maker. They’ve been around in one band or another, from the Stranglers to Right on the Night, in which some play on occasions.
Historians may quibble, but 29 August 1957 should be noted as a milestone in Australian rock ‘n’ roll. On that Saturday night, the Thunderbirds made their debut at Ascot Vale West Progress Hall and, they insist, “rock exploded in Melbourne”.
Guitarist Laurie Bell, 58, was an apprentice fitter and turner at the time. He remembers preparations for the big night. He’d lugged his tub and brushes around the inner suburbs and was drenched in glue from slapping up hand-bills on poles when a police car pulled up.
“And this copper got out and came over to us and said, ‘Do you realise that what you are doing is illegal?’ He said, ‘You better hurry up and put the rest of them up and get out of here before we book you’.”
The youngsters billed themselves “Kings of Rock ‘n’ Roll”. Frith laughs out loud at his presumption in writing this at the time. “There wasn’t anyone else. You know, go for broke.”
General merriment follows in St Kilda’s Esplanade Hotel where the five, who were either in the original line-up (Frith and Bell) or recruited within a year, have met to record a live album and reminisce about the days when they turned from jazz riffs and classical arpeggios to raucus rock ‘n’
roll.
They played their first show in the winter of a year in which Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira was made the exception among his people in being granted full Australian citizenship; Denmark’s Joern Utzon won the design competition for the Sydney Opera House; and Patrick White’s Voss
took out the inaugural Miles Franklin Award.
“You were mentioning about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in the ’70s,” says keyboard player Murray Robertson, 58. “When we were working . . . in the late ’50s and early ’60s, people were dealing with sly grog shops. I can remember one at Essendon where you used to pull up at a guy’s back
gate and unload cartons of VB out the back of his shed. It was six-o’clock closing. As soon as these pubs closed, all these dances go on. People had to get the booze from somewhere.”
Their first outing attracted a big crowd among sons and daughters of World War II veterans who’d gained Housing Commission houses in Broadmeadows. “A pretty small beginning,” says Frith. “We didn’t have any money for security. So I let the local toughs, Birko and Junior, in for nothing
to control the crowds. To cut a long story short, we ran for a couple of months and then the police closed us down. There were fights. There was a lot of trouble at rock ‘n’ roll dances.”
He remembers the mood of the times. “There was a full moon one night over Melbourne,” he says. “They were playing Blackboard Jungle simultaneously in about half-a-dozen theatres. The kids went mad. They were ripping seats up. I was sitting in the Waratah Theatre in Moonee Ponds.
It happened there, too. The papers were shocked and horrified. Teenagers all of a sudden became important. They suddenly realised they had a bit of power. That was the genesis of how it has become ever since.”
Peter Robinson, 57, met Frith on a train home to Pascoe Vale one night. He was playing double bass with the Victorian Symphony Orchestra at the time. “I had my bass. He said, ‘Well, why don’t you come and play with me? I’ve got a rock band.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ ” Robinson’s parents were
not too impressed when he swapped to a makeshift electric bass – a slab of wood strung with piano wire – constructed by Bell. They had their own ideas on rock ‘n’ roll. “They actually threw me out of the house, took all the stuff in my room, threw it on the front lawn,” says Robinson.
He rang Robertson, who plays keyboards in the band. “He came to get me in his little green van. Put all my records, my record player, and my clothes and books and stuff, and I went off to live in a flat with a couple of guys.
“My mum said to me, ‘The last thing I ever expected would happen to me was my son would go and play the devil’s music and join a rock ‘n’ roll band.’ It was pretty serious stuff in those days. All these rebels running around the streets. And that was how I joined the Thunderbirds. I had
nowhere to live.”
BELL WAS a classically trained violinist before turning to guitar. “I was involved in a church group and Bible study class and I found very quickly that, once I started playing rock ‘n’ roll, a lot of people who I thought were really good friends from the church wiped me like a dirty nose.”
For a while, they were resident at the old Earl’s Court, in St Kilda. Frith was afraid to walk the streets. “Back in the late ’50s, there were bodgies (male) and widgies (female),” Frith recalls. “They had long hair and Canadian jackets, draped suits, very wide and very long and often a key chain
hanging down. Blue suede shoes, thick crepe soles.
“They used to wear ‘ming blue’ suits. That was the color. And ‘Presley purple’ was one they tried to foist upon the people. Widgies had short, bobbed hair and ducktails slicked back similar to the boys. And tight dresses. They had to pass an initiation ceremony that the bodgies thought up,
which I won’t go into in any great detail, except that it involved quite a few bodgies.”
It was while playing at Preston Town Hall that they encountered the Sharpies. Robinson remembers them as “like a gang that used to wear top-notch clothing. Boxer coats, little cashmere polo shirts, very well-tailored pants. And everyone got hand-tailored pointy shoes from the Italian
shops in Brunswick or Smith Streets.”
The Thunderbirds graduated from green shirts with white stripes to red coats with black lapels and, finally, black suits. “We decided we’d be menacing, sophisticated,” Frith says. They have had similar suits made since they decided to play together again.
Bource and his wife, Liz, are organising this month’s show. Robinson is looking after publicity. Robertson has the job of sending out the mail. “In other words, we’re all just pitching in,” says Frith, who laughingly describes himself as “the executive supremo . . . and bullshit artist”.
He is adamant that they’re not trying to relive the past. “As far as we’re concerned, it’s just another day at the office,” he says, laughing. “We played up to then. Then there was a bit of a break. Thirty years or something. And now we’ve just picked it up.”
The Age 08th of August 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 