Stan Azzopardi was 15 when he fell for ’50s rock’n’roll. He quit his day job to play in a band. Now, at 50, he needs the day job, but he and his fellow fortysomethings rock on. Larry Schwartz reports.
IT WAS 1959, the year of the launch of the Mini Minor, the opening of the Myer Music Bowl. Neale Fraser, Roy Emerson and Rod Laver triumphed in the Davis Cup, Jack Brabham became world Grand Prix champion. `My Fair Lady’ opened in Australia, Cliff Richard’s `Living Doll’ topped the
charts.
The year Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and Big Bopper died in a plane crash, a fledgling rock’n’roll band was starting out in Melbourne with instruments including a bass instrument fashioned from a tea chest.
The Premiers became regulars at southern-suburbs dances. Their big moment came in March 1963, when their instrumental version of `Mary Had a Little Lamb’ made it to number 40 on the charts.
One of the players was Stan Azzopardi, a Maltese-born teenager who knew a lot of piano accordion and a lot less guitar. “If someone told me 30 years ago that I’d be playing the same music and enjoying it and getting money for it when I’m 50, I would
have said, `You’re crazy’,” says the balding guitarist, lone survivor in a reformed Premiers.
“But here I am doing just that, you know.
Azzopardi uses the word “pure” when talking about the music he heard courtesy of Stan “the Man” Rofe on 3KZ in the old days. “Now here I am at the age of 15. All this exciting music comes along. `Rock Around the Clock’, `Heartbreak Hotel’, `That’ll Be the Day’. It was all so exciting.
Their first gig in ’59 was the Mordialloc Surf Life Saving Club.
Theirs was the music of Del Shannon, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Bobby Darin, Duane Eddy, Bill Haley and the Comets, the Everly Brothers. Still is.
Thirty years after their nursery-rhyme hit, the Premiers have a Saturday night gig at the Duke of Norfolk Room, Prince of Wales Stand, Flemington Racecourse. Once again, Melbourne’s veteran ’50s-style band is in full swing.
The lead singer wanders among the dancers, sporting a crafted sheen of ducktail hairdo, polka-dot tie, double-breasted blue-black suit. When he waggles a white-on-black shoe he had made to match Presley’s in `Jailhouse Rock’, the tailor-made trousers billow about his leg.
On stage, the band wears pink jackets with black lapels, some with ornamental gold instruments. The sax player leans back, back, back on heels of pointed pink-and-black rock’n’roll shoes, closes his eyes and blows. The bass-guitarist kicks up his heels and grins.
The lead guitar player is hunched over his prized red ’59 model Gibson 335, the drummer whacking away at a kit emblazoned with blue stars and the leaning-tower-of-a-keyboard player’s mouth right up against the mike: “Hep!, hep!, hep!” Though the decline of the town-hall dances and
more complex music of the Beatles in the mid-1960s would make the likes of the Premiers seem passe, several of the original players have persevered in the industry. Stan Azzopardi went on to the Paul McKay Sound, the S.A.
Classix, the Allstars. The Premiers re-emerged two years ago with two originals (saxophone player Ken Semple has since quit) and mainly veterans of ’50s and early ’60s Melbourne bands.
Tonight, past the hour when the coach turns back into a pumpkin, a Cinderella is stranded on the dance floor at Flemington, writhing in too-tight, besparkled dress. Shirt-tail peeping from his jacket, a Prince Charming jives puppet-like _ all knees, elbows and chin.
Nearby, a barrel-shaped-in-bow-tie dancer wields a tattoed forearm and yells: “Jailhouse Rock or else!” The Premiers have endured a five-and-a-half hour wait from their arrival to set up equipment (they don’t earn enough to afford roadies) before they get to play to Sydney Swans supporters
at a testimonial dinner for recently retired captain Dennis Carroll.
Outside in the darkness, an electronic tickertape-type machine repeats a welcome to the Swans. Inside, white-clothed tables with red paper napkins, red and white balloons. Coach Ron Barassi is here. General manager Barry Rogers. Victorian State Football League general manager Ken
Gannon. Ron Joseph, of the New South Wales Football League. Swans heroes past and present. Greg “Diesel” Williams. Barry Mitchell. Rod “Tilt” Carter and Anthony Daniher. Many a supporter here from the days when the club was South Melbourne, the Lake Oval its home ground, will know
1959 as the year that Bobby Skilton won the first of his three Brownlow medals.
When Stan Azzopardi was a kid, local bands included the Planets and the Thunderbirds. “There was a very good band then called the Autocrats,” says Azzopardi, now a chemical company sales rep. “They got their name from their drum kit. OK? Our drummer was Joe Gatt. He had a `Premier’
drum kit …
The Premiers are meticulous in their attention to recreating sound and dress. “Essentially, we’re an amateur band but individually and collectively the approach isn’t that at all,” says drummer Mal Ronay, who has played with bands including the Bobby James Syndicate and Maori
Showband.
“When people come in they look up at the stage. That’s where they have to be looking back in time. They’re coming to a ’50s dance. They want to live ’50s. So it’s up to us more than anyone in the place to project that image.
Just 39, Ronay’s bandmates playfully tagged him “the Kid” when we sat in on rehearsal earlier in the week at Azzopardi’s east-suburban home. Luckily, countered Ronay, who sells office furniture, “the ’50s didn’t arrive until the ’70s” in his home town, Mount Gambier. And had not gone yet,
someone else piped up.
Stan Azzopardi: “One good thing we got in our favor is that we got no competition. All the artists we’re copying, they’re all dead .. they don’t do anything to change their style.
IN THE Premiers’ heyday, saxophonist Chris Anderson, now a 46-year-old draughtsman, was with a band called the Cavemen, whose members sported leopard-skin jerkins. On bass guitar, Ray Houston, 48, is purchasing officer with an engineering company. As a youngster, he played
western suburbs dances with a sextet, the Blue Jays. In 1962, he would co- found the Fendermen, taking its name from a top American guitar manufacturer.
Keyboard player Andrew King, 46, TAFE teacher, would follow a band called the Viscounts around “and occasionally they would let me play”. In 1964, he joined an instrumental band called the Memphis Men. “They were awful,” he says.
An instrumental band in an era when the charts were dominated briefly by the likes of the Shadows, the Ventures and Duane Eddy, the Premiers accompanied singers Bobby Cookson (their first guitarist)and Betty McQuade in the studio where they recorded their one song to become a hit.
These days they back several lead vocalists. Singer Tony Calcagno, who has been doing “Elvis shows” for 11 years, has played Presley in peppermint and radiator commercials on TV. At 26, he says he was “not even a twinkle in dad’s eye” when the original Premiers were around.
The band plays three nights a week for about $100 each a gig.
Weddings, parties, anything? The Premiers say they will play most, and with gusto, whatever the size of the audience. Venues these days include Pitrones in Keysborough, Carrum RSL and Just Rock in Kilsyth.
“A lot of the gigs we play are either 15 or 50-year-olds,” says Ray Houston, who was playing what he calls continental music at migrants’ functions until he got the call from Azzopardi to reform the band.
“Fifty per cent of each. My daughter just turned 18 and I took her to a couple of gigs. Can’t go out without her now.
Azzopardi recently turned down an offer to play a week-night in Moe because they would get back late. Must be able to get in time for work the next day.
“Not to say it isn’t hard on family life,” Andrew King says at a mid-week rehearsal. “There are some of the few musos I know in this room, who are married to their first spouse … There are an awful lot of people who are not, and it’s because it’s so hard on family life.
Married for 28 years, Azzopardi recalls that he retired from the Premiers when the first of his four sons was born. “Then the wife realised it’s like a drug. You just can’t keep from it. She’s so immune to it. She’s happy for me to be playing in a band. She knows what I love doing. She watches
the football while I go and play the guitar.
Azzopardi remembers quitting his day job at 18 to concentrate full- time on the band. “We were doing every night of the week at Rosebud and Tootgarook. My day job was selling clothing at Alexanders. I said to my boss, `I need my Christmas holidays at Christmas’. And he said, `You can’t
have them’. He said, `You’ve got to choose …
“I said, `You’re making it very easy for me because I’m getting 12 pound a week …’ _ and you can quote this in the paper if you want to _ 12 pound a week was my day job and earning 25 pound a week out of my music. So I gave up my day job and never looked back. That lasted a year and
a half living off the band. Until some bastard _ I mean that accurately _ stole all my band equipment out of my FJ Holden, which I bought off my dad, and I had to get a quick day job to buy some more.
Back in ’59, the Premiers took half the two shillings-per-person entrance fee on Sunday nights at Mordialloc Surf Life Saving Club.
They would play Malvern Town Hall on Saturday nights and Festival Hall on the same bill as Johnny O’Keefe, the Delltones, Jay Justin, Dinah Lee, Lana Cantrell, Mark Wynter and Normie Rowe.
For some in the band, there is a sense of recapturing the past. “To me it’s like back in the old Melbourne Town Hall days and all that sort of stuff,” says Ray Houston. “To me, when we’re playing, I’m remembering what it was like. It’s probably musically better than it was then. Let’s face it,
we were kids then.
Andrew King, however, talks of “a re-creation of something that never was”. “It’s how people imagine the ’50s were. I mean, it might have been like that somewhere in the world. But the late ’50s and the early ’60s were never like that here.
“We used to daydream about going back to Canterbury then. But, in reality if you did that, you’d be so disappointed by the horrible sound. It would sound so thin and horrible probably …
Chris Anderson reckons it wouldn’t be all that bad. “You went to the town hall to dance, or to fight _ that used to happen a lot, too _ and also to show off your car because everyone would park their car along the front.
Ray Houston recalls: “You wore peg trousers. They were black with fleck in them. You had your Mitchell blue shirt on after Guy Mitchell, your Perry Como cardigan or Ivy League cardigan. They were the clothes then. Rock’n’roll dances like Heidelberg or Collingwood, whatever. You had a
roped-off area where you could jive. You couldn’t jive in the main ballroom.
Andrew King wonders what became of a sign saying “NO JIVING THIS SIDE OF THE HALL” at the rock’n’roll dances at the Canterbury Ballroom.
THE Premiers arrive at the Flemington function room at 6pm. It takes an hour or more to set up. First, the large pink-on-black “THE PREMIERS” banner must go up at the back of the stage. Then the gear, the lighting, the PA. Everyone pitches in. Azzopardi is adamant that the sound must
be just right.
They had expected to go on about 8pm. This was not to be be. They would have to wait until after 11.30. “Hey, bow ties tonight, OK,” says Azzopardi, as they wander, suit bags over shoulders, in search of an elusive change room at 7.50pm. They have to settle for an area where serving staff
are relaxing, amid stacks of cups and saucers and ashtrays, boxes of knives and forks and spoons.
Most guests are seated by 8.35pm. The Master of ceremonies, radio announcer Peter “Grubby” Stubbs, tells supporters they are in for some great entertainment from the “very talented” singer Lisa Edwards, coincidentally backed on keyboards tonight by Azzopardi’s eldest son, Robert.
No mention of the Premiers.
Singer Tony has his head in his hands. Ray sits stoically, arms folded about his chest. The marinated rockling salad with pear tomatoes and lettuce hearts are set upon the tables. The loin of pork seasoned with caramelised apples served with shredded ginger sauce … still no Premiers.
Then the tributes to Dennis Carroll, teammates’ mischievous anecdotes and career details blow-by-blow. Time slipping away, the band huddles outside the function room, Andrew King hurriedly rewriting the song list for an abbreviated show.
It is 10.45pm and Carroll, receiving a hand-painted photograph of himself, is preparing to respond. Lisa Edwards has been and gone.
Finally, 11.32, drummer Mal Ronay’s “one-two, one-two-three-four” starts `Mr Bass Man’, the first song in two sets that would end close to 1.30am.
The Swans supporters love it. They are out there dancing, mouthing every word of every song. `Peter Gunn’, `Rip It Up’, `Twistin’ The Night Away’, `Don’t Be Cruel’. Tony’s voice soars at the end of `Unchained Melody’. `The Wanderer’, `Kissin’ Cousins’, `R.O.C.K’.
After a raffle, a video of career highlights and dessert, the second set starts with the instrumental, `Tequila’. By the time they have packed to head back to suburbia, it is close to 3am.
Stan Azzopardi says he wants to keep going full-time after he has retired from his job in five or 10 years. Where does it all end for a band of old rockers? “Tobin Brothers might call it a day,” says Ray Houston. “We won’t.
The Sunday Age 15th of August 1993
Larry Schwartz Writer 