Let’s do the Time Warp again – the Thunderbirds are back, writes Larry Schwartz.
BEFORE their first gig in the spring of 1957, the Thunderbirds printed handbills hailing themselves the “kings of rock’n’roll”.
“Nothing but cocky,” says drummer Harold Frith, 70, who this week recalled their Saturday night debut at a packed Ascot Vale West Progress Hall.
“Were these guys our founding fathers?” says promotional material for a 50th anniversary tour by the pioneering rock’n’roll band that prides itself on being the first by a Melbourne group to have a song on the charts – (Wild Weekend, which reached No. 14 in February 1961).
Grandfathers now, guitarist Laurie Bell, a part-time guitar-maker, turns 70 later this year; keyboard player Murray Robertson, 66, trains horses; and Peter Robinson, 65, the “baby of the group”, who made his first electric bass from a slab of wood strung with piano wire, is doing a TAFE course
on computers.
From the original Thunderbirds line-up or recruited within a year, Melbourne’s “original rock’n’rollers” have a new album out soon and are about to hit the road starting with an afternoon “warm-up show” at the Rattlers Hotel in Wallan East next weekend.
Frith, who had placed a newspaper ad for players, and Bell, among the first to respond, were in the original line-up at the Ascot Vale West venue at which they let local toughs, Hirko and Junior, in for free to control the crowd.
“Laurie did (Eddie Cochrane’s) Twenty Flight Rock,” says Frith at Fitzroy’s Rainbow Hotel, where they will play next month with singer Marcie Jones. “Since then, it’s been done to death and Peter says every bar band in the world has done it. I think because we did it before them, maybe it
should still get a guernsey.”
The band featured classical and jazz-trained players who turned to rock – “rhythmically it got to me, I’d have to say,” Bell explains – and played five times a week to packed crowds at Earl’s Court in St Kilda to fans in “Canadian jackets”, blue suede shoes and stovepipe pants.
The Thunderbirds were regularly featured with Ian Turpie on The Go Show and Teen Scene, compered by Johnny Chester.
They were veterans by the time they supported Roy Orbison, Ray Peterson, Dion, and Cliff Richard and the Shadows in late 1961.
Frith prizes an autographed airline ticket from Orbison, to “a great drummer”.
Backing Orbison as he sang Crying at the Sydney Stadium, was, he says, “the high point of my musical career”. Everything changed for the Thunderbirds with the emergence of a new group from Liverpool.
“All over the world, all these bands became Beatles clones,” Frith says. “Because we had our own style, we just went off and did other things.”
The Thunderbirds continued their musical careers separately over the decades. The Rainbow Hotel has photos and posters on its walls of Max Merritt and the Meteors, the Groop, Tim Rogers, Matt Walker, “Japanese blues cowboy” George Kamikawa and others.
Next to the men’s toilet is a photograph of the veteran band in a red Ford Thunderbird convertible when they last reunited in 1998.
Also in the picture is the saxophone player, Henri Bource, who lost his left leg in a shark attack near Warrnambool. Bource died soon after that reunion.
Harold Frith recently visited America with a group of music enthusiasts. He visited RCA Studio B in Nashville, where the Everly Brothers, Orbison and others once recorded.
In New Orleans, he saw Jerry Lee Lewis, Allen Touissaint and Frankie Ford, who had a massive hit in 1959 with Sea Cruise. He saw percussionist Candido at New York’s Blue Note club and played with a zydeco band in Lafayette.
Frith works out at a gym three times a week. “Here’s what I say; you don’t have to grow old if you don’t want to,” he says. “We’re playing better than we ever did.”
The Age 19th of May 2007
Larry Schwartz Writer 