Thirty-five years after they started playing together Tommy and Phil Emmanuel recorded their first album. Larry Schwartz reports.
“WORLD’S YOUNGEST GUITARISTS” said the sign on a rear door of their dad’s old station wagon. Other kids could only gawk when the Emmanuel Quartet or Midget Surfaries, as they were later known, came to town.
“Because we were playing instruments and we were already fairly good at it, doing television and stuff, young kids didn’t know how to handle that and they were s-o-o jealous” Tommy Emmanuel recalls. Kids would corner him, chanting some insult or other.
Big brother Phil, 42, betrays a protectiveness. “Yeah, but I used to punch the s . . . out of them.”
They were never bullies, he says. But if pushed . . . “Remember that time in Wyalong, that kid said, `Go on, hit me in the chin, hit me in the chin’? Remember? I kept looking at the chin and went bang right in the guts. Dropped him like a maggot.”
The only two of the original four still in the music business, the brothers have just put out their first duo album in 35 years of playing together. From recent photos of them to the fresh-faced guitar-wielding boys in old snapshots, the family resemblance is strong.
Yet up close, the brothers are also strikingly different. Though both have lived hard, Tommy, 39, has the chubbier look of success befitting a star with an Aria award-winning album and popularity in America where a single remained at number five on the adult contemporary charts for six weeks.
Phil, on the other hand, has the look of the hardened pro playing his licks in pubs to the backing of a DATT (digital audio tape) machine that simulates the sound of a band.
The younger brother has the glitter of ambition in the eye; the older, pacing around a room in Sony’s South Carlton offices when we meet, impatient with the publicity hoopla if no less proud of their work.
“Now, you’ve only got to look at our lifestyles,” says Tommy, once a frequent abuser of alcohol and cocaine. “Phil is a lot different person to me . . . I don’t really like to drink that much anymore.
Phil likes to have a drink, he likes to smoke. He’s happy playing where he plays . . . It’s a different market, a different style of person you see.”
THEY come from the New South Wales country town of Gunnedah, where their dad worked as as an engineer for CSIR0 and managed bands on the side. The Emmanuel children’s lives would be changed forever after he arrived home one day in 1959 with a Maton solid-body guitar now on display at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and soon after resolved to take his kids on the road as a travelling band.
A World War II airman who had been shot down over the Kokoda Trail in the Coral Sea Battle, Hugh Emmanuel had come back from the war with a heart condition and died in 1966. By then he had made his children a phenomenon in the music scene.
When you talk to Phil and Tommy, there is no sense that their dad exerted the kind of exploitative influence associated with fathers of rock prodigies. Even if Tommy concedes he was “pretty strict which is a good way to be. You never crossed him or anything”.
An instrumental band fronted by Phil (lead guitar) with Tommy playing rhythm as he still tends to do when they get together, brother Chris on drums and sister Virginia on Hawaiian pedal steel guitar, they took their music through a succession of venues around NSW and Queensland.
“We were lucky because we were born at the right time,” says Phil, who remembers that an early song they learned was the Shadows’ `Apache’. Though wary of playing in bands, he is putting together a group to play predominantly covers of songs by an early idol, Hank B.
Marvin, who fronted the Shadows.
“When we were old enough to pick up guitars and play, there was always something on the radio that was worth learning. We’d put a record on and listen to that and I would hear what the lead was doing and Tommy would hear the rhythm . . . We’d learn how one instrument would complement the other, to play harmony lines and things like that.”
The endless round of tent-shows and other venues was taken for granted by 1966 when the family stopped for a while in the Queensland cane town of Ingham, where Virginia now runs an animal rescue service and Chris works for the council’s parks and gardens department. This would be the first time the brothers attended school. Until then, a singer they worked with gave them lessons on the road.
“There were people who would talk about going all the way down to Mackay,” Phil says, “. . . which was six and-a-half, seven hours’ drive. To them that was a long way. But to us a long drive was from Broken Hill to Perth.”
There was a rain storm the day the brothers went back recently to pose for sleeve photographs in the old town where American servicemen celebrating the Battle of the Coral Sea victory are said to have inspired a local man, Dan Sheahan, to write the hit song, `Pub With No Beer’.
Phil: “It’s weird going back there. When you do, you realise how narrow-minded small towns are.”
Tommy: “How pleased you are to be away from it.”
Phil: “It’s a nice place to visit . . .”
Tommy shows a picture of them taken on the veranda of Ingham’s Station Hotel. Then there is one of their old fibro house. “Mum and dad slept in the back room. Phil planted that palm tree.”
The brothers share passions, including the work of the legendary American guitar picker, Chet Atkins, for whom Tommy once played an instrumental version of `The Road to Gundagai’. To Phil, their taste began to diverge in their 20s. when Tommy became enthralled with George Benson. He tended to favor Al Dimeola.
Even though the 16-track new album, `Terrafirma’, includes several self-penned songs, it abounds with influences, from jazz reminiscent of the likes of Larry Corryell to covers ranging from an AC/DC medley (`Riff Raff/Let There Be Rock’) to Mozart’s `Rondo A La Turka’. Also, there is a version of the `Last Post’, included to draw attention to Legacy, the charity that fed and clothed the family after their father’s death. “It’s just our way of tipping our hats,” Tommy says.
He and Phil have played together intermittently while pursuing separate projects. Phil has worked in the house band in the Texas Tavern, in Sydney’s King’s Cross, backed singer Gillian Eastoe and played with the band, Goldrush.
Tommy, who will resettle soon in Los Angeles with his wife, Jane, and young daughter, Amanda, is about to record an album with Slim Dusty. He has worked with other country stars, Buddy Williams and Reg Lindsay, backed singers Doug Parkinson and John Farnham, and emerged as a star, which is fairly uncommon for an instrumentalist.
“Just looking back over the last five years, I had a burning desire to get out of playing pubs and to be a concert player and to put out albums and whatever,” he says.
SALES for the Aria award-winning 1993 album, `The Journey’ (“104,300- and-something,” he says) exceeded by about 75,000 a Shadows album, until then the biggest-selling instrumental in Australia. He says it’s getting a lot of airplay and selling well in the US.
Tommy Emmanuel has been through a well-documented “pretty major problem with drugs and booze”, as he once put it.
He started using cocaine in the early 1980s. “I was not pushed into it but I was kind of egged into it by friends. And after a while, you have it every day and you work late hours and suddenly at four in the morning you think, Gee I’ve got to be up at 8.30. You just get on a bit of a treadmill.”
While he emerged from the years of drug and alcohol abuse, an elderly woman revived his interest in the Bible. He has found God, said so and attracted the attention of extremists among both Christians and Satanists. “My wife and I got mail from people saying, `We’re cursing you. We’re cursing your left hand. How is your hand?’ I’m not kidding.”
Then there were co-religionists “just thinking that they own you because you said once that you believed.
“After a while you either hang with those people all the time, have nothing to do with anybody else or you step back and look at the picture and go, I still belong in the world here . . .”
Tommy has been accused of a kind of glib showmanship. He says he and Sydney multi-instrumentalist James Morrison tag their critics The Jazz Police. “Jazz musicians call me a burlesque show or something like that. They hate the fact that when I go onstage people go nuts and when they go onstage people don’t. That’s it, to be honest.
“I was working with James one time and we were smoking. We had a great show. It was funny . . . It had beautiful light and shade, the whole thing . . . We were signing autographs after the show and a guy came up and said, `Look guys, the show was really good but it was a bit entertaining . . .”‘ With their national tour finishing with their Melbourne gig, the brothers have enjoyed working together. Phil, for one, generally dislikes the pressures that come with playing in a band.
“Every band I’ve been in, I’ve been the strongest member and I don’t like relying on people,” he says. “Working with Tommy, I can relax . . . I know I don’t have to worry about anything.”
THE SUNDAY AGE, 09-Apr-1995
Larry Schwartz Writer 