ASK anyone on the east coast about Australia’s great musical cities and they’re likely to tell you about Tamworth or Melbourne.

Chris Moss, former senior executive at Sony and Warner Music, says that’s a tragedy. Moss points to the city that made rock stars just 40 minutes north of Adelaide’s GPO.

“Elizabeth was incredibly significant,” says Moss.

“It was where the stone got dropped in the pond, and, as the ripples spread, the waves went throughout first of all Adelaide, and then went throughout Australia, and, inevitably, ended up going throughout the world.

“So the significance was really powerful and I think it’s something that isn’t recognised and is distinctly underestimated.”

Nashville, Liverpool, Detroit, sure — but don’t forget Elizabeth, the working class industrial centre built in 1955 that was a magnet for British migrants and their talented, ambitious, musical kids.

These days few know the full story, and many who think they do assume it starts and ends with Jimmy Barnes — who pays homage to his old stamping ground and its closed Holden factory, with his new song Shutting Down our Town.

But Barnesy was not Elizabeth’s first rock star — he just won the most glory.

Think of his older brother John “Swanee” Swan who spent time with Fraternity and Cold Chisel. There were The Cliffmores made up of the four Sutcliffe sisters who, though they were originally from Woomera, performed at the Salisbury Youth Centre.

Linda George had a successful solo career. Alan and Frank Tarney belonged to Johnny Broome and The Handels.

Glenn Shorrock and Terry Britten started their careers in The Twilights. Ronnie Peers started out at the age of 16 years old playing with Hard Time Killing Floor. Doug Ashdown hit paydirt with his beautiful, melancholic Winter in America. When another former Elizabeth local, Bernard ‘Doc’ Neeson later sang Am I ever gonna see your face again? as a member of The Angels, audiences across the nation, without fail, would answer: “No way, get f. ked, f. k off!”

These artists were immigrants and entrepreneurs.

They were working class kids looking for something more and willing to take a risk. Some tried and failed. Others became household names.

Many others did not, says Alan Hale.

Today the 74-year-old wears a white goatee beard, thin wire frame glasses and a flat cap. He talks slowly, gently.

Hale was at the centre of a revolution that started in 1963 when, on the boat from Wales, he played what may be one of the earliest DJ sets in Australian musical history.

He was just 19 and had been born in Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley, a coal town in the south.

He could count on one hand the number of times he had left the village, but then his father decided to move the family to Adelaide.

So Hale packed his record collection and boarded the SS Orcades.

About a week into the journey, the under-20s began to grow restless.

There wasn’t much to do at sea except sit around and talk. Hale saw an opportunity, and asked the captain to let him hold a dance.

He explained how down in the hold he had a record player and a pretty extensive collection. There were a few albums, but mostly ’45s.

The captain immediately agreed. That very night — and for every night for the rest of the trip — they danced.

The music arrived in Australia with a generation of immigrant teens who would change how the country thought about music.

All of them describe those first months in Australia as a surreal experience. Hale’s family moved in with his uncle at Elizabeth before finding a place of their own. “For the first six months I felt very uncomfortable living in Elizabeth,” Hale recalls. “So much was there for us, so much open space yet to be filled. And I didn’t quite know why I felt ill-at-ease and then one day the penny dropped: it was because the sky was so big.

“Where I came from the view of the sky was what you saw from the bottom of the valley when you look up and that was only about 40 degrees. We’ve got 180 degree view of the sky in Elizabeth.”

Unlike the old country, Australia was a place where anyone could do what they wanted, until they proved they couldn’t. While the emptiness of Elizabeth alienated some, others also sensed opportunity.

Linda George came out from Brighton, Sussex, with her family when she was 15 in 1964, before later going on to a solo career.

She starred in The Who’s rock opera Tommy, alongside the likes of Daryl Braithwaite and Colleen Hewitt.

“It was like coming to America in a way,” George says.

“Coming to Elizabeth, which was a desert, with hardly any public transport at all, was amazing. But there was nothing to do for teenagers. It was pretty difficult. There was lots and lots of work for adults, so the adults loved it.”

Music, as it turned out, would be a by-product of this industrial city with employers like General Motors-Holden bankrolling the period from 1963 through to 1974.

“We wouldn’t have survived without the industrial base because that’s where our bread and butter came from,” Hale says.

“The recreation was the playing of the music. The inspiration was what we heard overseas. Our young fellas had to work to pay the bills, to have the money, to get the guitars and then they had to play, play, play.”

It wasn’t long after Hale landed in Elizabeth that he started running dances, organising events at St Stephen’s Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth North.

He called it “The Hideaway Club”.

Hale quickly found playing records wasn’t enough. People wanted music live, so he started looking for bands. At that time, though, no one played original music.

They were all cover bands, copying what they had heard coming out of the UK to learn their craft. No one minded much.

The music they were playing still wouldn’t be released in Australia for another six months.

When crowds grew, Hale needed a bigger venue, so the Hideaway Club moved into the hall at St Peter’s Anglican Mission at the Elizabeth City Centre.

From there it would compete with other local events, such as that held further south at the Salisbury Youth Centre, where The Twilights would form.

As audiences grew, so did the ambitions of the bands and their managers. Soon it wouldn’t be enough to just play covers. Musicians began writing their own songs and dreaming of bigger things. Their managers looked south, to Adelaide, to find them bigger audiences.

About a year or so before The Beatles visited Adelaide in 1964, Hale arranged a meeting with famed local radio DJ Big Bob Francis.

He took two copies of The Beatles’ Please Please Me and played them. This was what was big in the UK, he told Francis. All the kids out north were listening to it. The Beatles were going to be the next big thing, and the DJ may want to play it on the radio.

“He thought it was a load of rubbish and he would not play it in a million years,” Hale says.

“A year later, things had changed, he was sponsoring the signing of a petition to bring The Beatles to Adelaide.”

Looking back, Hale thinks he was naive.

Someone recently told him that back then, the radio industry was pay-to-play.

As a result, music across Adelaide evolved differently. Instead of British rock and roll, the rest of the city had followed America’s lead, splitting between fifties style rock and instrumental surfie beats.

That would change as the new sound started to punch through. With the arrival of The Beatles, what was happening in Elizabeth bled south and the old venue operators and gatekeepers who once snubbed rock began to come around.

Hale joined them and opened his own venue downstairs at the east end of Rundle St, called The Beat Basement. Hale booked bands from up north like Blues Rags and Hollers, The Vikings and Music Express. Six nights a week, crowds of up to 300 people crammed into the venue.

By then Hale was managing several bands, holding down a day-job, raising a young family and still running events.

To keep everything organised he sat down at the kitchen table one day in late 1964 and drew up an exercise book to track who would play which venue and on what night.

The Central Booking Agency (CBA) would be formed out of Alan’s notebook and eventually hold a near monopoly over musical acts in the state.

Many of the bands and figures who would go onto bigger things passed through his doors. One night, Hale remembers Channel 7 asking to record a show at the venue for a band they were promoting.

“We said, ‘yes, fine, we’ll have them on stage’,” Hale says.

“Then The Bee Gees rolled up and played. They were just young kids. They even had a little difficulty in tuning their guitars. One of the guys helped them out with that.”

Hale wasn’t alone.

Across the city, a network of club owners were booking bands to play their venues. Among them was Alex Innocenti, an Italian migrant whose family moved into St Peters.

He had opened the Cellar Blues Club on Twin St where he initially booked jazz bands before moving into blues and underground music.

Ron Tremaine ran the Princeton Club out of the Greek Community Hall on Thursdays and the Burnside Town Hall on Saturday nights, which catered to the upper middle class.

Back north in Elizabeth, the Octagon opened in 1965, with a 1422 people-capacity, providing a critical mid-sized venue. Other venues in the suburbs included the St Clair Youth Centre in the west and the St Bernard Youth Centre in the east.

As the decade wound out, still more venues would open like Sergeant Peppers at 110 Flinders St. Jim Popov, who owned Big Daddy’s Disco in Gawler Place, would be one of the first in the country to import two Marshall amps when he flew them in to satisfy the demands of a band he managed called The James Taylor Move.

Anyone with a little talent and a lot of ambition suddenly had a reason to dream bigger. Fuelled by a steady stream of migrants, and with bars, pubs and clubs all competing to hold dances or bands, Elizabeth — and Adelaide — started to export musical talent, while also attracting the interest of big name bands from interstate.

“The thing was, what was happening in Adelaide in those days, it was the hub of music, thanks to those kids.

Other musicians from interstate tried to move to Adelaide because of all this,” says Innocenti. “Some people went to Melbourne to make more happen.”

Johnny Broome and The Handels, which formed in Elizabeth, moved to the UK for a time, though it didn’t work out.

Others looked east.

As a member of The James Taylor Move, Alan Tarney went to Melbourne where the group released their first single in 1967 before breaking up a year later.

After that he teamed up with Kevin Peek, Trevor Spencer and Terry Britten, formerly of The Twilights, as part of Quartet, and the four moved to the UK in 1969.

While they didn’t find commercial success as headline acts, they went on to work as session musicians, producers and songwriters for the biggest names in the business.

Tarney, who had started out covering Cliff Richard and The Shadows at the Salisbury Youth Centre, would play with him on stage and produce two of his albums: I’m No Hero and Wired For Sound.

This made him a very influential producer who worked with groups like A-Ha and The Hollies. Terry Britten, meanwhile, racked up songwriting credits including Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman and Michael Jackson’s Just Good Friends.

Others trod a similar path. After moving to Melbourne, Linda George joined her first band, Nova Express.

In 1973, she played the Acid Queen in Tommy and her single Mama’s Little Girl reached the Top 10 in 1974.

Ronnie Peers would leave, too, and help Stylus, the first white band to secure a recording contract with Motown Records.

He is recognised as one of the country’s best blues guitarists and inspired Ian Moss of Cold Chisel to take up the instrument.

Glenn Shorrock would have a long and storied career.

From starting out as a member of The Checkmates and The Twilights playing shows at halls in Elizabeth and Salisbury, he moved to Melbourne. After The Twilights broke up, he joined Axiom for a stint in the UK, though it didn’t last.

After a short solo career, Shorrock joined the Little River Band as lead singer in Melbourne in 1975, which went on to become one of the most successful bands ever to come out of Australia.

Fifty years ago, in 1969, Woodstock changed everything.

The three-day music festival, held on a dairy farm in the Catskill Mountains outside of New York, showed the world what was possible from live music.

A world away, in Adelaide, Innocenti, Hale, Trevor Brien and their financial backer Hamish Henry — who has consistently refused interviews — started to get ideas.

They wanted a Woodstock for Adelaide and so they organised the Myponga Pop Festival on a 62-acre farm Henry had bought to accommodate it.

On February 1, 1971, hundreds of people headed south to attend the three-day event.

The organisers had originally sought Cat Stevens to headline, but didn’t lock him in before promoters of a show in Los Angeles picked up him.

Instead, they got Black Sabbath supported by Australian artists including Daddy Cool, Spectrum, Fraternity, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, and Chain.

It cost eight bucks for the three days, six for two, three dollars for one and Hale worked the ticket office. On the Friday, as the event was due to begin, he looked down the road and saw people queuing.

That was when he realised it was going to be big.

He arranged for someone to form a queue at the little caravan which served as a box office. Locking himself in, he worked the counter as the queue remained constant all the way into Saturday.

“I didn’t leave that caravan for 18 hours,” Hale says.

“The little till drawer that I had overflowed and I was throwing money on the floor until it was up to my knees.”

With most of the money covering costs, the festival was a commercial bust and only held once. The Myponga Pop Festival served as the capstone on a decade of musical activity, a high watermark in a period which shaped Australian music.

But in what was perhaps a sign of things to come, Myponga would be overshadowed by the Sunbury Pop Festival, another event held on a farm in Victoria in 1972, which drew up to 40,000 people.

As the late music historian Vince Lovegrove wrote of Myponga: “If you have never heard of the Myponga Festival it is probably because it has been all but forgotten by most of Australia’s rock historians who seem to think that Oz rock exists only in Sydney and Melbourne in their time only.

“But Myponga Festival was one of the great Australian rock festivals and close to the hearts of all that attended — including Ozzy Osbourne (lead singer of Black Sabbath) and many of Australia’s mainstream acts. But it did not include most of today’s rock historians, who either snubbed the event or maybe were not even born.”

Elizabeth has since played its role in other musical movements, too. During the glory days of punk, the city produced bands like The Accountants who wrote Elizabeth City Riots.

Today Northern Sound System has given opportunity to a new generation of young musicians, and the city has contributed to some of the state’s best hip-hop acts.

Whether they know it or not, they are acting out a tradition that goes back half a century, but risks being forgotten.

“As you grow older, a couple of things happen,” Hale says.

“One is you just forget. We were so busy at the times that many things haven’t stuck in our memories. Maybe we didn’t remember it, to forget it. And, in addition to that, we developed notions of our own versions of stories.”

Other cities deal with this by writing the local heroes into the urban landscape. In New York, there’s a Johnny Ramone Lane. Even Melbourne has an ACDC Lane.

The house where Glenn Shorrock first lived at Elizabeth has since been torn down. The second house at Elizabeth — the one his father built — was still standing when he went back to visit around 2016, though there is no plaque to mark his association.

Much of the physical infrastructure of the period has been lost, too. The Octagon Theatre in Elizabeth, where many early bands started, was demolished in 2005.

No one runs tours through the Adelaide venues where a generation of musicians played, because none have been preserved.

That said, there are some doing the work to remember. The South Australian Music Hall of Fame recognises contributions to the state’s musical heritage. The State Library also maintains a dedicated collection for the state’s musical history.

Hale’s own contribution to this project started when he began collecting stories and crowdsourcing an oral history using a Facebook group titled Our Back Story.

Through it, he and others have been identifying the musicians and the venues they played in from old photos they have recovered from albums.

Since then, he has begun talking to the State Library to record the history of Adelaide’s “Rock Stars” from 1963 through to 1973. “It’s a project that’s close to my heart,” says Hale.

“I’d like the era to be remembered.”

He has also has helped dispel myths like one that he helped name Zoot. Doc Neeson, he says, named Zoot, alone.

But even he has forgotten things.

A friend recently told Hale about a night he walked into The Cellar Blues Club and sat next to singer Tom Jones where the two struck up a conversation over their mutual origins in Welsh coal mining towns. It had completely slipped his mind.

It’s this kind of thing that makes Hale wonder what might have been left to gather dust in someone’s garage or bookshelf.

Time doesn’t discriminate when it snatches away memory and this should matter to us all. If the foundation of identity is a shared history, we are all the poorer for forgetting.