Question: Why is an old bloke like me, whose entire life has been involved with posh classical music, sitting down to lunch with a legend of the pop world?
Answer: Two possible reasons. Scotland and Fassifern. But we find we have much in common.
Let’s start with Fassifern. It’s a suburb of the City of Lake Macquarie, a major station on the Sydney to Newcastle train line.
At 69, John Paul Young is the Pope of pop and Fassifern’s most famous resident. He and his family have lived there for nigh on 32 years.
“We used to have a house in Bronte, a large house overlooking the beach. We were there from 1978 to 1982.” So why the Sydney-to-the-bush transition?
“When the ’70s finished, the whole music industry suddenly changed. If you had been big in the ’70s, suddenly you were old hat. It’s kind of like horse racing, the music business. You always manage to get done over. That is unless you could reinvent yourself — according to their rules of course.”
There is nary a whiff of self-pity in his voice or demeanour as he rehearses his tale. Quite the opposite. He wears a smile throughout.
“My career died and the interest rates went up. I couldn’t get arrested, let alone get a gig. It was just basically a case of ‘nothin’s doin’.’ I couldn’t even see my way clear to sell the house and buy something somewhere else. My career was dead in the water.”
There are still vestiges of the sweet, fresh-faced longhaired lad I’d watched on that grainy Yesterday’s Hero music video, shot in Melbourne. There he is in black and white, striding across Princes Bridge in jacket, open neck shirt and a pair of those ridiculous flares. I’d watched this archival footage in preparation for our meeting. The look may have changed but the charm, sweetness, and frankness are still there four decades later.
He continues. “I had a friend who was a furniture dealer in Newcastle and I said to him, ‘You’ve got to find me a house.’ He rang me back a few days later and said ‘I’ve got one.’ It was a little old three-bedroom job with no sewerage, no drainage, on half an acre with a creek in the background and I’m SO, SO happy there. It’s one of the silver-lining stories.”
Fassifern has memories for me, too. During my time in National Service, it was one of the stations the train stopped at as I headed back to Rathmines RAAF base after weekend leave in Sydney. Established in 1939 and situated on the edge of Lake Macquarie, Rathmines was the RAAF’s main base for the famous Catalina flying boats during World War II until the early 1950s when it was repurposed as a training school for Nashos. Names of the surrounding small towns, villages then, Toronto, Awaba, Morriset and Fassifern are indelibly etched in my memory as places we passed through on route marches.
OK. A pretty tenuous connection, you say. Agreed. But what about Scotland?
Well, you see, JPY hails from Scotland, from the gritty, but zesty, city of Glasgow, and he has been chosen to perform in the moving remembrance section of the forthcoming Edinburgh Military Tattoo, and it so happens that I was involved back in 2005 in the first ever appearance in Australia of that mighty international spectacle.
I have to say, I was grateful for these two coincidences. They proved valuable conversation starters when I met Young for the first time over lunch at The Dolphin Hotel Dining Room in Surry Hills. Our musical tastes could not be more polarised.
While he was killing ’em on Countdown I was listening to Schubert’s Lieder on the ABC. But we got on famously. Affability was in the air. As was fame. We were barely seated at lunch before a fan named Sam, one of the hotel staff, bowled up to shake JPY’s hand and nominate a song that virtually changed his life.
But let’s wind back a little, to 1961. On New Year’s Eve of that year the Young family left Glasgow station on a train to London where they boarded the brand new P&O passenger liner, SS Canberra, bound for Sydney.
“We were on ‘A’ Deck,” recalls Young. “My family couldn’t believe it. In Glasgow my mother’s sister used to live with us. There were seven of us in a one-bedroom flat. All of a sudden we were on ‘A’ Deck. For a month! Breathtakingly wonderful.”
Reality kicked in when they were accommodated in a migrant camp in East Hills in Sydney’s west — for two years. He attended East Hill public school (the cricketing Waugh brothers were fellow students), Hammondville Public and Liverpool Boys High.
“When we moved away I’d get on my push bike and ride back to Liverpool.
“We’d go to the Liverpool Mall, hang about. One week someone said we’re going to form a band. I was the singer. In my family everybody sang. It was just part of my life. I was with the band for four years. We soon became the biggest band in Liverpool.”
His face, a tad more lined and creased than in that Yesterday’s Hero video breaks into a wide smile as he adds: “Just like the Beatles.”
His subsequent career is the familiar chronicle of smash hits and floperoos, experiments with modish styles such as disco and electro-pop, stints on stage and on radio, highs and lows, a litany of ups and downs, down and out in London, and riding high in Germany, which provided his first international hit. Enter En
glish record producer, music manager, author, journalist and general all-purpose music mogul Simon Napier-Bell, and manager, inter alia, of the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan and Wham!
Napier-Bell, now 80, was a legend. When I worked for a record company in London in the 1960s our paths crossed. Our biggest star was Dusty Springfield and he wrote the English lyrics for her first chart-topper, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.
Napier-Bell invited Young to record a song called Pasadena, written by Harry Vanda and George Young of The Easybeats. These two were to become Young’s preferred songwriters,
In late ’70s came Standing In The Rain, to be followed by the biggest hit of Young’s career, Love Is In The Air.
The man himself can’t tell me how many versions of this song have emerged since he recorded it but the fact is that he owns it.
It’s his signature, although Baz Luhrmann could perhaps lay claim to that honour after selecting it for the soundtrack of his 1992 triumph Strictly Ballroom.
It’s been the required encore at live concerts ever since, a natural choice for performance at the Opening Ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics,
These days ‘Squeak,’ as Molly Meldrum dubbed him, is taking it easy.
“At the moment, and for the last three years, I’ve been doing a show that I invented. It was pretty easy to invent, as it was right in front of me. It’s about the influence of George Young and Harry Vanda.”
He’s been touring that show for the past three years, performing in small outback towns in western New South Wales and Southern Queensland. Goodooga, Bourke, my old home town of Brewarrina, Walgett.
“Just me and my piano player and a PA system,” he explains. “We play to audiences of around 150 indigenous and white folks. The locals turn on a spread.”
Sandwiches and sausage rolls? “Nah, really great food, curries and the like. I take up about 10 kilos of prawns. They don’t see them a lot in the outback.”
The show is a celebration of the lives of two distinguished indigenous soldiers, Private Harold West and his friend, Private George Leonard, station hands, trackers and roustabouts from Cunnamulla in western Queensland.
Lifelong mates and brothers in arms, the two enlisted in Sydney in 1941 and fought side-by-side in World War II. Leonard was killed in action and West died of typhus in 1942 in a hospital in Port Moresby.
Young clearly has a soft spot for the outback. But he loves his Fassifern fastness, too. He becomes reflective.
“You grow up fast in a city. I was married by the time I was 18. I arrived here with a three-piece Italian suit and winklepicker shoes and now, all of a sudden, I am in Williams Creek in a pair of shorts. I like this.
“This country has given me so much. I can’t even begin to quantify the difference between me now and how life might have been if I’d stayed in Glasgow.
“I don’t think my life would have worked out the same.”
We speak about his wife, his two kids, his grandchildren.
His son is in the business but he never goes to hear him for fear of diverting attention.
And his wife “never comes to the show. She stays at home and looks after the kids”.
“And does the cooking?” I suggest.
“No that’s me.”
“But she will be coming to the Tattoo?”
“I hope so. I’m singing Love Is In The Air with 1500 performers, bands, singers, dancers and soldiers. I think I AM the Grand Finale.”
Grand it may be but with Young’s demonstrated survival instinct, it surely won’t be the finale.
Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, ANZ Stadium, October 17-19, tickets available from ticketek.com.au
John Paul Young and the Allstar Band will also perform the VANDA & YOUNG SONGBOOK on Friday December 13 at The Juniors, Kingsford.
