By Bernard Zuel
No one was ever able to tell Billy Thorpe to stop. Not in the 1960s when he played hundreds of gigs a year and was a genuine pop star. Not in the '70s when he and his band made ears bleed coast-to-coast as they gave birth to pub rock.
And not in 2007 when the man called "a force of nature" by Midnight Oil's Jim Moginie paid no attention to the idea that if you're a musician about to turn 61 you might want to consider slowing down, or stopping.
That's why Billy Thorpe - who died early yesterday morning in Sydney after a heart attack - had plans for two albums, including an ambitious African-themed concept album, later this year, and was playing gigs right up until Sunday night. And that's why at Sunday's gig at a hotel on Phillip Island, even though he was playing an acoustic one-man show, Thorpe would not go quietly, as Phillip Island resident Tracey Smythe witnessed.
"It was the first time I'd ever seen him, and it was enthralling," Smythe, 46, said. "He looked fantastic and the energy of the show just knocked me out. He was such a rocker. Even though he was sitting down surrounded by four guitars it was so loud you could swear there were 50 people on stage."
That description would not surprise anyone who worked with or watched Thorpe during a 50-year career which began in Brisbane, where the English immigrant had settled with his family. As Vince Melouney, a founding member of Thorpe's '60s beat combo the Aztecs, remembered, "Billy was full on, all the time, right from the start".
In the 1960s Thorpe and the Aztecs had a string of hit singles, beginning with Poison Ivy, and at one point in 1964 had four songs in the top 20 at the same time. The huge crowds they attracted dropped off in the second half of the decade, but Thorpe reinvented himself as a blues guitarist and hard-rocking front man of a new version of the Aztecs. By 1972, after the first Sunbury outdoor festival in Victoria, he was back at number one with what became his signature song, Most People I Know (Think That I'm Crazy).
However, while Thorpe had thoroughly lived the life of a rock star in his youth, as captured in the title of the first of his two autobiographies, Sex and Thugs and Rock'n'Roll, in the second half of his life Thorpe was fit, healthy and dangerously energetic. It enabled him to devote himself equally to his wife Lynne and daughters Lauren and Rusty, his career and supporting fellow artists both young and rising and old and ailing.
Soul singer Renee Geyer, whose earliest encounter with Thorpe was as she prepared for her first trip to the US nearly 30 years ago, has watched that energy up close.
"He was so wise, and literally a head turner. Even now he was so fresh and young," Geyer said. "And if he wasn't, he would tell you he was and you'd believe him. He had this magic self-confidence that was infectious. Everything was always a glass half full with him, never half empty."
After watching him support another veteran, the seriously ill Lobby Loyde, at last year's ARIA Hall Of Fame night, one former journalist and publicist said of Thorpe admiringly: "He was such a pig-headed, obstinate, strong man you thought he was invincible".
If not invincible, then maybe inevitable. As Billy Thorpe liked to tell it, it was clear he was destined for a music career not long after he began to walk and talk.
"I took my first breath on March 29th, 1946 in Manchester England, but life really began for me when I heard Sous les Ponts de Paris (Under the Bridges of Paris) on the radio in Blackpool England when I was three or four years old," Thorpe wrote on his website some years back. "Somehow that syrupy, sentimental French love song with its accordions and Mantovani-style strings got inside my four-year-old head and I was hooked. From that moment I couldn't get enough of music. Any music."
That may well be the only time that the words syrupy, sentimental and Mantovani-style strings appeared in the same sentence as the name Billy Thorpe. His close friend, the rock promoter and manager Michael Chugg, saw something completely different when, aged 15, he watched the slightly older Thorpe play a show in Launceston in the early 1960s.
"[The Aztecs] nailed me to the wall," said Chugg. "I'd never seen anything like the energy, the passion, the strutting, the confidence. It was f--king amazing. And that was it for me, that's all I wanted to do from that moment on."
Either directly from the stage or with just a word of encouragement, Thorpe made a habit of inspiring another generation to commit to music with the same passion he showed.
To Jim Moginie, Thorpe was "always so committed to the performance, so powerful, like a tribal elder". For the members of INXS, two of whom hitched to Sunbury in 1974 for the famous muddy festival where the Aztecs "blew Deep Purple off stage", it was much the same.
"We grew up listening to Thorpie," the band said in a statement. "The first gigs we ever snuck into were Billy and the Aztecs pinning us to the back wall with their power and extreme volume. We finally got to meet Billy in the early 1980s and were more than impressed with his intelligence, graciousness and passion for music. He was always pushing the boundaries of the Australian music industry."
Jimmy Barnes, whose band Cold Chisel, along with AC/DC, were the most successful of the bands which took the Aztecs' template and made pub rock the national music, admits to basing some of his on-stage persona on Thorpe after barging to the front of the stage at Sunbury in 1972 and being left gobsmacked.
After the Aztecs broke up, he left for the US. Even in the 1980s, as a long-time resident of Los Angeles, working as a consultant to toy companies and seemingly forgotten back home, Thorpe was often seen at American gigs by young Australian bands, offering advice or merely raucous support.
He was brought back to Australia in 1987 by promoter Andrew McManus to play at Brisbane's Boggo Road jail with the Divinyls and Rose Tattoo. Their partnership saw Thorpe become part of the Ultimate Rock Symphony tour with a swag of international stars such as Roger Daltrey of the Who, as well as recent tours by the likes of Deep Purple.
But as McManus recalled yesterday, if Thorpe wasn't always the headliner, he was never just a support act: "Billy never considered himself a support act. He used to drive us mad because he would want the same lights, the same production [as the headliners]," McManus said. "He would tell you straight up 'I ain't no f--king support act. Get your shit together, son'."
A public service will be held on Sunday afternoon in Sydney. Further details will be announced today.