When Sharpies ruled: CD celebrates a homegrown sound of the '70s

With their tight-fitting cardies, blunt-toed boots, hip-hugging jeans and close-cropped heads, sharpies stalked 1970s Melbourne like androgynous bovver boys. A uniquely Australian youth movement, giving sidelong nods to mod and glam but beholden to neither, sharpies were as tough as they were pretty – both the boys and the girls. They may have worn earrings and platform boots, but as former sharpie and current Oz rock legend Angry Anderson puts it, "they were tough kids from tough f---ing areas".

The term sharp, or sharpie, was coined in Australia in the 1950s to describe well-dressed, working-class, mostly immigrant troublemakers. By the '60s a new kind of sharp was frequenting Melbourne nightspots – kids in baggie woollen pants, V-neck jumpers and Cuban heels, dancing to the Purple Hearts (who featured sharpie hero guitarist Lobby Loyde​). It wasn't until the early 1970s that sharpies became a mass movement. The haircuts got wilder, the trousers both tighter and more flared, the knitwear tighter, and sharpies multiplied by the thousands.

Sharpies outside Flinders Street Station.Credit: Jack Kosky/courtesy Julie Mac

Still, they were maniacally precise about their dress code. In Melbourne, striped cardigans were made to order by Conti's in Thornbury, while chisel-toed shoes came from Acropolis in Richmond. In Sydney it was Zink's in Darlinghurst for custom-made trousers. This dedication didn't come cheap – a Conti cardigan cost about $30, two weeks' wages for a teenage apprentice.

Sharpies' taste in music was equally single-minded. It had to be rough, it had to be rocking, and for the most part it had to be local. They enjoyed imported glam such as Slade and Sweet, and didn't mind a bit of Bowie and Bolan, but sharpies loved loud, riff-heavy Aussie boogie rock.

Mount Waverley sharps.Credit: Liz Moll

The sharpie stomp, all flailing elbows and dragging knuckles, was performed en masse in front of Billy Thorpe's Aztecs, Lobby Loyde's Coloured Balls, Anderson's early band Buster Brown, and the newly formed AC/DC. As Loyde once said of the crowds dancing to Coloured Balls, "you'd think you were at the New York Metropolitan watching some bizarre modern ballet".

When Sharpies Ruled, a new compilation CD from one-time sharpie and now record store owner Glenn Terry, gathers 23 of these defiantly Australian moments in sharpie rock history. AC/DC are noticeably absent due to licensing issues, but the CD features groups such as Skyhooks, Hush and Rose Tattoo, alongside lesser-known acts such as Fatty Lumpkin, Fat Daddy and Finch.

The sound is raw and chunky, full of macho bravado and broad Aussie humour.

A member of Melbourne Sharps.Credit: Courtesy John Bowie

"Australian bands had all the elements of what was going on overseas, but it was more in your face," Terry says. "We had edgier guitar, faster music, rougher vocals. It was unique."

It's also a very blokey compilation, with not a female singer or musician to be heard. Julie Mac, who was a sharpie in the late '70s and has published two books about the movement, says there weren't strong female role models at the time. Olivia Newton-John was too soft, Helen Reddy too daggy. By the early '80s, Mac would be going to see the Divinyls or Wendy and the Rockets, but '70s Oz rock was very much a boys' world.

Julie and Burkie.Credit: Courtesy Julie Mac

Which isn't to say girls weren't welcome in sharpie culture.

"It was very inclusive," Mac says. "We had kids with ADHD, kids that could barely read or write, kids that had been through the welfare system. We had all different nationalities. Once you were accepted you were looked after, and it became a family."

A tattooed sharpie.Credit: Courtesy Rod Austin

Very few of the bands on When Sharpies Ruled actually identified as sharpies.

"We were basically a bunch of hippies playing rock'n'roll," says Ian "Bobsy" Millar, only surviving member of the Coloured Balls (Lobby Loyde died in 2007). The band certainly had the close-cropped haircuts, but Millar puts that down to a much more peaceful influence.

"We were inspired by the Hare Krishnas," he says. "We had a roadie who was a Krishna, and we thought it was a good look. It just happened to be the same time as all the sharps, so they thought of us as a part of them. And we were playing such high energy rock'n'roll, they used to really get off on it."

Buster Brown contribute a full-tilt cover of Roll Over Beethoven to When Sharpies Ruled, but Anderson's own dalliance with sharpie gangs was brief, and his hair short by necessity rather than design.

"I was going bald, wasn't I?" he says, laughing.

For most musicians, violence was the big deterrent. Sharpies were a tribal phenomenon, separated by train lines into suburban gangs, such as the Frankston or Thomastown Sharps in Melbourne, or the Blacktown or Rooty Hill Sharps in Sydney. There were provincial venues in each territory where sharpie-approved bands would play, but when gangs converged at concerts or at train stations, clashes sometimes turned ugly.

For the Coloured Balls, it was the perception of violence, more than the reality, that caused their eventual demise.

"The Truth [Melbourne's rabid tabloid] … reckoned we were behind it, trying to create violence with the music," Millar says. "It was all bullshit, but they kept at it until people didn't even want to book us, they were scared that sharps would turn up."

Sharps petered out in the early '80s, after punk, skinhead and new wave flooded in from overseas. Those who have discovered the movement after the fact appreciate its aesthetic, its dedication and its singularity, while the violent associations have largely faded away.

These days the sharpie revival is in full swing – there have been exhibitions, pictorial books, memoirs and novels. Melbourne especially is in the grip of a new sharpie obsession. You can see 21st century sharps on the streets of Collingwood or Brunswick, with the haircuts, the tight jeans and the clunky shoes. What's more, boogie rock is back, with new bands such as Power, the Me-Grains, Razorcut and City Sharps all worshipping at the altar of Lobby Loyde.

The difference is that when you see a sharpie in the street in 2015, you don't turn and walk the other way. In the '70s, sharpies were the bogymen of polite Australian society, even though they were mostly just teenagers thumping each other on train lines or at rock concerts.

"There was a lot of hoo-ha, but in some respects rightly so," says Anderson, who penned The Butcher and Fast Eddie, the ultimate ballad of sharpie violence, for Rose Tattoo's first album in 1978.

"I remember a concert at Richmond football oval, and sharps from two different areas started a fight. There were people hit with bottles, cut badly, knocked to the ground, trampled on. Some people got damaged for life."

But for Glenn Terry, the sharpie movement was one of the first instances of a particularly Australian youth culture.

"The music may have had its roots in blues and rock'n'roll, but there was certainly an Australian sound, due to the in-your-face production," he says. "And the fashion aspect was spawned in isolation from any overseas scene. It was truly homegrown."

"It was about the mateship, the community, the fashion, the hairstyles and the music," Julie Mac says. "We had our own speech, our own dance, our own jewellery. It was just the media that focused on the violence."

When Sharpies Ruled – A Vicious Selection is out now on Festival/Warner Music.