“And when we were 18 and 17, we just wanted to prove them wrong.”

Les, 63, is best known for being the lead guitarist of Hush in the 1970s, Australia’s first glam rock band.

Mulan, 62, worked as a bookkeeper during Les’ touring days and when Les left the band, the pair started a successful a music production company.

The couple worked crazy 90-hour weeks to build Song Zu into the leader in its field. The business won many awards and had clients which were household names, such as Qantas and Toyota.

Les and Mulan now love pursuing their passion for art in the Headland Park Artist Precinct at Georges Heights.

Mulan is a ceramic artist and runs Mu Studio Gallery, while Les enjoys painting and has consultancy business Sound Thinking. The creative Mosman couple have two sons, Adam, 44, and Chad, 38.

Les and Mulan met when they were teenagers at a cousin’s birthday party: “in much the same way as most young Chinese kids did”, they said.

Mulan, who is also known as Margaret, is fifth generation Australian and Les is first generation — his adoptive parents and birth mother are Chinese.

“We were the only ones left, the unwanted ones,” Les said of when they met in 1969.

Mulan had tagged along to a party with her big sister and when the older teenagers left to enjoy themselves elsewhere, she and Les stayed behind. That was in 1969.

“So, in the groups that we went to we were the young hangers-on; we were the leftovers, the little ones left behind and that’s how we met. We hung out together and we got on really well, so we were best buddies right from the start,” she said.

Les said that’s how Australian-born Chinese people, “ABCs”, socialised at the time.

“The Chinese, particularly back then, tended just to go to either your cousin’s or somebody’s cousin’s party or you were in the tennis association or you would go to various Chinese dances; as ABCs, that’s the sort of thing your parents would always encourage you to go to, to meet other Chinese people,” he said.

The couple ended up “hanging out” he said and, without realising it, were attracted to the fact that they liked different things.

“We actually liked very polar opposite types of music and polar opposite types of other things,” Les said.

“That sort of worked and has really become the pattern for the rest of our life, because we cover off different things; we approach problems or opportunities from a slightly different angle and that’s actually been very strong and I guess that’s why we are still here. It’s sort of an opposites attract type thing.

“I’m more the extrovert and Mulan is an introvert; she dots ‘i’s, crosses ‘t’s and I kind of mess all that up. Mulan is a left hander and I’m a right hander.”

Mulan said their parents thought they were “a bit young” to marry when she was 17 and Les was 18. Their celebration included a big Chinese banquet.

“Our parents enjoyed the wedding — it was fantastic,” she said. “But, by the same token I think they sort of knew we were pretty kind of sensible or capable. So, while no one really knew what the future would be, particularly for such a young couple getting married ... they just thought, if anybody was going to have a go at it, these two probably are,” Les said.

And have a go at it they did: the couple always had a plan — whether it was in the arts, in business or in both — and when Les became a glam rocker “by accident”, they never saw his new-found stardom as a long-term career.

Les, then an 18-year-old law school dropout, joined a group of amateurs who later became Hush, after he was noticed for his “exotic” look while performing with another band. Les is Eurasian.

“They saw me perform and they thought, ‘We need someone like that’ and there was another Chinese guy in that band and they thought, ‘That could be really interesting, two Chinese guys’,” he said.

“It was either going to work or it wasn’t, because it was very, very, very — and even today — very exotic; there were no Chinese people anywhere, nobody on TV, nothing, so it was kind of going to look really odd or maybe it was going to work.

“We got together and somehow, that was by accident, six months later, I ended up writing a song because someone said, ‘You really should write songs, that’s how you get ahead’, so I wrote something, it got recorded, it became a top-10 record and somehow we became professional and next minute we’re playing in front of 20,000 people and off it goes.”

Hush became professional in 1973. Les said performances, which included old-school flash pots and bizarre costumes, were “very, very outrageous”.

“I never thought of it as a career; I just did it for fun, so everything I did was fun,” he said.

“So it was kind of by accident; there was never a possibility that it would be a career. A career is to be a doctor — so going into music was not a career — the smart guys did maths and science because that’s how you get a lot of marks. I thought it would last three months.”

Hush was a raging success for about five years — the band played to screaming girls in packed concert halls and at school dances across Australia — and the group appeared regularly on popular ABC music television show Countdown.

The band had Australia’s No. 1 song, Bony Moronie, in 1975 and achieved 12 Gold records in Australia.

But Mulan said the couple saw Hush as “a short-term experiment” that was also “fashionable” at the time.

So, the couple decided to live of her earnings as a book keeper and they would invest anything Les earned on top of that.

“We invested everything we had, every cent we had,” she said.

Hush disbanded in 1977, but reformed briefly in 1979 for The Concert Of The Decade where the band played to an audience of 200,000 on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.

It was what the Gocks did post-Hush that shows why their marriage has lasted so long.

The couple saw a way to combine their music skills and business acumen to forge a new career in the music industry.

Mulan is a classically trained pianist — “Bach is my hero” she says — to Les’ rock ‘n’ roll.

Les had seen a musician with “a really fancy car” in a recording studio in Melbourne and found out that he wrote music for advertising.

“And I thought, ‘Oh, that makes sense’. So, that was our vision; we then planned a business to transition from what I was doing — producing records — to producing music for ads,” he said.

The couple founded Song Zu in 1977, using a manual typewriter and a random contact list of advertising agencies they had never heard of, and sold the business in 2003 when it had become the biggest of its kind with 40 staff.

Les said that kind of business back then was “very, very obscure”.

“I was the new kid on the block and no one knew that kind of business even existed. But I also had a natural flair for it and a natural understanding of the marketing side of things, the music side of things and the business side of things,” he said.

“The success of Song Zu — which then lasted another 26 years — was purely because of the fact that we understood the art of business as well as the business of art.”

The coupled agree that “yin and yang is everything”.

“We are business meets art,” Les said, “and east meets west,” Mulan said. “In any relationship long-term, there are going to be ups and downs, but I think that we have found ways through everything because we are quite complementary,” she added.

Visit studiomu.com.au and soundthinking.net.au for details about the Gocks’ pursuits.