Remember the time. The Age
September 1, 2006. By Jane Faulkner
13 years after Countdown became so much a
part of many Aussie lives, the program ended.
Countdown was the best free pop concert a teenager
could experience. Jane Faulkner relives her glory
days.
BY THE time I was 14, I'd seen most of the great
Aussie rock acts of the day and a few international
ones too. Stevie Wright, AC/DC, Billy Thorpe, Rose
Tattoo, Dragon, even the tartan-clad Bay City Rollers
Well, maybe that Scottish musical anomaly doesn't
count. But this was the 1970s, after all. An era of
music that stretched to include rock, glam rock,
punk rock and disco to good ol' ever reliable pop
with its relentless 4/4 beat and plenty of fluff in
between. No wonder I was confused: blame it on
the boogie.
Yep, I was a Countdown groupie.
Now that needs clarification. In my case, being a groupie had nothing to do with sex, as in having it with rock stars. That did not happen. But often the smell of sex would hang as heavy as the dry ice that was sprayed liberally around Studio 31, at the ABC in Elsternwick where Countdown was filmed and where I was a regular in the studio audience.
It was an era when the Skyhooks believed "you just like me 'cause I'm good in bed." But it wasn't always about sex. Dave Warner from the Suburbs, "I'm just a suburban boy," released a rather disappointing tribute, Countdown: The Wonder Years 1974-1987 recently, claiming "Countdown's audience was broad but heavily skewed towards adolescent girls looking for their Heathcliff".
You're joking, right? The first part's right but the latter's way off the mark. Countdown was simply fun, mostly innocent; it was a chance to be very, very close to your idol, rock star, anyone, even if he was wearing make-up, satin and lace.
Countdown was the best free pop concert a teenager could experience, the equivalent to a live gig at the pub without grog and an age barrier of 18. Sure, there were plenty of screaming teenagers and antics, but there was also - shock, horror - the music. It was sensational.
Countdown started in 1974 as a half-hour black-and-white series, but it really kick-started a year later. By then, it was in colour just as Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were ready with "Oh what a night." And that night was Sunday, 6pm to be precise. A sacrosanct do-not-disturb time for music fans of all descriptions: no one escaped the lure, for Countdown penetrated our psyche.
There was Ian "Molly" Meldrum, and Molly was the word, usually lots of bumbling, mumbling words or, as Michael Shrimpton, the original executive producer of the program, puts it: "A collection of nouns searching for a verb." But we teenagers got it.
While it was Sunday night fare for all, Countdown for me started on Saturday, about 2pm. That's when it was filmed. My friend Susan Barnard organised the tickets and we would get there early, hang around the entrance, talk to the acts and grab an autograph or two as they made their way into the studio. We Countdown chicks were a weird mix.
Sharpies and skinheads (or so they thought), the '70s dag thinking she was cool in a Miller shirt and Treads (those leather sandals made from car tyres) and a few straitlaces in between. And it was a bit like footy - you were either a Sherbet fan or a Skyhooks fan. I was generally in the latter camp; they were better musicians for a start. There were a few of us who disliked immensely the seemingly sycophantic, supercilious, often surly-looking Garth Porter, Sherbet's keyboard player. I didn't know such fancy words back then; we simply called him a dickhead. Howzat. Well, that was crap, too. The words were terrible and it didn't even have a good riff.
As for Skyhooks, Greg Macainsh, who wrote most of the band's songs, was the coolest dude out. He was the Boo Radley of rock with his pale, drawn, mysterious looks and matching white suit and hat. And Red? Well, he was good for a laugh, trying to be serious while he looked like a cross between a harlequin and a transvestite. Still, loved his million dollar riff, especially on Horror Movie.
The '70s were filled with great bands and I went to plenty of concerts: the Rockarena at Sunbury (featuring Santana and Kevin Borich) and Jethro Tull in 1977, David Bowie and Elvis Costello both in 1978 and in the following year, the Stranglers and Rockpile. I'd also been to the Sherbet Xmas Show and David Essex in 1976. Why? No idea. Countdown didn't discriminate in its influence. There was always the good with the not so good.
That was part of the joy of Countdown: it showed top rock acts and it also did pop and fluff well. I've been known to sing verbatim "because you're my, my, my, my little angel," that the puff-sleeved, sequin-diamante-encrusted William Shakespeare, our glam-sham-rock equivalent to Alvin Stardust, made famous in 1974. That was always counterbalanced with one of my all-time favourite rock songs released in the same year and sung by the incomparable Stevie Wright: Evie, parts 1, 2 and 3.
Wright was a charismatic performer, and in 1976 he released Guitar Band and appeared in red pants and matching sleeveless top with an S with a lightning strike emblazoned on the front, as if for Superman, "I'm going to be a star with my guitar in a guitar band." Little did I know that he was at the height of heroin addiction that very soon would take him to the brink of death. "(St)Evie, there must be a better way."
Then there was AC/DC. The most electrifying Aussie band of all time. I'd never seen anything like Angus Young in his school uniform, satchel and guitar antics. Nor Bon Scott. He was funny, cheeky, lewd and the most outrageous performer. Scott would wear pants so tight that nothing was left to the imagination, particularly the red silky overalls he once performed in. Then again, he also donned a school uniform, a female school uniform complete with fake boobs and plaits, taunting, "Can I sit next to you girl?"
But the best was taking part in the film clips. These days film clips are a multimillion-dollar Hollywood production effort. In the '70s, it was done in no time, assisted by a bit of gaffer tape and anything the props department could muster up in five minutes. Take Yesterday's Hero, John Paul Young's 1975 hit. A few of us played a part, it was all orchestrated, albeit simply, starting with the scene where we had to run up to a cyclone fence, scream our heads off, which we were all good at, pretending we had seen JPY. And more.
A few weeks ago, Gold 104.3 FM played a Countdown tribute and I heard Squeak - that was the moniker given to JPY by Molly - utter these words: "It's full of horror for me, my first appearance on Countdown. I will never forget it," he said. "It's probably the biggest thing that I remember of Countdown. I was absolutely petrified, and that was before the girls started attacking me and pulling me down off the little catwalk stage and my shirt started to disappear from my back. I didn't know what to do and the floor manager threw me back up on the stage and said, 'Keep going, just keep going.' "
Squeak, what can I say? Sorry. I didn't act alone, however; the director made us do it and I don't know what happened to your shirt. I only ripped the back panel off.
By the late '70s, I had given up the studio visits but not the Sunday viewing. In July 1987, 13 years after Countdown became so much a part of many Aussie lives, the program ended. A musical era was over.
Fast-forward 30 years (yikes) and the Countdown Spectacular is about to kick off. Why this need to revisit the past? Nostalgia with one last squeeze of sentiment, perhaps? It's been called "the ultimate celebration of iconic television in the form of the much anticipated live concert tour". And promises to "relive the glory years". I'm not so sure about that.
It'll be fun seeing Hush, Squeak, Leo Sayer, dare I say even Sherbet and a few others. But there's a touch of melancholy too. The Spectacular serves as a reminder of just how many legends are no longer with us: Bon Scott, dead at the age of 33 from alcohol poisoning, would have been 60 this year. Ted Mulry, Marc Hunter from Dragon, Shirley Strachan from Skyhooks; the list goes on.
Then again, "You can't stop the music. Nobody can stop the music."
The kitsch is getting bigger. The Age. September 3, 2006
Why do we still love Countdown so much? Its one-time biographer Peter Wilmoth recalls how he captured the spirit of Molly, the music, the fashion, and the moves.
In 1991, I sat down for lunch with Sophie Cunningham, the publisher at McPhee Gribble (later swallowed up by Penguin) to explain why I hadn't written a book for which I'd received - and spent - a small advance. The original idea had died, and our lunch, seven years after I'd signed the contract, was an attempt to bring me out of hiding and to think up a new idea that would save me having to cough up the $500.
So Sophie and I discussed ideas. We alighted on a biography of Ian "Molly" Meldrum, which quickly led to a large amount of merriment talking about the Countdown era on TV in all its (mostly) technicolour glory. More wine came and with it, more memories: Molly's tortured interview with Prince Charles; Kim Wilde asking Molly to repeat perhaps the longest question he had asked in 13 years; the phenomenon of singers who, if they happened to sing the word "brain", were somehow programmed to point at their head and look dementedly into the camera (the same applied to the word "heart").
The Molly biography idea was gone by dessert. By coffee, we were analysing the elusive qualities of Real Life, Supernaut, Pseudo Echo, Noosha Fox, Patrick Hernandez and Pilot, and we knew we had a good book idea. It would be about Molly. But it would be more than that. It would be about his ragtag support crew, the thousands of performers, crew and fans lucky enough to have stomped around amid all that dry ice.
That's how I started writing Glad All Over: The Countdown Years 1974-1987.
The task would involve immersing myself in a time and place that most reasonable people felt thankful to have left behind. If the '70s and '80s were the decades that style forgot, I was about to start doing a lot of remembering.
So, I hit the phone. Former Skyhooks member Red Symons, with his dark wit and contextualising skills, was a great starting point. Keith Lamb, of Hush, who'd been battered a bit by those years and managing schizophrenia, saw me at a Carlton cafe. Renee Geyer - whose force of personality could part your hair, but an encounter with whom you'd survive if you treated her with due deference - invited me over for coffee. I'm sure the unnamed media figures she described as "little blobs of nothing who have too much control over other blobs of nothing" have forgiven her by now.
I talked to Shirley Strachan of Skyhooks, Derek Pellici of LRB, Ted Mulry of the Ted Mulry Gang, Garth Porter of Sherbet, Les Gock of Hush, Angry Anderson of Rose Tattoo and John Paul Young, rock gods all. Well, maybe not Derek Pellici. Or Ted Mulry.
But I interviewed William Shakespeare, too. Oh yes, I didn't stop at the stars with well-conditioned hair, good teeth and a string of number ones. No. I wanted the one-hit wonders, the oddities, the marginal players in the piece. I wanted the whole messy feast. I wanted to give readers a taste of an era that Lamb memorably said was "like a carnival".
The project was taking shape, but I hadn't yet caught up with the main piece in the jigsaw, the accidental ringleader. That pleasure awaited me. I met up with Molly at the Kingston Hotel, near his house in Richmond. Over a four-hour lunch, and through a fug of cigarette smoke (he wasn't in his health-kick period yet), Molly gave me enough half-finished sentences to, well, fill a book. Like the man himself, the interview was funny, sometimes confused, always self-deprecating, fizzing with enthusiasm and with the best of motivations, underscored by that How-did-I-get-here? surprise at his own good fortune he retains today.
Recovering from the hangover legacy of the Molly lunch, I retreated to my little flat, which had turned into a sea of charts from Juke and Ram magazines, hilarious letters to stars from fans, video tapes of old Countdown episodes, my own teenage scrapbook (never throw anything away) and the reminiscences of the participants. I put the phone on divert, fired up the VCR, cancelled my social life and existed for months in a strange netherworld of women in ripped T-shirts and needlessly high hair and men wearing tights, kilts or codpieces.
It was a bit unseemly, as my father would have thought. He never understood my interest in pop music, which I, in turn, never understood. He called the guitar I took up to the Johnny Ardley guitar school a "banjo" and was dismissive of a sensational newspaper photograph of Cat Stevens in a velvet suit I'd pasted into the scrapbook. How could anyone remain unmoved by this magnificent world I'd discovered - largely through the Beatles, Stones, Simon and Garfunkel and Neil Young albums owned by my eldest sister, which I had on high rotation on a small portable record player.
It's true not everyone shared my obsession, or my view that this project might find an audience. Emerging one day from my grotto, a friend asked the not unreasonable question: what the hell I was doing? Why, he asked, was I writing about that era? Why would anyone want to read a book about a bunch of washed-up pop stars? Countdown had been dead for five years. Why prod at the corpse?
I didn't enjoy the splash of cold water. I said something about Countdown being a soundtrack to our youth and how it was fleeting and ridiculous and very funny and wasn't it fun screaming at the telly when a really crap act came on? Wasn't it? But the seed of doubt was sown.
Still, I ploughed on. I was determined to honour my contract. Besides, I'd be lying if I didn't admit I was having fun. These people were telling wonderful stories, full of humour and joy and recklessness and wonder. Their careers and lives were transformed by this program as much as ours were, and they couldn't believe their luck. Everyone was in on the joke, too - the ridiculous costumes, the ludicrous one-hit wonders, the gag-inducing lyrics, the girls doing the sharpie dance (swinging their wrists between two knocking knees) to the beat of JPY's Love Game.
There was a charming innocence to the memories the performers were sharing with me. It was an uncomplicated time and, back then, everything was new: colour TV, the gaudy costumes (it had been the blue denim and bad beards of the rock and blues era before 1975), and the massive reach and, therefore, power of the show that was sending careers into the stratosphere literally overnight.
Nothing like Countdown had happened before.The performers were as amazed as we, the viewers, were. It was a crazy ride for everyone, ABC executives included when they realised the hit they had on their hands.
Sure, I was having some laughs in the dark, but did anyone else care? In the early 1990s, the nostalgia industry was hardly on the radar. It was too close to find the '70s funny and the '80s had just finished. Like good wine, nostalgia only develops when given time to mature (and for grudging affection to replace indifference). Not enough time had elapsed for the Countdown era to be seen by those who lived through it other than with a dismissive shrug.
In 1993, we published the book. To my relief, there was interest, possibly because everyone had their own Countdown story. It was as though I had given grown-ups permission to drop their guard, to spend a moment reflecting on their own youth, to fleetingly re-connect with a community of like-minded souls who understood the nuances and the references and could have a laugh about it again, a dig at their own shamelessness at how much they enjoyed it all, from the safety of adulthood.
Fast forward to 2006. Nostalgia isn't a fleeting chuckle anymore. It's now big business. There's still a crucial element of ironic kitsch to the enjoyment of our recent past, but now writers aren't asked why they are doing a nostalgia project, they are asked, "Why aren't you?" Historical comb-overs sell - ask Chrissie Amphlett and Billy Thorpe.
The embracing of nostalgia that we've witnessed in the past decade points to the pleasure of reflecting on simpler, more innocent days, which is what, for many, youth represented, a time when pop songs were all three minutes long and were performed in front of audiences brandishing cigarette lighters, where the only intellectual involvement asked of the teenage studio audience was not to trip over the camera cables.
It's why the stage show Mamma Mia! became the supernova of the nostalgia industry, why Bjorn Again were able to make millions out of their Abba homage, why Ben Elton produced a Rod Stewart nostalgia stage show, why hundreds of tribute bands surfaced (my favourite name is the Pink Floyd tribute band: Wish We Were Them), why Channel Seven has got media muppets du jour Kochie and Mel to host the artless Where Are They Now?.
Several years ago, the ABC's late-night (and early morning) music show Rage began screening large blocks of Countdown. It was probably the first time many from a new generation had copped a gawk at it. The first time round it was a head-trip at the civilised hour of 6pm, good on a Sunday night with a bowl of soup and some Vegemite toast. Imagine how out-there and loveably cringeworthy it must have looked at 3am, post-big night out. Countdown had made a comeback - right into the heartland of another generation's music show.
It's been a slow burn since. The generation at which Countdown was primarily aimed is now in its mid-40s, as a friend has said, in our "boxed set" years. We go to A Day on the Green, a vineyard-based Big Day Out for your older punters. We watch Spicks and Specks and RocKwiz because we love trivia nights, especially in the comfort of our own home with a glass of wine. We buy Mojo magazine and we can't stand the "manufactured" karaoke of Australian Idol. Not that I want to generalise. (Or bat away uncomfortable realities such as the fact that some of Countdown's performers were just as "manufactured".)
We love nostalgia, and we're wizened enough to shrug off any shame about that. The Countdown generation is very busy now with kids and mortgages and midlife and career crises, so it's lucky we have people taking the time to package up our youth for us - from greatest hits CDs, Long Way To The Top, and now a whole show (plus DVD and CD) devoted to acts from Countdown pulled together by Michael Gudinski, the man who discovered my favourite band in 1975, Skyhooks.
It's an orgy of nostalgia, and if another generation finds it an unseemly spectacle - just like the boomers rhapsodising their own glorious decade, the '60s - well then, let's talk in 15 years when you're doing the school drop-off with Snow Patrol or Arctic Monkeys playing and see how you feel when the kids tell you you're a dinosaur.
On Thursday, thousands of those dinosaurs - including me - will get along to The Countdown Spectacular show and sure, we'll feel a little awkward and defensive about it, like anyone who goes to a Rolling Stones concert these days does, but we'll get over it.
As for me, it turned out that a youthful obsession with something ephemeral and fleeting and often very silly wasn't entirely wasted. After the affliction of taking the era seriously for 18 months, I went on to lead a relatively normal life. And it turned out that a specialty was useful: Thomas Friedman on Middle East politics, William Safire on language, Lynn Truss on punctuation, Stephen Hawking on black holes. Me? I chose the topic of Countdown to know a little something about, and my embarrassment about that will fade as the years tick by.
Recounting the beats
Three artists recall what it meant to appear on Countdown.
Sean Kelly, Models
"My first appearance on Countdown was in 1978 with Teenage Radio Stars. It seemed like the week before I was just a punter watching it at home. I was completely star-struck by meeting Molly. Meatloaf was the compare. He rode onto the set on a motorcycle and hosted the show while reclining on a couch. The experience was unbelievably exciting. I'm now convinced that I loved Countdown because of Molly. There were other music shows, but Countdown was consistently entertaining because of Molly's style, a really passionate, informed music fan, who occasionally just couldn't find the words to express his passion."
Grace Knight, Eurogliders
"After an appearance on Countdown, you'd have more people at your shows and you'd sell more records. Molly was instrumental. If he liked what you did, it would mean a hit. For all the jokes and the hat, he took his role really seriously. He recognised a lot of talent in Australia and that he had the power to do something about it."
Garth Porter, Sherbet
"It was great appearing on Countdown. There were always a lot of fans out the front causing various degrees of grief. The show once organised for us to take a boat from Melbourne to Sydney for a promotion during which they photographed us cavorting in sailor suits. Molly was a loose cannon, which was part of his charm."
