Phil Manning Band LIVE Around Oz 1975 was recorded by Phil’s sound engineer, the late Dave “Nightowl” Ridoutt (02/01/1950 to 19/12/2021, who originally was the inspiration for ARCA to put the Desk Tape Series together. Dave also was the sound engineer for Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons live desk tape from 1976, which was released by ARCA in June 2020)

Dave, like many other roadies, were the glue that kept the Aussie live music industry together at the very start. Consequently, if the bands did not sound or look good in a live environment, generally, they never went very far. Roadies, like Dave, were and many still are the backbone of the Australian music industry. 

Live Around Oz 1975 is a master lesson on the many shades of blues guitar. This line-up with Paul Wheeler and Trevor Courtney only lasted a year. But as the performances show, they knew how to come together at just the right time. (Paul Wheeler is now with Icehouse and Trevor Courtney is an organic hops farmer in his native New Zealand).

The impression of the live recording is that there’s a lot of improvisation during the show. But in reality, everything is kept tight and focussed – something Phil Manning learned when he toured with his idol Muddy Waters and his band.

Many of the songs were written just after his first marriage, so Manning’s skill at catchy melodies work well with lyrical heart-on-the-sleeves love songs as “Angel Surrender”, “Sunset Song” and “Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me”. The band take Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and the George Harrison-penned Beatles album track “Tax Man” and put their stamp on it.

In the psychedelic ‘60s, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton saw a generation of Australian guitar shredders rush out to get wah-wah pedals to add to their arsenal of tones.

Phil Manning was no exception. Live Around Oz, 1975 is sprayed throughout with wah-wah sounds, demonstrating his perfect pitch whether using the sound to drive “Lover Baby”, “I’m Free” and “Taking Your Chances” or using it as a sound effect at the beginning of “Train To Ride”.

Phil Manning moved to Melbourne in late 1966 and joined Tony Worsley and The Blue Jays. He played with a series of bands including Bay City Union, where he met singer Matt Taylor. The pair later worked closely on Chain, one of the best blues bands to come out of Australia.

Their January 1971 single, “Black and Blue”, which Manning helped write, reached the top 20. They had a second top 40 hit with “Judgement” issued in July. That year Phil Manning was voted third best guitarist in Australia by the readers of Go-Set magazine. Chain’s debut album Towards The Blues went Top 10 and certified gold.

Touring American bluesmen like Albert Collins were astounded by the Australian-ness of Chain’s music. “I know it’s blues but it ain’t anything like the blues I’ve heard!” he said famously.

Phil would go off to do solo projects but would return to Chain to record and perform. His debut solo album I Wish There Was A Way came out at the end of 1974, after which he formed the Phil Manning Band with an ever-changing line-up.

Models LIVE At The Overlander Hotel 1980 was recorded two years after the band formed in Melbourne.

Audiences insist there have been two totally different Models through the years. There was the early art-rock industrial line-up which was miles ahead of US bands like Nine Inch Nails, and the later chart busting version with “Barbados” and “Out Of Mind Out Of Sight”, but Models have always insisted their approach to their music has remained the same.

By the time of The Overlander Hotel tape, the “quirky” version was drawing big crowds to inner city venues in Melbourne and Sydney. Record companies were already circling but the band wanted to release its first album independently to keep creative control.

Models were formed in August 1978 by singer and guitarist Sean Kelly, who’d emerged in the punk era in Spred and Teenage Radio Stars with school mate James Freud. With Models, Sean Kelly expanded his musical palette to include David Bowie, Lou Reed, Eno and Roxy Music, thus augmenting his earlier influences, Top 40, classical music, show tunes and the theatre record collection of his parents.

Sean started playing piano and drums but switched to guitar. Original drummer Johnny Crash (aka Janis Friedenfelds), who died in on January 24 2014, came from Adelaide’s electro-industrial scene and proved himself a dynamic addition. Mark Ferrie replaced Peter Sutcliffe (aka Pierre Voltaire) who later won $503,000 in May 2014, on TV quiz show Million Dollar Minute.

Ferrie grew up in the western suburbs (“with an accent to match”) before studies at Melbourne University opened him up to the new sounds from the Carlton scene and later the St. Kilda movement when he moved to live there. By the time of The Overlander Hotel tape, original keyboard player, the gifted and experimental Ash Wednesday, had been replaced by the innovative Andrew Duffield.

Andrew studied electronic music and emerged with electro-pioneers Whirlywirld with his school friend Ollie Olsen. Aside from being a pioneer in synthesiser music, Andrew was also a fan of left-of-centre names such as Captain Beefheart.

Models’ spiky mix of new wave, glam, dub, pre-industrial and pop struck a chord with a new generation of punters looking for their own heroes rather than adopting those of older siblings.

Mark Woods recalls much of the audience were college and post-college students. Some of their biggest fans were The EMUs (Ex Melbourne University Students), a drinking club mainly but they booked a few Models gigs.

Models LIVE At The Overlander Hotel 1980 captures the way the band would switch from hard hitting (‘The Other People Incident’, ‘Holiday House’, ‘Golden Arches’) to synth-driven new world epics (‘Atlantic Romantic’, ‘Happy Birthday IBM’, ‘Keep It A Secret’ and ‘Early Morning Brain’) to left of centre dance pop (‘Brave New World’, ‘Strategic Air Command’).

They played five sets in that one day – three in the afternoon and two at night – at the country hotel in Shepparton in central Victoria. It had a 50’s style ballroom with a large dancefloor.

In 1984, Sydney trio v. Spy v. Spy were on a high. They’d almost broken up but signed to Midnight Oil’s management and label, and the mainstream was opening up to them.

Around the time of the Prince of Wales gig in Melbourne, they were playing powerful shows around the country.

The songs often had pop melodies but the lyrics addressed issues as homelessness, racism, irresponsible consumerism, destruction of heritage landmarks and corrupt cops.

The last song on the tape is the cataclysmic version of the theme song to late night ‘60s TV spy series Danger Man, which they watched every night at 3am in the squat, and “Mugshot” was inspired by the spy thriller novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammet.

What stands out about them on Live At The Prince of Wales 1984 tape was how tight they were, whether on the frantic “Injustice”, “Where Are We Going”, “Slow F***” and “Mugshot” or the more ethereal “Out And Dreaming”, “One Of A Kind” and “Good For Business”.

In 1984, Mark Woods was living in Los Angeles. After long stints as a sound engineer with The Models and Men At Work, he was working with US band The Call when he got the call to join Tina Turner on a three-month US tour. It ended in October and was to resume in Australia a month later. Woods returned early to Melbourne to catch up with family and friends to await her arrival.

During this time he got a call from the Oils office to do a v. Spy v. Spy’s show. He hadn’t worked with them before, but loved what he heard of them on community radio.

Craig Bloxom remembers the show for another reason. Some young girls joined them in their rooms at the hotel after, and collapsed from excess partying.

The v. Spy v. Spy story began when California-born Bloxom met English-born guitarist Michael Weiley at Nelson Bay High School in 1976.

They started playing around in bands on the north shore and were introduced to drummer Cliff Grigg, who was living in a squat (72 Darling Street) in the inner Sydney suburb of Glebe.

Naming themselves after the Spy. Vs. Spy strip in US Mad Magazine (the V in front was to prevent being sued), the two moved into the squat (which at the time had no roof or heating) and practiced. Others living there were illegal refugees, drug dealers and bohemians, and they could make as much noise as they wanted to.

There was a lot of drugs and alcohol around, and Bloxom admits v. Spy v. Spy music was as inspired by chemicals as the squat mentality.

By 1982 they were releasing singles and opening for the likes of U2 and The Clash.

The pub audiences responded to their rowdy showmanship, sense of community and the issues they were singing about which came from observing in Australian society.

Around the time of the Prince of Wales show, they’d released the Meet Us Inside EP and the single “One Of A Kind” which got them on Countdown.

Jimmy and the Boys were a Sydney cabaret/punk band fronted by singer Ignatius Jones and keyboard player Bill O’Riordan, who dressed up as drag queen Joylene Thornbird Hairmouth.

Their two studio albums Not Like Everybody Else and Teddy Boys Picnic had strong musicianship, but it was their outrageous onstage antics and Top 10 hit “They Wont Let My Girlfriend Talk To Me”, written by Tim Finn and with a video based in a mental hospital, that made them one of the biggest live acts in Australia.

LIVE At The Astra Hotel 1982 was taped by “Yogi” Harrison who regards it as far superior to the band’s live album In Hell With Your Mother, recorded at Selinas from that time. It was also the last show ever by Jimmy and the Boys.

The tape includes “Teddy Boys Picnic”, “Dr Cairo” about a surgeon who performed sex changes, stage faves “Butchy Boys”, “Babies On Fire” and of course “They Won’t Let My Girlfriend Talk To Me”.

LIVE At The Astra has two bonuses. It includes the band’s only live version of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”, always a showstopper, and “In Hell With Your Mother”, which they had written for the live album of that name, but never used.

The band’s onstage antics included blood capsules, burning babies and effigies of politicians, and a menacing tank backdrop. Their songs covered leather’n’chain sadomasochism, violence, cross-dressing, individualism, mental health, self-mutilation, sex change, drug abuse and simulated sex.

They were hated by Christian groups, cops and family associations. They caused riots at an outlaw motorcycle gang’s music festival (Ignatius Jones goaded them from stage and had to hide in a caravan which the enraged bikers tried to topple) and a Christmas show in Brisbane after a local paper claimed that the Baby Jesus was to be set alight and Joylene was to appear as the Virgin Mary.

Part of Phil Dunesky’s role as tour manager was visits to police stations to bail out band members and emergency departments of hospitals. There was an overnight stay at Blacktown Hospital in Sydney after Ignatius put his arm through a plate glass window coming off stage. As the live tape shows, Jimmy and the Boys had the musical chops.

The key members of Jimmy and the Boys had met at exclusive private schools Cranbrook and Riverview. The name ‘Jimmy’ came from a schoolboy slang for someone not too bright.

Bassist Michael Vidale and drummer Scott Johnston, for instance—highly accomplished players and well respected by other musicians— had their roots in jazz fusion, rock and the avant garde.

Bill O’Riordan played in Vidale’s fusion band Stepps until a nasty motorbike crash sidelined the bassist for a time. The keyboard player then joined Jimmy and the Boys which already had Scott Johnston in the ranks, and he later invited Vidale to join.

Ignatius Jones was among the last to join. Born in the Philippines to a multi-generational Spanish speaking family of classical music players, he moved to Sydney as a toddler. Later at school, fellow students were Mel Gibson and Tony Abbott.

LIVE at the FAIRFIELD HOTEL, 1982  was recorded when TMG were becoming a heavier band. It includes hits such as “Jump In My Car”, “Darktown Strutters Ball”, “My Little Girl”, “Lazy Eyes”, “Heart Of Stone” and “(You’ve Got) The Devil In You” and The Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women”.

Herm Kovac says that TMG were always a working class pub band who fitted in with their record company Alberts’ famous sound, which included AC/DC, The Angels and Rose Tattoo. In fact Herm Kovac and Les Hall earlier played in a band with AC/DC’s Malcolm Young. That LIVE at the Fairfield Hotel, 1982 got recorded and was released by accident.

Garry “Squirt” Brokenshire was 17 years’ old when he joined the TMG crew as a lighting designer in 1978. He met them when he crewed for Sherbet as a 15-year-old and the two bands toured together. In fact, Brokenshire used to join TMG onstage each night playing congas on “The Devil In You”. By the Fairfield show he was no longer in their crew, but he was interested in sound, so he and their sound engineer Steve Donkin worked it out he could set up in a truck and record the show. The resulting cassette was “lost” for 40 years in a box with other cassettes in a storage space, and he found it quite by accident.

It is only appropriate that LIVE at the Fairfield Hotel, 1982 is released on September 1st, 2021, the date of Ted’s passing. That month features a lot in TMG’s history. Ted Mulry was born on September 2 (1947) in England and died from cancer on September 1 (2001) in Sydney at the age of 53.

TMG played their first show on September 2, 1972. “Jump In My Car” reached #1 in September 1975 and stayed there for six weeks. “Steppin’ Out” b/w “It’s All Over Now” was released on September 2,1976.

Ted Mulry started out as a balladeer with hits as “Falling in Love Again” and “Julia”. In the early ‘70s, after a visit to England, he returned excited after seeing bands like Slade, T-Rex and Status Quo and wanted to form a band with them. They had a mutual love for The Beatles, comedy troupe The Goons, and Heinz Baked Beans.

They were also tennis fans. Herm Kovac remembers the Fairfield gig, because it was the day Bjorn Borg lost to John McEnroe at Wimbledon, and he was so excited listening to the match on the radio on the way he almost totalled his car.

TMG were a real “gang”, with recording royalties split four ways, and majority rules indecisions. The live shows were split five ways, with their “fifth” member, Ron Clayton, their long-time tour manager, production manager and driver.

TMG’s starving days ended when “Jump In My Car” went to #1. The song, written by Mulry and Hall, was an album track. But influential DJ Barry Chapman of Sydney’s 2SM started to play it and urged them to release it as a single.

TMG were in a bind. They knew Alberts wanted them to record a new album and would not issue another track from an early album. The band had a meeting with Ted Albert, head of their record company. As they crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Kovac told Mulry “Say to me, ‘We have to release ‘Jump In My Car’”. Mulry was mystified but did as he was told. Their meeting with Albert did not bring up the song.

Afterwards the band went to the office of the label’s A&R manager and pulled off a scam. A few weeks later Ted Albert severely told the band, “I heard what you did. You’re lucky it was a hit!”