Roots. Craig Horne
towns and 70000 villages had been wiped off the face of the earth, and by the end of 1945 the largest population movement in European history was underway.
It’s estimated that between eleven and twenty million people had been displaced by the war, leaving some 850,000 people starving in displaced persons camps across Europe by conflict’s end.
Britain, too, was bankrupt, leaving bombed-out cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and London with little money to rebuild. Things were made even more uncertain when Prime Minister Churchill proclaimed that ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent…’ which ushered the entire Western World into a Cold War with their former ally, the Soviet Union.
Even though Australia had lost over 27000 servicemen and women in the struggle with the Axis powers, in comparison to Europe we had emerged relatively unscathed. Some would say we prospered from it; the war had accelerated the development of Australia’s manufacturing industry which led to a significant fall in unemployment. Australia also emerged from its isolation from the rest of the world when then-Prime Minister Ben Chifley announced a mass migration program at the war’s end. Between 1946 and 1960 the program pushed an annual increase in Australia’s population of 2.7percent per year and contributed to the development of a cosmopolitan society and a more outward-looking nation.6 With a rising population and an emerging manufacturing industry, we were well-placed to prosper from the post-war boom.
Culturally, the surge in economic prosperity mixed with a collective feeling of relief, following the privations of both the war and the Great Depression in the previous decade meant that people were looking to relax and celebrate. The people wanted a goodtime, they deserved it, and the Melbourne jazz scene was primed and ready to deliver. Throughout the war and especially in the lead up to peace, there had been an explosion of jazz gigs across town, many attracting both American and Australian servicemen and women stationed in the southern capital. And the Bell boys were in the thick of it.
From the early ’40s Graeme Bell and his Jazz Gang played regularly at the Palais Royale, the Trocadero (previously the Green Mill), and the Exhibition Buildings, as well as at many of the town hall dances staged throughout Melbourne, according to Bell’s autobiography. In addition, the band played a regular Sunday session at Admiralty House on Exhibition Street, plus the odd special event — like a dance for three thousand people held in a huge factory in Morwell. There were also the lucrative, wild private parties where booze flowed and Albert Tucker’s ‘Victory Girls’ ran hot. Graeme also played piano with various bands at places like the Geelong Palais and the Heidelberg Town Hall. Then there were gigs at the Power House on Albert Park Lake, Manchester Café opposite the Melbourne Town Hall and, later, the Green Knoll Café, which soon morphed into the Horst Liepolt’s Café and Jazz Centre 44, located on the corner of Acland Street and the Esplanade right opposite Luna Park (more on this venue later). Maybe it was in the war years during which foundations were laid for Melbourne to become the nation’s live music capital.
Like a lot of contemporary Melbourne musicians, Graeme and Roger were also filling their diaries with guest spots in other people’s bands, sitting in when key personnel were shipped off for military duties. Graeme worked with Russell Jones’ band every Saturday night at The Power House, and even spent a few months playing with Claude Carnell’s band in Mackay, Queensland, performing for US soldiers as part of an American Red Cross show band. Graeme’s absence left the way open for Roger to join clarinettist Pixie McFarlane and regularly sit in with Benny Featherstone’s Dixielanders. This gig led to a residency at The Rainbow Room, with Don Banks, Lyn Callen and Laurie Howells. When Featherstone joined the Merchant Navy, Roger and his band, the newly-named Roger Bell’s Dixieland Jazz Band, took up their Saturday spot at the Heidelberg Town Hall. Roger’s six-piece band played alternate sets with Hal Lloyd’s Strict Tempo Dance Orchestra, a radical move at the time. It the brainchild of promoter Bill Glennon, and the idea took off like a rocket; suddenly there was a circuit of Glennon-sponsored events around town. This led to regular gigs for Roger and the band.
In the war years, Melbourne’s music scene was fluid, with side musicians running from gig to gig subbing in for unavailable players. With half of Melbourne’s jazz musicians enlisted in the armed forces, people like Graeme Bell who was exempt from war service due to medical grounds (he suffered from an inflamed vertebra) and Roger (who was working as an engineer in a protected industry and therefore also exempt) were in high demand. They adapted different styles of music for a variety of audiences; a jazz club, a swing band, a wedding, a private event (what we would call a corporate event today). There was also an occasional recording session.
Graeme and Roger could both read music charts, an advantage over their self-taught colleagues. As well as being outstanding musicians, they were also blokes who were easy to work with, an important prerequisite for a sideman and almost as important as musical ability. Most importantly, the more they were out there gigging, the more they were on band-leaders’ radar, and more gigs came their way. This is a practice that continues in Melbourne to this very day.
Right up to the ’70s the format of alternating a contemporary band with a full orchestra persisted at the Heidelberg Town Hall. By then the venue was a little daggy and Melbourne was alive with groovy discotheques that had sprung up all over the city: Berties, Sebastians, The Thumpin’ Tum — Q Club was even hip in comparison. But, for me anyway, the Heidelberg had two great attractions. The first was the Heidelberg Town Hall Big Band. What a thrill it was to hear that twenty-piece orchestra, with its full brass and reed section, keys, guitar, bass, percussion and drums in full roar. The second was The Charlie Gauld Trio (oh, and the gorgeously sophisticated office girls that seductively shimmied around the town hall all night long, but I was 15, they were unattainable, we move on).
My friends and I, along with a couple thousand others, would make our way to the Town Hall on Upper Heidelberg Road on a Wednesday or Saturday night. We would go to see Jill Glenn, Colin Cook, and Olivia Newton-John; I remember seeing her sing solo and with her old Go Show/Bandstand partner Pat Carroll. These artists, among others, would sing the hits of the day, backed by that mighty twenty-plus-piece band. When Jill Glenn did her ‘Little Egypt’ routine or swung her hips and did the hoochie-koo while singing ‘Big Spender’ from Sweet Charity, man I nearly popped my cork. Colin Cook also did a pretty good Joe Cocker impersonation when he performed the Mad Dogs and Englishmen version of ‘The Letter’ with the band. After an hour or so, the singers and band would take a break, everyone shuffling outside to smoke a gasper or talk bullshit or try to chat up one of the office girls or whatever.
After a half-hour or so, we were back inside and ready for — in my case — the main event. For me, the real highlight of the night was when the Charlie Gauld Trio took the stage to play the progressive rock hits of the time. Charlie was arguably one of the greatest guitar players in the country and a legend of the local music scene, having come out of Melbourne’s ’50s go-to house band the Thunderbirds, which had also included Harold Frith on drums and Peter Robinson on bass, who went on to co-form with Laurie Arthur the Strangers. The Thunderbirds had backed Betty McQuaid on her hit recording of the John D Loudermilk song ‘Midnight Bus’ as well as Johnny Chester on his version of the Johnny Kidd and the Pirates hit ‘Shakin’ All Over’. Listen to Johnny’s version of the song on YouTube; that’s Charlie Gauld wangin’ that surf guitar, and what a cold blast of icy reverb that sound is!
Charlie could play anything; funk, flamboyance or invention. The first time I heard Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Foxy Lady’, as well as Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ they were being played by Charlie at The Heidelberg. He stood expressionless and resolute behind his aviator sunglasses and extracted, it seemed to me, the same fire and fluidity from his Burns guitar that Hendrix and Clapton had managed to pull out of their Stratocasters. It was psychedelic, it was funk, it was blues, it was rock — Charlie Gauld played them all.
Many years later, Jeff Burstin and myself were playing a little acoustic gig on a Sunday afternoon at the Palace Hotel on Burke Road in Camberwell. Suddenly, a little old man wearing enormous sunglasses shuffled into the room, pulling with him a shopping trolley full of old newspapers.