Australian Metal Music

Identities, Scenes, and Cultures

Catherine Hoad, Rosemary Lucy Hill, Keith Kahn-Harris, Catherine Hoad

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787691698
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Defining 'Australian metal' is a challenge for scene members and researchers alike. Australian metal has long been situated in a complex relationship between local and global trends, where the geographic distance between Australia and metal music's seemingly traditional centres in the United States and United Kingdom have meant that metal in Australia has been isolated from international scenes. While numerous metal scenes exist throughout the country, 'Australian metal' itself, as a style, as a sound, and as a signifier, is a term which cannot be easily defined.
This book considers the multiple ways in which 'Australianness' has been experienced, imagined, and contested throughout historical periods, within particular subgenres, and across localised metal scenes. In doing so, the collection not only explores what can be meant by Australian metal, but what can be meant by 'Australian' more generally. With chapters from researchers and practitioners across Australia, each chapter maps the distinct ways in which 'Australianness' has been grappled with in the identities, scenes, and cultures of heavy metal in the country. Authors address the question of whether there is anything particularly 'Australian' about Australian metal music, finding that often the 'Australianness' of Australian metal is articulated through wider, mythologised archetypes of national identity. However, this collection also reveals how Australianness can manifest in metal in ways that can challenge stereotypical imaginings of national identity, and assert new modes of being metal 'downungerground'.

Part I

Australian Metal Identities: Masculine Genealogies and Trajectories

Chapter 1

Heavy Metal Kids: A Historiographical Exploration of Australian Proto-Heavy Metal in the 1960s–1970s¹

Paul ‘Nazz’ Oldham

Abstract

The key characteristics that eventually came to be considered to be Australian ‘heavy metal’ emerged between 1965 and 1973. These include distortion, power, intensity, extremity, loudness and aggression. This exploration of the origins of heavy metal in Australia focusses on the key acts which provided its domestic musical foundations, and investigates how the music was informed by its early, alcohol-fuelled early audiences, sites of performance, media and record shops. Melbourne-based rock guitar hero Lobby Loyde’s classical music influence and technological innovations were important catalysts in the ‘heaviness’ that would typify Australian proto-metal in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, loud and heavy rock was firmly established as a driving force of the emerging pub rock scene. Extreme volume heavy rock was taken to the masses was Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs in the early 1970s whose triumphant headline performance at the 1972 Sunbury Pop Festival then established them as the most popular band in the nation. These underpinnings were consolidated by three bands: Sydney’s primal heavy prog-rockers Buffalo (Australia’s counterpart to Britain’s Black Sabbath), Loyde’s defiant Coloured Balls and the highly influential AC/DC, who successfully crystallised heavy Australian rock in a global context. This chapter explores how the archaeological foundations for Australian metal are the product of domestic conditions and sensibilities enmeshed in overlapping global trends. In doing so, it also considers how Australian metal is entrenched in localised musical contexts which are subject to the circulation of international flows of music and ideas.

Keywords: Australia; heavy metal; proto-metal; 1970s; pub rock; Oz rock

Introduction

The key characteristics that have come to be considered as Australian ‘heavy metal’ emerged between 1965 and 1973. These include power, intensity, extremity, loudness, aggression and a rebellious attitude. While Australian music was certainly influenced by British and North American proto-heavy metal rock acts, the nation’s relatively small population and geographical distance from Europe and North America resulted in it commonly being omitted from international touring schedules. As a result, Australian domestic acts rose to fill the void. In this chapter, I offer a historical analysis of the foundations of Australian heavy metal as it emerged through four key acts: Lobby Loyde, Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, Buffalo and AC/DC. First, I address how the many crucial preconditions that would later be viewed as cornerstones of Australian heavy rock were established by virtuoso rock guitarist and technological innovator Lobby Loyde; a pioneering figure of Australian rock in the 1960s and 1970s. As will be seen, Loyde cultivated a style of raw musical extremism and a high-volume assault on the senses that was to set the pace for his peers. I then investigate how these characteristics became mainstream in the late 1960s and early 1970s through Loyde’s influence on Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, one of the nation’s most popular heavy rock acts, and through his own high-energy rock act, the Coloured Balls. The chapter next shifts its focus to the rise and fall of Sydney’s Buffalo. I explore how Buffalo added to the sound and image of what had come before with proto-doom and proto-stoner sounds and outrageous imagery that flirted with occult themes and macho sexism. Finally, I discuss how AC/DC came to define Australian heavy rock to that point, eventually managing to successfully popularise it on the world stage. In charting the development of Australian heavy metal’s foundations, I also demonstrate that they are the product of domestic conditions and sensibilities enmeshed in overlapping global trends, informed by its alcohol-fuelled performance sites and youth-oriented media. Australian metal is entrenched in localised musical contexts which are subject to the circulation of international flows of music and ideas.

Australia’s isolation from the rest of the western popular music industry markets in the twentieth century is well-storied, as is the cautious conservativeness of its record industry and primitiveness of its recording studios (see Hayward, 1992; Homan & Mitchell, 2008; Stratton, 2007; Whiteoak & Scott-Maxwell, 2003). These factors both restricted, shaped and inspired popular music actively produced, consumed and reproduced in Australia under local cultural conditions. Australia is at such distance from the original contexts, musicians and sites of jazz, rock’n’roll and significant popular music trends such as surf, soul and beat booms, that Australian artists often deferred to (and imitated) the global source texts flowing from the United States and the United Kingdom. Despite its geographical size,² Australia’s relatively low population size means that its artists cannot hope to generate domestic record or ticket sales comparable to that of the United States or United Kingdom. One consequence of this is that major record labels in Australia were, historically, often timid about investing in the facilities or talents of its local recording and sound production industries. Mainstream Australian radio, television and the press were similarly unadventurous. The compounding of Australia’s relatively small consumer market (even in urban centres) with its remoteness also meant that international tours were not as plentiful as those enjoyed between North America and Europe. Lastly, Australian artists were rarely recognised or successful outside of the national context.³ However, as Homan (2008) observes, whatever Australia lacked in facilities and consumers, it made up for in the nationalist pride it placed on its (typically white and male) rock performers, and their passionately earthy live performances. It is in the live context, and partially due to the scarcity of touring international acts, that Australian rock music, and later heavy metal music, developed and excelled. The country’s vibrant live music scene is concentrated around, but not restricted to, its metropolitan hubs. Cities with smaller populations, such as Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, far from concentrated activity of the Melbourne and Sydney⁴ have all produced a plethora of dynamic and influential rock and pop acts. This chapter now turns to the pivotal example of one such musician.

Lobby Loyde: Australia’s First Blues Rock Guitar Hero

The figure which looms largest in the very early history of Australian proto heavy metal is its first blues-based rock guitar hero: Lobby Loyde. He was both a virtuoso musician and a tech-head; once viewed as a leading light of Australian underground music, and was regarded by peers as a maverick figure who resisted compromise and commerciality. He earned his reputation in a series of rock acts throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and produced key Australian punk acts in the 1980s. Loyde’s music covered rhythm and blues, psychedelic heavy blues rock, hard rock, progressive rock and proto-punk, and pointed towards heavy metal, space rock, stoner rock, punk and alternative rock. Born in 1941 Longreach, Queensland as John Baslington ‘Barry’ Lyde, Loyde was the child of two professional musicians. He was raised on a remote farm and classically trained in piano and violin by his mother from age four. Thanks to his parents’ eclectic tastes and a large record collection, Loyde was steeped in a wide range of classical, jazz, blues and world music. His father also taught him how to tinker with music technology, demonstrating how the sounds on his records were created. In 1956, Loyde’s diverse influences intersected with a love of rock’n’roll by artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley. He was also drawn to fiery rockabilly guitar players, specifically: Frank ‘Franny’ Beecher of Bill Haley’s Comets; Scotty Moore of Presley’s original Sun recordings; Cliff Gallup from Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps; and James Burton from the Ricky Nelson band (Keenan, 2006; Perrin, 2006). Loyde taught himself to play guitar by ear in his late-teen years (McIntyre, 2011). By 1963, he became lead guitarist in his first band and promptly bought two effects pedals to make his sound dirtier: a Gibson Maestro FZ-1 fuzz-tone and an American Wow (a very early wah-wah pedal). Two years later, the Maestro had been popularised internationally by Keith Richards in May 1965, after it was used to create the distinctive fuzz-tone on the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (McIntyre, 2011).

Loyde gained his reputation among peers and the music media as Australia’s equivalent of guitar hero Eric Clapton with two respected underground bands: Brisbane’s hard-edged Australian garage R&B act, The Purple Hearts (1964–1966), and Melbourne’s experimental psychedelic freakbeat pop/soul rockers Wild Cherries (1967–1968). Loyde quickly became regarded as the loudest and most adventurous player on Australia’s music scene, creating unearthly sounds which seemed quite radical compared to his peers.⁵ While The Purple Hearts⁶ were known for tough covers, the jazz-steeped Wild Cherries gained a reputation for intense and lengthy virtuoso improvisations (see McFarlane, 1999; Spencer & Nowara, 1993). Unfortunately, as the Australian record-buying market was relatively small, local record companies of the era were notoriously conservative (McFarlane, 1999; McIntyre, 2006), with an unspoken mandate to release only that which was commercial and radio friendly. Hence, few ‘edgy’ bands got to record anything more than singles (The Purple Hearts and Wild Cherries included). Loyde was openly critical of what he considered to be the music industry’s lack of adventurousness and interest in anything musically challenging (McIntyre, 2006; Warburton, 2004). However, when he became the Wild Cherries’ chief songwriter, he was aware that compromises would need to be made to ensure the band’s material could be recorded and released by Festival Records. Thus, Loyde and producer Pat Aulton re-shaped the Wild Cherries free-form spontaneity into four carefully-shaped pop singles that had a simple lyrical storyline (McIntyre, 2006). Despite this, the single That’s Life, released in November 1967, remains one of the most adventurous Australian releases to that point (McIntyre, 2006; Warburton, 2004). While the Wild Cherries produced exciting and innovative commercial singles, little of their lauded artistic audacity and improvisatory prowess is evident on their studio recordings.

Lobby Loyde was also notorious for pushing the limits of his amplifiers. In The Purple Hearts, he blew up five valve circuits in his pair of Voxx AC-30s and eight 12-inch speakers in a 10-week period (Loyde, 1966, p. 8). When his speaker cones split, Loyde did not bother fixing them because he preferred the distorted sound (McIntyre, 2011). Loyde’s quest for ever-higher volumes transcended notions of brute force. He believed that extreme volumes and their vibrations vitalised an audience, while cleansing the mind of distractions to allow them to focus only on the music (Engleheart, 2010). Here Loyde’s thinking recalls Walser (1993, p. 2) who claims heavy metal’s staple characteristics of loudness and intensity empowers and energises its fans. Loyde worked with Australia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Critical Introduction: What Is ‘Australian’ About Australian Heavy Metal?
• Part I. Australian Metal Identities: Masculine Genealogies and Trajectories
• Part II. Australian Metal Scenes in the East and West
• Part III. Cultures of Resistance in Australian Metal
• Afterword. Being Metal, Being Australian? Reflections and an Afterword
• Appendix. Seminal Australian Metal Albums: A List by the Contributors
• Index