Lying in bed with a staph-infected leg above heart level and my head full of Codeine this past week, I had a very strange dream about having a food fight with the rock band Skyhooks at Sydney’s Manly Beach.
As some people howled with laughter and others with indignation, open sandwiches, party pies, sausage rolls and handfuls of various dips flew through the air, splattering on shirts, fancy hairdos and even fancier hats while a band – not the Hooks – played on from a nearby bandstand. It was a very strange and almost disturbing dream, and I knew that serious painkillers can screw with your mind, but this was not a figment of a distorted imagination. It actually happened, 50 years ago in January, at a launch party for the brand new ABC rock station 2JJ, and recently receiving a reunion invitation had clearly been the catalyst, wedging itself somewhere in the recesses of my brain.
Since my association with 2JJ, the ABC’s original olive branch to Australian youth, was through surfing – I was the station’s first surf reporter in 1975 – the dreamy food fight got me thinking about the relationship between the rock and surf youth cultures, and the many bonds of friendship, not to mention business partnerships that came out of that. And this line of thought was reinforced, again by the ABC, with two programs which aired during my leg-up convalescence.
The first was Paul Clarke’s excellent Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line, from a writer/director who has crisscrossed the line between surf and rock throughout his storied career, often bringing the esteemed surfer/author Nick Carroll along for the ride. And Nick’s occasional commentary here as a grom on the beach watching a band on the rise is the perfect illustration of the connection I’m talking about. I caught the early Oils on several occasions at their Narrabeen Antler gigs, loved their energy, the music not so much – that appreciation came later.
Call me shallow if you will, but I was a Skyhooks guy, and that had all started a decade earlier, just before the food fight at Manly, when I interviewed Shirley Strachan with Mushroom Records founder Michael Gudinski and we formed an instant bond, mostly over surfing. As well as being a singer of incredible range and an amazing showman, Shirl was a chippie from Melbourne who’d most recently lived on Phillip Island, where he’d check the surf first thing in the morning before deciding whether to work or not. He was an amusing, easygoing guy and thereafter, every time the band was in Sydney he would sneak off to Whale Beach where I lived and worked at Tracks mag, and where we had a commanding view of the Whaley Wedge at the northern end of the beach.
We’d sit around and drink beers and talk, and when the wind and tide were right, we’d surf. And Shirl was pretty handy too. We surfed together in a lot of places over the ensuing years, most notably in G-Land in 1997, just a few years before the untimely death of the now-Noosa resident in a helicopter crash near Kilcoy in 2001.
But back at Whale Beach in 1976, on one of those days when the Wedge wasn’t quite chucking up its fast-running left, and so maybe we’d had a beer or two too many, I talked Shirl into posing on the Tracks thunderbox in the backyard, sucking on a ciggie while reading the current issue. In my beer delirium, I wanted to run it on the cover, but when Gudinski got wind of that one he screamed a few versions of the negative down the phone at me, so I had to sneak it in down the back, where it still caused a sensation.
We were in Bundoran, Ireland, for the Quiksilver Masters in August 2001 and I was hosting the opening party when Quik founder Alan Green, a very close friend of Shirl’s, broke in with the news that our mate had fallen out of the sky while piloting his beloved chopper. This was a bit before Spotify, so we couldn’t find a Hooks anthem on our phones, but after a minute’s silence and a toast to Shirl, the barman managed to find a mixed cassette with Women In Uniform on it. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it brought the house down.
Shirl is still remembered in Noosa through Noosa SLSC’s annual Shirley Strachan and Bruce Warren Memorial Swim.
The other rock music/surfing link back in the day was Australian Crawl, who were surf-stoked enough to actually co-sponsor the Bells Beach Pro with Rip Curl one year. Bandleader Jimmy Reyne could surf, but the real surfers of the band in the ‘80s were guitarists Brad Robinson and Guy McDonagh. Sadly, Guy battled addiction and died in 1984, while Brad followed a dozen years later, of lymphoma.
Finally, to get this back to where we started, when Midnight Oil called it a day the first time around, three of its members formed The Break, one of the best surf instrumental bands since the Chantays in the ‘60s. Not sure whether we’ll hear from them again, but these days the surf connection lives on in music everywhere, from Jack Johnson to Pearl Jam to our very own Band of Frequencies.
Long live surf-rock!
FOOTNOTE: If you’re wondering what my favourite octogenarian has to do with any of the above, absolutely nothing except for the fact that Bob McTavish rang for one of our regular shoot the breezes while I was writing this Brine. Shortly after our chat, I was searching my files for a McTavish board shot for another project and this great shot from a big, clean day at Boulders in 2012 was staring back at me. Bob was 68 at the time, and still charging. And he still is at 80! I thought it deserved another airing.
