Sometime in 1968 my voice broke and puberty reared its ugly, pimply head. It was a strange time all round; kids would go away for the holidays and come back as muscled-up brutes. My life was a whirl of lessons and fashion, and falling in love with girls and getting thumped by bullies – and plenty of rock music of course, the great constant, flowing through my life like a river.

IN 1968 WE could choose two elective subjects and I chose French and Latin from the rather dismal choices available – I mean, commerce and metalwork weren’t really that appealing to a renaissance boy in the spring of things. But French did not reveal itself to me: it spat me out and had a good fucking laugh at my dire pronunciations. It was like maths: after a while a voice in my head said ‘boy, why are we even bothering with this malarkey?’ I always know it’s bad when that voice says stuff like that, it means it’s gonna switch my brain off to that particular thing. It’d already done it with maths and science and next French was getting the chop.

But the voice said good things too, like when I came across my first Latin lesson and it said ‘OK … this we can really handle … Go!’ It was like I wasn’t learning Latin but remembering it, similar to my ancient Greek recollections. I had such a hunger that I devoured it declension by conjugation. For two years under the wonderful Mrs McGlynn’s tutelage I raced ahead of the class and was deep into the textbook in no time. Sitting around at home doing Latin exercises because I loved it! Finally, after those bloody French lessons – going on about Monsieur Dubois eating a bread-stick down at Pont Neuf, we were invading Gaul and laying waste to the cities and our centurions were hailing ‘Mighty Caesar’ fresh from victories in Britannia! I loved Latin, and it came so easily I must’ve spoken it in some past life; I have no doubt about that now. But no Frenchmen in the woodpile – I ditched that as soon as I could. Anyway, as I always say, you can’t be good at everything.

Strange characters ebbed and flowed through my life. I became really good friends with a Swedish misfit called Stefan Strom. When he arrived at our school with his long blond hair and his accent and the prescription sunglasses he was allowed to wear in class, the girls flocked to him. All six feet three inches of him – he was like a Scandinavian Peter Fonda. But after a short time he proved too offbeat a character for the straight lassies of Lyneham and was marginalised with the other weirdos like, um, me. Stefan had already had sex with girls, had already smoked dope and inhaled a packet of Benson and Hedges a day. Nothing was a big deal to him. He was a true bohemian and didn’t give a damn what the kids at school thought. He was a lunatic: one day he pulled up out the front of my place in a car that had no seats. First of all, at fifteen we were far too young to have licences … and a car with no seats? So Stefan had stuck two deck chairs in there, one for him and one for me. Every time we went around a corner or he accelerated or braked the deck chairs slid all over the place. Stefan held onto the steering wheel for grim death as our seats went sideways and up’n’down.

Or he’d come and drink all my father’s Advocaat and wobble home on his ‘borrowed’ bike. Stefan also used to wag classes and kids would convene at his house and listen to records – he was way ahead of his time when it came to music and was listening to whole albums when we were just listening to singles. ‘Teenyboppers,’ he sneered.

As I got closer and closer to sixteen my need for my own bass guitar became a real gnawing longing. I was walking along a school corridor one time when I heard some familiar chords being strummed and looking through the window in the door I saw this kid called Don Robinson, three years younger than me, strumming ‘Atlantis’ by Donovan on a nylon-string guitar while a bunch of appreciative girls sat around him oohing and cooing. ‘Atlantis’ was one of my favourite songs then – it still is – and to hear some kid playing it kind of incensed me, reminding me that I still hadn’t gotten anything musical together. (Don Miller-Robinson, as he’s now known, is musical director and guitarist for Shania Twain and I’m not surprised: that kid had loads of music in him, and was very handsome to boot!)

My music dreams were temporarily shelved, though, when I went through a period of wanting to make it as a footy star – I gradually got sucked into watching and talking about and then actually playing Aussie Rules football. I randomly picked Essendon to barrack for because they had the best jerseys, black with a red hoop; nobody else I knew followed them so that appealed to me too. I joined the Turner Footy Club and started practising every Tuesday afternoon.

Again, Nigel Murray hove into view because he was in the team too and cried much derision when I joined and went out of his way to mock and deride my admitted hopelessness. My dad bought me my own expensive football, a Sherrin, and the second day I had it I kicked it to Nigel and one of his big mates, who simply walked off with it. I never saw it again. (And I let that villain into my bloody band!) I had one good thing going for me in that I could jump very high: I was a skinny kid and could leap up in the air without much trouble. In school I’d always been pretty good at high jump and long jump and Aussie Rules is all about players jumping in the air, sometimes on top of each other, to catch the ball on the full. It’s very spectacular and exciting to watch – the high mark is an incredible thing that Aussie Rules has that all the other codes don’t. Crowds go apeshit when someone ‘pulls down a screamer’. (Astute readers may recognise the phrase from ‘Outbound’ on my Painkiller album.)

But the trouble was I was bad at all the other stuff: the tackling, the shepherding, the handballing. I was scrawny and I was a coward. I didn’t care enough about the fucking football to get hurt over it; nothing could turn off my self-preservation mechanism, which just wouldn’t send me into the thick of things for a football. Plus, at fifteen, some of the other kids were already built like grown men, and had moustaches and stuff. I wasn’t gonna go up against that rabble! I was relegated to the B team, and then to be a bench warmer who was sometimes allowed to run around the field for five minutes when it didn’t matter anymore because our side was being so easily thrashed.

So I consoled myself by coaching an Under 7 side, and then I actually became an umpire. At 7am on freezing winter Saturdays you’d find me with my whistle, running around applying the rules to a bunch of weeny kids who were only just playing Aussie Rules at all … Until one morning at an oval in Reid – you read about this kind of thing all the time nowadays but back then it shocked me deeply – a bunch of parents on the sideline started getting nasty with me and the kids and each other. Soon I was presiding over a free-for-all with parents coming on the field disputing my decision, and eventually every bitch and bastard there was angry with me and screaming for my blood.

The umpires were issued with this little card so they could comment on the matches and report the scores. So I reported back what had happened, and got a call a few days later that a car would be coming around to take me to a tribunal! Sure enough a big black car rolled up with a driver in a cap and everything and drove me to an office somewhere where three important-looking geezers sitting behind a long table questioned me over and over about this stupid fucking Under 7s football match. They brought in witnesses and everything to make sure justice prevailed! And there was one of the dads carrying on as if he were in the High Court or something, saying I’d deliberately rigged the match. And this from one of the ringleaders of all the trouble, who said I was bringing our great game into disrepute! That evening Aussie Rules and I parted company permanently: this was not the kind of caper I was enjoying anymore. Me? A tribunal? You gotta be joking!

So my sixteenth birthday was approaching and I began to seriously ask my folks for a bass guitar. I wanted a violin bass, the same as Paul McCartney’s, because that was the first bass guitar I’d ever really noticed or thought about. In all truth I wouldn’t have known a decent bass from a plank of wood; I’d never even picked one up or handled one. I was an absolute beginner. My dad had his reservations and listed off a few things I’d taken up and spent money on and then quit – piano lessons, Navy Cadets (I kid you not!), football, and the Bullworker I’d gotten him to get me at some stage, hoping to give my scrawny self the muscles this contraption guaranteed so some bully wouldn’t kick sand in my face if I ever made it to the beach. It wasn’t that my dad was stingy; he just thought I seemed like what you might call a flake. That I was ‘gormless’, as my Aunty Lou Lou would’ve put it. No one thought I had the gumption to pull anything off, but the voice in my head was going crazy telling me to get the old man to get me a bass guitar. I knew the likelihood of my sticking with anything didn’t look good on paper, but something told me I’d stick to this. Jesus, I wish my dad could be at my 60th birthday party; I’d pick up my bass and say, ‘How’s that? Forty-four years and still pluckin’!’

So eventually September rolled around and my dad agreed to buy me a bass. He always had mates who had businesses who owed him a favour, and would do him a good deal because he’d gotten them a cheap fridge or something, so on Friday late-night shopping we drove across Canberra to the neighbouring town of Queanbeyan where Dad knew some geezer in a music shop. We walked in and I looked around. There wasn’t a single bass guitar in the shop, just a few acoustic nylon strings and one cheap semi-acoustic red thing up on the wall.

‘Hello Les, what can I do for you? Need a new piano?’ said the geezer.

‘No,’ said Dad, ‘I’ve come in to buy my boy a bass guitar. Do you have any?’

The guy looked at my dad and shook his head: ‘Nah …’ he scoffed, ‘No one’s playing ’em anymore, there’s not much call for ’em. They’ve gone outta fashion. Everyone’s playing rhythm guitars now.’ And he gestured to the red cheapie on the wall. ‘That’s a good rhythm guitar, that is. You can have it with a case for 40 bucks.’

‘That’s a good deal Slim!’ said my dad to me.

‘But Dad …!’ I said sullenly. ‘I want a bass guitar!’

‘You heard what he said, no one’s playing bass anymore!’ The guy looked at me and shrugged like he was saying ‘that’s the truth’. Dad was starting to get the $40 out of his wallet and everything.

‘Please Dad, can we go and try somewhere else?’ I begged.

As we left the shop the guy was shaking his head and looking at me as if I’d soon find out he was right, but I directed Dad to Tuffin’s Music House where I knew there was something exactly right – but would he come at the price? It was $80! Well, luckily he did and we arrived home that night, on the eve of my sixteenth birthday, with a brand new Aria violin bass – which was a fairly decent copy of Sir Paul’s old axe … if you didn’t know anything about bass guitar that was. But I was in love, and that bass rarely left my side.

At first I didn’t know what to do with my new bass; I didn’t have a clue. I bought a book on playing and learned how to tune it and the names of all the notes. But when the musical fly-shit dots began appearing a few pages in I chucked the book in the wardrobe of unwanted things (along with my footy boots, Navy Cadet get-up and the tattered remains of the music to ‘Marche Militaire’) and carried on regardless. One useful thing I did do was put on my favourite records and pretend I was playing the bloody thing while watching myself in the mirror. I looked pretty good with my violin bass and preposterous pageboy hairdo. Skinnier than skinny. (Actually, this exercise was just a small step up from the tennis racquet and ‘Please Please Me’ days: miming along and singing and plucking my bass and pretending.) It was within me, now I just had the tedious job of figuring the whole ‘music’ thing out!

It was like learning how to speak another language or something; there were general overall rules you had to get your head around before you could start getting specific things down. It was hard at first. I had to learn, or relearn, a load of things and understand certain concepts – about tuning-up, octaves and flats and sharps and all that stuff. Then there were the chords of songs and how they related to bass guitar …

For a while there I was amp-less; luckily my bass had a hollow body so it made a bit of a tonal sound – that is, you could hear the different notes in a quietish room. (Unlike my Fender jazz bass, which has almost no sound if played without an amp.) I also discovered that if I held my bass against the wardrobe of unwanted things it was amplified acoustically and I could get a bit of a bassy feeling. Then Dad came to my rescue again, procuring an old disused school PA system from somewhere. It had a one-column speaker and the amplifier, which he’d mucked about with so I could wire my bass straight in, seeing there was no jack plug.

I was very grateful, though it was possibly the worst bass sound anyone had ever heard! The thing crackled, and dropped in and out, and the bass sounded like a chainsaw going through a fuzz-pedal with a flat battery. Talk about a duck farting on a muggy day! It was a diabolically ugly and feeble sound. I probably blew the speakers in the first minute when I turned the volume and bass knobs up to full and strummed all four strings at once. (That’s an awful fucking racket let me tell you!) And then, after tooling around on it obsessively for a few weeks, and getting blistered fingers all over the place, I began to figure out simple bass riffs.

The very first one I ever figured out was ‘Little Green Bag’ by the George Baker Selection. Then Chicago’s ‘25 or 6 to 4’, which I hammered away at for hours until my mum or dad threatened violence if I didn’t desist! Then they all started to come out of the fret board: the Black Sabbath and Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin riffs. The blues riffs and the rest. I persevered and was rewarded. People would come over, relatives and stuff, and ask to hear Steven playing his electric guitar … but they wished they hadn’t after I’d given them a sample of my riff menu. Nobody really knew what a bass guitar on its own was supposed to really be; I guess it didn’t sound so good in the living room at 7 Baines Place, Lyneham, in 1970!

At the same time I bought a ten-dollar nylon-string guitar and got a book of chords and figured them out too, but I was never as comfortable playing the guitar as the bass. The bass is like my native language and with any other instrument I’m translating it in my head. It’s like my guitar and keyboard playing is broken and stilted and my bass is fluent.

After a while Dad bought me a very nice Maton amplifier; it was actually a Maton stack with four inputs, meaning other instruments could get in as well as the bass. I took up with a bunch of catholic kids from Daramalan College – there was a drummer called Mark Tolley and a guy named Fernando O’Reilly who played guitar. They probably liked me more for my amp than my bass playing, which was blah: we were all just figuring it out. Sometimes we went to Mark’s place in Dickson and practised in his garage. When I say ‘practised’ I’m using the term pretty loosely! We figured if Fernando played his E7 chord and I played a bass riff starting on the E string, and the drummer went boom, boom, boom, crash, wallop, we were roughly approaching some boogie number that those guys liked. They liked Savoy Brown and Foghat and bluesy boogie twelve-bar stuff. Which really wasn’t my cup of tea, but things aren’t always perfect and sometimes we all have to make do.

So Fernando and I became friends. We used to smoke Galaxy cigarettes (the shortest and cheapest on the market), and we’d gatecrash parties trying to pick up young ladies with questionable morals, whom Fernando termed ‘slackies’. One night we ended up at a party and a slackie sat on my lap and starting tongue kissing me like a machine. As Fernando would’ve said, ‘she pashed me off.’ Wow, cigarettes and guitars and kisses, I was really apprehending the adult world here!

Eventually there were a load of guitar players and me, the lone bass, hanging out of my Maton guitar amp stack on any given afternoon – in either our garage or Mark Tolley’s. Did I mention Mark had a good-looking older sister who dated Tony Hayes, one of Canberra’s most famous local bassists? He had a Burns Bison bass with the ‘horns’ and two big Lenard speakers. Along with his long blond hair and good looks ‘Hayesy’ also had his own powerful bass sound that I really admired. He had it all down. I wanted to be like him. So practising at Mark’s gave everything a slightly cooler feel; he even had this little pad out the back of the garage, with pop magazines and his sister’s old fashion mags, where we’d hang out and smoke ciggies ten to the dozen. We’d sit there playing ‘Rock Around the Clock’ or something like that for hour upon hour upon hour – this was what all the Daramalan catholic boys were into. All afternoon I’d play along to these incredibly boring, lacklustre, noisy twelve-bar jams that were going nowhere fast.

Between sessions Fernando and I would go into Tuffin’s Music House and, while I distracted Mr Tuffin, Fernando would hastily scribble down chords from the music books that were for sale up the back. Copying the chords to all these old-time blues and rock’n’roll numbers, oblivious to the fact that basically they’re all the same! Sure the keys might change but the progression always does the same thing. We were so naive we hadn’t quite cottoned on; besides, I’d resigned myself to playing this dull meat’n’potatoes stuff. Still, it was good to play with the drummer and the other guys and so we played the chords to ‘Rock Around the Fucking Clock’ all afternoon … or any other song like that you can think of – and there are thousands!

During all this there was no singing, no microphones or anything. I was gathering from the boys that the idea of singing was kind of pretentious, so no one even mentioned it. We had an unspoken uniform too, which no one dared transgress, though I don’t know where this uniform came from. My father used to always ask me, ‘Yes, but who decided that all this stuff was the fashion, that’s what I want to know.’ I still ask my kids that same old question and no one has ever found out. It’s hilarious, isn’t it? I guess most of it came from surfies or someone who knew a kid who went to school in Sydney; maybe someone a year older who went to a cool high school in Sydney, who was probably a surfie and had his own little pad where he played some electric guitar, smoked loads of cigarettes and had sex with his gorgeous surfie girlfriend. This guy had determined our uniform as thus: footwear had to be thongs or Ugg Boots or possibly desert boots. The thongs had to be white or at least black – white thongs showed off your suntanned feet. Thongs showed the white pattern left on your suntanned foot when you slipped them off after a long day of surfing, drinking milkshakes, eating hamburgers and hot chips and rooting attractive catholic girls.

Pants had to be jeans or cords. Now the jeans had a hierarchy in themselves, which varied from school to school. This was my school’s jeans hierarchy: first of all the basic ‘cool’ jeans were Levi’s. This was the base level of jeans. You couldn’t wear Amco or Leisuremaster or any other corny, cheap or no-name jeans – it just wasn’t on and almost everybody understood that. To be out in something less than Levi’s was social suicide; I never tried it after I twigged what was happening. There was an underground word-of-mouth: someone would say, ‘I saw Geoff Bancroft in a pair of light green Levi’s cords and he looked tough!’ Tough was what you wanted to be. Tough meant cool. Paradoxically if you said ‘cool’ that wouldn’t have been cool or tough at all! Wanting to be described as tough, I’d hasten along to a jeans store in town trying to locate the pale green Levi’s cords that Geoff Bancroft had looked so tough in. Though none of these fucking jeans ever really looked good on me either: they all had a bit of a jodhpurs look to them, which was vaguely disconcerting but it was the uniform. I’d always say to the guys in the shops, ‘Will these shrink?’ And if they were already a bit big the guy would say, ‘Oh yeah!’ But they never did! And if the guy could see they were already a bit tight he’d say, ‘Nah, they might even stretch a little,’ and they’d always shrink.

If you wanted something slightly cooler than Levi’s but a few dollars more you could go Lee – Levi’s were ten bucks a pair and Lee were twelve. Lee Cooper were next at thirteen bucks and Wranglers were fifteen bucks a pair, which seemed a fortune. Then one day someone spotted Geoff Bancroft in a pair of (imported from America) Bear-cat jeans, which were pronounced the coolest jeans of all. Somehow I found out there was one shop in all of Australia that stocked Bear-cat jeans, and so I talked my dad into driving to Melbourne to visit our rellies and friends just so I could get to the Bear-cats in some mall there!

We had a great drive down listening to the radio and discussing music; I was beginning to like my dad more and more. He was a truly reasonable bloke. Once in the shop in Melbourne I found my Holy Grail at twenty dollars a pair but the bad news was they had them either in the size above or size below my regular size. I asked the guy if they would shrink. ‘No way!’ he said with much authority. There I am thinking this guy is incredible just because he works in a groovy Melbourne jeans shop and I’m a squirt from Canberra, so I buy the too-small pair. They’re a bit small but I can get away with it. A school social is coming up where I plan to unveil the Bear-cats. The kids are all kinda miffed and envious, just as I’d hoped, but my mum washes ’em, doesn’t she? And did they shrink? Oh boy, yes indeedy! The night of the social they’ve climbed right up my calves until they’re only half an inch below being knickerbockers or something. And the famous label is covered up anyway because I’ve had to drag them halfway down my waist and my shirt is out to cover that up. (Unlike today!)

Some kid came up and sneered: ‘Love yer Bear-cats, Kilbey!’ This is the kind of thing that’s shaped me into the flaky fool I am today!