I look around me now sometimes and it’s like it never happened. Square kids in square jobs in square suits, believing in the same old stuff. It’s like we fought the rock’n’roll war for nothing. Yeah, that’s how it sometimes seems to me. I guess there will always be the opposing forces of society: the groovy and the non-groovy. And the non-groovy are usually better organised and seem to always prevail … That’s a real shame, but what are you gonna do?

SO HERE WE are in Chapter Two already and I’m putting myself at around nine years old. I’m living in Dapto, New South Wales, and I’ve got myself a nice little brother called Russell and life so far has proved to be pretty good. I do OK at school … I’m in the A class, though I flounder around the middle-to-lower end in all the tests. Everybody tells me I could do better and my general ‘cheekiness’ is usually cited as the cause for getting a C or D for conduct. I can’t help but be the class clown – I suppose it’s an effort to imitate my father, who is such a funny fellow, but I don’t make that many kids laugh, just arouse the wrath of my teachers with the flippant and disrespectful remarks I yell out in class. (‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!’ I say now to my former self who’s stuck in 1963 and trying to get on with it.)

One night there was a strange sight on the telly: it was a film clip of the new singing group The Beatles playing a song called ‘Love Me Do’. ‘Look at their bleeding Barnets,’ said my dad – Barnet Fair being cockney rhyming slang for hair. I must admit I didn’t undergo an epiphany upon first sighting the Fab Four, though it’s sure tempting to write that I did. A few kids came over that evening and they were all talking about The Beatles and how silly their parents thought they were. A few weeks later a friend of mine, who was a bit of a boy genius, turned up with a Beatles magazine and I quickly learned who was who and what instruments they played. I wondered what the difference was between the bass, rhythm and lead guitars and thought if I were to play, it would be rhythm because bass sounded too boring and lead too complicated. My friend Andrew was really excited by the whole thing and could even recite whole bits out of this magazine: what colour eyes the boys liked in a girl, and how they all shared a dislike for something called trad jazz. I also heard him discussing with my mother how JFK had been assassinated over in the US that same day, but it all meant very little to me – The Beatles and JFK seemed like they belonged to another universe compared to sunny Dapto and its little houses where we all lived.

That year we had a great holiday: we drove up to Surfers Paradise and stayed at a place called Stuvon Flats that had a swimming pool and everything. But the thing I remember most is that the owner of the place had a groovy teenage daughter who was already a crazy Beatles fan and had a load of singles by them and a lot of other long-haired bands who looked very similar to the Liverpool lads. This groovy teenager said she spent all her time playing Beatles records or going out to clubs where they played Beatles records all night long. I was struck by her dedication to this new thing that was starting to capture the young people and I made a mental note to check it out more thoroughly.

Soon enough my dad bought Please Please Me, The Beatles’ first album, and occasionally played it on the Kilbey hi-fi system. I got to know that record pretty well; I got to understand John’s gruff shouty voice, and Paul’s more smooth singing, and George’s sweet and youthful sound. I listened to the words and they made me yearn for love. Oh I didn’t care if I got my heart broken like on that song ‘Anna’ … I just wanted whatever it was that all this exciting sound was about! I couldn’t separate the love from the music: it was all some glorious thing waiting for me out there in the future.

I remember playing Beatles records when my parents were out, complete with stage announcements, miming along on the tennis racquet (this was a bass) or a squash racquet (this was lead), frequently accompanied by my fledgling brother Russell who played a badminton racquet (rhythm). He also wore a pudding bowl on his head symbolising a Beatles haircut – all before he turned two. With my racquet and announcements between tracks (‘Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen, this next track is called “I Saw Her Standing There”!’) I imagined myself onstage at my school assembly. There I shocked the boys and delighted the girls with my singing and playing and my brilliant songs. This, this was the way forward for me and I twigged it at about age nine. From there on in it was always at the back of my mind that I would escape all the drudgery and work and study and become a pop star somewhere, somehow. I’d pull it off in the end. I told myself that so many times that I began to believe it – I had no doubt the world would catch up with me eventually. (Although it still really hasn’t … or doesn’t want to.) That dumb belief would see me through many hard times.

One Friday afternoon at Dapto Primary School in early 1964 I was feeling very contented and pleased with myself: it was lovely weather and we’d finished the day with a game of softball and I’d done pretty well. I’d been hitting and catching the ball like a real good ’un. I felt relaxed and popular and all that stuff that you crave from school but was hard to always get. That certain cool feeling. I was pretty happy with my lot I must say. That night though Dad gave us some news that shook up my world – we were moving to Shepparton in the state of Victoria. He’d been promoted and transferred and there was a house that went with the job. It broke my heart to leave Dapto, which had been my home for most of my short life, but there it was.

Shepparton was a whole other trip. It was more parochial, behind the times. And everything was different: different sweets, different soft drinks, different schools, different desks. Even a different way of writing (with pen and ink). In fact, the whole education curriculum seemed different – more focused on art and that kind of thing, that’s for sure. My new teacher and I clashed immediately. Mr Scott was about 45 and a bit of a painter in watercolours, and pretty good too. We were too alike to get on I think, in the beginning anyway. The kids in class perplexed me too; I didn’t seem able to make any impression on them.

Everything was so weird to me at first: they even played a different brand of football, not the rugby or soccer I was used to, and nobody ever explained the rules to me. Every time I got the ball the whistle would be blown because I’d committed some Aussie Rules blasphemy. Like running with the ball or throwing it to other players or ankle tapping and tackling round the neck. Still, I had quite a vicious streak from playing rugby in Dapto and it amused Mr Scott to let me have a run when we played other schools. A lot of kids had never seen such mayhem as I was liable to cause, breaking all the rules I didn’t understand. It was somehow good for the morale of our players to see me go illegally berserk and run through the whole other side clutching the ball, even though the umpire had blown his whistle a minute ago.

Eventually I settled in and Mr Scott took me under his wing and I really flourished. By the end of the year I was dux of the class and had done well in every subject. I painted a picture of one of Mr Scott’s paintings and he was tickled pink. He would’ve been a great mentor for me if we’d remained in Shepparton; he had my measure and knew how to reward me and keep me from misbehaving. I think I was his favourite student, though he still told me off from time to time. But a lot of the stuff he talked about, like Greek mythology, was mostly for my benefit because I was the only one really listening. Suddenly I miss Mr Scott and my classroom in Shepparton; I would never have as good an academic year again. At the tender age of ten I’d done my education dash!

After a great school year and running around at large in the lovely Shepparton hinterlands, Dad once again broke the news that we were leaving – for Canberra, in December. Again I was brokenhearted: Shepparton had treated me well and I was much better for it but Dad had been promoted again and so we moved into a modest three-bedroom red-brick place at 7 Baines Place, Lyneham, which would be my dwelling place for the next ten years.

Canberra, in 1964, was quite small, and Lyneham was right on the fringe of it. So there I was again with the bush right on my doorstep, which proved fertile ground to wander in with its yabby ponds and minor industrial areas with all their engine parts and pipes and bits of machines and other things we didn’t even recognise. Lyneham Primary School was different again to Dapto and Shepparton – this was the Australian Capital Territory and they had their own friggin’ curriculum, but at least the kids were writing in pen and ink. But now the ink was in inkwells in the desks and every kid was somewhat covered in ink and the blots were everywhere. My teacher was a cat called Mr Ferguson – later on my brother had him too and then he even came across to the high school, following after me! Mr Ferguson was no Mr Scott, that’s for sure. For the first time someone applied the label ‘immature’ to me: ‘Steven often interrupts the class with a loud comment, which he regards as smart but is generally immature.’ My first really bad review – but of course my comments were immature, I was ten years old!

I made lots of new friends at Lyneham Primary and a few enemies. On my first day I got in a fight with a good-looking kid called Nigel Murray who was a year older than me. (It was a portentous sign that I completely missed – this kid would become the first drummer in The Church and play on most of our first album …)

I had a crush on a girl at school called Anna, just like in the Beatles song (although one they didn’t actually write). Anna was an Austrian girl I think. I mean, I never spoke to her – I just worshipped her from a distance. Anyway, I let on to these three idiots in my class that I was in love with her and one afternoon they concocted a letter that contained the immortal line ‘let’s have a root and see how many babies we get!’ Which they sent to her address. So a couple of days later the headmaster, Mr Slade, a real old crotchety geezer, came into Class 5A and grabbed me by the ear and led me down to his office. And there’s Anna’s father – a seriously full-on Austrian (not Australian, for you dyslexic types). I mean he’s got the accent and the look of a fucking Monty Python-esque Austrian, and he’s beside himself with fury that someone has sent such filth to his ten-year-old daughter. I’d be pretty miffed too; now I’ve got five daughters myself I understand where Mr Austria was coming from.

Mr Slade let him loose on me and left the room and the guy grabbed me by the chin and yelled all this crazy ‘Germlish’ stuff at me about his daughter’s honour etc. He started dragging me around the room by my chin, which was compounded by the fact that he was using it to lift the rest of me off the floor. Slade came back and they both pulled me about: Slade by the ear and Mr Austria by the chin. At one stage they were having a tug of war with my face, pulling me in different directions. It was uncool to rat on people at my school but eventually I blurted out the names of the kids I suspected were responsible. They were summoned. They confessed and were dismissed, but Mr Austria was convinced they were protecting me and went at me again even harder, cursing me in some guttural nastiness … Eventually Slade let me go, though with no sorry or anything.

Then that Saturday afternoon two cops knocked at our front door. Mr Austria had decided he wasn’t going to see me get off scot-free and had dialled the police. So these cops came around to my house to bust me for writing obscene letters, and the first two things they saw were a painting of a nude my father had done (painted from a book) and a copy of the latest Playboy magazine sitting on the telephone table. The 60s Canberra coppers were shocked: they were speechless! Their faces began to harden. Then my mother, who’d greeted them at the door, pulled out a real doozy that stopped ’em nonplussed in their oafish tracks. In her best Queen Elizabeth II accent she said, ‘We try to encourage our children to be broadminded in this house.’ Well, the cops were suitably impressed and left shortly after.

As we (and the neighbours) watched them back down our drive Mum reverted to her normal Burnt Oak accent, and turning to me said, ‘You little bugger, if I find out you had anything to do with this …’ And you know what, everyone forever after secretly suspected that I did! But I didn’t. I must just have a guilty face.

Meanwhile, I was getting intoxicated with rock music. In class me and another kid sat up the back drawing pictures of guys playing guitars and drums and just generally whispered to each other about our latest favourites all through the lesson. We convened after school a few times and did acapella versions of ‘Twist and Shout’ and other Beatles numbers.

I became obsessed with The Easybeats and bought their first album; my first-ever LP purchase. When they came to Canberra and played at the Albert Hall my lovely generous Dad got me a ticket and dropped me off and picked me up. My first-ever gig and I’m seeing a bunch of Aussie bands at the top of their game: there was Bobby and Laurie, who had a great song where everybody stamped along; then MPD Ltd, who had a load of hits I loved; then The Easybeats hit the stage and the place absolutely erupted. I was right down the front among a bunch of teenage girls and they were screaming and wetting their pants and everything. As an eleven-year-old boy (and one of the very few males in the joint among all those teeny teary girls) they regarded me with contempt and disdain.

The Easybeats were mind-blowingly brilliant. Little Stevie was only sixteen or seventeen at the time. He was so skinny and quick and he danced around that stage while the chicks had protoorgasmic spasms, or whatever it was that was happening to them. Easy-mania I suppose. The drummer was flinging out drumsticks into the audience and the girls around me were fighting tooth and nail to get them. Eventually one landed near me. Oh how I wanted that fucking drumstick flung out by Snowy Fleet! I went crawling under the chairs. There it was! As I reached towards it, hypnotised by the mojo it must contain, a face loomed into view. The face of a tearstained convulsing vicious teenybopper girl who mouthed these words over the deafening music of The Easybeats: ‘I’m gonna fucking kill you, you little bastard!’ She meant it and I stood back up drumstickless. There was no way I was gonna argue with that kind of hysterical teenage female when I was eleven. To tell the truth, I still try and avoid it now at age 59.

The Easybeats had an amazing stage show. At its culmination Little Stevie leapfrogged the three guitarists while still playing. He was agile and he was on fire that night. I wanted all that immediately for myself. A voice in my head said ‘this is the life for you’ and from that moment on I was more or less plotting, plotting, plotting my move into the big time. I had seen it for real, up close. The sheer adrenaline of loud rock’n’roll by my favourite band as they delivered hit after hit. The crazy girls like frenzied sharks smelling blood. The skinniness and the black bell-bottom trousers of the group, the sparkling drum kit, the different guitars, the sound of the bass, the light show flashing and blinding. Here lay a mystery I knew I could penetrate and from then on I counted on becoming a player. I was envious of The Easybeats and the other bands. I wanted the money and the chicks and the adoration. I wanted it so bad and so fast.

If you’d seen me as my dad picked me up in his Wolseley you might not have recognised a rock star in the making with my short back’n’sides, my freckles and my bermuda shorts. But inside the ideas were already formulating: I was in for the long haul – eventually, I was sure, I was gonna make it happen.

Maybe that’s why Mum and Dad decided I should get piano lessons. They got in this young teacher who was using a new method where numbers, which correlated with fingers, represented the notes on sheet music. Everything was fine until the day she took the numbers away; then I was flummoxed. No, she wouldn’t teach me to play a Beatles song as I repeatedly requested: she wanted me to play ‘Marche Militaire’ and it was a horrible piece of music and I had no motivation to try. The teacher sussed out I was a precocious little sod and she knew I had some good music in me but she wanted me to do as I was told and I just wasn’t interested in playing classical stuff from dots on paper. I wanted the frigging Easybeats and I wanted it right away! What did this jibber jabber have to do with me? So she went to my parents and tearfully resigned and that was that. I mean I kept horsing around on the piano, but I never got any good – and I’m still not. Now I wish I’d stuck at it because the piano is really the ultimate instrument in my book; the one that’s capable of so much and is an indispensable songwriting companion. But I was stubborn. I didn’t care that my piano lessons were over.

One day Mr Ferguson asked the class who liked The Beatles and almost every kid’s hand shot up cheering. Then he asked who liked The Rolling Stones. I shot mine up again but me and my mate were the only ones who did – the other kids groaned and moaned to think anyone would like those anti-Beatles, who’d just been in the paper for pissing all over a service station in England somewhere coz the toilets were closed. But the Stones were beginning to emerge and I was fascinated by Jagger: there was something urgent and primal and all those other clichés everyone uses to try and describe him. I knew a kid whose father allegedly smashed his TV set with rage when he saw Jagger singing and leering into the camera. I was starting to understand the equation that bad doesn’t necessarily equal bad. I saw at the early age of eleven that the ideal rock star could embody many new personas that were so different from the heroes we’d previously been offered.

Man, Jagger made guys like Mr Ferguson look so uncool! Jagger implied so much in each of his songs: freedom, rebellion, hedonism, ambiguity, sarcasm and aloofness, all hovering somewhere between the Stones and your ear. ‘Paint It Black’ slew me. Everyone’s used to it now I suppose, but when that hit the Canberran airwaves in 1965 I felt like I’d been knocked into another universe where everything was so fucking groovy it was ridiculous. Mick Jagger and then Keith Richards would become on-and-off obsessions for the next fifteen years: I loved The Rolling Stones. At the time only The Beatles or Dylan could touch them – ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ really blew my mind.

Eventually of course I got into The Kinks and The Who and The Yardbirds and all the rest. The Byrds too, from America. The airwaves were rich with fantastic songs all competing with each other and adding new innovations and increasingly sophisticated production values. It was a great leap forward for rock’n’roll and things began to get really interesting. I sat at home avidly watching all and any pop shows on the telly. And I began to love it when Mum and Dad started coming out with all the classic comments from those days: ‘He’s got no bleeding talent in his whole body,’ ‘They look like they would smell to me,’ and ‘Why don’t they wash their hair?’ ‘That’s not bloody music, that’s a racket!’ All the things I say to my daughters today. I was enjoying the generation gap. And Mick and Bob and all the others seemed to understand something my parents didn’t, something that I’d intrinsically felt my whole life, which was that the ‘straight’ postwar way of life was a farce and a charade. And that something much hipper was about to come along and try to obliterate it.

Meanwhile at school I was coasting along, doing OK. All my reports said I could’ve done better but they didn’t understand that I could only do well in the subjects I was interested in – I wasn’t interested in doing projects on the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme or the fruit growing regions of Victoria. One day Fergo-fart, as we called him, wasn’t there and Slagger Slade (the headmaster, remember? called Slagger because he used to slag on the boys he was yelling at) took over proceedings. Slade started asking us about Greek mythology and was astounded that I knew all the Greek names and their Roman counterparts. He was even more astounded when he found that I knew a whole heap about Norse mythology, and then I really took the cake when he realised I also knew my Celtic mythology. When he asked me to name the four ancient counties of Eire and I did so correctly he was utterly gobsmacked. I could see he was clearly fucking impressed. The rest of the class sat there bored and clueless but I’d been devouring every book I could find on mythology since I was first let loose in a library and had such a proclivity for the stuff that it was almost like I was remembering it, not learning it for the first time. I had an incredible affinity with the ancient world: in some ways I felt like I would’ve been more at home there than in Canberra, Australia, in 1965, which was hot, dry, barren and philistine all the way. Slagger Slade looked at me carefully: I was an impertinent little git who probably wrote dirty letters to little girls … but fuck! Did I know my mythology and ancient history?!

1966 came and with it the strange music that The Beatles were beginning to make on Revolver. The hair was getting longer and the music weirder. One day I walked into my Aunty Doris’s house and out of the radio on top of the fridge came a song I’d never heard before, which was ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. A totally new sound and a totally new rock lexicon as Dylan tore strips off some phoney chick with the most delicious sneering eloquence, with his jugglers and clowns and Napoleon-in-rags. Dylan set a new standard for lyrics right there in that very song. Everything about it was a blast to the straight world and all its fakes and bullies. It was a punch in the face delivered as a song. I could never again be happy with the corny stuff from the early Merseybeat days, and apparently neither could Lennon nor Jagger who both began noticeably to sharpen their claws à la Dylan, targetting the hypocrisy of our floundering Western morality and the pathetic double standards of the day. I lapped it all up and took it all in.

The next year I turned up at Lyneham High School one hot morning in late January feeling so fucking sick and nervous that I couldn’t believe it. (Backstage at the Sydney Opera House recently someone came up to me and said ‘boy I bet you’re nervous’ and I thought nope, I’m not nervous like going to Lyneham High that first day. That was NERVOUS! This was just a walk through the park compared to that!)

At high school, things intensified. It was a lot more violent and I saw kids get black eyes and kids getting their teeth knocked out. Suddenly I lost my taste for fighting: I really didn’t want my pretty face messed up forever because of some playground scrap. Unfortunately I had a big mouth, which meant I was often on the receiving end of a smack in the head. My mother had warned me it would be my undoing and it was turning out to be true.

High school also made me realise I’d better get with it as far as my clothing choices were concerned, and I became obsessed with fashion for the very first time. I went through a phase of Beatle boots: I had a black leather pair and a brown suede pair, which each cost $15 – a princely sum for a twelve-year-old kid’s pair of shoes in those days, but Dad indulged me. I was so in love with my boots I slept with them under my pillow for the first few nights, if you can believe that.

At my first school social I was blown away again – we had some local band playing and I was amazed at the fashionable threads and the music all around me. Something inside me was demanding to be set free and I was frustrated because I didn’t know what it was or how to let it out. I was always uncomfortable being in an audience; I felt implicitly that my place was up on the stage making the music not down there dancing around. I stood in front of the bass guitarist who had a pair of incredibly groovy suede boots that went all the way up his calves and sat there plucking this instrument that made a deep mysterious sound you felt more than actually heard. It was so different to the scratchy obvious sound of the electric guitars, as cool as they were. The bass seemed to me to suddenly be the most profound instrument of all, dictating everything with a rich depth that went right through your diaphragm and kicked your arse. I stood there watching this guy play and he looked back at me and winked very slightly – I guess he could see I was really getting hooked. His sound seemed omnipresent. I wondered how a squirt like me could ever master such a majestic instrument and from that night on I began to lean towards the bass guitar. Every time I heard anyone say ‘bass guitar’, or even if I just read the words, a thrill would run through me as if someone had said my beloved’s name or something.

I was beginning to see my manifest destiny and it had four thick strings on it and made the most incredible sound in the whole world.

The teachers at high school were much cooler than Fergo-fart and Slagger Slade: we had Miss Alexander, who was about twenty and wore floral and paisley miniskirts looking like she’d just rolled in from Chelsea. She had one of those Mary Quant hairdos, and eye make-up that made her look like Cleopatra only with ginger hair. I had a massive crush on her. There was Miss Liepins, the art teacher, who had BO and was from some European country; she too was some kind of bohemian I’d never encountered before. The school was awash in groovy characters; you didn’t have to look far. I fell in love with one girl after another. And one by one most of the bullies gave me a thump or three, which I guess I usually deserved.

And guess what? At Lyneham High School we again encounter this Nigel Murray character whose propensity to bully was really coming on nicely. I mean he was a really good bully: he was awfully good at inciting the big bullies to pick on other people. I always picture him as the jackal that runs around after the lions – after the big tough bully had thumped you one Nigel would sneer and say all the stuff he was good at saying. One day a bully punched me down at the tennis courts, after Nigel had incited him to clout me. Well it really hurt and I started to cry so Nigel said, ‘Aw, look he’s crying … Bless you child!’ Yes, he had a good line in patter; he was the nastiest, sneeriest little bully offsider you could ever meet. (And I, some thirteen years later, let this rascal into my first-ever successful band, despite knowing in my heart of hearts that guys like him never change.)

One day in the middle of the year as I was walking down a corridor after school some absolutely fantastically intriguing sound wafted towards me. I stood outside a classroom in awe. What the hell was this music that was emanating from the room?! Eventually I opened the door and went in. There was Miss Alexander and a bunch of kids sitting around a little portable record player. ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘This is Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles’ new album,’ Miss Alexander answered.

And after that the world began to rapidly change. Suddenly we were in the middle of ‘The Summer of Love’, even though it was actually winter in Australia. Everywhere there were flowers in hair and psychedelic paisley, and the hippies seemed to come out of nowhere and suddenly be everywhere at once. My dad grew a walrus moustache and had sideburns! That’s how far-reaching Sgt Pepper’s influence was, though he didn’t like the new psychedelic side of the music, it left him cold. The first time ‘Strawberry Fields’ came on the radio I was stunned, but my dad simply said ‘I don’t like The Beatles anymore if they’re gonna do stuff like that!’ and I realised that the older generation couldn’t possibly grok what The Beatles were achieving. They were transcending the limits of what pop music thought it could be, and they took everyone with them for a few brief months there back in 1967.