The Valentines go bubblegum. Left to right: Vince Lovegrove, Doug Lavery, Wyn Milson, Bon, Ted Ward, John Cooksey. Vince: “Melbourne was a lot more teenybopper oriented, which we foolishly catered to because it was good for the ego. But it wasn’t really doing us much good musically.” (courtesy Vince Lovegrove)
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5. MELBOURNE
The Valentines arrived in Melbourne on Friday the 13th of October, 1967—drawn inextricably to the city which was at the time indisputably Australia’s pop capital.
The rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney is one of Australia’s oldest. Sydney, city of water, speed and light, is the New World to Melbourne’s Old, with its long winters and its somber, more rarefied air. The rock’n’roll scenes in the two cities have always been as distinctly different as those of Los Angeles and London, and have always vied for supremacy.
In the very early sixties, both Sydney and Melbourne played host to thriving teenage dance circuits. The music was almost entirely instrumental rock’n’roll—surf music in Sydney, while Melbourne bands had a brassier sound. When the Beatles exploded and every instrumental band in the land scrambled to find a singer—not to mention grow their hair—it was Sydney, for some reason, that produced the first rush of hits, via the Easybeats and the Aztecs. But Sydney’s dominance wouldn’t last long. By the end of 1965, the emphasis had swung to Melbourne. It would not return to Sydney till the start of the eighties.
Success in rock’n’roll, like most fields, takes more than talent, and Melbourne had more than just bands. It had the Anglophile mod look that sunny Sydney could never quite approximate. It quickly became Australia’s media capital, too, the home of Go-Set magazine, the weekly bible of the sixties Australian pop scene, and of TV’s Go!! show and other national shows like Kommotion and Uptight.
Melbourne also boasted a whole new breed of young entrepreneurs who helped build up its live circuit. Although Australia is now famous for its bands bred in pubs, pubs didn’t really open up to live rock’n’roll until the licensing hours were extended in the early seventies. In Melbourne in the sixties there were two types of gigs, neither of which allowed alcohol: teenage dances in the suburbs, held in halls, church halls, town halls; and, for the older, more sophisticated audience, late-night clubs, called discos, which were unlicensed too (licensed clubs remained the preserve of adult entertainment, jazz, cabaret or comedy). With varying degrees of success, bands straddled the two circuits, from, say, the Q Club, a dance in suburban Kew, to city discos like the Thumpin’ Tum, or Sebastian’s in St. Kilda.
Led by the Loved Ones, Bobby & Laurie, the Groop and Ronnie Burns, a second wave of acts exploded out of Melbourne in 1965, leaving every Sydney band except the Easybeats eating dust. Further strengthening the scene, the Masters Apprentices and the Twilights moved to Melbourne from Adelaide, and then Johnny Young arrived from Perth.
Little of the music itself was actually very good—Australian musicians, without any background in blues-based rock’n’roll, were still just trying to get a handle on it—but the seeds of something greater were being sown.
 
When the Valentines pulled into Flinders Street Station on that Black Friday morning late in 1967, they had no tangible plans.
VINCE: “We had Ronnie Burns’s phone number. We called him from the station. He came and picked us up and took us to a Chinese restaurant. We stayed at a hotel that night.”
The West Australian had reported on the eve of the band’s departure, “The Valentines are willing to start at the bottom and work hard and these qualities have proven to be most necessary.” Indeed the Valentines would struggle for some time yet.
Within a week of arriving in Melbourne, the band was being managed by former Loved Ones singer Gerry Humphries, in partnership with Johnny Young’s drummer Don Pryor—for what it was worth. The pair threw a generous reception to launch the band along with “She Said,” but then . . . nothing. Humphries and Pryor’s interest dropped off. On the rebound, the band signed on with AMBO, the Australian Management Booking Agency, which farmed out the talent to a large proportion of Melbourne’s discos and dances. But with “She Said” going nowhere, getting gigs wasn’t going to be easy.
As if by way of a rude baptism, the Valentines were sent bush, on a tour of rural Victoria. They got around, gear and all, in a Kombi van they’d bought and daubed in psychedelic colors.
Renting a house in the far eastern Melbourne suburb of Burwood, the band almost literally starved, earning barely enough to cover costs from unattended midweek gigs. They would go into supermarkets and eat in the aisles, or steal milk money on the way home late at night. Though most of them were in their early twenties, the Valentines were still boys who had barely broken away from their mothers’ apron strings, and they had no idea how to look after themselves. Female fans helped.
Vince wrote: “Bon was the only guy in the band unruffled by our seemingly hopeless situation. He was a great positive inspiration in those days when we needed it most.”
Bon would occasionally stay with Maria, who had a flat in the same block as Humphries and Pryor, in swish South Yarra. But their relationship would always be problematic. Bon had chosen his path in life, and Maria seemed unwilling to accept the reality that it entailed—that he would be away a lot, on the road; that he would attract a lot of attention, particularly female; and that he would make no money, at least not initially. They were always arguing. The rest of the band, in turn, resented Maria for the hold she had on Bon. However, even with her taunting, Bon was hopelessly romantically in love. Whenever he was away, he would write her love letters, sometimes several times a day.
MARIA: “He used to talk about how when the group was successful and it would be on the road in Australia, and America, it would have a tour bus, and on the back would be a little caravan attached for he and I!”
Bon was possibly a little intimidated by the sophisticated, cliquey Melbourne scene, and so was happy to put his faith in Vince, who seemed capable of scoring the necessary social points. It suited Vince’s ego to be making decisions for the band. Strangely, there was a quite subservient streak in Bon. It was not so much that he craved acceptance, rather that he wanted to please people, and at his best he could be quite unselfish. So for the meantime at least, he was bowing to both Maria and Vince.
VINCE: “It was a confusing time anyway, for guys. Bon always seemed troubled by something, whether it was his creative desire as opposed to feelings of inadequacy due to his working-class origins, or lack of education, I don’t know. But there was some sort of conflict there, where he was unsure of himself. He had a lot of bravado, but really he was a softie underneath.”
Vince pulled off a coup when he managed to sell the band away from AMBO to Ivan Dayman. Dayman was the agent behind Sunshine Records and Normie Rowe; from his base in Brisbane he controlled a circuit of venues all over Australia.
As Dayman booked the band into Adelaide for a week in February, Clarion released a third Valentines single, “I Can Hear The Raindrops”/ “Why Me?” These were the first two original songs cut by the band—written by Vince and Ted Ward—but both were eminently forgettable, and the disc, again, died a death.
In March, the band ventured for the first time to Brisbane, then to Sydney and then back to Melbourne. It was an experience that taught them just how grueling life on the road could be. They lived, collectively, on a bare $300 a week, which was what Dayman paid them. They traveled by bus, train, car—however they could. They lugged all their own gear; they stayed in boarding houses and seedy hotels, and they played dives. But they wouldn’t have changed things for anything. This was the life they’d wanted.
By the middle of April, they were back in Sydney for an extended eight-week stay. This was a turning point for the band and for Bon.
Staying at the shabby Americana Hotel in the red-light district of Kings Cross—then buzzing like a boom town, due to the influx of American servicemen on R&R leave from Vietnam—the band was still strapped for cash, pooling funds to eat fish’n’chips. But they were getting somewhere at last. Go-Set stringer David Elfick proclaimed that the band’s “performances at Sydney’s Op-Pop disco justified their rating as Perth’s number one group . . . They have a distinctive sound . . . they play Pickett, Redding type numbers, straight top 40 and comedy (‘Would You Like To Swing On a Bra?’).” No band, at that time, played its own material on stage, unless those songs were already hits.
Bon wrote to Maria that posters for the band were plastered all over Sydney, and that while they were going down well—had even drawn “the biggest crowd in six weeks at Op-Pop”—it “could be a lot better”, and so the band was “going to have a meeting to try to find out how we can best improve ourselves”. The band was geed up in anticipation of going into Festival Records’ Pyrmont studios with ace producer Pat Aulton. Bon wanted to try out some Dusty Springfield songs.
The Valentines were a bit like babes in the woods in Sin City, Sydney, but they quickly took to it all.
MARIA: “In his letters, he would say, Don’t worry, I’ll be faithful. What a liar he was!”
Drugs were a new dimension altogether.
VINCE: “We met this piano player called Bobby Gebert, who turned Bon and I onto our first joint. We didn’t know it then either, but these guys were gay. We were so naive, we just thought they were in fancy dress. They had licorice papers, to roll joints—it was the whole thing. We were sitting there looking at each other, giggling like two little kids, saying, Has it affected you yet? Then we realized, we were just these two guys sitting in the corner at this party, we were stoned, and so we panicked and ran out of the place. We got back to the hotel and the other guys said, You guys have had drugs, you’re out of the band—because we had a rule, no drugs—and so we said, yeah, well, okay . . .”
At the end of April, Maria paid Bon a visit in Sydney. Long-distance love affairs are inevitably hard to handle, and Bon and Maria’s was starting to show the strain. But the couple spent a happy weekend together. As soon as Maria got home, however, the push and pull started all over again. The band had gone up to Brisbane. Bon spent all his time and money on long-distance phone calls. Maria was sick of Bon’s absence—she knew there were other women—and she was talking about going back to Perth. Bon began to fear that Maria might have taken up with someone else herself. When the band returned to Sydney, Maria came up again. It was plain to both of them then that it wasn’t going to work. They had been each other’s first love, but they’d grown apart.
For the second time in just over a year, Bon saw Maria off on the train—but this time, there would be no reunion down the line. Maria would always occupy a special place in Bon’s heart, and he remained in touch with her right up until he died. More immediately though, there was too much going on to waste time moping and any number of willing young women to help take the pain away.
 
The band finally got into the Festival studio in Sydney in late May and cut their next single, “Peculiar Hole in the Sky,” another Easybeats song. This they did with a session player on drums, as Warwick Findlay had buckled under the financial pressure, having a wife to support, and had left the band to find a real job. The Valentines were over the moon about “Peculiar Hole in the Sky,” and rightly so. It was a quantum leap for them, a good song done justice, cut in an almost modern studio with a capable producer, invested with all the appropriate psychedelic overtones. It was released in July. Go-Set, strangely, was not terribly impressed and it didn’t sell.
When the band pleaded in an ad for the single, “Please buy a copy—we’re starving,” they were only marginally stretching the truth. They had by then moved back to Melbourne and recruited a new drummer in Doug Lavery, and though they were starting to get ahead playing the Ivan Dayman circuit, Vince was still looking for a stronger connection.
They moved into a two-storey terraced house in seedy St. Kilda, in Dalgety Street, just off the notorious Fitzroy Street sleaze strip. Bon, now a legitimate bachelor again, had the attic bedroom, which he painted fire-engine red, where he reigned as gay blade supreme.
It was around this time he met Mary Wasylyk, who would become a lifelong friend. Born in 1950 of Ukrainian parents, Mary grew up in Melbourne’s grimy western suburbs, and after school went into fashion design. She saw the Valentines for the first time at a Sunday afternoon show at the Bowl, a disco in Melbourne. “You used to have arguments, you know, who was better, the Valentines or the Zoot? I used to make these hippie beads, and the band all really liked them, so I got to know them, and I stayed friends with Bon ever since.
“They were just trying to copy the English bands, sort of like an extension of the Easybeats but not as good. I mean, looking at them, none of them seemed talented, really!”
It was at Dalgety Street that the Valentines started to run really wild. They became the premier party animals in a scene that aspired to complete psychedelic degeneracy. It was 1968. Sergeant Pepper’s had changed everything. Hendrix and the Doors were having hits. Bon’s brother Graeme, then 15, came over on vacation and had his life changed. “Women were everywhere, and ganja. Vince gave me my first smoke. They’d go off to a show, and come back with women, sit up all night and smoke, whatever. For someone like me to come straight out of Fremantle, I couldn’t go back to that, so the only way out was to jump a ship.” Graeme remained a merchant seaman for many years to come, and he would drop in on Bon whenever he was in port.
Vince sussed a new opening for the band back at AMBO. Headed by Sri Lankan-Australian Bill Joseph, the agency had been revitalized by its employment of one of the new breed, Michael Browning. Browning was running two discos, Berties and Sebastian’s, and also managing Doug Parkinson in Focus, then the hottest new act in town. Vince figured that if he could parley an AMBO agent into managing the Valentines, too, the band might find favor in the same way Doug Parkinson seemed to.
The Valentines were well drilled, well established on the live circuit, and even though “Peculiar Hole in the Sky” had failed to set the world on fire, its potential, plus Vince’s determination, was incentive enough for AMBO boss Bill Joseph himself to take on the band. Ron Tudor, who was then launching his own June Productions company (and would go on to form the Fable Label), also came on board, signing the Valentines to a deal whereby June would record the band, and then lease the tapes to Philips.
Everything was thus in place, finally, for the Valentines to launch a full-scale assault on Australian teenagers.
 
The Summer of Love took place officially in San Francisco, and nominally also in London, in what was Australia’s winter of 1967. Its impact would be superficial in Australia. A local pop hit that could be described as psychedelic did not arrive until 1969, in the form of “The Real Thing.” Acid rock, as such, hardly happened at all, at least not until a later mutation appeared.
The reason why Australia missed the first blooming of flower power was essentially because the guards had reclaimed control of the asylum. The new order that had pulled the rug out from under the music business establishment in the early to mid-sixties—independent record companies and young entrepreneurs as well as artists—had by then been absorbed by the mainstream. The big record companies, those that traditionally ran the music game, had had enough time to adjust to the new rules and now they wanted their ball back.
Radio was reluctant to play far-out new acts like Hendrix, feeling more comfortable with the Monkees. The black soul sounds of Tamla-Motown and Stax, so successful in America and Britain, were hardly heard in racist Australia.
1968 was not a vintage year for Australian pop. Not a single Australian record went to number one all year, whereas previous and later years saw many local chart-toppers. The impetus of 1965-66 had been completely dissipated.
The success of acts like the Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, following in the footsteps of the Monkees, certified bubblegum as the biggest commercial trend of the year. Bubblegum was music that was shamelessly commercial—simplistic and repetitive to the point of inanity. Ultimately disposable, and more than likely manufactured, it particularly impressed Australian record companies.
Australian musicians had only just come to terms with chirpy Beatles-ish harmonies, but now they were discouraged from going any further. In America and Britain, sales of albums overtook singles in 1968. But Australia didn’t even have album charts until 1970. The hot new local acts were the Groove, who would go on to win the 1968 Battle of the Sounds, and Johnny Farnham. Both were confectionery.
At the end of 1968, an intense marketing campaign swung into action around the Valentines. In November, they made the unequivocal statement in Go-Set that they were a bubblegum group, “not afraid about being commercial.” The band had buffed up its image—Bon was dusting down his tattoos with foundation, and straightening his hair with sticky tape—and they wore matching orange frilly shirts, flares and beads. Although they would suffer in comparison with prettier band the Zoot, who exploded onto Melbourne around the same time with their “Think Pink” campaign, they hit the media all over Australia with a season’s greeting card proclaiming, “The slogan for this year is “BE MY VALENTINE IN ’69.”
Bon filled out a profile in which—claiming to be 19 when he was actually now 22—he revealed:
Likes—My room (painted red), long blonde hair, sex, showers,
swimming
Dislikes—People who hate Crater Critters (ex-Weeties pack),
being disturbed whilst thinking, washing and ironing
Loves—Parents, my pet Crater Critter
Favorite Food—Ice cream
Drink—Sand Zombie
Actor—Vince
Actress—Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave
Groups—Beatles, Moody Blues
Singer, Male—John Lee Hooker, Otis Redding
Singer, Female—Supremes
Music—Scottish Pipe Band music, soul, worried jazz
In early December the Valentines put down a new single, “My Old Man’s a Groovy Old Man.” This was yet another product of the prolific songwriting partnership of the Easybeats’ Harry Vanda and George Young; it found its way to the band via Ron Tudor. Tudor also proffered an obscure Pretty Things song, “Ebeneezer,” for the flip-side.
June Music had an office conveniently located just a couple of doors down from the state-of-the-art Armstrong’s Studios which Go-Set had trumpeted some months earlier: “People will no longer be able to blame a lack of equipment for poor Australian record production. Last week, Bill Armstrong’s studio in Melbourne installed an 8-track Scully recording machine.”
The skiffle-like “My Old Man” was as dynamic as it was vacuous—classic bubblegum.
After sessions for the single were completed, the Valentines hit the road again. Brisbane was something of a stronghold for the band; they spent the holiday there. Vince remembers a remarkable Christmas Day:
“We had this fan up there who was Chinese, and he invited us over for Christmas dinner. But what happened was, we took this mescaline. It was hilarious. Ted thought he was a hippopotamus, he just sat in the pool all day. Bon and I went to this lunch, it was meant to be a traditional Western Christmas—roast turkey and everything, you know. So we get there, and this guy comes to the door, and as soon as we walk in the room, where the parents are there to meet us, Bon just becomes a Chinaman, you know, he’s got his arms folded and he’s squinting with this stupid grin on his face, and he’s bowing and going, Ah so, Ah so. These people didn’t know what was going on. Anyway, they serve the food, and I suppose we must have thought this turkey was alive or something, because we just ended up getting out of there, we were virtually running down the road screaming. We started hitching, and of course no one would give us a lift, so we ended up walking all the way back to the motel, it was seven miles or something. We got there, and Ted’s virtually turned into a prune, he’s still in the pool, he still thinks he’s a hippopotamus!”
Returning to Melbourne, the band had to find new digs; the lease on Dalgety Street was up. Bon, Wyn and Ted set up headquarters at a flat in South Yarra, on Toorak Road, at the center of something of a pop-idol enclave. Johnny Farnham was a neighbor on one side, Johnny Young the other. Vince moved in just around the corner.
In January Molly Meldrum interviewed not just Vince but the whole band for Go-Set. What image were the Valentines trying to project? he asked John Cooksey. “A very happy, sweet, but sexy commercial type image,” Cooksey replied. “At the same time, we want to be able to entertain the disco crowds.”
“My Old Man’s a Groovy Old Man” was launched on February 14, 1969—Valentine’s Day itself. It took off immediately, although almost inevitably it was overshadowed by the Zoot’s contemporaneous first hit, “One Times, Two Times, Three Times, Four.” But the Valentines were away nonetheless.
When they played the That’s Life disco in Prahran that night, “the audience,” Meldrum reported in Go-Set, “screamed in unison, We love the Valentines. As soon as they appeared the audience went completely berserk and started to storm the stage. The two lead singers, Vince and Bon, were dragged to the floor and Bon’s pants and jacket were completely ripped off him.”
Writing on March 1, Meldrum went on: “This has been a regular occurrence since that particular day. Last Saturday night the Valentines appeared at another Melbourne dance, Piccadilly, and drew a record attendance of over 2,000 teenagers. Cupids (the Valentines’ symbol) were thrown out to the audience and in turn the audience threw back bubblegum. The Valentines didn’t even get through their first number before the stage was stormed.
“Ripped clothes and accessories was repeated and when Doug, the drummer, got up to sing, he left the stage two minutes later sporting only a pair of red underpants. The group were supposed to appear for 45 minutes but their performance had to be cut down to 20 minutes because the audience became completely uncontrollable.”
On March 10, the Valentines played a free concert before a crowd of 7,000 at the Alexandra Gardens, as part of Melbourne’s annual Moomba festival. A “riot” ensued during which Vince was arrested on charges of assaulting police. Vince was certainly a provocateur—Bon was the passive one of the pair, content to hang back and just sing—but all Vince did was push an overzealous cop from the stage with his bare foot. He was fined $50, and put on a 12-month good behavior bond.
With a new drummer, Paddy Beach—Doug Lavery had left to join Axiom—the Valentines concentrated on gigging around Melbourne, working Beach in and consolidating their support. “My Old Man” eventually peaked on the national charts at number 23.
Paddy Beach (né Veitch) was recruited from a trio called Compulsion, a Maori Hendrix-clone act that Michael Browning had brought to Australia from New Zealand just before they fell apart. When Paddy, who was white, joined the Valentines, pint-sized roadie John Darcy came with him. Darcy, as he’s known to all, remembers his first meeting with the band, at Toorak Road.
“I meet the guys, and they’re checking me out, because of the size of me, you know, because they’d just started to get some of the bigger gear. They said, Do you reckon you’ll be able to handle the gear? I said, I’m pretty fit, I’ve always done a bit of boxing, I go to the gym. So they said, Alright, we’ll give it a go. Then Bon says, Hey, you feel like a fuck? Well, that sets me back a bit, but I say, Well, yeah, I could always go a fuck, and so he says, Well, just whip into the front room there, there’s a young chick there, she’ll give you a go, no worries. So I go into the front room and there’s all these chicks there, stark naked, so I figure I’ll go for it. So I’m laying on this bed, stark naked, there’s this chick going down on me, and Bon comes in and says, How do you think you’ll like the job? I go, Well, I suppose I can try and adapt.”
The Valentines’ image might have been squeaky clean, but their reputation was easily the worst of any band around. Dope smoking was also constant.
The band played a lot of cards and neighbor Johnny Farnham was a frequent visitor, but Farnham’s manager Daryl Sambell wasn’t at all keen on his charge being seen associating with such degenerates.
DARCY: “You’d wake up each morning, and look out the little eyepiece in the door, and by 9.30 there’d be maybe three or four young girls there, in the hallway at the top of the stairs. At maybe 10.30, it’d be, Oh, there’s seven out there now. They were all like under 12. After lunch they’d start to get a bit older, you’d get the 14-year-olds starting to turn up. Of course, I’d be in and out, I’d have to duck up to the Toorak Village to get the papers, milk. I’d be stepping over girls. They’d be, Oh, can we come in, can we see the guys, can you get us their autographs? So I’d say, Look, I’ll see what I can do for you. So you’d let some in for 15 minutes or so, hand out some autographs. And then later on you’d let the older ones in; they could cook the meals for you, and clean the flat, do the washing and ironing. Then of course there’d be a couple of older ones who’d supply a bit more than that, give you a bit of a work-out before you had to go off to a job. It was unbelievable. Every day of the week it was the same.”
Even in their wildest dreams, the Valentines couldn’t have imagined it would be as wild as this. Bon was in his element. He had a little trick he employed to sort out the goers from the prickteasers among the girls who came backstage. He would let off one of the smoke bombs the band exploded on stage as part of its act, and when the smoke cleared, he would be standing there naked. The girls who didn’t run off screaming had to be goers. The band performed indecent acts on young girls in the back of the bus on fan club picnics, and then dropped them off back into their worried mothers’ waiting arms, reassuring these women, as sweet and innocent as you like, that their daughters had been in good hands—as indeed they had—and then laughing at how Bon especially could put it over them with all his boyish charm.
The band went out on the road, touring through Canberra, Newcastle, Queensland and South Australia, but cracks were already appearing in the facade. Back in Melbourne in early August, they played a reception at That’s Life to launch a new Coca-Cola commercial. “Most surprising thing though,” the Herald reported, “was to hear the Valentines play a bit of rhythm in contrast to their labeled ‘bubblegum’ style. As bass guitarist John said, ‘We weren’t under any pressure tonight, so we decided to prove a point’—that they are versatile.”
The very next night, the Valentines failed to take out the Battle of the Sounds, finishing second to the tied Doug Parkinson and Masters Apprentices; but the band was already set on a new path. Having met with commercial success, the Valentines, predictably, now wanted artistic credibility. Bubblegum, after all, was throwaway pap for little girls.
VINCE: “The scene was changing, it was starting to get serious, it was getting to the point where you had to be good.”
The novelty of local bands was wearing off. It wasn’t enough to merely ape your idols any more. Australia might have missed out on the Summer of Love, but in mid-1969, with Woodstock just around the corner, it was starting to catch up. New British and American bands that anticipated seventies rock, like Led Zeppelin and Santana, had an immediate and profound impact. A deep divide was drawn between dances and discos. The dance circuit catered to teenyboppers, with bubblegum bands; whilst discos, though still unlicensed, became the province of adult-oriented so-called “soul artists” like Max Merritt and Billy Thorpe, both on the comeback trail, and Doug Parkinson and the Levi Smith Clefs, who would take Australian rock into the seventies.
“Our aim,” Vince told Go-Set, “will be to present to dance crowds a wild act with a heavy sexual slant and attempt to please disco audiences by playing original free-form music. Just as Doug Parkinson made the transition from discos to dances, we hope to do the reverse.”
The Valentines made the transition that the Zoot, and even the superior Masters Apprentices, couldn’t. They would soon become a staple on the disco scene in Melbourne and Sydney alike. Ultimately though, and ironically, the Valentines’ musical coming-of-age also proved to be their undoing.
VINCE: “We found we had too many ideas for one band. We started to fall apart as well as become a better band.”
As the single “Nick Nack Paddy Whack” was released, the band went out on the road with Russell Morris, Johnny Farnham, Ronnie Burns, the Zoot and the Masters Apprentices as part of the huge Operation Starlift tour. “Nick Nack Paddy Whack” proved to be something of an embarrassment. An adaptation of the children’s nursery rhyme originally cut as a possible theme for a proposed afternoon TV show, it was never intended for release. But its failure to chart was proof positive that the bubblegum bubble had burst. Further encouragement to get serious came in the better response to the single’s B-side, a song called “Getting Better,” which marked Bon’s first ever writing credit, shared with Wyn. It was a convincingly urgent call to arms.
 
Bon particularly wanted his due. What credibility the band did have was largely thanks to him—his voice was acknowledged as one of the best in the business—and with an increasing amount of confidence, not to mention experience, he was ready to assume more of the initiative.
Vince was naturally reluctant to relinquish leadership, but he knew which side his bread was buttered. At the same time, Bon was sensitive to Vince’s feelings, and so he still looked to him for the nod. But certainly, the days of Vince’s autocratic rule were over. Vince told Go-Set: “Admittedly, I’m more popular than Bon, but he’s a far better singer than I’ll ever be. In fact, I think he’s the most underrated singer in Australia.”
The Valentines were delighted when “real musicians” like Billy Thorpe and Wendy Saddington started showing up at their gigs. They were invited to Billy’s pad in East Melbourne for spaghetti or a curry, and in doing so joined a quite exclusive little club. The Levi Smith Clefs came around and hung out at Toorak Road.
But still the Valentines clung to their original teenage female fan base, playing dances as much as discos, if for financial reasons as much as any other. They would work every week from Tuesday or Wednesday through to Sunday, building up on Friday to Saturday night, which often entailed three or four gigs. They would get around in the Ford Thames van that Darcy drove, lugging increasingly large amounts of equipment. The aesthetic progression rock was making was directly related to the advancements in its technology, its gear. Bon even wrote an essay for Go-Set at the time, admonishing bands who might be cheating their fans by settling for second-rate PA systems.
VINCE: “On a Saturday night, you’d do three shows: an early dance, a late dance, and then you’d do a club, a disco. Racing around all night, and you did it carrying all your own gear, so the thing was, you couldn’t possibly do all that without some kind of stimulant.”
DARCY: “On a Saturday night, you might start off, say, at the Ringwood Town Hall, do the first spot there, about 8:30, and of course, you’d only play for half an hour, and then you’d throw the gear in the van, and tear down to Dandenong. You might do the Dandenong Town Hall in the second spot, then whip the gear out again and race down to the Frankston Mechanics Hall and do the feature spot there. That would finish at about 11:30 or so. We’d stay straight for those gigs. Then the last gig would be back in the city, at one of the clubs there, Berties or Sebastian’s, so on the way there, as soon as we’d loaded out of Frankston, we’d be tearing up the highway, and that’s when the joints would start coming out, and we’d get stuck into the cookies. We used to make these hash cookies, it was a real good blast, and we found we could eat them without all the smoke giving the game away, you know. Wyn would come out of his room with this big cookie jar; they looked like butternut snaps!”
WYN: “We would undergo this transformation at midnight. We would literally change, we would take off our matching outfits and put on jeans. We’d stay straight up until then, if you like, then we’d let our hair down, and go to Berties and do what wasn’t the mainstream music—Led Zeppelin, guitar solos, percussion, all that. And that’s when Bon really came into his own.”
DARCY: “We’d get so stoned we’d just be giggling and carrying on, but it was really harmless sort of stuff. Anyway, we’d end up back at Berties, and I’m sure people used to come there just to watch us set up. You’d be off your face, and they had this tiny little triangular stage there in the basement, at the bottom of this really narrow stairway, and you’d have to set up.
“The signal was, they used to flick the light on and off when you were meant to start. Of course, we were always late, so it got so it was like a strobe! They’d have to keep the joint open just so we could play.”
VINCE: “That’s when a lot of the best music came, you know.”
DARCY: “We’d get home at maybe 3:30 in the morning, and we’d just get home and keep partying on. Barrie McAskill and the Levi Smith Clefs, any band that was around from interstate, they’d come back and party with you.
“It was like a little world of our own, we could sit up there nice and stoned and just watch the world go by outside. But we were pretty well known by then, the flat was, so anyone who drove by at four in the morning could have looked up and thought, Oh, the Valentines are having another party.”
WYN: “Then you’d have to be up at 7:00 to go out to Channel 0 at Nunawading to do Uptight. There’d be some pretty sick-looking people wandering around, wanting to get their make-up done.”
When John Cooksey announced his intention to leave the band in September, the Vallies decided not to replace him, but rather have Ted Ward switch from second guitar to bass. It was in order to rehearse this new line-up that the band took off on September 15 for a two-week sojourn at the Jan Juc Surf Lifesaving Club near Torquay, on the western Victorian coast. And it was here they came a real cropper.
“The pop world rocked last week,” read Go-Set on October 4, “when the police raided the practice hideaway of top pop group, the Valentines, and found them in possession of the drug, marijuana.”
It was the first en masse bust of a band in Australia, and it caused a scandal, although within the rock world it only enhanced their credibility.
It transpired that the band had been turned in by, to quote Go-Set, “a well-known member of one of our top pop groups,” who “informed [on the Valentines] to save his own neck on a similar charge.”
Unbeknown to the band, they had been under police surveillance for some weeks. The cops followed them down to Jan Juc, where they were dividing their time rehearsing, smoking, listening to Led Zeppelin and smoking. It was too cold even for Bon to go in the water.
Having watched the isolated clubhouse for five days, the cops simply knocked on the door with a search warrant on Saturday night, September 20. The band shat themselves. The cops found a pipe and a quantity of Moroccan powder.
With a court hearing scheduled for October—though they would not eventually appear until the following February—the band either boldly or foolishly spoke out against drug laws. “We believe it should be legalized,” Vince told Go-Set. They even got onto the subject of police harassment. Bon had always been known as the joker in the band, but he was becoming more serious in his new, more frontal role, and on this occasion, came about as close as he ever would to making a directly political statement.
“They should realize that what we do is right for us,” he protested. “We respect a lot of things about their job, but they shouldn’t persecute whole groups of people just for being different.” In another interview, he said, “The Australian government deserves a few ripples. They’ll be the last to legalize homosexuality, and pot will be the same.”
In the aftermath of the bust, the band instituted a no-smoking rule, but it was doomed to failure, and in fact, all it did was create divisions.
DARCY: “We made a pact, Okay, no more smoking, we’ve got to straighten out, for the good of the band. Well, Bon, Paddy and myself just sort of ignored it. Vince went off on his own trip too, I think. Wyn and Ted went along with the letter of the law, and that went on for a few months before they realized what we were doing. They were pretty cut, actually.”
 
In late October, the band went to Sydney for the first time since the Op-Pop days. Sydney had regained some initiative, because it had taken so readily to the new dawning in rock. Bands like the La De Das, Flying Circus, Jeff St John and Copperwine, Chain, Max Merritt and the Meteors and Levi Smith Clefs boasted firm followings in licensed discos like the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, Caesar’s Palace, Here and Chequers, which catered as much to R&R’ing American servicemen as local hipsters. “Head” bands like Taman Shud and Tully were so far out they ran their own “stirs,” free gigs for freaks.
VINCE: “Sydney and Melbourne were two totally different places then, in terms of the audience. Melbourne was a lot more teenybopper orientated, which we’d foolishly catered to because it was good for the ego. But it wasn’t really doing us much good musically.”
The band was happy to be back in Sydney, where they hadn’t suffered so much from labeling. Playing a residency at Caesar’s, as Tony Johnston later reported in the Herald, “They didn’t wear their uniforms, because as Vince said, that age group aren’t really worried about a group’s image, they’re just interested in the music.” Bon described what the band was doing as “trying things, feeling around for a musical direction.”
For two nights at Caesar’s, they supported the Easybeats, who, on the verge of folding in England, had been lured back to play a final tour of Australia. Yet though this was the band that had given the Valentines so many pointers, the Vallies were somewhat perplexed, because whilst everyone else in rock was launching off into the smoky stratosphere, the Easybeats had come full circle and gotten back to basics, playing straight-ahead rock’n’roll.
Staying at a big house the promoter provided for them on the edge of the expansive Centennial Park in Sydney’s trendy eastern suburbs, the band was hanging loose. Bon and Vince became friendly with a couple of girls who were waitresses at Caesar’s, and so they spent much time at their Kings Cross flat, getting friendlier. They would drop acid and go tripping in Centennial Park. Bon was developing a taste for liquor too, becoming something of a bar fly.
The Caesar’s gig was so successful that the band was booked back there for a fee reported “to be the second highest paid an Australian group,” whatever that meant.
Although the rot was already setting in, the band’s demise would be a drawn-out process, simply because of its common bond. Vince, who had just turned down a part in the Australian production of Hair, told Go-Set: “We probably have more personality conflicts within the group than anyone else—Bon and I have often come really close to punching the shit out of each other. But with all of us the group is the most important thing—it always comes first, before personal arguments, before chicks, before smoking, everything.”
In December, the band was lured to make its triumphant return to Perth; and, as it happened, this homecoming would appropriately serve as a virtual last hurrah. The band always said they wouldn’t go home until they could do it as stars, and certainly, they were welcomed back like prodigal sons. When they arrived at Perth airport, they had to run the gauntlet of a reported 4,000 screaming fans, to be sped away in waiting cars.
The band played a big New Year’s Eve show for 6KY back in their old stamping grounds, the Supreme Court Gardens. Staying at Vince’s parents’ place in Applecross, they enjoyed the run of the Perth clubs.
On the five-hour return flight to Melbourne, they kept up the bratty rock star routine, outraging fellow passengers with their obnoxious behavior, all to the tune of the tape they’d just acquired of the second Led Zeppelin album, which they blasted at full volume from the back of the cabin.
When they finally appeared in court in Geelong, near Jan Juc, in February, the band pleaded guilty as charged. Counsel William Lennon argued, “The group have told me that under the influence of marijuana they become more perceptive to musical sounds,” and that “long-haired pop stars weren’t automatically louts and drug addicts, and that they had not encouraged other teenagers to follow their example.” The band each received a $150 fine and a good-behavior bond.
With the dissolution of the Toorak Road flat, the Valentines’ end drew nearer. Rumors were rife that they were breaking up. Even Bill Joseph had to ring Go-Set to find out what was going on.
DARCY: “We were like lost souls then. After having something going so strong for a while.”
Only a sense of loyalty was holding the band together now. What would be their final single, “Juliette,” was released in April. A dead ringer for “Dear Prudence,” and written by the band collectively, it ran right into the so-called radio ban anyway, and barely scraped into the top 30.
The radio ban was a strange episode in Australian pop history, in which the big record companies demanded payment from radio stations for the right to play their product, on the basis that it was providing radio with programming; a demand at which radio naturally scoffed, claiming that it was providing record companies with essential, free promotion. The result was a stand-off, during which time no major label records, locally-produced or otherwise, were heard on the airwaves. What happened, of course, was that independent labels, who could see the opportunity in refusing to side with their major big brothers, stepped into the breach and filled radio’s programming void for free, with a glut of local cover versions of American and English hits, plus even the occasional original Australian track. Yet though June Music boss Ron Tudor’s new Fable Label would be a big winner out of the ban, the Valentines, whose records still came out on Philips, lost out.
The failure of “Juliette,” for whatever reason, was the last straw. The Valentines were on the road in Newcastle when the bullet was bitten. Talking later to Go-Set, Vince said it was because their opinions conflicted so much. “None of us were really happy in the group any more, but we didn’t say anything because we didn’t want to hurt the others.”
Bon wrote to Maria, to whom he was speaking again, from Newcastle on June 2:
Got some news for you. Guess what? The Valentines are breaking up on the 1st August. It’s been coming about for a while now and it came to a head last week when we found out that Vince was waiting for confirmation from a couple of jobs. Ted, Wyn and I decided we’d dig to split anyway and form a group of our own and run it the way we wanted to, so that was it . . . Vince is going to work for Go-Set and Paddy will get another group. We’re going to add an electric piano and organ and a new drummer and go into hiding for a couple of months. Then we’ll record an LP and a single and follow it up with a shit-hot group and make lots of money. The funny thing about it was that there were no arguments or hard feelings as everyone realized that a change was due.
The band returned to Melbourne and played its last show with a distinct lack of fanfare, at Werribee, a desolate, far-flung suburb known only for its sewage treatment plant.
DARCY: “The last job, it was a funny one, because no one . . . it didn’t sort of hit home, that we were doing the last job. I was sort of blown out, What, we’re doing the last job down at Werribee? It was like, it was a Sunday night, and so we were doing this job, and that was it. It was like, Shit, what are we going to do now?”
But if Bon had plans, they ended up just that, best-laid plans. He was made a better offer, one that held great promise.