A SONG FOR EVERYMAN Jackson Browne sings about the future on his new album. By Brian Wise.

SHE’S GOT BALLS

4 PAGES? Tana Douglas 1 photo Credit: Photo by Lisa Johnson Tana Douglas at Rockpalast: Photo by Manfred Becker Tana Douglas 2: Photo - Tana Douglas.

In this extract from her book Loud, Tana Douglas recalls meeting the members of AC/DC for the first time.

It was August of ’74 and summer was still a distant promise when I first pulled up outside the unassuming single-storey brick home on a tree-lined street in a quiet middle-class suburb of Melbourne. The house was large with several bedrooms but nothing special, maybe a little scruffier than its neighbours with a couple of rosebushes and a hedge as reminders of a time when its garden was cared for. None of this bothered me. I hadn’t come to see a garden – I’d come to meet the band. Standing there for that brief moment, scuffing my shoes on the cracked footpath, waiting for Michael Browning to lead the way, I had no inkling of what waited for me beyond that ordinary front door. In the entryway to the house there was a sense of a more glorious time that had passed. We’d let ourselves in, and Michael led me around a corner to the living room. I held back as he walked up to the group of six men casually standing around a table towards a kitchen area at the back. As a greeting, Michael placed his hand on the shoulder of a tall blond guy in his late twenties, while shaking the hand of the one who appeared to be the other’s business partner, a shorter guy of similar age with dark hair. These two were Harry Vanda and George Young respectively. I guessed they were in charge, as Michael had gone to them first. He called over his shoulder, ‘Tana, come meet everyone.’ The conversation stopped as they all turned to look in my direction, their smiles so big that I didn’t feel nervous. >>>

>>> Brother George, as he was referred to by the inner circle, took the lead. ‘How are you doing? Tana, is it?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Come closer,’ he said. ‘We won’t bite.’ And they all laughed, breaking the ice. ‘You’ve an accent,’ I said as I walked over. ‘Yeah, we’re all Scottish. Well –’ pointing to the tall blond guy ‘– except Harry, he’s Dutch, but he may as well be Scottish, as he’s family.’ Then George introduced me to one of the two guys who were closer to my age. ‘This is Malcolm, he’s my younger brother. He plays guitar and is the one who writes most of our music.’ In those early days, writing was a formula that started with Malcolm coming up with a riff and feel for a song, even an entire song’s rhythm section. Then it would get worked over, moulded with George’s guidance, then Angus would add his lead parts. Finally, Bon would be called in to add the lyrics that defined the feel of the song. (The three brothers would work closely together like this when working on Vanda/Young music also, for the likes of Stevie Wright and Jon Paul Young.) I looked to Malcolm, who was standing with his hands shoved in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched. He did a little shuffle with his feet as he took a step forward. Then he looked up, a big smile spreading across his face. He reached out, shook my hand and said, ‘Hi! Tana,’ tilting his head slightly to one side. The body language before the handshake, I later learnt, had been Malcolm doing a quick evaluation to see if he thought he could trust me. The Youngs always screened people before dropping their guard. Then it was the other guy’s turn. ‘Meet Angus, our youngest brother. He plays lead guitar.’ Angus, who was smoking a cigarette, looked like he’d just woken up – literally. (I would come to know that he always looked that way on a day off.) He followed Malcom’s suit, stepping forward in a more reserved, but still friendly way, after putting down his cup of tea and cigarette. Then with a distinctive, gravelly voice, he said, ‘Yeah, hi, how ya doing?’ Bon Scott reached over between George and Harry. ‘I’m not a Young or young –’ Bon humour ‘– but I am Scottish! I’m the singer, and I write the naughty lyrics,’ he said with a sly grin, slightly raising one eyebrow. He added that he was ‘the old man of the group’. Peter Clack was introduced as the drummer, and then Harry Vanda got a more formal introduction as the other half, with George, of the production team for High Voltage. With these introductions over, they didn’t stand on ceremony; they all started talking and smoking cigarettes at the same time. There was a buzz in the room as though they were on the brink of something big. So, that was the end of my job interview. I’d recently turned sixteen, and I’d just had my first encounter with the heart, soul and driving force of AC/DC. Of course, I didn’t know much about the band yet – they were only just starting out and hadn’t played any shows in town. We all moved to take seats in the living room where we kept chatting. Malcolm told me, ‘We had a version of AC/DC that played gigs in Sydney mostly, and then we did some in Adelaide, where we met Bon!’ nodding in his direction. ‘And even one show in Melbourne, where we met Browning.’ They always called Michael by his surname. ‘It just didn’t work out with those other guys. Our manager and singer sucked, and after getting stuck in Perth, we called it quits.’ The two members to survive that line-up were here in front of me looking for a fresh start. ‘It’s time for us to get serious,’ Malcolm said. ‘We need to steer away from a pop image. We want a harder edge. We want to play rock’n’roll. Bon can bring that.’ Angus added, ‘We’re all close, and we like to work that way.’ I told them, ‘You can count me in!’ The Young clan had a history in the Australian music scene: George had been a founding member of The Easybeats with Harry, and both had tasted international success with that band. But I was too young to know the backstory, or those of Bon’s earlier bands. I was just taking these guys at face value, and I liked what I was seeing. I had no concept of the talent standing right there in that room just chatting and joking. What I saw clearly, though, was their conviction about what was to come. Later that day the brothers picked up guitars and started working together. Malcolm and Angus played parts with George and Harry talking them through the process for their next studio session, ‘Try this chord here. Yes, that sounds good.’ Bon wandered off with a pen and notepad, disappearing into another room; he would reappear when called to contribute lyrics. That was how ‘Soul Stripper’ and just about every song was written. I knew I wanted to be a part of this. I liked them right away. I was in! I learnt that once they’d completed High Voltage, we would start a rigorous schedule of live shows to support the album. Until they found a permanent bass player, George would fill in where possible. They would also need a new drummer. Peter would play drums for shows until they found someone.

Not long after this meeting, and while still recording, we started rehearsals at Lansdowne Road. We converted one of the front bedrooms into a designated space that was in constant use day and night. Mal would stand in on drums or bass so they could work on the songs as they got more familiar with playing them live. They would all do whatever it took to get the music to where it needed to be. Bon would even jump in on drums if the brothers were working on guitar pieces. Malcolm and Angus would spend hours huddled together in the living room working on tracks until they were just right; they never settled for near enough. They had a clear plan and weren’t going to let anything distract them from it, and you were either on board or not. I was 110 per cent on board, so I got on with looking after all the stage equipment and instruments; my job didn’t include cooking or cleaning. At our first meeting, Mal and Angus had asked how I would feel about living in that house on Lansdowne Road, and I’d said it would be great. They had also asked if my mother would be okay with it, and I assured them yes. But it seemed they were still concerned about this, and not because they had any idea about my real age – they wanted my mother’s permission purely because I was a girl. So, when they returned from Sydney, I organised for the band to have a meal at her apartment on the St Kilda Esplanade; she could tell them herself that everything was okay. What struggling band is going to turn down a free meal? While my mother may have been a lot of things, she also happened to be a good cook and a generous host. She loved being the centre of attention. After a lot of great food and plenty to drink, I was deemed free to move into the house. And after an incident in which the barbecue burst into flames, the band all agreed that this would probably be safest for me. The funniest thing about that meal was watching Bon flirt with my mother, ostensibly to convince her to let me live with the band. He was definitely a ladies’ man, and I’m sure he was just trying to wind me up that day – he loved to wind me up. From then on it was official: Lansdowne Road was my new home, and AC/DC my new band. Little did the Boys know that my mother was glad to have me gone. She’d done well for herself since I’d fled her home those years prior, and God forbid I cramped her style or let slip I was the youngest of four children. * * *

Those Lansdowne Road days were a very busy time indeed. Creativity was bursting out of every room. There was no time to waste: with High Voltage now finished, the hunt was on for a rhythm section to enable us to start touring in earnest. George played bass on several shows in those early days, but he had other commitments. We were constantly working on new material. We were either rehearsing or sitting around the stereo playing all the music that each of us loved. The band used it to get to know each other better. As new members joined it was a way to get them on the same page musically for the direction Malcolm wanted to go. Bon was mad about Alex Harvey, Free and Elvis, while Malcolm and Angus were into old-school blues and rock’n’roll like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, and we all enjoyed a smattering of Bad Company along with ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres, but the blues was best. I think they let me play stuff that I liked just to make me feel a part of it. I learnt a lot about music from those early days at Lansdowne Road. During one of these sessions, Malcolm and Angus played Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, a song Malcolm used to play in one of his earlier bands. I cringed. They asked me why, and I told them, ‘I do not like Elvis, or his songs.’ But my only experiences with Elvis were those hideous movies; I’d never heard his earlier blues/gospel influenced songs. They obviously thought I’d lost my mind and had spent way too long in the rainforest. Malcolm turned up the next day to set me straight with an album that he wanted me to hear. It was Insane Asylum. The singer was Kathi McDonald and the song was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Mal knew I liked Janis Joplin, so he figured this was something I would relate to as Kathi had worked with Janis and they had some stylistic similarities. He sat me down and said, ‘Listen to this and tell me what you think.’ When the track finished, I looked over to him. He didn’t have a smug ‘I told you so’ expression; it was more a ‘Yeah? You get it!’ look. I learnt two things that day. The first was that a song can have many lives, and the second was that Malcolm truly loved music and cared enough to show me how one song can resonate with different people through different versions. A good song is a good song. The album was mine to keep. Something changed after that day. We spoke a lot from that time on. I’m not sure if it was just getting to know each other better or if Malcolm was getting homesick and missed the closeness of family. But I was becoming someone he could talk to, let his guard fall a little around, without affecting the dynamic with the other band members. These conversations weren’t to do with the songwriting but more to do with the people we were starting to get to know who would come to the house, or what I thought of Browning – we only ever called him Browning – or how the rehearsal had sounded. Never anything about other bands we’d be playing with. As a crew person I would have closer dealings with other bands and their crews, but that stuff didn’t matter to Mal. He rarely interacted with outsiders. It was a tight circle, and that was how they wanted it. The juggernaut was about to hit high gear with no looking back. No stopping it.

Loud is published by Harper Collins Australia.

THORN BIRDS

In her memoir My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend Tracey Thorn tells the story of her friendship with Lindy Morrison of the Go-Betweens.

Towards the end of 2019, author, musician and columnist, Tracey Thorn, arrived in Sydney for a 10-day trip that was publicly work, and privately an escape. As she was to write later, home life with her partner of 38 years, fellow musician and author Ben Watt, was in a state of tension and dissatisfaction just as the last of their children prepared to leave home. And decades of being the “good girl” had started to feel problematic for Thorn. “I feel myself coming adrift, unsure of what I want, unmoored from where I am,” she wrote: searching for meaning, sure, but also independence, comfort, euphoria, while recognising a coalescing of “unspecified rage”. Taking a kind of comfort in the epigrammatic thoughts of artists such as the novelist Anita Brookner and poet Kim Addonizio, she finds a line from filmmaker Agnes Varda that “In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed.” That’s the emotional churn within her as she headed to Sydney to see if there was both weight in, and support for, an ambitious book she has begun, her fourth, after two memoirs and a treatise on singing. This book is to be a kind of biography of her friend, the iconoclastic Australian musician, activist, academic, social worker and feminist figure rarely thought of as a “good girl”, Lindy Morrison. It will also serve as an examination of the exterior and interior life of a woman going through the music industry – in Morrison’s case as the anchor (in every way), of the beloved if never hugely successful indie pop group, The Go-Betweens - at the same time as Thorn’s own career in Everything But The Girl. So, a broader story built on the personal one. Or the personal one expanding. Or maybe both. Too many ideas were bubbling up to be left aside, if this book could happen that is. Although they had not been in each other’s presence for some years, they’d been talking online, some letters had been exchanged, and the idea broached before this trip. All with the knowledge that if Morrison, the tall, vibrant, funny, full-forced character whose drumming was contrastingly subtle and unusual, didn’t want to share her memories, diaries and letters, the project would be off. So, yes, this trip was vital. But in keeping with the state of flux in Thorn’s life, underneath that was another question, or series of questions, running through her mind as she travelled straight from the airport to Sydney’s eastern suburbs where Morrison lives: “Will I still know her after all this time? Will she still know me? Will I still like her? What will happen if I find I don’t?” Rather than beginning My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend with this moment, Thorn saves the reconnection until quite late in the book. The awkwardness and tension as they talk that first day is a reminder that they are quite different people, but also that the Lindy Morrison she has been describing for the preceding 189 pages –- is now vividly present and very real. “A large part of the impetus of writing the book, one of the things that I kept coming back to, was I had to make her a three-dimensional character. She has to be real,” says Thorne today, via Skye from the home she shares with Watt – their relationship intact, refurbished and surviving the months of Covid lockdown. “If it’s going to work and if I can convince people who have never even heard of The Go-Betweens why they want to read a book about their drummer, it’s got to be like a novel … she has to be three-dimensional, which means showing her in all her glory and her faults, and the things about her that I always loved and the things about her that I always found really difficult. It’s got to be as complete a picture as possible.” And there is the real nub of the book: beyond the biography, beyond the history, My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend serves also as a record of their friendship, begun 38 years earlier though latterly made a bit more tenuous by distance, work, absence, family … you know, life. In the Everything But The Girl song, Blue Moon Rose, Thorn sang of “a friend and she comes from the high plains/Wise as the hills and fresh as the rains”, a friend who “taught me daring/Threw back the windows and let the air in”. It’s a song of joy really. There is what Thorn calls “the weight of this history between us”. History that was begun in admiration (especially on Thorn’s part, after Morrison breezed into a dressing room where Thorn, then in the band Marine Girls but soon to start Everything But The Girl with Watt, sat and wondered). History that grew on difference (one a self-described small-town girl unsure of her place; the other “a tall, angular woman who seemed to reflect the light”). And history that never really wore away the edges of their contrasting personalities. “[This connection] said something interesting about friendships and how they work, that often you’re not looking for someone who is exactly like you. Especially when you’re young,” says Thorn. “I do think it’s very important the age I was when we met and the age gap between us. I was 20 and she was 31 and I was still at that stage in my life where I felt that I was quite unformed and trying to work out who was I going to be as an adult woman, especially an adult woman maybe working in this music business. “Was I going to work in this music business? I wasn’t sure. And there was Lindy, she was 31 years old and was working in this music business and also projected this image of being just entirely on top of things, able to deal with things, and confident and loud where I was quiet, and all those things.” If at first it looked an unlikely start for a friendship, they did have common ground, whether it be working surrounded by men, both being well read and voracious readers, both with an academic background, both feeling that “we were now moving in a world where that wasn’t necessarily what was wanted of us, or no one was going to be interested in it”. As Thorn observed of Morrison, she was far less “seen” by writers, critics and fans of The Go-Betweens than the two awkward/ charming/guileless/calculating songwriters, Robert Forster and Grant McClennan, who courted and were courted by writers, critics and fans. “When she did interviews no one was asking her about the books she’d read and the films she’d seen. She had all that inside her and I think she was grateful to find someone else to talk to about all that.” As might already be clear, Thorn’s book is such a beautiful book about friendship in its shifting phases, and one of the reasons it is such a captivating read is it doesn’t pretend to be presenting a perfect friendship and doling out innate wisdom. Instead, what is described is multifaceted and emotionally complex, a bold thing to do when we might expect some veneration of an older and in her own right iconic figure, or for some claim of a unique bond and special understanding. “But that’s not how I write about anything really, in an idealised way,” Thorn says. “I think a friendship is just another relationship and what have I always written about relationships? How fucking complicated they are and how difficult they can be and how it’s incredibly hard to fully connect with another human being because we are all partly inside our own heads and obsessed with ourselves. “And yet, they are brilliant and we take enormous strength and resilience from our relationships, whether they are romantic ones or family ones or friendships.” With the awkwardness anticipated but the looming book a hovering presence over any interaction, how did Thorn manage the reconnection in Sydney? Was she conscious of not coming across as some kind of – perish the thought! – grubby journalist? “I was trying not to make her feel like I was there interviewing her; I wasn’t sitting there with a tape recorder or notebook. But literally every time I was out of her presence I was writing everything down,” she laughs. “That chapter of us reconnecting is just a few little snapshots scenes. I don’t do very much analysing of the situation: it’s here we are at a party, here we are in a restaurant, here we are in someone’s house, here we are walking down the street trying to find our way. I tried to do lots of showing, not telling.” >>>

>>> What made analysis at that point unnecessary was that everything in the book that has led to this point had done the work for us. By the time we “meet” Morrison we have her history, Thorn’s history, the flesh and bones of their friendship, and a musical and historical context. All we need then is the fullness of Morrison’s company to embody it. “What’s interesting is it’s the friendship in action but it’s us 30 years on and we are both older and a bit set in our ways, and we have all these years of life behind us that we’ve lived when we weren’t in touch with each other,” Thorn says of this reunion. “So, there’s all sorts of stuff we don’t know about each other, and yet, within a couple of days we were making private jokes and I was just remembering how much fun she is. “I do think a lot of the time a lot is made of Lindy’s larger-than-lifeness and that she can be intimidating, and all those things. But I think too often she was painted as this slightly villainous, scary character. Obviously, a lot of those qualities are incredibly attractive and just fun to be around. You don’t have to be exactly like a person like that to be very drawn to them.” That force of nature, as the cliché has it, of Morrison is one thing, but Thorn is just as capable of exploring the vulnerability, the tenderness of her. It shows through the descriptions of a childhood in Brisbane and those early years at university and music, a time where confidence doesn’t come easily, where insecurities erupt over seemingly minor matters. And it extends into the intensity, rewards and failures of Morrison’s relationship with the far less experienced, less intellectually developed Forster (the relationship which sits at the core of his songwriting material) that sometimes seem like a series of small slights building to a bitter climax a decade later. Really understanding this less obvious side of Morrison is not just important for us as readers, it becomes the true strength of the book. In searching for why that is so crucial, why it feels different to this male observer, I wonder if it is as simple as saying female friendship are different to male ones. “Well, yes, because women experience the world in a different way. Obviously, that doesn’t mean all women experience the world in the same way. We all equally have our own individual perception of things and our own individual experience of things. But we will have certain shared experiences and obviously I focus on some of those, between me and Lindy, which give you a kind of shorthand,” Thorn says. “Often what women share is their experiences of being left out, or being patronised by people they are working with. Men’s relationships can often be based more on that power dynamic that’s about competitiveness: who is actually the strongest in this relationship, who is going to win, who is doing best at work?” Thorn readily offers that this is another generalisation but she’s not really wrong in the notion that for many men the vulnerable stuff can get buried and you just kind of bond on safe ground where weaknesses are hidden, even if you are not actually competing about your strengths. “But women, perhaps, more often bond by sharing the vulnerabilities because from that we take a strength. Hearing another woman say oh fuck, yes that happened to me as well, reminds you that you’re not going mad and so gives you a strength because it validates your perception of the world,” Thorn says. “You think oh shit, yeah, this isn’t happening because I’ve done something wrong, or because I’m stupid, it’s because this is the society we live in.” Is it also too simple to say that one reason why female friendships are different is in some ways they are in response to or in separating from men in the way men can impose themselves substantially in a woman’s life? “Yes. Sometimes within female friendship to almost have the sense of forming a little secret club that’s like the Resistance [she laughs] and if you are heterosexual it’s complicated, because you are sharing stuff about men at the same time as you have relationships with men and you are attracted to men,” says Thorn. “And Lindy and I definitely shared that, a kind of frustration with men we encountered sometimes, especially in that world of music. And yet within the same sentence we would then be joking about ‘well, yes but he is very attractive’.” Not so much nobody’s perfect as nobody’s pure? “That was the other thing I liked about Lindy: we shared a lot of feminist take on the world but you know, she’s not pious about these things. At all. Not sanctimonious. She will be contradictory in her opinions, and again I like that in people,” says Thorn. “I think it is completely valid to have a sort of political take on the world and yet still as a human being you will live in a way that will be contradictory to that. And sometimes you will have opinions that don’t quite sit comfortably within that take. “And I liked that about Lindy and I think we share that, that we were never rigid particularly in those ideas and we could allow ourselves the freedom to be a mixture.” Given many, if not most of us are somewhat rigid, pious even, in our certainties about life and the way the world should be when we are 20, 21, we probably all could benefit from having a kind of Lindy in our lives to teach us to bend a bit. Not that I’m suggesting, I tell Thorn, that she was necessarily rigid or pious at 21 and needed some bending. “But I was,” she laughs. “And I did. Often you don’t really do the unbending until you are a bit older. As much as meeting someone can be good for you and kind of shaking you out of that, it just takes experience really to be able to view the world in a slightly more complex way.”

PART 2

As a lyricist or a memoirist, Tracey Thorn is not afraid of digging, nor of exposing. Rereading her diaries, and then putting those early and unformed, or indeed later fully formed and frank revelations before us, has been the basis of a number of her books. Excavating herself in effect. Both Bedsit Disco Queen and Another Planet, among the three books she’s written since the band she formed with partner Ben Watt in the early ‘80s, Everything But The Girl, ended at the turn of the century, bared her fears and stumblings, the recriminations and the regrets, alongside moments of great joy and shared success. >>>