Let's backtrack. I was a classical music fan. If I stretched the boundaries of that it was to reach backwards into the Renaissance and before, not forward into rock music. Then I went to high school, turned thirteen and had to sign up for adolescence. A crash course with the local top 40 station revealed enough to go on, and when I graduated to Countdown on the weekends it was easier to identify taxonomy and call characteristics. I ended up liking quite a lot of it and armed with the zeal of the convert, pursued in earnest.
Skyhooks won me because all that wit was offered with music that had the same kind of smarts. The arrangements easily qualified, with their intricacy, as counterpoint. It wasn't Bach but it worked. On Countdown (already into their second year of chart dominance) they were weird. Drag and makeup and glitter but the music was a mix of tough and complicated, like someone who had started out classical but set themselves in rock music to join in. So, familiar.
Skyhooks' publicly deadly foes were the poppier Sherbet who were unabashed radio fodder. I liked some of their stuff but none of it quite broke through to me the same way that the Hooks' spikiness always did. Soon, I had removed the colour poster of them in the TV Times (thanks, Nanna!) and folded it back into the album sleeve. Hooked.
The album starts with the title track. A bold upward slide ends with a surf rock rhythm and Shirley Strachan's strong scream: "I feel a little crazy. I feel a bit strange. Like I'm in a payphone without any change..." The forward force takes breaks with what I would find out were things like synths and wah pedals. Every note is audible but nothing has that overly clean session musician nakedness. It sounds composed and arranged but also live tested.
Whatever Happened to the Revolution begins as a Doorsy blues but then the opening joke: Whatever happened to the revolution? We all got stoned and drifted away..." I took this to my limited impressions of the Gough Whitlam dismissal and even vaguer ones of the anti-Vietnam War protests.
At thirteen, in the deep north, I thought Balwyn in Balwyn Calling was a girl's name, not an outer suburb that suggested the inner city cool was threatened by a literal callback from yobville. I had no idea at all of any of this. To be fair, not knowing the Melbourne geography, my eldest brother didn't know either. So, ha!
Horror Movie starts with a synthesised creepy intro that moves into a confident funk. The punchline is that all the mayhem and bloodshed of the verses are describing the nightly TV news. Agreeing with this with a sagacity borrowed from older siblings gave me an air of grown up cynicism, at least in the mirror as I played along with the tennis raquet guitar.
You Just Like Me Cause I'm Good in Bed is a rocker that does what it says in the title with a side order of the pickup scene of the place and time.
Carlton (Lygon St Limbo) is a bright rock song about the inner city neighbourhood that I knew about from Homicide and Division 4. An elongated chorus warns to check how real the dealers are. An abrupt change repeats the Horror Movie funk riff as Shirley leads the rest in something more like an urban trible chant. The down and dirty suggestion of the lifestyle gave me daydreams but much later, after I'd moved to Melbourne and drank lattes at the University Cafe and pots of Carlton on Lygon St at the University Hotel (Uni of Melbourne is in the adjoining Parkville) this was not only on the jukebox but you didn't stay there for more than two pots without hearing it. I'd look out the window and imagine what it looked like a decade earlier. Change the flares for drainpipes and the hippy hair for shorn back and sides. No, it didn't quite work but it was fun finally being there and hearing the song in situ.
Toorak Cowboy is of the tradition of The Kinks' Dedicated Follower of Fashion and other digs at youthful affluence and small L liberalism. It's even done in the same country pickin' style. this is localised to highlight the cringey sophistication of the rich playboy buying everything he claims to be. The namechecks of south of Yarra neighbourhoods would have added a sting to the lyrics. Toorak was another place name I knew as the opulent big money village of Melbourne. Still is.
Smut is guitarist Red Symonds' turn at the mic and the only song on the album not by bassist Greg Macainsh. It's a bouncy narration of a purposed visit to a porn cinema. A minor key chorus shares lines between Red and Shirley. Then it's gleefully back to the mechanics of concealed masturbation in the dark. Shirley's middle eight, "better get a grip on yourself, you better pull yourself together" drips with contemporary slang. The harmonised oohlalaas sing us out as the lead guitar goes very sweet. This fits perfectly in the '70s context where it felt daring. Weirdly, with porn mainstreamed by the internet and its consumption de rigeur, this one probably comes across as quaint.
Hey What's the Matter is a rocky taunt at faux malcontents. You can't have your dope and smoke it, too. Crikey, was I living or what? I was and in the '70s.
Motorcycle Bitch is the female equivalent of Toorak Cowboy except there's more commitment to the object's lifestyle.
So, it's pretty much all bangers and even the cartoony cover art isn't rendered embarrassingly cute out of its context, being so frankly done. Ross Wilson is an unsung hero of the album, keeping everything cleanly lined but energetic as producer. His own experience as provocateur in front of Daddy Cool (Skyhooks creative ancestors) primed him for the role on this and the next few platters.
This was the only Skyhooks LP I owned. I liked seeing them on Countdown and always paid attention but was never quite reached after that. Maybe I got sick of this one album and didn't see much of a development. Maybe, the year to come with its discovery of the wonders of Queen and catching up with David Bowie's career through the cassette underground and the endlessly rewarding archaeology of the sixties beyond The Beatles. It was something. I honoured them by listening.
Skyhooks didn't survive the changes to come with strength. Red Symonds left for a career as a TV curmudgeon. The album after him had an American producer and sounded a lot more guitar heavy (Women in Uniform was good musically, though). When Shirley left and they opted for a distinctly different vocalist, they released a song about Queensland as a police state which appealed until the lines about the girls being sweet and juicy and underage ruined everything. And they thought they were being so punk. It didn't fly even back then. The Angels, oldie mouldy cover band who cut their hair and reinvented themselves as near-punks, really did cut it with Take a Long Line as far as standing up to the bad years of Brisbane. No smirking jokes needed. Times change quickly.
So, was it the commentary or the fun of the songs that sold them? Hard to know and it's strange that Macainsh over a very few years failed so self-defeatingly to read the room. An attempted revival in the '80s gave them a kind of novelty single that I can't say I've all the way through once. It wasn't the jokes or the rocking with Skyhooks, it was the times. In the mid '70s they felt fresh and taunting but by decade's end that suddenly felt try-hard. Punk did a lot of damage before it turned the gun on itself and bands like Skyhooks were clearly collateral casualties. Then again, the sheer invention and commitment of this debut blaster insists on your attention and, even with the loudest of its creaking jokes, works a treat.
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