Welcome to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Hello and welcome to the show. I hope you’ve been having a fabulous week.
And now I haven’t asked you for a while, so I will now. Is there someone you’d like to hear tell their story? Your favourite singer or musician from the 60s, 70s or 80s? Just shoot me a message through the website abreathoffreshair.com.au and I’ll get right onto it for you. For those of you still waiting, rest assured your request is well in hand.
Now onto our episode today and a request that’s coming from Robin in Canberra. Ever heard the name Gerard Bertelkamp? I bet you haven’t. What if I told you he’s better known as Beeb Bertels? Now some of you know who I’m talking about.
So how about I tell you that Beeb is an Australian musician, singer, songwriter and guitarist who’s been in groups like Suit with Rick Springfield, Mississippi and Little River Band. Now I’ve got your attention, haven’t I? Hello Sandy. Beeb, how lovely to chat with you again.
How are you doing? Oh, doing pretty good. There’s lots to talk to you about, and I noticed that you keep your original name here on screen. And do you refer to yourself and everybody else refer to you as that these days? No, they don’t.
But I’ll tell you what changed all of that. On September 11th, the whole thing that happened here in the United States, with the towers going down, I couldn’t fly as Beeb Bertels anymore. I had to go by my legal name because that’s what’s written in my passport.
So everything I do now has to be, you know, in my legal name so that the government knows exactly who they’re talking to. So you’re saying that prior to that, you were able to fly as Beeb Bertels? You’d fill in your form? Oh, yeah. Really? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. It was no problem whatsoever. How long have you been in Nashville? Well, I’ve been here 31 years.
Pretty soon now I’ll have been in the States for as long as I lived in Australia. Let’s track back, Beeb. Tell us your story.
You were originally born in Holland, right? That’s right. I was born in Amsterdam in 1948. When I was 10 years old, my parents decided to emigrate to Australia.
And so we landed in Australia in 1959. I had a wonderful, fantastic life growing up in Adelaide. Tell us a little bit about what Adelaide looked like to you in those days.
Well, it wasn’t very built up, let me put it that way. Of course, the influx of migrants from not just Holland, but from England and all parts of Europe made it very much a migrant kind of town. What it was like, really, was you came from Europe speaking your native language, and you were thrown into these migrant hospitals, and you couldn’t speak one word of English.
Were your parents horrified? Did they feel like they’d come to the end of the earth? Well, Australia was inviting tradespeople from Europe to come because Australia was still such a young country and they needed tradespeople. So you settled in Adelaide, you went to school, you quickly learned the language. Where did your passion for music develop? Oh, that would have come from high school.
I had a very good friend whose name was John Darcy, and he was an English migrant. He was like a mad Hollies fan. And we started to get together at his place or my place.
John knew a lot about harmonies, and he would teach us the different parts to Hollies songs. And that’s what pretty much fired up my passion for music. There was a lot of music around at that time.
In Australia, we were being influenced by music from America, from the UK. Actually, there wasn’t too much Aussie local music, was there? No, there wasn’t until probably, well, you know, Johnny O’Keefe had his Six O’Clock Rock show. That was a great music show, but probably wasn’t until the Easybeats came along.
That kind of hysteria happened in Australia. And, you know, one of the first albums I actually bought was the Easybeats, the very first album. You taught yourself to play the guitar? Well, actually, when we first formed our first band, I was actually nominated to be the singer in the band.
And we played this one show that was held in a scout hall. And it was so pathetic that we had a bass player in the group. And he was so disgusted with our performance that he promptly quit.
And so I said to John, I said, John, what are we going to do now? And in his very English accent, he said, well, lad, you’re going to have to learn to sing and play bass at the same time. I didn’t have a bass guitar, but my dad was a carpenter. And so he shaped the outline of a guitar.
And John knew where to lay the frets in the neck. And we put a pickup in it. And once I had this homemade guitar, I sat in front of my record player and I would pick off the bass parts to every song that we had been rehearsing for that very first show.
And that’s how I got to be a musician, an instrumentalist, say. What sort of music were you playing? Obviously, cover songs. A majority of Holly songs, of course, because of John’s influence.
But we just, you know, we just did the hits of the day. We became very, very popular over a number of years in Adelaide. And eventually, you know, we became known as Zoot.
Can’t you see that I’m down? I just don’t want you hanging around. I guess you better get it, better get going now. You better get going now.
You better get going now. You better get going now. We were actually first called Times Unlimited.
And then when Daryl joined, we changed our name to Down the Line, which was the title of a Holly song. And then one day, we were approached by these two guys from Elizabeth, one of the outlying suburbs in Adelaide. And they said to us, we really like your band.
We think you have a lot of potential, but we don’t like your name. And one of the guys suggested we call ourselves Zoot. That guy was Doc Neeson from the Angels.
We, you know, kind of tossed the name around for about two or three weeks and decided that, yeah, it was kind of a cool name. It was short and punchy and really didn’t mean anything. And so we took on the name Zoot.
And from then on, we kind of climbed the ladder of success in Adelaide until we moved to Melbourne in late 68. You certainly climbed that ladder very quickly. And were you already known as Beeb? Well, in high school, I got the name Bebe Eyes was given to me.
And it was one of the characters in the Dick Tracy cartoon show that was on TV during those years. It was Daryl Cotton who abbreviated that to Beeb when he joined the band. And I’ve been known as Beeb ever since.
So when you brought Daryl into the band, why move to Melbourne? We had gone to the top of the ladder in Adelaide. And if you want to get anywhere in Australia, you have to move to either Melbourne or Sydney. It was there that Zoot picked up a manager and a nightclub owner who promised to take them to the top.
It was Tony and Wayne who came up with the concept of the Think Zoot thing. That was after you cut the first record? Yes, it was. How did that do for you? Well, it did pretty good in our hometown, of course, Adelaide.
But it was written by a friend of George Harrison’s, Jackie Lomax. But, you know, shortly after we moved to Melbourne, two of the members of the group decided that it was not for them to stay in Melbourne. They ended up going back to Adelaide.
So Daryl and I decided that we’re going to find two people. And that’s when we added Rick Brewer to the lineup and we found Roger Hicks, who became our guitar player. So you start playing around Melbourne.
How are you receiving it? Well, the Think Pink thing, of course, took off and made us very popular. But here’s one of the great things that Wayne DiGrucci brought to us. In those days, a band would play, you know, there were still dancers at that time, you know, there was no alcohol or the pub scene hadn’t come up yet.
So Wayne said, you’re not going to be one of those bands that plays all night. I’m going to book you out for 40 minute spots. And so because we would hit the stage in our pink outfits and stuff, play 40 minutes, and then exit and go to the next gig.
Well, our female fans couldn’t get enough of seeing us. A lot of them would follow us from one gig to another. That’s what created the whole hysteria thing.
It was kind of a brilliant idea of Wayne’s. Just to explain, the four of you would dress in pink suits. And the slogan was Think Pink.
What was his rationale for that? He wanted to create hysteria and make us more popular. That whole thing about they couldn’t get enough of seeing us or hearing us play. You were a great musical group.
How did you react to this whole pink thing? Because I know that while the girls loved it, a lot of the boys wanted to bash your heads in, didn’t they? Oh, yeah. And they did a few times as well. But yeah, you know, the girls loved us and the guys hated us and called us poofters and all of that sort of stuff.
I don’t know whether we can even say that word anymore nowadays. We did that for a couple of years before Roger Hicks left the band. And then, of course, Rick Springfield joined.
Shortly after Rick joined, we decided to do away with the whole pink thing because music around that time, and I’m talking about late 69, maybe early 70s, was starting to change. We were starting to see more hard rock groups become popular like Deep Purple and Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and their music. As a group, we felt we didn’t want to be left behind with the trend going towards that hard rock sound.
But at that time, we still weren’t writing any of our original material. So we would take songs, popular songs of the day, and rearrange them in a much harder rock style. That’s how we were able to keep up with the times, along with the fact that we had this big burning of the pink suits that let everybody know that we weren’t going to be known as Think Pink, Think Zoot anymore.
We were now going to be just Zoot and wear regular clothes, along with this change in music. Men wearing pink in those days was an unheard of thing. What was your reaction to that? Well, I wasn’t thrilled, let me put it that way.
But I went along with it, as did the other guys, and we were still young and we were starting to be seen every week, just about, on Australian TV. We became very, very recognized people in Australia, no matter what city we were in. Going from Adelaide to Melbourne, we stepped onto a national platform.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. So it had taken Australia by storm, so much so that the hysteria that followed the Beatles also followed them wherever they went.
What was that like for you, having girls clawing at you and running down the streets and goodness knows what else? I’m sure you’ve got lots of good stories to tell about that. Yeah, well, I mean, it was fun. In particular, I have fond memories of these beach shows that we do every day.
We would travel to a different beach in the summer and play on a stage that they would erect on the beach and we would have our fans around. Yeah, you know, it was fun. I mean, we just went along with it.
We wanted to be famous while still playing the kind of music that we loved. Bright lights blind me And I’m wedged in by the people Pushing, rushing To the other side of music And my eyes are burning And my legs are aching You mentioned that you picked some of the songs of the day and gave them a bit of a heavier arrangement. I think you’re really well known for the one you did on Eleanor Rigby, aren’t you? Yes, absolutely.
Rick Springfield had a lot to do with that because he was so into coming up with guitar riffs, which is how that song starts. We did so many other songs. We did Hurdy Gurdy Man by Donovan and we did Shiloh by Neil Diamond.
We did I’m Only Sleeping by the Beatles. Did our own kind of arrangement of that. When I’m alone, I’m still yawning When I’m in the middle of a dream Float upstream, float upstream Please don’t spoil my day I was awake But after all, we’re only sleeping Everybody seems to think I’m lazy I don’t mind In that crazy run And everywhere that I dream I still am fine There’s no need Please don’t spoil my day I was awake But after all, we’re only sleeping By this time, Rick had started writing his original compositions which we were starting to play and record as well.
And had you found a whole new audience in the male side of the population having dropped the pink suits and starting with the harder rock sound? Absolutely, yeah. The guys came around and all of a sudden started thinking Well, these guys, they’re not so bad after all. They can really rock.
So with all that success, why did you break up in 1971? Well, actually, we were offered a deal with RCA in America and we were also going to go over there and tour and we really wanted to jump into the American market but it fell through. And unfortunately, we felt that we were at the pinnacle of what we could do in Australia and we amicably just decided to split up in 1971. And you and Daryl continued on together as a duo, didn’t you? Yeah, we did.
An opportunity came up for Daryl and I to be in this duo that was called Freeze because it was backed by a suit manufacturer. It was our job to play on catwalks or behind catwalks in major department stores while models were parading on the catwalk showing off the latest Freeze suits. I’m back here again Alive and warm and free The way that I was meant to be My feelings My childhood treasures I kept locked away Like dusty souvenirs of yesterday We did that for a year and for the first time ever, Daryl and I were earning some decent money but I wasn’t happy in the end doing the duo thing.
I really missed the camaraderie of being in a band and we split up. I just wanted to back up a minute. You said you hadn’t made any decent money playing a suit despite being so popular.
Who was getting all the money? The money just seemed to go on expenses. Whether it be paying for petrol to get from Melbourne to Sydney or whatever I can remember maybe being paid $50 a week or something. I mean, I never made enough money to put anything away, let me put it that way.
But I didn’t care about the money. I was doing what I love doing and I just love playing music and wanting to be famous. Didn’t you have your parents on your back saying, get a real job, son? Oh yeah, that was probably even before they said, yeah, the music thing’s all very fine and that’s good but make sure you keep your day job and put money away so you can buy a block of land and blah, blah, blah, all of that sort of stuff.
But I really wasn’t interested in doing that at all. I just wanted to follow what my heart was saying. So after the duo, you got asked to join a folk rock band by the name of Mississippi.
Tell us about that. Well, another Adelaide band called Alison Gross had come across to Melbourne and were offered a recording deal. They recorded this album of original songs that were absolutely fantastic.
Ron Tudor from Fable decided that Alison Gross was not really a cool enough name for them and he decided to rename them Mississippi. They had a hit record with Kings of the World. No one is trying to kill me Make way, say still I’ll be It’s only a year We’ll come back again Through this time and the Kings of the World One day I picked up the phone and this voice was asking me, oh, excuse me, would you be able to tell me how I can get in touch with Bea Bertels? And I was on the other end of the phone, of course, and I said, well, you’re speaking to him.
And that was Graham Goble, who wanted to get in touch with me because I think maybe, you know, John Darcy, who had been my high school friend, had been in Alison Gross, which was Graham’s band in Adelaide. And it may have been John who suggested to Graham, why don’t you call Beeb in Melbourne? But I wasn’t playing bass anymore. I had switched to playing six string guitar and writing songs and doing that whole thing for a year with Daryl.
But they were looking for a bass player. They wanted to put a live band together. And did you take the job? I took the job.
I actually bought a bass guitar because I wanted to be in the band so badly because I loved their songs. But I don’t think I was cutting it as a bass player anymore, which is the reason why I gave up bass in the first place and started teaching myself how to play chords, and along with that came being able to write songs. The minute that Graham heard my voice with their voices, he decided that I was the guy to join the band.
Mr. Moondog Do you hear me call Mr. Moondog I’m just about to fall They took my mind and tried to change it And they tried to buy my soul But no They’ll never get my soul You get involved with Mississippi, with Graham Goble, you start writing your own material, and you start writing with him in tandem, don’t you? Yeah. Well, we never actually sat down and wrote together, but I was always very good at starting songs and then losing the plot on them, and then so I’d hand them over to Graham to finish. And the very, very first song we ever co-wrote was a song called Where in the World, which was the flip side of our single Will I in Mississippi.
Mississippi saw a great deal of success in itself, didn’t it? Well, it did, but it was a hard grind for Mississippi. Three years of the whole pub grind thing that a lot of Australian bands were doing during that time. It was good though.
I always look back on my three years in Mississippi and say those were my true apprenticeship years as far as becoming a better guitar player, a better songwriter, and a better singer. And I was still chasing the whole harmony thing because I just loved singing harmonies. Oh, where in the world Would I be, would I be Without you, girl, without you Oh, where in the world Would I go, would I go Without you, girl, without you You wake me every morning Oh, you make me every night Everything you do, you make it seem all right And it’s hard to give you Every time I go How I stay away from you I’ll never know And I find peace of mind Without you I’ve searched everywhere But there’s just nothing there Without you, girl, without you I think it deserved more success than what it achieved in Australia, which is the reason why we chose to pack it up and go to England on that fateful journey.
What happened there? Well, we felt that we really didn’t get the radio support that we felt we should have had with Will.I. And so we decided to go to England and play on the Sitmar line, the cruise ship. Yeah, we were the entertainment on that. And it was a six-week journey to England, which was horrible.
I hated being on that ship for that long. It was just awful. But then we had a manager and we landed in London.
But as a lot of Australian bands did when they arrived in London, we couldn’t make it over there. The music scene was changing so quickly. We were entering the whole discotheque phase of music and a harmony-sounding band just wasn’t what was going to be popular in England.
So we broke up very quickly over there. And once again, the nucleus of Mississippi, Graeme, Derek and myself sat around and we were discussing why Mississippi wasn’t a bigger success than we thought it should have been. And we boiled it down to the fact that we didn’t have a lead singer who was the liaison between us and the audience.
We were just five musicians playing our music and sharing the vocals between us kind of thing. And so I suggested Glenn Shorrock because I knew Glenn was over there and had been over there for five years. He’d been in an orchestral kind of band and he was doing backup vocals for Cliff Richard and Olivia Newton-John.
And he was in that whole mix of Australians over there in London. But at the time that we invited him over to our house to play him some of our songs, he was tired of being in London and not getting anywhere himself. So he said to us he was going to go back to Australia.
So we sat around and we played a couple of our songs to each other and Glenn liked our songs and we liked his songs because he’d been writing songs. And we rehearsed It’s A Long Way There and when we hit that chorus in It’s A Long Way There, when we heard our three voices together, it was just something magic happened in the room and we just all looked at each other and thought, wow, we’ve got something really special here. When you heard the voices together and you knew you had something incredibly special, what did you do with it? Well, we also had run into Glenn Wheatley.
It was his ambition to find an Australian band to manage and take them to an international level. He said to us, why don’t you go back to Australia and reform the group there and then I’ll take over as management. And so that’s exactly what happened.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. The members of Mississippi were stone broke in London and took day jobs to save money for an airfare back home.
On arrival, the band underwent yet another name change. We did because we played some shows under the name Mississippi but we had a lot of fans who felt that how come you guys are an Australian band with an American name? We listened to them and so we decided to change our name to Little River Band. Yeah, I’ve heard Glenn tell the story that you were driving down that Geelong road one day and just happened to see the sign on the road and somebody said, what about that? Exactly, yeah.
Sometimes I think I’m just a crazy cat Running around, don’t know where it’s at Getting confused with my way of life That’s when you say, now you cut that guy right now Right now You keep this flame, I have a light in me And with this track, it’s curiosity That keeps me hanging all night and day Surprisingly, again I hear you say this one I’d written that song in London while we were there, written a few songs there in London actually that got to be on that first album. We always left it to the record company to pick our singles and so they chose Curiosity as our kick-off single and it became a top ten record in Australia. What were you writing about? Well, I’ve always been a lover of proverbs and the house we were living in in London, Graham and his wife had adopted this little kitten that they called Sparky.
Sparky was running around the living room one day while I was sitting there playing my guitar and that proverb popped into my head and all of a sudden the song just kind of presented itself. Curiosity killed the cat I’m telling you I know where it’s at Love is everywhere to be found Open your eyes and look around I was even more passionate about music now because I was writing my own original songs and wanting to be on an international level, you know. The best way I can describe it is even back in the early Zoot days I had musician friends who would say to me oh, wouldn’t it be great if we can become popular all over Australia and get on the telly and be recognised in the streets and all that sort of stuff and in the back of my mind I always thought be big in Australia.
I said no, I want to be big around the world. I had hoped to be on an international stage. Friday night it was late I was walking you home We got down to the gate and I was dreaming of the night Hard to tell about a lifetime It wasn’t very long until the band packed up and went to the US and became the first Australian band of the 70s to gain really significant international success and you guys paved the way for bands like ACDC Air Supply, Men at Work, In Excess What was it like being received so well there? Well it was a hard grind at first We were away from home for five months for that very first tour and it was, as you say, it was a rollercoaster ride because our very first show in America was opening up for the average white band in front of about 5,000 college kids but then the next night we’d be in Washington DC in a club that held no more than 200 people The whole tour was like that We broke through in the end and we kind of became the darlings of Capitol Records and they really got behind us Babe, of all the songs that you wrote for Little River Band do you have a favourite? My favourite will always be a song that appeared on Sleeper Catcher which is a song called Light of Day I’m a great lover of extended what we call outros on a song you know, like extended endings that go on for a bit and allows musicians to kind of show off what they can do Light of Day has this extended outro that has the most beautiful guitar solo from David Briggs followed by a bass solo by George McArdle It’s just an amazing thing to listen to A lot of Little River Band fans will name that song as their favourite song We were lucky in that every album that we recorded always had hit singles on it and that’s the thing that kept us going and of course, made us so popular in the United States Graham and I would retreat to our motel rooms and we’d always have guitars in our hands and be writing songs for the next album that was going to be recorded I was kind of the meat in the sandwich between Glenn and Graham because those two guys didn’t see eye to eye very often at all How many albums did you have all up? We recorded something like 10 maybe 10 studio albums but I left in late 83 and they continued to record after that Why did you leave? I felt that the music was being pushed into the wrong area for where I thought the band needed to continue I think Graham was sensing that Little River Band needed to have a harder sounding sound to them and the songs that were presented for the albums after I left displayed that but they really didn’t have any more hit records off those albums Look around you Look up here Take time to make time Make time to be there Look around your part Feel for the winter But I love you You’re not like the rest You’re there when I need you You’re there when I need I’m gonna need you Time ago I had a lady to love She made me think of things I never thought of Now she’s gone and I’m on my own A love song is coming to my mind A love song that was there all the time So lady Let me take a look at you now You’re there on the dance floor Making me want you somehow Oh lady I think it’s only fair I should say to you Don’t be thinking that I don’t want you Cause maybe I do Yeah, I became very dissatisfied with where the music was going and also a big part of that was the change in lead singers from Glenn Sharp to John Farnham which was not my choice I hear you So what did you do with yourself then? Well, I stayed in Melbourne for quite a few years and I continued to write I made trips back to America until I felt it was time to leave Australia and do something fresh ended up moving here in 92 What drew me here more than anything was I felt within myself that there was still more to be learned as far as songwriting went The songwriting community here is what drew me more than anything I tried my hand at writing country music for about five years not really getting anywhere with it It wasn’t my first love My first love will always be pop and rock music and then I gravitated to working with a guy called Bill Como who was also a session keyboard player from LA who had moved here and we formed an independent record company and that’s how I came to record my first and only solo CD that was called Driven by Dreams When I was young had my whole life in front of me No need to think about my future being the key Opened unlocked doors Everything just seemed to flow I never thought about money to be made As long as I could play the music of my days Travel round the world Giving it my heart and soul Driven by dreams And not fear On the crest of the wave Here at the end of my life Can’t crash it down or slow it seems I’m still standing here Driven by dreams We produced a lot of custom projects for younger artists that came to town and wanted to record Is that what you’re still doing today? Not doing much of anything anymore these days I mean I came back to Australia in the early 2000s when Graham talked to me about the reformation of Little River Band which ended up becoming Berta Shorrock Goebel I did that for a few years and now I’m, you know, 75 and I’m not doing much in music anymore I’m still dabbling in songwriting and would love to record something again at some point but whether that will happen or not I don’t know If there’s one thing in my life that’s missing It’s the time that I spend alone Sailing on the cool and bright clear water There’s lots of those friendly people They’re showing me ways to go But I never want to lose their inspiration It’s time for a cool change I know that it’s time for a cool change And now that my life is so prearranged I know that it’s time for a cool change You found the time in 2017 to write your autobiography too though, didn’t you? I did, on one of those tours with Berta Shorrock Goebel I came back to America and I thought if I don’t start putting my memories down I’m going to start forgetting things I didn’t stop writing for five years solid It all just came pouring out of me and for the longest time I really had no idea what I was going to call it until a friend of mine immediately said I know what you need to call it Every day of my life So that’s what ended up becoming the title of it and to this day people still will tell me how much they enjoyed reading it So if you were to go out tomorrow would you be a happy man having accomplished everything you set out to do? I think so, I think so It’d be nice if I could record maybe one more CD of some of my original music I’d love to do that but I’m just cruising along at the moment and enjoying life and seeing where it takes me 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the formation of Little River Band Beeb says his musical legacy is his greatest joy Hearing our music still being played that’s the legacy I think that I’ll leave behind having been part of one of Australia’s greatest bands Beeb, thank you so much for your time today I really appreciate your generosity Okay Sandy, thanks Be well, bye now Bye It’s a beautiful day You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye Beautiful day That you’re going away It’s a beautiful day