Hey, hey, hey, it’s a beautiful day and I can’t stop myself from smiling. Welcome to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Cause it’s a beautiful day.
Breath of Fresh Air. Beautiful day, oh baby, any day that you’re gone away. It’s a beautiful day. Hello and thanks so much for joining me today many of you listening already know that I grew up here in melbourne australia where during the 70s we used to party like there was no tomorrow the decade certainly was one of sex drugs and rock and roll i’m sure i’m not telling you anything new
here because if you’re of the same vintage i bet that’s exactly what you were doing, no matter where you grew up. It was an era when live bands played all the time, at schools, university campuses, town halls and pubs. You could head
out any night or day and catch a great show, and we definitely had our favourite bands to see. One of the ones that was on top of my list, like so many kids back then, was the band Skyhooks. These four guys revolutionised the music scene in Australia, with their catchy tunes, homegrown
lyrics, and zany outfits and antics on stage. Depending on where you’re tuning in from right now and how old you are, you may not know their songs, but I guarantee once I introduce you to them, you’ll never forget them.
Take this one for example, tantalisingly called, You Just Like Me Cause I’m Good in Bed.
That song was banned on the radio everywhere and that just made us love it all the more. Most of Skyhook’s material was written by the band’s founding member and bass guitarist Greg McKean, whom I have to tell you has required quite a bit of arm twisting
before he’d agree to this chat. He does have some awesome stories to tell though, so let’s get right into it. What I know about you, Greg Macainsh, is that you grew up in Warrandyte, a suburb of Melbourne,
and your father was a sometime poet while your mother was a librarian. And I guess that explains where you got the love of language and of writing from. Am I right? Well, yes.
from, am I right? Well, yes. I mean, I think in our household, it was, you have to keep your mouth shut, but it was okay to express your thoughts on paper because my father was always writing or studying. So I learned that language was a thing. And did you actually start writing down stuff
yourself when you were very young? Well, at high school, I started writing stuff down because I had a subject called English literature, where you actually studied great writers. And I think our assignments were we had to write poetry and short prose.
And then of course, in the 60s, I heard pop music and was fascinated by the lyrics. I had bands at high school and a big part of my awareness. When did you find out that you were pretty good at writing lyrics?
Well, I don’t know if I ever found that out, but… Oh, you’re very modest, Greg. Yeah, I was in a few bands as a teenager and we did all that usual pop stuff. I was in a band
called the Ruben Tice and they had a couple of original songs and I thought, yeah, maybe I could do this too. It was really when you first heard the Beatles, like so many artists, that you became
enraptured with music and decided to learn guitar? Probably, yeah. I remember first hearing the Beatles when I was in the Boy Scouts at a jamboree, and then there was also the Rolling Stones. I
gravitated a bit more towards that camp, you know, when I was 13 or 14. Little Red Rooster sounded absolutely wild at the time. We thought, gosh, this is from another planet. Keep everything in the farm gone
Sad in every way You dumped the Boy Scouts and took up music. Yeah, that’s kind of pretty accurate.
So you finished school. What happens then? Well, this was in the era of the Vietnam War and I was in the draft to be conscripted.
So one just sat around sort of waiting because one’s life could just… Turn on a dime, yeah. Yeah, who knows what could have happened. So I worked in a farm for a year and then I went to film and television college.
During that time, I was still playing in bands and around 1973, I put together another band with a guy called Steve Hill, who was a singer, and that became the first version of Skyhooks. I’m telling you Well, you can and you can’t get a
Oh, no, no, you can’t I said you can and you can’t get a Oh, yeah, duh I’m telling you At the time, were you considering music as a full-time career
or it was just a hobby? No, I wasn’t. But later on, I had to make that choice because Skyhooks started recording and were becoming very popular. So I weighed up the two options and chose music. Can you describe the music scene at the time?
Because Melbourne was the capital of music in Australia, wasn’t it? It was hard for me to compare because I hadn’t been out of Melbourne at that age. I really hadn’t. But I did used to go to a lot of dances and so on when I was 16.
So we’d all go to those.ose. So I saw a lot of 60s bands like the Masters, Apprentices, the Easy Beats, et cetera, et cetera. Monday morning feels so bad Everybody seems to like me
Coming Tuesday I feel better Even my own eye looks good Wednesday just don’t go My old man looks good. Wednesday just don’t go.
Thursday goes too slow. I like Friday on my mind. Some guys like to play football on the weekends. I played music. I was into songs, the equipment, you know. Guys talk about their guitars, their amplifiers and stuff.
So it’s just a hobby, I guess, that became a bit more serious. Well, it certainly became your life, didn’t it? Yeah. And you omitted from that list of things that were around, you omitted the girls because teenage girls were a big part
of the whole fanfare. Yeah, well, we weren’t really focused on that so much. We were more concerned about what we were doing and the audience sort of came second. So what were you doing?
You formed this band Skyhooks. Where’d you get the name from? That was just out of necessity because we’d rehearsed and we were at the stage of going out to play and we didn’t have a name. I had a little book where I used to collect band names.
Anyway, we had a rehearsal and everyone was leaving. I said, well, we’ve got to have a name because they want to put it on a poster for this thing. And I said, how about Skyhooks? And they said, oh, that’ll do.
You know, we weren’t particularly fussy about it. So that’s how it got picked. It was an imaginary object, a Skyhook. It’s the thing you grab for when you’re about to fall off the mountain. And it was in the same sort of grouping as a tin of striped paint,
these things that didn’t really exist but had a name for them. So that’s where that came from. Okay, so you start playing around Melbourne. You start getting attention from a whole lot of people, from a whole lot of fans, but also from one Ross Wilson.
Well, I saw a crazy chicka running down the street. I said, whoo, pretty baby, why the reddy beat? She said, wow, I square, don’t you dig a scene? Daddy Cool’s a-playing on that music machine. Daddy Who? Daddy Cool’s a-playin’ on that music machine
Daddy Who, Daddy Cool, Daddy Who, Daddy Cool Daddy Cool, Daddy Cool, Daddy Cool Daddy Cool, Daddy Cool, Daddy Cool Daddy Cool, Daddy Cool
Daddy Cool, Daddy Cool After Daddy Cool, he had a band called Mighty Kong. Skyhooks got a gig supporting Ross’s band and so that’s how he and I first met and sort of kept in contact. And then
I signed a publishing deal with him and he was motivated to get us recorded. And I think somebody brought Michael Gudinski down and Molly and Michael decided to put us on his record label,
Mushroom, and Ross produced us. So what had you been playing when Ross saw you? Because this was prior to your first album. Had you written all of these songs already? We were playing original songs and a couple of covers.
The bulk of them ended up on Living in the 70s. You had written most of the songs for that debut album, which we’re now celebrating the 50th anniversary of quite incredibly. What was your driving force?
What was your inspiration in writing some of those songs? Can you walk us through some? Well, I spent a lot of time listening to great songwriters, people like Bob Dylan. I was fascinated by the words and how they put them
together. And I used to sit down and copy out Bob Dylan’s lyrics just to see how it felt to write stuff like that on paper, like a Rolling Stone, you know, those songs which had lots
and lots of verses in them. And I thought at some point Bob must have sat down and written them out himself the first time. So I sort of copied him doing that to see what it felt like
and maybe get a sense of how he thought. And I did that with a few other people like Ray Davies who wrote great songs for the Kinks. Mm-hmm. songs for the kinks. And all of the night I believe that you and me last forever
Oh yeah, all day and night I’m yours Leave me never The only time I
Play the guitar and get a sense of the mood and melody for what it was to become. Because when you’re doing this, you’re flying blind. You don’t know exactly how it’s going to end up.
You have some idea, but quite often in the process, it becomes something else. And it’s not something that you can be academically taught, really, how to write a song, is it? It’s trial and error and you’ve got to have a feel for what you’re doing.
There are no rules around it particularly, are there? No, no. I mean, well, pop songs are pretty, they’ve got a pretty set sort of structure. There’s a verse, there’s a chorus, there’s the instrumental, there might be another bit.
So that side of it is tried and tested, but actually what goes into it can be anything. And, you know, generally they’re three and a half, four minutes long. For radio airplay, of course.
You have certain parameters that you have to fit it into. Like a schoolboy that’s grown a bit
I’m livin’ in the 70s Eatin’ fake food under plastic trees My face gets dirty walkin’ around I need another pill to calm me down
I feel a bit nervous I feel a bit mad I feel like a good time That’s never been had
I feel a bit fragile, I feel a bit low Like I learned the right lines, but I’m on the wrong show
I’m livin’ in the seventies, I feel like I’ve lost my keys I got the right day, got the wrong week And I get paid for just being a freak
I’m living in the 70s I’m living in the 70s I’m living in the 70s I’m living in the 70s
Zah, zah, zah, zah, zah Zah, zah, zah Zah, zah, zah, zah Zah, zah What you became really well known for, Greg Macainsh, was becoming the first Australian rock band to really write songs in a local setting. A lot of these artists that you were perhaps studying were writing about the towns, the cities, the countries that they grew up
- And until you came along, there was nobody really writing about this country, Australia. What made you decide to bring it in local? Well, you know, I wanted to have the same kind of
devices that people like Ray Davies or Bob Dylan or Chuck Berry had where they could mention a place like Memphis, Tennessee. And in your mind mind you’d think, wow, that sounds mysterious and
wonder what it’s like there. It’s that sense of place, which you can do in a few words. And I thought, well, can it be done here? Because as you said, it wasn’t a common thing. I’d heard a
few place names in Slim Dusty songs, but in terms of sort of pop and rock yeah there was no sort of benchmark of what was cool and what wasn’t so i started looking around for place names of places one that i’ve
been to and two that had a bit of you know ethos and maybe mystique or a story about them so if you mentioned turac people have they’d have some idea well well, in Melbourne anyway, not anywhere else,
that place meant more than just a name on a street sign.This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Toorak is, it’s like, you know, every city has their enclave of, you know, expensive houses and you don’t get to live there unless you’re well off and it attracts a certain type of people.
So Toorak was maybe the equivalent of Beverly Hills if you were in Los Angeles, I don’t know. I looked for other places as well that had some kind of cache and obviously I settled on Bourne, which at the time was a middle class suburb full of brick veneer houses and people at that kind of level of, you know, social economic hierarchy, yeah. And Carleton was sort of a place where there were lots of uni students.
So we were very aware of the different suburbs, you know. Those places were the ones that passed muster in my mind. You know, because there’s a million other suburbs around, but I didn’t really know enough to be able to make a comment on them.
In some ways you were quite a naive young man, weren’t you? You hadn’t travelled very much, you didn’t look outside your home city of Melbourne, never even considered Sydney or Brisbane or any of the other cities in Australia, let alone outside of here and I guess quite by accident you popularised Melbourne everywhere. You were a deep thinker, weren’t you? Yes. Well, I had an awareness that thinking was a thing to do and possibly my upbringing, but also the way people were taught at school then was to think about things and analyse things and there wasn’t as much sort of information as there is now.
So you read books, perhaps talked to people, but also you would ponder certain things and wonder how they were or how they came into being. You weren’t writing your average love song, were you? You were writing a whole lot of different subjects. Love songs weren’t a subject I was that good at and also plenty of other people were writing love songs and doing it very well and so I thought there’s got to be other topics apart from the usual and I think that’s what I sort of gravitated towards.
Because you ain’t safe when you get home She’s gonna call you on the telephone She’s gonna call you on the telephone Get on the phone, you stupid stallion Get on the phone, you stupid stallion So did you intentionally set out to make the band look and sound and feel different from whatever else was out there because obviously that’s what you managed to accomplish? Well yes, I mean I was always going out to see bands and they were good musicians but I thought visually or theatrically they weren’t that exciting and I wanted to have something that was interesting visually and musically so that sort of became the blueprint for Skyhooks that we had to give some thought to how we appeared but it wasn’t regimented, nobody had to wear a uniform it was just the rule was I guess no blue jeans and wear something that expresses a certain aspect of yourself That became fun because people would source their own costumes and things to wear and the other guys in the band wouldn’t know so when you’d turn up at the dressing room and you’d pull out something you were going to wear everyone else went, wow, or that’s awful So it became a bit of a game and just evolved from there Skyhooks were renowned as much for their flamboyant costumes and make-up as they were for those novel catchy songs that were intensely belted out by lead singer Graham Shirley Straughan I first met Graham as we all knew him up at Eltham and he’d come up on the weekends and go to all the parties we had up there because it was a pretty interesting sort of scene and I think Fred, our drummer, had met him at the Village Green Hotel where they used to have Sunday afternoon sessions with bands He was a really sort of gregarious, in-your-face, larrikin type of guy but there was this other side to him where you could tell he wanted to sing but he was kind of shy about it I guess so we heard him and I thought he’s pretty good and so he joined Skyhooks Graham Straughan was an avid surfer and his nickname Shirley was given to him by fellow surfers due to his long, sun-bleached and curly hair, referring to Shirley Temple He was also a carpenter Greg had utilised Shirley as a singer initially in his previous band called Frame but when Skyhooks’ original singer left the band Shirl took to the stage and blew everyone out of the water He was a natural frontman, young and gifted, loudmouthed and witty blessed with a sweet yet powerful voice and androgynous good looks Greg had told him he’d need to work the stage and Shirl never looked back, strutting out front like a man possessed Far more obvious than she’s a radical She’s sure it’s crazy and she’s sure a fool She rides a bike like she rides a man Just hold on tight and don’t feel a thing Slip the clutch and give it full throttle Open your legs that’s what I’m talking about Correct me if I’m wrong this was before the group KISS actually got started, wasn’t it? Yeah, before we were making records we were certainly dressing up, yeah And KISS wasn’t around yet in America? You know, I was vaguely aware of KISS I think I’d seen them once on a TV show but they didn’t really register I mean, the person that did register was Gary Glitter who I’d seen several times and his live show I was fascinated by and it was really, really exciting and the music complemented that but Skyhooks was different in the sense that the songs were about specific things more what I thought were interesting topics compared to something like Gary Glitter or the other, Sweet or the other sort of glam rock bands that were around at the time, yeah Come on, come on, come on Come on You were very different to any of them and I’m sorry for anybody who never had the opportunity to see you guys play live because it was one hell of a show both in terms of the way you guys dressed up and in terms of the music itself You addressed teenage issues like buying drugs like suburban sex, like the gay scene like the loss of girlfriends and as a result many of the songs from that First Living in the Seventies album were banned on commercial radio which just made them all the more appealing really, didn’t it? Yeah, I mean I think that was more of a concern to our record producer and record company because they wanted stuff to be played on the radio obviously but it was a pretty extraordinary step the Federation of Australian Recording Broadcasters to send out a letter saying these songs are not to be played and why they’re not to be played because of certain lyrics and so on You had absolutely shocked conservative Australia, hadn’t you? Everyone was just mouths open, agape going what has happened here? What has music become in this country, right? Well, I guess so We were sort of too busy to be concerned with what certain sections of the community might say and we were just happy to be doing what we were doing and didn’t really care if it wasn’t accepted or anything Right, well I mean some of them were incredibly controversial Songs Like You Just Like Me Because I’m Good In Bed Come on, who is that written about for? Yeah, like I’m going to tell you Damn! But songs are sort of documentary but you’ve got the opportunity to extrapolate and embellish stories Of course and that’s what makes them interesting Of course Real stories are pretty mundane and quite often boring so you have to make them a bit more fun Greg McKeach, I’m not sure that your life has actually been mundane and boring but anyway Just like me cause I’m good in bed How’d you manage to tell me Just like me cause I’m good in bed You said that you were too busy to be concerned with the reaction that you guys were getting What do you mean too busy? Was there a lot of pressure on you from record companies to keep pushing out songs at that stage? Well, there was that but we were also playing live a lot and touring and you’d get up really early in the morning and catch a plane somewhere and do radio interviews and then play and that was day after day activity so you didn’t have lots of time to be relaxing or enjoying yourself It was hard work So for a guy who’d started off rather shy and naive how did you feel about all this adoration that you were getting? Well, it’s unnatural and very uncomfortable at first and I don’t think anyone really ever gets used to it and to get lots of attention for doing something that is fairly straightforward to yourself is weird, you know but yeah, there was a time where I couldn’t go into the centre of Melbourne without being followed by people, which is awful Was it enjoyable overall? Well, it was part of the job and if you wanted to play music to lots of people and let the thing just go where it was going to go and that’s the thing with Skyhooks it just took off and nobody could really stop it so you’ve got to surf the wave or get back on the beach I like that Well, it certainly exploded Skyhooks didn’t last all that long but while you were riding that wave you were at the height of heights for sure The second single from Living in the Seventies was Horror Movie and that was kind of a commentary on the nightly news which still seems so apt today probably more apt today than it was even back then Again, a sign of what a deep thinker you were Can you tell us what your thought process was in putting that one together? Well, one, the news and I was very aware of the news because of the Vietnam era and every night you’d hear about Australian guys that were killed in the jungles of Vietnam so it was sort of part of the consciousness I remember listening to a song by Frank Zappa called Trouble Coming Every Day which sort of dealt with a similar theme and I just must have come up with the lyrics and then a lot of music that had that sort of ominous kind of feel to it and that became the song And what a great song it is I was always aware that more stuff would be needed so I was always jotting ideas down and then when I had spare time I’d make demos because I knew that we’d have to have stuff for subsequent albums If I thought of a good idea or I saw something to write it down and keep it to work on later on When we first started recording we had no idea that anyone would take any notice of it for a start so there’s a bit more freedom where later on you think, oh gosh is this suitable, is this, will people like this There’s all those thoughts and you’ve just got to keep on doing it.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Your follow-up album, Greg Macainsh, was Ego Is Not A Dirty Word.
I loved that song, and I wonder if you still think today, 50 years later, that ego is not a dirty word. Yeah, I mean, when we were sort of recording that, you know, people said, oh, the kids, they won’t know what ego means. I think I might have said, well, they’ll find out.
But it was really a comment on being confident, I guess. We had to give that illusion that we knew what we were doing, and we were on top of the situation. And the line says, if I did not have an ego, I would not be here tonight.
And that’s true, because I’d seen many other musicians who were very good, but they didn’t follow it through, or they were put off by criticism. And even though skyhooks were popular, there was certainly a lot of criticism as well. And you had to learn to deal with that.
So I think the song is a reaction to that. If I did not have an ego, I would not be here tonight. If I did not have an ego, I might not think that I was right.
If I did not have an ego, I might not have a way to impress. If I did not have an ego, you’d just be like the rest. What sort of criticism did you get? Some people said the lyrics were trite, we looked ridiculous, etc, etc.
So part of that might have been envy, but it doesn’t matter. If you’re on the receiving end of it, it has an effect. Greg, tell me what happened when you started to tour America, because that didn’t turn out quite the way you’d hoped it would, did it? Well, I don’t think we really hoped for anything, apart from going there and playing and to see what it was like.
And I always say to people, well, we had the choice to go to England, but I didn’t want to go to England because all the Australian bands that went to England were all criticised by the press, whereas America I thought was a much more interesting place. I wanted to go there myself and we toured there for five months or something and made an album there. But I never expected Americans to get into it in the same way Australians did, because we were inherently an Australian group.
Because they didn’t understand the local references. Yeah, there’s that, the look and it’s an incredibly different culture, even though we speak the same language, they use it totally differently as we do. Well, all my friends are getting married Yes, they’re all growing old They’re all staying home on the weekends They’re all doing what they’re told Well, I looked into the crowd The other night And I saw an old familiar face He said, how are you doing Cheryl, my boy He said, tell me, are you playing the same old place? I asked him All about himself And he said that he was married With a kid Showed me a picture Of his wife, and we talked about All those things we did Well, all my friends are getting married Yes, they’re all growing old They’re all staying home on the weekends They’re all doing what they’re told That was 1976 and you kind of broke up some time later.
Shirley Straughan started to put out his own solo records. Why did he want to do that? I think he just wanted to do something where he had some personal input into it. He wanted to see how it would work.
So in 78, your next single was Women in Uniform, which was also a smash hit. Well, Red had left the band in early 1977, and he was replaced by a guy called Bob Spencer, and we wanted to do another album which we did. What was your inspiration for that one, Greg? Well, I always tell the story of being in Atlanta or I think it was, and they had women security guards who used to swagger around the shopping centre with guns and handcuffs and so on.
It was something I’d never seen in Australia. I thought, wow, that’s a very interesting juxtaposition of femininity and power. So I started looking for similar kind of metaphors and put them together and that became the song.
By the time we get to the turn of the decade in 1980, the band announces it’s going to break up. Yeah. Why? Well, Sherl had left in 1978.
He wanted to do other things and he certainly did that. He and Red had been sort of introduced to television by our television appearances, and I think it was something in the world of TV that kind of appealed to them, and that’s pretty obvious given that Sherl had his own TV show. It became more difficult on the road, and economically it made sense to stop.
Were you disappointed? No, no, it sort of run its course. To actually stop being in that world for a lengthy period was really a good thing. So how did you look toward the future? I didn’t look towards the future.
I was used to looking, living day to day, so the future was not really a concern, and I tend to think things take care of themselves. Opportunities present themselves, and there’s more to life than playing music. And yet in saying that, the demand for the classic line-up was still so strong.
You did come back together in 83, and in 1990 I think it was the first time you recorded new material, which included the song Jukebox in Siberia. Yeah, yeah. Well, we’d done a couple of reunions because there was interest in it, and Cheryl came to me and said, you know, I really want to go out on the road again.
And I’d been playing with John Farnham in 1986, 87, and I said to Cheryl, look, it’ll be a lot of fun and it’ll work. So then we thought, perhaps we should record a bit new material. So we did a couple of songs of which Jukebox in Siberia was one, and that surprisingly got to the top of the charts.
I don’t think anyone thought that was going to happen, but it did. Had you been writing in the interim? Yeah, yeah, well, it sort of became a habit and you can’t stop ideas coming to you.
They just do. So would it be fair to say that you’ve got a whole lot of notes still stashed away somewhere that could be great songs to be recorded sometime in the future? Yes, I mean, I haven’t burnt my notebook. Some people do, but I do have a collection of thoughts, yeah.
So it may not be the last time we’ve seen Greg Macainsh. I know from personal experience how difficult it was to get you to interview now and it’s only on the basis of the 50th anniversary of that very first album. But the original members of Skyhooks haven’t had a whole lot of luck since then.
Of course, Shirley Straughan was killed in an air crash in August of 2001. Peter Starkey died of complications after a fall in 2020. And now we’ve had Bob Starkey with a terminal illness diagnosis.
So it will be getting harder to see any kind of original lineup come together again. We’re not 20 years old anymore, are we? No, no, and it’s a great thing to do when you’re young. I’m not sure as one gets older, I know people do it, but touring is really physically demanding and you’ve got to be in the right frame of mind to do that.
So I just think it’s a natural thing that one tends to slow down. And also the music business is pretty one-dimensional. And if you’ve got other thoughts of things you’d like to do, you should definitely go and do them.
Yeah, you only get one shot at it. So no one expects you to be in a pop group that you were in when you were 21 for the rest of your life. You’ve certainly managed to reinvent yourself several times over, haven’t you? You did study to be a lawyer and tossed that in a little bit too.
So you’ve had lots of different starts and goes. Is there anything left on your bucket list? Probably, but I’ll see something that I want to do and I’ll do it. But like I said earlier on, I don’t spend a lot of time planning the future because that’s not for us to know.
Greg McCage, which song would you like us to go out on here? Hey, What’s the Matter? That was a song that on living in the seventies, it was almost a throwaway song, but lots of people say they love it. I mean, it’s got hardly any lyrics and it’s incredibly simple, but it was always a lot of fun to play. And I think the audience picked up on that too.
Yeah. ♪ What’s the matter with you ♪ ♪ I said, hey, what’s the matter ♪ ♪ Yeah, what’s the matter with you ♪ ♪ I’m asking you ♪ ♪ I’m asking you ♪ ♪ Eat it too, oh no you can’t ♪ ♪ Oh well you can’t have your cake, can’t you ♪ ♪ Eat it too, oh no you can’t ♪ ♪ I’m telling you ♪ The album was remastered by David Briggs, former member of the Little River Band. Greg McCage, congratulations on a fabulous career and thank you from each one of us who grew up living in the 70s here in Australia and beyond for the awesome music that you’ve given us.
We wouldn’t be the same had you not given us this music. Thank you. Thank you.
♪ It’s a beautiful day ♪ You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. ♪ Beautiful day, oh I bet any day that you’re gone away ♪ ♪ It’s a beautiful day ♪