A very big welcome to you today. I hope you’ve enjoyed a terrific week and feeling great. My guest today is probably the only person in Australian rock music, who isn’t able to make a comeback, simply because he’s never been away. His career spans more than 50 years. And Ross Wilson remains one of this country’s most respected artists, with bands including daddy Cole and Mondo rock as a solo artist, or as a songwriter of classics, like Eagle Rock.
Ross Wilson success has continued unabated for decades, both locally and globally. As you’re about to hear, he’s an enigmatic and enthusiastic character with a bunch of terrific stories to share. Ross Wilson, thank you so much for your time. I am being inundated with requests from my listeners asking to hear from you. So I’m really excited to spend a little bit of time with you. Great.
You’ve been going since 1964, haven’t you? Could you fill us in on how it all started for you?
It all started when I got myself a harmonica. And I started like copying old blues records and things. And that’s how I got into my first band. I was still in school, this other guy came up to me and they said, Hey, that we love what you’re doing there. Can you sing? And I said, Yes, I can sing. And suddenly I was in a band. And we started making records, we put out our first single, and all the kids in the neighbourhood bought it and I got on the charts. So that was great. It was a version of the much recorded so I’m Louie Louie. And the band’s name was the Pink Finks.
Can you tell us a little bit about what the music scene was like back then?
Well, it was quite good in many ways that you don’t have now them. The main one being that there were lots and lots and lots of places to play. There were dances every teenage dances. Because it was before the licensing laws in our hometown of Melbourne were quite strict. So they had what was called Six o’clock closing all the clothes at six. And so all of these dances, there was no alcohol or anything like that. It all changed when they loosened up the laws and that was 10 o’clock closing. And the music started to move from dance halls in the past.
At the time, teenagers, 15- 16 year olds, probably even people younger than that. We’re going along to see bands played you simply went along to have a dance and listen to the music.
Have a dance have a good time? Yeah, no place to get crowded out. You know, there it was fantastic. I mean, they had all the same sort of complaints from old people that are you know, there’ll be trouble and all that good. But there’s more trouble now because a kid’s got nowhere to go. Yeah.
So you cut your teeth in those first dance halls? By 1966 you formed a band called the Party Machine. How did that come about?
So we were we were happening in the 1965 we released four singles. But then, you know, everyone was starting to leave school me included. I had to go get a job and the line-up changed. And the big change was we started to write our own songs. And so the Party Machine became the new band and the principal thing was we were going to write as much original material as possible, which we did you know, some of it was great. Some of it was terrible. Myself and Ross Hannaford on guitar who had been with the Pink FInks with me. And on bass, we had a New Zealand guy called Mike Rudd, he went on to form Spectrum. When I left to go to England, Mike formed Spectrum. When I came back I formed Daddy Cool. And both of those bands had number one hits with their own self written material. So that all came out of those days you know, it was very important and Spectrum was a very well known band who still plays around town today.
Ross, what did you learn about song-writing at the time?
What I learned by the time I went off to England, I went over there to on the invitation of another band that had gone there, and they were having line-up changes. They wanted a front guy. No, it was, they thought I could fit the bill. So an Australian band. Yeah. And so I went off over there and sang with them and we played places like the marquee club and various venues. Things with that band were falling apart by the time I got there so I was just kind of a stopgap thing, but I had a great time on my trip back across the world with no money all through Asia and the Middle East, all these places you can’t go to today. By the time I got back to Australia about a year later. I had a whole lot of ideas about what I wanted to do and that’s how Daddy Cool eventually came about by the end of 1970.
So what was the idea behind Daddy Cool, what did you learn?
What I’d learned is one idea. One song. So the article was all about like bringing it back to basics. I was experimenting with all AR and VR was investigating all rhythm and blues and do what music you know, for peace, harmonies, bass voice, which was Hannaford was able to provide so we were having fun, you know, that was just a side project. And I didn’t expect it to take off but it took off straightaway. So we went with the flow, you know, but it was all about being simple. Just concentrate on the rhythm and write nice simple songs. And everybody have a good time and get on the dance floor and dance around. And that’s what happened.
Where did you get the name? Daddy? Cool. Well, I just sort of came out of thin air. I don’t think I pinched it from anywhere. I just seemed to think it was the right name for what we were doing. However, there was this young guy that lived around the corner. He said, Ross What are you doing? Because we were rehearsing my back room. He goes What are you doing? I got this new thing called Daddy Cool. You know, gotta play nice. I’ll do up songs and have a rockin good time. He goes out daddy. Cool. You got your name from that? That old song? And I said nah. What is it? He ran it ran home, pulled out this old single and bought it to me. And it was the diamonds. And I knew the A side which was silhouette because that was a hit. And on the flip side, it was his other song called Daddy Cool. And I played it. I went Wow, that’s great. So we immediately learned that as our theme song, but the name came first and then I learned about the song that was fake.
You became known personally as Daddy Cool didn’t you?
Well, sort of. Yeah. The front guy always gets most of the attention. But no, it was the whole band that was Daddy Cool. You know, I wasn’t actually going around saying I’m Mr. Daddy. Cool.
You were pretty cool. I seem to recall. Yeah, he’s still pretty cool. I’m chatting with Ross Is Wilson from Daddy Cool and a whole lot of different bands post that happened after Daddy Cool.
I had called Sons of the Vegetal Mother which was a much more gentle band. One time, at one of these dances we got up and played some Daddy Cool as well. And lo and behold, like, in that era, there was a thing called progressive rock. And there was like people play long guitar solos. And people would sit on the floor and just listen to it and then clap and all that then when Daddy Cool came on, they all jumped up and started dancing. It was like, Oh, this is what we’ve been waiting for, you know, we’re gonna be there. We’re bouncing off the walls from the first gig. So the word went out that there’s this exciting new group, you know, people dancing, even, you know, all over that summertime, we sort of took over Melbourne, we’re playing everywhere, all the dances. And then suddenly we’re headlining, we hadn’t even put a record out. We were headlining, and this local record company came along, and producer was Robbie Porter, who I knew is Robbie G. He’d been a child prodigy. He had a lot of hits. And he said, I’ll producer, we’ll take you to America, because I live in America all the time. It said, that spoke to me because I’d been to England with that band that I’d mentioned before. And I realized all the bands in England were trying to get to America, because that’s where the money was. So when he said that I said, Well, that sounds good. So we signed with them. And it turned out he was a very good producer. And he produced the next few recordings, including Eagle Rock.
The Daddy Cool classic Eagle Rock was a national number one in Australia for 10 weeks in 1971, and charted again in 1986. And then again in 1990. It was Eagle Rock that influenced the writing of Elton John’s Crocodile Rock, where he spent two and a half days making that album. It took the tapes off to Los Angeles and he had it mixed by a guy that makes the whole album there and so unusual if that time we came out with an album. We did what everyone does now, which is like record an album first put out the single Eagle Rock became number one. Then they released the album that became number one. So worked really, really well. Less than a year that after we formed, we were in LA, doing a showcase that Whiskey a Go Go to try and get a record deal there which we did.
You couldn’t have in your wildest dreams imagined that this could actually come to fruition, could you?
Oh, well, when you’re young, you do think that good things happen a lot faster. When you’re young, I can tell you that. Do you listen to Eagle Rock a lot. Alongside the other songs that were coming out of Australia? It sounds different because of the way it was mixed. There’s hardly any reverb or any kind of echo, there’s no, it’s just the guys in the room playing. You know, it really captured that really well, and showed what a dynamic we had as a group.
Can you share a little bit about how Eagle Rock came about? And what was it? I mean, you said that the music of Daddy Cool made everybody get up and dance you managed to energize everybody.
What was it about that music that got them up and dancing rather than sitting on the bums and clapping?
Eagle Rock’s an interesting song, the way it’s put together. I actually started writing when I was in England at that time, and I came up with the original riff Dan lamb that that that those funky goes that’s very reg Todd. get time to rank the tank and the purpose of Bob but the deck a deck. So it’s like three second world war Mississippi blues, it was influenced there to pull in your different ways that try to manage so you’ve got the tension of the verses, and then suddenly, hey, it’s got all this release the mood Oh, leave the rocks
I saw a picture in Sunday Times article about the blues while I’m writing that song. And I’m like going, Oh, that’s interesting. There’s a picture of these black people in a juke joint. And they’ve got like this in depth. Yeah, it’s a very evocative said and it said they were cutting the pigeon wing and doing Eagle Rock. So the picture was sort of came from the same place as the influence of the music, you know, and I’m going to do your rock. I don’t know That’s what I’ll do with the song. There was some people dancing and having a good time doing the Eagle Rock. I mean, I didn’t know what the Movement was of the Eagle Rock. But anyway that’s how it all evolved. So I had the riff and I had the new and the Eagle Rock and a couple of lyrics but then I had to leave England and make this journey and as I said, through Europe and hitchhiking home no money but when I got back to Melbourne I had access to a guitar again I’m going this song needs a chorus right? So then I came up with something
using the four chords I know. It then goes into the so called solo section which is basically us just hammering on that rifff you know,
fortunately, as fate would have it I had found the right people to make that song work required that ban those other three guys because I tell you I’ve heard a lot of bad versions of Eagle Rock it’s not that easy to play unless you’re Daddy Cool.
Daddy Cool really was one hell of a band, and the song Eagle Rock rewrote the books for Australian pop music. It stayed at number one nationally for eight weeks and was the best selling Australian single of 1971.
Daddy Cool was originally a side project for Ross Wilson until the band exploded onto the Australian scene in late 1970. The 50s style rock and roll had everyone up and dancing and they debut album daddy who Daddy Cool spawned another mega hit in comeback again. That song went gold within a month.
There was a lot of theatrics on stage that went hand in hand with it?
We had a lot of fun because Ross had a buddy who was still at art school. And he had all his art school friends. They’d go, Oh, we love the band. That’s great. Put this on. They gave me these little ears like where a man in a box. I was up in the foxtail on the back now had to be there and he said look, I got feral Fox or something. You know? It was pretty funny. Guys, we’re having a ball. Yeah, so we just put on whatever that gave us, you know, go out on stage and be as silly as we could possibly be.
Daddy Cool took their outrageous antics and costumes and their old time rock and roll To America, where they were also greeted with enthusiastic audiences.
To crack America, you really have to keep going back there. And we went there three times. And it was sort of happening in a couple of places. There was a few places that showed us what could happen. We played in one place called Grand Rapids, Michigan was with an early version of Fleetwood Mac. And we went over like us. Great, you know. So a few months later, we’re back there to promote our second album. And we were number one in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and they said, the TV station down of interviewers, and we were headlining that same room, like a few months later, I was going to like, wow, we’re number one in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
So why didn’t you keep touring it through the states? Well there was a couple
of reasons and one was, even though I had a lot of fun, doing daddy, cool, it wasn’t like, I wanted to do retro stuff for the rest of my life. And I felt I wanted to go back to the essence of what I was doing with, say, the party machine or sons of visual mother, which is writing contemporary material. Yes, Eagle Rock was contemporary. But that other sort of framework of Daddy Cool was a 50s kind of thing.
Just before we leave Eagle Rock – it’s celebrating its 50th anniversary, albeit a little bit late because of COVID. Are you aware and my kids only made me aware of it recently. But even today, when Eagle Rock has played at a celebration, like a wedding or an engagement, all the guys drop their pants.
Yeah, this is something happened over the last 30 years or so. I don’t know where it started. It’s the same practice. I was horrified when I just found out fairly recently, and I’ve instructed my daughter who’s getting married this coming December that she’s not to play it.
You keep your undies on though with your pants around your ankles. It’s sort of like the crazy uncle putting the lampshade on his head. Yeah.
The guys, not the girls?
Well, girls have been known to like, whip up their bras and move them around.
Right? How does that feel for you? You’ve started a whole new ongoing tradition.
I didn’t start it. You know, I don’t know how the Australian public came up with that. And now it’s all over the place, you know, spent to begin? Like a 21st. Like you mentioned, it’s big in the military of military colleges. You go to Duntroon or something, and you graduate and you become an officer. The other guys find out you didn’t drop your pants and you’re in trouble.
That only happens here in Australia, though, doesn’t it? Maybe the Americans will catch on to it too. Now that we’re telling them about it.
Well, if you go onto YouTube, you can find things about some American going. I was in Australia, and what happened when they play? It’s like, so it is all over the place. But I look at it as a expression of like, the silliness of Daddy Cool. And this to me seems a good response. And we can claim it for ourselves just like the Australian public came up with Am I ever gonna see your face again? No way, etc, etc, etc.
Well, you certainly put the fun into music in that era for sure that song became Australia’s all time champion number one Rock Anthem, and still is today everyone knows the worst.
It’s up to about 15 million streams on Spotify alone. So that’s pretty amazing.
It’s just a shame that you as an artist don’t get more for each stream. That’s right.
While you had Daddy Cool, you then started producing albums for another incredible Australian group called Skyhooks?
Well that happened was when I mentioned that I had a band called Mighty Combo -we went for about a year. And one of the last shows we did before we were going to break up was at Melbourne Univeristy. And this support band was Skyhooks. They had everything I like, you know, they were kind of weird. They were funny. And they were taking the mickey out of things in their songs, you know, socially kind of satirical, and all of that. And all of that appealed to me. And I went up to them afterwards. Just before we played, I said, who wrote those songs because I could tell there was a couple of good songs in it. This guy hit the bass play, right, so songs are cool. Hey, I really love what you’re doing. Why don’t you come around, never chat to my house here. Give me a call. And he came around and I said, I’m starting a new publishing company. I don’t like the way publishing is handled. I’ll give you this better deal. And no one had offered him anything. And I signed him up to this new company. I could do music. And then the line-up changed. really quickly in that band, and they got better, almost overnight. And so every time I went to see them, they were better. I’m going this is great. So we started doing demos with him and my, as a publisher, I’m saying I’m thinking I’ve got to get these songs out there. I’ve got to get I came, became a bit obsessed with the whole thing. So after about a year we were and then the lead singer lead, and Greg McCainsh the bass plays, and somebody said, I know this other guy used to work. His name’s Graham strong. So they got him and I went to see the band you know, this guy could sing. He was good looking. He was cheeky. He was fantastic. And I said, I want to produce it because I know exactly. I can hear it or so we go into the studio. And I said to the record company, our producer, but you’re not allowed to censor them. And that’s exactly what we did. We went in and recorded Skyhawks and all their cheekiness and social comment and the way they sounded like no other band and came out and boom, glued, that is cools records out of the water. And that was the start of the whole explosion that started with Daddy Cool. Skyhooks, took it to the next level. And from that time on people like you know, your Midnight Oils and Chisels and all that was starting to sell hundreds of 1000s of albums.
Which was your favourite Skyhooks tune?
On a couple of levels Ego is not a dirty word as a single is perfect.
If we could go back a minute to when you had the band, the Party Machine. Yeah. And you published a lyric book, tell us what happened to that, I think was about 1968?
Yeah, we were writing all our new material and sort of singing it. And I go, Well, how are we going to get this across, you know, let’s do a song book. And we’ll just give the song book away at dance. And so we printed up a bunch of those, and we’d like, give them away. And then our manager gave some to the NGO sector that was our national music magazine. So they were putting free ones in they’d stick in admission song but above got a whole isn’t when What’s this, that there was songs about it, I believe all your kids should be virgins was whether this there was another one that was sort of about sadism, and all kinds of stuff. kind of silly stuff you do. And so a mother complained to the cops. In that era, Melbourne had a vise squad. The Victorian police had the single device squad, which would go around censoring people and making sure they didn’t do the wrong thing. Or that’s a pornographic film or, you know, slept down the street, or whatever device or on police, right? If I was pleased, and included like what you could print, I didn’t get charged with anything, which is great. Then I went off to England, and the publishers of it. Who printed it, they got a judge goes said they go Judge, I come back it’s months and months and parts, you know, ages and finally get back and the case is still hasn’t come to court. I’ve been away for nine months. And it goes to court and the magistrate goes look it through and he’s going well. It’s not really obscene. You know, he’s going but to please the by squad, he said, Destroy them. We were back to burning the book. It was the best thing was it was on the front page of truth and stuff as well. There was all kinds of stuff, you know, seditious song
made it much more in demand.
So we had a lot of publicity. So it taught me Hey, it’s not that bad getting banned. You know, like, what we got the most publicity were the head. So this guy comes along. And again, you can’t send to them and they get I think six out of the 11 songs on that. Living in the 70s. You couldn’t play on commercial radio because they had a code of conduct. But horror movie was a big hit. Everyone wants the album. You can hear that all the songs on the radio, because half of them are bad, are they that sounds great. So that was like it really helped the album. Yet to get the album to hear those songs.
Again that old adage any publicity is good publicity. Yes. So from Skyhooks you became renowned as the go to producer and you started producing JoJo Zep’s first two albums for Joe Camilleri, as well as Stephen Cummings of the group Sports.
Getting those guys into the studio. They were sort of contemporaries of mine, Joe, he was the same age, we came up through the ranks together and I saw he was getting good at playing the horn and he could sing it he said in with Daddy Cool a couple of times. And I’m going really want to make a record. So the first thing I did a we did a Christmas record we did. And that’s where he came up with the name JoJo Zep, which is basically his name’s Joe, and in Malta, where he kind of his family came from Joe is just a zip. So Joe, Joe Joe Zep, like ZZ Top, but JoJo Zep had a meaning as well. That was quite clever, I thought. And we did run run Rudolph, a Chuck Berry song and put that out as a single and then he had to start going out and promote it. So we put a band together what he did was my wife at the time ticketing anemone she had a band called The Marvel Cavalry basically took that band and they started doing some promotional gigs and then he started getting more popular and so that then became his fan
During this time that you’re busy producing, you’re obviously not making your own music. It gets to about 1977 and you decide to form another band called Mondo Rock. Why?
Yeah, well, when I was producing those Joe Camilleri records, I was in cahoots with Glenn Wheatly who most people would have heard of, he managed The Little River Band and he wanted to start a record company. And he had the backing of EMI. So let’s pull my record company together because you have Skyhooks. I can tell you’re a good producer. And he, so we did that. But time went by and I realised, you know, producing is not my be all and end all. I like I have to be really into the act to produce a major Skyhooks song. Otherwise, it’s kind of boring. And what I really liked doing is performing. So like, let’s get a new thing together. And I put out one of the tracks, things that came out on the record company, was a song called Living in the land of Oz. I’d done a soundtrack for a movie called Oz. So that was big at the time. And I had to go out and promote that single and the agent said what are you gonna call the band Ross and I said, I’ll call it Ross Wilson’s Mondo Rock so for a while it was Ross with Mondo Rock and then after a while, we got more popular and now it’s just became Mondo Rock and we started putting out records.
Living in the Land of Oz released in 1976. For the soundtrack of Australia’s first rock movie, it was a song that championed Aboriginal rights. It was one of countless hits that Ross Wilson scored during the dozen or so years that Mondo Rock kept pushing out punchy, lively adult pop rock. Both the Australian charts and Aussie audiences were enriched and enlivened by what Ross had to offer between 1977 and 1991. Don’t go anywhere, much more to come. Welcome back, I’m chatting to one of Australia’s most iconic performers. He’s musician songwriter, and producer Ross Wilson, who even after more than 50 years, still manages to well, audiences everywhere. After forming Mondo rock, you put out several albums with them. And again, you’re on top of the charts with songs like Cool World State of the heart chemistry, summer of 81, you could do no wrong?
There’s a lot that went on for 15 years that we were together. Sometimes we still get together occasionally. Yeah, that was a real growth period for me. I was only 23 at that time. By the time Mondo Rock hit in a big way, I turned 30. And I was mature, more mature, and the music was more mature, too. We and I got Eric McCusker into the band because he was a great songwriter, and good guitarist. So he was providing lots and lots of really good songs. I was writing some good songs. You know, I wasn’t as quite as prolific as him. But it was a good balance between I had sort of had a certain brashness to work. I didn’t know he had a much more sophisticated kind of melodic sense. And so between the two of us we got this good balance happening. We wrote a few songs together as well.
Is there one Mondo rock song that’s closest to your heart?
Well, of the songs that I wrote, I’d say Cool World.
I had Eagle Rock, that’s my perennial, Come said the Boy, that’s Eric McCusker’s. He has in fact, been contacted by Keith Urban about six months ago, saying listen, Eric, I tracked you down and I’ve heard I’ve been listening to the guitar solo and Come Said the Boy because Peter was a pretty good guitarist. And I gotta say that’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard. Come said the Boy which was overall probably the most best remembered of Mondo Rock songs it still gets played all the time on the radio. So Keith Urban is a big fan of Come Said the Boy.
What was writing about in that song?
Well, Eric grew up mainly in Bronte in Sydney. They had a really cute little house on top of a cliff, unimpeded view of the ocean waves, and Bronte beach. So he was sort of beach people, girls on the beach, you know, like Tamarama, with topless girls and all that kind of stuff. And so that was sort of speaking about his teenage years. And he’s told me that it though it’s fictitious, it sort of draws on about three different events that happened. And one of them was like, fancy this girl and she was a bit older than him, you know, and various things that he constructed this interesting song about it. And I think one of the things is really touched a nerve with the Australian public, because like, 80% of the population of Australia lives on the coast, you know, close to the coast. And that whole thing of like, summertime, and you know, your first girlfriend and or boyfriend, and the beach, and all of that really speaks to everybody back then and still does.
After that period of time, what brought Mondo Rock down?
They took a while to get going, but it started the very first time was in 1976, and then, sporadically, and then by 1979, we bought our first album, from 79 to 90, we had a series of albums, we had a lot of hits, but then you know, us by date kind of gamer, we had a pretty good run, I brought out a solo album in 89, because I was feeling a bit restless. And the final Mondo Rock album was 1990. But by that stage, it was just me and Eric, just sort of a natural kind of attrition there. Yeah.
And your solo career has continued today, hasn’t it?
Well, in the 90s, after Mondo Rock, I had had a divorce. And I was, you know, living alone most of the time. But I’ve also had a few other relationships along the way, before I got married again in the late 90s. And we started to have kids but in that mainly during the 90s, I was riding with other people. And this was a new thing. Because I’d had John Farnham had a big hit with a Mondo rock song, attached to paradise. And so people will go it wouldn’t mind writing with you, as I was writing songs with Jimmy Barnes and three albums. I’ve used it, I’ve got songs on from around that period, early 90s. And he was selling tons of records. So I was having pretty good success with John Farnham. I went on some writing trips over to France and America and learn a lot about, you know, writing with like, all these other professional guys. And so it’s like honing my skills and learning a lot. And because I was living by myself, didn’t they sort of need to go out on the road, I was doing another thing. But then when I got married again, and started having I had another couple of kids, I was like, Well, I’ve got to get back to work. And I started performing again and putting out a few more solo albums. And that’s been great. I mean, I really got into like the whole life thing again. And, you know, I think I’ve matured as a performer as an entertainer and I just love playing so it’s great.
You’re one of very few Australians who’s never taken any major time off. Have you virtually been a performer since you started in 1964?
Pretty much oh man I’ve been very very lucky. I mean, I haven’t had like huge international success a few overseas artists have John Joe Cocker recorded a song of mine about nine years ago, which one was I come in place which is the title track of solo of my head.
He sadly passed away soon after, but it was his final single. And he was huge in Europe still and massive in Germany. So there was a platinum album with that song on it in Germany and that song got played on radio all throughout Europe and have an artist to statue to record yourself as great as a individual performer. I’ve not really known outside Australian to do a few fans. But despite that, I’ve been able to make a very good living and have a good career just you know, mainly playing in Australia, or doing things here, unimpeded since Daddy Cool since 1971. So that’s, that’s, that’s pretty good. I’m out, either as a producer or songwriter, performer, you know, music publisher,
I think it’s better than pretty good. I think it’s damn good. You’ve got a lot to be very proud of yourself for and the fact that a lot of people outside of this country may not have heard your music is just the way the industry was, I suppose if it had been today, and you were handled by a label, they would have taken you out to the world instantly.
Maybe? Yeah, I mean, we had a stab at it, you know, but the thing is, I’m really grateful for where things have gone. And as far as being known in other countries, it’s sort of like that everywhere. Really. I mean, you might be big in Japan, but no one knows you’re here. Same big in Germany, but what’s a matter in Australia? Yeah. So everyone’s got their own local scene going. And some Yeah, I’m just very lucky and I’ve got some new recordings that have done an EP and other so you’re still writing and recording today? Yeah, yeah. Got plenty of songs. Yeah.
What’s this new EP is his first new music and along 13 years, it’s called she’s stuck on Facebook all the time. And I think lots of us living in this modern age might find that someone quite easy to relate to
not getting enough love. What the number one cause is not getting enough loving busy days. Facebook That’s right. She’s stuck on Facebook all the time.
Anything left on your bucket list other than to just keep going the way you’re going?
That’s a good question. Well, I think I just want to get another album down. That’s the main focus at the moment. Play a lot of festivals. Have a good time. It’s got really great guys I play with the line-up shifts a little bit but for me, they’re all great players. And so that makes life very easy. I don’t have to worry about whether one guy’s not a good player or not. Right.
And you still get really energized by performing even at 75. You can do it like you did it when you were 25?
I think it’s really good for me mentally and health wise, the whole thing keeps you fit. I mean, I go to the gym and I gotta stay fit, you know, lift weights and all that kind of stuff. But most people when they’re 75, don’t do. You got to do it if you want to stay on stage.
Awesome. Ross Wilson, you are definitely the King of Cool in this country and probably a lot more once I get to know more about you and I daresay that will happen over time. Anyway, thank you so much for chatting with us today. It’s just been a pleasure getting to know more about your life and career. You. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks a million for talking with me today. Ross. I really appreciate your time. Bye bye. See you now by Ross Wilson there who’s had a career spanning nearly six decades, issued over 45 singles and EPS 17 of which hit the top 40 and released 25 albums. Not a bad innings really is it? Ross is also touring again. So check out his website, Ross wilson.com.au To see if he’s coming to a town near you. If he is Do yourself a favour and go and see him. He always puts on a fantastic show. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really hope you’ve enjoyed hearing from Ross Wilson. I look forward to being back in your company again same time next week. Have fun Meantime, won’t you see you then find out because it’s a beautiful day. You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye.