Page 3. 1976-95
Electric Fence
I lived in Melbourne 1976-77, but things were going nowhere music-wise, relationship-wise and career-wise, so I decided to retreat to more familiar territory in Ballarat. Jack and Noycey, along with some other Ballarat musos had a very good Sunday night concert happening maybe once a month. It was called “Crosscurrents” and aimed to bring together people who did not necessarily play together regularly, but formed ad hoc groups for certain songs for the occasion. Guests were invited to come and play too, so the music scene in Ballarat was pretty healthy.
With Jack and Noycey in Ballarat, I hoped there would be a musical revival of some kind. I got Noycey to build me a fretless 4-string bass guitar in 1978, anticipating amplified music rather than acoustic would provide more possibilities. Noycey had met Dave Dahlenburg who shared our tastes in country music especially, and he convinced Dave to get his drum kit from Nhill. Noycey made his own electric guitars of course, and Jack had a semi-acoustic electric guitar and pick ups in his acoustic guitars. Ian “Moses” Morrison, a singer, guitarist and mandolin player joined us to form “Social Error” (another Damon Runyan inspired band name) and we played once or twice, but soon morphed into “Electric Fence”, with Jack singing and playing guitar, Noycey on guitar, harmonica and sax, Dave on drums, I was on bass and Claire Fricker joined as another singer. A little bit later, Linda Dunn came in as backing singer and piano player.
We would promote “Electric Fence” as “a shocking band”. Claire’s stage name was Barb Wire, Linda’s Starr Post. The Fence played covers from country music, including Jerry Jeff Walker, The Band, The Amazing Rhythm Aces, Guy Clarke, and we included old rock ‘n roll covers too from people like Conway Twitty, Elvis and The Everly Brothers. We had a fortnightly gig at a local pub (The Union) on a Friday night and it became quite popular. The Fence thrived for a few years but eventually broke up after a few practice sessions dominated by some arguments about what and how we should be playing. We all remained friends nonetheless. The Fence had probably just run out of power. Along the way Linda and I had formed a relationship and we married in 1982!
After the Fence, Jack, Linda and I formed a trio, Gentle Annie and the Prickly Pair. We played a few times, just for fun really.
The 5 O’Clock Shadows
Dave Dahlenberg was working doing odd jobs with Bruce Schmidt. Bruce is also from Mildura. I knew him through his sisters Kris (who was married to Glen Tucker for a few years), and Norelle who was in my year at school. Bruce played guitar very well. Dave and Bruce knew Patrick McCabe, a very good guitarist and singer from Ballarat, and, with me on bass and Terry Byrne singing and playing harmonica we formed “The 5 O’Clock Shadows”. The Shadows bit indicated our enjoyment of The Shadows instrumentals, and we incorporated a few of those into a repertoire that was much more pub-rocky than previous bands I had been in. Terry was a wonderful performer who, while continuing to sing, would jump from the stage to the bar of the pub, The Bridge Mall Inn, that became our regular Thursday night gig. Thursday nights because it was Uni students’ gig night, and we got packed houses. Tezza had a false tooth in front and, when he got excited, and screamed his songs, he would sometimes spit the tooth. We looked for the tooth in the darkness of the dance floor a few times!
Bruce left after a while to be replaced by Don Neander, and I followed maybe a year later, circa 1988 (work and family made it hard to do Thursday nights), replaced by Chris Morris on bass. The clip below features that later iteration of the 5 O’Clocks recorded at a live to air gig.
Greenshed Music 