“Matt Finish, XL Capris, the Warumpi Band… it’s a whole lot of stuff that you don’t think is pub rock. O’Grady suggests that they “were never really a pub rock band when they were in Australia, and they came back as a theatre act”, but admits that even he was taken by surprise at the reach of compiler David Laing’s project. Some bands, most significantly AC/DC, are notable by their absence from the album. Bunter Band) to art rock (Split Enz) to heavy metal (Heaven) to punk (The Hitmen) to party-flavoured pop rock like Mental as Anything and the Cockroaches and all points in between. While Blood, Sweat and Beers concentrates on many of the harder edged acts like late-period Aztecs, the Angels, Radio Birdman, Rose Tattoo and the bands that spawned or came after them – Buffalo, Coloured Balls, X and the like – the Glory Days CDs contain a vast array of bands playing everything from classic blues (Cyril B. Pub rock’s scope was so tremendous that no single, clearly defined set of guidelines exists for what bands it could be applied to. Punters of both genders were spoiled for choice. “Up in Sydney Rugby League was really trying to attract live crowds and looking at celebrity eventers to get women to come along, but women had absolutely no problem going along to a pub rock gig!” Divinyls “I think that rock had a more vociferous following than even sport did,” O’Grady says. Rock barns were squeezing in thousands a night. Some games could barely attract more than a few hundred. In the 70s and 80s, it was still struggling for a decent profile. These days, Rugby League dominates all media platforms in Sydney and south east Queensland from February until October. Numbers swelled in accord with the fact that crowds attact a crowd, and it became a cultural thing.” There was no video games – maybe the Atari, but at least not on the scale there is now, the Internet didn’t exist except in the very rareified atmosphere of the military and universities, and so the crowds tended to coalese at music. “There was a unique set of circumstances, not just musical but socio-economic and political, that really created the environment in which pub rock flourished,” he theorises, a point he makes in his extensive liner notes to the Glory Days compile, “and there was also an absence of competing interests. O’Grady, who headed the staff of the influential Rock Australia Magazine in the 70s and 80s, explains how the phenomenon came to be. Rooms like the Whitehorse and the Station in Melbourne and Sydney’s Bondi Lifesaver and Stagedoor Tavern wrote themselves into history as they hosted some of the most successful music acts this country has ever produced. The Thursday paper’s entertainment section was crammed with listings of hundreds of gigs for the upcoming weekend, all over the city and suburbs, and all of them would pull crowds. During the pub rock era, live music was simply everywhere. Nor do they show how devastating its loss has been to the music scene since. Of course, one only has to switch on to rock radio to hear how pub rock continues to dominate the airwaves, but that handful of Oils, Chisel, Oz Crawl and Dragon songs and ‘Take a Long Line’ hardly paint a picture of how immensely powerful a cultural force it was in Australia. Recently, the Molly TV series, the newly-updated edition of Murray Engleheart’s Blood, Sweat & Beers and music releases like the vast and excellent Glory Days of Aussie Pub Rock have helped to rekindle an interest in this most important era of Australian popular music. Then, quite suddenly it seemed, it was over. Pub rock was, in the words of veteran Australian rock writer Anthony O’Grady, “a revolution in Australian popular music”. It dominated the sales charts, filled TV screens and radio airwaves, and the bands who made it filled the pubs across the land every night of the week. Between late 1976 until the early 90s, rock music informed almost every part of Australian musical culture. It latched on in the pubs across the cities and moved into the suburbs and country towns, ebbing and flowing across two decades. In the mid-1970s a musical and social phenomenon took hold of Australian youth.
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