An Atmosphere of Revolution
Marius Webb walked in to The Star Hotel on the night of September 19, 1979, expecting to see The Heroes take the stage for “the final racket” at The Star. He didn't expect to see police storm the venue during the final song of their set and pull the artists off the stage. The pigs pissed off the punters no end, and the crowd’s reaction grew into one of the most notorious alcohol fueled riots in Australian folklore.
Having attended the gig with the intention of recording the live music for his recently established youth radio network, 2JJ, Webb and fellow ABC broadcaster Ron Minogue were armed with sound recording equipment. They were able to record the entire spectacle, with Webb narrating the riot at The Star as it unfolded.
“And he's got away. A fantastic hail of cans and bottles, as the police rush in and grab a guy who's just got out of the van, as you can hear, the rain of cans coming down on the police car.” A huge boom interrupts the recording.
Webb describes the scene as “slightly violent”, as well as, “the most extraordinary fucking scene” - yelling over the aural onslaught of the mayhem in the background.
An unnamed young Novocastrian sums up the night's emotion while an upturned police car is set on fire: “The pigs have... tried to close The Star. They're bastards! They hate the youth, mate, but they found out that we aren't gonna stand back anymore.”
The riot at The Star Hotel, recorded by a man with the influence to make it heard, exemplifies the rebellious and raw attitude that not only became the foundation of the radio station now known as Triple J, but also the inspiration behind an entire music-loving generation.
The 1970s were a tumultuous time to be a young person. The hopeful days of the cultural revolution promised in the 1960s hadn't happened. Baby boomers formed a majority of the Australian population and young Aussies were feeling disillusioned. The seventies were the hangover of the sixties.
The sacking of Gough Whitlam in 1975 added to youth's general air of resentment and barely restrained aggression. It seemed that the those in authority were no longer on their side, and it was up to them to actively preserve and promote their culture.
Great sixties artists such as The Beatles, The Stones, The Doors, Bowie, Zeppelin and Creedence, still dominated the airwaves. Pop music was diversifying, and there was an avalanche of new music being created. “There was a hell of a lot of music happening”, says Webb. “Music was happening big time.” What was lacking, though, was an Australian voice; an outlet for Aussie youth to access and enjoy.
Fed up with his lingering degree, Webb moved to London in the mid-sixties where he had two cousins who were involved in the music industry. One of whom was the road manager for Georgie Fame, the other would one day be the studio manager for Genesis and Phil Collins
After working in London for four years and experiencing the flourishing music scene first-hand, Webb returned to Australia at the end of the sixties, which, for him, “was like stepping back in time.” Compared to England, where the pirate radio stations were showcasing a huge amount of great, new music to the ever-expanding audience of rock and roll, Australia was a void of conservative commercialism.
Webb was offered a trainee job at the ABC, which he admits he probably only got because of his overseas experience. “I'd been living on my wits for more or less four years, I suppose, so the ABC was looking at a lot of people who came straight out of uni, who
didn't have any of that experience.” He began to produce “unbelievably boring” programs on the ABC, which gave him no satisfaction.
“Commercial radio in Australia was incredibly dull and conservative,” says Webb, and it wasn't until the early seventies that the ABC created programs such as 'Room to Move', which was the first attempt on their part to present what was called, “album music”. Commercial radio stations did play some pop music, “but they were all hide-bound by commercial playlists – formula radio it was,” he says. Radio driven by ratings.
“So there were tiny little windows where you could hear music that wasn't in 'The Hit Parade', as it were. For a lot of people it became really boring, because this was a time when the music world was just exploding.”
Before Double J began, in January 1975, groups would come to Australia and still sell out concerts, with huge ticket queues spanning around city blocks. The groups that came weren't huge, but people still knew of them. “Buggered if I know how,” says Webb, “presumably through newspapers and magazines.”
“The publicity machine had not yet gotten underway”, but there were still a few magazines that had started for young people, which were carrying information about musicians from America and England. “And there were often fanatical people who worked in record stores and they'd be able to recommend good music to their clientele.” It seems word-of-mouth was the most common way young Aussies heard about new music, which is amazing to compare with modern times where we have access to a completely overwhelming amount of information, music and otherwise, at our fingertips. It is too much information for any one person to take in in one lifetime, and can either be a benefit or a hindrance for any young upstart band. For example, lesser known bands are able to upload their music onto a website and let it be heard by countless numbers of net-surfers, whereas on the other hand, they still must contend with the unimaginable number of bands doing the exact same thing.
“You didn't have anything. You didn't have any radio station or internet. When we went to air in 1975, a lot of people inside and outside the ABC had been agitating for a change to the radio set-up.” These people ranged from Webb himself, to the classical music people (who he admits were instrumental in forming an FM network in Australia – their rationale being that FM is a far superior medium for the transmission of music), as well as the people who wanted jazz and rock music.
When the station opened, they began by playing the back catalogue. “It took us a year to get through records that had been released in the previous six years. One of our favourite albums in the first year had been released in 1972, and here it was being played for the first time in 1975. There was a huge awakening going on. In other words, people were hearing music that they didn't know about that had been around for years.”
By that stage, the concept of rock and roll had become synonymous with youth culture, and Double J quickly gained popularity because their aim was at a young audience. They were able to play an “extraordinary width of stuff”, ranging from Frank Zappa to Tubular Bells to Led Zeppelin, including all the tracks that were too long, rude, edgy or raw for the commercial networks.
The first song aired on 2JJ was Skyhooks' 'You Only Love Me 'Cos I'm Good In Bed', which, according to Webb, was mainly because it was Aussie, it was a new band, and it was like “up yours”. The station played music by Marianne Faithful, N.W.A., and other 'socially disruptive' artists sure to engage the average Australian listener.
“It's hard to realise just how cloistered and old-fashioned the world we were coming from was. It was a conservative era, when the Anglican church was terribly important, and there was this strict sense of morals. You had censorship of books and films, and there were all sorts of songs you weren't allowed to play on radio, for god's sake.” But being within the ABC meant they didn't have any mechanism to stop them. The ABC had to try to stop them, and generally it was too late, and whatever it was they had a problem with had already gone to air. “We got away with a lot,” says Webb, “and unless there was huge, outrageous complaints, nothing happened.”
“A lot of what happened was that we created an atmosphere of revolution because of the way we did it. We didn't do things conventionally, we didn't have a set hierarchy, and it worked terrifically well in our favor.”
The ABC, to its credit, was the only place in Australia at the time that would play female voices on the radio. 2JJ had liberalised the workplace, making it possible for someone who had just joined the station to go on air. There was no talent pool of female voices, so this is the way that female disc-jockeys and announcers were able to make a name for themselves in radio.
Webb and the team at Double J were changing the way that radio was being presented and approached. “The ABC was still doing things based around everything stopping and starting at the top of the clock, same with the commercial stations, and I can remember, for example, a test match being broadcast, and it was literally down to the wire. It was the last wicket, but because the clock struck six, bingo, off went the broadcast and on came the news.”
They began to question these sorts of things. Would anyone be upset if the news bulletin was delayed by five minutes? Do people set there clocks to the news hour? “We knew there was going to be some change. There had to be some change.”
It is not hard to see the many advantages that a radio station like Triple J has given to our society. Not only did it bring together a largely disjointed and disillusioned youth culture, but it cemented their place in a society in which they felt they had none. It exponentially expanded the Australian music scene, and paved the way for countless great bands and artists to create the music that we love and always will.
“The whole business of working creatively is a difficult thing, and some things work well in some circumstances and some in others. I used to try to talk to people about the situation we were in as being a creative one. A radio station is like an orchestra, it could produce a work of art in the same sort of way, but on the one hand it's hard for an orchestra to play if everyone's not following the same sheet music.”
Marius Webb sums up Triple J's success in saying that the reality was that there was a very healthy music scene in Australia, outside of the radio. Double J didn't create the scene, it made it accessible to the greater public. Bands that were previously unheard of were suddenly pulled from obscurity and gaining exposure, and bands with a small amount of exposure were given a chance to cut a record and be played on a national radio network.
When asked if he'd ever thought about his impression on Australian culture or the impact Triple J had on Australian music, Webb humbly replies, “I would have to go on word of mouth and say that everyone I've ever spoken to reckons that what we did was hugely important to the local music scene.”
It's likely, though, that history will mark Marius Webb's legacy as a pathfinder, innovator and cultural warrior - the man who gave a generation a voice.
31ST OCTOBER 2012