HOW MANY PEOPLE can you fit in a mini? Quite a few if the memories of Orlando Agostino and legendary folk singer, Megan Sue Hicks, are anything to go by.
It is 1970 and Orlando’s great friend, the folk singer/songwriter, Greg Quill, was working as Sydney regional editor of the music magazine, Go-Set. This worked out well for Orlando as he got to meet some of the women working there including the then writer, now famous country music performer, Clelia Adams, and Megan, who he describes as a “kind of a Girl Friday”.
Orlando liked both of them. One would become a major reason why he moved to Tamworth in 1979; the other had him play on her album, the deeply collectible, Maranatha, which was recorded in Sydney at EMI studios in early 1971 – all under the cover of darkness, and with no contracts signed. Just as the Greg Quill and Country radio debut album, Fleetwood Plain, had been a few months beforehand.
This is an important moment in time. Between them, this little group, would impact the histories of Australian music for years to come. And here they all are jammed in a little blue mini – well, Megan remembers blue; Orlando says it was sort of maroon – tooling down Pacific Highway from Go-Set’s offices in Crows Nest to heaven knows what adventures. Hicks remembers Orlando “as a skinny kid. He was Ollie, in true Australian nicknaming fashion. I remember that blue Mini of yours that we got ... how many people into? Your aunt’s house. And the Shack. That’s where I first saw you play. I think we met a few weeks later at the Go-Set office.”
Orlando either doesn’t remember or isn’t owning up to how many people were squeezed in the car but her comments surprise him: “I didn’t know she had come to The Shack but it all makes sense now if I was playing with Greg! Yes, my aunt’s house in Leichardt St, Leichardt. I lived there for a while.” As it turns out, they also played on the same bill together – at Macquarie University on February 24, 1971. Megan has mixed memories of the gig: “I kind of remember it. I played solo to an audience of, I don’t know, four or five people. I sat on the edge of the stage and shut my eyes when I sang so I obviously didn’t create any rapport with anybody. When it was over a young man came up and told me how much he loved my music. It was abysmal. Stage fright was a real thing for me whenever I tried to sing live in public.”
It’s funny how memory works. Some things disappear for good while others just need a decent jolt to pop up again. Orlando has been finding this ever since the interview began so when I ask him about the Maranatha sessions we end up rather rapidly in Canada where he isn’t going to be until 2010.
“I remember the session being in a different studio to the one where we recorded Fleetwood Plain. I only went in for one session and played on two or three songs, basically. The rest was left up to Flying Circus’ Doug Rowe [who produced the album and played lead guitar] and his fellow band members, one of whom was the bass player, Terry Wilkins.” Flying Circus, of course, also ended up in Canada. In 1970, the band won Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds and used its prize to travel to San Francisco in mid-1971, before relocating to Toronto, Canada, where it signed to Capitol Records.
Orlando continues: “Terry ended up marrying a Canadian girl and played in several major Canadian groups including Lighthouse, Rough Trade, Big Sugar [as a founding member] and Freeman Dre and the Kitchen Party and in Ironbark with Greg [Quill].
“I met the main guy from Big Sugar, Gordie Johnson, in my buddy Steve Wright’s shop, Vintage Music in Calgary. That was some store and I used to hang out there a lot. My knowledge of old instruments grew exponentially and I was privileged to see a lot of beautiful pieces go through that store. Unfortunately, it closed down not so long as go.
Terry is still playing blues and jazz in Toronto, Canada, most recently in a band called Uncle Bass. Back in the early 1970s Sydney, Orlando found himself rather isolated, having left Country Radio to concentrate on and finish his apprenticeship as a Letterpress Printers Machinist. Greg was either touring Canada or Australia – with the now six-piece Country Radio – for much of 1972 through to 1974. In 1975, he was one of the first Australian musicians to be given a grant by the Australian Council for the Arts, along with Margret Roadknight and guitarist Rob Mackenzie, whose extraordinary band, Mackenzie Theory I’d seen live in Melbourne on several occasions culminating in its farewell show at Dallas Brooks Hall on May 15, 1974 (some of which is captured on the album Bon Voyage).
Thanks to the grant, Quill spent much of 1975 in Toronto where he eventually put together a new band, Hot Knives, with Country radio drummer, Tony Bolton, Toronto-based bass guitarist Dennis Pinhorn and violinist Anne Lindsay, and expatriate Australian guitarist, keyboardist, and songwriter Sam See (Sherbet,The Flying Circus, Fraternity, Lighthouse). In 1977, guitarist and songwriter Chris Stockley (Cam-Pact, Axiom, The Dingoes) replaced Lindsay in 1977 and bass guitarist Bruce Worrall (also ex-Sherbet) replaced Pinhorn. The band of Toronto-based expatriates took up the name Southern Cross.
After releasing a single, Been So Long, Southern Cross split at the end of 1978 following an Australian tour, and Greg returned to Canada alone. A re-arranged and remixed version of Been So Long, with parts added in Toronto by bass guitarist Steve Hogg, singer Ian Thomas and keyboardist Hugh Syme, was released in Canada as Quill's first solo single there, but it was the b-side, the guitar-centric, I Wonder Why, that got played most on Canadian radio. Not long after Quill quit the music scene and didn't play again for two decades. A new album, Correspondence, produced in Toronto by Alan Thorne, was recorded but has never been released. It included a bunch of new Quill songs with guest appearances by Canadian guitarists Amos Garrett and Mike McKenna (Mendelson McKenna Mainline), in addition to Thomas, Hogg and Syme.
Quill wasn’t the only one of Orlando’s friends to disappear overseas. Megan Sue Hicks returned to the US as her visa had run out and disappeared off the face of the musical map. Clelia Adams quit Go-Set and took up a job in product and marketing at WEA Records, before leaving for London and Canada where she continued to work in the music industry.
She returned in the mid-1970s and, drawn by its country music scene, headed off to Tamworth with her then husband Garry Adams, formerly of the outstanding progressive Australian band, Galadriel, whose self-titled album from 1971 is also a highly sought after collectors’ item that now fetches up to $2000 for an original copy. His family lived in Werris Creek near Tamworth.
There everything changed for Clelia. She began her career as a singer joining Cate McCarthy and Jacqui Glynn [pictured right] in the all-girl trio, Skarlett, and worked with the groundbreaking New England Rangers featuring husband Garry, Lawrie Minson, Paul ‘Pixie’ Jenkins, Tom Galbraith and Glen Walters. These are all names that will play roles, some significant others not-so, in Orlando’s life over the next couple of decades. The Rangers were Tamworth’s first country rock band and change was on the way in the previous rock and roll dominated town.
Clelia would make her mark as a session singer on hundreds of country music albums while in Tamworth before returning to Australia in 2000 and the northern NSW coastal town of Mullumbimby near famous Byron Bay. That year, she released her first solo album, Bring It On, and quickly became a smash hit in Europe. Her subsequent list of achievements is extraordinary.
The period between 1972 and 1979 was one of the quietest in Orlando’s long career as he literally had nobody to work with. In his own terms: “I was in limbo.” He married a Sydney girl, worked in printing, then – in 1977 – separated from the Sydney girl. Drawn by Clelia’s presence in Tamworth he decided to move there in 1979. But before we pack up and head off to Australia’s country music capital there is one more truck stop to make: Al Head.
A man of tousled, curly locks, beard, and a cheeky grin, Head had a short-lived but notable career. Signed by singer, publisher and producer, Gus McNeil (who signed Greg Quill to his Cellar Music publishing business and produced Fleetwood Plain), he released two singles – the minor hit, Oh Mamy Blue, and the far more interesting Margarete Gone Eastern, the flipside of his first single, Walk The World Away – on the very cool, but short-lived, Generation Records (also owned by McNeil). Its big drawcard was the excellent Company Caine which released two singles and an album, the outstanding A Product of a Broken Reality, on the colourful and trendily designed label. Add singles from Aesop’s Fables, former Teen idol Jeff Phillips and Les Stacpool, and albums from the Garry Hyde Tradition and The Unisounds, and Generation’s day was over not long after it started. Back on the northern beaches, Orlando was in his short-lived first marriage and had become involved with a community group attached to a church in Manly. “It was through that group I met Al Head. The only reason I think Al was involved in the group was he was interested in a girl that went to it. He was a bit of a ladies man. And he had a reputation for sleeping on everybodys’ couch.
“I heard him sing at one of the youth evenings at the church hall, I think it was at All Saints in Boyle St, Balgowlah, but I was a bit sheepish about meeting him. He already had a reputation. Anyway, I knew he was doing a gig at the Basement Bar in Sydney, the one that’s upstairs at street level, so I got on the Manly ferry with my guitar, went to the city, and approached him. I said, “Hi Al, my name’s Ollie, and I want to play guitar with you. And he said, ‘Oh, okay. What are we going to play?’ I said, “Whatever you want to play’. That’s how Al and I became good friends . I called him in New Zealand just before he passed away a few years ago and he was tickled pink. He was very talented.” So was Orlando but he needed people to play with. Tamworth beckoned. But, hell, it was going to be different. Today, Tamworth is a modern regional centre and home to an estimated 60,000 people. In 1979, it was a lot smaller; 30,000 souls or thereabouts. However, it’s prime attraction, the Tamworth Country Music Festival was already underway, having kicked up its heels for the first time in 1973, when Radio 2TM staged the first Country Music Awards as a part of its long term Country Music Capital promotion which had started in the late '60s.
Held in in mid- to late January every year, the festival is now the second biggest country music festival in the world after Nashville, and attracts up to 100,000 tourists a year over its 10 days. A highlight is the CMAA Country Music Awards of Australia night, better known as the Golden Guitar Awards, after the trophy each winner receives. A big Golden Guitar was erected in front of the famous Longyard Hotel on Sydney Road, Tamworth, in 1988, and is still there today.
But 40 years ago, Tamworth was pretty raw. Located 280km directly inland from Port Macquarie on the mid-New South Wales coast, and 420km north-west of Sydney, Tamworth was about as far removed from the niceties of the northern beaches folk scene and Sydney’s bohemian culture as Orlando Agostino could get. What it did have was musicians – and possibilities – galore. But first the folkie had to “learn to play country music”. And that, he did.
He laughs, “It is one of the highlights of my career, watching the town and festival grow over two decades. I had a career as basically a sideman for everybody.” The list is long. But let’s begin with Clelia and Garry Adams who were well settled in the town by the time Orlando arrived. “Their house became a drop in centre for all these different musos who used to travel to Tamworth from all round Australia and, sometimes, from the US,” Orlando says. “There I met Paul Stookey from Peter, Paul and Mary, and others. In those days the country music festival was in its infancy. People were performing in church halls, community halls, in parks, and some of the locals absolutely hated country music. When January came around there was usually an outspoken bunch of people who didn’t want the festival in Tamworth and would leave town for the duration.
“I was in the New England Rangers [pictured above (L to R): Tom Galbraith (bass, obscured) Paul 'Pixie' Jenkins (fiddle),Lawrie Minson (guitar), Garry Adams (lead vocals, guitar), Clelia Adams (backing vocals), Orlando Agostino (guitar, vocals), Steve Carter (backing vocals), Glen (drums)] with Garry when I first moved up there along with multiple Golden Guitar winners, fiddle player Paul ‘Pixie’ Jenkins, and multi-instrumentalist, Lawrie Minson, who has played with everybody. He plays pedal steel, lead guitar, and used to run the harmonica championships in Sydney which was sponsored by Hohnen.
“Lawrie is a Tamworth boy. His father was Country John Minson, who helped put Tamworth on the country music map. He had a folk, jazz and country music show called Hoedown on Radio 2TM Tamworth. The truckers would tune in on their radios, pull up at phone box, go in, ring him up while he was on air and request a song. From the early 1980s you could pick it up as far north as Queensland.
“In the 1980s, most of the country music gigs in Tamworth were in halls and community centres. It wasn’t something you would go to a club to see. The clubs were all about rock music. Now several of the major clubs have amalgamated. “In those days the Workman’s Club was one of the biggest clubs. Now there’s also the West Tamworth League Club. And there are about 10 pubs in the main street.” A fact that has endeared itself to many a Tamworth festival-goer over the years.
The list of major acts that have appeared at the Worker’s Club includes Little River Band, Skyhooks, Cold Chisel, Russell Morris, Australian Crawl, Sharon O’Neil and The Angels. And as the Tamworth Country Music Festival has grown in popularity so has its crossover appeal with Cold Chisel appearing in 2020 and members of bands such as Midnight Oil regularly sitting in on sessions. However, despite the growing glamour and reputation of the festival, the life of a working musician in Tamworth was much, much harder. “To say I’ve been around the place is an understatement,” Orlando says. “I saw most of country NSW but didn’t do a lot in Queensland. In country NSW we were playing clubs to nobody, just four, five, six people. Sometimes you would drive for two or three hours to find you were double booked. And then, of course, the venue didn’t want to pay you. Luckily, we had contracts as we were working through an agency. But there were a couple of places where we did miss out on getting paid. “It was hard because my wife, at the time, had to look after our three little kids – two girls and a boy. They were crawling all over the place and she wasn’t coping really well. I’d get a call 15 or 20 minutes before I was due onstage and I’d end up going on feeling upset because I couldn’t do anything about it. “I can see how a lot of musicians become loners because to have any chance at succeeding they have to be 100 per cent dedicated to what they are doing. Not only are they running a business, they have to interact with people and they have to be willing to travel, be prepared to go almost anywhere. I was always torn between hanging on to a job, making sure I had enough money to support my family, and being a musician. That’s just the way it went.”
And he also has a lot of memories of the diesel and dust days. Touring the Australian outback can be epic, and it's certainly demanding. But do it for long enough there are stories aplenty to tell. Topping the bill are the Crosby Sisters, Jodie and Kelly: “I was in a trio with the Crosby Sisters, who are Golden Guitar winners. We were quite successful but it wasn’t always easy. When you’ve got two siblings in a band there can often be a bit of trouble. The last straw was one day they actually had a fight on stage. That was it for me I didn’t want to do it anymore.
“And it’s a shame because when we worked together it was really good. But I was the meat in the sandwich. I’d arrive at their house to pick them up for a gig out in the bush at somewhere like Lightning Ridge or even further out and Kelly would open the door and say ‘Come on, Olly, Jodie and I just had a fight. We’re not getting on. Let’s go. We’re going to do the gig on our own.’ I never knew what was going to happen until the last minute.
“When we broke up we got quite a nice write up in the paper. The real reason was never explained but the locals knew. Since then though we’ve stayed in touch.”
The Crosby sisters are still playing together, and also have successful solo careers. Orlando continues, “For four years, I also worked in a duo called Party With The Bear. I actually made a living out of that. After playing with Party With The Bear for years and travelling all over country NSW I had had enough of that whole covers thing. But I did enjoy it and it paid good money. I owe a huge thanks to the Bear – his name is Steve Charles and he’s a great performer in his own right – because the work allowed me keep my family fed. We used to leave on a Thursday and not come back until Sunday night when we might even do a gig, as well. We’d do three or four gigs a week. And the money was good.”
Then there is Max Ellis. Now a spry 83 years old, Ellis has long been a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. Born in Melbourne, before moving to Canberra and then Armidale, NSW, Ellis ended up in Tamworth in 1967 when he joined 2TM as a journalist. He’s still there. He was one of the five men, the others being Eric Scott, John Minson and the late Kevin Knapp and Warwick Higginbotham, at 2TM who were responsible for launching the idea of Tamworth country music capital in 1969. It was a bold move because country music had been runover by rock and roll and was struggling to re-emerge. However, slowly but surely, it did, and Tamworth was at its heart. Ask Australian country music superstar, Keith Urban, about Tamworth and he tells stories. Urban played the Rural Aid fundraiser at the 2019 festival and told the ABC at the time; "Tamworth and I go back a long way. When I used to come down here when I was nine years old and they used to have the Capital Country Music Association Awards … I competed in the sub-junior section and won a little trophy."
"I thought that was pretty awesome and they said 'you get to come here and play on show and do one song'.
"A couple of things have changed since then, but what I remember about winning that particular thing is, I'd played a bunch of places but nothing like the massive, magnificent grandiose [Tamworth Town Hall].
"When you're nine, this thing looks like a stadium. I just remembered I loved how I sounded in here and I was so excited. I think this is really where it started for me."
That story is important because it underscores how important the work of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of musicians such as Orlando Agostino was in helping raise Tamworth to its status as a centre of country music today. Most of them never got to be even remotely famous, yet alone a genuine superstar like Keith Urban, some of them never even got to make a living from music, but without them Tamworth would never have taken that concept launched by Max Ellis and his associates and successfully run with it.
“I saw a massive change in the festival over the many years I was there,” Orlando says. “I was good friends with Max. He and I lived in East Tamworth and I would see him walking to work in the morning. I mean, five minutes in any direction and you are out of the downtown. “He was instrumental in corporatising the Tamworth Country Music Festival. He had an agency, Max Ellis Marketing, and I benefitted from it because I did start up my own fledgling printing business in the last 10 years I was there and Max’s company supported me. It was only ever very small but I think I made a bit of a dent in the place anyway.”
In 1973, the now famous agricultural field days event, AgQuip, was launched as an initiative between 2TM and 2MO Gunnedah, and held over four days in nearby Gunnedah. The event meant, for the first time, the agricultural industry could market its products and services in a rural region of NSW. Over the years it has become massively successful and is still held in Gunnedah today. Ellis was also a key figure in its story
“Max was very forward thinking and by 1972 had become station manager at 2TM,” Orlando says. “He was also acting CEO of BAL Marketing, the marketing division of the New England Radio Network, which was involved in both AgQuip, the festival and the Golden Guitar Awards. Meanwhile, through Max Ellis Marketing, he also stayed involved with the country music scene and the festival.
“Since 1994, the festival and awards have been run by the Tamworth Regional Council and that’s good for both the city and the music industry, because as long as the Council owns the event then isn’t going anywhere, and as I said before, there has been talk on and off over the years about moving it. “Back in the 1980s though, we used to watch the population of Tamworth double in 10 days! People used to camp down by the Peel River [which runs through the city] and occasionally there would be the odd flood and they would have to be rescued and moved.”
That reminds Orlando of the ARIA Award-nominated, Golden Guitar winning group, Kevin Bennett and The Flood which was formed about 25 years ago around the indigenous singer/songwriter and the Sydney band: “They played the same venue for years and years and years and became a real staples with their own dedicated fans. Kevin Bennett is a big figure in roots music today.”
And that bring us neatly to The Hired Hands, the stuff of which legends are made. The name is self-explanatory. Lawrie Minson pulled together a group of local musical ‘gunslingers’ to back acts at the 1980 festival. Over the ensuing 40 years, the band has lived up to its rather amorphous beginning by remaining intensely flexible. Country legends aplenty have ripped a chord or three as a Hired Hand. Paul ‘Pixie’ Jenkins, Randall Wilson, Warren Gordon, Ken Mackay, Kirk Steel, Paul Henderson, Ted Tilbrook, Russell Adams, Ken Ramsay and the late Steve Williams, have had the honour – and so has Orlando.
“The Hired Hands [pictured above: Gary and Kirk Steele, Orlando Agostino, Pixie Jenkins, Lawrie Minson, Russell] was one of the best bands I played with while I was in Tamworth,” he says. “I could never work out if I was an official member though as I played with them in the early days and then, much later on, I stood in for one of the members who didn’t show up for a gig. I just happened to be in Australia on a visit from Canada. Lawrie and I are still good friends, talk online from time to time and call each other up on our birthdays.”
The final note to this chapter in Orlando’s story sums up the life of the eternal sideman: “While I was in Tamworth, I played on quite a few demo albums. There was a company that used to get a bunch of artists together, record them, put all the tracks on one album and send it out to all the DJs. I’d go into the studio and be paid for a three-hour session – $150 or something. Then, in that session, they would throw three or four people at me and I would play guitar on their song. I never got to hear the finished product though. I never really heard what went out there. In fact, I still don’t know what went out there.” So if you are reading this and own one or more of those albums, drop me a line and I’ll let Orlando know. He’d love to hear how they turned out! Here we are then 30 or so years down the track from The Shack on Sydney’s northern beaches and still about 20 to go.
All rights reserved. This story and the contents of this page – written and photographic – cannot be copied, reproduced, sampled or used in any way, shape or form without the express permission of the author, Mike Gee. CREDITS: Unless otherwise credited, photos by Mike Gee or supplied by Orlando Agostino.
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