ORLANDO AGOSTINO stands thoughtfully on a railway track, eyes looking away from the camera, a cool beatnik figure, hands tucked into a brown leather jacket matched with black roll neck jumper and brown pants shoes. His hair, jet black, drops just to his shoulders and a black beard – but no moustache – adds to the effect. To the far left stands a big man, a formidable man, who will become an Australian music legend, Greg Quill, staring at the camera. Almost pensive; a slight smile on his lips. Between them the third member of the band, Chris Blanchflower, is a step or two back, also looking away down the tracks.
The cover photo, by the noted Australian photographer, Philip Morris, that adorns Fleetwood Plain, the 1971 debut album by Greg Quill and Country Radio, is a masterpiece in its own right. Beautifully understated, it has the right air of folk and country, yet exudes a mysterious artfulness and genuine soulfulness. For these are three men who will walk different paths in the future: Quill, the great songwriter who moves to Canada, puts away his guitars and becomes a journalist, before embracing music again later in his career; Blanchflower, the English harp player who makes Australia his home and whose playing will echo across the roots scene for decades to come in a variety of bands and line-ups; and Agostino, the guitarist, the picker from the folk tradition, will be the one that got away. This moment, this album, is Orlando Agostino’s biggest, no matter the fact that over the next 50 years he will become the ultimate sidekick, a man who plays on so many sessions and bands they blur in time and memory.
It was a hell of a year because he also played guitar on an album called Maranatha by an unknown American folk singer, 20-year-old Megan Sue Hicks, who was living and working in Sydney. They couldn’t have predicted that it would become of the most sought after and respected folk/folk psych albums of all-time. It’s a true collector’s item fetching up to $500 whenever one of the 250 or so that were pressed goes on sale. Interviewing Megan recently and telling her full story for the first time, nearly 50 years after Maranatha’s release, not only catalysed her into making the album available online but also led me to Orlando. It is his untold story that is stuff of hope and glory. It’s the pages of a never-ending diary of a musician whose dad told him to follow his dreams but ensure he always had a trade to fall back on to the pay the bills. Advice he listened to and leaves a perennial ‘what if?’ hanging over his narrative. Yet, ultimately, his is a story of survival, of the grit and grind of making ends meet, while playing a tune wherever and whenever there was gig to be had. And it is a significant chapter in the rich story that is the northern beaches of Sydney music scene, one so fertile it had three distinct waves. Greg, Chris and Orlando were part of the first wave, the originals. This is how it goes.
Orlando Agostino grew up in Manly, the jewel in the northern beaches crown, some say. Today it is rather like a mixed deli, full of different flavours – from its summer-season-backpackers, South American, European, American and English, that flock to its beaches, to the endless daytrippers who make the trip on the famous Manly ferry from Sydney seeking a big day out, fish and chips, a chance to get their feet wet and run the golden sand through their toes. And, then, there are the natives, some of them the third and fourth generations of families who have always called Manly home, who prefer the seasons when the tourists don’t come and they get their Manly back. Finally, there are the surfers, for Manly beach is an epicentre of surfing, globally renowned, a historical hotpost that is home to the equal most successful women’s surfer ever, seven-time world champion, Layne Beachley (read this eloquent article for the big picture on surfing and Manly).
It was in this potpourri that Agostino, Quill, and others would grow up and start their careers.
“I was born in Kirribilli and lived in Fitzroy St, but when I was about five we moved to Brookvale [now a light industrial centre]. In those days it was really a swamp that nobody was interested in. Then the Italians built the second biggest shopping centre [Warringah Mall] in the southern hemisphere at the time and that changed things,” Orlando says, on a fine but cold late May afternoon in Calgary, Canada. It’s a tick after 4pm. We have faced off on FaceTime. Two older fellows on a journey into the past. One, the musician, reminiscing; the other, the writer, trying to get a tale to tell.
“We lived in Brookvale for a while. Do you remember Tony Bartuccio? He was a dancer and he had his own troupe, the Bartucchio dancers, which frequently appeared on television in those days. We did a walk in/walk out swap with the Bartuccios: Our one acre with a Californian Bungalow in Brookvale for their mixed business with a residence above it in North Steyne, Manly.
“Dad was a cobbler but he got sick and tired of fixing shoes and wanted to try something different, so we had that business for a few years. Then he sold it and bought a house in Birkley Rd, Manly, just behind the gas ball [a large gasometer built in 1931 and owned by the Manly Gas Light and Coke Company].
“I went to Christian Brothers college in Raglan St, Manly. When I was in 6th grade there were 58 boys in our class so we had A and B classes. The college was run by the brothers in those days. It was both a primary and secondary school so 4th, 5th and 6th grades were in the downstairs part of the building and the first formers through to those doing their leaving certificate, were upstairs. The brothers themselves lived on the very top floor. The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Gilroy, moved the College in 1965 from Raglan Street to its present site on Manly's Eastern Hill, in the grounds of St Patrick's Estate and it eventually became St Paul’s College. I finished my schooling there [as did several fellow arts luminaries including director, screenwriter and producer, Baz Luhrmann, and actor Ryan Kwanten, most famous for his role as Jason Stackhouse in the dark, hit vampire TV series, True Blood]. “We lived in the Birkley Rd house until 1970 when mum and dad decided to go and live in Canada and moved to Victoria on Vancouver Island taking the youngest two of my brothers and sisters with them – my other sister and I were over 18 so we opted to stay in Australia.” A wise move as it turned out.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Back track to a decade earlier. When he was nine or 10 years old, Orlando picked up his mother’s acoustic guitar for the first time: “Mum could play three chords and used to like singing songs like Down In The Valley. Some country songs. As soon as I saw her playing guitar I thought ‘I have to try this.’” And so the career of Orlando Agostino, guitarist, began. Once he was in his teens it quickly picked up pace. “I used to go the Catholic Youth Organisation dances and there I met a young man by the name of David Hannigan. He introduced me to a girl called Julieanne Batley who was the first cousin of Noeleen Batley, Australia’s Little Miss Sweetheart. Noeleen appeared regularly on Bandstand and Six O’Clock Rock and had quite a career.
“Dave played a nylon-stringed Maton Classical Guitar 3 and I knew a few chords so he said ‘maybe we should get together with Julieanne’, so we started up a Peter, Paul and Mary cover group. When I was 12 or 13 I was already ordering the first Peter, Paul and Mary albums through the World Record Club. By the time I was 16, I had all of their albums. I virtually learnt to pick and play from listening to them. I was self taught. “Once we got a few songs under our belt – we were doing three-part harmonies – we became one of several Peter, Paul and Mary cover groups in Sydney. Do you remember a singer by the name of Linda Keene? She was in a trio [The Charade] that did a lot of their songs and other stuff as well.” Linda Keene is name that flickers in and out of Australian music history with some significance. When she was 17 years old she joined The Charade (videos and the band's story), replacing Siobhan Sheppard, and they became the resident folk group on Bandstand. After that history seems to lose track of her until 1979 when she appeared as one of the vocalists on the ACTU Achievement album singing Part Of the Union (the old Strawbs song) and Achievement, both with Mick Leyton. That album is also significant for one of the earliest appearances of Chrissie Amphlett who would a year later become the much-loved lead singer of the great Australian rock group, The Divinyls. Much later still, Linda appeared at the memorial concert for Greg Quill held at The Shack not long after his death on May 5, 2013. He was just 66.
And here is the nexus of the first part of the story – The Shack and Greg Quill. The story of The Shack is a central part of Northern beaches music history and folklore. Linda Keene was, in fact, returning to the place she started out that day she honoured Greg. And it’s where it all began to take shape for Orlando Agostino. “We were the Peter, Paul and Mary cover band of the northern beaches and we used to play at a restaurant called The Seafarer in Dee Why,” he says. “After we finished that gig we would go to The Shack and play a few songs there. And that is how I met Greg Quill. I was only 16 or 17. When I started playing with him it would be have been late 1966/early 1967.”
The Shack was the epicentre of northern beaches folk music. Originally held in an old ambulance shed in the Narrabeen camping area, it relocated to a shop in Narrabeen where it opened three nights a week. Artists who trod the stage included the brilliant trio of female folk and r’n’b singers, Jeanne Lewis, Marion Henderson and Margaret Roadknight, Bob Hudson, Al Head, and The Stovepipe Spasm Band (featuring Chris Blanchflower).
Like many a folk club, The Shack came and went with the times, closing in the 1970s, reopening in the 1980s, then closing again before getting a new lease of life in 2006 when it was revived by Trevor and Kathleen Swadling, Rhonda Mawer and Paul Robertson. And it survives to this day at the Tramshed Community Centre, Pittwater Rd, Narrabeen, in the Lakeview Hall, although its doors have been closed for several months now due to the COVID-19 outbreak. “It is a historic part of Sydney’s music scene. It really, really is. It’s like a number of people came out of that time, some of whom have passed away now. It was like a community. Everybody looked after each other and everybody respected and loved each other. It was great,” Orlando says.
“To some degree it still is a tight little community. Some of the old ones. They are like fishes. They don’t like to let go of the reins too much. Paul [Robertson] and Rhonda [Mawer] got the Northern Beaches Music Festival going.
“They’ve had a lot of hurdles to overcome and, of course, one year they just couldn’t afford the insurance. In recent times, there have been new rules and regulations about the number of people you can have in one spot and the amount of security you need. They had to pay the police big fees.”
Quill, nearly four years older than Agostino, was already a dominant figure in the local folk scene and ran The Shack from 1967 to 1969 when he handed over the reins to his brother Christopher.
He lived at his parents’ house on the headlands in Narrabeen. It was one of the returned soldiers’ houses. His father was a veteran who worked for Rothmans cigarettes. Greg lived in a flat in the garden and was going to university, at the time, doing a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in journalism.
“He was an incredible writer. I found that out, not just through his songwriting, but years later when he was living in Canada and became a journalist for the Toronto Star. He reviewed everyone from Big Sugar to Glen Campbell, “ Orlando says
“If Greg paid you a compliment, it was compliment indeed. As a person, he wasn’t overly full of compliments. He was a bit of a wild card but very eloquent when he wrote. When he first went to Canada he didn’t have a job because he was trying to promote Country Radio – by that stage I had left the band – and he and the band virtually lost the shirts off their backs.
“It’s nice to know we were part of the early days of the northern beaches scene, the pioneers if you like. And it all came out of us wanting to get together and do a bit of picking. It came at a cost though! I used to get into trouble for not being home by midnight because we lived in Manly and the last bus that actually went to Manly stopped before midnight so the only bus I could get was the Wynyard bus which dropped me off at Balgowlah and then I had to walk along Condamine St up to Fairlight then down in to Birkley Rd so I’d be home at 1am or 2am,” he chuckles.
Orlando spent the next four years playing with Quill, a relationship that culminated with the formation of Country Radio and the release of Fleetwood Plain.
“I used to love going to The Shack but while playing with Dave and Julieanne was good, I needed to progress. So I became a sideman with Greg – I just asked him if I could get up and play along with him. I never thought I was good enough to play with him or anybody of his stature but he paid me a tremendous compliment when he came back to Australia in Juy 2009. He said he’d like nothing better than for us to get together and play a few songs and could I organise it
“He came back to see his mother who wasn’t well and I organised a show at The Excelsior in Surry Hills and one at The Shack. People were lining up outside The Shack at Narrabeen to get in; they were turning people away. They didn’t make a big fuss about him appearing, and instead included him as one of the three acts they normally put on each night. It was a real reunion – Chris Blanchflower and I were both there. There are some songs [The Killing Heart and Back This Way] from that night on You Tube. We did the song, Fleetwood Plain, the way we did it originally, not the way it was revamped in later years on other albums that he produced.” Fleetwood Plain is unusual in that it was one of the first Australian albums to be released on the nascent Harvest label, which had been started by EMI as a subsidiary in 1969. Gus McNeil was a music publisher and talent scout and/or producer for EMI in those days when the label was in Elizabeth St, Sydney, Orlando thinks. After a chance meeting McNeil signed Quill to a publishing deal with his company, Cellar Music, and the album that followed found its way to EMI.
“We recorded Fleetwood Plain over a few sessions in EMI’s studio at night, unbeknownst to the powers that be, because none of us had any money,“ Orlando says. “And we never signed any contracts either. [As is the case with Megan Sue Hicks and Maranatha]. The members of Gus’ former band, Gus & The Nomads, who were Scots College boys, provided all the electric guitars, the bass and drums. Greg and I played acoustic guitar and Chris Blanchflower played mouth harp. He was like Australia’s Charlie McCoy. By the time the album came out the Nomads had broken up and three of them had joined [the legendary psych and prog outfit] Pirana. “They were different times. People were experimenting with drugs, and I was really naive about all that stuff. The only thing I ever did was smoke a joint. That was kind of acceptable but I knew there was other things going on. But I was a very trusting kind of guy. If I was told to go in as we were doing a session tonight I’d show up and the next day my eyes would be hanging out at work because I’d just started an apprenticeship.
“At 18 that wasn’t easy because some of the younger apprentices working for the same company saw me as competition as I was older than them. I didn’t enjoy the first two years of my apprenticeship but then they transferred my papers to another company for the last two and that was enjoyable. I felt I was being appreciated as a person.
“It turns out Country Radio was probably the first Australian country rock band. We were playing folk, rock and country, melding it together and creating our own genre. That made us seminal to other bands like The Dingoes that came after us. “Bands started to cotton on to the idea that they could be acoustic and electric at the same time, that they didn’t necessarily have to be a rock’n’roll band. Now I’m the last one left of the three originals – Chris Blanchflower passed away last year. It seems strange. I was best man at his wedding, many, many moons ago, you know.”
Fleetwood Plain, to these ears, is Greg Quill’s finest moment. Modest commercial success followed with the band’s excellent second and third singles, Gypsy Queen and Wintersong, and a live album (Country Radio Live) faithfully captures the oft-called classic line-up of Quill, Kerryn Tolhurst, John A. Bird, John Du Bois, Tony Bolton and Blanchflower. Gypsy Queen became an anthem of sorts and shared the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) Song of the Year award with Mississippi's Kings of the World. I was at the Sunbury Festival in January 1973 when Greg Quill and Country Radio appeared around sunset in front of 80,000 people, many of whom sung Gypsy Queen out loud. I don’t think anybody in the band – or the crowd – ever forgot those minutes.
That said, for purists, Fleetwood Plain is hard to beat. The title track is a small masterpiece – a song of undeniable beauty that captures the heart and soul of raw and rural Australia with an unforgettable melody. It is one of the great Australian songs. And the entire album is redolent of its core members’ folk roots. Orlando, Greg and Chris mesh beautifully and their playing is as exquisite as it is often delicate. Oddly, Country Radio, despite its success, never recorded another studio album. In fact, Quill’s recorded output is incredibly limited given his stature with only two more studio albums hitting the racks over the following 40 years. In a way it contributes to the romance that surrounds him. With Greg Quill, as with Orlando, a ‘what if?’ will perhaps always hang over his story.
Back in 1971, things were about to change. It is strange how often they do when people are poised and opportunity is beckoning.
“One day, Greg announced he was thinking of moving to Canada and asked if I was interested in going with him? Of course, I was … but I just couldn’t,” Orlando says.
“I started an apprenticeship in the printing industry when I was 18, after working in bank until then. In 1971, I still had another year to go to finish my apprenticeship. If I had left my apprenticeship then there was no way I could be reinstated because it was seen as breaking the bond that you had with the employer.
“My dad had ingrained in me that it’s okay to do whatever you want to do as long as you have something to fall back on so you can at least work, eat, pay your bills. He always said that if I at least had a trade I would never go hungry and he was right. He was so right. Although I did pick a trade that was the most poorly paid of the lot. It was tied to the metal union which had the lowest rates of all of them. I did my apprenticeship as a Letterpress Printers Machinist and later on I learned Small Offset.
“I was always torn between finishing my apprenticeship and wanting to play music. I never got to dedicate myself to one or the other. At that time I had to dedicate myself to my trade because I wanted to get my papers when I finished. As a result, I’ve always been somebody else’s side man.
“But, yes, that was the main reason. Otherwise I would have been in all the other future line-ups. Perhaps I would have played in the bands, Hot Knives and Southern Cross, that Greg formed in Canada after Country Radio split [Kerryn Tolhurst leaving in mid-1973 was the killer blow, and he was soon followed by Bird and Blanchflower]. Who knows? But in the end, Greg became quite disillusioned and quit music in 1978. He put his guitars away and didn’t play for more than 20 years. “He lived in Toronto then moved to Hamilton later on. He edited some music magazines [Music Express (1981–82), Graffiti (1982–83), Applaud, The Canadian Composer, Songwriter] and became a journalist working the arts scene in Toronto, where he was an entertainment columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest newspaper.
“It was Kerryn who eventually brought Greg out of retirement and they recorded the album, So Rudely Interrupted, in 2005. There’s a new version of Fleetwood Plain on it plus The Killing Heart, some new songs, and a couple of others that they revamped. Yes, it’s easy to wonder what might have been but you are never going to find an answer if you do.
“So I finished my apprenticeship and then I married a Sydney girl. I was still trying to get back into music but I didn’t have anybody to work with at the time. I was in limbo for a few years, then in 1977 we separated and I moved to Tamworth in 1979.”
And, strangely enough, if he hadn’t met the now noted country singer/songwriter, Clelia Adams, and her friend, Megan Sue Hicks, at Go-Set when he visited Quill who was writing for the music paper, things might have turned out quite differently. Again.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ...
Orlando: "The master tapes for Fleetwood Plain are lost. We don’t know what happened to them. Nobody knows who’s got them. Something happened to them in the move when EMI sold all its equipment because it was all reel-to-reel. Somebody knows what happened to them but we don’t because we weren’t supposed to be there were we!"
Part 2: Maranatha, The Tamworth years, Al Head, more Quill Part 3: Blue Sky Country – John Chesher, The Reunion, Canada, Craig Moreau 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: Photos by Mike Gee or supplied by Orlando Agostino.
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