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Zoot Locker
• You Better Get Going Now [2:03]
• 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 [2:12]
• Monty & Me [2:31]
• It's About Time [2:50]
• Sailing [2:11]
• Yes, I'm Glad [2:37]
• Little Roland Lost [2:35]
• She's Alright [2:07]
• Sha La La [2:58]
• Flying [3:00]
• Mr. Songwriter [3:01]
• Strange Things [3:22]
• Hey Pinky [3:01]
• The Freak [5:03]
• Evil Child [2:53]
• Eleanor Rigby [4:36]
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Like Sydney, Adelaide’s migrant settlement areas were hotbeds of amateur beat music passions in the early 60’s. The areas of Elizabeth and Port Noarlunga, with their heavy British populations, spawned hundreds of ambitious young groups, eager to follow the Mersey lead (which many of the players had witnessed personally).
The Twilights were the first Adelaide group to break nationally, late in 1965. The Masters Apprentices flew the S.A. flag in 1967 and by late 1968 The Zoot made their presence felt in the eastern states.
As with virtually all successful Australian groups of the 60’s, The Zoot was formed, in the mian, by British and European settlers. Darryl Cotton (Aust.) and George Bertelkamp (Dutch) were school pals, who would get together every Friday night to catch The Twilights at The Caledonia Hall in King William Street. Guitarist John Darcy was a recent arrival from Manchester who worshipped hometown heroes The Hollies.
The three came together in 1966, with drummer Teddy Higgins, to form Down The Line – later renamed as Strings Unlimited (with no a violin to be seen!). Each Sunday morning the group would tape the ABC radio replay of British TV’s ‘Top of the Pops’ and then knock out passable stage versions of unreleased-in-Australia hits by The Move, Small Faces and The Hollies. “We were the mod band in Adelaide” recalls Darryl, “we played the mod dance at Scot’s Church every Friday night”.
Throughout 1967 Strings Unlimited became a hot live draw in Adelaide, occasionally providing backing for a young English singer who had just split from The Mavericks – Johnny Farnham. When Farnham was discovered by accountant Darryl Sambell and signed to EMI in September ’67, the group were called upon to back the singer on In My Room – the flipside of Sadie.
Before this recording debut, the group had undergone a name change. As Cotton recalls; “a couple of young dance promoters came to see us one day about some bookings and said ‘you guys are a great band but you’ve got a lousy name – why don’t you change it to The Zoot’. Years later I found out that one of the two guys was Doc Neeson”. Rhythm guitarist Gerard had also, by this point, effect a name change – to Beeb Birtles.
In mid ’68, hot young EMI producers David McKay was on the road with The Twilights. When the tour hit Adelaide, he was highly impressed by one of the support acts and summarily offered them a recording deal. Recalls Cotton, “We only had homemade amps and guitars and hardly any money to go to Melbourne to make our first single. So The Twilights loaned us their incredible Marshall amps and paid our train fares across.”
In Melbourne they recorded You’d Better Get Going Now/3 Jolly Little Dwarfs, then returned to Adelaide to await release. By this point John Darcy had departed (later to appear in Allison Gros with Graham Goble) and been replaced by Steve Stone.
In late August they were instructed to venture forth to Melbourne once more. “McKay was pleased with the record” says Cotton, “but he insisted we needed management. The next day a fellow called Wayne de Gruchy knocked on our door”.
Wayne was the manager of Berties Disco and, together with creatively-inclined owner Tony Knight, he came up with a masterstroke of promotion – Think Pink – Think Zoot. The concept was launched at a now-legendary media party at Berties on September 3. Knight checked out the joint in total pink, adding such embellishments as pink champagne, pink carnations and the suchlike. Though it didn’t do a great deal for the debut single, the night was a roaring success from a promotional stance.
A second single was knocked out in quick time – this time produced (and written) by the creative bum of the splintering Twilights, Terry Britten. 1 x 2 x 3 x 4, released in December ’68, became a moderate Melbourne hit (32), firmly establishing The Zoot as a light bubble-pop outfit. “We’d never really decided to go in that direction” offers Cotton, “but we played the style of the top 40 and when it changed, we changed. By 1969 the charts were full of American bubblegum.”
When it became apparent that global superstardom was not on immediate offer, Higgins and Stone split back to Adelaide. Determined to continue, Cotton and Birtles recruited Roger Hicks – a classically-trained Toorak guitarist, and Rick Brewer – an experienced Adelaide drummer (living in Melbourne) and schoolfriend of the pair, who had already recorded for EMI as a member of The Third Party.
A significant nationally breakthrough came early in 1969 at giant outdoor concert at Melbourne’s Velodrome track, staged and televised by the 0-10 network’s 4 hour pop forum – Uptight. Bottom billed to such acts as The Twilights, Iguana, Compulsion Wild Cherries & Chelsea Set, The Zoot stole the show outright – courtesy of a core of hysterial girls, assembled by fan club president Jan Gilbert. The unexpected audience frenzy greatly impressed the TV execs and the group soon became regulars on ‘Uptight’.
With insidious logic, de Gruchy barred his charges from appearing in any public place in the company of a female. Accordingly, Darryl’s girlfriend was beset with the ignominious task of climbing over his back fence whenever she wanted to visit.
Thought it may not have been apparent at the time, The Zoot kicked off the second ‘pop wave’ of the sixties (Easybeat/Twilights in ’65 being the first) and by the middle of 1969 The Valentines. The (reorganized) Masters Apprentices, Russell Morris and The New Dream were scoring hits and causing riots.
Single three, in June ’69, backed a leftover Britten production Little Roland Lost (a solitary Birtles/Cotton composition) with an A side produced by Ian Meldrum. Monty & Me – an ode to a pink-dyed Afghan hound (joining car, apparel etc.) – came from the pens of Hans Poulsen and Seeker Bruce Woodley (who also wrote with Paul Simon). It fared a little better than its predecessor, peaking at only 33 in Melbourne, but 1 in Brisbane.
A month later they took to the road on their first tour; slogging through the wilds of Queensland alongside Ronnie Burns, Jon Blanchfield and The Sect; with teenybop frenzy in abundant supply throughout. Two months later, in September, they joined Russell Morris, Johnny Farnham, Johnny Young, Ronnie Burns, The Valentines, Masters Apprentices and Doug Parkinson in Focus on Operation Starlift – a monstrous (and financially disastrous) capital city tour by the absolutely upper echelon of Australian rockdom. In December they visited Tasmania with Russell Morris and an amazing 1969 (despite the loss of the playoff final of Hoadley’s National Battle of The Sounds of The Nova Express in August) came to an end.
Back in Melbourne, the group – now being managed by Darryl Sambell and Jeff Joseph – were without the services of always-out-of-place Roger Hicks, who had finally reacted against the escalating ‘pretty pink pansies’ ridicule by defecting to The Brisbane Avengers. The Avengers took on Hicks after losing their first choice – Rick Springfield.
Springfield was an exceptional-looking guitarist/songwriter of considerable talent. He had toured Vietnam based with a reformation of MPD Ltd. And was playing in Pete Watson’s Wickedy Wak when a Johnny Young composed (Meldrum produced) single Billie Bikey Boy’s thrust him to general attention. Both The Avengers and Valentines were vying for his services and they were soon joined by The Zoot, who had spotted him on their northern tour (Beeb sang harmonies on the WW single). In the young, popular and obviously pliable Zoot, Springfield saw the best potential for his own future, and so joined later in 1969.
At this point, new EMI house producer Howard Gable was assigned The Zoot – a relationship commenced under a cloud of dispute. For it was in the Go-Set ‘new releases’ column that the group first became aware of their 4th single – a Brian Cadd song called It’s About Time. It had been recorded as one of a batch of demos for a possible new single and the group were fully expecting to re-record it (or whatever else may have been finally chosen) for commercial release. They yelled and howled from one end of this vast continent to the other – virtually ensuring the surprise single’s chart failure.
This sudden interest in musical values was, of course, a direct result of Springfield’s presence. Though he initially clambered into the pink garb, his disdain of the sub-teen image orientation was obvious and in early 1970 the group ceremoniously burned all things pink before camera of ‘Happening 70’. And not before time. The snide sniggerings from media and peers was being supplemented by other, more worrying incidents. In December ’69 the group had been beaten up in Brisbane by a gang of louts, leaving Darryl with a (well publicized) mild concussion. By 1970, rock in Australia had become drastically polarized. Seriously ‘heavy’ groups such as Chain, Spectrum and The Aztecs were beginning to draw huge (often tedious) instrumental jams were dismissed with the ultimate insult of the era – ‘commercial’.
With Springfield at the creative helm, The Zoot set to work on their first and only album – Just Zoot, early in 1970. It emerged as a highly admirable effort – with powerful inventive originals (the likes of Mr. Songwriter) and two more superb Britten compositions. (Zoot Out in 1971, was just a hits collection).
But the most apparent manifestation of the new impetus came in June with the (approved) release of a fifth single – Hey Pinky. This unsubtle lampoon of their just-discarded image was heralded by a Go-Set ad sporting a rather startling beefcake shot of the group. Whether their naked rumps gave them a new credibility in the serious music market of whether it merely gave little girls naughty dreams, remains an inflamed point of contention (though one should not lose a great deal of sleep over it).
In the same month, on the 20th to be precise, the ‘new’ Zoot turned the nationally televised Go-Set Pop Poll on its ear. With backs to the audience they hurtled into a thunderous, extended workout of The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby and quite literally brought the house down. In the poll itself they performed rather dismally, coming in fifth (behind Masters, Axiom, New Dream, Town Criers) after an outright win in 1969. Two months later they narrowly lost Hoadley’s National Battle of the Sounds to The Flying Circus.
The maudlin Beatle song was just one of a series of contemporary classics worked over with a heavy hand by The Zoot – others including Hello Goodbye, Woodstock and Hurdy Gurdy Man. However the strong reaction from the pop poll performance had Gable insisted on Eleanor Rigby as the next single; and in December 1970, it was.
The response was immediate – radio went with it on day of release and by the first week of the new year it was on its way to the top three and a 21 week chart run. Cruelly, sales stopped just short of gold single status – a feat eventually achieved in 1979 after a re-release urged by Birtles and Cotton.
In the wake of this sudden success the band’s pendulum swung a great deal further left of center than it should have. They became heavier, louder and more complicated – determined to slap their critics in the face by being adopted by the ‘head’ audience. Brewer was the worst offender, becoming obsessed by experimental British rock and attempting to implement his adventurous tastes into what was, after all, a simple pop-rock band. “We really began to fire as a band then” recalls Cotton, “but it was a bit too late – we just couldn’t escape our image. The pink thing haunted us.”
A follow-up single, The Freak/Evil Child, fared fairly dismally (27 in Melbourne only) and by early 1971 irrevocable disillusionment had set in. Beeb was being threatened with National Service, Rick Brewer wanted to expand musically and Rick Springfield was under considerable pressure to pursue a solo career.
The camel’s back was broken in May when RCA America – furiously excited with Eleanor Rigby – were thwarted in their attempts to secure The Zoot for a US deal, by idiotic Australian bureaucracy.
Having split almost out of spite, Darryl and Beeb hitched themselves to a suit manufacturer and became a duo called Frieze, while Rick Springfield signed to Robbie Porter’s Sparmac label and became a prominent teen idol in America. Darryl also found his way to America, where he recorded for MGM as a member of Friends and for 20th Century as one third of the moderately successful Cotton, Lloyd & Christian.
Beeb turned up in harmony group Mississippi in the second half of the 70’s participating in the metamorphosis to Little River Band. A short time later Rick Brewer made a long-overdue reappearance in The Ferrets – playing on their national number 1 hit Don’t Fall In Love, in 1977.
As this is being written, Darryl Cotton is back in Australia, scorching up the top five with a massive hit – Same Old Girl, Rick Springfield is popping up as an actor in America TV cop shows and Beeb Birtles has enjoyed his 5th consecutive top 5 US single with Little River Band ( and just issued a gospel album with Graham Goble). Rick Brewer is maintaining a low profile.
It is these subsequent activities which testify best to the exceptional level of talent which lurked beneath the surface of a band whole lifespan was marked with sad neglect and ignorant derision. Hear for yourself – right now. – Glenn A. Baker Aust. Editor – Billboard June 1980.
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