"Frank Avis's Memoirs of 42 Years in Radio"

A highlight of John Pearce's radio memoirs (see earlier post) is his remote broadcast from a country dance for 3SH Swan Hill, probably some time in the late 1940s.

I've just found another entertaining account of a country dance broadcast, this time from Frank Avis in The Ball Broadcast, recalling his time at 2LF Young in the mid-1950s. Avis, best known as a radio newsman, is publishing his memoirs as a blog at FrankAvis.com.

Frank Avis started in radio at 2MG Mudgee, and his latest post (15 February) takes his career up to 2DAY-FM Sydney in the 80s and 90s. Along the way, he's worked at 2LF Young, 3BO Bendigo, 7HO Hobart, 3UZ, 3XY, 3AK and 3DB Melbourne, 6PR Perth, 3MP Mornington Peninsula, and 2GB and 2MMM-FM Sydney.

Frank arrived at 3BO not long after the young John Laws left, and he tells a couple of good yarns about Laws's time at the station.

Great stories from a radio insider: highly recommended.

John Pearce at 3SH Swan Hill

[The Argus, 1932]

For the Love of Mike, the memoirs of Australian radio announcer John Pearce, were published online a few years ago. His radio career starts just after the War, when he chanced upon a job at 2QN Deniliquin after he was de-mobbed from the RAAF. He went on to 3SH Swan Hill, 7HO Hobart, and to 2GB Sydney, where he was one of the pioneers of Australian talk-back radio.

Pearce's site is no longer online, but fortunately we can still access the whole work at the Internet Archive [title page, table of contents].

Being a radio fanatic from way back, I find this insider's view of radio irresistible, especially the chapter on 3SH, our local station during my teenage years. Pearce seems to have been at 3SH around the late 40s to early 1950s.

Pearce calls 3SH a "fun station", a "happy station", and this comes through in his reminiscences. There are plenty of endearing characters and entertaining stories: the outside broadcast at a local dance (how quaint!), hillbilly amateurs on the Christmas Appeal radiothon, grappling with a local politician to make sure he stayed near the mike, locking the duty announcer in the outside dunny while a three-minute song was playing...

The station manager at 3SH was Harry Lithgow, still there when we moved to Swan Hill in 1961. I believe Chief Engineer Bernie Walsh was still around then too.

Since For the Love of Mike has disappeared from an active website, and does not seem to have been published as a book, I'm posting the chapter on 3SH, which gives a great insight into the workings of a country commercial station in the pre-rock'n'roll era.

Victorians to the North:

Chapter 7 of John Pearce - For the Love of Mike

In the days when broadcasting meant radio, and not television and/or radio, the Victorian Broadcasting Network consisted of a head office in Melbourne and three country radio stations.

The main one was in Hamilton, the second best was in Sale and what was left went to Swan Hill, way north on the River Murray, the dividing line between Australia and Victoria. I got a job as an announcer at the latter. I can't remember how I got it, not even how I learned about it. Read it in the paper, maybe. However, it was mine; and I arrived after the adventure of the drive in my vintage Hupmobile...

Continued here...

Timeouts: The Tornadoes and a Marching Band

Gregg Sinclair who - as I mentioned previously - was a panel operator at 2GB, emailed with two more examples of Timeout Instrumentals: Lapland by The Baltimore & Ohio Marching Band (1967) and Hot Pot by The Tornados (1964).

Lapland is one of those obscure instrumentals that was surprisingly popular in Australia. In early 1968, it reached #5 in Sydney, #20 Melbourne, #9 Brisbane, #20 Adelaide. It didn't register nationally in the US, but charted regionally.

As for The Tornados: I can't believe I overlooked them, as they would've been a rich source of Timeout Instrumentals. They had that one stunning worldwide hit with Telstar (1962), produced by Joe Meek who also wrote a lot of their tracks, and they continued with a series of organ-led instros. These were pleasant enough but not in the same class as Telstar, and tended to sneak into the lukewarm end of the hottest hits.

Globetrotter (1962), Robot (1963), Dragonfly (1963), Monte Carlo (1964), Hot Pot (1964) and Exodus (1964) all charted somewhere in Australia - though not spectacularly - and I remember The Ice Cream Man getting some airplay as well. One thing Aussies dug in those days was an instrumental.











The Tornados. Bassist Heinz Burt (far right) had some vocal hits as 'Heinz', notably Just Like Eddie (1963)

The Timeout Instrumental

At the end of the hour on Top 40 radio, just before the news, the last record would end, the deejay would talk for a bit, and then he would fade in an instrumental track that had been playing in the background. The instrumental would be cued up so that it finished right on the pips (the electronic countdown to the hour). This practice was common in the 60s, but it seems to have faded out during the 70s.

I asked radio historian Wayne Mac and former 2GB panel operator Gregg Sinclair if there was a name for it and they said, yes, it was called timing out, and the tracks were fillers or timeouts.

In my mind, these works have always formed an unofficial, unnamed sub-genre of the pop instrumental. Radio people in the 60s could identify it immediately, just by choosing something that sounded okay in between a bunch of hit records and the news.

I'm calling this musical sub-genre the Timeout Instrumental, just so it has a name.*

The Timeout Instrumental might have been something by Herb Alpert (right): maybe Bittersweet Samba or Up Cherry Street or Mexican Shuffle. It probably wouldn't be the latest Shadows hit, but it could be one of their B-sides or an EP track, something like The Miracle. You might have heard some album tracks, often by middle-of-the-road orchestras. I'm sure Dalilia, that space-age classic by Roger Roger & his Champs-Elysées Orchestra, would have been used: it was a favourite as background music on Australian radio and TV.**

As examples of likely Timeout Instrumental artists, Gregg Sinclair gives The Baja Marimba Band (associates of Herb Alpert), Bill Justis and Floyd Cramer. Raymond Lefèvre's Soul Coaxing is one track he recalls.

There was some skill in timing out: if the timeout track was 3 minutes long, it had to start playing, faded down, three minutes before the pips, while the last record was still playing. Gregg Sinclair writes:

The art of ‘timing out’ was made all the more interesting by the fact that most of the tracks supplied weren’t timed! Believe it or not, any panel operator worth his salt could look at a track and determine how long it ran. After a few years of experience, I could look at an album track and say: “that’s about a 2’45” job”! However, I always preferred to time them if I had the chance. Usually, I’d get in early and go through the ‘music log’ - radio talk for the playlist – and time the appropriate tracks prior to going on air.

There was a feeling in radio that using instrumental filler in this way sounded sloppy or out of date, so from the late 60s it was replaced by playing regular vocal hits up to the news.

For me, though, it lives on. Sometimes when I hear an old instrumental track I haven't heard before - maybe something by Cyril Stapleton or Sounds Incorporated - I find myself waiting for the pips, and I know I've stumbled on another Timeout Instrumental.

[For more on Timeout Instrumentals, see follow-up posts here and here.]

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*As a genre, Timeout Instrumental is similar to Northern Soul in that (1) it is applied retrospectively and (2) works are included not strictly for being of one musical style. See also Bizarro Shadows World Down Under, which is applied retrospectively and is partly defined by geography rather than style.

**Timeout Instrumental intersects with what is now known as Space Age Pop (another retrospective genre). For more on Dalilia, see Only in Oz (9).