2QN Deniliquin

In the last post I mentioned 2QN Deniliquin, where John Pearce started in radio in the 1940s before moving on to 3SH Swan Hill.

When we lived in Swan Hill in the 60s, 2QN was one of the stations I could pick up clearly if I was roaming the dial looking for pop music. Another was 2WG Wagga Wagga. Like most country stations at the time, they had their moments of good Top 40 programming, presented by disc jockeys who could sound just as good as their big city counterparts. One of the 2QN announcers had an American accent, something unusual on Aussie country radio.

This Melbourne Argus story from 23 February 1945 (via the NLA's Australian Newspapers archive) shows how a financially weak 2QN nearly lost its licence to Wangaratta, a town in north-eastern Victoria. Click here for larger image.

Wangaratta didn't get its own commercial station until 3NE opened in 1954.

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...

Eight Records on the Radio, Summer of 1966-67

A list of songs that I heard on the radio December 1966-January 1967:

The Cryan' Shames - I Want To Meet You • The Innocence - There's Got To Be A Word! • Twice As Much - True Story • The Small Faces - My Mind's Eye • The Settlers - Till Winter Follows Spring • The Cyrkle - Please Don't Ever Leave Me • The Righteous Brothers - On This Side Of Goodbye • Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra - Summer Wine

 

To listen to them on my playlist click here: Spotify.

This must be from the summer vacation of 1966-67, December or January, going by the release or chart dates of the songs. In Australia our summers begin in December, and the new school year starts around the end of January. I was sixteen, about to start my final year of high school. For a few days, as I heard a new song I liked on the radio, I wrote it down on the back cover of a foolscap writing pad left over from the school year. If I knew the label I wrote that as well, probably because at the local music shop it was easier to order a record if you could tell them the label. I was in Swan Hill, a town on the Murray River in northern Victoria.

In reality, I couldn't have afforded even one-half of one of those records, let alone eight. It’s only recently that I’ve finally got hold of every song on the list, helped along by the coming of the Net, file-sharing, and emailing mp3s, as well as CD reissues of every other song ever recorded.

I've heard of kids back then keeping their own charts, their personal Top 20 of current favourites, complete with hit picks, new entries, and drop-outs, as they got hooked on a song then got sick of it. A guy from Delta, British Columbia, who uses the name Taliesyn, had his personal charts published in the local paper: nowadays he regularly posts them on Usenet. I wasn't so organised. I just wrote a bunch of songs in Pentel Sign pen on the cardboard at the back of a writing pad. I didn't even manage to find the same coloured pen each time. Years later, I threw out the pad, but tore off the list for nostalgia's sake.

The list doesn’t include any huge international hits, and some of the artists are barely known, but they were being played on the radio, probably on small-town stations such as 3SH Swan Hill, 3BO Bendigo, 2QN Deniliquin and 2WG Wagga. Regional radio stations back then usually had their own eager young disc jockeys on their way to the big city, and they would have had some say in the music they played. Some of the songs might not even have been heard on big city stations like 3UZ in Melbourne.

The Righteous Brothers - On This Side Of Goodbye (Carole King – Gerry Goffin) This is my favourite from the list, and the only one I still listen to regularly. It’s also my favourite Righteous Brothers song, a big production of a moody Goffin-King ballad, a bit in the vein of The Righteous Bros' earlier records with Phil Spector. I’ve never understood why this isn’t better known, or why it wasn’t a hit. (I also have a version by Alan Price that has a different arrangement, a different feel: not in the same league, as much as I like Alan Price.)

Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra - Summer Wine (Lee Hazlewood) #2 Melbourne, #7 Brisbane #4 Adelaide  This is the only song on the list that was a hit in Australia (though not in the USA), recorded by seasoned producer-singer-songwriter Lee Hazelwood with his younger client, daughter of Frank Sinatra. Australians were nuts about this duo, especially in Melbourne and Adelaide, where they had seven charting records, compared with three nationally in the US.

The Small Faces - My Mind's Eye (Ronnie Lane - Steve Marriott) #4 UK Regularly included on Small Faces Best Of… collections, thanks to its success in the UK.

The Cyrkle - Please Don't Ever Leave Me (Susan Haber) #43 Adelaide American band, associates of The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel. Their best-known song was Red Rubber Ball (1966), written by Paul Simon with Bruce Woodley of The Seekers, a hit in the US and in Australia.

The Innocence - There's Got To Be A Word! (Don Ciccone) #37 USA The Innocence were Pete Anders and Vini Poncia, who also recorded as The Videls and The Trade Winds (New York’s A Lonely Town, 1965) and as a duo under their own names. They produced the original version of Zoom Zoom Zoom, by Our Patch of Blue, covered by Australian band Cam-Pact.

The Cryan’ Shames - I Want To Meet You (Jim Fairs) Jaunty pop song with harmonies by Chicago band, popular in their home region, whose version of Sugar and Spice is on Nuggets 1. I Want To Meet You was written by Cryan’ Shames guitarist Jim Fairs.

Twice As Much - True Story (Andrew Rose – David Skinner) Recorded for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label by duo Andrew Rose and David Skinner, who had a bit of a hit in the UK with Sittin’ On The Fence (1966, #25), written by Mick and Keith of The Stones. David Skinner is mentioned below for co-writing P.P. Arnold’s Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.

The Settlers - Till Winter Follows Spring (Kent, Jones, Fyffe) Pop-folk song, pretty much in the vein of The Seekers, by group from Birmingham. This is on the anthology Autumn Almanac, one of the Ripples series of compilations of 60s British pop obscurities (The Settlers' Major To Minor is on Dreamtime, another in the series).

What does the list say about either my musical tastes at the time, or the playlists of the stations I was listening to? Let's face it, these songs are mainstream pop: no garage rockers or frantic r&b here, and the Righteous Brothers' nod to soul stands out amongst all that jaunty, sunshiney jingle-jangle and folk-pop harmonies. (Ah well, it was Summer, after all.)

One more thing I noticed: there are five American records, three British, and none from Australia. Sorry, mate.