“Fraternity live like no other band in Australia,” Vince Lovegrove wrote in Go-Set, “in a house in the hills 17 miles from Adelaide. Surrounded by seven acres of bushland, they’re secluded from everything but nature. What a buzz!”
Fraternity had noted the Band’s example—they had set up a communal base on a Woodstock farm called Big Pink—and Hemming’s Farm, as Fraternity’s Aldgate property was known, became their own Big Pink.
In May, “Uncle” John Ayers came to town with Copperwine and stayed behind. Bruce Howe asked him to join Fraternity and he moved straight onto Aldgate.
“Fraternity are into a trip of their own,” Vince went on. “Sure they know they’re good. Why else are they playing music professionally? But they’ve passed the ego scene years ago. They don’t need ego trips, because they see too many good things in life, and they don’t want to lose them.”
This idea was farcical, of course. Fraternity was a strictly hierarchical and very volatile band. Bruce Howe was the boss—there were no two ways about that—and Mick Jurd was his senior partner. John Bisset, who wrote more material than any other member of the band, was a brilliant but troubled man; he and Mick Jurd did not get on. Both Bon and Uncle simply managed to go with the flow. Uncle was “upstairs” (Fraternity-speak for out of it), even by the standards of the day.
HAMISH HENRY: “Bon was just a gregarious, very nice guy. I used to swim with him; he was a very good swimmer. To Bruce and Mick and John Bisset, a singer was probably something of a necessary evil, and so Bon revolved around them, rather than vice versa. Bon was always late, for rehearsals or gigs or whatever, and Bruce and Mick probably did discuss sacking him, but they couldn’t have done it. I think the band was appropriately named, because it was very much like a family, and Bon belonged to the family.”
“Fraternity was a shitter for Bon, because all those other guys were educated, and he started to feel he was inferior,” said Pat Pickett, who became friends with Bon after encountering Fraternity in Melbourne around this time. “They wouldn’t let him write any lyrics. A lot of the early AC/DC stuff was written during those days.”
JOHN FREEMAN: “Bon joined Fraternity to learn about music really, I think. Whatever else, he could sing, and he had what most singers would give their eyeteeth for—a distinctive voice. He joined Fraternity so he could learn about music, so he could go off and be a rock’n’roll star.”
Bon and Bruce were like chalk and cheese, but they shared a bond, and Bon readily deferred to Bruce. With his portly stature and prematurely thinning hair, Bruce looked almost Buddha-like, and indeed, he had a sort of an aura about him, and a hold over the entire band. Bon and Bruce remained close even after Bon effectively deserted Fraternity. Bruce was perhaps the only man Bon ever really confided in, whose advice Bon always sought out and respected.
If Bon’s own musical input was less than it might have been, he nevertheless felt privileged just to be working with musicians he held in awe. But they were by no means a band who worked hard. Fraternity played a couple of gigs a week at most, and in their three-year, two-album career produced barely a dozen original songs.
PETER HEAD: “Fraternity spent most of their time on magic mushrooms. Everybody smoked dope, everybody. Everybody took mushrooms. Plus, Fraternity were all heavy drinkers as well.”
The days and nights at Aldgate passed in one long, slow, lazy, hazy stoned-immaculate flow. There was no call to do anything especially. If food was required, a big, brown, sloppy pseudomacro stew was concocted. “Hamburgers hurt,” muttered Uncle. Every weekend, tribes of beautiful people from Adelaide would descend upon the place, tripping out, soaking up the good vibes generally, and fucking each other silly.
Bon was almost 25. He hadn’t a care in the world. He acquired the nickname Ronnie Roadtest due to his willingness to try anything. Vince described him as “constantly in a dream world of his own . . . but he’s having a ball.”
In late May 1971 Fraternity went out on the road, first to Perth, then Queensland. The response in Perth was ecstatic—the band up--staged Chain, then riding high on the back of “Black and Blue”—but in Queensland it was mixed. A Go-Set review of a Brisbane gig described them as “loud, too loud sometimes.” Sheer volume was part of Fraternity’s arrogance.
“They wanted to be the Band” (Vince Lovegrove). Fraternity as a six-piece, winter 1971:
Mick Jurd, John Freeman, “Uncle” John Ayers, Bruce Howe, Bon, John Bissett.
(courtesy John Freeman)
At this time Queensland’s infamous hillbilly dictator Joh Bjelke-Petersen was at the height of his powers, and Fraternity ran afoul of the law. Playing on the Gold Coast, the cops showed up and told them to turn down. Which they did, but with qualifications.
BRUCE HOWE: “Bon made this speech, on stage, about the Queensland cops, you know, and the promoter was standing there, just shaking his head. Bon was quite naive about political things. He was very street smart, he had this ability to assess people on the spot, their character, and generally his gut feelings were pretty good. But when it came to politics, that sort of knowledge, he was absolutely fucking hopeless. Of course, it went over really well with the crowd, because he’d stood up.
“The cops stopped the show; we had to get off. I said to Bon, you dickhead. Because I used to be like that with him, when he’d do things like that, when he’d be at his most naive. I said, I told you what it was like up here. We started to talk about politics. Bon didn’t understand the technicalities. Like, listening to politicians talk on the TV, or reading about it in the paper, used to bore the shit out of him, but we might be just sitting on the bus, out of it, nobody else around, and Bon would say, Well, why is it? Why is that allowed to happen in Queensland, and yet if I said that in Adelaide nobody would give a fuck?”
UNCLE: “Bon was really perceptive in some ways. Blind in others. In some ways he had his feet firmly on the ground. He was so down to earth, there were some areas where Bon could see the wood for the trees where others couldn’t. Yet there was that other side that was out to lunch.”
Back in Adelaide, the band resumed its comfortable lifestyle around the winter fires. Talk around the rest of the country was that Fraternity had become complacent and spoiled in their private domain. They countered that they were preparing to go to America.
JOHN FREEMAN: “Hamish should have made us work a lot harder, we should have done much more work on the east coast. But we always thought we were above that.”
At home, Fraternity could do no wrong. Routinely playing at least once a week at the Largs Pier Hotel, they established themselves as an Adelaide legend.
Melbourne is usually cited as the birthplace of pub rock, but while it may have been the cradle, it was in Adelaide that Australia’s first real regular pub gigs sprang up—and the first of those was the Largs Pier. At the height of Melbourne’s renaissance in 1971, its live circuit still consisted largely of dances and discos. Pubs wouldn’t open up to rock’n’roll for a few years yet. Adelaide pubs, however, embraced this new trade.
The Largs was down by the beach at Semaphore, opposite the pier of the same name. After all the taboo-breaking of the sixties, kids were growing up a lot quicker, and nothing made them feel more grown-up than going into pubs. This meant that the crowds at the Largs ranged from 15-year-olds, who were able to get away with getting in, to sixties survivors—all determined to write themselves off to the tune of roaring rock’n’roll.
Bands that regularly went over to Adelaide—the Aztecs, Daddy Cool, Max Merritt and the Meteors, the La De Das—loved playing there. But Fraternity were the hometown heroes who had baptized the place, and they were the house band.
Fraternity changed with its audience. The Largs was as rough as guts and Bon felt right at home there. He would prop up the bar, a hard-up hero wallowing in Scotch and adulation. Occasionally he would catch some flak. After all, as a tall poppy he was asking to be cut down. Besides, he would flirt with all the wrong girls. Bad girls. Who had bad boyfriends. Brawling was commonplace. Regular audience members included future Cold Chisel singer Jimmy Barnes and his half-brother John Swann.
JIMMY BARNES: “We used to go into Adelaide, and we’d go in a gang to fight, you know. It was, hey, let’s go into Adelaide—and wreck it!”
JOHN FREEMAN: “At that stage, because it was the only gig of its type, it used to draw a much wider audience than just the locals, and I think there might have been an element of the locals versus everybody else. The thing was, it was just so crowded—we used to play on this tiny stage in the corner—and so how 700 people could possibly spend four hours in an environment designed for four, without some sort of aggravation, well, it just couldn’t happen.”
SAM SEE: “Bon was always into a bit of a scrap. I was never partial to it. But he’d go out to the bar, have a drink with this guy, fight that guy . . .”
UNCLE: “I remember Bon and JB [John Bisset] at the Largs Pier once, both totally blind drunk, trying to find the biggest Maori in the room to fight him. He had to be at least nine foot six! I saw Bon jump off the stage a couple of times, because he saw it actually happening in the crowd. But I never saw him set on anybody, or set them up.”
The Largs crowd had no truck with anything “poofy” or cerebral. As a result Fraternity’s art-rock tendencies rapidly disappeared, replaced by a harder, rockier edge. Fraternity’s claim that they single-handedly spawned pub rock is an overstatement, but given their evolving style and the seminal influence they exerted on Cold Chisel (the highpoint of the genre), there’s more than a grain of truth in it.
BRUCE: “You had this young audience that would come and see you, and the more quad boxes and horns you stuck up, the louder you were, the more they liked it. They could tell what you were trying to do.”
In August, Fraternity took out the national Battle of the Sounds. Sherbet were the only group to come near them, as Go-Set reported. But again, this only had the adverse effect of reinforcing Fraternity’s belief that all was well.
The Battle no longer carried the prestige it once had—and the crowd at Melbourne’s Festival Hall, where the final was held, was quite thin—but still it meant that Fraternity went home with much booty under their arms, including air fares overseas, and free studio time at Armstrong’s.
“They won the Battle,” remembered John Brewster, a friend of Bon’s who was a roadie, “and there was all these prizes, so they divvied them up among everybody, and there was this stereo left over, after everyone had got their equal share. So they decided what they’d do was, whoever did the grossest deed, got it. So they’re on their way back to Adelaide and Gus—they used to have this bus driver called Gus—all of a sudden, he pulls up the bus on the side of the road, and jumps out. He leaps the fence, grabs a sheep, humps it, and he goes, Howzat! He got the stereo. Bon told me that.”
Sam See, home from Canada with the Flying Circus, was at the Battle of the Sounds show. Bruce asked him to join Fraternity. He leapt at the chance.
After the Battle victory, Adelaide’s Channel Nine produced a special on Fraternity. The show portrayed the band at work and play up on the farm. Of course, there’s no show without Punch, and so Bon had to put on a performance. Attempting a party trick riding one of the company trail bikes, he left the dirt road and came off into a briar patch. He emerged wearing a sheepish grin and many cuts and bruises.
Bon’s trail bike stunts were legendary. He is variously said to have taken off on one from a party in the nude, and rode one up a flight of stairs into a crowded gig. On another occasion he impulsively rode over to Melbourne from Adelaide one weekend for a birthday party. Ill-prepared, wearing only a T-shirt, he got sun- and wind-burned by day; while by night he froze, sleeping in a ditch by the side of the road.
In September, Go-Set ran a cover story which proclaimed, “Fraternity: The Next Big Band?” The band journeyed to Sydney to play a short season at Chequers. A backstage scuffle ensured the season was even shorter—the band was sacked as a result. Fraternity’s petulance had a way of turning on them. The question mark with which Go-Set had qualified its headline was prophetic.
Back in Adelaide, Bon moved off the farm and back down to town. Along with Bruce and John Bisset—and Bisset’s wife Cheryl and son Brent, not to mention dog Clutch—they found a place on Norwood Parade, within spitting distance of the city.
BRUCE: “Me and Bon and John didn’t take too kindly to the house in the hills. All these people would go up on the weekends, and just sit around and look at the trees and say how lovely everything was. Me and Bon, if there was a prospective fuck or a wild time in the offing, we’d go back down to town. The problem was getting from the hills down to town. So we shifted back down.”
Bruce was running amok because his girlfriend Anne was in England. Bon was raging as ever. At first Bon took up with a girl called Fi who was one of the Valentines’ foremost Adelaide fans. She’d returned to Adelaide after Bon saw her in Melbourne, where she was working for, of all people, Mary Wasylyk (now Walton), who had opened a boutique on trendy Chapel Street in Prahran. Bon hadn’t seen much of his old friend Mary since she got married, until he walked into the In Shop to see Fi. He was surprised and delighted to encounter Mary there too, and their friendship was renewed.
The relationship with Fi was short-lived; she was looking for a man who was husband material. Bon was many things, but he wasn’t that. On the rebound, he met a woman called Clarissa, a dancer with the Adelaide Festival Theatre, but that too was a brief fling. Before long, he was having an affair with a married woman called Margaret Smith. With her doctor husband, the petite, attractive dark-haired Margaret was a regular visitor to the farm. Her marriage was crumbling, and though her relationship with Bon was doomed in the short term, she would reappear later in his life.
PETER HEAD: “She was a rock’n’roll groupie made good. As soon as I saw her, I thought, She belongs with Bon. She was that same sort of wild woman.”
BRUCE: “Bon loved his girls, but he didn’t give them a lot. Sex. And things. Like, he’d come home with a bunch of flowers, or he’d cook a meal. But he wouldn’t talk intimately to them, or share secrets, about his past life, whatever. He could commit to the boys, because boys are boys, and so when you have to go off and fight another war, everyone pats you on the back. But when it came to women, a family, that was very scary to Bon.”
There was something about Bon that set him apart. Maybe it was the tattoos he’d become so ashamed of, as if they were indelible watermarks of an uncool, cruel youth.
JOHN FREEMAN: “I don’t think anybody ever saw the real Bon, I don’t think Bon ever knew the real Bon, that was his trouble.”
UNCLE: “He was always willing to look for it!”
FREEMAN: “That was running away from it. He had such charisma it was difficult for him not to be on stage 24 hours a day.
“You know, he could walk into a room at a party and sit down in the corner, and he would be instantly surrounded by a crowd of women, who would put down their lives for him. My mother said he could put his slippers under her bed anytime, and my mother’s a very conservative old woman.”
UNCLE: “My mum too. Bon had this thing about him, he really touched people when he met them, in a way you thought he really cared about you. So many guys considered him their best mate.”
FREEMAN: “Life was only ever a transitory thing to Bon. He would drop a trip without worrying if there was anything he had to do that day. I know him to have gone to the dentist, for major surgery, whilst he was tripping. I’ve never known anyone else that would do anything like that.”
UNCLE: “Bon lived for the moment. Forward planning, I mean, I don’t think that was a part of his life. But I can never remember Bon not trying his hardest. I remember him living for the show, being alive during the show, and everything else being an anticlimax.”
In September, Bon met the woman who would become his wife, Irene Thornton. Irene had just returned from a year-long working holiday in England. She knew Vince’s girlfriend Julie, and through her and Vince, met Bon. She decided, as so many women did, that she fancied him. The difference was, she snared him.
Born in Adelaide in 1950, Irene was a nice girl from suburban Prospect. That she had just returned from England made her very cool. That she was also strikingly attractive, quite tall, with long, straight blonde hair and a slender figure, and was very down to earth—she liked a drink, wouldn’t say no to a smoke, and enjoyed a joke, dirty or otherwise—made her irresistible to Bon.
Irene went with Vince and Julie to a party up on the farm. It was then that she first encountered Bon. Looking for the toilet, she burst in on him in a bedroom, sucking some woman’s toes. The next time they met, at the Largs one night, she was more impressed: “He was funny. Chatting away, you know, he just came out with comical things. We just hit it off.”
It was a whirlwind, fairy-tale courtship. For their first date, Bon and Irene went to the drive-in, and both sat bolt upright all night. Such was the effect Irene had on Bon, he was uncharacteristically nervous in her presence. They would go out and hold hands, and Bon would plant a peck on her cheek as he sent her inside at her parents’ place at the end of the night. Irene was a princess, just as Maria had been, but unlike Maria, she would extend her golden braids out from the ivory tower. Irene fell in love with Bon, and she loved him for what he was. She remembers a night they spent early on in their relationship poring over the recently released book of comic strips, The Adventures of Barry MacKenzie, both cracking up. “I suppose we just had the same sort of sense of humor,” she said. Indeed, it’s impossible to overestimate the value Bon placed on laughter, and this he shared with Irene.
Bon and Irene on their wedding day, January 24, 1972, just prior to leaving for England with Fraternity. (courtesy the Scott family)
Irene was amused by his banter, and his high jinks. One time, to shock Irene’s teenage sister Faye, he took off all his clothes and bounded past her and a girlfriend watching TV like he was Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Faye was mortified; Irene, like Bon, was reduced to tears.
Soon Irene was staying over at Norwood, and before long she moved in.
The headline on Vince’s column read, THEY’VE FAITH IN ADELAIDE: TO RECORD IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA, but the fact of the matter was that Fraternity didn’t trust anyone in Australia to produce them. If Adelaide studios were inferior, at least if they were at home Fraternity could produce themselves. But the battle was the same all over Australia.
SAM SEE: I don’t think [the sound] was ever caught on record, as a lot of Australian acts at that time weren’t. The bands were victimized by the studios.”
BRUCE: “The live gigs were the greatest satisfaction. We could not get it down on record. But we had some great live gigs.”
October saw two “new” Fraternity singles released. The band had by now left Sweet Peach, and so in retaliation the label exhumed a track left over from the Livestock album sessions. “The Race” was a lyrically complex Doug Ashdown song described by Go-Setas “not [a single] which will help the group.” The other new slice of vinyl was “If You Got It,” which the band cut itself in Adelaide, and put out independently on its own Raven label. A straight boogie, it climbed to number two on the South Australian charts.
The band was now talking about going to America by June or July of the following year, 1972. Meantime, it’s not as if they put their heads down at all. It was summertime, and the living was easy.
UNCLE: “There was this one party, the Three-Day Party . . . I think we’d played these two gigs, the Largs Pier, and the Bridgeway, there was 2,000 people there, it was Christmas or New Year’s Eve or something, and so everybody was invited up to our place for a party. It went for three days. There was barbecues, security guys, whole bars full of spirits, bonfires all round the lawn. I had children born in my bed and grandmothers die; I remember picking up my sheets with a broomstick and taking them out to the bonfire at the end of the three days, I wasn’t going to sleep in them again. I haven’t been to a three-day party since. Those days are gone.”
Bon and Irene were getting on swimmingly. Bruce was a lot happier too, because Hamish had flown Anne out from England to be with him. That was the sort of thing Hamish did. He believed, and he put his money where his mouth was. When the band needed a new Hammond organ because this particular song called for that particular sound, he got it for them. He had the foresight to form a publishing company for the band, so that they owned their own songs, which few bands do even today.
“With hindsight, I’ve got a lot of respect for Hamish,” said Peter Head, who was also managed by him. “We all used to rubbish him at the time, can him about being rich—we had no appreciation whatsoever of the value of money—but he was the one who made things possible.”
As big fish in a small pond though, Fraternity were getting nowhere fast. Even Vince dared suggest they needed to “get off their arses and get some hard work done.”
SAM SEE: “Even though there was a sense that Fraternity shows were special, we were still doing the same gigs week in, week out. In those days, the concept of making it had no reality at all.”
By January, plans had changed again. The band was now going to go to England. This was yet another mistake—the wrong place to go, at the wrong time—but it was where Hamish had connections. In the past year, as he’d tried in vain to get both T Rex and Yes out to tour Australia, he’d at least made some contacts over there. The plan was to finally use the free recording time they’d won at Armstrong’s, then play a tour of South Australia for the Arts Council, then leave.
Again, the band spent a mere few days in the studio, cutting the album which, in a fit of Australianness, would be called Flaming Galah. It contained only three all-new songs—“Welfare Boogie,” “Hemming’s Farm” and “Getting Off”—alongside rewritten and re-recorded versions of old material. Hamish set up a deal to release it through RCA.
The decision to leave was a bad one not only because the climate in England at that time wouldn’t suit a band like Fraternity, but also because Australia itself was just about to bound into the future. Only weeks before Fraternity left, Billy Thorpe acquired the first remote mixing desk ever seen in this country. Of course, right then, Fraternity couldn’t wait to get out of Australia.
HAMISH: “We had this supreme self-confidence, coupled with a certain naiveté, and so we couldn’t see any barriers whatsoever.”
Prompted by Hamish’s offer to pay for wives—but not girlfriends—to go overseas with the band, Bon and Irene decided to get married. They’d known each other for only a few months.
IRENE: “Everyone seemed to be doing it at the time. Bon had asked me to go away with him; then he told me that Hamish would pay, and so there was a few weddings going on. But we were really wrapped up in each other.”
Bon and Irene’s wedding merged into a blur along with Bruce and Anne’s, and John Freeman’s. Uncle had taken up with Freeman’s wife’s sister Vicki and while they wouldn’t actually tie the knot, Vicki would go to England anyway. John Bisset and Mick Jurd had both been married all along; only Sam See was unattached.
BRUCE: “I didn’t like the idea of Bon getting married to Irene, I thought it was premature. They didn’t really know each other that well. But she was a nice girl.”
With the wedding scheduled for January 24, Bon’s mother Isa came over from Perth. She wasn’t terribly impressed by the whole business either.
Bon and Irene, however, were extremely pleased with themselves. Bon loved Irene as she loved him; but as much as that, he loved the idea of her: that is, the most wanted woman in Adelaide was his.
SAM SEE: “Bon and Irene, when they got married, I remember it being like, I was going to say, Paul and Linda—it was all a bit glam, you know.” civil service was held in town, with Bruce and John Bisset as witnesses. The bride wore a cream crepe forties-style jacket and a long crepe skirt; the groom, a poo-brown suit with flared trousers and wide lapels. A reception was organized up on the farm afterwards. “It was like the best party I ever went to I think,” Irene said.
Bon and Irene get married, Adelaide, January 24, 1972. Graeme Scott: “It was a surprise to me, because not long before, Ron was telling me, ‘You don’t ever want to get married!’” (courtesy Irene Thornton)
All possible futures seemed golden.
At the very same time, at a site 50 kilometers north of Melbourne, the first Sunbury festival was taking place. Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs headlined. It was this performance that crowned Thorpe’s ascent. The resultant double-live album, released later in the year, outsold every other Australian album released in 1972. Everybody who was anybody was at Sunbury that weekend—except Fraternity.
Any ideas of a honeymoon that either Bon or Irene may have harbored were waylaid in excited anticipation of going to England. Besides which, the band was due to hit the road on February 12, on a tour devised by the Arts Council to take a bit of urban rock culture to the bush.
Trucking through South Australia in a big black bus, Fraternity were their own merry pranksters. Bon, Ronnie Roadtest, was in fine form, even if he was away from his new bride—or maybe because of it. Bruce Howe remembers one incident in particular, at Port Lincoln.
BRUCE: “It was one of those really still, hot South Australian days, and Bon said, I’m going for a swim. So he put his bathers on, and we walked out on the jetty. All these people were there. At the end of the jetty, they had these scales, for hanging the sharks they used to catch—the big white pointers. The water was so still and so clear you could see everything, and you could see it was just a sea of great big huge stingers, jellyfish, you know, with tentacles ten feet long, all just beneath the surface. Bon looks around, sees he’s got an audience, and so what does he do? He climbs right up to the top of the shark tower and dives in. He swims underwater out of the reach of these things, and climbs back up. Of course, everybody on the jetty sends up this big round of applause. That’s the sort of thing he was capable of. I was amazed.”
Back in Adelaide by early March, the band played two concerts as part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts program, another first for rock music in the State. Repeating a role created by Tully in Sydney, Fraternity accompanied singer Jeannie Lewis and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe’s “Love 2,000.” It was a last gasp for the band’s “classical” aspirations.
“Welfare Boogie” was released by RCA as a single later in March. It did nothing, except perhaps provide a glimpse of the sort of themes Bon would later explore more fully with AC/DC:
I’ve got me a problem, a real social problem
I can’t find employment for more than a week
You might think I’m sleazy, but you know it ain’t easy
Finding employment’s a job for a freak.
The album followed in April. But the general attitude to Fraternity seemed to be that they’d frittered away their potential. By then though, the band was in England—not so much a band as a juggernaut, an entourage numbering 16 people and a bus (plus Clutch the dog of course!). As far as Australia was concerned, Fraternity would be heard from no more. All the unfulfilled promises would be forgotten; the name Fraternity would just fade away.
England in 1972 was teetering giddily on the stack-heels of glam rock. The glittering stars were T Rex, David Bowie, Gary Glitter, and the Sweet. Fraternity were a bunch of bearded wonders playing what was more than once described as “country-rock.” It was all they could do to polish their RM Williams stockman’s boots.
Fraternity’s 18 months in England would do nothing but grind the band down—and finally out. The experience also took a heavy personal toll, as interpersonal relationships, including Bon and Irene’s marriage, soured. For the first six months they were there, they did virtually nothing. They found a place to live—a big four-storey house in Finchley—and sat around waiting for something to happen.
Had they gone to America as they’d originally planned, they might have fared better; they would have fitted right in on the West coast. But from the moment Fraternity arrived in London, it was obvious it wasn’t going to be the picnic they’d expected. The mountain of gear they’d hauled half way round the planet was already antiquated.
Hamish Henry set up shop with his partner, former DJ Tony MacArthur, as the Mainstreet Gramophone Company. MacArthur was managing French crooner Charles Aznavour, and acting for Dutch art-rock band Focus. Hamish got Fraternity on the books with a powerful agency, MAM, but he had little to sell the band on. That they were almost the next big thing in Australia just wasn’t enough.
With more than a dozen people living under the same roof in Finchley, it was inevitable friction would occur.
IRENE: “Being young, you have expectations. I was 21, Bon was 25. The thing in England didn’t help matters, because it wasn’t conducive to normal life—a lot of pressure, not enough money, no one really with any privacy. If you wanted to go out to the back yard to hang out the washing, you had to walk through someone’s bedroom. It was pretty hard to live like that, coming from Australia, having to live on nothing in miserable conditions. I think everyone got to really hate England.”
The girls all had to go out and look for work to support the boys. Bruce and Anne—Anne who was at once pregnant and bedridden with a broken leg—holed up in the attic, above it all. Everyone was feeling the strain. England was cold and gray; Fraternity were nobodies there, and they were broke. Sparks started to fly. The only consolation the band found in England was the price of hash. They smoked red Leb by the brick.
In November, they played their inaugural English gig at the Speakeasy. It was a non-event. Beyond that, all the band really had lined up was a short German tour. At least it got the boys out of the house.
John Freeman wrote home to the News, “We are now moving into top gear in a flat-out bid to gain the necessary exposure that is vital for a new group such as ours.” That flat-out bid consisted of infrequent gigging—the most Hamish could hustle—playing supports with bands that were second division at best—Atomic Rooster, Sparks, the Pink Fairies, Mungo Jerry. The most impressive bill Fraternity shared was with Fairport Convention.
SAM SEE: “The basic scam was that the wives went out to work and the band loafed at home. Really, to be honest about it, not doing much of anything, just sort of goofing off, watching telly and playing cricket in the back yard. It was really a bummer. And so maybe it’s idle minds, I don’t know . . .
“It really was a very squalid house, full of people who weren’t united by anything except the music. I mean, the different personalities in that band, I don’t think I’ve ever played in a band that was so diverse. And so when the music dropped off, all these personality differences came out. There was all sorts of cross-pollinations, violence both physical and verbal, mostly verbal.”
Bon didn’t know what to do with himself. He became frustrated when he was denied the release of performance. His whole being was thrown into question, he feared.
HAMISH HENRY: “The essence of Bon was when he was on stage, his thumbs stuck in his jeans and his chest sticking out, strutting his stuff. That was all he ever wanted to do.”
Bon was reduced to getting a day job, like the girls. He went to work in a factory where he knotted wigs. He got Sam a job there too. He and Irene were squabbling constantly. Bon could be distant, cold almost, certainly brusque, and Irene felt the brunt of his frustration. They both grew resentful. It was a vicious circle. Irene gave as good as she got. She and Bon both had sharp tongues, and when they were downcast, especially after a few drinks—which was most of the time—neither of them was prepared to give an inch. If one slipped, said the wrong thing, the other jumped on it. Or else Bon just clammed up.
But there were good times, however few and far between. Irene remembers fondly how Bon was perplexed by the English propensity for forming queues—he would brazenly jump them, for no other reason than to rock the boat. She also remembers how he went to see Little Richard, one of his oldest heroes, and came home mortified, since it was obvious that the Georgia Peach was gay. Bon, in his innocence, never would have thought . . . Alex Harvey, however, was a different matter. Already thirty-something in the early seventies, the godfather of Scottish rock’n’roll was then at his peak, and Bon became one of his biggest fans. His humor, his storytelling bent and his energetic showmanship had a profound effect on Bon.
Fraternity scored only the odd gig. They’d had the wind knocked out of their sails. Sam See remembers one of the last gigs he played with the band. “We were all in the bus, the juggernaut, rolling down to Bournemouth to support Status Quo. The only thing we knew about them then was ‘Pictures Of Matchstick Men’; it would’ve been just before they broke again with Piledriver. This was probably the last sign of the Fraternity arrogance which I always loved. As usual, on the way to the gig, we’re having a few drinks, we reckon we’re gonna cream ’em. So we’re sitting there in the bus, waiting for the hall to open, because we were egalitarian, we all used to help lug the gear in. No stardom for us—bullshit! Anyway, so we’re sitting outside the Bournemouth Odeon, and these two Bentleys pull up, and these guys resplendent in Kings Road finery get out. We’re there, you know, ‘Look at these pooftas,’ Bon’s going, ‘Yaarrrgh!’ We’re at this point extremely confident we’re going to make a name for ourselves in Bournemouth. So we went on, we did quite well, didn’t get an encore but did okay, and then Status Quo came on, and they’d changed out of their satin and bells into the familiar Status Quo jeans and T-shirts, and they were three times as loud as us and twice as polished. They were hot.
“We lurched back to London with our tails between our legs. It was probably one of those nights where someone had too much to drink and punched somebody else, I can’t remember for sure. But something went wrong within the ego of the band, definitely. By the time winter rolled around, I’d had it.”
Sam moved on to Canada to rejoin the Flying Circus, where they were enjoying a modicum of success. “It was really the end I think, because we could all see that the band had lost its fight.”
During the winter, Billy Thorpe, in all his arrogance, blundered through London. Fraternity were glad to see a familiar face. Thorpe hit town expecting to lay ’em in the aisles. He left after blowing one gig, at the self-same Speakeasy, where he had the plug pulled on him, ostensibly for being too loud. Thorpe’s convenient excuse was that the imminent second Sunbury festival wanted him back, for a record fee of $10,000 plus air fares. He was on the first plane he could get.
Some time early in the new year Fraternity changed their name to Fang, “to fit in with the current English trend,” whatever they thought that was. To Hamish, this marked the real beginning of the end.
In April 1973, Fang played a couple of gigs with Geordie, the Newcastle upon Tyne band whose singer, Brian Johnson, would eventually replace Bon in AC/DC. Graeme visited England at that time, and remembers those shows. “They had the bus, and the thing was, if they’d support a band, they’d take the other band’s equipment too, and they were booked to go with Geordie. I think we went to Torquay first, and then we packed up that night and went on to Plymouth. Brian used to carry his guitar player on his shoulders too, I think that’s where Ron got the idea, because when he joined AC/DC there was no one around doing that sort of thing. Angus was the perfect guy to carry around. He was so small.”
Fraternity, now renamed Fang, play their last-ever gig, an outdoor show at Windsor, outside London, August 1973. L-R: Bon, John Freeman, Uncle. (courtesy John Freeman)
In May, the band played a short tour of the provinces with Kraut-rock doomsayers, Amon Duul. The headliners, the Gloucestershire Echo said, were “an enormous contrast to the raucous Australian band who started the concert [whose] unambitious but multi-decibel bedecked set sounded much like the rhythm and blues material that was churned out by a million would-be Rolling Stones in the early ’60s.”
Relations within the band and its extended family were deteriorating to the point that final implosion was imminent. Uncle hocked Vicki’s Mixmaster to buy hash. The drinking became increasingly heavy, putting a surly spin on things.
GRAEME SCOTT: “It was the boredom I think. They were hardly doing any shows, making nothing, and there was a lot of arguments, wifely troubles as well as band troubles, not just Bon and Irene but a lot of them; nothing was going right, and so I think the drink really came into it then.”
Bon was feeling desperate, and one day he again seriously tempted fate.
IRENE: “I was at work, and when I came home, he was crawling around like a gibbering idiot.”
He’d eaten datura, a poisonous plant once believed to have hallucinogenic qualities. Most self-respecting heads wouldn’t touch it.
BRUCE: “That’s when the darker side emerged, and you really knew you were dealing with a person who didn’t care if he lived or died. There was this fatalistic side to Bon which was always there. He was fatalistic because he took risks. He took risks with drugs, it’s true, it’s not a myth.”
IRENE: “Impulsive is the best word. He liked being outrageous. When he was pissed, he could either be the life of the party, or else, you could see it happen, his eyes would glaze over, almost go black, like there was something there really crapping him off, and a nasty side would come out.”
Irene was in a panic trying to find out what he’d done, what he’d taken. “I was trying to get him to drink a glass of water or something, but he was just so completely off his face, he couldn’t even talk. Uncle was frantically telephoning the hospital trying to find an antidote. Eventually, we gave him some lemon juice, and he just threw up.”
By the summer of 1973 the band had ceased paying rent. Vicki, who was subsequently diagnosed as schizophrenic, was behaving increasingly erratically. John Bisset insulted Mick Jurd’s wife Carol one time too many, and that spelled the end of him. Bon and Irene were at each other’s throats. Resentment was also growing towards Hamish, who the band perceived as living in the lap of luxury at their expense.
In August, the band played what would be its last ever gig, a two-bit festival at Windsor. Hamish bailed out. He’d had enough. He’d sunk a small fortune into Fraternity, and he could no longer see any prospect of a return. The dream was over.
HAMISH: “I think the real reason Fraternity failed in England was because they were just too loud!”
The band lingered in London, shell-shocked, just wondering what to do. Bon got a job in a nearby pub, behind the bar. Unsurprisingly, he was a natural. But his and Irene’s days were numbered.
The band started limping back to Adelaide. Uncle was the first to arrive, in November. “We just didn’t make it in England,” he told Vince in the News. “It’s good to be back. [The others] will be home soon.”
Bon and Irene arrived after Christmas, and went their separate ways. Irene stayed at her parents’ place; Bon moved in with Bruce and Anne and their infant son, into a tiny house down near the Port. But hope springs eternal. Bruce especially was hopeful that Fraternity would rise again; and Bon, that he and Irene would get back together.
But you can’t undo the damage done. And the damage ran deep.
Finally back in Adelaide, Fraternity were in suspension, licking their wounds. Bon felt loyalties strongly, but even he wasn’t sure that Fraternity, as such, had a future.
He sat tight, or rather even while he fidgeted, he held his tongue. He had enough to worry about as it was, with his separation from Irene.
IRENE: “It just got to a stage where you’re arguing about everything, and there’s just all this bitterness. We were just arguing about anything and everything, stupid little things that you wouldn’t normally . . .”
BRUCE: “The thing that went wrong with their relationship was that Irene just needed more intimacy, not sexual intimacy—communication, you know. I think she just felt like sometimes Bon just used to shut up shop.”
Isa, never one to mince words, said: “They both liked getting their own way too much.”
Bon was reeling. It was maybe just as well then that he had to go out and get a job. No one else was going to support him, and it might keep him out of trouble. So, like Bruce who was supporting his young family by working as a builder’s laborer, Bon started a day job for the first time in almost ten years. He loaded trucks at the Wallaroo fertilizer plant. It was a monumental comedown, but it was what he had to do to stay afloat. Bon could be stoic about such things.
He got a bike, a big Triumph, to get around on. He was mucking around with Peter Head’s Mount Lofty Rangers, a band, of sorts, which at least allowed him to keep his hand in. He would drop in to see Irene at the place she’d found for herself in Stepney, but all that did was upset them both.
Bon’s stoicism didn’t extend to matters of the heart. He would have willingly succumbed to the ways of the flesh, and damn the consequences. Had Irene let him, he would have happily climbed back into her bed, and ridden off the next morning. That was his whole philosophy—tomorrow would never come. Bon refused to accept the truth—the marriage was over—and his visits only served to hurt himself as much as Irene.
Irene showed the greater strength. For all the love she still felt for Bon—and knew that he felt for her—she knew their marriage wouldn’t work. Cruel to be kind, to both herself and Bon, she had to cut him loose.
Bon couldn’t accept it. And so it was that one night after he’d had a row with Irene he arrived, already drunk, at a Rangers rehearsal, then stormed off from there, even more drunk, and rode his bike at high speed into an oncoming car. He was almost killed.
Bon was in a coma for three days. Irene didn’t leave his side. “I remember being there once, sitting there with my sister, looking at the screen, you know, the heartbeat monitor, and the line stopping, and yelling for a doctor. The doctor came and banged him on the chest. It started again.”
When Bon came to, he asked Irene if he could come home. What could she do? No one else was going to look after him. He was released a few weeks later.
IRENE: “He was terribly sick, he looked like a thin, frail old man. He was hunched from the broken collarbone, his throat was cut—he had a horrible scar there—and his jaw was wired up. He was just virtually skin and bone. And he must have had some sort of internal problem too.
“The clearest memory I have of Bon is of him in a blue checked dressing gown, after his accident, with his teeth missing,” said Peter Head’s wife Mouse, “and I guess I remember it because he just looked so shocking. I mean, his face was scarred, and you know, it had an impact pretty much on us all, when it happened.”
Isa came over from Perth, to tend Bon during the daytime when Irene was out at work.
Bon never fully recovered from the accident—he bore scars and suffered pain for the rest of his life—but he was quickly on the mend. He was nothing if not resilient. He’d taken beatings before, and he would take them again. He even managed to find something in it all to laugh about. He sent Darcy and Gabby in Melbourne a picture of himself taken not long after the event, leering toothlessly at the camera, bearing the caption, “I left my teeth behind on the road.” He was laid up, but he was still able to roll himself a steady supply of joints. He drank—liquor—through a straw.
IRENE: “He made a bit of an effort then, but [the marriage] was already stuffed. But it was probably like the friendship was a lot better after it was all over, when the bullshit, the bitterness, was out of the way.”
It wasn’t long before Bon was back on his feet, if unsteadily. He was already anxious about his professional future.
IRENE: “We went to a concert, I can’t remember who it was, it was an outdoor concert, and there were people there from the industry who just walked right past him, and he said something like, These arseholes used to be all over me.
“He thought he was just a has-been.”
Lacking any other option, Bon joined in rehearsals with Bruce, Uncle, John Freeman and guitarist Mauri Berg, formerly of Headband. (In July, he went into the studio with Pete Head and Carey Gulley and recorded two songs, “Round and Round and Round” and “Covey Gully,” which would eventually see the light of day in 1996.)
Mick Jurd, like John Bisset, had remained in England. But Bon wasn’t entirely convinced. And when the News devoted a story to Fraternity’s ostensible reformation, it started to smell suspiciously like the bad old days. The band came across as full of all the same old bullshit: “We’ve got a lot of plans, and we’re in no hurry.”
The last thing Bon wanted was a repeat performance of the last three wasted years. He knew he had to find a ticket out.