With special guest:
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Jeff Apter
… in conversation with Bill Kable
George Young made his name internationally by writing with his best mate Harry Vanda a song we can all sing along to more than 50 years after its release. So it was a natural choice as the title of Jeff Apter’s new book Friday on My Mind: the life of George Young.
George managed to get a ticket to The Beatles Sydney performance in 1964. He decided right then that he was going to be in music as a career but it was not going to be a straightforward ride as we learn in Jeff’s book.
We hear from our special guest today about the toughness of all the large Young clan. Eight of them arrived in Australia as Ten Pound Poms. They needed that toughness firstly as they grew up in a dreary part of Scotland. Then when they abandoned their life in Scotland they needed to be tough once again when they arrived in the Villawood Migrant Hostel in Sydney. Villawood was not the land of milk and honey they had seen on the posters. It was after a fight in the hostel that George met Harry strumming a guitar and the nucleus of The Easybeats formed.
Years later there followed some rough patches where George must have wondered if music was the right career move even after that worldwide hit. George had expected that The Easybeats would burn out relatively quickly but not as fast as it occurred in the absence of another big hit after Friday on My Mind. Then George realised that his real interest was in writing and producing rather than performing in front of screaming young audiences.
After four years in England without really making a mark George and Harry came back to Sydney and worked again with the redoubtable Ted Albert who had always encouraged George. What followed was a conquest of the Australian music scene that had never happened before. Working from the Albert’s studio called The House of Hits in downtown Sydney it seemed that George and Harry had their names on every song that did well locally. With songs like Love is in the Air sung by John Paul Young the world saw George as Australian and George always saw himself as Australian despite the Scottish roots of the family.
That procession of hits and artists from the Albert studios would include AC/DC with George’s younger brothers Malcolm and Angus leading the way. It is through his brothers’ enormous success that George put an exclamation mark on his contribution to Australian music.
In this program we get to salute George’s monumental life with his biographer Jeff Apter who completes the trilogy after his seminal works on Malcolm and Angus Young. Anyone interested in the broad range of music produced in Australia since the 1960’s will love hearing from Jeff and getting to read this fascinating book.
Jeff Apter
Jeff Apter is the author of more than 20 music biographies. His subjects include Johnny O’Keefe, Keith Urban, John Farnham, the Bee Gees, the Finn brothers and Angus and Malcolm Young of AC/DC. As a ghostwriter, he has worked with Kasey Chambers, Mark Evans (of AC/DC) and Richard Clapton. Jeff was on staff at Rolling Stone for several years and has written about legends such as Aretha Franklin, Patti Smith, Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan, Chrissie Hynde and Lucinda Williams. In 2015, he worked on the Helpmann award-nominated live show A State of Grace: The Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley. Away from music, Jeff has also worked on books with soldiers and diplomats and sports greats such as Michael Slater and Tim Cahill. He lives in Wollongong, New South Wales, with his wife, two children and a cat that’s so damned cool it needs no name.
Song selection by our guest: Friday On My Mind by The Easybeats