Paul Clarke is an Australian documentarian who’s done features on the likes of ABBA and Jessica Mauboy. His latest work, Blood and Thunder: The Sound of Alberts, is a departure from the glitzy sounds of pop, instead exploring the history of the Australian rock and roll sound.
While most readers will be familiar with the impact bands like The Easybeats and AC/DC had on homegrown rock and roll, Blood and Thunder provides a context for their formation, centring on Alberts, the iconic Aussie record label where these bands found their home.
The two-part documentary series was recently broadcast on ABC and received several positive reviews. The Sydney Morning Herald called it a “cracker” and praised it for providing an exploration of “an important and largely untold story in Australia’s cultural history”.
Untold, indeed, because according to Deirdre O’Connell, a PhD Candidate in History of Culture and Race at University of Sydney, the documentary’s nationalistic focus has resulted in the omission of one of the least talked about but important flashpoints in Australia’s musical history.
As O’Connell notes in an op-ed for The Conversation, Blood + Thunder does provide an entertaining summary of three decades at Alberts, recounting Ted Albert’s quest to find the “Australian sound” with the help of a group of “working-class migrant kids”, but it’s hardly a ‘warts and all’ affair.
“Clarke and his team have a good eye for a choice bit of archive footage and a discerning ear for a killer guitar lick,” O’Connell writes.
“But this is not a documentary where the images speak for themselves. At times overblown, often fun, the narrator leads the audience by the nose through the highs and lows of the Alberts’ stable of artists.”
“Clarke walks a fine line: setting down ‘what really happened’ and spinning the national yarn – at times, even exaggerating the music’s ‘unique’ qualities and glossing over anything that might rupture the shiny veneer.”
The most conspicuous absence, O’Connell writes, is the blues. While we meet the Glaswegian future guitar gods George, Malcolm, and Angus Young, we’re not introduced to the records that inspired them. Nor do we get to hear the song that the Easybeats’ founding members first bonded over.
“Policies such as White Australia were in fact obstacles standing in the way of an entire generation of Ted Alberts.”While Clarke’s documentary gives ample time to the young generation of kids “primed for rebellion” and simply awaiting the right soundtrack, O’Connell argues that “Blood + Thunder dodges the existential terrors of Australia’s cultural cringe”.
Looking at Australia’s unfortunate history when it comes to the issue of race, one could argue that policies such as White Australia were in fact obstacles standing in the way of an entire generation of Ted Alberts.
As O’Connell details, going back as recently as the post-WW1 period, those in Australian politics who felt it incumbent upon them to uphold the “White Australian ideal” would even go so far as to keep out “foreign” musicians, in particular “coloured” ones, in order to “quarantine the British cultural imagination”.
They considered it a matter of national importance that the “deviant” styles of expatriate musicians be barred, as they could potentially thwart the development of local culture. In 1928, this culminated in the deportation of the Sonny Clay Orchestra, a group of “negro” jazz and blues musicians.
“Albert Music was part of this story, granting [the Sonny Clay Orchestra] exclusive performing rights to ‘My Blue Heaven’,” O’Donnell writes. “Nine weeks later the band was deported, the victims of a trumped-up moral scandal orchestrated by the Commonwealth Investigation Branch.”
The Commonwealth Investigations Branch or CIB was the precursor to modern Australian law enforcement organisations such as ASIO and the Australian Federal Police. As Dr. Melissa Bellanta writes in her blog The Vapour Trail, it didn’t take long for Sonny Clay and his band to run afoul of the CIB.
“The band was dogged by the authorities from almost the moment it arrived. After decamping from Sydney to Melbourne, its members were asked several times to leave their hotels for rowdy behaviour. Some of the band removed to a flat in East Melbourne, and shortly afterwards were subject to a raid by police,” she recounts.
“As a result of the Sonny Clay Orchestra ‘scandal’, an African-American band would not be seen again in Australia again until almost a quarter of a century later.”“The piece de resistance of the Colored Idea’s Australian tour came when they were deported at the end of March 1928. In the preceding months, a nationalist resentment had been simmering in Australia over the fact that a local military band had been refused the right to play in the States.”
“This resentment had led some to object to the fact that an American jazz band was currently playing top Australian venues. Add to this racist anxieties about ‘coloured’ men and their obvious success with Anglo Australian girls – and add, too, sundry jitters about the diabolical jazz – and one has a sense of how the story played out.”
“As one Australian politician put it in parliament: ‘Does the Minister not think that in the interests of White Australia and moral decency, permits to such persons should be refused?’”
According to jazz historian Andrew Bisset, as a result of the Sonny Clay Orchestra ‘scandal’, an African-American band led by a black musician would not be seen again in Australia again until 1954, almost a quarter of a century later.
As one music historian cited by O’Donnell describes it, the Australian music scene slipped into “doldrums” during the 1930s, as authorities vetoed the entry on all but a handful of “foreign” musicians. “Disappointment and feelings of inadequacy marked reviews of local bands,” O’Connell notes.
“Granted, the arrival of a half million American servicemen in 1942 injected a much-needed vigour into the music scene, but the years of cultural isolation had taken their toll. ‘A country musically strangled by reaction and narrow chauvinism’ was how British composer Sir Eugene Goossens described Australia in 1947.”
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It was only when the ban on “coloured” musicians was lifted in the early 1950s and visas were issued to future icons like Louis Armstrong and other black artists that Australia became a country with a cultural scene fertile enough to support Alberts and a flourishing Oz rock scene.
“And that’s how Australia got the blues and Ted Albert discovered his much-fabled sound,” writes O’Connell. “Blood + Thunder is correct in claiming that the ‘Australian Sound’ was homegrown and an embodiment of the culture.”
“But the style was in no ways unique to the national character. It was part of a tradition that stretched from Sydney to the Niger Delta. So why pretend otherwise? Overboiling the nationalist egg offers little nourishment. It’s a tired argument and contributes nothing to the emotional heart of Blood + Thunder.”
Indeed, omitting an important series of events, however perturbing, does a disservice to the story of how Australia’s musical culture developed. We must swallow the “less palatable truths about ourselves” in order to better understand where we are and where we came from.
